"I'm not sure this is worth it!" - Maya

"BBQ chips? That's for junkies and crack whores!" - me

"Does it taste like free?" - Jacbo
"Tastes like wet free." - Admo

Posted by tederick at 1:36 PM in j-o-b & photoblog
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One scathing email, two failed mover negotations, two large going-away meals within three hours of each other, one supervisory smackdown, three hotel getaway scheme needs assessments, one unplanned wander around the midtown area, and one half-accurate and hilarious description of my job later, I'm feeling quite a bit better thank you. I would like to go see Batman again, and then I think everything will be set to rights.

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

In the more immediate future, I need a couch.

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

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

Posted by tederick at 9:32 AM in 1701 & j-o-b & movies & podcastery
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Me and my boss just tried the thing where you pop popcorn with your cell phones and it does not work. Those videos are fake. I feel fractionally better about my place in the world.

Posted by tederick at 9:46 AM in j-o-b
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Well, and officially, it's summer and everything sucks. Any intimation of having to do anything at all is met by me with a massive IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA IDONWANNA!! And I am not alone. This entire jive-ass turkey town is staring out the window (wistfully). If I were Ferris Bueller, I would take the Day Off. I am petulant, emasculated, dyspeptic, and blasé. It's something's-gotta-give mode at Tederick Central Command. (TCC: kicking the TTC's butt!)

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

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

Posted by tederick at 11:02 AM in j-o-b & miscellaneous crap & the rum diaries
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It's official: I'm a manager. It's also official: I am no longer able to keep up with my email.

I'm holding the line at work - barely - but at home, messages will sit in my inbox for near of a week before I get to them. You'd think the frickin' BlackBerry would make things easier in this regard, but no. The BlackBerry just means I have to process everything twice.

By the way, if anyone knows how to create a "you annoy the fuck out of me" friends list in Facebook, which blocks the status updates of all those irritating shmucks on said list, please kindly let me know.

I wrote this on my BlackBerry, by the way.

Posted by tederick at 3:56 PM in j-o-b
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Hello The Earth, I survived management offsite week 2008. At the tail end of same, I also ate way too much food and now I can't sleep. But otherwise, things are all right. I've probably blown all the fitness progress I made over the weekend on three days of bad snacks, but I can buy that back tomorrow and the next day and still be at least half-on ready for Sunday. At least, that's the working theory. (The working theory does not, it should be noted, include thunderstorms and other such bullshit. Are we ever going to get some nice weather around here? Is it possible that "nice weather" is one of those things we're going to have to learn to live without in a post Al Gore world, like bottles of water?)

So: with the exception of Martin J. McFly, every single major Hollywood hero from the 1980s will have been reincarnated in a pointless 21st century sequel once Beverly Hills Cop 4 (heh, that's funny, I wrote Beverly Hills Copy 4 by mistake) rolls off the projector reels in 2010. I like the Die Hard 4 take on the scenario, wherein the United States is so desperate to escape its current emotional landscape that it's resurrecting action heroes from the last time American marquee hearthrobs were tough and uncomplicated. But I know it's actually that having run out of fantasy novels to stripmine, and quasi-classic slasher films to remake, Hollywood is so badly out of saleable market-point ideas that they are actually left with repatriating the icons of the B-movie upgrades they were making three decades ago. 21st century, thy name is pastiche. But with Axel Foley (and, forgive me Michael, little chance of a Back to the Future 4) out of the way, I think we're out of quarters in even this gumball machine: who's next? The Tom Cruise character from Legend?

[Heart stops, realizes we've yet to catch up with the latter-day adventures of Maverick from Top Gun yet]

[starts humming theme music]

As it turns out, when you're all alone on a Wednesday night with a brain full of strategy and a belly full of too many foods, there really is nothing to do besides ponder the utterly imponderables, and wonder who's sleeping sounder than you.

