One scathing email, two failed mover negotations, two large going-away meals within three hours of each other, one supervisory smackdown, three hotel getaway scheme needs assessments, one unplanned wander around the midtown area, and one half-accurate and hilarious description of my job later, I'm feeling quite a bit better thank you. I would like to go see Batman again, and then I think everything will be set to rights.

No more cell phone driving Ontario? OK. The telecommunications industry and its foibles has been much in my mind of late, but due to various conflicts of interest I will have to publish my findings at another time. Until then, please do not call me while I am driving.

In the more immediate future, I need a couch.

On another topic, I'm not entirely sure how we got a hundred and nineteen shows into this deal before stumbling upon the title "Mamo a Mamo," but we've finally arrived, and with that clever bit of pun titleage, my esteem for Matty Price has grown another hectolitre. Here's Mamo #119: Mamo a Mamo, in which further Batmania is discussed.

And in the "let's further prove that we just don't get it" sweepstakes, Sony is trying to widen the Spider-Man movie platform with a Venom spin-off. I for one couldn't be more thrilled: Spider-Man 3 being the only entry in the series that I can actually enjoy (I own it on Blu-Ray!) and Venom being the worst thing about that awful, awful movie, I must expect that a Topher Grace-headlined Venom flick would be fan-fucking-tastic, not just in a so-good-it's-bad way, but also in a so-bad-it's-hallucination-inducing sort of way. I can see molten rivers of obsidian CG goo in my mind's eye right now... hopefully they relocate the story to a smaller city in the American midwest where Venom arrives as a hapless outsider on the run... and have an orphaned kid involved, who forms a tender bond with the oil-slick-with-a-heart-of-gold Venom... It'll be the story of us, man, who we are right now, all us loners and losers and people made of glop out there. Yeah. That's moviemaking.

Posted by tederick at 9:32 AM in 1701 & j-o-b & movies & podcastery
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Today sucks, for reasons blah, and blah-ha, and boo-hoo, which I shall not utter here. I shall, however, say: Ha! (Not a "ha" of merriment. A "ha" of deep, diaphragm-clenching malaise.)

I will also say that if you're going to have a gigantic see-thru glowing toy bust of Fat Palp on your desk (I'm not), this is the one to have. Tell me this ain't some scary shit. Damn the Japanese are weird.

Unsurprisingly given the storm clouds over my head today and also the obvious cinematic parallels in The Dark Knight, I've been thinking about There Will Be Blood quite a bit lately. The TWBB blu-ray remains one of the highlights of my collection and the flick is just, well... "even better every time" don't cover it. It's goddamned stunning. In fact I think a blu-ray TWBB/TDK double feature (to be subtitled: The Night America Stole Your Soul) would be quite the crushing experience of cinematic awesomeness, examining the complete dissolution of moral certainty in the 21st century, and I may stage such a viewing at 1701 in the fall sometime.

That's right, 1701: behold the tag for my new domicile, in which I shall be living solo starting on September 1 of this year. I signed the lease on Friday. Now I'm all bound up with labour and logistics. More detail to follow.

Posted by tederick at 1:49 PM in 1701 & galaxy far & miscellaneous crap & movies & toys!
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Continuing onwards!:

I have a 17" CRT computer monitor (a Samsung SyncMaster 900 IFT) that I will give to anyone who still has a need for such things.

I have a 2-drawer black metal filing cabinet that I will happily part with for no fee, should you be willing to come and pick it up. The pickup might have to be slightly later in the summer because I'm still in the process of clearing it out, but claim early!

I have a Game Cube - no games, no controllers - that is yours for the plucking.

I have framed posters of Episodes 1 and 2 in varying states of repair. Please take them from me.

Still on from Sunday's bake-off:

DVDs at five bucks a pop:

• Ginger Snaps II a.k.a. Ginger Really Snaps

Books for free:

• The novelizations of Episodes I and II, in hardcover!
• Memoirs of a Geisha, also in hardcover!
• The Making of the Modern Age, which many of you probably read in history class in high school
• Oscar Widle - De Profundis and Other Writings
• Jean Genet - Our Lady of the Flowers

Keep an eye on the comments to figure out what's sold and what's not.

Posted by tederick at 9:01 AM in miscellaneous crap
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Know that if I were still collecting toys, I would collect the shit outta this one.

Actually, I still might.

