Category: Friends

R.I.P., Connor

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CBGB had some folks over to their place last for night for a housewarming…ironic, since yesterday was an unseasonably cold & windy day. Still, GB fired up the barbeque in style and dashed off more than enough food for all. There were even some thai appetizers that I avoided…wisely, as it turns out; Nellie had one and spent ten minutes fighting off tears. A good time was had, etc.

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I know a few friends who could use the services of LBA (Lip Balm Anonymous). Time for an intervention.

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We watched The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill (imdb | rotten tomatoes) over the weekend after it sat on the PVR for months. It was yet another documentary that deserved to win the Oscar more than March Of The Penguins, but whatever. I figure I must be getting soft in my old age, ’cause the personalities of the parrots and the dedication Mark Bittner showed to them were pretty touching. It sounds like it’ll be a boring movie but it’s not. Highly recommended.

[tags]lip balm, wild parrots of telegraph hill, march of the penguins, documentary[/tags]

In A Soldier's Footsteps

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Our fourth documentary was In A Soldier’s Footsteps (hot docs), the story of a Ugandan refugee who’d been a child soldier in the rebel army (which eventually formed the country’s government). A Danish film crew followed him on his return to Uganda to retrieve his son, and then tried to track him after his sudden disappearance. After that the plot thickens, as they say, and the intrigue builds as in any political thriller. I gave it four out of five on my ballot; through no fault of their own the filmmakers couldn’t really wrap things up or answer many questions for us, but they told a hell of a story.

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Walking down Bloor on our way to the movie we ran into pacman and his lovely wife. Funnily enough, just two seconds before he’d yelled “Dan” (I’m still not sure what that was about…they said something about a nametag). Anyway, it got my attention and I saw them when I looked around, just before they saw me…so I couldn’t figure out why they seemed surprised to see us if they’d just been yelling my name. Yeah, it was probably funnier if you were there.

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[tags]hot docs, uganda, denmark[/tags]

CBGBBQ

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The Star has once again started dumping free newspapers outside my door. They do this a couple of times a year, unprompted. Normally a free newspaper is a good thing, except that I feel compelled to read a newspaper if it’s put in front of me (well…unless it’s a complete shitrag like The Sun) so I end up getting to work late every day. My own fault, I suppose, but dammit, they’re enabling me.

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Carl Bernstein, a guy who knows a thing or two about impeaching presidents, asks in the HuffPo if the president should be impeached. I have a recommendation, but I don’t think I get to vote on this.

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I’ve won tickets from Now Magazine for the second time in as many weeks. This time it’s for The Sentinel, which probably won’t be quite as good as Brick, but hey…it’s free and I was gonna see it anyway, so 3 shy little hipster hoorays for Now.

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This month’s Toronto Life, in addition to humorous letters, contains an article about the Don Valley Parkway. They make the point that further north — near Eglinton or Lawrence — it feels like a big, dead, cold highway, but the further it gets into the downtown core, it paradoxically becomes more and more green…more trees, more grass, better conformity to the landscape. Near the Bayview extension you can see the Don River, trees, fields, and the downtown towers pulling up over the trees. The first time I rode down the DVP with a friend, shortly after moving here, I was blown away as we neared the bottom of the valley at sunset, shocked by how green space I could see (I lived at Yonge & Sheppard, so I wasn’t used to seeing any), and then suddenly we were on the Gardiner and I was looking at the incredible cityscape. I remember it was the first time that I liked looking at Toronto.

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CBGB had us over last night for a barbeque, which was pretty sweet. It’s never a bad thing to have friends who own meat grilling equipment and live within the city limits in quick transit distance. And, of course, are nice enough to invite us over on a whim on a sunny Sunday afternoon for some red wine & red meat. It made us [sigh] look forward to the day when we have our own barbeque.

"Only people who'll remember this is us."

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We just finished watching Gunner Palace (imdb | rotten tomatoes), a documentary about an American field artillery unit who took over Uday Hussein’s old palace in Baghdad. It was a bit uneven and slow at times, but overall a pretty informative slice of (shitty) life for these guys and the Iraqis they deal with. The soldiers have to duck rocks, worry about IEDs and deal with the fact that no one back home will every understand what their time in Iraq was like. The Iraqi people get held at gunpoint, woken up in the middle of the night by soldiers and sent to prisons like Abu Ghraib without much evidence against them.

“I don’t think … anywhere in history has someone killed someone else and something better has come out of it. It’s just … not possible.”

Whatever you think about the war, you have to respect the soldiers for the work they have to do, and feel sorry for them when the situation sometimes pushes them over the line. Gunner Palace was a good look at a bunch of soldiers standing at the edge of it.

