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I just had the Grapefruit of the Decade.
It's so nice to be in '09, and to be able to clearly see so many "of the decade" commendations.
I have half a cold right now. It's driving me crazy. I would like to either have a whole cold or no cold, thank you. I don't do well with wishy-washy cold commitment.
More information available: here
Well, my cold has gotten the better of me. I'm in bed watching Wrath of Khan. My wonderful special perfect girlfriend brought me a burrito. My life is literally perfect.
Superman IS Todd Ingram, and other casting news. Honestly since Zack & Miri, it's become clear to me that I'll pretty much sign up to see Brandon Routh do anything. Not because I'm necessarily onboard with him being a good actor, just because I seem to find him oddly mesmerizing. Unfortunately, the casting news for Pilgrim also puts a nail in the fact that Sarafina will not be playing Kim Pine (and will therefore not get to slap her sticks together and shout WE ARE SEX BOB-OMB!!) in the film. But that's okay, she's more my Ramona V. Flowers anyway.
I am sick today, and would like to go home. I tried to "feed a cold" by eating everything on all four buffet tables at the Mandarin last night, but it didn't work. Nonetheless I wouldn't trade these midwinter Mandarin trips for anything. They're having a dumpling festival right now! A festival! For dumplings! In the middle of winter when it's nasty out and the subway almost takes you right back home without even going outside! I got home, collapsed on the couch-bed, and fell asleep to the sounds of Superman and typing.
Yup, today was one of those days where, when checking my BlackBerry on the way out the door, I thought I was looking at the wrong day's emails because no way could it possibly be Wednesday. It's Friday! Clearly it's Friday.
Is it Friday?
It's not, is it.
The nice thing about the blistering cold happening in Toronto right now is the sheer number of things I can achieve without ever leaving my building. Last night, Sarafina and I had dinner at Windows, the restaurant in the hotel. It was not bad, given that it's hotel food, American-sized, and expensive. Today I might try ordering room service and seeing what they do. I can also:
Switching tracks, I read The Sinestro Corps War in its entirety, and am absolutely obsessed with how good it is. For a run and jump superhero story, that sorta feels like the biggest widest grandest most ambitious most exciting thing I've read in years. When Coast City lit itself up green at the beginning of the climax in the last issue, I was sorta beside myself. I fell ass-backwards into this thing just in time for this whole Blackest Night dealie that is supposedly coming, and before that I don't think I'd even had two thoughts to spare about Green Lantern since I was playing with his action figure when I was eight. Now I'd say it could even be my favourite thing I'm reading. Really, really impressed across the board.
Hey, you ever have that thing where you just got out of the shower and you take a call on your cell and when you're done you realize your cell is completely soaked because your beard was still full of absorbed water? Cuz I have.
Listen: internet: last night Sarafina and I couldn't sleep at around 5 in the morning so we got out of bed and watched The Golden Girls on DVD. Recommend. It sure messed up the next few hours when my body just couldn't seem to do the math on how much accumulated sleep it had actually received, but it was still just about the pleasantest time you can have with four old ladies at any hour of the day, and especially the pre-dawn hour.
DAMMIT - the link I was going to link to right here, which was really the meat of this post, has apparently been removed. Well now the wind's gone right out of the thing.
I was going to spend today doing various miscellaneous admin and working on Guy in the Sky, but after being kicked around more than a bit by the week just past, I am instead going to do what I do best: indulge.
I'm neither, but someone remind me never to skip my Wednesday night burrito again. FRICK LORD could I go for a burrito right now. I feel like my whole planet's off-keel.
Last night I made what might be the sandwich of the decade. On freshly baked Ace bread, I put two strips of skewered steak, one of which had been wrapped in bacon; I added some sharp cheddar cheese and then doused it in the Dinosaur Barbecue's Wango Tango habanero hot sauce. Salt and pepper and wrapped it up. Ooh - my knees are shaking.
Speaking of "of the decade," it occurred to me that in about 360 days we're gonna get to do a best films of the decade list. For some reason I had it in my head that it was gonna be next year, but no, this is the year. We're in the last year of the goddamned decade. When did that happen? The decade never even got a catchy name!
I am feeling much better than yesterday.
