Well, fuck. Here it is the next-to-last day of the whole darned year and all I can think of is the word "Benjmobutt." It is obsessing me. I can't get it out of my head, it's calling me even now, it isn't even fucking funny and wasn't to begin with and yet here it is: Benjmobutt. Frig.

Here's what's also obsessing me:

• My chest hurts. My chest hurts, my hair is turning grey, I can't breathe particularly well at night any more, and my mind has turned into a leaky fucking trap. That's what happened in 2008, for those keeping score: I started getting really fucking old.
• "Leaky trap"? THAT ISN'T EVEN AN EXPRESSION!!!
• Further summarization of 2008 isn't really possible because I have completely lost the thread of what went on here and why. I know that I had, on balance, a pretty terrific year. I know that a lot of people around me did not. I know that the year coming up is going to have serious, significant, ongoing life challenges to it and that a year from now, pretty much everything I currently consider a "core" element of my life has the strong potential to be gone or unrecognizeable. That freaks me out.
• Well, on the good days it "seems like an exciting challenge." On the rest of the days it freaks me out.
• Tederick.com's Woman of the Year is Sarafina, because, I mean, well obviously.
• She glows!
• On a completely unrelated note, it is likely that I am within a stone's throw of no longer being able to manage my stress. This was the year everything started rushing, all the time.
• slow down.
• Hey! Planet! Still be here tomorrow, 'kay?

Posted by tederick at 10:09 PM in cantankerous & jedi antics & tederickdotcomdotcom
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"Every day I smoke two hundred cigarettes and one hundred cigars and drink a bottle of whisky and three bottles of wine with dinner. And dinner is meat." - General Dirk Anger, Director of H.A.T.E.

“It’s never as bad as it seems. You’re much stronger than you think you are. Trust me.” - Superman

Best overall: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

What was better - the arc where Buffy had salty, wet-dream-inducing lesbian sex with Satsu the Vampire Slayer before going army à army with yakuza bad guys on a roof in downtown Tokyo while giant Dawn matched roars with giant Gojira robo-Dawn... or the spinning Fray reboot arc where in the midst of cruising the deathly wastes of her own legacy and handing Dark Madwoman Willow her final smackdown, Buffy made apology to the entire English language? There's no escaping the numbers on this one. Every issue of Buffy that dropped in 2008 hit.

Best ongoing: Ultimate Spider-Man

Given a fresh face by Stuart Immonen's you're-the-only-male-I-currently-want-to-have-sex-with artwork, Brian Michael Bendis's reliably enjoyable tales of Spider-adolescence became one of the few titles I legitimately treasure month to month. The iconic Spidey-stories might have been told in the first hundred issues, but with them behind us, this year's work got to be more character-driven, narratively elliptical, and deceptively badass. Resurrect Gwen? Kill Harry? And confront, in the first two pages of the annual, why our recklessly-in-love, horny-as-jackrabbit 15-year-old heroes haven't yet had sex? Ultimate Spider-Man looks simple, because it is. To stay simple and still be this good, though, is nothing short of amazing.

In which our super man, knowing he is days from solar-irradiated death, undergoes his final labours... which, because he is Superman, he does even faster and kinder and better than ever before. A surprisingly canny meditation on mortality and legacy, on the evolution of the icon, and on our own inner strength, wrapped up in a clockwork narrative structure that only Grant Morrison could make sensible.

Other shit what was great: Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon, New Avengers, Powers, The Boys, Brian Azzarello's Joker

Fallen from grace: Astonishing X-Men by anyone else, X-titles generally, Immortal Iron Fist, Hellboy, Angel: After the Fall, Runaways, Mighty Avengers, and the rolling non-event EVENT! called Secret Invasion

I was late to the party: Scott Pilgrim, Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., and Y: The Last Man, the first comic book that actually made me cry.

Posted by tederick at 9:51 AM in comix
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This sucker took me by surprise with its stark stainless steel stainlessness, and also by the degree to which one should never attempt to shoot anything of any sustainable quality on a BlackBerry Pearl. But then maybe the crap fits the milieu.

Posted by tederick at 10:38 AM in bathrooms of the world
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• The Hunter S. Thompson tapes
• Socks
• A soap dish
• Batman and Philosophy
• The Acme Novelty Library - Number Nineteen
• Soap
• Floss
• an IOU for that do-it-yourself Muppet
• cash money
• A tangerine
• A jigsaw puzzle of me and Sarafina as adorable Japanese people in love
• Batman underpants (the bum says Batman; the crotch is Batman)
• Kill Your Boyfriend by Grant Morrison (from my girlfriend)
• little.com by Ralph Steadman - who the fuck is Grant Steadman?
• A Pirates of the Caribbean colouring book
• Chocolates!
• A Jack Sparrow Pez dispenser
• The 1960s Batmobile
• An American Express travellers' cheque which will shortly become an Iron Man DVD. Are you watchig closely?
• $50 to spend at Swiss Chalet.

And that's probably about it.

I was gonna spend Boxing Day lying around in couch-bed watching movies. I was gonna watch Superman II, Alien 3, and Indy 4. It's frickin' snowing like crazy so today would have been perfect for it. But after 2 straight days of gorging and lethargy I just can't face the idea of further gorging and lethargy, so I am going to brave the winter wilds in search of deals and good times. Maybe I'll see some of the movies that are supposed to be good, since that has been such a stunningly weak year in cinema and I wouldn't mind getting out of that rut. Or maybe I will just find a chair somewhere so that I can sit back, stroke my fatted belly, and say "mmmmmmmm."

