I found this on the site: Cheated by Life and thought it was brilliant. So of course I stole it and offer it here. Shh.
The subject (and author) is a blogger, author and quite the humorist – you can check out his site at http://www.andrewmcdonald.net.au
Ringo Star & Justin Bieber
In the past, Canada has put forward a lot of great musicians like Celine Dion, David Foster, Alanis Morrissette, Bryan Adams, k.d. lang, Luba, Leonard Cohen, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, Tragically Hip, Neil Young, Ashley MacIsaac, Randy and Tal Bachman, and the list goes on and on. Click the link above to visit the Wikipedia list. It’s pretty amazing.
Today, we present the modern equivalent. Justin Bieber.
What’s a Justin Bieber? You ask? He’s a 16 year old kid from Stratford, Ontario (read: nowhere) and he taught himself how to play the piano, drums, guitar, and trumpet. In 2007 his mom started whoring him out posting videos on YouTube of him performing songs by Usher, Justin Timberlake and Stevie Wonder.
He’s a tiny little boy who’s talent will probably only last until he hits puberty, but for the time being he’s making teenage girls “swoon” (we’ll call it that for the sake of propriety) all over the place. Ok, I admit, I think he’s relatively adorable, but that swoop of hair across his face is annoyingly cutsie and I just find him generally annoying.
Sadly, this is the current state of Canadian musical talent export. Feel free to check him out at his official site if you wanna be “current” in Canadian “music.”
Dear America. Back-atcha. Canada.
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I don’t have any pictures of it this year, it seems to have come and gone quickly. I’m referring to the annual pink budding of Vancouver. For the last few weeks, thousands of trees have sprouted their pink blossoms and come to life during the amazing weather we’ve had.
Unfortunately, and fortunately, that’s coming to an end. I say unfortunately because it’s so pretty to walk down the street and see hundreds of trees festooned in bright pink – a sure sign of spring here. It also means that we now get “pink snow” with sidewalks covered with millions of rotting pink petals as they drop from the trees making way for the green.
I say fortunately because it means that summer is fast approaching and the weather will stop being as unpredictable. Plus seeing Vancouver return to it’s lush forest-like state is the way we all want to see it.
It also means that Chris’ birthday is approaching. Early April and he’ll be, well let’s just say turning another year older. It always causes him stress and last year I didn’t exactly help alleviate that so I’m going to try to do something special this year. Not a big party, but something nice.
We’re also planning on a small mini-vacation either that weekend or the one after. Just a quick trip out of town for 2 nights to re-group and see someplace new. Technically it’ll be the first vacation we’ve taken as a couple. A few years ago we went to Calgary for a long weekend, but we stayed with my family the whole time and had a tight agenda of things we had to do. Not really a vacation.
This will be all about us – relaxing, no agenda (other than getting to the destination), no interruptions. The dog is coming with us, but he’s low maintenance generally.
Spring is in the air!
It wasn’t the best weekend, mostly because Chris was super sick all weekend. It didn’t entirely stop us but slowed us down. It’s now Monday and he’s not 100% better, but improving. Poor guy.
I spent the majority of the weekend working on my WordPress plugin. Standout Comments runs the comment system on this blog and many of my other personal blogs. My partners in this, Alex Shalman and local marketer John Chow hope to launch this to the public on March 25.
I’ve been struggling with Tweetbacks, a system for tracking tweets about your blog across the Twittersphere. I think I finally nailed it 100% this weekend, but it cost me about 8 hours of tracking, testing and coding to get it. The main problem was that it sent thousands of requests and Twitter would rate-limit me. When Twitter rate-limits you, they send back an error that says “Enhance your chill.” Cute, but not helpful.
We had to cancel some plans with friends and the weather wasn’t great for getting out or having the windows open too much either, it seemed like I was opening and closing windows every 5 minutes, or turning the heat on or off too.
Combine that with “Spring Forward” and the new early morning darkness and it was a little confusing. Oh well, now it’s Monday. Which can only mean one thing…
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Nathan Sawaya is a Lego Artist – a job title that not many people can lay claim to. And man is he good.
Take a look at his latest creation over there —>
Nathan has created this Lego model of a BlackBerry for the BlackBerry developer conference coming up and this is just the latest example of his work.
Like I said, this is my kind of job. I’m sure it’s not easy and something like this one must be a technical challenge since it has to be vertical, support it’s own weight – oh, and contain a functioning television!
My brother, Brad, and I used to spend many, many hours in the basement playing building with Lego. We built entire cities, a fully functional and accurate football stadium and many abstract creations. The football stadium had concession stands on the outside and a store! It was huge and we were very proud of it. I won’t tell you how old we were at the time.
Unfortunately time moved on and we moved out of the house. Neither of us could afford to, nor had room to, take the Lego we had amassed with us and it was left behind. Eventually Brad managed to sell it but for a LOT less than it should have gone for. I miss it.
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