A couple of weeks ago I was invited to witness the Wii-lympics, a live competition of teams of two or three using the Nintendo Wii. Billy Nguyen, pictured here, was photographed by William Ting for the Straight.

Billy told me that he practiced for four hours a day leading up to the event.

Get the lowdown, and the results, over here.

Also this week, a report on the finalization of the Masters of Digital Media program at the Great Northern Way campus, and has the approval of no less than four institutions: BCIT, Emily Carr, SFU, and UBC.

Read today, in the London Guardian, that scribe Aaron Sorkin, the guy who brought us Sportsnight, the West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, is turning the brilliant Flaming Lips CD, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, into a Broadway musical.

This is exciting news, as it would bring together two very creative minds in Sorkin and Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne.

Coyne was quoted in the Guardian article as saying that the story of the musical will be something like this:

There’s the real world and then there’s this fantastical world. This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It’s almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that.

The publicity photo above, of Coyne and bandmates Michael Ivins (in the shades) and Steven Drozd, was taken by J. Michelle Martin.

The photo below was taken (by, if my Spanish is any good at all, Xavier Mercade) during the 2006 edition of the Estrella Damm Primavera Sound music festival which is held annually in Barcelona, and conveys perfectly the bizarre and whimsical sensibility that you’ll experience at a Flaming Lips live show. They are marvelous.

There’s a new documentary film that will be airing on History Television next week, repeating a week or so later, that investigates and recreates the historic Battle of Vimy Ridge.

The First World War campaign was the first time Canadian troops fought together, and the success of our soldiers arguably led to Canada being recognized by England and the rest of the world as a country unto ourselves.

The timing of the broadcast is aligned with the reopening of the Vimy Ridge memorial in France, on the 90th anniversary of the Canadian and British defeat of the Germans, and in reviewing an advance copy of the film, I couldn’t help but remember my grandfather, who was a veteran of the Second World War.

The documentary is fascinating, and well worth watching. Read more about it over here.

My latest Trigger Happy column has run in the Straight. In it, I wonder why Gears of War won so many Best Games of the Year trophies in recent awards programs.

Sure, it was an exhilerating experience, but it was also fairly standard fare.

Read it over here.

Sometimes, songs share characteristics that cause them to blur into one another in my head.

When I woke up this morning, there was a chorus deep in my mind. When I first tried to get it to the surface, I thought it was Sting’s “Fields of Gold,” from the Ten Summoner’s Tales album. A few minutes later, though, I realized I was humming “Uptown Again” from the Afghan Whigs.

I’m not sure which of them it was I woke up with.

I think the element of these two songs that is similar is the cadence of the lyric.

With “Fields of Gold,” Sting sings the first line, “You’ll remember me … when the west wind moves … upon the fields of barley,” and it resembles the pacing of “Uptown Again” when Greg Dulli sings it: “Uptown again … nobody home … feelin’ surrounded … should never left me on my own.”

So I’ve got both songs running, in parallel, this morning. Who said I couldn’t multitask?