Posted by tederick at 10:10 AM in miscellaneous crap
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For Christmas this year, I made this:

It is Sarafina as a rock star ninja, which she was already, but now has a toy about it. I loved doing this. I haven't customized an action figure - heck, I expect there are Tederick.commies reading this who didn't know I ever did - in aeons. Busting out the Dremel, going to the art supply store every couple of days, sanding and painting and spraying and cutting and finishing... boy, this was wayyyyyyyyyyyyy more fun than any gift creation process should ever be. I even made a box:

The Sarafina action figure comes with the following accessories:

• Sword
• Guitar with authentic guitar strap
• Bag of snacks
• Microphone stand
• Portrait of Peter O'Toole as Zaltar in Supergirl, saying "Yes You Can!"
• Figure stand
• Window box.

The Sarafina action figure is a limited edition, #1 of 1.

As used to be the norm for me in projects such as this, I documented the construction process, with notes and additional photos, in my Custom Action Figures section. But be careful - it's geeky in there.

Posted by tederick at 5:15 PM in toys!
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Hey Al,

Thanks again for coming out this morning. This is my egg nog recipe. The only thing I will warn you about is that this recipe makes about 3 litres of nog, so you'd better a) need that much, and b) have somewhere to put it! If you need less, halving all of the quantities obviously works just as well. But here's the original MB concoction:

• 6 eggs
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon Vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup Brandy
• 1/3 cup Dark rum (original recipe recommended Capt. Morgan spiced rum but I don't like spiced rum, so I use Appleton Estate black rum).
• 2 cups whipping cream
• 2 cups milk

Refrigerate all of the liquids (including the booze) for about an hour before starting for best results. I even throw the booze in the freezer sometimes. The colder the better for some reason, it just mixes better.

1. Beat 6 eggs in an electric mixer for 2 or 3 minutes till very frothy.
2. Gradually add the sugar and vanilla. You know how mixers tend to have that little opening at the top to add ingredients without turning off the mixer? I do it like that, mostly because it's fun.
3. Turn off mixer, and stir in the brandy, rum, whipping cream and milk.
4. Chill before serving. And shake vigorously before serving, too!

Merry Christmas! See you soon.

- M

Note 1: "My" egg nog is actually a modification of a recipe I found a few years ago on the texascooking.com web site. I've tried about half a dozen egg nog recipes in my time and this is my favourite (and, thankfully, also the actual absolute easiest.)

Note 2: I am working on perfecting my Grandma Brown's recipe for egg nog - who knows where she got that one, but it probably wasn't something she invented either - out of a sense of family loyalty and also because if you're looking to get sauced in a hurry, nothing beats Grandma's egg nog. It's like drinking lighter fluid. I've come closer this year than ever before but want to do some more futzing before I publish.

Posted by tederick at 1:17 PM in foodin'
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So,

I get up, get on the subway, get all the way to Kennedy station. At no point on my journey is any announcement made to the effect of "the entire Scarborough Rapid Transit line is down today." I arrive at Kennedy, find the entries to the RT blocked off. There is no signage, there are no announcements, there aren't even any TTC employees around to inform passengers as to where on the platform one might find a shuttle bus. When I ask a TTC employee for that information, he yells at me because he's just gotten on-shift and doesn't know. When I ask a second TTC employee for that information, he yells at me that the shuttle buses load where they always load, at the end of the station. (I presume he had somehow miraculously gleaned from my appareil that I could not, ever, possibly be someone who would not already have that information.) The driver of the shuttle bus announces that he is driving an RT shuttle bus from Kennedy to McCowan, and then drives to Scarborough Town Centre and stops. When I am still sitting on the bus, he asks me why. I tell him I'm going to McCowan. He yells at me, because no buses are going to McCowan and I should know this. I get over to McCowan, and find the station locked. An employee inside yells at me for trying to open the door. (The station is the only on-foot access point to Consilium Place, where I work. Well, the only one that doesn't involve trudging across an unploughed field that is four feet thick with snow.) I walk the rest of the way.

I wish I got to be as bad at my job as the TTC gets to be at theirs.

I arrive at the office to discover that the Tederick.com database has dumped the category information for every post on the site, so after retrogressing the database to Sunday afternoon I spend a half hour manually reconstructing the 20-odd posts created since then.

I receive one cancellation and two no-shows to my morning meeting, and think that perhaps I will go in a corner, drink my egg nog, and contemplate the mysteries of a world in which, on three and a half hours of sleep and in spite of all the aforementioned information, I am still in a somewhat humourous mood.

Posted by tederick at 9:29 AM in i hate the ttc & j-o-b & tederickdotcomdotcom
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Driving the sisters DiFelice home to Brantford in the midst of the third blizzard in a few days here in Toronto, on the way back I found myself on a long stretch of highway with no discernible edges, lane markings, or other cars. Like an endless hockey rink and I was the last man on earth. Quite a thing to see - and it lasted a while.

Going to bed now.

Posted by tederick at 1:30 AM in poetical
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• A jigsaw puzzle of me and Sarafina as adorable Japanese people in love
• Batman underpants (the bum says Batman; the crotch is Batman)
• Kill Your Boyfriend by Grant Morrison (from my girlfriend)
• little.com by Grant Steadman
• A Pirates of the Caribbean colouring book
• Chocolates!
• A Jack Sparrow Pez dispenser
• The 1960s Batmobile
• An American Express travellers' cheque which is, as my friend Gina pointed out, really an Iron Man DVD in disguise
• $50 to spend at Swiss Chalet.

Some themes are emerging.

And as for what I got Sarafina, I will be posting a thing about it soon. (With pictures.)

