I know, I know. I'm my hero too.

This was a pretty fucked up week, Internet. Yes I'm aware that the week does, in fact, continue tomorrow, but from where I'm sitting it's gotta be over by now. Some pretty spectacularly upsetting and disappointing things happened this week. And some pretty terrific things too. And yeah, I actually did burst into tears at Osgoode station at one point, and at another, a dude in the middle of the sidewalk yanked out his dick and started pissing at me - and at Super-Soaker strength, I might add. But it was in the aforementioned Whitby that I did something that was very precisely, defiantly for myself, and that, for the time being, steadies the waters.

Posted by tederick at 10:06 PM in photoblog & poetical
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New Ewan McGregor / Charley Boorman motorcycle road trip series! Yeeeeeeee!

No Lost on DVD till December 11! FUCK THE WOLD!!!! And I just gave all the tapes to the Mennonite. Fuck. The. Wold.

Posted by tederick at 11:34 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & obi-wan kenobi & shinydisks & tv
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Yarrrrrr! My Pirates score be three. Three be my score, and three be its rank, and three be the number of testicles on a mutated Alsatian boarhound. Yarrrrrr!

I'll tell you something about Vampirates that you probably didn't know: it's set in the 26th Century. WTF? Oh, and also, it's terrible. I mean, I know it's written for ten-year-olds but apparently it's written for the ten-year-olds who sit in the back of the bus inhaling all the fumes. I'll tell you, unless this 26th-C thing pans out in a big way I'm going to have to give it a fail, because why would you set a tale of vampire pirates in anything but the mythic past? Roundabout when King Kong came out, Matty "Neuschwanstein" Price pointed out (for it is in the text of the film itself) that you can only set stories like this in the human past, pre-1945, the last time in our history that the earth still contained "blank spaces on the map." World's End is a bit about that, too ("The immaterial is now immaterial" / "The world's the same, there's just less in it"). There's an untraceable human past where it was/is still psychologically possible to believe in the fantastic, an option that the present now closes to us. Efforts were made in the late 80s and early 90s to position the deep sea (The Abyss, SeaQuest) as the next uncharted frontier where the real can still intersect with the mystical and the fantastic, but really, the only one remaining is interstellar space (Star Wars), and even that is a reach of the imagined version overcoming the known reality of space flight. Joseph Campbell would have something to say (in fact, probably did say something) about the fact that we exist for the first time in our history where the mystical cannot be found or imagined anywhere in our cosmological sphere, and that's either a serious potential problem for our psyches, or a major turning point in our evolution. We've been far enough up in the air to know that heaven ain't up there, and far enough down in the ground to disprove the traditional location of hell, too. And the chances of being attacked by a werewolf or sailing with vampirates seems similarly null. Phillip Pullman solved the problem with parallel worlds, but they're a bit thin on potential since one can't imagine ever actually going there. I don't need heaven or hell to get by, thank you very much, but I wouldn't mind being able to trick myself into believing there's a Kraken or two still swimming around out there.

Which is why Japanese whalers finding giant squids is cool. The end.

Posted by tederick at 9:33 AM in books & movies & pirates
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Posted by tederick at 7:01 AM in extreme steve
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Well, my awesomeness lasted all of 96 hours. Damn you planet!!

Speaking of planets, does anyone know the planet that's hanging low in the west in early evenings right now? I'm presuming Venus, yes? Would certainly fit.

Let's play Know Your Browns!: Last week at dinner with the fam, we somehow got onto what everybody's favourite movies are. Can you guess who (me, Adam, Caitlin, Mom, and Dad) each batch belongs to?

Brown #1: Return of the Jedi, Seven Samurai, and as this list was collected before last Thursday, the Brown in question would like to note that it has subsequently been revised

Brown #2: Reds, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Brown #3: American Beauty

Brown #4: The Empire Strikes Back, Eraserhead

Brown #5: Airplane!

And that's Know Your Browns for today. Moving on: I have a space monkey in my cubicle at work now. A huge space monkey. I don't know exactly what to do with so large a space monkey. Then earlier today, someone threw my space monkey at me. And the space monkey is not small, mind you. This was the same person who beaned me in the back of the head with a tennis ball yesterday for no reason, so I went to the Red Place a little bit over the space monkey incident. I don't like it when people throw things at my back. It reeks of cowardice. Cowards shall not be quartered, narrrrrr!!

Went to my umpteenth blogTO meeting tonight; by reaching the umpteens I apparently opened the door for Jerrold to shoot me in the head with a bottlecap. Has that ever happened to anyone besides me??? My life. I fucking swear. Anyways I'm booked ludicrously solid day and night until after Heart & Stroke, which means my room looks like a Chechnyan toxic waste spill and my to-do list runs out the bottom of iCal and into Macsaber. Those are what we call "end-user experience" at work. Admittedly some of the "booked solid" is related to Pirates, but most of it is legit.

OK. Back to the drawing board.

Posted by tederick at 9:45 PM in blogTO & j-o-b & movies & pirates
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Q: What did you do tonight, Matt?
A: I started recording my second installment of City Surf, a series of audio walking tours of various areas of the city of Toronto. This tour was about Chinatown.

Q: Do you speak any Chinese, Matt?
A: Not a drop.

Q: Was Chinese occasionally relevant to the audio tour in question?
A: Oh, frequently.

Q: If your last City Surf experience was reminiscent of The Amazing Race, which television series did this one remind you of?
A: Firefly.

