Today my Nomad randomly served up “N.I.B.” by Black Sabbath. It reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend’s brother back in high school. This guy played bass in our band and was a big Sabbath fan. As coincidence would have it, he’s now remodelling my mother’s kitchen. Anyway, I’d asked him what “N.I.B.” stood for. He didn’t know. Actually, I believe his exact answer was, “I dunno…Nib?”

This evening, when reading through my usual feeds, I find this item posted on Yes But No But Yes:

Who originally wrote Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart?” What does N.I.B. mean? Who is Baba O’Riley? How am I supposed to live without you? Is the drug-outlaw character in “Kid Charlemagne” based on someone? Will anyone read the eight posts about Hanson’s “mmmBop?”

Ho. Lee. Crap.

Does anybody out there know an emoticon for “what the fuck?” I could use it for this.

The digital cable has already paid for itself this month. I was playing around with the free content in the video-on-demand section, and there’re some indie music videos in there. Only when watching the video for “Understanding The New Violence” by Uncut did I realize that the version I have in my MP3 player was a remix. And the original version kicks some ass, believe you me.

Ever watch a movie or a tv show and think that one particular character was just amazingly hot, but after that they disappear or just never recapture that beauty? Maybe it was the particular character they played, maybe it was the writing, maybe it was just the time in your life when you watched it. These are the 3 biggest ones that I’ve noticed:

• Chris (Alexandra Powers) in Dead Poets Society. The classic example. Pretty much every guy who watched this movie fell in love with her along with Knox, and she was never heard from again. I still get a little swoony when she shows up in her wool coat and mittens, no matter how many times I watch the movie.
• Karen (Jennifer Lopez) in Out Of Sight. As much as I can’t stand Jennifer Lopez, and as overexposed as she is now, when I first saw this I barely knew who she was, and she played the role perfectly. She was gorgeous but sold herself as someone who could kick your ass…or, as it turned out, shoot George Clooney in the leg.
• Rebecca (Teri Polo) in Sports Night. I’m talking when we first see her, not when she suddenly shows up in the series finale. I’m not usually a fan of really short hair on women, but it worked on her. I had no time for Teri Polo in Meet The Parents or The West Wing, but as Rebecca…man. She killed me. The scene where she finally asks Dan out and they walk away while “Sloop John B” plays is *just amazing*…seriously, I can’t do it justice.

Hey, now that I think about it, 2 of those 3 played love interests to Josh Charles. Eerie.

By the way, don’t be surprised if some of these show up on Girlfriend Du Jour.

…to find their way to my Nomad:

• audioslave – doesn’t remind me
• belle orchestre – throw it on a fire
• cardigans – i need some fine wine
• detroit cobras – i wanna holler (but the town’s too small)
• earlies – morning wonder
• joel plaskett – happen now
• long winters – the commander thinks aloud
• magic numbers – forever lost
• maria taylor – birmingham 1982
• matt pond pa – champagne supernova
• rogue wave – publish my love
• serena-maneesh – drain cosmetics
• thrush hermit – the day we hit the coast
• troubled hubble – what we do
• uncut – understanding the new violence
• william elliott whitmore – the buzzards won’t cry

Want some perspective?

I don’t care if this bastard’s 81 or not, he should be locked up for 10 years for the decades of animal abuse. And how ridiculous are the Canadian animal abuse laws that, despite being found guilty of 42 counts of dog abuse, they’ll be able to own pets again in 8 years?

Oh, you’d better believe I’ll be watchin’ this: “I Walk The Line: A Night For Johnny Cash”.

November 16 on CBS, kids. Set your VCRs. And, uh…prime your TiVos?

Last week was a weird one for me. If you were reading my posts you saw that I missed a couple of days at work and wasn’t feeling great. I didn’t say much about it ’cause I didn’t want to freak people out unnecessarily, but it seems like everything’s ok now.

Tuesday at work I started having pain in my chest. Not bad pain, but it was localized around my heart, so I noticed it. Even joked about it with people in the office; I wasn’t worried about it. But when I got home I started to feel numbness in my left wrist and hand, which started to worry me. I mentioned it to my wife and laid down on the couch. It seemed to go away, but came back after I got up and moved around again. After a quick check on WebMD I decided to call Telehealth; the nurse told me I should go to an emergency room. Now I was a bit freaked out. And annoyed too; for days I’d been looking forward to ordering pizza and watching the Canadiens play the Bruins on TSN. Now, just before the game started, I was getting in a cab and heading to St. Mike’s. The numbness in my hand had pretty much stopped, but I was feeling a little wonky, which I chalked up to nerves. My breathing was fine, the pain was minimal and I wasn’t lightheaded, so I didn’t show any other signs of a heart attack…but still, better safe than sorry, I figured.

The emergency room was interesting, especially since I’ve never been in one before. St. Mike’s, I think, is a bit more interesting than most; the guy next to us was in handcuffs and had a police escort. So there was that. Anyway, after being processed I managed to watch a few minutes of the Canadiens-Bruins game in the waiting room. Nellie waited with me, reading her book.