Posted by tederick at 12:57 AM in j-o-b & movies & the apocalypse
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"What do these vegan bean-eaters have against cream?" - Matt

I am very content, thank you; content and happy, the last several days were lovely, sunshiney even without the sun, fresh airy even when indoors, excellent in all respects, no you can't have any, go away. Sarafina and I closed the V-day weekend at Skin Tight Outta Sight, where there was much winnings of things and other merry-making, which was a perfect cap to a solidly enjoyable long weekend and involved a Boy Scouts uniform top. So... hot. Things have just resolved and clarified in new and exciting ways over the past few days, and look to further improve in the coming weeks. The only shock to the system was a rather unexpected launch into my new position at work - I'm basically in the management role as of right now. But that's okay, because I feel a lot more solid right now about what I'm doing, who I'm doing it with, and where the major signposts are over the next 4 months or so. It was Sarafina's first day at her new job yesterday, too, so we debriefed our mutual awesomeness over sushi, and finished off The War of the Roses before bed. I'm liking all this. I have a slew of team meetings next week, and a very big exciting long weekend to look forward to in June, and I have to hire someone at some point. Otherwise the summer is looking clean, enjoyable, and Batman. Is Batman an adjective? It is now.

Gulu's getting married! Good for Gulu.

Aragorn's in The Hobbit! Good for Aragorn. Boy that seems to have freaked some folk out; I'm more worried that they'll try to shoehorn Orlando Bloom into the Elvenking's palace somewhere. More importantly, though, it looks like we're a few days out from confirmation of the screenwriting tasks on the flick - I'm assuming it's Fran and Phillipa for screenplay, Guillermo and PJ for story. But jeez lord, I want to know what the sequel movie deal is going to be. I don't get it.

I've been listening to "Desert Chase" from the Raiders of the Lost Ark score repeatedly all week. I think it is my very favourite piece of John Williams music, or at least is in the top three, or the top two. Everything that is different and better about Raiders vs. the other movies can be boiled down into that one track - a difference in mood, or intention, or something. We watched the whole trilogy on Friday night - don't do that, eh? It's hard. And it makes Raiders glow like a Shankara Stone, and Temple kick hard ass like a Thugee guard on methamphetamines. And Crusade sorta sucks all of a sudden.

Crystal skulls? I dunno. I'm excited, but very hesitant, about my commitment to Dr. Jones tomorrow night. But I'm going to enjoy seeing it with my girl and my best friend and Christy too, so it's sort of a win regardless of what happens in the eponymous Kingdom.

"And here... we... go." - The Joker

Posted by tederick at 1:41 PM in batman! & dr. jones & j-o-b & jedi antics & pj's playground
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By happy coincidence, I watched season three's "The Man Behind the Curtain" right before I watched last night's episode of Lost, "Cabin Fever." The two rhyme beautifully. The two darkest characters on the show - Ben and Locke - are both born in relatively horrible circumstances at the head of each episode; the mass Dharma grave (and resident corpse Horace Goodspeed) feature prominently in both; and let's face it, both episodes are creepy as fuck. (It's not every TV show that can actually make me nervous, but walking toward that fucking cabin is now shaking loose collywobbles born of every childhood nightmare about the woods behind the cottage.) But really, the most important thing about both episodes is that they kick us square in the face of the obvious: all this time, we really should have been paying closer attention to Guyliner. "Doctor" Richard Alpert, and his perennially boyish girl-eyes, has done some serious traveling of note, hasn't he? Come next season, mightn't we be saying things similar regarding one Matthew Abaddon, keeper of the greatest name in the history of great names? Who exactly was behind the wheel of the truck that hit young Swoosie Kurtz, anyway? Time will tell, and be damn wooshy about it in the meanwhile.

Regardless, last night's was indeed the balls-out goodness. The grounds shifted.