Posted by tederick at 5:24 PM in awesomeness & galaxy far & toys!
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Lots more stuff coming out of my house and potentially into yours over the next few weeks. Let's start with some DVDs:

• The Prestige, a film I simply cannot recommend highly enough
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
• Ginger Snaps II a.k.a. Ginger Really Snaps

Five bucks a head. That's right, FIVE. If you live elsewhere than here and cannot pick up the DVDs, we can also work out a shipping cost.

Now some books:

• The novelizations of Episodes I and II, in hardcover!
• Memoirs of a Geisha, also in hardcover!
• His Dark Materials
• The Making of the Modern Age, which many of you probably read in history class in high school
• Oscar Widle - De Profundis and Other Writings
• Shadow Moon, the actual novelized sequel to Willow
• Jean Genet - Our Lady of the Flowers

Books are FREE. I don't feel right charging for books. Same rules apply re: shipping if you don't have the ability to come get them in person.

Posted by tederick at 10:28 AM in books & shinydisks
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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..."

That photo turned out sorta crappy, but that's the camera on a smartphone for ya. No matter what certain organizations (ahem) may say, it's pretty piss-poor to put all your gadgets on one device. Anyways, piss-poor was the order of the day with this lacklustre benny at Clinton's, whose only real fun is found in saying "CLIN-TON'S!" in the same commanding basso profundo voice perfected by Harry Shearer on that Simpsons Hallowe'en episode.

The problem with this eggs benedict is its everything. The entire thing pretty much sucks. When the plate showed up Sarafina looked at me and said, "that looks pretty thin." She needn't have vocalized; a silent look would have said more than this meal ever could have. The soupy, barely-off-white Hollandaise, which leaned far too heavily on the lemon, and the laughably undercooked eggs did little to disguise the rough, chitinous peameal beneath. God help any benny this difficult to cut - sure, the cutlery at Clinton's doesn't exactly boast Ginsu level edgecraft, but the food was doing the knives no favours this morning.

The salad that came with was so lackadaisical that I didn't bother with it after a few bites, and the home fries were rather enjoyable if only for their trashiness. The fruit salad was like a sad commentary on our societal need to inject "healthy" alternatives into thoroughly unhealthy lifestyles.

Crappy. Just crappy. One egg out of four!

Clinton's is located at Clinton and Bloor, in the Annex in Toronto. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.

Posted by tederick at 5:48 PM in the benedict chroncicles
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Between me and my brother, this morning:

Me: Check it out, aliens are actually real.
Adam: Damn... here's hoping he's sane. I wiki'd him and he's 78 so he may just be senile from all the age and space travel.
Me: Or maybe he has a CRYSTAL SKULL??
Adam: More likely, yes.

It wasn't until a few days ago that I actually registered the full measure of my disappointment about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was tooling around indianajones.com, there were some video clips from the movie on there, and I just sorta gawped at it. Good lord in fuck, why on earth would anyone ever do a thing like this. It's amazing that three Star Wars prequels couldn't make me hate George Lucas, but this one did it with one computer-animated gopher poking out of a dune hill, and took down my teenboy love of Spielberg with it. They're freezing Lucas in carbonite over in Japan in officially sanctioned product now; can we get desk-sized ones on this side of the Pacific?

On a much lower scale of disappointment is the X Files sequel. For years I have been crying "The world needs Fox Mulder!" so I guess I'm getting what I paid for this weekend; in the post-Batman orgasmic high it barely mattered to me at all that this movie was even coming out, and the results bear out:

I genuinely do: I want to believe. I want to believe in aliens and psychics and fluke men. More than that, though, I desperately want to believe that if the Man is being a scary, lying sonofabitch, there's a couple of methodical, deadpan FBI agents out there with flashlights and cell phones and a drab mid-size sedan, patrolling the highways and biways of middle America / Vancouver with a dogged (Doggett?) interest in figuring out just what the hell is going on. Maybe not solving, maybe not saving, but at least seeing. I believe in The X Files.

Rest of the review is here.

Now utterly unsure of what the hell I'm supposed to go do with myself, I'm going wander around the city and try to find new gods.

Posted by tederick at 12:12 PM in ADAM & dr. jones & galaxy far & miscellaneous crap & reviews
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...but it looks like the X-Files movie turned out pretty bad.

