Author: Dan Dickinson

In which Dan (officially) starts to lose it

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Habs won woo. Duke and Memphis lost, so my bracket’s dead, long live Nellie’s bracket.

Slaughterhouse-Five is done. Next up: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, since it’s been on my shelf for, oh, nine years.

Life my be a carnival, but work is a circus. (Workus!) Exercise and proper nutrition have taken a back seat (for example: I would punch a nun right now for a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich), as has coherent thought and interestingness.

BSG is over, but Kings has started. Not a fair trade, but it has King Swearengen, so that’s something.

This day’s gone on too long. This’d better be the best 5 hours of sleep ever.

Is there such a thing as a combination calculator/alarm clock (aside from my Blackberry)?

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My apologies for the poor blogging lately. I have once again re-entered the annual period at work which, well, turns my brain to butternut squash puree. I quite literally go to sleep picturing spreadsheets and wake up calculating revenue projections in my head these days. I have another week or so of this delightful experience, including this weekend I think, and then should return to some sense of normalcy.

In between all this I did manage to make my pics for Hot Docs, finish Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and bear witness to my Montreal Canadiens recent swoon. Hopefully last night’s thumping of Atlanta was the turning of the corner.

How does a homeless junkie get a broadcast license anyway?

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By now you’ve likely heard about the episode of the Fox News show Red Eye (if you haven’t seen it already, download the WMV) wherein late night panel show host Greg Gutfeld mocked the Canadian military. Predictably, this got the Canadian public, pundits and politicians all in a palaver. Today Gutfeld apologized…kind of. It was one of those “I’m sorry you got so offended by what I said” apologies. So Canadians are a little less pissed, but pissed still.

I’m not. Make no mistake, I would take great umbrage with anyone who questioned the dedication or sacrifice of our military, if I were inclined to respect their opinion in the first place. But this was five minutes on a 3AM panel show. On Fox News, which is a laughable network to begin with. Featuring four people no one’s ever heard of and a host who used to run Maxim magazine. Oh…my wounded pride.

Look, when the crazy guy on the sidewalk starts yelling at you as you pass him, do you get offended? No. He’s shown no signs of ever having been insightful, so you chalk it up to the fact that he’s batshit insane and you ignore him. Giving him attention will just make him act crazier.

So now a lot of people who were entirely unaware of either Greg Gutfeld or Red Eye before the weekend have heard of them, and know the time and channel they’re on TV. How sorry do you think Gutfeld and Fox News really are?

"Please Oskar…Be me, for a little while."

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I heard a ton of buzz last year about Let The Right One In (imdb | rotten tomatoes), a Swedish movie about coming of age and, uh, vampires. I heard it referred to as the best (read: least ridiculous) vampire movie many had seen, and it was a sweet story about kids to boot, and it was also done with style. Given the near-unanimous praise it garnered (it rates a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes) there was more than a bit of outrage when it wasn’t even nominated for the best foreign language Oscar.

Even considering all the hype between the release date and when I finally watched it this morning, and the high expectations that come with it, I really liked this film. I saw one review on RT comparing it to Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, and I can definitely see that. It was horror, but not in the way we’ve come to know it in North America, full of laughable cliches, improbable setups and over-the-top violence. It was tension and fantasy in mundane, dreary and dreary circumstances…you know, life.

It was certainly the most unusual vampire movie I’ve seen. It was beautifully shot. It was creepy and touching and almost cute sometimes. Highly recommended.

The first single from Born To Rind

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Somebody needs to stop us from going shopping around Church and Wellesley. Between the meat we bought at Cumbrae’s this morning and the cheese we bought at About Cheese (Le Mont-Jacob pasteurised cow milk from Quebec, Parmigianno Regianno raw cow milk from Italy, Thunder Oak gouda) we’ll be well-fed, but much poorer. We also got some tasty bread at About Cheese, as well as some spruce beer and maple beer. Very interesting indeed.

There must be some kind of way out of here

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Spoiler alert: I shall herein be talking about last night’s series finale of Battlestar Galactica. Look upon me, ye laggards, and despair.

Oh, don’t worry, I won’t give away details. I’ll just say that I didn’t think much of it. The big mystical destiny bits seemed forced, if they were resolved at all. The action was ok, but…did we even see five seconds of Viper dogfights? C’mon. The ending…meh.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the near-perfect finale of The Shield, but this epic ending left me feeling pretty underwhelmed, especially considering some of the fantastic seasons finales the show managed over the years.

