The best music I’ve bought lately, in no particular order:

• Japandroids . Celebration Rock
• Shearwater . Animal Joy
• Sharon Van Etten . Tramp
• Beth Jeans Houghton And The Hooves Of Destiny . Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose
• Cannon Bros . Firecracker Cloudglow
• Jack White . Blunderbuss
• The Kills . Blood Pressures
• Perfume Genius . Put Your Back N 2 It

OK, I may have fibbed just now. There was a tiny bit of order: the new Japandroids was at the top of that list because in sheer rawk-awesomeness it outshines the others on the list.

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Austerity pushers and vaccination kooks are giving kids in Washington State whooping cough. Or something. Warning: contains the eye-meltingly great line, “I hope there’s a hot place in Dumbass Hell for Jenny McCarthy.”

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Recent movies we’ve watched:

• Here’s how to tell when Air Canada’s in-flight entertainment has run out of movies I’m willing to watch: I watch Contraband (imdb | rotten tomatoes). It was rubbish.
• The Guard (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was superb. Fun, and funny. It didn’t disguise the fact that it was a standard cop movie trope (big crimes in small towns, kooky townspeople, fish out of water big shot from the FBI, etc.) and it took me a few minutes to understand anything anyone said, but once it got going Brendan Gleeson was terrific and people like Don Cheadle and Liam Cunningham filled in the rest nicely.
• Triangle (imdb | rotten tomatoes) came out of nowhere. I don’t remember where I heard about it, but it sat on my hard drive for more than two years before we finally watched it. And it was pretty good…a decent little thriller that worked just fine as long as you didn’t think too hard about the sequencing (and sequencing, and sequencing) of events.

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I’ve been sending this article to just about every extrovert I know. Specifically the ones who think introversion is something they think they can help people “get over” by forcing them into social situations. Which is to say, all of them.

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OK, so…the Eaton Centre shooting yesterday. Brutal. Tragic, obviously. Stupid.Worrying, sure, due to the premeditated gun violence carried out by multiple attackers on someone who is probably, at least according to early signals given by the police, directly or indirectly linked to a gang…worrying in the same way the Jane Creba shooting was. But not scary. Not to me, at least.

We know the questions will come about whether we’re worried about living five minutes away from the Eaton Centre (well, ten minutes from the end of the mall where this happened), but honestly it doesn’t feel that close. To be honest, I don’t even consider the Eaton Centre to be part of Toronto. It’s like this weird suburban amusement park wedged between the tackiest corridor of Yonge and ugliest stretch of Bay, in which no non-teenager valuing their sanity would set foot for more than a few moments, and into which no actual Torontonian would walk of their own volition. So that underground food court where the shooting took place seems to me like a far-flung, unknown corner of the city.

As it happened, Nellie and I walked through the mall (straight through, actually…there’s a shortcut from Yonge to the Mercatto abutting Trinity Square) about five hours before the shooting. Had we chosen to eat dinner there instead of a late lunch we would have been there for the shots (albeit two levels up) and would have rushed out with the rest. But even knowing that, there’s no feeling of fear due to proximity. It happened somewhere else.

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Featured image by kata rokkar, used under Creative Commons license