Me as a Simpson's character

I finally had some success with the Simpsonize-me program and this is what it came up with. Truth be told, I had to tweak the image (you can change the features yourself once they do it) but I think it turned out pretty good.

Paris Je T'aime

I just came back from seeing Paris Je T'aime at the Princess Cinema. It was a wonderful film that I would recommend to all the romantics in the world.

The movie consisted of 18 short films, all by differend directors and starring different actors. One reason I wanted to see this movie, other than the fact that it takes place in Paris, is that many of my favourite actors are in it.


Steve Buscemi








Natalie Portman












Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer








As well as Bob Hoskins, Gerard Depardieu, Elijah Wood, Maggie Gyllenhaal, William Dafoe, and Juliette Binoche. Oh, and a mime...


After seeing this movie, I am even more excited about my exchange. I hope I'll fall in love with Paris too (or, failing that, just meet a really handsome boy in Paris).





Here is the trailer:

The five hottest rockers

To celebrate my last day of classes for the summer term, today's post is going to be completely brainless. Here are, in my opinion, the five hottest rocker stars:

Number 5: Ryan Star

Born: January 7, 1978

Known from: Rock Star: Supernova

Star gets the number 5 spot because I don't really know him from a rock band, but rather from reality television. Regardless, he was my favourite contestant on Supernova and I was very sad when he was voted off.

Check him out playing his own song, Back of Your Car here.

Number 4: Trent Reznor

Born: May 17, 1965

Known from: Nine Inch Nails

Okay okay, at 42 he's a little old for me. Regardless, he's aged well, and he's still relevent! NIN's most recent album Year Zero is amazing. You can check out one of the videos, Only, here.

Number 3: John Mayer

Born: October 16, 1977

Known from: Being John Mayer

I'm kind of departing from the "rock" rock, but I'll let it slide for Mayer. I love his songs, I love his voice, I love that he's tall and very handsome. This picture is from his new GAP campaign.

Here he is playing Neon from his first album.

Number 2: Sam Roberts

Born: October 2, 1974

Known from: Sam Roberts Band

I love Sam Roberts. I mean, to the extent that I'm a member of the "Sam Roberts is my husband" group on Facebook. I love his music, love that he can pull of the messy, scruffy look, love that he's Canadian.

I found this clip of him playing a Gordon Lightfoot song.

Number 1: Josh Homme

Born: May 17, 1973

Known from: Queens of the Stone Age

I save the best for last. QOTSA has been one of my favourite bands for a while, and I've been holding a torch for Josh for almost as long. It may be my weakness for redheads, or that I listened to his singing for so many hours that I began to imagine he's singing for me, but he just does it for me.

Here are the Queens doing their hit No One Knows on acoustic.

The end of term is nigh

I drew an enormous breath of relieve Thursday night as I submitted the last assignment of the term! Take that, "Genres of Business Communication"!

To celebrate, Chris, Chelsea, and I (constant 3rd wheel) went to see Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix. It was amazing, especially seeing all the characters growing up. We got to witness Harry's first kiss:

Actually, I was really struck by how Daniel Radcliffe looked on the cover of the new Details magazine. Check it out:

All I can say is....wow! I can't wait for the final Potter flicks!

Bénabar "Le Dîner"

Here's another great song by French crooner Bénabar. Here are the lyrics:

J'veux pas y'aller à ce dîner, j'ai pas l'moral, j'suis fatigué, ils nous en voudront pas, allez on n'y va pas. En plus faut que je fasse un régime ma chemise me boudine, j'ai l'air d'une chipolata, je peux pas sortir comme ça. Ça n'a rien à voir je les aime bien tes amis, mais je veux pas les voir parce que j'ai pas envie.

On s'en fout, on n'y va pas, on n'a qu'à se cacher sous les draps, on commandera des pizzas, toi la télé et moi, on appelle, on s'excuse, on improvise, on trouve quelque chose, on n'a qu'à dire à tes amis qu'on les aime pas et puis tant pis.

