It's possible I'm going to have a heart attack. Like, soon. Can’t count the number of days of this hollow, malfunctioning feeling in my chest. If you're checking the blog over the next and there's a sudden cessation of new postings, it's probably because they didn't get me to the hospital on time. (Or maybe I won the lottery! Fuck all y'all!)

STRESS.

Things at work got bad. Really, really bad. They will get worse. This I know. In the home life, I am directionless and utterly without point. There's this movie I've wanted to make for (and now with the literally) ten years and I frequently do not make it.

This is, I presume, how one's life becomes one's life.

For a big watershed year where a lot of things would change and get decided, so far, I hate the living shit out of 2009. And where's my hoverboard, Zemeckis? I am getting mightily tired of waiting.

Somehow, things got to a very bad pitch here. The economic (and forthcoming environmental) recession is a poorly-transparent metaphor for the recession in life. I need a stimulus package of the soul.

Posted by tederick at 12:55 PM in jedi antics & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by tederick at 6:03 PM in photoblog & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (0)

Complete text.

Study questions:

• Which key crises does Obama target in his initial words, and which does he omit?
• Does Obama quote scripture as a believer, or is his quote a concession?
• What does Obama consider science's "rightful place?"
• In which direction will Obama balance the choice between "safety and ideals"?
• Does Obama widen the space for non-belief in the moral majority of American thought by including it among the names of major religions?
• Do the speech's patriarchal overtones and omissions suggest direction for women's rights under his administration?
• Does, and could, the speech live up to the expectation?

Posted by tederick at 3:40 PM in goddamn politics & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (0)

I've said this before and I'll say it again, the only real problem I have with winter is the quantity and weight of the armour. I just walked from my place to Bay and Dundas and back, and I am frickin' wiped and my back hurts. Hey: while we're on the subject of stuff I've said before, the retail industry can/must self-destruct within the next decade. I can't remember the last time I went to a chain store to buy something, and actually found it on the shelves; nor can I remember the last time I walked into a chain store and didn't find them blowing out merchandise at bargain-basement prices to clear room that they can no longer afford to clog. The methodology of stocking and then selling items in a large-scale environment just doesn't make sense in the new economic landscape. (Nor does ordering everything online, unfortunately, due to environmental impacts.) I guess that means the real answer is: stop buying shit altogether. Which the econopocalypse will, of course, shortly make viable. Woot for our team!

The good news is, the rest of the world might be falling apart, but I can now command 80% predictability accuracy on the scramble crossing at Dundas Square.

I went to see The Fly last night, not the Jeff Goldblum one, the Vincent Price one, although Vincent Price is barely in it and certainly doesn't get turned into a giant fly which would be awesome. ([Vincent Price voice] I'mmmmm a giiiiiiiiiant flyyyyyyyyy!!![/Vincent Price voice]) Not to take anything away from the Jeff Goldblum one, but if they ever wanted to make another remake of that flick, they should try to adapt the original story - because it's crazy. The thing starts with a berserk Montrealer getting his wife to squash the parts of his body that have turned into fly, and then proceeds to observe Vincent Price wheedling the backstory out of the wife for about 20 minutes, at which point the entire picture goes into flashback for an hour where we learn the terrible tale of how the man knew that his telepods did whacky shit like reversing the writing on his "Made in Japan" dinner plates, but thought he'd give human teleportation a go anyway and turned into a table-thumping rum-sucking freak. (Now that, my friends, is a run-on sentence.) But I guess in 1958 (Back When We Weren't Jaded) if you were going to see a movie called The Fly, you really would wait through an entire movie for five minutes of a dude running around with a fly-head at the end of the picture. That was thrilling enough, and you left satisfied, because you a) believed the illusion, and b) had never seen anything so freaky in your damn life. If, on the other hand, a 1958 audience had to put up with Jeff Goldblum puke-aciding on Stathis Borens' foreleg, I think they'd all have six-month hairy conniptions and retire to bed without supper.

My lady love has been ill for the past few days so I have spent much of my time hanging out on her couch-bed watching Ugly Betty, or UgBet for short. We watched about half of the second season, enough time for me to go through the entire cycle of starting to wish I were gay and pretty, actually wishing I were gay and pretty, and then no longer really wanting to be gay or pretty but being happy just being me. As a series, UgBet is perfect for days like this, because it is attractive and undemanding and fun. (Like me!) But lord goodness gracious, I can't waits till Lost, and may order the shinybluthirdseason on teh intrawebs, just to be sated.