Myy relationship with review aggregators has become interesting over the past year or so. There was a time when I would have resisted the very notion of aggregators, and on a basic theoretical level I suppose I still think they're an even more flawed approach to film response than thumbs up / thumbs down (a reduction so gross that even Roger Ebert has said it is specifically responsible for destroying modern film criticism). And yet, there's little denying that any movie I'm even slightly "on the fence" about, I'll go to RT and see what the critical consensus is before deciding whether I should give it a try. Money and time being as finite as they are right now, I lean on the rapid data snapshot - which I suppose by default must also mean that I no longer think my critical taste distinct enough for the masses that there is a better-than-average chance I will like something that the majority does not, i.e. even if using the aggregators is a massive generalization on my likelihood to like a movie, the odds are still in my favour that I'll come out above par by just following the herd. And this from the guy who liked The Phantom Menace. Ah well. If only movies (Dark Knight notwithstanding) weren't so crappy right now.

Comics being in a similar state of blah, I went all Five Families on my pull list Wednesday night - chucked the Avengers, the X-Men, the Boys, the Hellboys, the Angels, and came damn close to chucking Iron Fist thanks to the unannounced (at least to me) switch to an entirely new writing/art team. WTF? Fraction and Brubaker abandon sweet IIF awesomeness for Uncanny frickin' X-Men? Grrrrrrr.

Speaking of Five Families, all the stolen bike raids are making Toronto feel like The Untouchables this week! You know, like when Sean Connery walks across the street and knocks that door down and there's all the jamokes in there? Exciting.

Posted by tederick at 9:40 AM in blogTO & comix & movies
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Posted by tederick at 5:44 PM in extreme steve
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Three whole years of Mamo's extraordinary amazingtude have brought us right back to the beginning: Christopher Nolan's done a Batman movie, and holy shafizzle, they don't come any better than this. Matty Price and I recorded this Mamo on Tuesday night and not only did it turn out to be really, really long (which is always fairly satisfying), but also rather good (which is equally satisfying if not more so). Y'know, I'm just damn glad we've been doing this thing for three whole years with no sign of stopping. It's starting to feel like an actual Thing.

Mamo!

Posted by tederick at 8:57 AM in batman! & podcastery
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MA!!!!

In other capsule news:

• Stop the George Lucas, I want to get off.
• Ultimate Extreme Steve 3 running late. Because he's ultimate.
• Mamoversary show - and it's a doozy - should be posted today. Mamo Facebook page in effect: please join.
• I have a love ninja button on my pants.

Posted by tederick at 9:52 AM in galaxy far & podcastery & tv
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True Blood poster!

Ironically enough it premieres seven days after the long-awaited glory of Matt permanently ending his relationship with Rogers. Oh man howdy, am I looking forward to that phone call. Cancelling the cable, the internet, the phone, the everything, and when asked why, responding "because of how awful each and every one of you has been to me over the past five years. Even your fucking phone-answering robot. That's why." It'll be the victorious conclusion of my 14-month tangle with Fido all over again...

Posted by tederick at 9:28 AM in tv
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I don't want to rain on the Whedonites' weekend, because lord knows those poor miserable people have been through enough. (They cancelled Firefly! In 2002!!) But I'm just not on board with Dr. Horrible. Did no one else find it... kinda humdrum? There's a self-congratulatory air about the proceedings with this one, which I hope does not extend to Dollhouse, but probably could. Yes, the whole project is sorta adorable and there are songs and Doogie Howser has a death ray. But if this were made by a college kid - aside from the fact that we'd all be gawping at the fact that he somehow found fifty billion dollars for his budget - would we really be calling it all the great things it's been called this week? The story is flat, the genre innovations are a no-show, and the technical craft is bottom-drawer. There isn't a single note here that wasn't done better in any of the other superhero inversions of the past five years, and there's no ending. Honestly, I've come to expect more. Captain Napalm: strike!

Anyhoo. Rough weekend. I ate several grilled cheese sandwiches. Well, to be fair, one cannot really call what I grew up with as "grilled cheese" truly "grilled cheese," as there is no grilling involved whatsoever. It's more like "broiled cheese sandwiches." To whit:

1. Toast two pieces of white bread
2. Butter one side of each piece with the yellowest margarine you can find
3. Pre-heat oven on broil
4. Place both pieces of toast on a baking sheet, one with butttered side up, one with buttered side down. On the one with buttered side down, place two pieces of thin Kraft cheese singles, the ones that are not made out of actual cheese.
5. Put in the oven and heat until cheese is gooey and other piece of toast is notably browning
6. Take out of oven, put un-cheesed toast on the cheesed toast, flip the whole sandiwch, and re-broil until other side is as brown as the first side was
7. Serve and enjoy.