But man fuck, I love doing these things. My first one is briefly previewable over at the City Surf web site if you click on St. Lawrence Market. And the Flatiron one and the Reservoir Lounge too, now that I think about it, although they're actually all part of the same tour. Mmmmm. My voice is mesmerizing.

Going back to finish up next week.

Posted by tederick at 10:17 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Thanks to the intrepid efforts of Chia the Chris, I finally have Windows installed on my Mac - and things are starting to feel like they're getting back to normal around here. The most salient outcome of which is that my DVD profile work again, which oughta interest Teen Girl Squad, who are becoming fairly excited about the possibilities inherent to having the equivalent of a Blockbuster upstairs from their home. The other big news of a technical nature is that I am embarking on a large new initiative for Tederick.com:

If all goes according to plan it will basically replace all of the site's off-blog content, except for the reviews and film pages, and become - yes, you guessed it - an editable repository of Tederick lore that will define the capital achievement of the first ten years of Tederick.commage, while thrusting ust us boldly into the next ten years. I'm not sure exactly which web dot oh this is (2? or are we onto 3 yet?), but I'm excited, particularly about the page about Extreme Steve. That will be hilarious.

I think, dollars for doughnuts, the last three or four days have been about the best long weekend I've ever had. Or certainly, in the top five. It all just came together for about 100 glorious hours - and man fucking howdy, was I glad. Felt a bit weird to struggle out of bed this morning, and weirder still to get hit by a sun so bright it actually hurt to walk eastward from the Starbucks to the subway station, but I'm back on the rails with at least a vague recollection of what it felt like to be me yesterday.

The other night I dreamed that I had a very large number of lumps under the skin of my torso, which were regularly spaced and oddly circular. I managed to massage one of them out of myself (having tried with another one and only succeeded in breaking it), and found it to be a small disk of concrete which, when broken, positively guzzled tiny plastic stars and crescents in various bright colours (pink, green, blue, gold) all over the place, everywhere I went, like a comet trail. And I went to my doctor and said, "Are you really sure I should have all of these concrete disks with stars inside them, inside of me?" And she said "yes."

Posted by tederick at 9:52 AM in dreams & jedi antics & tederickdotcomdotcom
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OK I swear this is the last time (unless I think of something else):

1. What happened to this?:

I was so looking forward to wearing that for Hallowe'en. Was it fake? I can't even find a reference for where that image came from. Did I Photoshop up a falsie in my sleep again? Damn.

2. Sameer's review, incorporating/responding to mine.

3. Mamo At World's End a.k.a. the Golden Griddle at 2:30 in the morning.

4. The glories of Hans Zimmer: I have owned the score for about 60 hours and I've listened to it over fifteen times. That's once every four hours, folks, and I've slept (though not much). And no word of a lie, I have listened to "up is down" thirty times. Best track ever, track I most want playing over anything I ever do for the rest of my life. This is far and away the finest score of Zimmer's career, and a complete refutation of this argument from last summer, wherein I claimed that Zimmer was only ever great in conjunction with the works of others. Now, I'm still glad as all fuck that Zimmer looks to be partnering with Howard again on The Dark Knight... but I am really goddamn impressed with the synthesizer monkey right now. An excellent detailing of the cues can be found over at the haven of all things scorey, Soundtrack.net.

5. Keith Richards action figure (no pic yet). The first wave of AWE figures is entirely skippable; the second wave is so completely buyable. (Elizabeth is in the bathhouse smock; hopefully for added play value she have all her... uh... particulars.) Now all we need is a really solid 12" Captain Swann figure, and we're all spanked thrice and handed to our mama.

Posted by tederick at 9:55 AM in blogsphere & movies & pirates & podcastery & toys!
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Everything is officially coming up Milhouse. I am just so goddamned happy right now.

Posted by tederick at 2:43 AM in pirates & poetical
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It's 7:29 in the evening...

...Pirates has already made eleventy billion hundred million dollars. True story.

No, not really, but it snatched an unbelievable $17M from just the two screening slots last night. Between 8 and 2 last night, the flick made seventeen million dollars. We didn't get to do our post-Pirates Mamo as hoped (because I left my headset at home), but there's gonna be plenty to see as this movie continues to roll out over the weekend.

I could not be fucking happier. Not about the grosses, because honestly, I could care less. About the whole thing. About me, Matty Price, Courtney, Bex, Jess, TJ, Steve, Adam, Sameer, and Sasha going to see the thing last night. Getting let in an hour and a half early when just me and Sameer were there, and the two of us holding an entire row with just loud voices and grim looks. About how, not halfway through the first fucking scene, I turned to Jess and said "this is my favourite movie ever." About turning my rum flask upside down at the two-thirds mark of the movie, and watching a drop dribble out before getting to say the line, in context (which I rarely do). About getting all excited talking to Meghan about just the score today, or recapping the Pirates with Matty Price on the phone just now. Flying through the streets on my bike on the best day off I've ever had. And most of all, that I can still feel this way, and that it means something.

Posted by tederick at 7:29 PM in movies & pirates & the rum diaries
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This is the best fucking movie I have ever seen.

Okay... let me see if I can explain that without sounding crazy...

Click here to read my review.

Posted by tederick at 11:56 AM in pirates & reviews
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Love ya.

