Insane. Racist. Cowardly. Whiny. Scary. Tragic. Unbelievable.

Holy CRAP, this looks good.

[via]

From Eye: R.L. Burnside dead at 78.

If you buy one of x, you are a y.

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
When the levee breaks I’ll have no place to stay.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Lord, mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.
Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way home,
You don’t know which way to go?
If you’re goin’ down south
They go no work to do,
If you don’t know about chicago.
Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
Now, cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.
All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
Thinkin’ ’bout me baby and my happy home.
Going, go’n’ to chicago,
Go’n’ to chicago,
Sorry but I can’t take you.
Going down, going down now, going down.

When The Levee Breaks

Hang in there, NoLa.

Someone at work pointed out the following:

If you’re black it’s called looting, but if you’re white it’s called finding.

[update: turns out he got it from Atrios or Kos]

Last night we pored over the film festival programme book and I came up with a list of 58 festival films that I want to see:

1. 3 Needles
2. A History Of Violence
3. A Little Trip To Heaven
4. American Gun
5. Angel
6. Backstage
7. Bangkok Loco
8. Bee Season
9. Beowulf & Grendel
10. Breakfast On Pluto
11. Brokeback Mountain
12. Bubble
13. Capote
14. Dear Wendy
15. Edison
16. Elizabethtown
17. Everything Is Illuminated
18. Fateless
19. Free Zone
20. Harsh Times
21. Imagine Me And You
22. In Her Shoes
23. L’Enfer
24. Les Saignantes
25. Lie With Me
26. Little Athens
27. Little Fish
28. Manderlay
29. Mary
30. Mrs. Henderson Presents
31. Neverwas
32. No Direction Home
33. North Country
34. One Last Thing
35. Proof
36. Revolver
37. River Queen
38. Romance & Cigarettes
39. Shadowboxer
40. Shopgirl
41. Slow Burn
42. Sorry, Haters
43. Sympathy For Lady Vengeance
44. Thank You For Smoking
45. The Proposition
46. The Quiet
47. The Three Burials Of Melquides Estrada
48. The War Within
49. These Girls
50. Thumbsucker
51. Tideland
52. Transamerica
53. Trust The Man
54. Walk The Line
55. We Feed The World
56. Where The Truth Lies
57. Why We Fight
58. Winter Passing

Many of them I won’t bother marking because they’ll be released to theatres soon, or because they’re galas, or because the schedule just doesn’t allow (I’m away on course for a whole week right in the middle of it!). After running the rest by my wife to get her opinion, I believe we have narrowed our list down to the required ten. We’re only seeing five, of course, but you have to pick 1st and 2nd choices for each. Here’s the tentative list:

1. 1. 3 Needles
2. 1. Sorry, Haters
3. 1. Thank You For Smoking
4. 1. These Girls
5. 1. Winter Passing
6. 2. Harsh Times
7. 2. Imagine Me and You (working title)
8. 2. Lie With Me
9. 2. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
10. 2. The Quiet

I’ll probably buy a single ticket here or there as well, depending on when I get back from my course, what’s available, etc.

I have no sympathy — zero — for people who whine about gas prices. The top story on the news this morning: hundreds dead from Hurricane Katrina. Story #2: the rise in gas prices because of the hurricane. Gas was selling for about $1.20 this morning at some GTA gas stations, and you’d think the goddamn apocalypse was nigh.

Get it straight, people: low gas prices aren’t a human right. It’s not guaranteed anywhere in the charter. It’s a fucking commodity, and the people who control it can charge you whatever the hell they like. Ever notice how airine tickets double in price around Christmas? It’s not because the airlines improve their service (god knows), or because it’s harder to fly at that time of year. It’s because they know people will pay it. Is it greedy? Of course. Is it gouging? Absolutely. Airlines and oil companies aren’t in it to be altruistic, they’re in it to make enormous amount of money…just like every other for-profit business ever incorporated in the history of the world.

And why shouldn’t they gouge us? We keep paying for it. We tell ourselves that cars are absolutely vital to our survival, and we just keep lining up to suck their nozzles no matter how many times they punch us in the face. We keep moving further and further away from our workplaces, naively assuming that there will always be low gas prices and open highways to take us wherever we want. For example, take the woman interviewed in this story who says, “I do an hour and a half every day to and from work, so this is not good.” No fucking shit, lady, did you think you were ordering a pizza? If you have to drive 90 minutes (presumably by highway) each way to get to work, you’ve made a really shitty decision somewhere along the way. Move closer to work. Take a GO train. Car pool. Trade up to a hybrid. Do anything, but please, just stop whining about how you’ve become a victim of your own excesses. It’s boring.

We had CBGB over this evening to teach them the intracacies of the film festival ordering process. There was also some free pizza delivered (where we learned about the “chicken wing” formula (x/2 + 1)) and a riddle invoving the man who walks into a restaurant, eats the seagull and shoots himself. We also finalized our picks tonight; I’ll be posting them on radioDan tomorrow.

I just walked by the TIFF processing centre (it’s practically around the corner from my office)…the lineup stretches all the way over the Bay Street and maybe further. Apparently this happens every year: people line up to get in the door at 9 AM…but they’ve already bought the tickets. They’re reserved. Getting there early doesn’t help you in any way.

And each year I see people walk out with their request forms and begin madly scanning the forms, trying to pick their films as quickly as possible so they can submit their completed envelopes. It’s a random draw, you knobs! It doesn’t matter which box you put your envelope in. The last person to submit has just as good a chance to win the lottery as you do.

I’d like to think that anyone who sees the film festival is reasonably intelligent, so I put this down to herd mentality. Me, I’ll be sitting here at my computer, downloading the schedule from the website, drinking a dp. Losers.