I think I’ll go watch the miniseries again.

Loosest slots in…well, anywhere.

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If you live in Ontario you might have heard about the guy who hit the jackpot on a slot machine for $42,900,000. Trouble is, the machine was supposed to max out around $9,000. Via the Toronto Star:

Paul Kusznirewicz, perhaps the world’s most unlucky lottery “winner,” thought he had struck it big at the Georgian Downs casino in Innisfil this past December, when the 2-cent slot machine he had been playing for 20 minutes exploded in lights and music. A message: “Call attendant. You have won a jackpot of $42.9 million” popped up on the screen, the 55-year-old says.

But when casino personnel arrived to investigate, they told the Wasaga Beach resident that the slot machine had messed up and he wasn’t entitled to any winnings. All Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. machines display a notice that malfunctions void all pays and plays. “This machine clearly malfunctioned. The most it can possibly pay out is $9,025,” said OLG spokesperson Allison Sparkes.

While the OLG is technically right, they’ve also technically been pretty douchebaggy about this. They didn’t give the guy the $9,000 he should have gotten — presumably the amount calculation malfunctioned, not the fact that he won — but rather offered to comp him dinner for four. How magnanimous. The man, quite understandably, is suing the bejeezus out of OLG; it almost certainly would have been less costly for them to simply do the right thing in this case.

But when reading this my cynical side kicked in. Maybe this was a ploy by the casino, a devious(er?) form of marketing. For the cost of some legal fees and the $9,000 they’ll surely end up paying this guy to go away, they’ve guaranteed themselves a ton of press. Now, you might say that this is bad press. I would counter that, aside from there being no such thing, those with a tenuous understanding of math and odds — in other words, a casino’s primary audience — might actually see this as a chance to visit a casino whose slots are screwy and prone to giving out exorbitant sums. I know, it seems a stretch, but I suspect that even now some poor rube  is planning a trip to Georgian Downs with their fingers crossed that they too will trick the computerized moneymaking system.

Let's get ready to rumble!

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Welcome to this bout for the superheavyweight ridiculousness championship of the world.

In this corner we have the Canadian minister of state for science & technology, Gary Goodyear (who obviously missed his true calling: cartoon race car driver), who refuses to say whether he believes in evolution:

Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said he was flabbergasted that the minister would invoke his religion when asked about evolution.

“The traditions of science and the reliance on testable and provable knowledge has served us well for several hundred years and have been the basis for most of our advancement. It is inconceivable that a government would have a minister of science that rejects the basis of scientific discovery and traditions,” he said.

Mr. Goodyear’s evasive answers on evolution are unlikely to reassure the scientists who are skeptical about him, and they bolster the notion that there is a divide between the minister and the research community.

And in this corner, with a reach much greater than Mr. Goodyear’s, is Pope Benedict, who yesterday said that condoms won’t stop the spread of AIDS in Africa.

“You can’t resolve it with the distribution of condoms,” the Pope told reporters aboard his plane to Yaounde, Cameroon. “On the contrary, it increases the problem.”

While health workers — including some priests and nuns working with people with AIDS — advocate the use of condoms to curb the spread of disease during sex, the Catholic church promotes fidelity within marriage, chastity and abstinence.

More than 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to estimates from the United Nations. Since the 1980s, roughly 25 million people have died from AIDS.

Come out, touch gloves. Let’s have a clean fight. Against reality.

"Is he giving squinting lessons?"

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Activists in Calgary plan to protest the arrival in their city of George Bush. Oh, kids. Bad move. Don’t give him attention in any form. The opposite of love isn’t hate, you ninnies, it’s indifference.

George W. Bush can expect a cordial welcome tomorrow inside a Calgary convention hall as the wildly unpopular former U.S. president gives his first public address since leaving office, but outside, a gauntlet of protesters don’t plan to be the least bit polite.

Local activists have been ramping up their anti-Bush efforts in advance of the $4,000 per table invite-only event titled a “Conservation [sic] with George W. Bush.” The media is banned from hearing Mr. Bush talk about “eight momentous years in the Oval Office” and “the challenges facing the world in the 21st century.”

Politics aside, this strikes me as odd. A former president he may be, and an interesting public figure to be sure, but how can anyone possibly consider it a worthwhile use of $4,000 to listen to George Bush talk? You’re better off paying for Lindsay Lohan to speak: she’s about as insightful, her entourage takes up a few less hotel rooms and she brings her own DJ.