Let me tell ya something: for a guy who didn't read Green Lantern a year ago, I am enjoying the living shit fucking piss crack out of Green Lantern right now, what with the Blue Lanterns and all. I've read #36 three times already. Boy, for a whacked out space doodad comic book about weirdness, it's sorta thoughtful, isn't it? Hope and will and fear and rage and all that. And all in colours.
I am also so unbelievably satisfied with Indiana Jones: The Soundtracks Collection. I think it has everything I want, except for (inexplicably) the track in Skull from the arrival at the area 51 gates to the reveal of Indiana Jones, which is missing for no reason I can think of and is probably my actual favourite piece of music from that film. But otherwise, this is a long, long, long awaited pleasure, particularly all the missing stuff from Temple of Doom which I have wanted in my collection for, literally, three quarters of my lifetime. Boy. I didn't expect this to make me this happy.
Still owing much backstory of the preceding several days and its realizations, I am meanwhile sinking comfortably into my new status as a cranky old man.
"... and I passed out and hit my head on the toilet paper dispenser." - Matty Price
"Jeez, did you have a vision of a cottony-soft flux capacitor?" - Me
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:
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.
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.
"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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
The Burrito Boyz split up and Joe took Burrito Boyz South and Ian took Burrito Boyz North which is the little one underground that we all think of as "Burrito Boyz" but Joe has the right to the name "Burrito Boyz" so Ian has to rename Burrito Boyz North and he's having a contest at Burritowhat.ca to rename the restaurant and you can win five hundred dollars if you name it but right now there's a big sign outside that just says "Burritos!" and it terrifies me and this is why Chipotle is going to win the burrito market for Toronto and Matty Price said this is why bands pay millions of dollars a year for therapy because fucking up a partnership is a bad idea especially in these harsh economic times I'm freaking out!!!!
Yesterday afternoon Daniel and Demetre rehearsed a few different versions of an idea I had written and now I have Frankensteined together an actual script using sticky tape and initiative. It will be my first movie in well over a year, and might even go to camera before the beginning of December (but barely). After rehearsing we also watched My Best Fiend, which is about Werner Herzog's relationship with an egomaniacal actor named Klaus Kinski, and also Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is about Werner Herzog eating his shoe. I am going to be Werner Herzog for Hallowe'en. Daniel, who will be in Germany at the time, will be Klaus Kinski.
I also had banana bread ready when D & D came over, because it does not suck to work with me. I am doing more cooking - honest.
I was disappointed to learn that Sideshow has put their Lord of the Rings 12" figure line on hold, which basically means on cancelled. Apparently sales were weak. Kicking off with a shite Aragorn, charging $70 a head for hobbits, and those goddamned excruciating belt-loops on Faramir and Boromir... they've had some troubles. But boy, this Gandalf is pretty. I wish I could afford it. I'm sure they'll resuscitate the affair come Hobbit season, but I was rather hoping for opportunity for a Gandalf the White. Ah well. Seems rather strange to think that a couple of years from now around this time we're actually going to all go see another (kinda) Lord of the Rings movie... I wonder what that will be like.
Freezing my fingers clean off right now, actually typing with gloves on in my office. I will go home later, more writing, more VHS dumping to data, fixing the Final Cut Pro problem and maybe some editing of rehearsal footage. Getting back on track, big ugly gears, but moving.
My new(ish) apartment is exemplary in almost every detail with one notable exception: the grocery stores are horrible. I hate them. I actually hate them, like you'd hate a person or a president. They are so fundamentally, bafflingly mismade that I will often wander their completely incoherent and disorganized aisles in a state of near apoplexy, trying to find the most basic staples of human consumption like milk or flour or meat. One of the stores is a Dominion in Carlton Court; the other is an ugly dwarvish Sobey's. Both are open 24 hours - this seems like a bonus, yes? But what good is the 24-hour availability of grocery stores, when the aisles are stocked with nothing but despair, the tills are staffed not by the damned but by the rejects who could not even pass muster as the damned, and the haphazard physical layout is so mind-alteringly incomprehensible that it would make Rubick himself sit upon the ground and shit his pants? At the Sobey's, for example, the baking goods are found, in portions, in three separate aisles. Oats are in aisle 1, flour is in aisle 2, and for chopped walnuts or other finishing products, you'll have to go all the way to aisle 4. Tortillas are at the front of the store, rolls are in the vegetable aisle, and for all other breads, go to the back. At the Dominion, cheese in some form is found in every single aisle. Every single one. This ready-at-hand convenience might seem helpful to some, but try keeping which cheese is found where straight in your mind, and you will find your neurons slowly warping themselves onto the path of total senile dementia. And none of these goddamned establishments carry deluxe KD. Oh, I hate them. I hate them so much.
