Author: Dan Dickinson

"I left my thimbles and socialist reading material at home."

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.:.

Wow, three days without blogging. That’s probably a record. I can explain: busy Friday, busy Saturday and today I feel like ass.

Friday I was at work until about 7:30, and by the time I got home all I really had the energy to do was eat and watch Friday Night Lights and The Wire.

Yesterday we intended to see There Will Be Blood but when we got to the theatre we found that the new Eye Weekly film listings had lied to us. No wonder Torontoist hates them. No other showtimes worked so we had one last meal at the Biryani House in Roy’s Square. It’s closing in two weeks (moving just around the corner onto Hayden Street) to make room for 1Bloor. Mmmmm…samosas and pakoras and shrimp masala…tasty. After lunch we walked back down Church street, cleaned up a little and waited for CBGB to arrive. They joined us for dinner and a couple of tasty drinks at Smokeless Joe (hence the picture above), then back at ours for a bit.

All was going well until I woke up this morning stuffed up, with a sore throat and a pounding sinus headache. Last night I had nothing; by this morning I was deep in the throes of a cold. Shitty. I feel very unpleasant right now. As such we did next to nothing all day; I have no energy. My day has been limited to lots of basketball, football and movies.

.:.

The first movie we watched today was Stranger Than Fiction (imdb | rotten tomatoes) which, based on the ads, I’d all but dismissed as typical Will Ferrell clowning. It was, in fact, very funny, clever and sweet. Ferrell is so good at the subtle humour he showed here and in Winter Passing that it kills me to see the ads for crap like Semi-Pro. A few times in this movie I laughed out loud, and I rarely laugh at Will Ferrell movies.

We also watched Marie Antoinette (imdb | rotten tomatoes) this evening. The first half was interesting, but it completely lost steam in the second half. It was like watching a dessert cart being paraded around…it looks lovely and inspired at first, but after you stare at the same sweets for two hours it loses something. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it that much to begin with; Sofia Coppola had me in the first half, but lost me again in the second.

I forgot to blog last week about Italianetz (imdb | rotten tomatoes), yet another foreign entry at a past film festival that I wanted to see. The story was about a Russian boy set to be adopted from an orphanage by an Italian couple (hence the title) but who worries that he has a mother somewhere that, should he go to live with another couple, he’ll never see again. The plot takes him on his search for her, but the real star was Russia itself: a dirty, drunken, stormy, barren, corrupt plain of despair…that one little boy refuses to give up on. Worth watching, if you can tolerate the dodgy subtitle translations.

[tags]friday night lights, the wire, there will be blood, eye weekly, torontoist, biryani house, 1bloor, smokeless joe, stranger than fiction, marie antoinette, italianetz[/tags]

I am a happy fellow

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My assignment, the last for this course, is done. I finished it off around 10:00 and practically skipped — pranced, even — to the couch to watch the Canadiens-Bruins game on the PVR.

That’s the last schoolwork I have to do for a couple of weeks. Weeks, internet, weeks! On an unrelated note, there’s a bluebird on my shoulder and everything is satisfactual.

[tags]mba, canadiens, bruins[/tags]

How to make snow look warm

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I don’t even remember where I saw it, but one of my site feeds recently pointed to a list of their favourite photoblogs. Of course the list contained ddoi, of which I’ve been a fan for years, and a few others I already knew. It also contained a few that I didn’t recognize, the best of which (in my opinion, anyway) is Julien Roumagnac’s photoblog. His pictures of Montréal make me homesick for a city I’ve never lived in.

Have a look at today’s picture of Rue de la Commune, for example. As cold and snowy as that looks, tell me you don’t want to be standing there right now.

[tags]daily dose of imagery, julien roumagnac[/tags]

An hour early

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I stopped at A Taste Above on the way home tonight. It’s a take-away ready-to-go meal place just up the street. Pricey, but good food and I felt like some quick pasta for dinner. I got there around 6:15…closed. Wha? You’re catering to the busy after-work crowd and you close at 6 PM? Brilliant. Dear A Taste Above: a little advice…send whoever’s in charge of your company on an introductory business course. You’re welcome.

.:.

Esquire breaks down Jerry Bruckheimer’s Laws of Science. Example:

The Law of Inverse Emotional Importance

Oftentimes an event may appear significant when in reality it’s not. When confused, remember this simple rule: The significance of any event is inversely related to the speed of its motion.