Round about when Harvey's got the gun to Gary Oldman's kid's head, it's time to go home.

Posted by tederick at 1:37 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & movies & the apocalypse & tv
Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Kirk Cameron have-you-broken-a-Commandment test, I am ten for ten. YES! I have defied all of god's laws! This is a lovely gloss on Cap'n Malcolm Reynolds' line quoted above. I am as filthy sinful as it's possible to be, even if being so requires hanging my commission of murder and adultery upon defining murder (as the bible does) as having even a moment's hatred in your heart, and defining adultery (as the bible does) as ever having lusted after a woman, at all. Fuck, if that's the definition, I have committed adultery just by looking at my own girlfriend when she got on the train just now. (She's cute.) I cheated on her with... her. Way to go!

Today was one of those days they warn you about when they tell you not to sell out to "The Man." Phone never stopped ringing. Wall-to-wall meetings. Benefits claim rejected. Overdue invoice got sent to the wrong place. And so forth. God is aware of my sins, and he is comin' at me! HALLELUJAH.

I'm watching The Long Way Down, which is the sequel to The Long Way Round, which is the continued adventures of Charlie Boorman and Ewan McGregor on motorcycles around the world. This time, Ewan=no beard. It's sort of the perfect life, isn't it. Be an actor, become well off enough that you can afford and organize a massive 10-man expedition across the planet, go and tape it and have the world's best-produced home movie to watch in your rocker when you're a hundred and eight. Not a bad life. I've been thinking a lot lately about sustainability and where it's all going and what we're all supposed to be doing, and I guess chugging around the planet on a diesel engine isn't really useful along those lines, but then neither is sitting here, doing this. It's excess traded for excess, and I bet on a highway in Zambia, even burning through dinosaurs, you're probably on balance eating less of the world than I am right now. And there, there's wide open spaces and a sense of direction. Here everything's vertical.

Posted by tederick at 10:36 PM in j-o-b & jedi antics & obi-wan kenobi & the apocalypse & tv
Permalink | Comments (0)

The good news today is that my friends and colleagues in Mumbai are safe; the obvious bad news being that many people in the city, unfortunately, aren't. It's been a very dispiriting day, overall. We have a handful of Tederick.commies in that part of the world, too; if you're reading this, we are certainly thinking of you.

Sometimes when scary or sad things happen, or even if I'm watching a particularly glum episode of television, I call my girlfriend and tell her I like her. Well, come to think of it, I do that most days anyway.

On the good days at my job, I am essentially doing an impression of one of two different people who have been my bosses in my time at the company. On the really good days, I'm doing a combino-impression of both. Today was one of those days, and the good days always make me reflect on how much those two people added to my life. Earlier this week, though, was one of those days where I was doing a rough interpretation of the arrogant wanker I was in high school. We call those "bad days." On those days, I deserve whatever swordplay and stormy waters I get into. A minor slap-fight is small price for being a pigheaded noob.

Working late tonight, but from home, where my lovely couch does what I need it to do, and my task list takes care of the rest.

"Have you ever had the dream where the Cannonball is crawling up your leg with a knife in his teeth? Cuz I have." - Me

Posted by tederick at 5:01 PM in dreams & j-o-b & the apocalypse
Permalink

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
Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it's the first of October, and I have a Dark Materials hurt on like you would not believe. If I'm not careful, I'm going to end up one of those Christopher Lee types who read the book every single year, like clockwork. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just that it would get in the way of all the other stuff I want to read. Fortunately, I bought that Scoresby/Iorek book over the summer and felt it was far too warm out to read it, so perhaps I will read it now. I hope it tastes right. In the meantime I am reading Who Killed Retro Girl? and enjoying it quite a lot.