Posted by tederick at 11:38 AM in galaxy far
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Over on Ain't It Cool, Hercules said this: "I think the minute Young Ben Linus met hippie Richard Alpert in the woods, [Lost] cemented its status as one of the 10 greatest TV shows of all time."

I disagree. I think Herc's off by about two show-hours. I'd say Lost joined the pantheon right about when drunk and broken Future Jack stepped up on a concrete abutment, whispered "forgive me" to the sky, and made to meet his holy maker.

Will it pan? Who fucking knows. The feeling around the campfire is that if the series does indeed launch to the present with the island now being set in flashbacks and if Jack must now make good on his promise to unmake his big mistake, then we're really heading somewhere. But as per the usual, there's no way to tell whether the seeming changes afoot are actually going to play out the way we're interpreting them, or if we've got it all wrong, yet again.

I love Matthew Fox. That performance was not only a perfect recapitulation of every single reason why he is the hero of the show, but it was also a fairly deeply personal piece of art for me as a viewer. Jack is a goddamned brilliantly frustrating leading man, and a rarity on television in that he's consistently forcing us to reevaluate his character, over and over again. So much for one-note TV drama.

I love Dominic Monaghan. I've had more than my fill of Charlie, thank you, but he really brought the goods in the past two episodes. In three years this series has gone from being "the one with the hobbit" to being something completely else, but I owe a debt to the fact that it was Dom who, in the first place, got me interested in watching this plane-crash series, Lost.

Does a present-tense time period for future seasons mean we get all-growed-up Walt back, full time?

Does Christian Sheppard survive his rejuvo-island experience and write Jack prescriptions for painkillers back in L.A., or has Jack gone brain-loopy?

Does the strong return of the Rival Billionaires Theory herald a new level of gamesmanship between Mssrs. Widmore and Hanso, with a returned-to-civilization Hurley as their "new money" club-mate?

Does Jack attempt to influence past events on the island by astrally projecting himself into a certain cabin, knocking the k off his name and adding an ob?

Does an empty funeral signify a bad end for James Ford, John Locke, Sayid Jarrah, or someone else entirely?

Does anyone have Evangeline Lilly's phone number, now that the hobbit is off-island?

FEBRUARY!! Fuck.

Posted by tederick at 9:37 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42
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Most likely to die tonight: Jack (it's his episode), Charlie (doom foretold), Locke (already shot). My pick: Charlie. He's reached his apotheosis (twice!) and if I'm right about the series at all, he's done. Locke and Jack, on the other hand, have business yet with Four Toe Island.

Game changer: I was supposed to do Game Changer Theory of the Day all week, but I couldn't keep up with it. Those were bullshit jokes anyway. My pick: "Back to the States." Yup. I think the format of the show inverts, and the present-day segments are set in the real world while the flashbacks become set on Four Toe Island. If the riddle of the series is indeed "what is the island," then the answer will require off-island information, just like Dorothy couldn't find herself in Oz but had to go back to her own back yard. If this happens, though, I'm also saying that Jackwise W. Sheppard stays behind. Why? Dunno. But it sounds cool. Benry, Rousseau, Rose, and Bernard would also likely be staying. Locke would be dragged away kicking and screaming, if at all.

And them's the theories. Bring it, Lindelof!

Posted by tederick at 2:25 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42
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Tederick.com is winning the war on comment spam, Internet. Spammage? Down 80-frickin'-percent! Yes this sort of thing actually gets me revved up. WE ARE KICKING ASS HERE GUYS. I would feel bad for the spammers... if they weren't worthless, rape-crazed cockroaches.

Extreme Steve, unfortunately, will not be appearing this week due to some delays in the art department for episode 43. As I'm sure you can intuit from the past few weeks' issues, this one's gonna be a doozy - a real season capper, and I'm quite proud of it - so it's taking a bit longer than usual. Extremely sorry! Perhaps this Mamo will be a balm to your injured soul? Recorded yesterday, I really enjoyed it. One of the upsides to us not Mam-ing as frequently as we used to is that when we get around to it, we've got a sweet fuckload to talk about. Like the Joker, Summer Glau, and Pirates, Pirates, Pirates. Woot.

I've said it before but I'll say it again: I haven't been this excited about a Harry Potter movie since the first one. Man howdy that thing looks brick shithouse. That shot of the DOM Avengers sprinting down the row of prophecies while all hell breaks loose behind them... yeah I'm all about that in a deep and personal way. "We're in this together." Damn right.

Hope for humanity alert: New York cabs go green by 2012.

Another year: gone! Strangely enough the show that most made me notice that a whole season has once again passed us by was Heroes, the one whose pilot got me so damn excited that I was making Watchmen references. Man that show is jus dreadful. Actually the word that really describes it is clumsy. Spectacularly clumsy. The commercials for various summer movies that aired during the finale were significantly more enjoyable than the finale itself... but I'll give the episode a pass, if only for Shaft. Goodness gracious, the world needs more Shaft.

Posted by tederick at 8:18 PM in h-pot & podcastery & tederickdotcomdotcom & tv
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Hi, my name is Matt. We've never formally met. I wanted to take this opportunity to draw your attention to the fact that I now link to your blog, as part of the relatively small cadre of permanent blog links that grace the right side of this page. The only reason this is worth mentioning is that I only ever link to the blogs of my friends, mostly for simplicity's sake. This makes you a special case, because as I very recently mentioned, we've never met.

