Author: Dan Dickinson

In which I geek right out

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment
  • That’s a pretty kickass-lookin’ Iron Man.
  • Jenna Fischer wants to do more nudity in her films. Well, if that’s what she feels she has to do for her craft, I guess we’ll all just have to support her.
  • Ray Park, the who portrayed Darth Maul (probably the only good thing about Star Wars: Episode I) will now get to play Snake Eyes in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie. That’s two iconically cool characters in one lifetime, Ray. Give thanks.

.:.

May not blog for a couple of days. Conference. Talk amongst yourselves.

[tags]iron man, jenna fischer, ray park, darth maul, snake eyes, g.i. joe[/tags]

UnZipped

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Here I thought taking some time away from the MBA would be nice and relaxing, but with work being what it is and with Christmas just around the corner, it’s still loopy. Still, anything’s better than reading about the effect of tax shields on corporate financing decisions.

.:.

Do you love yourself? Do you love good music?

If you answered yes to both of those, then ask yourself this: have you listened to Spoon‘s Kill The Moonlight? If you haven’t, then you were probably mistaken about the first two questions. Really, it’s one of the best collections of music I’ve ever heard. If you haven’t heard it, I can’t really give you a good reference point for comparison, even if you’ve heard other Spoon albums. Just do yourself a favour: go download it. At first you’ll only like one or two songs, but soon they’ll all grow on you.

.:.

I have signed up for The Movie Network and am planning to cancel my Zip account. It’s just not cost effective; I’m paying $15/month and not watching any movies. TMN, on the other hand, gives me a lot more immediate variety (as opposed to variety that I have to order) and access to TV shows that we want to see in real-time like The Wire and Dexter. Some day — like when the MBA is finished — we may go back to Zip, but for now it’s going bye-bye.

[tags]spoon, kill the moonlight, tmn, zip.ca, the wire, dexter[/tags]

The ruins of adventure

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

A couple of stories of subversive perseverence that are fascinating me today:

1. The decades-long near-total anonymity of the musician called Jandek;

Only a handful of people claim to have contacted Jandek, whose steadfast anonymity is legendary…Some of Jandek’s allure stems from his small but devoted fan base that includes Sonic Youth, Bill Callahan, Mike Watt, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, Low, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Bright Eyes.

2. The year-long infiltration of a Parisien “cultural guerrilla” group to restore an antique clock in the Pantheon.

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

Amazing stories, both.

[tags]jandek, untergunther[/tags]

Ow! Yawn. Hooray!

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I’m very excited, Internet. I finished my latest assignment this afternoon and, while I’m sure I’ll have to fix a few problem following my review in a few minutes, that’s it for me for the MBA for a little while. OK, only eleven days, but still…I’m looking forward to not reading finance for a week and a half like you can’t believe. Should give me time to finish up some shopping and knock off a few other niggling tasks.

.:.

Last night was my company’s year-end party, so we had some folks over for a pre-event drink or two, then had mingling & dinner & such just a few blocks away, and then back here for another drink or two. T-Bone somehow managed to get home even though standing seemed a struggle, and I somehow managed to knock over a pepper mill which knocked a martini glass off the counter which sent glass shards flying in all directions. Oy. In my haste to extract a cat from the glass minefield and clean it all up I got a piece stuck in my foot. I couldn’t reach it so I had to sleep (not very well, mind you) with it stuck there until Nellie woke up enough to pry it out with some tweezers. On the plus side I managed to clear some room in the liquor cabinet by finishing off the lingering drops of two different bottles of scotch: a 10-year-old Macallan fine oak and a 10-year-old Bruichladdich. So yeah, a fun night. Looking forward to next year.