Hey look, the Right Honourable Evil Space Robot Stephen Harper's Evil Space Speechwriter is apologizing for plagiarizing someone else's work like a third-grader with an essay on peregrine falcons due the next day, when what he should really be apologizing for is peeling back the lie that is marketing-driven politics in the 21st century and thereby freaking out the stiffs. I am so phenomenally uninterested in Harper and his jive that the news on this story didn't even really factor for me, but I must admit to feeling somewhat generally more ornery this time round than I was last time. I blame atheism. I feel underrepresented in the House. Just think - there's at least a game possibility that an African-American is about to become POTUS (which suggests that by early February, asteroids are going to come hurtling towards the Earth!), but I'd put as good as fifty years between us and the first time a major candidate in either the U.S. or Canada is going to have the stones (or the backing) to stand a chance at election on an admission of "I do not believe in the Christian god." Thanks to that rat Bill Maher, I am suddenly rather anxious about arsenals of nuclear destruction resting in the hands of religious fundamentalists, or the environmental catastrophe of the global industrial complex being governed by people who literally believe that 4,000 years ago, God gave us a whuppin' when we tried to think for ourselves. Sigh. Is there a way out of this one with a modicum of grace? Not that I mind spending the weeknights talking freedom and responsibility with Mark on the streets of downtown Toronto when we were supposed to be talking about girls, but I could do with a few days of no news about murder and sexual violence and the end of the world. There's all those pretty ideas to think about.

Posted by tederick at 10:21 AM in books & goddamn politics & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (0)

I am a dizzying 17-storey height above the city right now, it is a beautiful Tuesday, and I am on vacation. Were it not for the slight inconvenience of spending the only truly gorgeous weekend of our entire apocalyptic summer not on a cottage deck drinking beers (a lack felt so painfully that, in Canadian Tire the other day and confronted by a truck-sized billboard of Canadian Shield granite poking through a mist-shrouded lake, my eyes started brimming), I'd say everything's going off without a hitch.

In comparison with my former roommates, it turns out I am relatively monastic in my quantity of possessions. I figured I'd be in the middle of the pack (nobody was going to out-clutter Brandy) but after spending 2 hours on Sunday night just bringing boxes of stuff down to the living room from Chris' room, I felt positively Spartan. All in all my move was a piece of cake, a lazy Sunday afternoon in the driveway at 3QF with my big truckin' fuck. It was only after an existantialist nightmare trip to Ikea, when the sun went down and we started loading Chris and Brandy's big truckin' fuck, that things started to get frazzly. I have consumed more sugar in the past 48 hours than in probably the last month (including a bushel of Cinnabons which, had I the means, I would have pre-digested Fly-style and sucked up whole), enough sugar that, after midnight on Sunday and while the others thought we had gone off to slack, Steve and I even hoisted Brandy's beaten, broken couch out the front door of 3QF and smote its ruin on the mountainside.

Now in my surprisingly enjoyable new pad - which, for everyone who's missed the subtext, is christened 1701 - Zam is being her predictably adorable self, so needy and clingy (as she is after any traumatic event) that she's almost an entirely different cat. All is well. Sarafina came over last night (her office is a scant 4 minute walk from here) and we made a delightful feast of Swiss Chalet among the forest of box towers, and watched American Graffiti. The roar of the city kept me up for much of the night, and now I am surfing the ether of unpassworded wi-fi, watching DVDs and emptying the boxes I spent the last week filling. Life is insane. So much production, for so little change.

Posted by tederick at 9:29 AM in 1701 & 3QF & the apocalypse & zam!
Permalink | Comments (0)

Mushroom clouds in the Toronto sky, riots in Montreal, weather patterns so schizophrenic and unpredictable that they augur doom. It was not the best weekend to go to the cottage, perhaps, but we did it anyway - a narrow ribbon of time sandwiched between job responsibilities and highway shutdowns. But it was nice, y'know? Waking up not knowing you've slept for ten or more hours without noticing. A chill in the air and a bunch of warm blankets will do that to you.

There's an unofficial maxim in the movie-watcher business: if Harry Knowles hates a flick, it is fucking bad. I mean that guy gives positive reviews to pretty much everything. Well, last night Harry Knowles wrote a scathing indictment of The Clone Wars, and this morning... he pulled it off his site. I suspect conspiracy. There's a good tract of it here, and reading the thing last night - talk of racist Ziro the Hutt, and cutesy Stinky, and how terribile that tweener Jedi girl actually is - cemented my complete unwillingness to engage George W. Lucas on any matters Star Wars-related, ever again. It's an amazement to me that The Phantom Menace didn't dim my SW enthusiasm a jot, but a bad Indiana Jones movie is apparently enough to buy back ten years of disappointment and grief. And I tend to be on the "charitable" side of this argument.