BUT:

I pretty much think you're the cat's pajamas. I found your blog several years ago while Googling something Buffy-related and have been reading it slavishly since then. I've been there for the blog-lapses, the comment-system inconsistencies, the move from pitas to blogger, the redesigns from orange to pink to red and back again. (Wait, maybe there was never a pink.) I like the fact that your blog now combines all of these colours, and hope that you stick with it. It feels "vibrant."

The back-and-forth interplay between our two blogs in the past year or so (perhaps best exemplified by Dress Like Your South Park Character Day, or the fact that I seem to have spent the last week stealing/repurposing every single outbound link you posted during that entire time period) suggests to me that inasmuch as it would ever be possible for two people to become friends exclusively by reading one another's blogs without leaning on any other form of contact, we've probably achieved that. If you lived in my city or vice versa, maybe I would have called you up by now and asked to be your friend. But no such luck. Nevertheless I felt it was time to formalize our fiendish union, like the villains in various Batman movies would have done, by declaring their mutual interest in overthrowing Gotham City. Which in this context for some reason boils down to hyperlinking.

No further action is required on your part, and if this seemed at all creepy, then... well yeah, I can see how it might seem spectacularly creepy, especially given that I apparently just compared you to the Riddler. But them's the interwebs for you.

Cheers,

Matt

Posted by tederick at 11:49 AM in blogsphere
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The trailer for The Golden Compass reminds me of that scene in Back to the Future II where Doc actually used a blackboard to explain the plot to the audience, just in case they weren't on board. This time it's "Here's why any sane and reasonable Lord of the Rings fan should consider this film to be Lord of the Rings Part IV, and spend their money accordingly - with diagrams."

I liked the sizzle reel a whole lot more than this. The creature animation is terrible, which isn't helping, and Daniel Craig looks to have missed the boat on Asriel's... er... gravitas rather a lot. But who fucking knows. The truth is that if this book was adapted into a halfway competent script, then that script would be almost completely incapable of rendering the kinds of vox pops and sound bytes that make for a good trailer - you can actually hear the chop job they did on Lyra's lines just to come up with some sort of identifiable "here's what I have to do" mission statement for the character.

Looks pretty, at least. Damn pretty. Only time will tell.

Hey remember when I swore I wasn't going to talk about this movie at all any more, and that I'd just see it when it came out? I'M SUCH A GODDAMN LIAR!!!

Posted by tederick at 2:49 PM in movies
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Posted by tederick at 12:50 PM in tv & youtubery
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I am officially 100% tired of listening to my neighbours have sex. At least the dude seems to be picking up a bit of skill; a couple of months ago he could really only be counted on to give her a short pounding; now he seems to last a solid five or six minutes, but the inevitable downside to that for me is that I have to listen to that shit for longer, and the sympathetic vibrations on the longer time scale send crap flying off my shelves like you wouldn't believe. Also they're way up with the conversation during. She's going at him like a traffic cop. So there you have it, women of the world: communicate your needs, and boy may actually learn a thing or two. Nobody enjoys working in a vacuum.

On Saturday night I went to a BBQ that involved a farting baby and setting off fireworks in a hospital quiet zone. All of which would have been hilarious except that I am on no beer until after Heart & Stroke, so... less hilarious. Oh beer. (I will, naturally, have a bit of rum at world's end on Thursday.) Then on the way home Saturday night I managed a rather spectacular DF (that's detest-fest for those not down with the '94-era lingo) and burned out a buncha negative crap that had been accumulating in the old noggin. So that's... good? I don't know. Saturday nights can be pretty spectacularly lonely times, especially when you're surrounded by people.

See - even right now - Pizzazz and Megatron and Big Fuckin' Hermione are waving around like John Milius on a surf board because the damn neighbours are at it again! Dammit I hate when my blogging gets inadvertently explicated by real-life occurances before I even get to hit "Publish!" Fucking Victoria Day sex. I used to have Victoria Day sex, you know... back during Queen Victoria's actual lifetime, mind you. ZING!

Last night we had a terrific soccer game against a solid team which we worked up into a 4-4 tie; I let at least one of those goals slip right through my legs so I'm irritated about that, and I had a good scoring opportunity that I completely failed to capitalize on, but otherwise it was awesome times all around. Cold as a witch's teat, though; Teen Girl Squad pitched a tent in the back yard last night and I'm sort of curious to see if they'll turn up dead this morning. This is not V-day weather. I got myself the perfect pizza (anchovies, artichokes, mushrooms, green olives, thick crust, garlic parmesan base sauce), wrapped myself up in warmies, and watched Dead Man's Chest till the wee hours.

Hermi Odle slobbers here. It's not over yet.

Posted by tederick at 9:57 AM in jedi antics & sex (theoretical) & sockey & toys!
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Joss has snapped, and like the useless little sycophant I am, I'm right there with him. I have lately perceived a subtle shift in the anti-women fervour in North America (what Inga Muscio calls cunthatred) from the baseline repressive technology that it has been for the past, say, two or three thousand years, to something that feels even more dire and desperate. I think this is because of an equilibrial shift brought about by the realities of modern economics. Marriage has become pretty much irrelevant in a society where every member can generally hold a career and support themselves (and children) financially, so control of female sexuality/reproduction is in jeopardy of falling somewhat out of male domination for the first time since the stone age. I say jeopardy, because it hasn't happened yet, and if Bush and his like get their way, it won't for a long time. Shutting down abortion is essential to this, as is shutting down gay marriage, as is shutting down anything that is even linked to the notion that a woman can choose to have and raise a child on her own. Speaking directly to the "torture porn" point, I do believe a strong psychological need has grown up in the United States to view elaborate fantasies of brutal domination of women, as a kind of psychic vengeance for womens' successful movements towards equality in the past hundred years. (The lead characters/victims of Hostel 2, naturally, will be three American college girls... who are studying abroad, to add a bit of free xenophobia atop the preexisting misogynic engine. But I also think Spider-Man 3 justifies the American presence in the Middle East, so what do I know.) We're still very much in the beginnings of a time when there will either be a tremendous amount of positive change that will rewrite the landscape of how our societies work (taking heterosocial relationships as the baseline of all current societies today), or a phenomenal backslide into sex-based despotism that would make the Inquisitors blush. Obviously I'd prefer the former, and I also know that nature abhors imbalance. Some treaty will need to be reached.

