Natalie Merchant‘s cover of the Horseflies song “Sally Ann”.

I love how Bob Harris over on This Modern World is now referring to George Bush as “Delusional Monkey”.

“Just came across the actual rider signed by the John Kerry and Delusional Monkey campaigns in arranging their upcoming ‘debate,’ which will actually be (like most U.S. ‘debates’) more of a joint press conference.”

Normally I’d post politics stuff over on the other blog, but this is about the debates (and, therefore, has little to do with politics or news and everything to do with infomercials).

The platinum edition of Return Of The King is over 4 hours long.

Just got back from Word On The Street with Stanzi. Spent about an hour there, walking around, picking up magazines (Taddle Creek and Saturday Night). We saw Jack Layton and Olivia Chow at the Eye booth.

I’m glad it’s at Queen’s Park now. There’s so much more space; last year on Queen Street it was a titanic struggle just to get 10 feet down the street.

Last night, after months of anticipation (my brother told me about the movie almost a year ago) I finally got to see Shaun Of The Dead (imdb | rotten tomatoes). My expectations were high, but justified; the movie was hilarious, scary enough in bits to make the crowd jump, almost like a date movie in parts, socially relevant and to top it all off had my girlfriend in it. What more could I want? The day Shaun available on DVD I’m plunking down my money. This is one I could watch many, many times.

To prep, we rented a few classic zombie movies before hand: Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead (the original) just so that we’d catch a few of the in-jokes contained in Shaun (“We’re coming to get you Barbara!!”). Both started off kind of slow but got better; I loved how Dawn was more a satirical poke at us than a zombie movie; the zombies were hardly scary at all, just lumbering around trying to negotiate escalators and simple doors. I wish they’d been able to keep that same satire in the remake.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club‘s “Spread Your Love” + Goldfrapp‘s “Strict Machine” = this.

I’m proud of my home province. Yesterday Nova Scotia quietly legalized same-sex marriage. Let the gnashing of conservative teeth in the Chronically Horrid begin.

Finally, progress. They’ve begun construction on our condo building.

A CD arrived in the mail last night. It was Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. As Nebraska is one of my favourite discs I downloaded it, gave it a listen and decided to buy it. A few of the songs are throwaways, but it has some standouts:

• Nebraska – Chrissie Hynde And Adam Seymour
• State Trooper – Deanna Carter
• Open All Night – Son Volt
• My Father’s House – Ben Harper

“State Trooper” and “My Father’s House” are fairly faithful recreations of how Springsteen recorded them. “Nebraska” is slower and, somehow, even starker (pardon the pun) than the original. But what really haunts me is Son Volt‘s version of “Open All Night”. It’s strung out like a honky-tonk ballad, and when it’s playing I have to stop whatever I’m doing and just listen.

So, something weird happened yesterday. Alice Wu — writer and director of Saving Face (which I wrote about here, here and here) — left a comment on my blog. At least, he/she claimed to be Alice Wu, but I have no reason to think that someone would pretend to be a writer/director that few people have heard of (sorry Alice!). You can read her comments here.

Does this mean that real people are reading my blog? Actual, creative, intelligent people I don’t know?

Nah.