Comfort food is lovely, but I may panic soon and need to watch the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. It's a scale of escalation.

So, I am likely not going to be living in my dream home at College and Yonge come September first. This means I am shortly to join Toronto's homeless population. As predicted on this blog 18 months ago, my homeless personality shall be Captain Jack Sparrow - me and that Jedi guy outside the Scotiamount are gonna have a fight. Look for me - my hair is nearly long enough for dreadlocks already. Shiesh! How do people stand having hair in the summer?

Happy Potteaster! On this day in 2007, Harry Potter died for our sins and was reborn a complete franchise. Praise Potteresus.

Posted by tederick at 9:40 AM in foodin' & h-pot & joss
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The Dark Knight - which arrives at a level of craft and dedication that will be a high-water mark for 2008 - is not just the film that Batman Begins inspired in all of our minds with its critical final words ("escalation," "taste of the theatrical," "calling card"). It is significantly more: the most dextrous, complicated, and absorbing "comic book movie" ever made.

Click here to read my review, with a heavy spoiler warning.

This review was murderously hard to write. Actually, I guess it isn't even a "review" at all, more of a film analysis than anything about pros/cons of a new Batman flick. Oddly enough I glimpsed at my review for Begins just now, and was struck by how oddly and unintentionally parallel the two reviews are in construction. Which I suppose bodes well for my theory on Nolan and the films, if they could spontaneously generate such similar responses without any purposeful re-examination of my previous writing. That guy is doing some fucking incredibly solid work, man, and with each successive entry I become more and more fascinated.

Posted by tederick at 3:49 PM in batman! & movies & reviews
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Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman Batman!

Posted by tederick at 7:17 AM in batman!
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Me and my boss just tried the thing where you pop popcorn with your cell phones and it does not work. Those videos are fake. I feel fractionally better about my place in the world.

Posted by tederick at 9:46 AM in j-o-b
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Yes.

I know, I know, infections and/or tetanus and/or scurvy and/or death. Shut up mom.

Posted by tederick at 6:06 PM in pirates
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Well, and officially, it's summer and everything sucks. Any intimation of having to do anything at all is met by me with a massive IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA!! And I am not alone. This entire jive-ass turkey town is staring out the window (wistfully). If I were Ferris Bueller, I would take the Day Off. I am petulant, emasculated, dyspeptic, and blasé. It's something's-gotta-give mode at Tederick Central Command. (TCC: kicking the TTC's butt!)

If I were a fruit fly, I would be bumping lazily against the fruit, accomplishing nothing.

Ugh. To be on a beach, naked, with a bottle of rum...

Posted by tederick at 11:02 AM in j-o-b & miscellaneous crap & the rum diaries
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Oh no now I'm in trouble NOW I HAVE TO DRAW THE NEXT ONE

Posted by tederick at 12:14 AM in extreme steve
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Aside from slight disappointment that they didn't name all the tracks after species of bats like last time 'round, I can tell ya simply: James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer have done it again. Oh lordy lordy, I thought his laugh freaked me out...

Posted by tederick at 5:58 PM in batman!
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Look what I bought on the street!!!:

and

and this one I've wanted for a while

yes!! awesome.

Posted by tederick at 10:05 PM in awesomeness & books
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Spider-Man 1. It was Spider-Man 1. And now Danny Elfman will now be a selly-outy sucky wanghole for ever and ever amen.

Yesterday my soccer team won! Which is frickin' unheard of! And I (me personally) had an actual good play! Which is also fairly rare! So tonight's the night for betting on horse lotteries, folks. If it weren't for the TCSSC shipping us further and further into the hinterlands of Ontario on fields that can absolutely not be qualified as "Toronto" or "Central" (or even "Social" or "Club," so I guess really the league should just be called "Sport!" with an exclammation point), I'd say this soccer season is shaping up fine.

Meanwhile, the city of Toronto stole my blue boxes. All four of them. They were there, they were beautiful, they were mine, and now they're gone. We are reduced to pitching empties out the kitchen window at the upright bin in the driveway. Who do you call to charge the city of Toronto with theft? 3QF is going to make it to the end of our tenancy on fucking fumes. By August 31 the only things left in the house will be a broken kitchen faucet, the noise the fridge makes, and six floorboards.