Posted by tederick at 8:40 AM in joss & movies & sex (theoretical)
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"See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum…and one night… one night they decide they don’t like living in an asylum any more..." - The Joker

Posted by tederick at 11:29 PM in movies
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The inescapable conclusion is that I am attracted to assholes. I have gotten all worked up in the naughty-parts about folk who turned out to be real jerk-offs. Not exclusively, but a fair percentage of the time. I need to change my plan of attack on this thing: it's time to bring the "nice" back. It's time to go for "actually a decent person" for a change. It's time to aim squarely for "would have some sort of moral problem with being a shit to Matt." I feel I have grown somewhat in this realization.

Additionally, in the last thirty hours, I have:

• Finished my Terra pages
• Finished the Portrait storyboards
• Written five pages on the new comic
• Booked a consultation
• Bought eyeliner
• Picked up Pirates tickets
• Bought a new yoga mat... an Eco Mat (like me)
• Read a comic book entirely in French.

The new comic has a name, and that name is Snapdragon. The new comic has a cast, the new comic has a rough 4-issue opening arc, the new comic has a good sense of humour, enjoys long walks on the beach, and is a non-smoker. The new comic is looking for a relationship with you, the reader. But the new comic is not yet dressed for dating.

Not sure if I believe in Harvey Dent, but I do believe in this.

(We're at about half-a-Heath at this writing, by the way. Looking forward to seeing the rest.)

So anyways. It's the Victoria Day weekend, which (for my eight American readers) means that we have Monday off. It feels like an ocean of time. I think that means my work-weeks have been becoming more frenetic; I'm liking where things are going, professionally, but it's a lot of uphill effort and PM-ing and so forth. But damn, it feels good to be off right now. I did all my creative work this morning before yoga, and then after yoga I picked up my bike, kicked ass from Eglinton down to Queen and back again, and am feeling generally on top of my shit. It's good. As I was reflecting to Helen earlier this week, this past winter was really, surprisingly, awful. But it feels like little more than a bad dream, now. That's all right.

"Hello. My name is Mistah Eco Matt." - Me at yoga this morning

Posted by tederick at 5:01 PM in jedi antics & movies & the process
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Four U.S. states veto cervical cancer vaccine for girls, in yet another link I have stolen from Jocelyn this week. Shameless! This one's on the grounds that supporting the program would encourage promiscuity, and is strongly emblematic of the entire American thinking process: guns don't kill people (people kill people), and that pesky human papillomavirus is the thin tumoury line between a girl saving herself for marriage, and total teen sexual anarchy. (Total Teen Sexual Anarchy: the name of my next comic book?)

Obviously, I think vaccinating girls against the virus that causes cervical cancer is about as close as our species gets to the divine, and by the same token, I am obviously unsurprised by the American unwillingness to embrace this life-saving concept, due to their national apoplexy on the realities of teen sex in the 21st century. Nevertheless the cost vs. rewards issue (mentioned at the bottom of the article) is also worth considering as a debate point. We're still in the early going on the whole thing, but hopefully this can get worked out soon enough that we can start knocking these cancer stats down a bit.

Posted by tederick at 9:07 AM in sex (theoretical) & vagina fridays
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I'm sorry, but look at these three:

I cannot believe they all actually managed to grow up hot. Rupert and Emma, there was a while there where I had my doubts. (More so Rupert, obviously. I thought that dude was going to end up looking like Mr. Burns in the X-Files episode where he's all gunged up on radioactive whammy juice.) But hey, they not only missed the ugly tree but I'm pretty sure they went at it with chainsaws and then had a naked bonfire. Hot hot hot! Man we've come a long way with those three. It's one of the few undiluted pleasures of this movie series: they actually kept the cast. (Except Disappointledore.)

Pirates tickets: achieved. I am thrilled to bits. Literally at this point, if I could, I would be doing absolutely nothing with my time but watching Pirates of the Caribbean parts 1 and 2 over and over again in rotation... the former being so enjoyable that there was actual whooping and cheering in my living room last week; the latter being a sequel that (at the time) I claimed had disappointed me. Boy has that opinion changed. I love the living toes off that thing now, no longer see a single flaw in it, no longer care, want Pirates 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, and am despondent at Bruckheimer’s recent claim that no matter what, this is the end of the show. Fuck that! We get an unwanted Indy IV, Die Hard 4, a whole second Spider-Man trilogy, and god knows what fuck all else, but I have to settle for three measly Pirates movies? Hell no, Internet, hell no. Not this pirate. No.