Today I am spending my time doing a manual, page-by-page migration of a legal compliance course that might just as well have been written by chickens. It's the worst thing I've ever read in my life. Honestly, the scribblings on our bathroom wall are more useful from a learning perspective. (Plus, they have pictures. Every mens' room wall has the exact same drawing of a penis - always the exact same. It's one guy, a guy with what I can only presume is an incredibly misshapen wang, going from bathroom to bathroom around the world, drawing that thing.) Well anyways. I didn't mean to digress quite so far there, but I'm bored and pissed. Learning shouldn't be crappy. Zwuh.

Well anyways, like the Jewel of the Nile says, when the going gets tough, the tough get goin'-ga-goin'-ga-goin'! Hoo! Ha! Hoo ha ha hoo!

Posted by tederick at 3:16 PM in j-o-b & miscellaneous crap
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Posted by tederick at 11:45 AM in ADAM & toys!
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• A Jack Sparrow Pez dispenser
• The 1960s Batmobile
• An American Express travellers' cheque which is, as my friend Gina pointed out, really an Iron Man DVD in disguise
• $50 to spend at Swiss Chalet.

Call me an old fashioned vanilla smoothie, but with it snowing goddamn near constantly in Toronto, and being able to dip into the last-minute-shopping well without actually having to live there, Christmas is a step more enjoyable this year than it has been in a good long while. Part of that relates to what I'm getting for my girlfriend, but I will share more about that at the appropriate time. Till then, there is hustle, there is bustle, there is to and there is fro, and something like goodwill towards (women and) men. I am listening to actual Christmas music, doing actual Christmas wrapping, and sipping the actual egg nog recipe of my late grandmother, which (after it flummoxed me silly a few years back) I have somehow managed to revisit and perfect. It's like a whole thing over here. Shit, I might have to read A Christmas Carol this year and everything. How far do I want to take this?

To the market! For the makings of a fine holiday meal!

Posted by tederick at 6:10 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Did I dream about the new season of Lost last night: yes.

Did my dream about the new season of Lost involve the revelation of a giant retro robot rampaging around the island, and poor Desmond being turned into a (smaller) robot as well: yes.

Should the new season of Lost, then, be all about robots if it wants to satisfy my desire: yes.

I'm telling you, that Beren & Luthien thing has got to be a movie. It has all the things "the kids" like. They even pull a Zolo when Beren holds up the Silmaril to Carcharoth and the wolf just goes ahead and bites the hand clean off. And whether you call him Dr. Zolo, Minister of Antiquities, or Col. Zolo, Deputy Commander of the Secret Police, he is still just a butcher.

Today I am calling telecommunication companies and eluding their ceaseless marketing campaigns by lies and deceit, and leaving lengthy voice mails for my co-workers along the lines of what Alpine says here. It's fun. While I'm doing that, here's a hot fresh Mamo for your digestion.

Speaking of digestion, yesterday Christy took me out for bruuuuuuuuuuuuuunch!!! (so named because it's so goddamned big.) I am planning to eat again on Tuesday.

Oh: and I might have inadvertently posted some October 2005 blog entries to the front page before re-dating them. So if you thought I suddenly took a turn for the turbo-angsty, that's why. Stupid Movable Type. Is importing HTML-based blog entries into an MT database really that far beyond the ken?

Posted by tederick at 10:36 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & books & dreams & podcastery & tederickdotcomdotcom
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Their exploits were as black as sky-kissed crude showering down on the souls of harsh labourers who know nothing beyond their own mean sensory needs; as dark as leathery wings set against the midnight sky of a foul and stinking city rotten with crime. They were men of strong liqour and sharp edges; men who walked with purpose and furrowed brow; men grappling with righteousness in the dirt of humanity's soul, with lost, bright eyes glaring out into impenetrable doom.

One was an oil man. The other was Batman.

On Friday night we screened There Will Be Blood and The Dark Knight (in that order), something I've wanted to do since July and maybe since the day I was born. The results were mixed. While the company was excellent and the egg nog milkshakes were divine, the collision needed to be more seamless and I think the pairing probably required some discussion questions, perhaps in a little booklet, to be handed out. (Is the oil fire sequence in There Will Be Blood a September 11th touchstone, and if so are the two halves of the film, before and after, comments on the then-and-now states of America, and if so what is the significance of the image of the flaming eye?) I wanted to introduce Daniel Plainview to the Joker and see them move in a straight line - they share the same theme music, after all, and glare at one another from separate corners of the emotional and moral void of post-apocalyptic America - plus, I really wanted to sink into those thick blu-ray images. The blizzard outside was a good idea. But starting two two-and-a-half-hour movies back-to-back at nearly 9:00 robs the evening of a certain frisson. And starting with TWBB, though deliberate, is a little like what the Joker says about starting with the head - makes the victim all "fuzzy."

Next time.

Yesterday Sarafina and I went shopping on the busiest shopping day of the year, which was exhausting but surprisingly enjoyable. We found a Chairman Mao alarm clock that we could have had for peanuts, and enjoyed samples of a rather amazing vodka at the LCBO. (This is a thing now? Handing out free vodka in the middle of a Saturday afternoon? Our world is improving.) After mooning over a blu-ray copy of When We Left Earth at HMV and looking at more pairs of earrings than I know what to do with, all of my Christmas shopping is actually, really, genuinely complete. Nothing left now but to take the orphans to breakfast on the 24th, attempt to devise a gluten-free cheetsa recipe once I've made the regular version with my mom, and watch sixty movies on Boxing Day starting with Superman II. I wish the snow would stay. I am feeling snuggled.