Grounds shifting further: I'll be stepping up to manage my team at work for the coming year. It's been in the works a while but only finally got announced today, so I guess I can actually talk about it. I'm excited. A lot of things that I had been working on since the day I started with the company came to a thrilling conclusion about six weeks ago, and at almost exactly the same time, this next major sequence of events got started moving forward. When I look at the sheer distance I've traveled in my two and a halfish years here, well... I sorta get vertigo. I owe one Old Man a cookie, that's for sure. Big tackle and mysterious ways. Came on like old leather.

All week I've kept having this weird dream that I buy The Golden Compass on blu-ray because I can't resist the foil wrapping, and another one that Indiana Jones is as strange and unsettling as the green M&Ms they've tied in - I mean, they're not really bad, but who looked at the silhouette of Indiana Jones in the prison of their dripping, subconscious mind and thought "mint"? What if his shadow in our eyes was wrong all along?

Posted by tederick at 9:04 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & dr. jones & dreams & j-o-b
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Back at Worthington Labs in Vancouver BC, till late Friday night; I get Friday to do my own thing, and the other days to do all the other things. My packing this time was a model of utter stufflessness, one half-full carry-on only, and fully a third of the things I brought with me are staying here. I am an "everything you don't need goes overboard" kind of traveller.

For my flight over - and this I'm fairly happy with - I just sat for four hours and reviewed the Lord of the Rings scores with their liner notes and detailed track listings. Clicking from "track 2 - 2:17" to "track 17 - 8:53" to compare the development of a Ring sub-theme is sort of the biggest snobby geek-out I've had with my iPod in a good long while. It was illuminating on a lot of levels. Plus, I got to stare out the window. Everyone assumes because I'm big, I don't want to sit on the window. But then I never get to see!!

I don't smell like me, which is a problem; the terrorism thing means I can't bring my usual deodorant. I don't know how other humans walk around in a cloud of the filth that is a 24/7 Speed Stick. Plus, my perpetual traveling companion (my leather jacket) is still bloody overseas. I'm not Newman!

Is there no sun in this cursed country??? They've got a weather readout by the elevators that looks like it's been set on "cloudy" since the Truman administration. I wonder if it's controlled by levers and wheels, somewhere deep in the bowels of the gulf between Wall Centre North Tower and Wall Centre South Tower, and whether the man who works the levers has a huge grey moustache and is named "Edward."

In the plus column, Vancouver's insane geography is finally starting to make a weird kind of sense to me. If I completely give up on even trying to understand where the cardinal points lie (if someone tells me one more time that "the mountain is north" when the sun is clearly rising behind it, I am going to become murderous), I know how to drive from downtown to the office and/or the airport, with a stop in Kitsilano to go comic book shopping. Plus, great Mexican last night, and actual free parking... nice town.

Posted by tederick at 6:40 AM in hotels & j-o-b & jedi antics & pj's playground
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ITEM!: I launched 34 e.learning courses this week, a personal best. I told you I could dance.

ITEM!: I want to eat Jason Shawn Alexander's Abe Sapien art for breakfast, and have room left over for pie. That's my second comic artist crush in a week! I am a comic artist makeout slut.

ITEM!: Though predictably, BKV's Logan does not much with the suck.

ITEM!: Red Tent Sisters is starting Menstrual Yoga this Sunday. If you menstruate, consider menstruating with them.

ITEM!: There is a store near my house with a sign in the windows that reads HEM PANTS SAME DAY, but because they ran out of space on both lines in mid-scrawl it actually says HEMPANTS SAMEDAY, and I think Hempants Sameday would make an outstanding name for a butler, and that the Hemp Ants would be superlative villains for an eco-themed comic book about disease.

ITEM!: I finally have an idea that will resurrect Extreme Steve, and I have had this idea for a month, and I have not found time to do it, which explains why Extreme Steve needed resurrecting in the first place.

ITEM!: Some days are all about whether you go into the big scary with a scaredy-cat tremble, or if you walk in whistlin'.

Posted by tederick at 5:34 PM in comix & j-o-b & miscellaneous crap
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