I haven’t seen more than ten frames of the new movie, too, which is really cool. I’ve seen exactly one shot of exactly one TV commercial, and it’s Captain Jack waiting for a long, pregnant pregnant before exhaling the word: “pirates.” Yes fucking sir, pirates. Yes sir.

Posted by tederick at 10:24 PM in h-pot & pirates
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Shortly after putting some thought into writing an interactive simulation, I saw this link: two artificially-intelligent Chatbots talking to each other. Among the philosophical musings:

J: How do you define life?
A: Life is the opposite of death.
J: So death is the absence of life?
A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.
J: Why not?
A: Ambiguous.
J: Yes!

Which, if you substitute "Matt" for "J" and "Daniel" for "A," could be a real conversation.

Posted by tederick at 2:04 PM in j-o-b
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The gents at the Snail tell me it's been exactly one year since Frank Miller's last issue of Batman All-Star... but who fucking cares. SO GOOD. It's amazing after all this time that Miller can still be doing something new with the character - in this case, showing him to be absolutely out of his goddamn mind - while Jim Lee still finds all the ways to make a man into an animal and back again. And based on the first six pages, I'd say someone oughta be seriously considering letting Miller write All-Star Wonder Woman, too... someone's gotta solve the problem of that haughty Amazon princess, and I'd say Miller's bracing mix of misogyny and empowerment is a good place to start.

Game-Changer Theory of the Day: Ben is Jack's father's twin brother, who used to live in Christian's stomach Kuato-style but was separated surgically. This therefore means that Ben is Jack's uncle, and Claire's uncle, and Aaron's uncle once removed, which paves the way for everyone turning out to be related once it's revealed that Bernard is, in fact, Jin's son.

Posted by tederick at 8:44 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & comix
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Huh. They didn't kill him.

I have an unshakeable fondness for stories where someone meets themselves - looks in the mirror and says, Here are all the bits of me, I am no more or less than what I am, and that's going to have to do, and then goes and does the really hard thing anyway, stumbling off to whatever destiny, good or bad, lies down the road for them. This sort of colours my feelings on what the island is about and why Eko died the way he did, and what might or might not happen to Charlie. But who fuckin' knows, and now Tracy Middendorf - the Wraith of Television Awesomeness - is involved. Game on.

I think I'll do a Game-Changer Theory a Day for the next week. Here's today's: they all get rescued and the final three seasons are spent on mainland America... but mainland America is controlled by the apes!!

Posted by tederick at 11:04 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42
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"Overwrought." The word to describe today was "overwrought."

Ugly Betty was on Letterman the other night... so not ugly. Man that's a fine-lookin' young lady. And she was so nervous! I find it really appealing nowadays when celebrities aren't all blasé about doing things that would make you or I very anxious.

But man howdy I am ready for this TV season to be over. Aside from Lost and House I'm pretty much enjoying nothing any more. I just wanna watch DVDs all summer long. Last night I had a terrific thunderstormy evening - I watched 2 French new wave flicks (from the Six Moral Tales box set I bought last year) and then From Hell (from the DVDs Matt Watches Repeatedly, Nay Obsessively box set). Frothy.

Borne out of this psychic vortex, I think I came up with an idea for a comic book. A perfect little gemstone of an idea that is so "me" it's actually a little scary to contemplate in its entirety. It's funny because when I come up with any story idea at all, my first thought is always "movie," but within about 60 seconds on this thing I had identified that this would work way, way better as a comic. So I'm going to develop that a bit and see where it goes. I've got a Benjamin / Camilla D'Errico look in my head (only not as porny). Lots of blues and greens and overexposed backgrounds beyond underexposed mid-grounds. Hmmm... that was specific. Anyways I scribbled out a bunch of character stuff over lunch, and again after work. And this was with me still owing Terra pages and Portrait storyboards. But I think the detour actually let my brain solve some of those problems, too. Writing by way of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Following up: the only Free Comic Book Day comic that might actually lead me to read a new title was the Umbrella Academy short story by Dark Horse. It was pretty sloppy actually but I liked the art and some of the super powers (like, the ability to make lies come true). I also liked Dan Slott's Spider-Man oner, I have to say, because it was a gentle trip back to the way Spider-Man comics used to be - in that "oh no, I'm late for Aunt May's birthday and the cake has been spider-webbed to the wall!" sort of way. Otherwise, as with many a FCBD, you get what you pay for. I'm slavishly trying to read a graphic novel printed entirely in French. It's my Hamburger Hill for the week.

This guy really hates Cameron Crowe. I gotta come out of the closet on this thing: I do too. It's hard to admit this given the company I keep, but I didn't like Say Anything and I didn't like Almost Famous, and everything else he's done is just stupendously awful. I pretty much want Cameron Crowe to explode.

It amuses me to calculate the exact moment when Jerry Falwell must have looked into the Great Eye yesterday, and figured it all out way too late. This was a long, gymnastic, cacophonous day, and I'm just waiting for the next rolling wave.

Posted by tederick at 9:26 PM in comix & movies & the process & tv
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Posted by tederick at 6:56 AM in extreme steve
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• "The Dragon is omnipotent."
• "When others leave the field of battle the Dragon takes a step forward to solve the problem with authority and dignity."
• "An excessively negative Dragon can be one of the most unpleasant human beings imaginable."
• "If jealously suspicious of rivals, [the Dragon] will not hesitate to use cunning, lies and trickery to discredit them."
• "Intolerant disdain of underlings, to whom they will nevertheless delegate the carrying out of minor details in their grandiose schemes."
• "a passion for luxury"
• "a lust for power"
• "unlimited sexual lust."