I closed an email to a friend of mine with that line a few years ago, and it has lingered in my mind since as the moment where I inadvertently defined my entire personality.
So I've been fairly successful in the no-coffee thing. The real goal (at least for now) has been to stop having a Starbizzle on my way to work every day, which was the main source of my environmental worry, and which proved surprisingly easy. I had a couple cups on the weekend and one over dinner last Thursday night, but that's about it... sure, it almost certainly contributed to the headache from hell (even my doctor commented on the boldness of my timing choices) but whaddayagonnado.
Meanwhile, as the world adjusts slowly to the environmental apocalypse, the economic one continues apace: I bought something for my apartment today - the piece de resistance, really - and was smartly slapped in the face with how meteorically the Canadian dollar has fallen in the past month. My last Amazon order went in with the dollar in the mid-to-low nineties... and now, a forty dollar auction cost me sixty damn bucks. It's like 1992 all over again! Oh well. I cancelled my pre-order on blu-ray Firefly, and died inside a little bit.
Somehow, Superman and Batman vs. Vampires and Werewolves slipped under my gaze. But no longer. It's quite rare that four awesome things end up in the same title.
There are apparently two things I simply cannot forgive:
While in the list-making mode, the Thanksgiving weekend has made me realize that I left two important signposts off my recent list of things that make you an actual grown-up:
That colour, by the way, was "firebrick." Hex code #800517 for those looking.
Incidentally, my brother tells me some crazy son'bitch out there actually wrapped a turducken (which is actually, by default, a turduckenage, as we explored yesterday) in bacon, thus creating (for all intents and purposes) a bacoturduckenage. Five meats.
Hot Toys Two-Face: not shabby! Neo-Toht with meltyface: not coming! That latter was worth my updating my meagre little Toht fan page from back when the internet had fan pages, for the first time in about eleven years.
Right, so I went to see a puppet show with Rebecca today, which was as decent enough as any a way to spend a holiday Monday. Plus, it's unseasonably warm in T.O. today. I might go for a bike ride back to my old abode, and see if that frickin' crystal skeleton ever showed up. And tonight is all about watching Batman with Mark. Doin' just fine over here.
"Guy rips out the other guy's heart, shows it to him, and tosses him into a fire pit." - Me, explaining to Bex why Temple of Doom continues to have a profound hold on my subconscious
Hey! It's Thanksgiving. The one day of the year (that isn't Christmas) (or my birthday) where I don't just wanna be a carnivore, I wanna prove shit. Be a fundamentalist about the affair. Right now my brain is in a single staccato repeat of "bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird." When word reached my ear of a friend of Sarafina's making a turducken the other day, I wanted to make my way there just to encounter it, just to see what it smells like. I didn't get there. But apparently sausage is involved - apparently "turkducken" is an underexaggeration. It's actually turduckenage. I sort of want to see a turkduckenage take on a tofurkey at some sort of Caligula dinner party. Don't worry: I want to be fair about things. I want that tofurkey to sing tofurkey awesomeness. It's the excess that attracts me, not the culinary philosophical contretemps. And then I just want to see those two balls of opposing gustatorial confection - the height of their respective antithetical branches of a food industry's technological brow - meet each other on a playfield of decadence, to see what happens.
Yesterday napping and last-of-the-season long weekend sunshine was taken to a high art form, and then I drove the sisters DiFelice to B-fo
HOLY SHIT THE DEVIL JUST WALKED IN
THAT'S THE DEVIL
He looks like an average white guy, slightly overweight, could be shopping at a Wal Mart in Pennsylvania, except he has horns and is wandering around the room right now looking out the windows
The devil.
