For fuck’s sake, when are we going to get tougher animal abuse sentences? This prick got two months in prison and a five-year hunting ban.
“When a moose wandered onto the groomed path, Norris plowed into it several times with his snowmobile until its hind legs were broken, said investigators. Norris then jumped on top of the animal, which put up a struggle to escape…Norris then killed the moose with an axe.”
More than two months ago I pre-ordered Revenge Of The Sith from Future Shop. It reached my office building (sort of) on Nov 3, two days after it was released. Our mail room, however, said they never received it. It definitely, absolutely did not show up, they said. I waited for six weeks, hoping it would arrive, but of course it never did. So, after xmas, I used one of my many gift cards to buy a copy of the DVD.
So what shows up in the office mail today? Yup, Revenge Of The Sith, two months late. The package had been ripped open, but the plastic wrap and packing slip are still intact so at least I can return it.
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I need more sleep. After the movie last night we met up with some old university friends of mine, and their SOs. 7 West was packed and their staff’s wait time estimates were shabby, so we went to the Bloor Street Diner instead. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen one of these folks, and the first chance I’ve really had to get to know his wife, who’s delightful (I believe Nellie’s quote was, “Now she’s my kind of people!”). Still, by the time we got home from that and watched the Daily Show and done odds and ends it’s 1:00 and the alarm’s only 5.5 hours from ringing. I just can’t operate on 3 hours like I could when I was at Delano.
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My Habs have gone in the tank. They’re currently tied for the last playoff spot in the east. My basketball pool has gone in the same direction, though I’m keeping things close in my hockey pool. And hey, the Raptors actually seem to be a half-decent team all of a sudden. Or, at the very least, they don’t appear to be the worst team of all time, which they were threatening to become in ’06.
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The Conservatives were leading in the polls yesterday. Big whoop; that happened last time. The Tories run their attack ads, people say “Yeah!!” and answer a poll differently, and then a week before the election they actually consider the possibility of a Canada run by Stephen Harper. Also, people who’re on the NDP/Liberal fence will engage in Jack Layton’s favourite pastime — defensive voting — and vote Liberal because Harper scares the bejeezus out of them.
Just got back from the screening of Hostel (imdb | rotten tomatoes). I kinda liked it, but I think we were both a little disappointed. I think maybe we’d built up our own nerves so much that there was no way the reality could live up to the hype. Maybe I’m just de-sensitized now, but I never once felt sick or light-headed. C’mon, Eli!!
Now…all that said, the movie is ***WAAAAAAAY*** to graphic and gory for anyone who considers themselves even the slightest bit squeamish. Put it this way: if Saw or Creep bothered you, I’d stay away from this. If you could barely stomach Natural Born Killers or Cabin Fever, then for god’s sake, don’t even approach the theatre.
.:.
Also: we got home just in time for the third period of the world junior gold medal game, and Canada is kicking Russian ass. Barring a massive Canuck collapse, it looks like Evgeni Malkin and the rest of the Russians will have to eat their words.
One of the things I got for xmas was a new pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and I’m really digging them. They’re great for work (and only work, I suspect; if I wore these outside I’d get hit by a cab within an hour) ’cause they block out so much of the annoying office noise. I had the same initial problem as my brother about pushing anything so far into my ear, though I got it pretty quickly. I suspect they’re less complicated than his Etymotics.
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Mmmmm…Chromewaves has a picture of my girlfriend in today’s post. Thanks Frank.
Well…it sure as shit beats Whoopi Goldberg.
Jon Stewart to host Oscar ceremony [via Yahoo]
My new hero: Luigi Cascioli.
Now that my magazine subscriptions have pretty much run dry, I’ve actually been able to get back into some real honest-to-goodness books in between chapters of economics. I’ve gotten back into Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson which has been languishing on my shelf for a year; once I’ve finished that I plan to read one of the following:
Sweet. I just won tickets from Now Magazine to an advanced screening of Hostel (imdb | rotten tomatoes) on Thursday. Check out the description of the movie:
Internationally renowned filmmaker Quentin Tarantino presents Eli Roth’s HOSTEL, the follow-up to the writer-director’s hit debut, 2002’s CABIN FEVER. More grisly than Roth’s feature bow, HOSTEL is a mixture of many of the most terrifying things about human nature and the world at large, culled from many impossible-but-true stories of human trafficking, international organized crime, and sex tourism. Relentlessly graphic and deeply disturbing, the film is sure to shock even the most hard core genre fans.
So I guess I should be prepared to have a jumpy, paranoid wife for the next month…
Today we went to see two very good, very long movies: Munich and King Kong.
Munich (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was one of the best movies I’ve seen all year, and right up there with Syriana in terms of cerebral style and complex subject matter. Spielberg did a very good job of not trying to answer a question for the audience, instead laying out as many facts and viewpoints as he could about the morality of assassination and effectiveness of retribution. The acting was excellent, the story was tense and never action-movie-ish, and the flashbacks recreating the Munich massacre were unsettling (it happened three years before I was born, but the iconic image of the masked terrorist on the balcony has always made me uneasy). I cannot recommend this film enough; like Syriana or Good Night And Good Luck, the film’s subject is as relevant and difficult today as it was generations ago.
King Kong (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was also one of the best I’ve seen this year, but for entirely different reasons: it was pure escapist fantasy, but it was done so expertly and so convincingly that I lost myself in it. It was funny, brutal, touching, disgusting and engaging, and it looked remarkably real. Only once or twice did I think to myself, “Hey, that’s CG,” and that was during the wide shots of people running through the jungle or driving through 1930s New York; the Kong effects were nothing short of mindboggling. Peter Jackson did it again; he took a beloved, oft-told tale and told it again, finding a new — and ultimately truer — way to tell it.
[UPDATE | 3 Jan: I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept thinking about Munich, kept running over it in my head, especially the scenes of the massacre. It’s obviously affecting me even more than I thought it would.]
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 