After maybe half an hour a nurse came to get me and took me back into the ‘major’ area, hooked me up to about a thousand little leads and starting doing tests & asking questions. My blood pressure was kinda high, but I figure it’s because they were hooking me up like a new Borg victim. And the poor nurse had some trouble drawing blood; I have my mother’s veins, so after 10 minutes of trying to find one in my arms she took some — very slowly — from the back of my hand. Anyway, many tests & consultations later, they told me there was probably nothing wrong with my heart. ECG, blood pressure, heart rate, blood work, chest x-ray..all normal. They thought it might be related to some weights I’d been lifting a couple of nights before…maybe a pulled muscle or something. After about an hour Nellie finally just walked back there and asked to see me; I’d wanted to send someone for her so she didn’t worry, but the nurses disappeared after they were sure I wasn’t critical.

They kept me around for a second blood test just to be sure (this time the nurse taking the blood really knew her shit; she hit a vein in my arm on her first try); poor Nellie had to sit there in a chair next to the bed and wait. It wasn’t a fun place to be; there was a hyperactive drug case nearby, a man yelling at the woman waiting with him because she wanted to go home, an old delirious woman who moaned and cried non-stop…I just wanted to get out of there. Finally they let me go at 2:00 AM. I was never so happy to get into a cab, pet the cats and crawl into my own bed.

Five days later I still have some of that pain in my chest, but it’s less now. I mostly feel it when I turn on one side, or stretch my left arm in a funny way, or sit cramped into a theatre seat or something. I found a doctor and scheduled a checkup — my first ever — for this week. It’s weird; I realized that up until now I’ve felt kind of indestructible. I’ve never broken a bone, despite falling out of trees and off of roofs many times as a kid. I’ve never even had a nosebleed, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I caught an elbow in the low post. The worst thing that’s happened is my shoulder injury last year, and that went away after a few physio sessions. It probably still stands as the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but there’s nothing like a few hours in St. Mike’s to put some fear in you. I’m trying to eat better now, and once I feel up to it I’ll step up the exercise.

I feel I should say something about the hospital. For all the complaining about our health care system, I thought it could’ve been a lot worse. I was processed and in a bed in about half an hour; granted, that might have been because I was showing heart attack symptoms, but I have no other basis of comparison. The nurses were great, the doctors seemed good, and from the time I hit the bed until I was discharged it was just over 5 hours. That seemed like a lifetime while I was sitting there wondering about my own fate, but it’s probably a reasonable amount of time to do 3 assessments, a chest x-ray and 2 rounds of blood tests.

I feel I should also say something about my wife. She never once looked or acted more worried than I did, and I’m generally a pretty calm guy. I’m not sure I would’ve kept it together as well as I did if she hadn’t been there; she even paid attention to the score of the hockey game so she could update me. It’s not like I was going through hell (especially compared to some of the other patients), but it’s not much fun sitting there alone trying to keep your fears and paranoia from driving you nuts. I can’t imagine having anyone else next to me right then.

So yeah, it was a pretty freaky night. But it all turned out fine in the end: the Canadiens won the game 4-3.

First of all, may I just say how much we lurve the PVR? LURVE IT!!!

Ahem.

We’ve watched three movies so far this weekend, and they’re three pretty wide-ranging choices. The only way the weekend could get more diverse is if I finally popped in the copy of Jules et Jim that’s been sitting by the TV for a month. But here’s what we have seen:

• Trees Lounge (imdb | rotten tomatoes), another one that I’ve meant to rent since university, got buried at the bottom of my zip list and sent to me pretty much at random. It’s Steve Buscemi from top to bottom…written, directed and starred. It didn’t have a movie plot so much as it recounted a story, like a collection of Raymond Carver stories about the same guy strung together into a screenplay. I found myself feeling actively indifferent about Buscemi’s character, which I suppose in itself is an accomplishment on his part.
• I went to see Doom (imdb | rotten tomatoes) in spite of the bad ratings because I used to play the game. My wife went to see it because she has a thing for The Rock. Really, it was just shit. I wish that, just once, they’d abandon any thoughts of crafting a terrible plot and giving characters shallow backgrounds and dreaming up some absurd scientific explanation for what’s gone wrong. Instead of all that, just show 90 minutes of non-stop mayhem. Seriously. Give the guys their chainsaws and BFGs and shotguns and send the baddies at them. Let the tension (which was completely non-existent here) rule the day, like it did in the game. Tension + large guns + gore = happy fans. But hey, they have my money, so what do they care? By the way, it was obvious that the majority of yesterday’s audience were hardcore gamers reliving their youth, as most lacked any social graces that would indicate daily exposure to humans.
• I thought Bubba Ho-Tep (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was hilarious. My wife…not so much. But c’mon, how could you not love the premise? Any movie featuring Elvis, old and in a nursing home, teaming up with an old black man who thinks he’s JFK to fight a re-animated Egyptian mummy dressed as a cowboy just has to be good. I thought it was hilarious, with just enough ridiculous over-the-topness to remind you that the cast is in on the joke. If you like satire & zombie movies, this one’s a pretty good bet. “But what do I care? I got a growth on my pecker.” Hee hee hee. I’m twelve.

Via Yes But No But Yes, I read this Ask MetaFilter thread that’s really quite remarkable. A guy who’s just trying to track down a 1938 Vienna phone book so that he can see where his grandfather lived ends up with 15 pages of official documents that researchers from the Holocaust Museum track down for him and his family. Kind of makes up for all the porn spam, huh?

Good old Asterix.

Habs win again, by the way.