Anyway, - wow, real life intervened there for a second, walked around a Starbucks and threw me off my shit, I'll be right with you -
OK. So I drove the sisters DiFelice to B-fo last night for the long weekend, and I've got my family affairs later today. The place still feels strange when it's just me there alone, kept trying to hug Zam all night while in the throes of listless sleep, but I got up in the morning and embraced bachelorhood, ate Pop Tarts and wrote about action figures and watched the last of season 1 of Californication a little bit high. You know, that show turned faintly tremendous toward the end there, or at least as close to as it's likely to get, because there's no denying I just cared so much when that little whelp stole his manuscript. Perhaps I am sensitive to plagiarism, artistic thievery, and not getting to claim the awesomeness that is yours. (Remember when that kid stole my web site back in '01?) But yeah, those last three episodes or so when suddenly the good guys (Mulder, McElhone, Bendis, and the potty-mouthed and stone-cold-stoned lesbicurious Brazilian waxer Marcy who is, in her way, the funniest character on earth to me right now) were very much a unfocused, disspirited mess, but the bad guys (ho-girl and ho-secretary) were lining up to be all evil and whatnot, and even that stupid Wednesday Adams daughter seems terribly effective all of a sudden and I sorta had to sit on my new grey Ikea couch-that's-a-bed-also and say "Yeah, apparently this works" cuz I'm just so agitated about everything.
And now it's nearly 1 and I would very much like a sandwich, except that I would also like to be hungry later, and I would very much like to be out in the sun reading comics, except that I'd like to write something first and laptops work in sunshine like vampires work in... sunshine. (Shit.) But in the meantime, I am thankful for every single thing in my little life. And gratitude is success.
At Sarafina's suggestion I put Jabba on the fridge, which was something that had been kicking the back of my mind anyway, and thus turned a large and unwieldy collectible I was seriously considering getting rid of, into the best thing about my house. Jabba on the fridge: pop art, cautionary tale, or just good decorating? A bit of all three, I think.
I spent the afternoon making chili and watching The Godfather. 
What we did not realize until recently was that quietly growing in Sarafina's back yard over the course of the summer, deceptively coy in their cheerful redness, were in fact the Insanity Peppers of Quetzlzacatenango, which are nominally grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum. We bought the seeds at the Party Farms near her house. Who knew? Suddenly bereft of my Thursday night plans I decided to make tacos, tossed in a single such insanity pepper because I've yet to find suitable chili flakes at a grocery store near my house, and found the resulting taco stuffing virtually inedible due to its extraordinary, tongue-flaying heat. Gulping spoonfuls of plain yogourt I was able to survive, but it was a harrowing ordeal. I made it through the third episode of True Blood and the sixth of Californication, and then passed out, as high as a Christmas-tree pie.
Neither series, incidentally, is what I would call "good." The former is turning into a guiltily enjoyable trash novel (kind of a Southern Gothic Melrose Place with fangs) and the latter is just some sweet pimpin' Duchovny porn (ironic, no?), so it's not like I'm not rabidly enjoying them; just that my enjoyment comes with snide attitude and above-it-all arrogance. As it should.
Once Upon a Time in the North is making me ache quite a bit, but otherwise I'm enthusiastically adoring it; it was exactly what I needed, being an adventure story featuring cowboys and bears. Cowboys are dead interesting when transplanted into unfamiliar climes. (And re: young Lee Scoresby, I have but two words: Nathan. Fillion.) I'm on page 50 and doing my best not to run through the whole thing at a gallop, but so far it's my favourite book of the year. I suppose that wasn't surprising.
It is chilly as a son'bitch in Toronto, and Nuit Blanche is tomorrow night. This year's philosophy is "pick a zone, stick to that zone." But which zone?
But it sure feels nice to have some.
Last night was lovely. El familia and I and Sarafina went to Scaramouche, and I had quail and pasta and a very strange and interesting wine. And boy, they're not kidding about that coconut cream pie. Everything golden and nice and I went home very happy. Adam and Caitlin gave me The Force Unleashed for the Wii, which didn't exactly set the world on fire, review-wise, but I'm ready to yank a Star Destroyer out of the sky with my mind right now anyways thanks to my contentious and highly frustrating relationship with Ikea over a certain $1300 they owe me and/or a couch that apparently is never, ever going to show up. Can I give you some advice? Don't ever buy anything from those Danish fucktards ever. "Ikea: Swedish for we're assholes."
