Clupeid Rauwolfia

Clupeid - Of, relating to, or belonging to the family Clupeidae (various widely distributed soft-finned fishes, which includes the herrings, menhadens, and sardines).

Rauwolfia - a genus of evergreen trees and shrubs in the Apocynaceae family. The approximately 85 species in the genus can mainly be found in tropical regions.

The last few days, I learned that with enough people, you can make Wikipedia say anything. To an extent.

Note: some words in the following paragraph had their letters reversed so that this post does not come up when searching for certain phrases on Google. You will understand why soon enough.

In French class the other day, two of my friends made a page about a Dr. hsoJ namlA, professor of botany at UofT. The two of them and I have been adding onto it little by little, and trying to fight off the various claims to delete the page. I have a theory that if only one person had made the page and done all the editing, they would have deleted the page near instantly, but as three different users have been working on it, they had to delay for a while. They did put up a candidate for deletion template on the page, however, and so far all moderators who have viewed the page have voted to delete it, which shows that you can't really put just anything onto Wikipedia. Basically, from what I've learned from this page, you shouldn't trust an article on Wikipedia if it has been edited within the last minute or has a deletion template on it, and if neither of those is the case, it's probably fine. For fun, though, you can go to the page, and add whatever you want to it. Just try to make it realistic-ish, so that maybe we can keep the page for another couple days. Hopefully the people researching whether Dr. namlA exists won't come here and find out the truth (that's why words were reversed, by the way).

Also, you should click on the links to the moderator discussions about the page. Some of them are quite funny. Plus, because anyone can edit any page Wikipedia, you can change what their discussion says! They change it back almost instantly when you do that, though, so watch out. While Wikipedia is a great idea, and useful resource, I guess there is a backside to everything.

Now, onto Guitar Hero! Basically, Jon seems to dislike it because it has rock music in it, and FFR has a higher BPM (beats per minute, in case you didn't catch on in his post) than Guitar Hero does. As for his problem with rock music, I cannot help it if he has bad taste in music. Most of the songs he seems to like are techno/trance, which I like to an extent as well, but obviously there are some differences between techno and rock. Basically, all I can say is that whether or not you like the music is preferential, and just because Jon doesn't, that doesn't mean Guitar Hero is a bad game. Plus, there are some songs like this and this (beware: there is a long intro) which I think that even he would like.

Regarding the BPM, I completely agree that some songs in FFR have much higher BPMs than most in Guitar Hero do. I don't think that this is a problem. When the goal is to hit arrow keys that are right next to each other, you can generally hit more notes than when you are using a guitar hero guitar to play. However, not only do I find the guitar controller much more fun to play with, but I think playing with arrow keys is pretty lame. It's pretty much the equivalent of playing dance dance revolution with an Xbox controller instead of a dance mat. Those of you who play DDR should know that that takes away all the fun. Plus, some Guitar Hero songs can have very high BPMs, but they are generally difficult for other reasons, like rhythm or playing lots of chords.

In other news, CBC is very evil. They decided to move jPod from Tuesday nights at 9:00 to Friday nights at 9:00. I went to my television yesterday expecting to watch another episode of jPod, and instead found myself watching some random sitcom about hockey players' wives… Also, I generally have things to do on Friday nights. Humph. Fortunately, you can watch all episodes of jPod online at their site, so it's not too bad. I'll just have to watch jPod on Saturdays instead of Tuesdays.

Speaking of watching television on the internet, everyone should check this out – the Comedy Network put recent episodes of the Colbert Report and the Daily Show and South Park, among other more memorable episodes of each, online to watch whenever you want, without ads. Well, that's not entirely true. There are ads for some show they started online called Lil' Bush, which, surprisingly, has not been taken down by the FBI. Just watch a few ads for it, and you will see what I mean.

Speaking of which, Super Tuesday went by yesterday pretty much as expected for the Democrats – neither Obama nor Clinton have a non-trivial lead, and according to pretty much everyone, the battle is going to get nasty. Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, nasty isn't usually what you would expect. Stephen Colbert actually talked about this in his episode two Tuesdays ago, so you should go watch it! I won't say any more, so that I don't spoil it for you. Plus, he makes everything seem funnier than it really is. I got his book, I am America (and so can you!), and it's really funny, even though I disagree with a fair portion of it. I would suggest reading it, when you are taking a break from playing Guitar Hero, or urgently awaiting Brawl (I assume you spend your time doing the same things that I spend my time doing).

As for Republicans, McCain has pretty much won. I hope he doesn't win the real election, though (this one was fake, of course). He seems to be very similar to the current president. According to an article I read in the Globe and Mail the other day, Republicans are very lucky that Canadians can't vote in the American elections, because over 90% could vote Democratic, almost regardless of which candidate was representing them, mostly because they don't like Bush. Therefore, my opinion is probably fairly prominent among people here in Toronto.

Anyway, after spending a fair amount of time writing this instead of playing Guitar Hero, I think I need to return, or something like what happens to Ethan from CAD when he doesn't play video games for a decent amount of time might happen to me as well. Well, maybe a lower-scale version of that. Anyway, until next time!