I miss the old days.

Everything's funnelling down toward September now, the boxes are stacked ceiling-high at 3QF, my vacation is booked and the prep for 10 days of TIFF is well underway. I do a lot of rushing about. Scraping twenty minutes to read some Y: The Last Man in the rain. Sometimes though I spend a Sunday night watching dumb sweet Juno with my dear one, and afterwards, there's a bit of singing as we're getting ready for bed. And that's enough to get another week underway with.

Posted by tederick at 10:29 AM in galaxy far & the apocalypse & tiff 2008
Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Permalink | Comments (1)

Sittin' in the Starbucks, rockin' the Indian pop music.

Siegels triumphant! With everything else seemingly Superman-related this week (and for some reason, I'd just read The Escapists last week, which made me think about reading Kavalier & Clay a second time), half of Siegel & Shuster (or the descendents thereof) now co-owns Superman again. (Shit, I fucked up the tenses in there somewheres, but the sentence is too complicated to go back and fix it.) Neil Gaiman twigged to the most interesting idea, which is that technically, the Siegel family could negotiate Superman licensing with a company that isn't DC. Not that I am particularly advocating a Superman vs. The Sentry smackdown in the Marvelverse, but it opens the mind to the possibilities. I'm all for creators (or their great-grandkids) getting their share, but at some point Superman should just enter the public domain. Ain't nobody owning the copyright on Jesus, is there?

Meanwhile, Dr. Pepper will give a free can of pop to every person in America (except Slash) if Chinese Democracy actually gets released in 2008. Frankly, this just makes me want to see how they'd even manage it, were they called upon to do so. How do you pull off a day-and-date complete-citizenry mass distribution? Well, I guess it wouldn't have to be day-and-date. But not doing so might actually be even harder, logistics-wise.

(I think too much about logistics.)

I have read the entirety of Nextwave, and have pronounced it good, and cruelly short.

Yesterday was goddamned thick and satisfying. After the stock was done bubblin', me and Sarafina went to Little Italy in search of Italian music; then there were non-B-Boyz burritos at Burro Burritos, which are just sensational, by the way. Check 'em. Then there was gift shopping aplenty (they're really starting to like me at the Labyrinth, I'll tells ya), then there was dinner with Christy and the widest cost-to-noodle-bowl-size ratio ever, and then a completely directionless and in many ways amoral Mamo with Matty Price at Marché in the middle of the night. (Oh, if only "night" were spelled with an M.) Lots of stuff jammed into a day and with fresh air in the... er... air, finally enough stamina in me to actually allow for all the running around.

There was, as I'm sure you've heard, also Earth Hour, which meant flicking the switches on all the power bars at 8:00 and sitting in the living room at 3QF drinking curiously strong wine, with candles n' shit. I've been saying it since '03 and I'll repeat: screw this one-hour deal, let's have full dedicated blackout nights 3 times a year (when it's warm). We shouldn't need reminding about things like this.

Peaceable times to you all.

"Oh my god, in a minute and thirty seconds I'll be eating burrito." - Sarafina D.

(aaaaaaaaaaaaand I love that girl.)

Posted by tederick at 10:21 AM in 3QF & comix & foodin' & podcastery & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (1)

Holy fuck it's stunning out there. Absolutely stunning. Leaving the Land Rover in my driveway just now was like, "yeah, I may never see you again." Darkness is closing in, and more snow too, and nothing to be done about it. I've never seen a winter like this in my life. It was, fortunately, a day for mimosas and fine Mennonite meats, and also for yoga and cuddling, and tomorrow there's B-Fo and tonight there's a party, but right now, the whole world is holding its breath as the covers get pulled tight, and I want nothing more than to burrow deep down, nestle in with her, and whisper secrets in the face of oblivion.