Otherwise, things are coming together. Zam is now the nicest cat ever; she was apparently so traumatized by the move that she even started sitting on my lap while I watch TV on my complete and utter lack of a couch. I am going to get her a scratching post. I have internet at home at last, some more furniture hand-me-downs coming, and the makeshift couch-bed on the floor of the living room ain't bad for watching movies, looking out at the skyline, and/or musing abuot life / plotting the downfall of the wicked. And I ordered this. It's gonna be somethin'.
"Honey Kisaargi, an android created by her scientist father, is attempting to balance her dull office job and her secret life as the constantly costume-changing, pink-clad superhero warrior of love, Cutie Honey. When the dreaded Panther Claw gang returns to create evil and steal our hero's Love System necklace, it can only be Cutie Honey to the rescue!"
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:
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.
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.
BUT YEAH.
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.
With Matty Price's road trip imminent (and he's not taking me!), we knocked off another Mamo, our last before The Dark Knight. Which makes this anniversary season: we actually crossed the three-year threshold last week (and MP and Leah and Sarafina and I had a generally stupendous dinner at Mercato to celebrate... buffalo mozzarella flown in that morning from Italy, mmmmmm), and given that Batman Begins was our first show, expect the TDK episode to be... gushy. You know, I haven't actually gone back to listen to that first podcast in a good long while. I should do that, just to see how completely clued out we were.
I must also regretfully report that I am completely lost when it comes to the subject of frappucinos.
On the subject of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan currently owns 88% of my brain. I can hear his voice in my head right now. It's calming.
Well, here comes a big motherfuckin' storm. Rock on, Toronto!
Being now quite thoroughly besotted with all things Scott Pilgrim, I went searching through the stacks this morning for the Free Comic Book Day issue I picked up back in '06... and found it undeniably gone. I AM SO PISSED. Admittedly, there was a "get rid of the FCBD garbage" comic stack purge earlier in the year, but being as Free Scott Pilgrim is one of the three FCBD titles I can actually specifically remember enjoying, I'm sorta irritated that it's missing and stupid shit like the Viper Comics sampler survives. Stupid piles of garbage and nonsuch! They foil me.
So what else is going on? Well, it was goddamned hot over the weekend, that's one thing. The natural answer was: barbecue. But the problem with that was: I don't know much about barbecues. So I did proceed to, if one is looking at it technically, purchase the briquettes that go with a non-gas BBQ, and then used them on a gas BBQ. The result was... er... significant. Fortunately, nobody got blowed up or died, and there were iced creams enough for all. Praise.
Plus! Soccer! It was a hot sonofabitchin' humid mosquito-infested oh-god-are-dinosaurs-coming-out-of-those-trees-to-eat-us? game last night, but we held a decidedly excellent 4-4 tie in spite of being outnumbered 148 to 1. It was our Crazylegs vs. their Crazylegs (ours won), Everywhere She Needs To Be Stacey like a goddamned psychic defensive dervish, and The Man With No Name Whose Name Is Actually Demetre with seemingly boundless energy and laconic squinting. The memories more than make up for the morning ouches.
This BlackBerry Pearl deal is crazy! Did you know I can receive my email while on the go? The world is insane, and sushi is delicious.
Thus far in June, I have:
Plus, I saw Sex and the City and Troll 2, which are comparably fascinating cultural documents. SATC because it was exactly like going to see a fanboy movie - only it was for girls! I mean, the entire audience actually gasped aloud when Big showed Carrie her new walk-in closet. Kinda like how all the dudes in the audience for Hellboy 2 will go "YEAH!" when Hellboy brings out his new big shotgun. And as for Troll 2... well the good news is that Sarafina won it on DVD at the Bloor on Saturday night, so I think there are going to be trips to Nilbog aplenty this summer. A bit of smoke, a bit of wine, a bit of soup, a bit of perfect if you ask me.
I have re-Feng Shuied my cubicle and bought myself a Seven Samurai poster. Tonight I am attending what could actually be described as a family reunion. I need a haircut, but otherwise I clean up pretty nice. It's a Tuesday. Davy Jones is coming.
"I guess the closest thing women have to Indiana Jones is Carrie Bradshaw."
