Author: Dan Dickinson

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Day one is over. Pretty easy so far. The new business building is sooooo much nicer than the old one where I did my undergrad. Some people from the university gave the group a campus tour at lunchtime, which was nice…could see what’s changed. And it turns out one of the guys giving the tour grew up 15 minutes away from me and went to high school with some of our close family friends.

Anyway, tonight was a quiet one, maybe the only quiet one. We finished a case around 6:00 and had a bite to eat down at the Rogue’s Roost. I’ll enjoy my relaxation time when I can get it.

[tags]mba, dalhousie[/tags]

Love my bed SO HARD

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Sorry, there hasn’t been much time to post. It’s been a whirlwind since landing in Halifax…lot of catching up and celebrating and so on.

It’s amazing to be back in Halifax. Seeing old familiar places (like Pizza Corner) and new ones (like Rogue’s Roost), with so many good friends, many of whom have never been here before, has been fantastic. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the week — even the classroom time — and they’re keeping us busy in the evenings. Feels weird to be here without Nellie though.

I have to get up early, and I’m damned exhausted, so that’s it for tonight. I’ll have more later in the week. If you desire more updates and want to follow along with the minutiae of my daily life, you can follow me on twitter.

[tags]mba, halifax[/tags]

"It's the ciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife!"

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In three days I’ll fly to Halifax (again…I was just there less than two weeks ago) to attend the final intensive week of my MBA and write my final exam. I’m excited about this, for reasons beyond the obvious…the obvious being that I really, really, pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top want to be done this fucker.

Ahem…like I said: beyond that. Even though I’ve lived in Toronto for eleven years now, I still very much think of Halifax as another home. A different kind of home than the family farm, which is two hours northwest of Halifax, but home nonetheless. I spent four years at university there, where I met my wife. I visited Halifax with my family several times as a kid and have visited many times since I moved away. I was married in Halifax. I have good friends there. Some of my favourite places are there: the Public Gardens, the Daily Grind, the bottom of a glass of Granite Brewery Special Best Bitter. If there’s such a thing as a spiritual home, I think Halifax is probably it. If I love the farm for feeling familiar and comfortable, I love Halifax equally for being liberating. Not liberating from the farm or my family, but liberating from the nearby town where I went to high school and the life I was afraid I’d slip into there.

I’m glad I’ll get to enjoy next week with new friends, good friends. It’ll be fun to be one of the two people who’ve lived there and show the tourists around and explain what a donair is. It’ll be fun being on campus, even if it’ll be quiet during the summer. I think it’ll feel like closing a circle too, righting a small wrong. I’ve never felt like I wasted my university education; in fact I think I’ve done fairly well by it. However, I look back (as most people probably do) and shudder at the weakness my work ethic in those years, and regret the sloppiness of my first two most especially. I’ve been lucky enough to learn some of the stuff I, quite frankly, probably should have learned (or remembered) from my first go-round at business school. Not many people get a second crack at that.

How lucky, then, that I get to wrap it all up in the city where it started. Where everything started.

[tags]halifax, dalhousie, public gardens, daily grind, granite brewery[/tags]

"I'm not a monster…I'm just ahead of the curve."

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Deary me, I somehow managed to forget to blog about seeing The Dark Knight (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Nellie reminded me tonight while we were having a drink and some food at C’est What. That was tasty, by the way, even if they didn’t have half the beer I wanted.

Anyway…TDK. I liked it lots and lots. I liked that they finally introduced Bruce Wayne’s internal conflict into the series, the fact that he doesn’t want to be Batman, but maybe secretly he needs to be. I liked that Christopher Nolan doesn’t film fight scenes by just jump-cutting together dozens of quarter-second snippets. I liked that Maggie Gyllenhaal was in it instead of Katie Holmes. I liked that the batvehicles, as bizarre as they looked, moved like real vehicles. I liked how dark (mood, not lighting) it was…Batman’s supposed to be dark. Most of all, I liked that for all the hype I’d heard about how good Heath Ledger was as The Joker, I was still blown away. He was very good, and very scary. Nicholson was very good, but never scary.

I didn’t like that Christian Bale sounds like Tom Waits when he does the Batman voice and I didn’t like that they took Aaron Eckhart’s* storyline too far. Those are minor complaints, though; it was an excellent film.

