Like poisoned ashes in my ear stupid daylight savings grumble grumble give me my goddamned coffee.

Posted by tederick at 8:16 AM in miscellaneous crap
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I have today off. So naturally, I am spending it scratching my ass with thoughts such as:

Did you know that on May 28th of last year at around noon, I turned a billion seconds old? And I didn't even do anything. Frig.

A billion is a big number. Think about that the next time Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End makes a billion dollars. The next time I have a billion-second-aversary to celebrate, I will be in my mid-sixties.

Did you know an asteroid nearly obliterated the earth last week? It's stuff like this that really gets up my skirt. WHERE ARE THE LASERS. The company I work for is in the process of building a new cross-country high speed network; perhaps they could install lasers on all the towers to prepare for the next asteroidal near-hit. That way if a big rock was coming at Canada, Stephen Harper (or someone intelligent) could hit the big red button marked "lasers" and KZZPOW! she gone.

We have a black president now. It's time we stepped up our concern level re: planetary obliteration by asteroids.

Whether it's giant 'roids, Skynet, or good old fashioned locusts there's something appealing about wiping the slate clean with a solid global disaster. I call it "the lure of the post-apocalypse." Admit it: you want to live in a desert world fighting for gasoline, or a water world fighting for cigarettes, or the emotional dystopia of Margaret Atwood's A Hamdmaid's Tale (if you got to buck the system and live). Economy? Fuck economy! Fuck money! Time was, a captain's job was simple: a ship could help you find work, a gun could help you keep it.

Why isn't the prologue segment from Firefly on any of the DVDs? It was nice.

And: is yesterday's commenting incident further related to the possibility that there are two Daniels, weaving in and out of this and an alternate universe, and that once again, one of them does not know which universe he is in?

Well anyways. Nice talking with you.

Posted by tederick at 3:11 PM in miscellaneous crap
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BLUE GUY IS STANDING 10 FEET AWAY FROM MY CUBICLE. This could be it, internet!

He's leaving... what do I...

FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BOLD!!

....okay I'm back. I'm okay. I followed him downstairs but then he just hung around talking to some woman for like ten minutes. I think he knew I was catbirding him, too. Blue Guy has eyes on the back of his blue head.

Frick. To be continued, internet.

Now lookit: there are more than enough ways for people to get instantaneously in touch with me. MORE THAN ENOUGH. If I get one more BlackBerry Messenger add request, I am going to throw spitballs at a person. Email to both my work and personal account, plus SMS, Facebook, and voice, all come to my BlackBerry. Adding a sixth contact mechanism through the same single device strains credulity. I am available. Enough already.

I must now regretfully declare the U2 of the 21st century a shitty band, which is a sadness to me, because even when they were shitty in the 90s, they were still kind of awesome. No Line on the Horizon = third boring CD in a boring row.

Posted by tederick at 1:06 PM in j-o-b & miscellaneous crap
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Yep… that went well.

This morning I saw an ambulance with “emergency” written on the hood in the usual mirror-writing, except that the writing was also upside-down, because apparently in whoever painted it’s version of the world, Objects In Mirror Are More Inverted Than They Appear. What a fucking terrifying vision of hell that would be, if every time you looked in the rear-view the road was flipped skyward, but everything in front of you was normal? I’m nauseous just thinking about it.

Are you like me: do you just not care a whit any more about Watchmen, at all? I don’t see how anything that might be on that screen on Friday would be worth this quantity of noise. They offered me some of the character posters at the Snail last week, free, and I turned them down. If there was a way I could download the experience of seeing the flick into my brain without actually having to take the time and trouble to go to the theatre and do it, I would. Stupid event movies. Stupid everything-that-isn’t-Terminator-fucking-Four right now.

Today is the first day in about a month that there are actual half-hour cracks in my meeting schedule. Who knows what I will do with this new, strange freedom?