Posted by tederick at 8:15 AM in batman! & jedi antics & movie night
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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..."

Is it possible for a breakfast to be boring? That's what the Eggs Benedict ("classic") at Eggspectation was: fuckin' dull. I'm getting snoozy just thinking about it.

Admittedly, I could have helped matters by trying any of the 8 variant bennies available on the Eggspectation menu, but I wasn't feeling it. And frankly, if your core benny can't pass muster, what are the other ones really going to offer me?

The only thing the Eggspectation benny contributes to the Beneverse is the use of gruyere cheese on pretty much every offering on the menu. It's interesting, but the flavour is sufficiently subsumed by the rest of the meal that it doesn't even add the looked-for "spike" which would take the dish out of the mundane.

As a general rule, if your restaurant has "egg" in the name I expect better things. Instead, I'm getting bored just writing this. Time to give my single egg out of four, and go.

Eggspectation is located at 220 Yonge Street, in Toronto. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.

Posted by tederick at 10:50 AM in the benedict chroncicles
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It's so awesomely blizzardy outside, I'm not even willing to interrupt the hush with TV or music while I work. I'm just listening to the world.

Posted by tederick at 1:53 PM in photoblog & zam!
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What surprised me more? The swank sweetness of the Novotel Aeroport, or the fact that apparently the French trust their partners enough to have semi-opaque french doors as the only barrier between loved ones' bathroom duties?

Posted by tederick at 1:38 PM in bathrooms of the world & hotels & j-o-b
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Of leukemia, yesterday morning. Only met her once, but she was a grand, brassy lady. Kind of like what I want to be like when I'm 76 (only a dude) (but definitely also the voice of the computer on Star Trek).

Posted by tederick at 10:52 AM in tv
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Their: possessive, meaning belonging to them.

There: locative, meaning the place where that is.

They're: contractive, meaning "they are."

(How can something I haven't had a single problem keeping straight for 32 goddamned years suddenly be screwing up on every third email I write?)

Posted by tederick at 1:05 PM in miscellaneous crap
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"What, just because you're not there doesn't mean it didn't happen. I'm mates with a telepathic fish, you practically dated a dragon, let's move on." - Spike

Lemme tell ya something about Angel: After the Fall: after a suck so massive that I actually stopped reading the comic altogether, (I obviously started reading again, and) suddenly it's just stupendous. OK, the middle was bad. Really bad. Embarassingly, everything-that-can-go-wrong-with-a-comic bad. Let's not discuss it (more). But issue #15 (released yesterday), that's how you wrap up a story, right there. The voices ring true, and each beat drops like honey. Where was this for, say, issues 4-13? What a wildly uneven slap-ride this has been.

But wait, there's more: if you order now, you get the flavour injector ABSOLUTELY FUCKING FREE.

This morning, high as a fucking kite on paint fumes and awesomeness, I stumbled around the house nude trying desperately to open a single can of tuna fish, while Zam screamed at me for her cut. It took me 5 minutes to get into that tin, no exaggeration. The evening prior had been spent moping about the contents of the display window at the Silver Snail, and contemplating a short script titled A Girl Enters, Bleeding From The Head, based on a nearly-true series of events that took place at Carlton Court on my way home. I have run completely out of time, pre-Christmas. I'll wake up and it'll be December 29th.

I am still reading The Silmarillion but more importantly, I am currently reading Beren & Luthien, and that is a fucking story, my friends. They should give up on this Hobbit movie jive altogether and just do that. Tolkien's (well, whoever wrote it)'s prose is distant and sullen, but there's a goddamned evocative little story in there, with a hundred thrilling nooks and crannies, and it's ages long and decades wide. I love it. I want more of it.

I'll be done when I'm done, dammit.

Posted by tederick at 11:26 AM in comix
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Today, my cat Zam is eight. EIGHT! That is a fat stupid age.

Also today, my team got me a 1960s Batmobile model to put on my desk (next to my other Batmobiles). I am all Batmobiled up over here. So far for Christmas 2008, Matt Brown: 2, rest of the world: 0.

But wait'll you see what I got YOU.

Tonight I have to do one of those things where I have ten different things to buy, at ten different stores, which actually form a straight line (well, more of an "L") between Yonge and Wellesley, and Queen and Spadina. So I guess I'll just walk along. I've been slowly back-filling the blog archive with material from before the Movable Type migration lately, and reading all my florid former prose has me riled up.

Posted by tederick at 4:09 PM in batman! & j-o-b & tederickdotcomdotcom & zam!
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"Salad is a mixture of cold foods, usually including vegetables and/or fruits, often with a dressing, occasionally nuts or croutons, and sometimes with the addition of meat, fish, pasta, cheese, or whole grains. Salad is often served as an appetizer before a larger meal." - Wikipedia

Frick. Ing. Tired, internet. How are things on your end? Today is nothing but eggs. Eggs benedict for breakfast (review forthcoming), egg salad for lunch, and tonight, I'm making egg nog. At approximately 11:30, my liver will explode. (From the drinking.) Followed by my heart, though, because of the eggs. I have a table now! How that might figure into the creation of egg dishes escapes me, but it was nice to actually have a sit down dinner of fish and rice and salad at my table with my girlfriend last night. I'm bored. Buy me a starship.

We were conscripted into making gingerbread houses at the office last Friday and since then, I have slowly been eating them. I'm the only one doing so. I am single-handedly decimating an entire gingerbread suburb. People approach me with a mixture of respect and fear, and there's whispering when I walk by.

Boy, the last 2 weeks before the holidays. When you're relentlessly busy for about 12 straight weeks and then it suddenly stops, it's a bit like sucking up a big lungful of nitrous. Giddy!

