Despite having an inflated self-image, aov’s own Matthew Dorrell has neglected to gloat about having a poem published UPEI’s student creative writing journal, Annex 2000.

Matt’s poem, Selling Vacuums is funny and upsetting. However, like all geniuses he is falsely humble and unhappy with the bounty of his quill (that’s what old pens that smart people used are called). He claims that the published piece is “in many little pieces and I have not as yet discovered how to re-assemble them properly”.

The world won’t wait. Ladies and Genderless, an aov exclusive (sort of), the newly revised version of Matthew Dorrell’s Selling Vacuums, previously published in UPEI’s Annex 2000:

In large letters:

P – E – N – E

and where the final S was to be, an aov member rolling in the freshly fallen snow, laughing histerically at his poor spelling.

Today the sun made an extended appearance.* People danced in the street or, at the very least, they smiled for the first time in weeks.

Forget all that nonsence about free-will. We are simple animals with a complex system of rationalizing our actions. Actions which are based on nothing more than the electricity and the chemical soup housed in our pre-historic brains and influenced by the environment which surrounds us. A quick equation to demonstrate:

Sun = Happy

This doesn’t mean you have no control over your moods. Here are a few things which may help you tip the balance of happy vs. sad chemicals in your favour:

Ya Mama – Fatboy Slim
Shake what ya mama gave ya. Found on Fatboy’s new album Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars and on the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack.

Charlie’s Angels
No plot. No point. Beautiful women kicking people. Bill Murray. Happy.

The Grasshopper
2 oz. green creme de menthe
2 oz. white creme de cacao
2 oz. light cream

* Actually this happened yesterday. Today it is snowing. The delay on this post comes from having nearly finished this post yesterday and having it disappear. It angries up the blood I tell ya.

The fine people who make our Swiss Army Knives seem to have a promotion on that if you play their little SwissCard Tetris game and get a really high score that holds until the end of the month… they give you a free SwissCard! Let’s all get free SwissCards, they give out 10 a month.

(the highest score is about 6000, the lowest is 3000, shouldn’t be too hard, right?)

Update: Either my flash/java/whatever it uses is messed up, or that game is rigged. It speeds up slowly, and becomes unplayable at around 300 points. Mr. 6000 points is cheating the Swiss somehow. No free knives today…

Before last week I had never heard of the authour Lemony Snicket (AKA Daniel Handler). I do not believe I was alone. In the last week Snicket, the pen-name used by Handler when writing kids books, has been featured in The National Post, his website has appeared on K10k and Handler has also written an article for Salon discussing the top five books with the word “bird” in the title.*

It took me some time to determine whether or not Lemony Snicket (simply the best pen-name out there other than Mark Twain) was actually a children’s authour. His series of children’s books, titled A Series of Unfortunate Events, is certainly written so that a child can read it, but the content is somewhat unusual for a children’s fiction. The beginning of the series, titled The Bad Beginning, involves the death of the Baudelaire children’s parents in a fire. This is followed by, among other things, Count Olaf attemting to marry 14-year-old Violet, 12-year-old claus nearly killing someone with a buzz-saw, and an angry mob chasing the children from town.

The people who didn’t like the Harry Potter books will really hate this series. Myself, I think it’s about time we got back to the age old business of frightening small children.

* My favourite book with “bird” in the title, At Swim Two Birds by Flan O’Brien, is mentioned but doesn’t make it to the top five. It should. Thankfully, To Kill a Mockingbird does not make an appearance.

“Student newspaper.” What do those words mean to you? Do they seem to imply an ownership of the paper by students? At the very least wouldn’t you imagine that a “student newspaper” would involve some level of control over the newspaper by the students?

Staff at UPEI‘s student newspaper, The Cadre recently learned that the above assumptions don’t necessarily hold true. Staff had decided not to publish an issue for two weeks so that they might concentrate on their studies – you know, the reason they’re at univeristy? The break from publishing would not have interfered with the requirement that The Cadre publish 10 issues a semester. However, The Cadre was told by its advertisers that they had no choice and had to publish a new issue.

The result of this bullying is The Faction – a minimalist paper which is fully 50% advertising. For my money (the paper is free) this is probably one of the best issues of The Cadre, or any incarnation of UPEI’s student newspaper, that I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Nearly all the non-advertising content in The Faction attacks the advertisers and advertising in general, but does so in an intelligent manner.

Well done.

To receive your copy of The Faction go to the Main Building of the University of Prince Edward Island. Room 06 in the basement.