Mmmmmm, Green & Black’s organic dark chocolate…

.:.
A Conservative government is looking quite possible. I find this unsettling. Fiscally the tories and liberals are practically twins, so I find no relief there, and am left only with the thought of a prime minister who would’ve surely taken us into Iraq, who probably would’ve blocked same-sex marriage, who almost certainly wouldn’t have instituted a firearms registry and who will likely weaken the economy. Lest any conservatives out there are still naive enough to think that a Tory government leads to means a stronger economy, go do some research.

.:.
A week ago I talked about how my internal mail system delivered a package, opened and two months late. Well, today something even weirder happened. In May 2004 a friend sent me a cheque for some maple syrup he bought from me; it got lost in internal mail and he sent me another one. Since it was only for $16 he didn’t bother stopping the payment. Today he emailed me, telling me that the first cheque — the one sent 19 months ago — was cashed four days ago. This seemed strange, firstly because I hadn’t cashed any cheques and secondly because you can’t cash a cheque that old. From what we can tell, it must have floated around the depths and morasses of internal mail for a year and a half, been opened by somebody (which is issue #1: why is someone else opening mail addressed to me?), somehow been sent to my bank’s processing centre and deposited into one of my accounts. But not my primary account…not even a chequing account! It’s all very, very odd; lots of things wrong with that, obviously. My friend is tracking down how a 19-month old cheque gets deposited at all; I’m trying to find out how someone thinks it’s ok to open my mail. Crazy.

Best. Ad. Ever.

Today’s daily dose of imagery makes me homesick for a neighbourhood that we haven’t even lived in yet. Incredible.

I’m jealous that my brother gets to go to this Mogwai concert and hear songs from the new album. I won’t hear it until March, dad blast it.

.:.
Seriously? iPod-ready jeans? Seriously?

I’ve heard about this, but this is the first article I’ve seen that really lays out the fuss being made over Steven Soderbergh and Mark Cuban’s plans to release a movie in theatres and on DVD at the same time. I can see why studios like it, but it’s pretty obvious that theatre chains hate the idea. Too bad though; customers want it, so it’s only a matter of time.

.:.
I watched Prizzi’s Honor (imdb | rotten tomatoes) over the last week or so, drawn mostly by the fact that it had been nominated for 8 Oscars and was some kind of low-level classic. It was, in fact, shit. Boring shit, to be precise. It was neither dark nor a comedy, despite being billed as both. Maybe it’s just because of my hatred for the 80s, and maybe this is over-generalizing just a bit, but every single human in the world looked ugly/ridiculous/both between the years 1980 and 1989, so I didn’t buy Kathleen Turner as an attractive woman. The whole movie played like a substandard episode of an aging dramedy; you know, when a show’s been on for seven years and they know they’re going off the air so the cast just starts phoning in their performances and collecting their paycheques, not really giving a crap about the quality of their work? That’s what this felt like. And, apparently, the entire Motion Picture Academy was on coke in 1985 when they nominated it for four major awards. Yeesh.

.:.
Speaking of phoning it in, the Habs were awful last night. They somehow managed a 1-0 lead through two periods but then coughed it up with less than ten minutes left. And when I say coughed it up, I mean Radek Bonk, with about 3 minutes left, passed it to a Colorado player in his own zone and then forgot to cover his man (who wound up scoring). Hack, hack.

We’ve just finished booking our weekend getaway to Montreal in April. We’ll be staying here and going to see a Canadiens game. Who knows what else we’ll get up to? Time to brush up on my French, I guess.

It’s 8 degrees in Toronto today, freakishly warm considering it’s the middle of January. Hooray for global warming!

.:.
I agree with this post on Torontoist: people from Ontario are being hypocritical about the hate they have on for this upcoming film about Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Serial killer stories — many of them based on true stories, as this one is — air on TV or come to theatres all the time, but this one seems inappropriate because it happened here.

.:.
You need to go read this post on Peace, Order and Good Government, Eh?

To counter the Conservative attack ads, which have been running for several weeks now, the Liberals have launched some of their own. Some people are lamenting this advent of American-style politics north of the border, but anyone who thinks they’ve only just arrived obviously doesn’t remember the conservative ad that made fun of Jean Chretien’s speech.

.:.
A bit bruised today after basketball, but not sore. We had 14 16 (thanks T-Bone) people out so there was lots of time to rest. Others weren’t so lucky though; pacman might’ve broken his jaw, t-bone hurt her back, I think I hurt somebody’s arm wrestling for the ball…it was a war of attrition out there. Still fun though.

.:.
I really don’t know why I bother wearing a tie. It’s so warm in the office that I just rip it off the second I get here.

We made some Winterlicious reservations today: beerbistro, Noce, and The Strip House. We’re still working on Canoe, of course*. Put these together with our upcoming (non-Winterlicious) visits to The Strand and Luce, we’ll be eating pretty well for the next month.

* For those of you who don’t know, Canoe is like my white whale. We always try to make reservations and it’s always booked; the one time we managed to get a table I had this work thing come up and I had to bail at the last minute. I don’t actually believe that Canoe exists anymore; I think it’s just a phone number and a website, both created to taunt me.

Rogers finally managed to turn on the few digital specialty channels I’ve been asking for: BBC Canada, BBC World, the Independent Film Channel and the Documentary Channel. I couldn’t remember what the fifth channel was supposed to be; feeling the pressure, I got the NHL Network.

.:.
Last night’s debate was a bit of a snoozer. Nothing we didn’t already know (except maybe Martin’s promise to get rid of the federal not-withstanding clause…it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out). They were all their usual selves: Harper was vaguely creepy, Martin was bumbly, Layton was ineffective and Duceppe…well, one wonders why Duceppe is even on the stage for a national debate? Anyway. I have to applaud Paul Martin for demanding an intelligent debate as opposed to character assassination, but I suspect that was defensive posturing rather than genuine moral outrage since he’s the one being assassinated.

.:.
Basketball’s back on tonight. Good; I need to work off some of the holiday festivities.