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I also watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (imdb | rotten tomatoes) this week. Dopey martial arts movie, but holy smokin’ Joe Kubek, that Tony Jaa is one bad-assed squeaky-voiced mofo. No effects, no digital tricks, no “bullet time”, just a little dude kicking and elbowing and jumping and kneeing his way through a whole raft of baddies, including one creepy voiceboxed chief. If you appreciate martial arts movies for the action and don’t mind the thin plot or dippy dialogue, pick this up.

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The Canadiens all but eliminated the Leafs tonight, winning 6-2 after beating them 5-1 two nights ago. Atlanta lost, so Montreal moves back into the 8th playoff spot. The way things are going, the Montreal-New Jersey game we have tickets for in two weeks could be big indeed.

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Clubbed today: protestors in Minsk, baby seals.

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My old friend from university, Farm Boy (ironic that he got the name, since I grew up on a farm and he did not) visited today. He, his wife, Nellie and I had lunch downtown at the Irish Embassy and then caught up for a bit before they left to have dinner with his brother. They were enamored with the cats; who wouldn’t be?

They're no here

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Ooh, almost forgot: Chromewaves’ Frank noticed that Mogwai will make a stop in Toronto after all. Like him, I think my ears have healed sufficiently since I last saw them. I shall see if M2 is up for it.

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Ever see Ripley’s Game (imdb | rotten tomatoes)? I just watched it this week; don’t even remember how it got onto my Zip list, but I’m glad it did. I liked it very much; Malkovich is better than usual here, and that’s something. I like movies with style; this one has it. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

The best-laid plans of mice and plastinated men

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We were foiled in our attempt to see BodyWorlds last night at the Science Centre last night with CBGB. Apparently we left it too late (the exhibit leaves Sunday) and it was sold out by the time we got there. I guess we shouldn’t have left it so late, but vacations and house purchases and xmas trips just got in the way and, alas, we may have missed our chance. I’ve seen the show (in an earlier incarnation) so I wasn’t that disappointed, and CBGB may be able to see it this weekend, but Nellie probably will not. I felt bad about that.

Defeated, we went back down to the Danforth and had some food & drink at Dora Keogh, then home to watch The Shield, which kicked ass.

The place is dead anyway

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Since Nellie’s sick, we’ve been laying low this weekend, which means we’ve watched lots of movies & recorded TV. Actually, because of her faux-OCD, Nellie’s holed up on the couch right now with the kleenex, her laptop and some downloaded Veronica Mars. But we’ve also watched:

  • XX/XY (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was something we’d never heard of, but IFC has been advertising it like mad. We both like Mark Ruffalo, so I recorded it. It wasn’t bad; a little whiny and self-interested maybe, but I’ve seen worse. I had to laugh at the tagline though: “There’s no room for honesty in a healthy relationship.”
  • Power & Terror: Noam Chomsky In Our Times (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a Japanese documentary that just featured a couple of lectures and interviews with Chomsky shortly after the 9/11 attacks. It was interesting to hear his take on things when feelings were still so raw…he asked for perspective (“The best way to stop the practice of terrorism around the world is to stop participating in it…”) but also contradicted those proclaiming imminent doom by saying that, all in all, the world is a much better place than it was even 50 years ago, and *far* better than it was two centuries ago.
  • But I’m A Cheerleader (imdb | rotten tomatoes) started off as a pretty smart and biting satire about sexual mores, religion and politics, but ended up degenerating into a plain old girl-meets-girl love story. Meh.

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I don’t get companies who treat their email address like a fax line. It’s not something you just check once a week, people. It’s a personal communication channel. You know, like a tel-e-phone? Catch up.

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CBGB called us tonight from the pub around the corner and asked us to join. Since we hadn’t gotten off our asses all day, and since Nellie was feeling better, we did. They’d just left a chocolate-making class we gave CB for her birthday, and had loads of their own handiwork with them. We had chocolate-covered strawberries and truffles over pints of beer and nachos. Somehow it came up that they’d never seen Swingers (money, baby!) so we came back here to watch it. Then CB spilled tea on herself and we made her watch Family Business, which scandalized her. So not a good night for her.

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And now: the NBA all-star skills competition. God bless the PVR.

Paradigms shift. So do chords.

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Our good friend MS just told us that she’s gonna be a mom. This is weird, since she was fiercely anti-motherhood when she still lived here. But things change, I guess; there’s been a lot of movement on that issue since we all met in our early 20s. Surprise surprise.

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Speaking of friends, CBGB now have a blog detailing the move into their new house. It’s in the sidebar. Check it.

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“Soon Enough” by The Constantines might just be my favourite song of 2005. I almost get weepy when I listen to it.