Now listen up you bastards!! Chris got me Transformers for the Wii! For ten glorious minutes I was a destruction-bent autobot with absolutely no idea what he was doing or why! I destroyed buses full of civilians! I shot holes in bank walls! I climbed the sides of buildings and rained fire down on a dim and unsuspecting public!! And yet, I never transformed... The Wii is a dreamspace in a box, with all the attendant ironies and vagueries.

Meanwhile: Brandy got me the SNES controller for the Wii! So now I can download and play Donkey Kong Country 2, my Favourite Game Ever! So there!!

I am absolutely not coming down with a cold. FYI.

I think I radically underestimated the recovery time for the film festival; I was so fucking tired yesterday I actually lost the ability to pull correct words out of my vocabulary by around 5:00. I was malapropping like a pro for a while there. I passed out in Caitlin's bed for an hour or so and that let me get through the night, but it was a near thing. Note to self: one night of solid sleep and then going hard like a demented undergrad for the next three nights, not so much "good."

Meanwhile, check this shit out:

But when you're Adam, you never get to be in the picture. We went to a place called Il Mulino, which is on Eglinton near Bathurst (though not very near Bathurst) and it was goddamned tip-top. Terrific beef carpaccio and I tried the octopus as well; an imported mozarella so lusty and flavourful it was like I could actually see the cow; and the best gnocchi I've ever had that wasn't made by my mother and brother. Plus, actually the best waiter ever: not only could he detail the interrelating qualities of the entire menu and twelve daily specials, and provide a fucking HUGE wine to go along with, but he could also enunciate the finer points of 3:10 to Yuma and crack a fairly solid joke. If I could import this guy like they import their mozarella, all would be well with the fucking world. I am so in need of a valet.

The owner came out and got to talking to Mom and Caitlin about Torino and Sienna, and I'm beginning to realize that for all my farther-east travel ambitions, I've made an error by not yet having been to Italy. That, and actually going to Egypt (where my mother was born), have been on my mind a lot lately, as little more than angsty sensation waiting to be made form. I wonder what I would do in a year with no film festival.