Proof: Pearl Harbor, about the devastating attack that pushed the U.S. into World War II, features more slow motion than Samba Night at the hospice center.

.:.

Must…finish…assignment. But don’t…want…to.

Inside/friend voice says: suck it up, princess. It’s due Friday, and after that I’ve got a couple of weeks off before going away on course again. It’s just that everything else seems to be SO much more enjoyable right now…watching hockey, thinking about big problems (opportunities?) at work, spending time with Nellie, going to movies, drinking beer, even running at 6AM…I’m loving all of it right now. The last thing I want to do is more school work.

Good thing my wife is a) supportive of me disappearing into a book for several hours a night, and b) fond of television.

[tags]a taste above, esquire, jerry bruckheimer[/tags]

I guess a resounding caucus win'll do that for you

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Five days ago I read a post on Richard Florida’s blog, in which he pointed to an expert opinion on the upcoming US presidential elections:

Obama is going to win it all — Iowa, the nomination, the Presidency. And I think it ultimately comes down to the fact that he is a rare combination in American politics, in that he is both the “emotional” choice and the “electable” choice. … Traditionally, we’ve always had to make a tradeoff between the emotional and the electable choices … But with Obama the two sets overlap.

While that struck me as a bold claim, the author that Florida quoted is surely more knowledgeable about American politics than I, so while I couldn’t dismiss the prediction, I was certainly skeptical.

Then today I read another post on RF’s blog. Take a look at the chart in that post. As my friend Evan would say…”Shift Of Power!” Fine, these are only prediction markets (a description Florida takes a poke at, since they’re awfully reactionary) but suddenly what seemed dubious five days ago seems pretty smart now.

[tags]richard florida, barack obama, prediction markets[/tags]

Gulf of Tonkin, anybody?

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From The Independent:

The US and Iran have engaged in their most serious military confrontation in recent times, with American warships on the verge of opening fire on gunboats of the Revolutionary Guards which had threatened to blow them up.

Sound familiar?

The “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” defined the beginning of large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Historians have shown that the second incident was, at its best interpretation, an overreaction of eager naval forces. [via Wikipedia]

[tags]iran, gunboats, gulf of tonkin[/tags]

Insufficient bandwidth

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I want to write something witty. Really, I do, but after a 3-mile run this morning and going pretty much non-stop all day and then leaving work at 7:00 and working on my corporate finance assignment all night, I’m tapped. I have all kinds of cool stuff in my starred Google Reader items that I want to read and blog about, like an article about the knowledge economy and a Chuck Klosterman piece from Esquire and a Mark Kingwell essay from The Walrus about Toronto fauxhemians/bobos and a Vanity Fair article about George Lucas & Steven Spielberg and a chunk of Macbeth…but I’m just not up to it. I need to go get my shit ready for tomorrow’s run and try to wind my brain down into sleep mode.

Sorry, internet listeners. I’ll try to do better another day.

[tags]insufficient bandwidth[/tags]

Underwhelmed

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I believe this is the second time in a week that I’ve quoted Sloan. Anyhoo…

I was pretty sick yesterday so I couldn’t do much other than lay on the couch and watch the Canadiens lose in OT (boo!), watch Team Canada win in OT (yay!) and watch some movies. Both Letters From Iwo Jima and World Trade Center were disappointing. I don’t understand the hype about the former — is it really that groundbreaking to show a war from the other side? — and the latter was so overwrought in the second half that I could barely finish it.

I’m feeling better today though. Just got back from having brunch with CBGB at Joy Bistro.

[tags]letters from iwo jima, world trade center, joy bistro[/tags]

These two things have nothing to do with each other

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Money woes add to Saskatoon Symphony’s troubles

The Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra is in debt to the tune of about $300,000, a musicians union official said Thursday.

“It’s effectively bankrupt,” Cam McConnell, vice president of American Federation of Musicians Local 553, told the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.

Premier outraged Idol skipping Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall is calling on fans of Canadian Idol to lodge a protest after Saskatchewan was left off the list of audition locations this year.

Wall said he was outraged when he learned the reality TV talent competition would schedule auditions in 10 major Canadian cities, but leave out both Regina and Saskatoon.

[tags]saskatoon symphony, canadian idol[/tags]