[tags]walkin’ on, walkin’ on broken glass[/tags]

That was my first pomegranate foam intermezzo

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Last night, to celebrate CB’s birthday we had dinner at Canoe. It was, as always, spectacular. This was our first time getting the tasting menu. It would take too long to list the full details of everything we had with all the wine pairings, but here’s the brief overview:

  • our amuse bouche was shaved carrot, mushrooms, caper berries and beans and a chocolate sauce
  • next up was warm goat cheese on bannock with shaved black truffle and vanilla foam & veggies on lentils
  • the salad was warm lobster (which I normally don’t care for, but this was quite good) with a dill pickle tartar & lemon thyme
  • the intermezzo was a pomegranate foam with olive oil and a light salt on top
  • our main was a BC sablefish with a black mustard dressing. CB had the same thing with foie gras on top. The others had caribou.
  • dessert was a quince bread pudding with fruit and candied almonds, paired with a 2006 Fielding Estate Select Late Harvest Gewurztraminer

It was an excellent, excellent meal. I can’t imagine Canoe ever falling off my list of favourite Toronto restaurants.

.:.

Today’s been a busy one. We have people coming over in a couple of hours so we’ve been scrambling to get stuff ready, and to run all the errands we didn’t have time for this week. We just carried our new chairs home; of course it’s the coldest day of the year on the day when we have to be outside carrying packages…so it goes.

OK, must shower and throw together a playlist.

[tags]canoe, tasting menu[/tags]

Can I get a copy of that?

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Here’s how my life is gonna go for the next couple of days. Tonight I have to work on my finance assignment. Tomorrow I have to go to work, of course. Tomorrow evening we’re having dinner at Canoe with CBGB; Saturday I’ll watch the PVR’d hockey game and then we have to run a pile of errands and pick up our new chairs. Saturday evening we have people coming over before we head out to a holiday party. Sunday will be spent recovering, watching another PVR’d hockey game and finishing — hopefully — the finance assignment. It is at that point that I will collapse onto the couch, read the newspaper and give the middle finger to the MBA for two weeks while I focus on Christmas shopping.

Weird to have the next 72 hours of my life planned out like that. Kind of depressing too.

.:.

Today’s episode of What The Duck distills the troubling conundrum of “entertainment news” down to a three-panel comic.

.:.

I will be going to this:

Whipper Snapper Gallery recently announced an exhibition of Toronto’s top four photo bloggers for the month of December. It’s called The Too-Explicit Injustice of Kind Population! and it runs from the 6th to the 29th. The exhibition title is an anagram of the different website names. Don’t worry… I don’t get it either!

More info.

[tags]canoe, what the duck, whipper snapper gallery, toronto photobloggers[/tags]

Was Anna Nicole 2006? Or 2007?

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

From OpenCulture: an interview with Stephen King. Normally I have no interest in what King has to say, but this is pretty funny:

STEPHEN KING: So who’s going to be TIME Person of the Year?

TIME: I really don’t know, there’s a very small group of people who make that decision.

STEPHEN KING: I was thinking, I think it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

TIME: Really?

STEPHEN KING: Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, “You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you’re missing the whole fox hunt.” Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who’s gonna get custody of Britney’s kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit. You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West’s mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that’s going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his… wife. And meanwhile, you’ve got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You’ve got a guy in charge, who’s basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d’etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.

.:.

I have to tell you, a Canadiens win over the Leafs puts me in a good mood for at least a couple of days.

[tags]stephen king, time person of the year, canadiens, leafs[/tags]

R.I.P., Richie

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

There was a power outage in my neighbourhood today…except I don’t think the power went off in my building. I was just leaving work at 7 when the power came back on in the large area that had gone dark so I can’t say for sure, but nothing in my condo would appear to have suffered the ill effects of a blackout. Weird.

.:.

Sad news from back home today: my old neighbour Richie Pettigrew died. I’ve known Richie since I was born, as my father probably did. He worked for my grandfather, and his son worked for my dad. My childhood memories are filled with funny stories Richie would tell us, or of being at his (and his wife Margaret’s) house down the road, or of eating freshly-made maple cream off the tiny wooden spoons he’d carved by hand for my dad.

He was like a great-uncle. I’ll miss him.

[tags]toronto blackout, richie pettigrew[/tags]