J'suis pas d'humeur tout me déprime et il se trouve que par hasard, y'a un super bon film à la télé ce soir. Un chef-d'oeuvre du 7ème art que je voudrais revoir, un drame très engagé sur la police de Saint-Tropez. C'est une satire sociale dont le personnage central est joué par de Funès, en plus y'a des extraterrestres.

On s'en fout, on n'y va pas, on n'a qu'à se cacher sous les draps, on commandera des pizzas, toi la télé et moi, on appelle, on s'excuse, on improvise, on trouve quelque chose, on n'a qu'à dire à tes amis qu'on les aime pas et puis tant pis.

J'ai des frissons je me sens faible, je crois que je suis souffrant, ce serait pas raisonnable de sortir maintenant. Je préfère pas prendre de risque, c'est peut-être contagieux, il vaut mieux que je reste ça m'ennuie mais c'est mieux. Tu me traites d'égoïste, comment oses-tu dire ça ? Moi qui suis malheureux et triste et j'ai même pas de home-cinéma.

On s'en fout, on n'y va pas, on n'a qu'à se cacher sous les draps, on commandera des pizzas, toi la télé et moi, on appelle, on s'excuse, on improvise, on trouve quelque chose, on n'a qu'à dire à tes amis qu'on les aime pas et puis tant pis.

It's that time of the year...

...when school is just paining me.

To illustrate:

lemon = me

juicer = school

I had a bunch of stuff due last week, even more due next week, and I am sooo tired. I may be developing a dependence on energy drinks, although I'm sure it's just a placebo effect that makes be believe they work.

But after next week things will quiet down and I will see the new Harry Potter movie and be happy.

This cute drawing is from http://www.nutandbee.com/index.html. My friend Mary is a fan of their stuff. Check out the site if you want a dose of uber-cute.

New Laptop!

I just ordered a new Dell laptop yesterday. I was originally going to get a plain one from Best Buy or something, but once I saw the ads for the new colourful Dells I knew I had to have one. Look at how cute they are!

Oh God, I am such a girl.

My housemate Steve is getting a black one. I opted for the green, although the brown and yellow are also pretty neat. But green looks better with my skin, and isn't that the most important thing?

I cannot wait till my little lappy comes in the mail.

I got the matching case too, natch.

French music doesn't suck, part 2

This is in response to the comments I got for my first posting about French music. My buddy Mark, who lives in Montréal (and therefore knows about such things), told me about this French (from Paris) hip-hop trio called TTC. My other friend Steve told me that French rap sucks, so this is also to prove him wrong.

So I present to you all the infectious beats of TTC:

1. "Téléphone"



2. "Travailler"



This music is a perfect antidote to the Canadian politics essay I have to write by tomorrow.

My Boyfriend the Monster is hungry...

This is an illustrated story I made last year. Note that the only French word in the entire thing, "sautéed," is misspelled. So few words, yet I still manage to muck it up. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy my story! (Disclaimer: this work is entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is not intentional)

Me Talk Pretty One Day

The following is an expert from David Sedaris' hilarious collection of short stories Me Talk Pretty One Day. In this, the title story, the authour is taking French lessons. On the first day the teacher asks her pupils to list things they like and dislike, and proceeds to insult their lists.

The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide, and I jotted frantic notes in the margins of my pad. While I can honestly say that I love leafing through medical textbooks devoted to severe dermatological conditions, the hobby is beyond the reach of my French vocabulary, and acting it out would only have invited controversy.

When called upon, I delivered an effortless list of things that I detest: blood sausage, intestinal pâtés, brain pudding. I'd learned these words the hard way. Having given it some thought, I then declared my love for IBM typewriters, the French work for bruise, and my electric floor waxer. It was a short list, but still I managed to mispronounce IBM, and assign the wrong gender to both the floor waxer and the typewriter. The teacher's reaction led me to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France.

[...]

I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand, thinking- but not saying- that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to crack pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied.

If you've ever been as frustrated with learning French and remembering the genders of nouns as I have, you should take a look at this book. Honestly, it is one of the funniest I've ever read.

Transcend practically the dichotomy?

