[PHOTO] For OCAD, look up

For OCAD, look up
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

The unusual design of OCAD--the local shorthand for OCAD University, the OCAD meaning "Ontario College of Art and Design"--is best demonstrated in this park, located directly below a projection of several floors from the main building that's supported by pillars like the two visible beyond the Emergency column.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton wonders why fictional names for an independent western Canada are so lame.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait goes over the evidence about the supposed massive distant gas giant Tyche in our system, pointing out that there are suggestive theories but no proofs, and no, this has nothing to do with the Sumerians.


• blogTO reproduces the underwhelming Toronto bikeway network.


• Daniel Drezner speculates about the possibility of a domino effect of revolutions in the Middle East.


• Eastern Approaches reports on the plight of refugees in western Ukraine, who tried to get into the European Union but failed.


• Far Outliers documents how Ethiopia's late medieval approaches to Europe were driven by deteriorating relations with Muslim polities.


• The Global Sociology Blog links to a variety of sources on survival sex, everything from the improved career prospects offered sex workers in Craiglist to survival sex in Soviet Estonia.


• Laywers, Guns and Money's Paul Campos thinks American politics is single-wing, without a strong left at all, at least in economic and foreign policy.


• Otto Pohl makes an interesting post noting the surprisingly strong relationship between Denmark and Ghana, the country where Danes once maintained a slaving outpost.


• At The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer starts off a series on Bahrain, a Persian Gulf island state with an American relationship dependent on oil and basing rights for the Fifth Fleet.


• Window on Eurasia picks up on the phenomenon of Russians moving south across the Amur River into China.

[MUSIC] Lady Gaga, "Born This Way"

Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" annoys me.

It's not that it's a badly-constructed song so much that it's a cliched song, not only with the narrator getting some privileged knowledge ("There's nothin' wrong with lovin' who you are"/She said, "'Cause He made you perfect, babe" /"So hold your head up, girl and you you'll go far") she then kindly shares with people she urges not to keep hiding themselves in regret and shame or whatever, with some cringeworthy lyrical selections ("chola," "orient"), and, um. I don't find all that much to disagree with in Mark Simpson's review.

It’s a catchy single, of course, and will make a lot of money, but everything about this song is backwards. The music, the lyrics, the mentality, the politics. For all the self-righteous posturing it’s completely free of any content. But brimming over with bullshit. Not only are we ‘born this way’, and ‘God makes no mistakes’, and being gay is apparently an ethnic trait, sexuality is also now some kind of smug fucking railway – ‘I’m on the right track baby’. Well, stop the choo-choo, I wanna get off.

It’s as if someone decided to remake The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a GLAAD public service announcement, with Harvey Fierstein or Dan Savage in the role of Frankenfurter. And cut all the songs.

In my humble opinion, Gaga should never write head-on about sexuality again. Ever. That’s her only hope of recovering the post-sexual charge that made her seem so interesting and relevant just a few months ago. She embodies post-sexuality, and the notion that you might want to choose who you love or shag – or who you are – better than anyone. But she clearly can’t articulate it self-consciously in a lyric. It might be impossible for anyone to do that – but almost anyone could make a better fist of it than Gaga in ‘Born That Way’.

Musically, the homages to Madge were much better done on The Fame Monster (though it was the Boney M salutes such as ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Poker Face’ that were her best tracks). In 2011, especially after being dubbed ‘the Diva of Déjà Vu’ by Camille Paglia (you were so right, Ms P!) she really, really needed to escape the gravitational attraction of Planet Madge.

But she wanted this song to be GAY!!! so she returned yet again to the nipple of the original gay Borg queen at her gayest. And as I say, she may have poisoned herself fatally with this tragic pastiche, that is a HiNRG cover of Express Yourself in a Vogue stylee, but with less 21st Century lyrics than either of those 20th Century songs.

The point Simpson makes in the third paragraph, especially.