Archive for January 10th, 2008

Almost the weekend, there's no almost to the weather. It's wet, and it's going to stay wet.

    - Who needs comfort food? I do! I do! Me too please!  Check out this recipe for Banana Maple Pecan Bread.  Yum!

    - The Naughty But Nice Sex Show starts tonight and goes all weekend.  Nice? Who are they kidding, it's all raunch

    - For those not headed to that show, perhaps The Backyardigans weekend series of shows is more your speed.

    - Babies Babies Babies. Pam Anderson is pregnant is not pregnant.  Avril Lavigne is pregnant is not pregnant.  Nicole Kidman is not pregnant is pregnant.

    - Have you signed Nat and Drew's petition yet?

    - Do you enjoy playing Nintendo Wii?  Well, you're just like the Queen of England, aren't you?

    - A car for $2500?  Yup, and it gets 64MPG.  But the best part, it's a Tata!

    - Kuljeet's new haircut is soooo 2008.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

A province wide ban on smoking indoors is being upheld. That means hookah parlours and cigar lounges will no longer be allowed to offer their custormers the privelege to puff on the premises.

I’m an anti-smoking nazi. Hate the stuff. I mutter “die smoker” at the cancer kids huddle in the wind and rain outside building doors. I boycott tobacco companies and all of their subsidiaries.

Did you know Kraft is actually owned by Phillip Morris Altria? Add in all their subsidiary brands like Nabisco, Kool-Aid, Maxwell House, Jell-O, Oscar Mayer, Post…- and if you’re not careful when you do your groceries, you could actually be supporting big tobacco.

So it’s not surprising I should feel no sympathy for the hookah people now that their reason for business has been removed from them. One parlour owner downtown is trying to trumpet his business as a place for Persians and Iranians to have a bit of home, here.

I got an idea, how about when women are treated equally in your part of the world, you can smoke in our part of the world?

When in Rome Vancouver, friend. When in Rome Vancouver

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

How relevant are Olympic sports?

I mean, in our ancient history discus and javelin were probably relevant measures of strength and accuracy for those who hunted and occasionally gathered, but in 2008 is the distance you can throw a spear relevant?

There are more strange ones in the Winter Olympics. Like ski jumping. Are there people sliding down cliffs and soaring over fjords in Norway on the way to school? Do we need to find out “who does it the best”?

That’s just the cynical side of me, I think it’s a beautiful sport, and one of the ones I would consider seeing live at the 2010 Olympics (but I’m really hoping to see short track speed skating).

The venues are going up across Vancouver-Whistler at an amazing rate and over the past month the ski jumping facility at Whistler was completed for the teams to test and train on. I say “teams,” plural, because Canada has a men’s team, and a women’s team. But only the men can compete in the Olympics.

The women argue that for a new sport to be admitted to the Oympics now, it has to have both male and female editions. BTW, ladies, it also has to have a reasonable base of people in the world participating in the sport.

Guess how many women, on the entire planet, are ski jumpers.

86.

86 women in the world are competitive ski jumpers. You could argue that if they had the chance at Olympic glory, more would enter the sport, I would argue do we even need ski jumping?

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?.

Last week the recording industry released sales figures showing the sales of physical cds is plummeting.

I argued that with digital sales rising, the books should really be balanced because of the decreased costs in manufacturing and transporting music that’s digital. All you have to do is upload a song once and you’re done. You don’t have to burn cd’s, print artwork or stuff jewel boxes, all you do is throw the song on a server and cash the cheques.

I’m a fan of Sia. She’s done work with Zero 7, has her own solo career and has a beautiful quirky style that I find magical.

I was in Starbucks yesterday and saw her new album. A total impulse buy, I thought about getting it until I flipped it over and saw the price was US$13.95 / C$16.95. Hmm .. a little steep, and throw in the exchange imbalance and I said no. Now before you chastize me for wanting to buy music in a coffee shop, you need to know my life does not revolve around a mall. I’m in Starbucks more than HMV, so it’s convenient for me.

So I put the CD back, too expensive (mind you I did pay $6 for a chai latte and a treat), reminding myself to check iTunes later.

I just looked up Sia on iTunes. The CD, the whole album, is $9.99. It’s not a part of iTunes +, so that means the tracks have Digital Rights Management attached to them, and I won’t be able to move them between my devices easily, so I checked Amazon MP3. Sia - Some People Have Real Problemsis $8.99 and totally DRM free.

Almost HALF of what a CD would cost me.

That’s why I’m not buying CDs, cause y’all are screwing us!

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?