Posted by tederick at 4:36 PM in the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (0)

Not to keep stressing the point, but what a godfucking terrible week. The illness gave way on Thursday or Friday and in its place, a big gnawing depression. I'm completely wiped out and run down. I can't even look at the world right now, it's so stupendously dismal out there. I guess I did all right making it this far without any other major incidents. But still, I would support the destruction of our planet in a heartbeat if it meant a fiery yellow sun burned through this grey bilge and scorched the earth with light.

I am filing this entry under "miscellaneous crap," because that's what my life is right now. The one area in which I am excelling is in finding and framing bits of art for my walls. Everything else is gash.

Hey guess what, zombies? YOU WIN!! I cannot fucking stand playing Resident Evil 4 any more. I'm just not up with the skill wit da vidja games. This Illuminados-killing suicide mission long ago ceased to be entertaining and became merely time-consuming, so I'M GIVING IT UP. Let the zombie hoards overtake this goddamned horrible world. I don't care any more, man. I am courting apocalypse.

And science: I'm tinkering around with something I call the Law of Facebook Status Response. It goes something like: the amount of time in which a Facebook "friend" replies to your status update as though it's a personal message to them is inversely proportional to the degree to which you have no desire to hear from that person whatsoever. Suffice to say, I shall shortly go on a Deleting Frenzy.

I, too, am fucking Matt Damon, and he's tight.

Posted by tederick at 4:42 PM in miscellaneous crap & the apocalypse & wii & zombies
Permalink | Comments (7)

Completely exhausted and mopey last night I drained the last of the 15-year-old single malt, and sat on my floor organizing comic books. (As with my mother, Rule #1: when stressed, organize.) It turns out I am one short box short of a box. Otherwise the experience was like a Matt Brown, This Is Your Comic Reading Life! episode. I think probably the most embarrassing thing I found was the complete run of Star Wars: Republic, which I didn't even like when I was reading it, yet collected every issue; the entire canon of the Emma Frost series (designed for, pitched at, and seemingly written by 12-year-old girls) came a close second.

I was in bed by 9. I vaguely recall waking up at midnight with serious pain in my lower back, but that might have been a dream; I've yet to find proof. I was certainly not on this earth but mingling in the dream-borne paradise the rest of the time; I was Jack Sparrow, becalmed on the Pearl, with not a lot to do besides sit and talk. I think you were there. Then a window opened into the other world, the world after, when we had already survived the apocalypse at great loss of life. Equilibrium, at long last, between us and it. Then I was Faith, soaking wet on the deck behind Gigi's mansion. Dawn was coming (the morning kind, not the giant kind).

Now I'm at the Starbucks for some good honest reading, though I should really be doing some good honest writing. But it's all part of the same back-and-forth, I guess. The headline of the Star this morning is "PM to Cities: Drop Dead." Oh I wish Space Robot had actually said it that way!

Strikewatch: day 5!: Joss Whedon likes Matewan! WTF. That is the movie equivalent of The Stone Angel, which itself is the CanLit equivalent of spinach.

Anyone notice that even the air is shivering? Whatever we're on the edge of, it's gonna be a sight.

Is there any way I can go to Burrito Boyz for lunch?

Posted by tederick at 8:01 AM in comix & dreams & goddamn politics & joss & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (0)

Me and the Cannonball have a plan, and that plan is: survive the apocalypse. Further to this, there are some things we figure we need to train ourselves up on in the years leading up to the collapse of human civilization:

• How to skin an elk
• Archery
• Killing a man in a fair fight
• Marriage brokering
• Defending a small encampment in the wilderness against the vastly superior numbers of the plague-ravaged American zombie hoarde.

Further to that end, yet in fact entirely unrelated, I have finally cottoned to the fact that everybody - everybody - calls me Matt Brown. Not Matt, not Matthew, not His Excellency, but Matt Brown. As such I am thinking of changing my professional name to reflect this. After all, when legend becomes fact, pring the legend. It's too late to change the credits on The Secret of String (too late by way of "I'm too fucking lazy"), but it's an idea for going forward.

I see death in Jin's future. Grim, salty death.

I've just come back from a rather large Chinese dinner in celebration of Felix's birthday, which was quite an excellent thing to do, actually. Before I left, I read this, and on the way downtown, I was thinking about how much I hate Bill Donahue. I don't think there's a word in my language derogatory enough for Bill Donahue, so I decided to make one up. The first one that came into my head was unart, pronounced "oo-NART." I thought that sounded pretty good and then I wrote it down and realized that its subconscious origins might be a tad on the obvious side, but I'm keeping it. An unart (noun) is a person so vile and despicable that they are, on any objective moral scale, unworthy of the right to call themselves a member of our species.