I am wearing longjohns today.

Posted by tederick at 1:38 PM in foodin' & galaxy far & toys!
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I snapped this sucker off somewhere in Toronto, sometime in August. I can't for the life of me figure out where.

Posted by tederick at 12:44 PM in bathrooms of the world
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In case you were worried that between Iron Man and Dark Knight, comic book movies were just getting too awesome this year, The Spirit is here. She's a good mother.

Holy. Moly.

I spent the entirety of the day - I mean, literally blocked off the calendar, sat away from the computer and ignored email, went through (and created) pages and pages of notes - planning. Planning for every single rock and eddy that's coming my way at work in the next 12 months. Creating strategy, building business cases, allocating resources, boiling down major objectives into teensy tiny tactics. Y'know what (unsurprisingly)? One day didn't sack it. So I'm gonna have to do more of it, as things continue to gliss down over the course of the holidays. But I got a substantial amount done today, enough so that I actually feel less than completely worthless. (I mean... wait... what? Good. I feel good.) Boy, sometimes you come around the turn on those double negatives and you're flying out of control through a guardrail and into a lake. And the lake is meat.

Now all I have to do is book the sixteen different holiday social events, and I'm made out of stars.

Anyone who wants to know what Bea Arthur looks like now can go over here, because the grand old lady has finally been inducted into the TV Hall of Fame, emphasis on grand old lady. Those hands. Wowahs. Anyways, I guess now I will literally never get to see Bea Arthur in person and I will spend the rest of my days kicking myself for not going to see her one-woman show back in '04. I am a mighty, mighty fool.

Those pics of Angela Lansbury (same page) made me remember to tell you that I am no longer calling my band Jessica Fletcher. It will now be called Queen's Royal Starship.

Posted by tederick at 5:28 PM in j-o-b & movies & tv
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One thing I will say I have noticed since moving to College & Yonge, is what I would have previously called a disproportionate number of people who walk the streets yelling to themselves. "Previously called," because obviously, it's just the reality of this place. Sarafina said a while back that downtown just makes people crazy. I'm inclined to believe her.

But the convenience...! I'm so close to Fire on the East Side that when Matty Price and I had to postpone our brunch date just now, I was able to detour home in only 2 minutes! Convenience beats crazy. Because inconvenience... is crazy.

Posted by tederick at 9:45 AM in 1701
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The cheesiest Tederick.com title ever???

Quite enjoyed screening The Silent Partner last night, not just because I will get behind any film that features Toronto's old bright-yellow police cruisers, and not just because it continued to reinforce my ongoing assertion that Christopher Plummer could kick Christopher Walken's ass and walk away smiling. You can see why Curtis Hanson is hanging on to a piece of that flick with an intend to remake: it's a slick job, and if that Inside Man movie could make money, a remake of this thing could pull it in hand over fist if the right cast was put together. The screening was fortified with a designer cocktail called Plumber's Crack, which came with a single gossamer strand of Elliot Gould's blood, a lovely image which turned sour when Plummer hacked off the vixen's head with the side of a broken fish tank. I really, really, really have a problem with broken glass. This has become regularly plain to me since the shattered wine glass incident at 3QF a few years back. I was reflecting a few weeks ago that I'm not one of those people with a primal fear that can turn me completely willy-noodle, but it's becoming less and less true. I don't like snakes, but man, I really don't like broken glass. Ugh. I get nauseous just thinking about it, so why am I writing about it? Tell ya what, though, I'm gonna have a honey dilly of scene about it in a flick someday.

I also now think every movie should have a scene where two characters have a toast "To Success!"

I've been putting some time this morning into the archaeology of the movie nights at 3QF, being that I am now designing the 2009 slate. I think statements like "Nightmare on Elm Street 3 is the primal scene of my entire horror psychology" are the reason I do them. But I feel like I'm missing some of the events in my notes, so if you remember any that I don't, please send them in.

Posted by tederick at 9:25 AM in blood & movies
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If any computer system on earth was gonna become Skynet - i.e. become self-aware and decided to wipe out humanity - wouldn't it most likely be Wikipedia?

If Jodie Foster's production company was called Egg Pictures and Hugh Jackman's company is called Seed Pictures, at some point is an actor going to have a company called And Pregnancy Ensued Pictures?

And: has there ever been geek-speak more sublime than this:?

Anthony: So everyone in the prime timeline, like Picard and Riker, are still off doing their thing [in spite of whatever time traveling muckity happens in the new movie], it is just that [time-traveling bad guy] Nero is gone.
Bob: Yes, and you will notice that whenever the movie comes out, that whatever DVDs you have purchased, will continue to exist.

Posted by tederick at 5:19 PM in miscellaneous crap
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So as it turns out, watching my rock star girlfriend play her rock star songs turns me into a 12-year-old girl and I can only communicate in OMGs and LULZs. Yep, I've tried to write this paragraph fifteen times but every time I finish with "Parkside played the Cameron House on Tuesday night," everything else I could say is just overexcited chipmunkly gibberspeak. Hey! I'm in love with a rock star! Leavemealone.

YEAH! PARKDALE!

I took the day off yesterday and Sarafina and I watched, get ready for it, the entire fourth season of Lost. All of it. For a long time I've presumed that such a thing was theoretically possible but I never had the wherewithal, or the enabler, to support such an action. Well now I've done it, with the only person I'd ever want to have done it with, done it with Swiss Chalet and couch-bed and deliciousness and general decadence, and I'm willing to call it the best day ever. Oh, what naughty schoolchildren we.

