Abstract Random

All my mental energy is being zapped by a monstrous project at work and will continue to be for the next few weeks or so. So, I'm too tired/scattered to tell you about my long weekend (but I will tell you to go see Extract), or talk about food, or lament on Starla's latest downturn (we're taking her to the vet on Friday). I can, however, provide distraction in the form of an assortment of cute/cool videos because, really, isn't that what the internet is for?

Japanese ukulele puppets!

Kermit as David Byrne!

Long exposures of bugs under a street light (cooler than it sounds).

In the absence of anything super exciting to report (other than the fact that I made bacon chipotle barbecue sauce the other day and it is deee-licious), here are links to some things I've seen around the net recently that I thought were pretty cool:

- the chalk animation video for Firekites' Autumn Story;

- a Flickr set of classic album covers redesigned as Pelican books;

- a demo version of The Last Dance, a new track by The Raveonettes;

- a Twitter feed of the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened... 40 years later; and

- another stop motion video, this one featuring Post Its.

I'm going to become an aunt sometime over the next few days or so, though for my sister-in-law I hope it's sooner rather than later. I'm pretty excited about it, and I'm really happy for my brother and sister-in-law.

Today is the first of my Fridays off for the summer. My big plans include doing some housework, going to the gym, and picking up a new pair of black flats from Browns to replace the stinky cheap pleather ones I promised Arun I'd get rid of.

My weekend project (with Arun) is to finish up the podcast we've been putting together. If all goes well we'll have something for you early next week.

Oh, and if you haven't seen them yet, you have to watch some keyboard cat videos on YouTube. Like this one and this one. It's my new favourite thing on the internet.

1. New! Doves! Video!

2. Chandni Chowk To China is playing at The Mayfair this weekend. Bollywood + Kung Fu = We will be going to see it.

3. This video of birds flocking on power lines is very cool.

It's been a relatively uneventful week. You know, it's February. In Ottawa. I'm happy to be settling back into our normal weekday schedules now that the buses are running again. I went to a work-related fundraising dinner last night that, despite the jazz guitarist, was relatively painless.

Tomorrow, is, of course, Valentine's Day. Arun and I have never been especially big V-Day celebrators but we won't pass up an excuse for a mid-winter treat. Tomorrow will be pretty low key, we'll make spaghetti carbonara for dinner (we got some fresh peas in our organics basket) and maybe an apple crumble or carrot cake for dessert. But next Sunday we're going to Montreal to see Thievery Corporationand calling that Valentine's related.

Oh, and if you haven't seen this then you should check it out: 278 Star Wars lines made better by replacing a word with "pants". It's incredibly geeky but undeniably funny.

Christmas came early to our house this weekend, in the form of an Xbox, Rock Band 2, and Left 4 Dead. Wasting Spending our time off over the holidays playing video games has been a long-standing tradition, going back to our first PlayStation and Wipeout XL, and this year we'll both be off for two weeks so a new gaming console seemed to be in order. We were both fighting colds and in need of a pick me up this weekend so Arun very sweetly went out and bought it while I was at my Saturday morning French class and surprised me with it when I got home.

Rock Band 2 is super fun and I was chuffed to see it comes with a Bikini Kill (!) track, not to mention L7, Lush, Blondie, Joan Jett, and The Go-Go's.

Left 4 Dead is a first-person shooter that normally wouldn't interest me except that this one involves zombies and, well, zombies change everything. Plus you can play co-operatively with other people and the game is smart enough to "tailor the frequency and ferocity of the zombie attacks to your performance," which is great because I have enough trouble just navigating my character through the game, I spend half my time just trying to figure out where I am, never mind having to fight off ferocious zombie attacks. In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I'm toast.

Obamafy is a free Photo Booth plugin by Dubi Kaufmann so now everyone (everyone with a Mac, anyway) can emulate that iconic Obama poster by Shepard Fairey. Sweet!