It is also the first day upon which, in a variety of matters and in no way related to the actual temperature outside, I can feel the springtime coming, with all of the things that come with it. And baby, you ain’t kiddin’.

Posted by tederick at 11:05 AM in j-o-b & jedi antics & miscellaneous crap & movies
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Posted by tederick at 10:59 AM in miscellaneous crap
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"Backhaul." Repeat: "Backhaul."

Posted by tederick at 5:50 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Well, you can have this day right back. Yes you can.

Posted by tederick at 6:27 PM in miscellaneous crap
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This dumb old Facebook game turned out way too good. You:

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop, the gimp or similar to put it all together.

5 - Post it to FB with this text in the "caption" and TAG the friends you want to join in.

And I got:

And I am humbled by chaos in all its creative power. This is, potentially, the finest argument yet written for why natural selection wins over intellligent design.

Posted by tederick at 11:16 AM in miscellaneous crap
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Megatron, motherfucker! He's back and this time he's a tank! A TANK! Boy I wish I could transform. I could be anything.

I'll tell ya, I am a developing a sickly parasitical relationship with the suckness that is the Transformers movie franchise. I think it was when I was watching the Blu-Ray a couple of weeks ago and thought to myself, 'you know, the design of the new Megatron isn't that bad,' that I realized I had a problem.

Speaking of problems, here's a fella can't get hired for shit, so he decided to go bananas on Craigslist. It's so filthy, internal security won't even let me open it on my work computer. (Which makes me wonder how they're gonna handle a post that starts with the words "Megatron motherfucker.")

Let me take a minute (once again) to wax Michael Giacchino's car. Any man who trots out John Williams' Lost World theme for the Oscar telecast deserves a bit of praise. I downloaded the 3 Lost season scores, and though I always liked the music on the show, I don't think I had a clear understanding of how freakishly well-laid-out it is until the "John saviour" theme got brought out rather subtly in one track at the tail end of season 1. This Giacchino dude really did map the whole thing out, huh? By the time you're into the mid-third season the thematic relationships are nothing short of mind-boggling (and oh so listenable). He must be one of six people in the world who actually knows what the frick the end of the story is. New Best Composer Ever?

"He walks among us, but he is not one of us." - Jack Shephard's tattoo

"An Eagle Cleaves the Emptiness" - Matthew Fox's tattoo

(...BUT WHICH IS THE REAL TATTOO...??)

I think about Lost, and (unrelatedly) life, a lot these days.

Posted by tederick at 11:51 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & megatron & miscellaneous crap & movies & scars
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I now have what can accurately be described as a ridiculous quantity of rum. 2 more bottles last night, one of which has naked dancing girls on it (that one's from my mother). I have so much rum, if things ever got silly at my apartment, we could have a rum fight. And still have rum left over for sippin'. Mmm rum fight.

The rum will help: I'm not gonna lie to ya, it's been challenging. I had a shite week, and a shite weekend because of it, and I gloomed around a lot of the time and lay catatonic for most of the rest of the time, and started to feel better for about an hour yesterday and now am right back into weary disaffectation and a general lack of good mood. These times are hard; not insurmountably so, but they wear on you. I could do with a win, or at least a sunny hot vacation.

I guess I make that mistake every year: thinking I don't need a few days to get the fuck out of here and do something which is as meaningless as my day-to-day, but in an entirely different way. Righteous meaninglessness.

Speaking of righteous meaninglessness, OH MY GOD THE BORINGEST OSCARS EVER. The whole thing looked like a descent into utter crapitude till Anne Hathaway was brought onto the stage, and then it suggested the possibility of a good show for a few minutes, and then it died a thousand deaths again as they trotted out the "here's how we make a movie" approach to awards order. Add the Slumdog march to glory and it's actually as uninvolving a year as there's been in my memory. We did our usual live-podcasting thing and ended up with a 30-minute show when all the segments were combined, which is a bit longer than usual, but surely we were only so loquacious to combat the encroaching torpor. (And also because we are utterly in love with the sound of our own voices, and with each other, and with cinema itself.) Listen to the Mamo here.

