- for those who don’t know, i will soon be fleeing the ugly interior of canada for the pristine beaches of the west coast. i’m going to ubc in vancouver for grad school in the fall, gettin my masters in film studies (god willing. more on him later). apparently i will be TA’ing a first year introduction to film class, for which i have to lead 2 tutorials. im looking forward to indoctrinating fresh young minds with my obsession with the matrix. im also TA’ing a second year class on classical hollywood cinema, a topic of which i don’t know shiiiit. looks like i have homework for a school i haven’t even started at!

- this jesus money thing just won’t die! oops, blasphemous pun, this keeps happening…. so after the intense publicity junket i did following the event (har har) the news is out! ugh, its so… embarassing? or maybe just weird i dont know. first up, we have the christian kids’ (aka the campus crusade for christ) own article on their website, in which they state, and i quote, with a feeling of blasphemy:

Andrew Dewaard, a 4th year film student, was the overwhelmed student whose number was drawn at our event to win the $2500 towards tuition. Pray that this gets Andrew thinking as he is from a Christian background but not in a relationship with God.

ummm i don’t know what to say. i feel bad. and horrified. if there is one thing athiests don’t want, it’s people praying for them. but these bible thumpers mean well, i have no beef with that.

and then there is the article written by a fims (which is my faculty, the faculty of information and media studies) journalism student. this article reminds me why i should never talk to “the media”. i suck at it. i shoulda learned my lesson with the cbc interview i did for my documentary a ways back. now i’ve been “soundbyted” to “i just came for the money” in the audio interview. ugh.

oh well, at least i’ll always have the hilarious photos from this whole debacle.

i also burned the cheque at dallas’s party.

purging by fire. seems (foreshadowing-ly?) appropriate.

here is jenny telling me that starting a fire in her yard is probably not a good idea.

she was probably right. besides, we had other not-so-well-thought-out ideas to do, like visit an abandoned, boarded-up, gutted-by-fire frathouse, providing me with a bloody hand and copious creepy pictures.

and the weird thing about this picture is that the red eye avoidance setting was on, so jordan’s glowing eyes aren’t a camera thing.

jesus and demons, when did my life become so biblical?

just like last year this time, i had to say (temporary) goodbye to some dear ol’ friends in the past few weeks. most beloved of all, my precious roomates.

alicia.

immediately following her exit from a bus, alicia runs home. like full tilt. arms flailing, book bag swinging, hair all over the place, not a care in the world; i feel like this act sums up alicia quite well. i’ll miss the chicken-wing runs and the roof tops and the bike rides and the chip n dip and the rick mcghie and the purple paint and the freaks n geeks and the st paddy days and the ceeps brew trays.

sioned.

it’s fun to witness the early days of someone so obviously destined for great things. im almost tempted to lose contact with sioned just so we can meet again in 10 or 20 years and she can enthrall me with her many stories of travels and hardships and adventures and victories. of course, i won’t be able to cope without constant contact with my beloved sioned, but it’s an interesting thought. i’ll miss the post-it notes and the spontaneous arguments and the addictions and the ‘did ya talk to yer buddy for me?’ and the sam roberts and the highary and the pathetic attempts to avoid our late-nite drunken wake-ups.

jackie.

affectionately known as ‘our annoying little sister’ (despite having graduated before all of us), jackie was a last minute addition to the household and it just wouldn’t have been the same without her. as her and i split ways, the winchesters have officially dissolved, moving on to bigger and better, but never forgetting that end of the hall, 2nd miller westmin. i’ll miss the jumping-on-the-bed-rock-outs and the epworth treehouse and the weezer dances and the westmin beach and the reunion camping and that unphaseable smile.

speaking of drunken wake ups, this is the result of one such attack on sioned’s peaceful slumber.

tear.

i have like a billion other things i wanna say when i have the time (the whole finishing my undergraduate degree thing), but i had to put a link to this, cause colbert made the most INCREDIBLE speech at the white house press secretary’s dinner. you have to watch this (or try here), or at least read it.

right in front of the president, he says stuff like

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

the speech also lampooned the american news media, which i think (in true mit form) is one of the bigger reasons why we’re in this whole near-apocolypse mess of a superpower-turned-fascist state. and the irony of it all is that no major news source reported on colbert’s incredible critique. cowardly is putting it lightly, even the so-called liberal bastion new york times didnt even mention colbert and just bought into the whole ‘lets make our beloved president likable cause he can joke about himself’ crap.

It’s insane journalism not to write about Colbert’s appearance. It’s the main event. Like it or hate it, it’s the thing to talk about. You have to CHOOSE to focus on the lightweight entertainment that preceded it.

to me this is a big deal, cause politics in pop culture is kinda my thang to study, as are postmodern tactics like irony and satire, and i think colbert and stewart are really great examples of this. but more than that, the Colbert Affair Exposes Loss of Rights

if you wanna read more, there’s Colbert’s Smart Bomb and The Truthiness Hurts from salon.com, and then commentary on the lack of coverage with Ignoring Colbert: A Small Taste of the Media’s Power to Choose the News and Ignoring Colbert, Part Two from huffingtonpost.com:

Colbert’s was a brave and shocking performance. And for the media to pretend it isn’t newsworthy is a total bafflement. And a symbol of how shoddy and suspect the media is.

update: actually now that i search a bit more, this seems to becoming a hotly debated topic, especially in the blogosphere. and bush was quite unhappy with it, yes. and you can thank him at thankyoustephencolbert.org, haha. and jon stewart called it “ballsalicious“.

indeed.