Seeing how it’s Monday night, and I have nothing better to do, I’m going to talk to you about a subject which may, perhaps at first, seem silly and inane; but with some clarity and deeper thought, you might come to realize its hidden importance.

Okay, that’s not true. It’s pretty stupid all the way through.

But anyways, the subject tonight is regarding one of Google’s April Fools jokes. Did you manage to catch the one about Google Paper?

According to the site, Google was offering Gmail users the ability to receive their e-mails via hard copy printouts — up to a hundred thousand copies. This included high quality glossy prints of any photo attachments, attached to the Google Paper, which, by the way, was 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum.

Got all that?

Now, I want you to pull your eyes towards the picture of the female Google model above, sitting on the bench and using the laptop. In case you haven’t noticed, she is what I would call ‘mindfuckingly hot’.

See, when I first saw this April Fools joke, it started me thinking: Google controls our lives, right?

I use Google Mail as a central hub for my billion of school and personal accounts, I use Google Calendar to organize my life, Google Maps to go where I need to go, Google Search to do research and Google Books to sample books and Google Scholar to find articles. Hell, I even use Google to spell-check my documents, and to convert feet to meters.

So is Google Women or Google Girls entirely out of reach? Will Google one day provide me with dates and potential love interests?

All I have to say is, if they all look like her, sign me up, yo.

I’m going to miss quite a few things about Ottawa.

Like the perennial girl next door, with her cute button-nose and dirty blonde hair, Ottawa has managed to maintain its innocence, even with its position as the capital of Canada. Nowhere else in the world can you find a capital city which is so clean, so polite, and so comfortable to live in.

But then it snows. Yeah, it snows big time. In the middle of April.

Pack your bags, dollface.

For those of you who had the luck of missing the snow/slushfall in Ottawa this morning, there was actually a lot more snow than is shown in the above picture. Or slush. It was wet. And it was deep. And I nearly broke my tailbone on the driveway.

Relationships with the girl next door never work out anyways.

We like the bad ones, too.

There’s a hilarious story being discussed on the WoW forums. For those of you who’ve been stuck in the ice age, WoW or World of Warcraft is a computer role-playing game played by a huge online base of (more or less addicted and lifeless) players.

And for my fellow Ottawaians, take a guess where this story takes place.

Edit: Apparently, the correct term is “Ottawans”.

Thanks Dan “The Jackass” B.

Dan and Heba wrote to me today regarding my post on Joshua Bell’s incognito performance in the D.C. Metro station.

I hope you — like me — can find enjoyment (and perhaps even criticism) in their wonderful commentaries.

To: Phil
From: Dan
Date: Late night
Subject: Contact Form Results

I must admit I only had time to quickly scan the article…Are they honestly saying Mr. Bell’s experiment demonstrates even remotely something about the average person’s disdain for classical music? They can’t actually be condemning society this way. If this is case, someone should introduce these vain people to the scientific method.

Amongst the many flaws this experiment has, the most outright is in the context. As someone who currently lives in a city with a subway system, I know that whether you’re playing pop/rock/classical/african music, you’re likely to be ignored by tens of thousands of people in a given day. Even the greatest classical enthusiast doesn’t hang out in the dirty, acoustically-dreadful subway to hear masterpieces…

So why should busy and unsuspecting commuting people be expected to pay any attention? Do people even have to visibly react or pay him to prove they enjoyed/acknowledged something? I see and hear things all the time that I find enjoyable but I don’t always stop to smell the roses.

On the other end of the spectrum, I don’t interrupt my morning jog when I see people I dislike to punch them in the face, either. Maybe I should.

In this case, neglect does not necessarily imply disrespect.

Tell the proponents of that attention-seeking virtuoso to get a clue. They make better musicians than scientists/sociologists.

Night,
Daniel

To: Phil
From: Heba
Date: Sometime this afternoon
Subject: Contact Form Results

Math and classical music are not for the masses, but [are] very fine indeed. Most people like junk food, not gourmet stuff. So math and classical music is gourmet food for the mind and soul. Cherished by those who covet true quality. You, Mr. Phil, are a true connoisseur of gourmet food.

Heba

I find it endlessly amusing when people call me Mr. Phil.

Thanks to Macarena who sent me this article about how celebrated violinist Joshua Bell was filmed playing at a D.C. Metro station while largely ignored by over a thousand people.

joshua bell

“It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah…”

The word doesn’t come easily.

“…ignoring me.”

Pearls before Breakfast

As a classical violinist, I’m not surprised.

You shouldn’t be either.

It’s well known that classical music (and certainly, classical violin) doesn’t have the same kind of mainstream appeal as say, classic rock n’ roll, pop, or the blues. In fact, I’m not even a fan of some of the music he played that day (and I’ve played some of the repertoire myself!) — it’s just not the kind of music I grew up with and not the kind of music that appeals to the Generation X or Y population.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I prefer classical guitar over classical violin. There’s a much broader range of musical offerings on classical guitar — especially in the contemporary period. However, violin repertoire is still very much inspired by the rennaissance, baroque, and classical periods. It’s hard to escape this on the violin and the end result is that usually if you dislike Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi — that kind of thing — you’re going to dislike the violin.

Was it an interesting experiement? Sure. Did it surprise me? Not really.

The simple truth is that classical musicians are not rock and roll stars or movie celebrities. Bach’s Chaconne, however beautiful, is not recognizable in this day and age. And sadly, a supermodel flashing the masses at a street corner is likely to draw more attention — however undeserved.

And now who wants to draw the similarities between the mainstream appeal of classical music and that of math?

The link was fixed. What? Nobody bothered to tell me?