All right.

The shifting sands of wiki-knowledge can be parsed here!

Posted by tederick at 10:30 AM in miscellaneous crap
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No matter how many times it happens, I am never ready for the fat old Pakistani woman who fucking near rugby-tackles me in her efforts to board the RT before any of the passengers can get off. One of these days, that bitch is going DOWN.

Buncha folk (Demetre, D-Coc, B-Gold, DaveChris, me, someone named Alison) went to see Hot Fuzz last week. Let us glory in the power of the Dalton, and the three words of excellence: "THISSHHHHH REARRRRRY HURRRRRRRSS." I am all about the Dalton right now. He's my favourite James Bond. (Along with all my other favourite James Bonds.) Dalton was the first new Bond introduced in my lifetime, and Living Daylights is just I-don't-care-what-you-say kickass. Not that Daniel Craig isn't still my actual Actual favourite James Bond, but who knows how long that will last. And I was looking at On Her Majesty's Secret Service a couple of weeks ago and I love that Lazenby guy, too, because he's just such an unrepentent prick about the whole thing. I guess the secret of the James Bond Fantasy Mechanism for Men is the degree to which 007 can be a lozenguli twattus and not only get away with it, but get all the fucking perks for his trouble: the Aston with the stitched-leather interior, the designer martinis, the Beluga and the Bollinger, the Eva Green. Do you know what James Bond would do to an RT-crashing old women? He would fucking kill her. And someone would just hand him a drink and say "good show old boy."

During Hot Docs, I somewhat inadvertently (by way of forgetfully) bought so many packets of gum that I was literally finding them in every pocket of every piece of clothing I wore for the entire ten days. I could build armour out of the fucking things. It is a period of time we now refer to as the Gumming Frenzy. Fortunately, I have chewed my last as of today, and a bajillion plastic gum-blisters are on their way to the eco-netherworld. Let us never speak of gum again.

Spielberg + Jackson = Tintin? What kind of goodgy math is this? I read some Tintin when I was a kid because my grandparents inexplicably had it at their house. You know what it was? Boring as all fuck, that's what.

Here's an ugly idea: 12-year-old girl sues school after being forced to watch Brokeback Mountain. Leaving aside the debate on whether homosexual content should be slapped with an R that heterosexual content might not have received - I'd say tone and content more than support the Brokeback rating - when did it become okay to show R-rated films to a grade school class anyway? When I was in grade school they showed us The Wizard of Oz, not Schindler's List, even though the latter could very easily be justified under educational content. Even if education was the intent here (and somehow I doubt it), 12 is pretty goddamn young for spit-and-slap impromptu bum-play. Besides, at that age can't we show them stories of happy gay love instead of unbelievably tragic, repressed, unfulfilling gay love? Give them something to shoot for?

Posted by tederick at 8:25 AM in movies & pj's playground & sex (theoretical)
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I have a long, deep scratch down my left bicep and a small diagonal scratch across the tip of my nose. It's possible that I'm running illegal, underground boxing clubs while I think I'm sleeping. That would also explain why I'm so g.d. tired. That, or the furious workout of riding all the way to Sunnbrook Park only to end up punted into the offense for most of our soccer game, before having to ride back home. I am fucking exhausted, Internet. It's nothing but coffee and Buffy music today to keep me going. Whoa shit the trigger song that made Spike go kill-crazy just came on the iPod. Should I open someone's throat with my fangy-fangs? Mmmm jugular. I'm blood-lusty.

But hey, driving practice! Yeah I had something I haven't had in fifteen years yesterday: a driving lesson. Matty Price is teaching me how to drive standard. This is so that if I ever accidentally get thrown into a cross-country death race, I'll be ready. One can never be too prepared for a cross-country death race. Well anyways learning standard once you know how to drive is a hell of a lot better than learning it when you don't know how to drive. Yeah I'm still lurchy, but I'm getting there. Two words: Dodge Challenger. Two more and some letters: BMW safety training. Yeah.

So as for my Lost theory: I made a list of all the things on the show that my theory doesn't currently explain. Stuff like who the whisperers are, or why they killed a character as awesome as Dr. Arzt after only one apperance. I'm not publishing until I can either explain or disregard all the elements on that list. But I'm working on it.

Posted by tederick at 9:04 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & blood & sockey
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It's looking strongly like I will owe quite a bit of money on my 2006 taxes. This has put Portrait of a Young Artist in my Bed in jeopardy, along with the Philadelphia trip, although I think I will be able to keep both of them on the boards if I move a few things around... and, obviously, spend a lot less money. This works out nicely because a) I'm spending a lot less money lately anyway, being as I'm not so much into "things" any more, and b) because I was planning to do an Operation: Annihilate for books anyway - i.e. I'm not buying any new books till I've read the seventeen that have accrued on my desk. If I get really ballsy I'll extend that and O:A my DVDs too - got about 37 of those to watch, and do I really need to own Pan's Labyrinth the day it comes out? No, probably not. Mmmmm consumer asceticism.

I'm pretty pleased with my physical state right now - everything just sort of clicked together after last weekend, and my last two yoga sessions have been the best I've ever had. I am really going to new places of flexibility and strength that I've never had before, and my breathing and mental focus have been similarly new-level-y. I found a little hill off the beaten path the other day and actually meditated, the first time in my life I've been able to slip into a state of relative selflessness and just be while meditating. I am kicking yoga ass! Yeah I'm proud of myself and gloating a bit. That's why I'm into yoga: the glory.