I have to day off, too. I haven't even turned on my phone, I wonder what's going on. I may start a "communications down" approach to my life, to compliment "slow down. Maybe the problem is just that all our communication is just too fast. I was reading my own auto-responder this morning and it occurred to me that we are now officially way too immediately communicative: we have machines to communicate for us even when we're not there to communicate. This is, of course, one step away from robots ruling the world. If I deleted my entire inbox, and left my cell phone off, what would people do? ...slow down.

I can't write worth shit today. Let's play, "what's it got in its pocketses?"

• Wallet (empty)
• $2.87 in loose change
• 1983 mail-away Emperor action figure
• Mini-DV tape case (empty)
• iPod
• pocket knife
• Notebook and collapsible pen.

Remember all that in case you need to identify me someday.

In case you were worried, The Dark Knight is the Blu-ray you're gonna be showing all your friends when they come over to your house, for pretty much the rest of time. I watched about half of it on Tuesday night before the show and it actually stuns the mind, it's so goddamned pretty. It's worrisome in some ways that we are now (well, have been for a while) at the point where the potentiality of home display actually outpaces the quality of the average film print. Print stock is cheap as shit these days, and I'd swear there are colours and dimensions in that Blu-ray (which, admittedly, has been digitally enhanced and all that jive) which I never saw on no big screen, IMAX-included. I was gonna go off on a rant the other night after seeing Ballast at the Carlton, because I was once again in one of those closet-sized theatres and wondering why I didn't just watch a movie at home, but I will admit there was still something useful to the theatrical experience on that one. I'm lonely, but I ain't that lonely yet. But I suspect these days are fading.

Right: I must now get to my toy sourcing.

Posted by tederick at 10:46 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & batman! & jedi antics & shinybludisks
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Dear friends,

After great consideration, I have decided to buy the 4th season of Lost on Blu-ray instead of traditional DVD. This is not because I don't like you, and not because I have not enjoyed lending my first three seasons of Lost to literally every person I know over the course of the past 3 years. It is only because I believe in mouth-wateringly brilliant picture and sound, and in the ecstatic visible pleasures of the Lost series itself. I have faith in all of you that someday soon, you too will own a Blu-ray player, and at that time, can enjoy my Lost DVDs again.

In case you had not heard, Batman Be Blu-ray again today, as well. To commemorate the occasion, the Academy has reversed its lunkheaded decision to exclude the Dark Knight score from contention for this year's Academy Awards.

Cheers, etc.,

Posted by tederick at 9:07 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & batman! & shinybludisks
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Let me share something with you that I've been working on: slow down.

I know these are hectic times, I know you have a lot to do, I know it's snowing. But take your time. Think about your decisions, think about what will happen after your decisions, think about other ways you could achieve the same thing. Relax: stop freaking out. Guage your level of concern against your level of impact. When was the last time you took a deep breath? Do that. Stand up, roll your shoulders, walk around the room. Look out the window. Think about your task list - can you relax any of those items? Do any have long-term implications that you haven't explored? Maybe you need to do something a bit later to think out those long-term implications a bit more. There's nothing wrong with planning. Planning and a slight delay are way better than no planning, insta-service, and trouble later.

Think about the people around you. Everybody wants what they want. Everybody thinks their own thing is as important as your own thing. Take a look at it from a higher altitude: what are the really important pieces? Everybody has an opinion, but which opinions reflect the greatest common good, or the greatest positive impact? Which are the quick wins? Which are the big wins? Which aren't really wins at all?

Keep looking out that window. Watch the snow. It'll come to you.

"Breathe, man, relax!" - Mark Brown in How to Piss Under Pressure

Posted by tederick at 12:07 PM in jedi antics
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I am now Facebook friends with Dorothy Zbornack, and I am going after Blanche Devereaux.

I could do without these 5 a.m. wakeup days when my brain instantly goes into "spin" and I end up with no better solution than to answer work emails. I'm sure this is only temporary, as my work life (along with everything else) is about to go into that gentle 3-week sleep. For all the ways it is damned inconvenient, I do love my city under snow. I stood in my living room at 5:30 this morning just watching it, and watching the steam from next door wash over the skycraper canyon in front of me. It's beautiful. I digitized aboput half of the Guy in the Sky footage yesterday - if nothing else, it's gonna look tremendous.

Still breaks my heart.

More Dan Aykryod news: in addition to his largely indigestible wines, the man has vodka available in crystal skulls. Now that's a quirky conversation piece I could get a handle on, if it didn't cost fifty bones (get it?) for a small bottle. I like that Dan Aykryod's career now basically revolves exclusively around mystical boosterism and the shlepping of booze. Relationship? Maybe?

I read Brian Azzarello's Joker on the weekend; on the whole it has been a year for Joker interpretations. Miller's tattooed dragon, Morrison's super-persona trashing and reinventing itself time and again, and of course Heath Ledger's dog chasing cars, which is not so much an interpretation as a wholesale revision, and far and away the most useful such revision ever done to the character. Azzarello's is somewhere in the middle. He's playing in what is essentially the Nolanverse crossed with the traditional comic world, and to reasonably good effect, all of the characters grounding more successfully than they do when Killer Croc is actually a giant crocodile. Plus, we get the first Nolanish appropriation of the Riddler, which one can presume is the first of many. It was like with the Joker genie out of the bottle in Dark Knight, Riddler secretly went from abysmal bottom-tier joke to "Next Interesting Villain" in everybody's subconscious minds. Hell, I've even got a sketch of him in my back pocket, which I doodled in the Annex the day after Halloween...