- Sarafina
I feel goddamned odd, dizzy and oddly-perspected. My head feels like a gaping space where a migraine would be if I weren't popping Advils like tic-tacs right now. This might have been generously helped along by the coconut rum and Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom last night. More likely it's just be the up-and-down-and-cawayyyyzy weather. After all, last night also featured Magic Oven pizza, and a lot of girlfriendly adorableness. Those things don't cause headaches.
Fun fact: did you know that the median human penis size is smaller than the average human penis size? (The median size, for those of us who slept through middle school, is the number right in the middle of the scale - i.e. if there are 1,000,000 penises, the mean-sized one is the one at number 500,000 on the scale.) So basically what this information tells us is that the majority of men on the earth have a penis that is smaller than what the textbooks and Dr. Sue tell them is "normal." I think this explains an enormous number of things, not least of which being why every single episode of Sex With Sue contained at least one male caller phoning in to ask if his penis is "the right size." Let's round up and say, six times out of ten, those callers went away feeling inadequate. Then they built churches.
I took one for the team and tried the Angus burger at McDonalds earlier this week, and also choked down a Starbucks breakfast sandwich this morning. Something bad has happened to the meat products of the planet Earth. All in all, it has not been a good week, food-wise. I feel like my insides have been scraped out by a melon-baller, and I sorta just want to sleep for a year.
How ares ya, Internet? I am cruising such a high wave right now, this blog and my personal journal have both de-volved into utter happilany gibberspeak. Every word has a rainbow comet tail and every punctuation mark is a punctuation... of love. The world is RGB CRT, the currency is vanilla bean scones, and everything is robots and glee. Fuck! I'm even annoying myself, I'm so goddamned giddy.
On Friday night, Sarafina and I celebrated by dressing in finery and trolling around Little Italy in the almost-springtime warmness, looking for a place to eat. We ended up at Olivia's at 53 - which, holy crap Internet, nicest candle-lit dinner for two with delicious wines ever. Then, 48 hours later and to round out an absolutely perfect Sunday afternoon, we celebrated again - at Swiss Chalet, with quarter chickens and Jackson Triggs acid-o-wine. Y'know, you spend a day talking about robots and Slave Leia fetishism with a girl that you like a whole lot, and it makes you feel like stepping out: in style.
Here's my cousin being all successful n' shit. Which rather painfully makes me want to upload a copy of that picture of her taking a bath in the cottage sink when she was a baby, but I don't have a copy of it on this computer.
Goin' well. Goin' very well.
Funny how that looks like "sword" to me, given the number of extra letters.... anyways. Springtime. Comic books. Fresh air. It's all happening now; even Big Brown Mountain is melting. I dreamed of whips, blood, and quickening rivers. Glaciers moving, but slowly.
Fortifications: holding. So tired was I of the various off-project interruptions that plague my day, and so delighted was I to find that my trebuchet is finally a useful piece of artillery, that I set it up on my cubicle floor. Then I sent an instant message to my brother: "C'mere, I gotta try something." He strolled through the door and PAZOWWWW!!! there was a rubber eraser flying exactly at his head, launched by the ancient technological powers of ballistics!
This, to me, makes it all worthwhile.
Continuing on with Y: The Last Man, and into the meat. The Wizard of Oz issue was just tremendous. Sex and death, sex and death... Bondage and baptisms and my blood in my ears. All snuggled up reading last night, and then wandering around the rainy streets looking for something to eat... we ended up going to an Ethiopian restaurant at Bloor and Ossington, and fuck-damn, it was awesome and solved the whole night for me. I have bad associations with Ethiopian food, like that time Mark tried to make it and I said (rather memorably) that it tasted like a shirt. Or the inevitable reality that no child of the '80s can hear the words "Ethiopian food" without a single-frame nightmare-flash of Sally Struthers feeding a kid paste. But last night's meal rocked my socks clean off and around the block, and I only wish I hadn't left the leftovers in Sarafina's fridge this morning. I'm hungry as a bastard.
The noises coming out of my big project are finally, officially, the rattles of imminent death. I shall dance into the mist. I'm going on vacation in 20 days. You can't come.
Appropriately (somewhat), my work on Captain Napalm and the Legions of Havoc began with arts and crafts - glue sticks, specifically, and tiny piece of paper.
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