Posted by tederick at 3:44 PM in books & jedi antics & shinydisks
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This morning my friend Lisa brought a cake to work for Al's birthday and we went to town on that sucker at like ten past ten in the morning morning with plastic spoons and a completely dull knife. It was the Earliest Cake Ever. It was so fucking good! Man. Cake for breakfast: making blowjobs look like crap.

The weirdest thing has been happening lately: people know what blogTO is. I was just talking to Teen Girl Squad down on the porch and they knew what it was, and for the past few months whenever I throw the name out, whoever I'm talking to knows what I'm actually referring to. This is new (in my experience). I have been loving my blogTO experience lately, I've gotta say. It took a few months post-moviesTO to figure my shit out but I really feel like I'm participating at a new level now, and I'm liking the space that the blog is carving out in the Toronto landscape lately. It's connected me with my city and my subculture in positive and meaningful ways. I'm pretty up with the whole thing right now.

And man, I loves me some Teen Girl Squad. They are just the cutest things ever. It's like having the Box live downstairs. They just borrowed my copy of The Secret Garden because our collection actually outmatches Rogers for size and selection. And in a few weeks, they're gonna throw a toga party. And before that, cupcakes and weed. It's nice to have people in the house who are actually sociable and willing to hang out and be friends, as opposed to the other thing (siege towers and oil).

Hey! There's two fucking new episodes of the actual Teen Girl Squad! When the fuck did that happen! Awesome. Just awesome.

Zombies? Anyone?

Posted by tederick at 5:57 PM in 3QF & blogTO & foodin'
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I suppose rather predictably, here are the key search terms that have brought internetophiles to Tederick.com:

• vagina
• autocunnilingus
• hairy vagina
• oily vagina
• old vagina
• origami vagina
• vagina massage
• autocunnlingus [sic]
• vagina anatomy
• fucking vagina
• Sarah Silverman's vagina
• meat curtains
• queef

Queef incidentally is pretty much the grand grandpappy of search strings for the site, ever since December '04 and the original vagina post. I guess not too many folk out there are blogging about the queefage.

Posted by tederick at 11:26 AM in tederickdotcomdotcom & vagina fridays
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If my brother had a TV show, it would be called Everybody wants to be Adam's friend. It would be a single-camera sitcom like your Arrested Development or Malcolm in the Middle. It would be about how every person Adam meets thinks he's extremely interesting and then, in turn, wants Adam to think that they're interesting too, so they're always bringing him stuff that they did or made, like CDs or paintings or bank statements. And Adam wants none of it, so he spends the show on the run from town to town like The Incredible Hulk. So the end of every episode is Adam thumbing a ride on the Trans-Canada Highway, set to the "going away" music that they referenced on Family Guy. Because once again no matter where he was in that episode, too many people showed up who wanted to be Adam's friend, and life there could no longer be managed. So he left.

The theme song for Everybody wants to be Adam's friend is the Propellerheads' cover of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." Other characters include our sister Caitlin (but not me), and Adam's sole confidant / travelling companion, an unstable drifter named Kradzinski. Adam and Kradzinski also keep a pet monkey as the third member of their unofficial team. The monkey's name is Bessarion.

Posted by tederick at 11:57 AM in tv
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I like Piper Perabo a whole lot. I think she's a good actress in a supermodel's body and she's therefore underappreciated. I hope she sticks around on House. I find the idea of House having his first stable relationship in the history of the show with a 26-year-old vegan nutritionist phenomenally entertaining.

Meanwhile, I do not find Benry entertaining at all. I am fucking sick of that guy. So much lying. So last night's ep was pretty much just an hour in la-la-land because I'm not inclined to even believe that his flashbacks are true. Benry is a useless character, narratively irrelevant, even more so now that he has been shown to be nothing more than yet another opportunistic gadfly on the back of the greater mystery of the island. Is Locke dead? Very possible (Terry O'Quinn just sold his house in Hawaii), but somehow continue to doubt it. What's Jacob's deal? Something new. Whatever else is going on on that island, I don't feel like the Phantom Menace is not a manifestation of something we've seen before. He might, however, be the center cog. We've been seeing a lot of caves lately. Three years later we're nearing the end of the setup.

This is interesting.

I woke up at 4:30 or so when the thunderstorm was really getting going last night... and also because there was a car horn ringing out over the neighbourhood in one long, uninterrupted blare. Based on what the movies have told me I can only assume someone either flipped their car over, or was assassinated in their driver's seat by a double tap to the head. Horn went on for a solid half hour or more. But I fell back asleep and slept deep - it's always an entirely different level of narcosis when there's a thunderstorm happening outside. Like being back in the womb or something. I woke up late and the world was shiny.

The inevitable Spider-Mamo is posted here. Mamo!

Posted by tederick at 11:23 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & dr. house & podcastery
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"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."

I met Daniel after work the other day at the Last Temptation in Kensington, and couldn't help but notice the eggs benedict displayed prominently under "brunch" on the menu. It was about 6:00 on a Tuesday afternoon, though, so I had to pose the trepidatious question: "Do you by some miracle serve brunch all the time?"

They do indeed!

Benedict at the Temptation is a strange, tangled affair. In fact in proper terms I might not even be able to define this as a benn