I feel better today than I have in many days, which might be denial or it might be grim acceptance. I'll take it, whichever it is.

Posted by tederick at 8:58 AM in batman! & comix & foodin' & j-o-b & miscellaneous crap
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It was near around exactly a year ago that a certain young lady and I woke up on a snowy, too-cold-to-go-outside day just like this one, and she suggested that we watch Pirates 1 and Pirates 3 but not Pirates 2 because it sucks, and thus did I immediately know I was never gonna not love this person. And last night she suggested we order a bunch of Indian food and watch Star Wars, and thus confirmed what I earlier bethunk. When the food arrived I uncorked a Dan Aykroyd cabernet merlot that I've been cellaring for several months now - let me tell you, that is a huge wine! In this case it was the "huge" of Dan Aykroyd popping out of the bottle covered in sweat and rotten fruit and giving you a long, unasked-for hug, but still: huge. It's also the only wine, by the way, where I've ever seen "pizza" as a recommended accompaniment on the label. Huge. Simply huge.

All full up with pakoras and baingan bharta, Sarafina and I lay back on the couch-bed with our huge wines and considered ourselves very content. We were gonna watch The Empire Strikes Back this morning - because Matthew has it pretty good - but she's got a movie to make and so do I, and better we get to that sooner than later, so it was a brief excursion to Party Farms and tea and croissants for me watching the commentary on Blade Runner, and now, to work.

Posted by tederick at 1:43 PM in jedi antics
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Alien-free Alien 5 under Ridley/Ripley stewardship, one imagines to be inevitably titled simply Ripley? Colour me intrigued.

(No honestly: not only am I one of only six people who finds something of merit in each and every Alien movie, even Resurrection, but I do certainly feel there is much, much more landscape to that universe, featuring Ripley at any age, than we have seen so far. If anything, what cuts down 3 and 4 is their unwillingness to do what 2 did, and abandon 1's structure to really chart new territory in the existing mythos. They have their veins of that, the third film far more than the fourth, but the dogmatic necessity of sticking to the original paradigm keeps them pretty tethered.)

Christmas shopping always puts me in such a spectacularly foul mood. The way retail stores are laid out is the finest standing argument for why everything must eventually go online. But I digress.

Saw Jack Layton pronounce the word "parliament," live and in person! So I'm stroking that off the bucket list.

Plus, wrote a thing I actually really like.

Posted by tederick at 3:12 PM in goddamn politics & movies & the process
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I'm making a list and checking it twice, and on the list is terror. The constraints of good teamship prevent me from waxing too philosophical about the last two days, but I will say that if the responsible leaders of my organization were in the market to create a substantial quantity of pre-holiday fear, they achieved mightily. Bravo! Beyond that, their other achievements remain murky to me.

In the meantime, Nonreligiousholidaymas shopping. The list is surprisingly short this year, partially because I got some of the key items out of the way in November, and partially because I no longer spend time with any of my friends. Plus, I don't know if you heard, but the economy is in a downturn. And the Space Robot prorogued the shit out of Parliament - couldn't have prorogued it more in a hundred years of trying. I'm going to Nathan Phillips Square this afternoon to hear Jack Layton pronounce the word "parliament" in person. (I suggest you join me.)

Last night Daniel and I went to see Ballast, which made me think there's a very obvious and interesting idea for Demetre's villains/twins movie which I might try to put to paper. Ballast was also a rare moviegoing experience where I went in with literally no awareness of the content of the film, at all. And it also felt like the first movie I've seen in about four months, although I know that's not true. I have got to get out more. At some point in the next 4 weeks I should really see:

• Australia!
• Frost/Nixon
• Milk
• Rachel Getting Married
• Slum Dog Millionaire

to say nothing of all the movies coming out soon that I should also see. And I will confess a naughty craving to double-feature Twilight and Punisher: War Zone.

(Show me.... Matty Price!)

Posted by tederick at 10:34 AM in goddamn politics & j-o-b & movies
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Do you ever want nothing so much as to go home, drink rum, and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

"...but you don't, because you're in a hospital, with resuscitating equipment!!!" - Dorothy Zbornack

Posted by tederick at 2:26 PM in j-o-b & the rum diaries & tv
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THE WORLD DOES NOT NEED A REMAKE OF ROMANCING THE STONE, YOU HOLLYWOOD FAT CATS! I DON'T CARE HOW LARGE AND LUMPY MICHAEL DOUGLAS AND KATHLEEN TURNER HAVE BECOME, IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE ANYTHING STONE-RELATED YOU ARE DAMN WELL MAKING A THIRD SEQUEL AND INTRODUCING THEIR WILY ADVENTURING SON-AND-DAUGHTER COMBO CHET AND LOUISA, AND LETTING THE WHOLE FAMILY GET INTO SOME SORT OF GEM-RELATED DIFFICULTY IN THE COUNTRY WHERE JACK AND JOAN MET AND FELL IN LOVE: COLOMBIA! do i have to do everything around here

Words/phrases I did not know existed until recently:

• prorogue
• stimulus package
• Michaëlle Jean

Posted by tederick at 9:12 AM in goddamn politics & movies
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Lord god, writing that thing for blogTO put a B-Boyz craving in me that could carve wood. The good news is, after what I would call a disappointing run of maybe 5 or 6 months at this place, the large chicken I laid hands on tonight was actually the best burrito I've had in a year. I wish it had been twice as long and three times as fat. I woulda eaten it all night.