Posted by tederick at 12:36 PM in 3QF & movies & sockey
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Last night the 3QF cinematheque hosted perhaps its final double feature of the season, Krull vs. The Machine Girl. In an odd bit of unintended synergy, both films featured the same five-bladed starfish weapon. The latter, though, also featured a schoolgirl with a machine gun arm. It's tremendous what they're doing with movies these days.

Food on hand for screening: Crullers and sushi.

Coincidentally, around the same time we were doing all that, Warner yanked Where the Wild Things Are from its release schedule altogether, after having previously shoved the release to late '09. The bulljive is in full swing in the press release, and lord knows I'm no great Spike Jonze fan anyway, but I wonder if we're now ever going to see what he conceived as the proper approach to this unmakeable film - an approach which, regardless of how it turns out, is inherently way more interesting to me than anything that "delivers for a broad-based audience." It's a feature-length adaptation of a 15-page children's story, and if the rumour mill it to be believed, it's gonna have giant walking puppets. Honestly, I don't care if it sucks; I just want to see it. There just aren't enough amazing things in the world any more.

Admonitions like that, however, lead to Hellboy II. And it is, unfortunately, time to report that I don't want any more things to lead to stuff like Hellboy II. I am declaring a moratorium on underwhelm: let's get back to kicking some ass, shall we? Review snippet follows thus:

For all his prodigous gifts with the look n' feel, Del Toro has always suffered from recurring skill gaps in his writing: an over-reliance on form; a lack of substance in his English-language dialogue; a tendency to see hererosocial relations from only the male point of view; and what's with all the clocks? Pan's seemed to herald the completion of a successful leap upward from the young director of able adventure stories like Blade II and even the first Hellboy. With Hellboy II, sadly, all of Del Toro's weaknesses as a writer have come roaring back, and have brought some friends. The thing looks fantastic, but goddamn, this is some piss-poor storytelling.

And full review is here. I can't help but notice that I'm writing a lot more bad reviews these days than good ones. I do hope this isn't because I've become an asshole, which I admit is becoming more and more possible with every film I see. I suppose it's unlikely that every single goddamn thing sucks. HB2 has many admirable qualities and means well, if "meaning well" means to plumb whatever street cred Del Toro has amassed in order to make a nice chunk of summer-movie coin. (I don't even begrudge that. Who wouldn't want to make coin? Coin buys condominiums.) I just want a flick to have appreciable achievement in all areas of filmcraft, not just one or two, y'know? Or at least, transport me so spectacularly into its own idea that I come out unable to help admitting that yeah, that thing was a movie, a thing of the world worth making and bestowing upon others. (Like Wall-E, and in a completely opposite series of ways, like The Machine Girl.) I'd like to stop rounding up.

Posted by tederick at 11:42 AM in 3QF & movie night & movies & reviews
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Oh, I'm gonna be mighty pissed at myself if it was that obvious the whole time.

Posted by tederick at 2:16 PM in comix & joss
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This has been a spectacular couple of weeks for feeling old. Sure, I've got long, straggly grey beard-hairs. Certainly, my memory is a leaky faucet nowadays. And by all means, my body is being goddamned odd in its response to stress. But last night? Limping up the stairs to 3QF because my right knee had apparently gone stiffie without my knowledge, settling into bed with my clothes still on and an audible "Ohhhhhhh," and then passing clean the fuck out for 2 hours before 7:00 at night? Well that's just unacceptable.

So I read me some Scott Pilgrim on the way to work today in order to engage with "youth culture," and am feeling generally content. I have yet to find an apartment, and now seem to be in jeopardy of not having anywhere to live on September 1 - expecting to be able to move in to a new place before November of this year was, evidently, a spectacular miscalculation on my part because Toronto is BOOKED UP. I will be prowling the corridors of Yonge & College this afternoon with a song in my heart, because I actually do find the whole moving-out thing very exciting right now. And then going to see Hellboy with my special lady. There could be sushi involved. So today is ok, lack of residence and bad knee notwithstanding.