I'm going to leave you with some collected pull quotes from the last 24 hours, along with a few tips to make living alone less awful.

"Do you call your boobs your 'killer whales?'" - Adam to Caitlin

"You know what I like? I like how, over time, Adam and I have switched personalities." - Me, not related to prior quote

"DON'T fall in love with me." - Steve Martin to Tina Fey

"Whoa! Her eyes are pretend!" - Sasha, watching commercials again for the first time in a year

"Right now Jack Nicholson is applying a thimblefull of bleach to Keira Knightley's asshole." - the answer to why neither were at the Oscar show

Posted by tederick at 10:22 AM in miscellaneous crap & movies & podcastery & the rum diaries & youtubery
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Posted by tederick at 3:33 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Wait a minute - Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day (yesterday)?? Jeebs, Canadian grade-school history class. How'd ya miss that one.

SOMEONE HAS HAD TOO MANY SUGAR PRODUCTS TODAY AND IT MIGHT BE MATT BROWN. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Today's question is: Who Is Blue Guy? Let me tell you about blue guy. Blue guy is a tall, stately fellow who I have noticed on my morning RT ride with quite a bit of regularity since I started working in Scarborough. He is called blue guy because he always wears blue. ALWAYS. Blue guy is obsessed with blue. He wears blue pants, or a blue jacket, or a blue tie, or a blue hat. ALWAYS. He has blue ribbins braided into his hair. Dude likes blue, I can appreciate that.

So anyways, I noticed blue guy from time to time, but lately I've been noticing him more. And what I've realized is, blue guy not only works where I work, blue guy probably lives in my building. I mean what are the odds of that? And is blue guy actually a government agent monitoring my behaviour? That's the key, man. WHAT IS BLUE GUY'S JOB. Am I going to have to fight blue guy to the death? Is he my new best friend or new mortal enemy or what? So many questions. I'm going to try to snap a picture of blue guy on the subway today and post it for you later, so that you can all keep an eye out for him.

This week was a roughie (not a roofie, though the hangover felt like one). Next week I'm going to Montreal for a few days. This weekend's Valentine's Day, hence the chocolate. And today I realized that it's the thirteenth of February and I have not gone snowboarding at all, nor made any plans to do so before end-of-season. WTF, internet. I gotta reorganize my life.

Posted by tederick at 10:36 AM in j-o-b & miscellaneous crap
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Attention, email software developers of the world: I have an Idea. See, I receive a lot of cc's. A lot of cc's. Sometimes it's legitimately good FYI information, usually it's just the "I copied this guy in case I'm gonna get in trouble" sort of thing. Whole conversations, entire discussion threads, occur in these cc's of mine, in which I rarely need to get involved or even read through. At the beginning of the day I'll often sort by subject in Outlook, and just blow away whole subject lines to clear information quickly.

So,

How about a button in Outlook that marks a subject line as something I don't need to read? It could be called CONDEMN. You're getting cc'd on something that doesn't actually matter to you, you just hit Condemn and it roundfiles the whole thing automatically so that you never have to trouble yourself with it again, never even have to receive an alert or a BlackBerry message saying that it's there. You send it to the cyberequivalent of the Phantom Zone (squirt?). And then go about your day (squirt.).

Can I get rich now please?

Posted by tederick at 10:04 AM in miscellaneous crap
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Everyone - literally everyone - is getting married. When did that happen and why wasn't I informed. I'm going to have to put a wedding-spending-related cap on 2010 or I will not be able to make rent. Gifts for prospective brides and grooms include blank VHS tapes, fishing tackle, and straws from McDonalds.

