Month: February 2006

Thank god for Germany and Italy

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It’s an unusual feeling, watching Canada suck at hockey. I guess this is how countries like Norway and Latvia have felt in the past when they played Canada, as if their team really shouldn’t even be in the same tournament as their opponent. Finland flat out dominated Canada today, in a way that Switzerland didn’t yesterday. The Swiss had a hot goalie; the Finns just beat Canada like a rented mule. Canada couldn’t get into the zone, iced the puck, went offside, lost faceoffs, lost footraces, gave pucks away, and so on, and so on. The Finns, meanwhile, were perfect; as much as I despise the trap for being the most boring hockey tactic ever devised, it wins games. And the Canadians couldn’t even string two passes together, let alone break the trap or win a dump-in. They deserved to lose. The only hope they have for a medal — any medal — is the famous Canadian ability to turn it on when it matters, but so far in this tournament they’ve not even been in the same league as a team like Finland.

The place is dead anyway

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Since Nellie’s sick, we’ve been laying low this weekend, which means we’ve watched lots of movies & recorded TV. Actually, because of her faux-OCD, Nellie’s holed up on the couch right now with the kleenex, her laptop and some downloaded Veronica Mars. But we’ve also watched:

  • XX/XY (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was something we’d never heard of, but IFC has been advertising it like mad. We both like Mark Ruffalo, so I recorded it. It wasn’t bad; a little whiny and self-interested maybe, but I’ve seen worse. I had to laugh at the tagline though: “There’s no room for honesty in a healthy relationship.”
  • Power & Terror: Noam Chomsky In Our Times (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a Japanese documentary that just featured a couple of lectures and interviews with Chomsky shortly after the 9/11 attacks. It was interesting to hear his take on things when feelings were still so raw…he asked for perspective (“The best way to stop the practice of terrorism around the world is to stop participating in it…”) but also contradicted those proclaiming imminent doom by saying that, all in all, the world is a much better place than it was even 50 years ago, and *far* better than it was two centuries ago.
  • But I’m A Cheerleader (imdb | rotten tomatoes) started off as a pretty smart and biting satire about sexual mores, religion and politics, but ended up degenerating into a plain old girl-meets-girl love story. Meh.

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I don’t get companies who treat their email address like a fax line. It’s not something you just check once a week, people. It’s a personal communication channel. You know, like a tel-e-phone? Catch up.

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CBGB called us tonight from the pub around the corner and asked us to join. Since we hadn’t gotten off our asses all day, and since Nellie was feeling better, we did. They’d just left a chocolate-making class we gave CB for her birthday, and had loads of their own handiwork with them. We had chocolate-covered strawberries and truffles over pints of beer and nachos. Somehow it came up that they’d never seen Swingers (money, baby!) so we came back here to watch it. Then CB spilled tea on herself and we made her watch Family Business, which scandalized her. So not a good night for her.

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And now: the NBA all-star skills competition. God bless the PVR.

Am I even awake?

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Have I missed something? Who the hell is Neil Entwistle?

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Canada loses 2-0 to Switzerland in men’s hockey. In other news, wood does NOT float.

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If you’ve been watching CBC’s Olympic coverage at all, you’ve seen the ads for Yoplait Creamy yogurt. And you know that they are probably the most irritating commercials ever devised and set loose upon the world of man. Worse than the talking beavers. Worse than the McCain’s oeuvre. Worse than the horribly dubbed shampoo and deodorant commercials. Worse than Bad Boy. OK, maybe not, but…seriously. I’m thinking about PVR’ing the entire day so that I can skip the commercials and spare myself the pain.

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Any now the guy who Cheney shot is apologizing to Cheney. It’s like I’m trapped in a nightmare of retarded news, commercials and hockey scores. He’p me.

Home is where the superior blog engine is

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Like the new digs?

It’s a work in progress, obviously. The template is only temporary, the sidebar isn’t really organized yet, and a lot of the old posts have some crazy number where the subject line should be. But, I can live with all that since the WordPress engine kicks Blogger’s ass. It was able to pull over every post from my two old blogs, skirl and radioDan. I’ve been using WordPress at work for a while now, and I just dig it.

And yes, it’s part of the larger site. A lot of the apps on this site won’t even be visible to you — I use them to manage my own life from various global locales (like, uh, my apartment and my office)  — but I’m hoping to spin out a few interesting things.

By the way: yes, “dan dickinson” is me. Screw this anonymous stuff. I’d take Scoble’s advice about posting my cell phone number on the blog, but I don’t have one.

Paradigms shift. So do chords.

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Our good friend MS just told us that she’s gonna be a mom. This is weird, since she was fiercely anti-motherhood when she still lived here. But things change, I guess; there’s been a lot of movement on that issue since we all met in our early 20s. Surprise surprise.

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Speaking of friends, CBGB now have a blog detailing the move into their new house. It’s in the sidebar. Check it.

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“Soon Enough” by The Constantines might just be my favourite song of 2005. I almost get weepy when I listen to it.