Basketball again tonight, and for at least one more week. Thank god; I need something to snap me out of holiday-lazy gear.

Despite having to leave town (well…if you consider staying in north Scarborough “leaving town”) for a week at the end of the month I managed to sneak a few Winterlicious reservations in. Right now we’re down for Bymark and The Strip House with T-Bone (how fitting) and Biff’s with G&C. There may be a Canoe trip in there somewhere as well.

My brother’s been arranging the trip we’re taking to Europe in the summer. Right now the plan is to fly to London and stay with him, taking one weekend trip to Edinburgh and another to Vienna and Budapest.

Working, studying, planning escapism. That’s my workload.

…I’ve missed 24.

I guess, living in roughly the same neighbourhood, I’m going to run across Geddy Lee from time to time. Growing up a huge Rush fan, he’s instantly recognizable, and I’ve now seen him at least 3 or 4 times in the last year or so. Friday night he sat in front of my wife and I at Million Dollar Baby. He’s so…little. I just keep picturing him in A Show Of Hands, singing “The Manhattan Project” or something…it’s weird. I mean, walking around Yorkville you’re always noticing famous or semi-famous people (like this morning, walking to Whole Foods, I saw the Bob Vila-looking guy from the Canadian Tire commercials), but to see someone who was part of a band that I obsessed over as a teenager, sitting in front of you and eating popcorn…it’s trippy.

We’ve been to see two movies this weekend: Million Dollar Baby and Closer.

• Million Dollar Baby (imdb | rotten tomatoes) deserves all the hype it’s getting. Typically Clint Eastwood in style and pacing, we grab on while these difficult people slog through difficult lives, hoping that their lives or personalities get easier. There should be a rule that once a year Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman make a movie with one other Oscar-caliber actor (Gene Hackman, Hilary Swank, etc.), just to set the bar for everyone else. By the way, Geddy Lee sat right in front of us.
• Closer (imdb | rotten tomatoes) annoyed some of the people in the audience, but that’s not surprising. Some people just can’t bear a whole movie without explosions or pratfalls or cliches or fart jokes (Gerry was the ultimate example fo this). This was a dialogue movie about unpleasant people acting cruelly and/or pathetically. To me, discomfort and dislike for characters is as valid an response to provoke in your audience as any other, so I liked the movie. Or rather, I appreciated it; there was nothing likeable about it. Recommended for any serious movie fan.

24 and The Shield starts again tonight, bringing one of my few appointment shows back to TV.

Today’s asshat company: Purolator.

First, they don’t deliver my package. No phone call to my office phone, no notice of delivery…nothing. Finally, a week after it shipped, they leave me a voice mail saying I have to go way the hell out to the west end of the city, a place virtually inaccessible by transit, to pick it up. They don’t leave me a number to call.

So I pull the general number off the website and call. Their IVR is of no use, so I wait to talk to an agent. It puts me on hold in what I can only assume is the wrong queue, since the automated voice thanks me for my patience in French. I wait 10 minutes and hang up.

Argh.

We heard the record executives cry out from our gutters and ghettos that file sharing is hurting sales figures, eating away at their profits, driving them out of business, taking food out of their families’ mouth, leaving their children in rags and shivering in the col…oh. uh, Never mind.

Toronto’s a funny place. 5 cm of snow and most people either stay home from work or leave early. Heaven help these people if they suddenly had to move to the prairies or one of the atlantic provinces…

I think Chromewaves mentioned this a while back, but January 25th is shaping up to be a monster day for me: new CDs by Trail Of Dead (which I can barely sit still for) and Low, and DVD releases include Some Kind of Monster, When Will I Be Loved, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and most importantly, season 2 of The Wire. Goodbye paycheque.

Looking at the sidebar on Chromewaves, I see he links to Banana Boys, a novel by my former colleague Terry Woo. It’s still weird to see Terry’s name everywhere…linked from cool music sites, on Amazon, in ads for the play this past year…I still think of him as the guy who sat across the aisle from me…

Still fellating Chromewaves, he tells us that Metacritic is now reviewing books. Sweet.

from the CBC: CNN lets Tucker Carlson go

“Linkage between Apple’s iPod and Playboy could offer the latest in hand-eye coordination exercises.” Heh.

from P2Pnet