The people I don't really like get the You are a Douche cards. Now, I don't like "douche." Don't like it as an insult for all the obvious reasons; don't like it as a feminine product for all the other obvious reasons. But I do like simple black-and-white cards that say it as it is. Along similar lines, and I think it's largely all the Irvine Welsh currently in my life, the word "twat" as an insult amuses the fuck out of me right now. Twat is a bizarrely spectacular word all of a sudden. If it didn't mean vagina I'd be using it derrogatorially on a daily basis. But it does so I don't. I don't want to inadvertently compliment the jerks in my life by analogizing them with the wondrous.

I'm really quite glad that so many people are having Edgar Wright and/or Kevin Smith related fun in Toronto these days. Glad by way of HATE.

To cap off my morning, Christian Bale fucking apologizes over here, which sorta takes the luster off the whole thing, at least until someone dance-remixes it ("because she is CRAZY").

Posted by tederick at 9:26 AM in miscellaneous crap
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I can't believe the Prisoner, Khan, and Batman all died on the same day.

Posted by tederick at 9:06 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Yeah, I haven't posted 2 of my year-end lists: movies and toys. Neither have you! And yes, I haven't posted the Suck It we just recorded, or gone out to buy Serenity on blu-ray, or been to the Snail for this week's comics. I also haven't showered yet this morning. Have you? Hey: listen: throwing a dinner party is hard work. You're laughing at me right now because you knew that already, but you didn't tell me so you don't get "I told you so" cred. You're just a dummy rotten stupid-face.

Posted by tederick at 9:42 AM in miscellaneous crap
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Always happy to be proven wrong, as of 12:09 a.m. Chris MacLean was still alive.

2009 feels like such a non-year, doesn't it?

Posted by tederick at 2:28 PM in miscellaneous crap
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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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• 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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• 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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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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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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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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This is what I get for being slave to a foreign country's popular culture.

Posted by tederick at 9:46 AM in miscellaneous crap
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Not only is Chinese Democracy actually coming out on Sunday, not only can you actually listen to the whole thing right now on MySpace to prove it, but the Dr. Pepper thing is actually happening too. Get your free Dr. Pepper coupon for 24 hours starting at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday morning.

Do it even if you hate the substance, because they owe us, man. They owe us for 1994 through 2008, man. They owe us for the last three tracks of The Spaghetti Incident? and the first two tracks of Lies. They owe us for the rock n' roll.

Here's where we're at as of this week:

• The TTC makes me so angry I want to punch chickens
• Werner Herzog's Nosferatu does not suck
• Harmful to Minors turned out to be a surprising page-turner
• I would be indebted to anyone who knows where I could find peppermint-striped pieces of 8 1/2 by 11 paper.

Meanwhile, here's an experiment you can try at your job. Don't turn your computer on. My computer ate its brain on Tuesday night and it took security and tech support a stupendous quantity of time to stop scratching their ass holes and actually fix the problem, so I spent Wednesday morning computerless, and was inspired to go the entirety of the day in like kind. I'm an e.learning guy. I needs me some computin'. But just leaving that godawful box in a drawer and sitting on the other side of my desk, working only with my phone and a piece of paper, was relatively liberating. I had my feet up a lot of the time, and I looked out the window somewhat, and I listened to music. I had useful conversations and stirred shit up. Give it a try, if only because when the apocalypse comes, you won't have your computer anyway. Be more of a pirate than not, is all.

Cleaning clown-goo off my fingertips and looking forward to an anniversariffic weekend.

Posted by tederick at 11:19 AM in books & i hate the ttc & j-o-b & miscellaneous crap & movies & pirates & sex (theoretical)
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Sending it out to Babs Yuen, oldschool, on the day of her birth.

Yeah.

In the meantime, I am still the sort of 32-year-old who makes Christmas lists. This is because I am an obsessive control freak with sloppy spending habits. This year it goes like this:

A new winter jacket for the snowboardin' - I got rid of my old mega huge-o parka in a secret promise to myself to never ever ever have to wear that godawful thing again.