* did anyone else keep thinking about the crooked cop from the Batman every time he was on the screen? “Eckhart…think about the future!” [blam!]

[tags]c’est what, the dark knight, batman[/tags]

"It makes me aerodynamic, for fighting."

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We saw Pineapple Express (imdb | rotten tomatoes) yesterday. I guess I liked it…I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie by any means, but it was very funny at times. I probably would’ve been confused by the movie’s style had I not known David Gordon Green was the director. He injected some of his style into an otherwise typically Rogen/Goldberg script, which worked for some scenes and made others feel odd. It gave the movie a pretty uneven feel, but the funny moments were good enough to make up for it. Some surprisingly prolonged fight scenes too.

After that we met up with CBGBLB and some of CB’s family for dinner at beerbistro. Much tastiness ensued…for the second straight night. I watched a little Olympic action and then slept like the dead, fortunately nowhere near all the explosions. Check out the pictures and video of that at Photojunkie.

[tags]pineapple express, beerbistro, toronto propane explosions[/tags]

It is with mixed emotions…

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Earlier in the week Torontoist reported that Yorkville’s Cumberland Cinema will soon be demolished.

The Cumberland Cinema is being demolished to make room for another towering condo development. We don’t know yet when it is going to happen, but we do know that this is a terrible shame: while the loss of the theatre isn’t significant from an architectural or stylistic standpoint, it’s a saddening blow to independent movie fare in the downtown core.

I’m torn about this news. On one hand, as Torontoist points out, the Cumberland shows a lot of first-run indie films that tend to start there, move to the Carlton and then disappear. It serves the niche of films that are a little too indie for the Varsity, and much to indie for the Scotiabank or Yonge-Dundas 24, but not so indie that they go straight to the Bloor. Put another way: I’m pretty sure every Wes Anderson movie had its Toronto debut at the Cumberland.

On the other hand, the Cumberland is a shite theatre. The screens are small, the sound is awful, the sight lines are bad (especially for my vertically challenged wife), and it’s always cold enough in there to chill white wine while you watch a film. I suspect I’ll miss the niche the Cumberland filled more than I’ll miss the Cumberland itself; my hope is that the Varsity picks up a little of the slack. It is, in my opinion, still the best theatre in Toronto.

Just a note: I was going to list the four movies currently playing at the Cumberland to demonstrate the quality of movies they usually show, but the lineup this week is Man on Wire, Closing the Ring, Step Brothers and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. That’s one well-reviewed documentary along with three pieces of crap. Maybe I’m not so torn after all…

[tags]cumberland cinema, torontoist[/tags]

Like a Christmas turkey

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Last night Nellie and I went to Amaya, which we’d so enjoyed during Summerlicious. Nellie had some errands to do in that neighbourhood anyway, so it seemed a logical place for dinner.

I arrived before her and had a Kingfisher. When she arrived we ordered a pakora and somosa trio and some cassava fries. Next up: aloo gobi (which I don’t normally care for, but this one was fantastic) and kala chana masala, paired with a very strong Australian shiraz. Lots of naan and rice as well, of course. I don’t know how (or why) but we shared the spiced brownie (with coconut ice cream) for dessert. At this point I was so full that I prayed for sweet, sweet death, but somehow paid the bill and grabbed a cab before lapsing into a coma. I spent the rest of the evening in discomfort. I haven’t been this full since I stopped eating meat. Stupid expanding rice and bread…

I woke up this morning still full. Normally I’m ravenous by 7:00, but this morning I still felt like a python digesting a pig. I just ate a croissant about half an hour ago and I think that should tide me over until dinner. Plan for today: go see Pineapple Express, visit CBGBLB and then go out for dinner. Again. Sucker for punishment = me.

[tags]amaya restaurant, pineapple express[/tags]

Turn out the lights. The party's over.

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Well, nearly.

I just submitted my very last assignment* ever. I’d celebrate a little if I didn’t have to sign in and answer a bunch of work emails now.

But…yay!

* assuming I pass this final course, that is. Actually, if I don’t pass, I’m likely to hurl myself from the parapets of Casa Loma, so I guess it’s my last assignment no matter what.

[tags]mba, casa loma[/tags]