Posted by tederick at 10:37 AM in miscellaneous crap
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If one were to approach culling one's comic book pull list by simply dropping to a single title per author, the numbers would disintegrate nicely. Like,

Fraction: Immortal Iron Fist, culling Invincible Iron Man
Whedon: Buffy, culling Angel (I know he doesn't write the latter, I'm just dying to cull it)
Brubaker: Daredevil, culling Uncanny X-Men
Vaughan: doesn't publish any more, but I'm known to buy an Ex Machina trade now and again
Morrison: All-Star Superman, culling Batman
Ellis: Getting culled clean off this list unless AXM improves substantially in the next five seconds
Ennis: sucks

The problem is Bendis. Stupid dumb writes sixty comics in a week Bendis. I'd never trade off Powers or Ulrimate Spidey (that's Ultimate Spider-Man's Cantonese knock-off, for those not in the know), because they're both the sort of books that make me, y'know, want to write books. I s'pose I could axe yer Secret Invasions and yer Avengerses, the latter of which just hasn't been that great lately anyway. But I gotta admit Secret Invasion #4 was pretty tight, even if the whole Jessica's-a-Skrull thing is potentially the worst "it was all a dream" narrative cop-out since One More Day. Bendis is a goddamned annoyingly competent motherfucker. I should throw an egg at his head for foiling my pull-cull master plan.

Posted by tederick at 10:18 AM in comix
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Posted by tederick at 7:42 AM in extreme steve
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There's almost no describing how much better the Blu-Ray Batman Begins is than the regular disk. This is the one where the real geeks will keep their standard DVD and their Blu-Ray side by side, so they can show performance comparisons.

The depth, the dimensionality... Required a firmware upgrade like you wouldn't believe, but it's some sweet candy now. Good lord, I can see into Christian Bale's soul...

Posted by tederick at 3:39 PM in batman! & shinybludisks
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It's too god damned hot today to do anything but this.

and, this.

Posted by tederick at 9:17 AM in youtubery
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I can't seem to get the Juno "pie balls" line out of my head today. I've also taken to using "turducken" as a swear word... though the latter is more of a secret, vulgar ambition than a curse.

When you're moving, you want to move as little "stuff" as possible, so I've stopped mending socks. That's right: sock pops a stitch, sock go bye-bye. The socks are terrified. They saw what I did to these bastards, and they're running scared. My side of it is brilliant; not only do I get to terrorize my socks, but I also get to look forward to a mid-September socking spree. New socks!

Now watch as I tear a strip off this: What is the deal with the Facebook Friend Finder? That thing is retarded. Never, not even once, has a single person who appears there been someone I can identify by name. Am I getting someone else's picks? Whose Friend Finder do I show up in? Maybe they invented the FF as some kind of second law of thermodynamics motivator within the naturally-structurecentric Facebook universe. Where we attempt to build logical roads between the cities of our social profiles, the FF tunnels through the earth to random out-points that are unrelated by any commerce to our Facebook cities. (Yikes... that metaphor barely held.) The inevitable result of following the Friend Finder to its disconsolate ends is utter entropy across the board: networking with everyone rather than select few; "friendship" as a meaningless watchword in a hazily homogenous Facebook fog. Fie!

Well anyways. I've had coffee, and written in my journal about two or three of the more beautiful things of the last 72 hours, all while sitting in the sunset rays of my soon-to-be-erstwhile home of the Danforth. I remember the summer of '04, when I did nothing else...

Posted by tederick at 5:56 PM in 3QF & miscellaneous crap & socks
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Just bought my Festival Pass for 2008, and as has become tradition, I am so goddamned excited. Might be the inevitable reality that I so very, very much need my vacation, but whatever it is, September can't come soon enough. And if everything goes according to plan I'll be able to walk home from Midnight Madness... outstanding.

Meanwhile, Batman. Ohhhhhhhhhh Batman. The marketing is out in full force, and I swear every time I see anything DK-related on any billboard, bus or balustrade (what?), the nervous strings of the Zimmer/Howard score start playing on an endless loop in my head. Duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH.... It never pays to be this excited about anything film related, but fucked if I can't help myself this time.

After a fairly miserable late-last-week, the weekend augured on quite nicely. There were brunches. And delicious drinks. And at least one fabuloso bike ride cum personal awakening moment. With the confusion and mess-around of Canada Day it didn't really feel like a full 2-day I-had-a-weekend type weekend, but still, it will serve, at least until my Batman Be Blu-ray shows up tomorrow. I'm gonna sit on my couch writing performance reviews while Liam Neeson gets all sage on Christian Bale's ass on the telly. Duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH.... Wow-woowwwwwwwwwrrrrrrrrr....