A steamer trunk - I think this would come in dead handy. Apparently the Amish make them, no doubt out of their fondness for long sea voyages.

Young Indiana Jones, vols. 2 and 3, on DVD - you're out of your mind if you buy these at HMV. But online, they're only mildly expensive rather than prohibitively so.

Flash by Benjamin - I enthused about it here.

Obviously, I wouldn't be stupid enough to say no to the BMF (Big Motherfuckin' Millennium Falcon), though I've no idea where I'd ever put it. I sort of miss my Queen's Royal Starship. Meow.

Other DVDs from my wishlist, especially the "Needs," and anything from my Chapters wishlist, which can be found under my main email address. (If you don't know it, you don't know me.)

Some nice socks.

Edit: Adding the Indiana Jones soundtrack boxed set.

Posted by tederick at 12:44 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Did I fall asleep and wake up in the future??

Wait, who's president of the United States?

[checks]

OH MY GOD...

Posted by tederick at 12:42 PM in miscellaneous crap
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Woke up this morning with a depression hangover, my whole brain and body hollowed out and dried by a vortex of the nasties last night, a perfect storm of every stupid thing that is stupid wrong with my stupid life, 15 Portraits of Despair. I think most days I would prefer not to have a brain, and that's not even counting the days where the brain actually turns on you and through cunning and concerted action starts to make hopeless every corner of your miserable soul. If I did not have a brain I would be married with 2 kids and a third on the way, and I would have a savings account and would know how to cook meals rather than parts of meals. But I suppose the whole week was awful, and relatively speaking I got the light end of the awful-week stick anyway, so riding out the bad till dawn and then getting up and making a better day of it today seems like a trivial inconvenience compared to the alternatives. It's all just chemical soup. Disgusting.

Now I am sitting in one of the Starbucks where you must claim a seat before you can even order a beverage, if you hope to sit at all; if you go dutifully to the line upon entering the store and then try your chances with finding a seat you will be standing. This is because of the nature of the space that is Starbucks, as though the space itself is trying to prevent you from finding solace. I am wearing what are now my very favourite pair of pants. They are my pre-weight loss jeans. I think perhaps the secret to happiness must be buying pants which are at least five inches too large for your waist. They are excellent for walking. Last night on the way home from Brantford and while sitting in 4 hours of gridlock on the QEW, I promised myself repeatedly that at the next exit, I would get off, find a place to walk around or at least sit comfortably, rather than continuing the interminable crawl, but I never did. I think this too is a form of insanity.

Posted by tederick at 10:40 AM in miscellaneous crap
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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.

Posted by tederick at 2:37 PM in comix & foodin' & miscellaneous crap & the apocalypse
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So after a six and a half year self-imposed protest strike against the entire dental industry, I went to the dentist today. I would like to dedicate my return to Marilyn, the horrifying telemarketer-cum-receptionist who valiantly worked the phones from 7:30 a.m. till close to midnight, Monday through Sunday, 365 days a year at my former dentist's office. At the new place, I got a substantial layer of crap taken off my teeth, but on the whole fared pretty well for someone who hadn't engaged in dentistry since he moved out of Mommy and Daddy's house. This is because I have Great Teeth. Nigh on indestructible, they are. In spite of that, I had a wee cavity, which I had them fill, and now all's back to normal. I'll visit again in 2015, wearing vacuum-sealed high-tops and carrying my hoverboard under my arm.

Over in the real world (I call it: "Ontario"), cell phones + driving = illegal, which dismays me only in that our species apparently needs laws for this sort of thing, instead of figuring that, say, typing an email while driving might be slightly Darwinism-worthy. But then, we're the ones who forked over enough money to guarantee a sequel to The Da Vinci Code. So we get what we get.

Go Chris Nolan go. You've got my vote for Genius.

Posted by tederick at 1:15 PM in batman! & miscellaneous crap
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