Look: it's Wonder Woman!

I am wearing a hat.

Posted by tederick at 10:41 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & movies & tederick films & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (2)

I AM EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH, INTERNET!!! Wowsers. Only took two damn years but man that's satisfying. I used my corporate points to buy a 3-man tent. I was going to go with a gardening tool set that comes in an attaché case, because I figured it would be like I would be the gardener equivalent of a contract killer: I'd show up in your back yard and be like, "We are doing some fucking gardening, bitch" and then whip out my annodized grass shears. But no, I went for the tent instead because now when the apocalypse comes I can just lit out for the hills with my tent on my back. Aragorn-style. It pays to be forward-thinking on matters of the apocalypse; the post-apocalypstic wastes will offer little opportunity for gardening (due to soil atrophy).

I haven't even bought the Blu-Ray player and it's already giving me trouble by way of the format war. Two titles are out of my reach: the forthcoming Zodiac special edition, which is a Paramount title and therefore format-specific; and Transformers, which is a godawful movie but man fucking sweet pants do I want to own that on Blu-Ray. In fact, it was the flick that kicked off the entire Blu-Ray decision in the first place because who doesn't want ultra high definition splendourific awesomeness of Megatron trying to crush Shia LaBeouf like a bug? Stupid DVD companies and your wars! Don't you see it's your war, but our world??? Shame.

My new hoodie has thumb holes. Oh, I love it. But remember: you can't marry a hoodie. A hoodie cannot love you back, even with thumb holes. It can only keep you warm and make you feel awesome.

Iorek and Lyra are on the wall of the Scarborough Town Centre across the street, sixty feet tall. It's going to be a glorious winter.

Posted by tederick at 1:36 PM in hoodies & j-o-b & shinydisks & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (5)

You know, when the apocalypse showed up, I somehow expected it to be... redder? I don't know what I find funnier about situations like this ("this" in this case being a 30-degree Thanksgiving weekend in Toronto) - the people who throw their skirts over their head and declare this to be definitive proof that we've fucked the climate beyond all repair, or the ones who insist in stern voices that this is little more than a momentary temperature blip and could not possibly be related to the still-unproven issue of climate change. Actually, I wouldn't mind organizing a Braveheart-style line battle in Queen's Park over this one. The apocalyptics would be hampered by all their survival gear, but the it's-no-problem folks would probably overdress for the heat and become fatigued. Result? Battle hilarity all around!

I like autumn. I would like it to arrive so that I can enjoy it. In the meantime, I am riding my bike down to the Silver Snail and getting my comic books.

This week was stunning, and I mean that literally. My entire department at work met offsite for Tuesday and Wednesday, and then my team gathered on Thursday. Lots and lots and lots of work-related hanging about. Long, long days (12 hours plus apiece). Tons of food, tons of wine, everybody having a good time. It was all dead useful and as usual it's nice to see my cross-national team all in one place so that we can mingle and fraternize. But I've been booking solid sack-time all week and still waking up mentally and physically exhausted, so I'm looking forward to doing... uh... not that for a few days. It's been a dang long time since I've had some solid screwing-around time; I think I've got two days' worth banked up right now. Excellent.

Posted by tederick at 2:35 PM in j-o-b & the apocalypse
Permalink | Comments (0)

Wiimote meets lightsabre, in the long-awaited marriage of obvious applications of designed objects.

This review is so fucking funny, it actually almost makes me want to buy the Death Proof DVD. Almost. Actually I'd buy a Death Proof-only DVD quite gladly, if it were the cut I saw in theatres this past spring, but needless "deleted scenes thrown in" cuts just piss me off. Can we just for frickin' once let things be?

If you feel like saving the environment today, go here.

Otherwise, perhaps you'd like Jane Schoettle's job.

How pathetic is it that I've finally caved to the Facebook gods and can't get the fucking thing to send me a confirmation e-mail so that I can actually activate the gorramned account? Wow yeah, pretty fucking pathetic. Well anyways, I'll keep you posted; half a bajillion idiots can do this, so it follows that I can figure it out.