I suppose that means I am officially going with Ian, who is opening another Burrito What (working title) in the Annex soon. I can't for the life of me think of a good new name for the franchise, though. Burrito Girlz makes the most sense, because... I mean, well, let's be realistic here. But I suspect that ain't gonna work for reasons both moral and legal. It wasn't till I found out you can forego the $500 prize for the equivalent value in burritos that I really started trying to think of something, anyway. Now I'm probably humped.

My work life is bleeding into my home life, by way of the BlackBerry. It took about 8 months but I am fairly well addicted to that thing now. It's tough times at the j-o-b and the result is a sense of always being "on," which is slowly frying my brain. Still, could be worse; my boss went to a 7:30 meeting today. On the day they send me an invite to a 7:30 meeting, I am firing myself.

In retaliation against all this, I am going to make egg nog. I am going to fully engage the spirit of the season by way of the mixing of eggs with creams and rums. I tell you this: I make a mean egg nog. And I might just sip at it, looking out the window when all the world's gone quiet.

After an 8-issue storyline, I give Secret Invasion a miss. Ultimately it just wasn't enough story to be worth all the falderal, and the endless tie-ins and also-rans in the other titles was enough to drive me clean out of the thing for 2008. Weirdly, I'd call the DC megavent more interesting to me overall than the Marvel one this year. I still don't have a sweet clue what actually happened in Batman RIP, but it kept me more engaged, which is more than I can say about any other DC title in five years.

I want that Joker. I want a lot of things, actually, which is most of my problem. Some nights, I get to sit on the couch and spitball some jokes with my lady. And that - that's all right.

Posted by tederick at 5:52 PM in blogTO & comix & foodin' & j-o-b
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Honestly, the entire gall-darned topple-the-Canadian-government dealio right now makes me shriek laughter right down to the toes of my pink pirate socks!

Super special extend-o-cut of The Dark Knight score available next week in time for the blu-ray which is, I just learned, actually being sold at midnight at HMV next Monday night. Because... why? So folk can run home and watch Batman until 3:30 in the morning on a school night? But extend-o-cut soundtracks are always fine by me, and that DK score grew on me like a heroin rush.

I guess, with the Hot Toys Joker also cruising into town day-and-date with the DVD, I needed yet another Batthing to spend money on. And on the same news cycle, it seems that three million shy of a billion is actually enough for the judicious souls at Warner Brothers. Good for them, resisting the temptation.

Today I took Zam to the vet, where she was very good. The most traumatic experience of the entire event for her was the ride in the elevator. My cat! Strange.

Now I'm at home watching The X-Files on blu-ray. Unsurprisingly, the new X Files movie plays better on DVD. (Somewhat surprisingly), it's actually substantially better. The thing's shit-hot-n'-pretty, and it's hard to feel underwhelmed when you're watching blu-ray snowflakes drift down around Mulder's face. Chris Carter's shots make sense. The venue seems creepier. Even Billy Connolly seems creepier / makes sense. Why did they release this flick in July? It's a winter movie.

Posted by tederick at 6:32 PM in batman! & goddamn politics & movies & shinydisks & zam!
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I worked from home today, and as is often the case while doing so, I put in a DVD of ER and let it run in the background while I performed my miscellaneous inane tasks. Only this time, one of the eps on the disk was that one - the scariest hour of television I ever saw. It's the episode where they kill Lucy, and it remains a legitimate masterpiece in the filmic craft of creating seemingly unbearable suspense by delaying the gratification of knowledge that the audience has, but the characters do not have.

At the end of the previous episode, Lucy and Carter have been stabbed by a knife-wielding schizophrenic whose condition worsened while in the ER. The incident took place during the Valentine's Day party, and the loud music prevented anyone else on the staff from hearing their cries for help. Now, at the beginning of this episode, we know that Lucy and Carter are in one of the examination rooms and dying, but nobody else in the ER does. Then, in what I still consider to be a storycraft masterstroke, the entire first act of the episode unfolds around the outside of the room that Lucy and Carter are in - the camera almost uniformly pointing towards the room, past oblivious characters who do not yet realize that their friends are bleeding to death just on the other side of the walls they are standing beside. The room, and its occupants, are the key point of the story and so the room is given visual priority in every frame. And for about 6 unbroken minutes, the other characters find every single conceivable reason not to go into that room. It's maddening. I still remember watching that episode with my sister the first time it aired, and I'm pretty sure by the end of act one we were actually screaming at the TV. I still get chills thinking about it. Not bad from a nighttime soap that was, even then, a few years past its prime and is, nowadays, utterly irrelevant to the television landscape it still vaingloriously inhabits. They made a casual Lucy ref a few episodes ago when Maura Tierney finally left the series, and I was left thinking, "yeah, even 9 years later they've still pretty much never done better than that."

What a fabulous little episode.

Posted by tederick at 5:29 PM in tv
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Absolutely no one was interested in letting me sleep last night, though when I did finally nod off at 3 in the morning I had a nice nightmare about funerals. Thanks for that.

Yesterday's shoot went well. Having subjected Daniel and Demetre to forge-like summer heat on Standoff in 2006 and mind-altering, skin-blistering cold all day on my balcony yesterday for Guy in the Sky, we have determined that the third part of the trilogy will take place in a burning house which falls off a cliff into deep water. Then, and only then, will we have thoroughly examined this thematic thread, whatever it is.

I'd say I got about 40% of what I wanted yesterday, but under the circumstances I'd call that a higher achievement than I'd expected. It will be interesting to see if the bits I collected after my brain completely flash-froze actually cohere into anything at all watchable. (Or in focus.)

Oh wait: I'd need a working copy of Final Cut Pro to do that.

Everything's a process...

Posted by tederick at 9:02 AM in dreams & tederick films
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