A few days ago I received an email from the Université Paris-Dauphine, the school where I'll be taking classes this fall. I'm supposed to let them know what courses I plan on taking, but that isn't easy. First, they don't tell you when the lectures take place, and second the course descriptions are some of the most cryptic ones I've ever seen. Case in point (and this comes straight from their site):

Aesthetics and organisational culture

Objectifs:

This course has three main goals:

1. Transcend practically the dichotomy between science and "humanities" in education and particularly between economics and arts as well as literature in management training.
2. Discover one's personal creativity and use it as a professional device.
3. Perceive and experience transdisciplinarity and transculturality through a mode of cognitive navigation between different traditions of reality representation.

Contenu:

Peter Drucker's expressions about work content in the "Knowledge society" as well as Daniel Bell's perspectives on "post-industrial society" in the 60's have both already been validated by numerous researchers dealing with the paradigm of "knowledge economy". This course focuses on Knowledge economy. It starts with Nonaka's 's the Knowledge Creating society and enquires deeper about the concept of knowledge , its meaning in history as well as its anthropology. Going on through the case studies of innovation processes, the role of the metaphor is also explored as an intellectual tool for communication as well as brainstorming.

I don't really understand what any of that means, but seeing as I'm a fine arts and business student, the title sounds promising enough! I've had a life-long desire to experience transdisciplinarity and transculturality. This seems like the kind of course that would make more sense if you attend the lectures high.

Suprising Fact: French music doesn't suck

I suppose I'm a bit close-minded at times, but in my mind all foreign-language music sucks. For my French conversation class, however, our teacher had us research some French musicians. Shockingly, I rather liked some of it! Here are a few good music videos you can enjoy:

1. Mickey 3D "Respire"

This is an adorable video, but the lyrics are rather sad, telling the story of how mankind is destroying the earth. The video's ending is particularly poignant.



2. Bénabar "Dis Lui Oui"

A very catchy tune and cute video. I rather think Bénabar is pretty cute too! His songs are about real life. This one is about him trying to get a girl, Muriel, to take her boyfriend. The boyfriend is driving Bénabar nuts; he sings that he can't handle living with this guy who is continually talking about her and writing poems about their intimate moments.

Canada Day Fireworks!

I can't work out how to post a video without creating a new post. Nevertheless, here are the fireworks from the Waterloo Canada Day celebration. Enjoy!

Canada Day Celebrations

Just as we planned, my friends and I trekked up to the Columbia Ice Fields yesterday to partake in the Canada Day festivities.

Here is the crew: me, Mary, Chelsea and Chris.

Here are some adorable lemurs that were in the petting zoo.

A giant octopus kite.



Me enjoying "the champagne of ginger ale."

The delicious pulled pork sandwiches we all ate. I cannot explain how delectable they were. There were other food vendors there, but this stand has their own smoke-cooker apparatus and advertised all the awards they'd won. Here is the site if you're curious http://www.kitchenerbbq.com/.

Although it was pretty fun, the daytime stuff was more or less exclusively for little kids. Case in point: Chris and I tried to obtain some free Freezies, but were denied because they were "for the kids." BOOO!! On the plus side, we saw a lot of adorable kids, especially twins for some reason.

We came back to the Ice Fields for the 10pm fireworks. I haven't seen decent fireworks in ages, so I was really blown away.

I'm a Clever Equation!

I'm a bit surprised I have never done this before, but my friends showed me the website that makes anagrams. Naturally I wanted to see what could be done with my name, so here are the best anagrams for Veronique Lecat:

1. Clever Equation


2. Acquire Love Net (see drawing)


3. Never Quite Cola


4. Crave Quiet Noel


5. Ace Event Liquor


6. Quite Over Clean


7. Evil Queen Actor


8. Eat! Conquer! Live!

I rather like the last one! It would make a good motto for me. I suppose having three E's in my name in addition to a "QU" really opens up anagram possibilities. If you want to see how your name can be rearranged, go to http://wordsmith.org/anagram/.

Also, Happy 140th Birthday Canada! My friends and I are planning to go to the big UW Canada Day Party. I will post the pictures tomorrow.