I'm becoming interested in wolves lately. Can anyone recommend any books about the use of wolves in folklore and the relation of wolf archetypes to psychology? (Hmmm... heavy request.)

OK... birthday ongoing, no time for jivin' suckah. Hit the road JACK!

"Take what you want. Give nothing back!" - Captain Jack Sparrow and Mr. Gibbs

Posted by tederick at 3:54 PM in movies & shinydisks & the apocalypse & wii
Permalink | Comments (5)

You get broken down to every teeny tiny bit of yourself, live there for a while, and then in a few days, you'll build yourself back up fresh; defragmented. Today was the first day I forgot my tickets at home, the first day I got off at the wrong subway stop. I feel fine. I am an androgynous monkey-lizard swimming through a river of time. I am a gorilla riding a yak. The towers of this city shall be my Redwood trees; my skin is a map of the tattoos I haven't drawn yet. I am sexless; I am wind. I am a ranger. I am blood and oil.

Matty Price and I have started calling actors almost exclusively by the title of their most significant film - "Kick his ass, Die Hard!" "Hit that bitch with a frying pan, American Beauty!" "Direct the shit out of that film, Fitzcarraldo!" As with most things at this point, this is amusing only to us. Mongol is this year's Bugmaster (why? I'll tell you why). In this obscene wilderness you find a new kind of sense. Tiff (the person, not the festival) branded me the Silver Snail groupie today. I guess that means I've arrived. My eyes are clear.

In the limited moral universe of Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, the drama only stems from the question of what meaning is assigned a specific act before, and after, its execution. I side with Ewan McGregor: once you've killed, you'll still have to find a way to live the rest of your life; prison is irrelevant.

In the Antarctic waste of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, scientists prophesy the coming apocalypse; view us as day-players on a world whose interest in us is fleeting. In unintentionally direct retaliation to this, two scientists play electric guitars on the roof of their hut in the middle of the frozen waste. They bring the defining triviality of our species - art - to a place that cannot hear it, understand it, or record it for later use. They do it just to do it, and on we go.

I am sitting at Queen & McCaul, cross legged with my laptop, against a giant wall billboard for a competing laptop brand, wearing my blogTO t-shirt and blogging about TIFF on Tederick.com. I am this city.

Posted by tederick at 4:26 PM in blogTO & blood & poetical & the apocalypse & tiff 2007
Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't much want to toot my own horn, but I just wrote the best fucking thing ever. Or at least, of all the things I've written this year, it was the one that most precisely hit the mark of what I was going for. Man, I've got a fucking physical rush on right now, just from reading the measly paragraph I just spat out. Hot diggity. Between this and finishing my really, really, really overdue Terra pages yesterday I'd say the pieces are falling into place rather nicely. If I can just finish my Portrait storyboards now, it'll be game set match, or whatever the tennis metaphor is. What? How would I know tennis?

Hot Docs is pretty much done. Last night I walked out of Super Amigos - it wasn't bad, it just wasn't very good, a mighty example of a documentary subject (Mexican wrestler superheroes!) fully failing to live up to their concept potential ("superheroic" only in that they organize rallies and shit). I might go see Call of the Hummingbird tonight to top things off. (How can I resist a "full frontal eco-manifesto"? Can't, that's how.) And yesterday afternoon I saw a flick (Garbage Warrior) about a guy who's experimenting with self-sustainable housing in the New Mexico desert. Building houses out of Coke bottles and tires and shit. My grandfather would have loved this guy, and I thought about Grandpa a lot while watching the movie, which was nice because I rarely get opportunity to bring the old dude into my daily life any more. Anyways I'd nominally put something here about how I'd love to live in an earthship-style house perched on a rock in the wilderness that generates all its own heat, power, and water, but I suspect it's irrelevant, as the survivors of the coming apocalypse will inevitably end up living in such structures anyway, and I fully intend to survive the apocalypse. So we'll table that for now.

Teen Girl Squad (plus one) is sunbathing in the back yard even now. It's good to be alive.

Posted by tederick at 1:52 PM in 3QF & movies & tederick films & the apocalypse & the process
Permalink | Comments (0)