110640223111824774

Given the weather (snowstorm, cold, blowing winds, etc.) we’ve decided to huddle indoors for warmth for the weekend. We’ve stocked up on movies & snacks, I have tons of reading material (only about half of which is for my HR class), I bought a bottle of this. The only way it could be better is if the Toronto Star hadn’t forgotten to deliver my paper this morning.

My poor wife had to go to work today though…but just for a few hours.

On an unrelated note, good for Paul Martin.

So much for CRIA claims of an impending dustbowl

The Globe and mail reports that the recording industry isn’t really hurting so much after all. They attribute the good fortune to “anti-piracy campaigns, consumers’ frustrations with the glitches of file sharing, lower CD price tags and a popular crop of new release”. The latter two: maybe. The first two: laughable.

The president of HMV Canada nails it: “When there’s good-quality music, people will buy.” While I rarely buy CDs from HMV due to high cost and shite selection, it’s hard to argue with that sentiment. I have no problem paying $15-20 for a good CD, nor does anyone else I know. I know some pretty big music fans, and most of them are computer-savvy enough to download music, and not one of them thinks that downloaded music is a substitute for buying the CD.

I refer the CRIA to something John McClane said in Die Hard: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Quit bein’ part of the fuckin’ problem and put the other guy back on.”

If you know what I mean.

Blue crap

Oh, Stanzi. Stanzi, Stanzi, Stanzi. You told me to add Blue Crush (imdb | rotten tomatoes) to my ziplist, because you love it so. Quel mistake. It was like Karate Kid with skinny girls. Only good feature of the movie were the visually impressive waves, and they might’ve been the best actors too. Sad. But we’re all allowed a crap movie now and then.

I keep listening to Green Day‘s American Idiot and Movement by The Gossip. Oh, and the song “Mystery And Misery” by Rainer Maria is my favourite song this week. Love that fuzzy guitar.

The new Pitchfork

Is it me, or does the redesigned Pitchfork look terrible? They’ve plugged the page with so many ads that when you use the FireFox adblock extension (as I do) it just leaves great gaping holes in the page. That means they’ve a) built the design into the ads, or b) built the holes into the design.

To make it worse, there’s still no RSS feed (short of scraping it myself). So each day I go to the site (it’s one of the handful that I still read with a browser), quickly scan for anything interesting and then bolt as quickly as possible. It looks that bad.

110599448444370769

I just drank half of one of these. Observations:

  1. Dumbest name ever. Sounds like a Mexican nickname.
  2. I feel as if I might die / fatten / lose teeth at any moment
  3. It’s about the same as the espresso brownie as far as fat & calories, so really…if i feel the need to kill myself i’m gonna use the brownie