Posted by tederick at 11:25 AM in batman! & tiff 2008
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If you have anything on loan from me - books, comic books, DVDs - please arrange to return them to me by the 20th of July. (The weekend Batman comes out.)

If I have anything on loan from you that I asked to borrow, I will endeavour to return it to you within the next 10 days.

If I have anything on loan from you that you spontaneously gave me because you thought I'd like it, I have already burned your possession.

Posted by tederick at 10:05 AM in miscellaneous crap
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Right now Matty Price is in Philadelphia having cheese steaks with his son, and I'm in Toronto, where even my stupid fucking horrible cat refuses to spend a modicum of time with me. Life: teh suck.

I'll say this for moving out: it forces the landlord to actually pay attention to the quality of the house. Stairs to the third floor? Fixed, two days after she found out we were leaving, and four weeks after she found out they were broken. People don't give a sweet fuck about you, ever, unless it costs them an enormous amount of money not to. Remember that, internet; let it scour your veins like oxaliplatin. Meanwhile, B-diddy (not to be confused with Bone Daddy) has successfully located her new home, Chris is Hugh Hefnering his way around the main floor, and I have not even started apartment-hunting. Should I be paranoid about not having secured a September 1 move-in date, when it's the fourth of July? I feel like I should, given that I'm so frickin' roped up about everything else these days anyway. What's one more slice of freak-out on the big freak-out pile.

You ever been to Sushi Train? Give it a try. A little conveyor belt brings the sushi to you. Ambulatory sushi is a thing worth having, even if it is indescribably precarious as a business model.

Right now, somewhere out there, Larry Hama is being awesome.

Posted by tederick at 12:56 AM in 3QF & foodin' & miscellaneous crap
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1. Deluxe original cheddar Kraft Dinner
2. Sprinkle with Dinosaur BBQ Cajun Foreplay spice rub
3. Drizzle lightly with Dinosaur BBQ garlic chipotle pepper sauce.

BUT YEAH.

Posted by tederick at 7:01 PM in awesomeness & foodin'
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Astonishing X-Men by Ellis and Bianchi - sucked! oh god, did it suck. Human words cannot describe the ugliness of Simone Bianchi's art, nor the degree to which Ellis apparently never read a single issue of the comic he's taking over. When did Hisako become a cross between Molly Hayes and a pissed-off gym instructor? Never. Fuck you.

Angel: After the Fall, now with a revolving clusterfuck of increasingly incompetent artists teasing out the dregs of Brian Lynch's evidently uber-thin original concept - the worst comic I am currently reading! I cannot believe the phenomenal fucking nosedive in quality this thing took around about the middle of issue 4, nor the fact that 6 fully awful issues later (including the unforgivable "First Night" mini-arc), I am still here. Spike: After the Fall? No thank you.

Batman: RIP by Grant Morrison - incomprehensible! Utterly, structurally, conceptually, executionally the worst-written anything written I've read since The Writer's Journey! Morrison has had it! The hack is off the job! Four more issues of this just to find out what the Big Change is? Not worth it.

Buffy vs. Fray - so fucking good.

Posted by tederick at 2:21 PM in batman! & comix & joss
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Since our last installment, I inadvertently celebrated Canada Day by going for an impromptu 1-hour walk that became an impromptu 3-hour hike, which then required an impromptu half-hour climb out of the Don Valley through some rich guy's goddamn back yard, which then dovetailed nicely into an impromptu picnic, then an impromptu sunset lounging with Sarafinaprovised drinks, then an impromptu balcony barbecue till well after the firecrackers were pounding the night sky. Then impromptu sleeping at Sarafina's house when I had none of my things for work with me, necessitating an impromptu 6:30 a.m. wake up / stopover at 3QF to resupply before going to (promptu) work. Finally: back on promptu. But it was a grand way to spend a day, Canada. I like it here.

Trolling the LCBO web site this morning (as is my practice), I discovered that a store very near me has not one, not two, but seventeen bottles of the El Dorado 15-year-old Demerara rum that I spoke of so fondly back in February. So needless to say, I plundered that secret cache and made it my own. It's a little thank-you present to myself for being so awesome, and also to the world for making great rum. But mostly, I want to thank Pirates of the Caribbean, for selling me so many toys. Shit, I'm babbling.

It's Wednesday! Buffy! Astonishing X-Men! Burritos! Oh, 'tis good.

Posted by tederick at 3:31 PM in comix & foodin' & jedi antics & the rum diaries
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