The Film Fesitval site has been updated for 2005. Passes go on sale next Monday. I get pumped about this every year; this year there’ll be fewer movies for us (my next course falls right in the middle of the festival), but I still look forward to the buzz the city gets.

Finally sorted through all the pictures. Just under 700 usuable ones. Whew! I should be able to upload them sometime this week while I’m reading all my HR crap. In the meantime, here’s one of my favourites:

I should have the rest up somewhere soon. Haven’t yet decided which ones I’ll share, and how. Stay tuned.

Hooray for schoolwork. I have to read 127 pages of HR and write a six page paper by next Monday. Oh, and I have two summerlicious dinners (one tomorrow evening, one the day the paper’s due), and a friend visiting from out of town on Friday.

I guess I’m paying the penalty for a two-week vacation now…

Willie Nelson to release reggae album. Also: cats and dogs to live together.

Ah, back to the crap. I have a small assignment due Monday, so I had to get back to (school) work today. I also realized that I have a larger paper due a week from Monday, and haven’t even begun reading any of the material yet. Whee.

The other night my wife asked me if I’d seen the video for Jessica Simpson‘s remake of “These Boots Are Made For Walkin” yet. Of course I hadn’t, but I had read a few snippets of news surrounding the controversy over it. I knew that she’d sexed up the video, that Christian groups (who claim she used to represent them) were upset about it, and that her handlers were so unoriginal that they had to rip off Paris Hilton’s sexy-car-washing shtick. So this morning I watched it, and I can safely say this: Jessica Simpson is a talentless whore.

We already knew the talentless part; the whore thing is just fairly new.

So full…so tired…must go to sleep soon. The chocolate torte was delish.

…going to see one or two of these:

• A Silver Mt Zion @ Tranzac, Jul 27-29
• The Shout Out Louds @ Lee’s Palace, Aug 4
• Foo Fighters @ Molson Amphitheatre, Aug 13
• The Constantines @ Lee’s Palace, Aug 20
• The White Stripes @ Molson Amphitheatre, Sep 16
• Sigur Rós @ Massey Hall, Sep 19
• BRMC @ Phoenix, Sep 24

Summerlicious kicks off tonight. We’re heading to Wildfire with T-Bone, our first of four outings.

Some final thoughts on the grand European tour of 2005:

• We did a lot. London, Edinburgh, Vienna and Budapest in 12 days. We had a nice little wind-down toward the end of the trip that kept us from being completely wiped out when we returned to Toronto…but we’re still pretty tired.
• The German poo-shelf toilet is truly an unnecessary and diabolical invention. If you don’t know what the poo-shelf toilet is, click here.
• I loved Vienna. Loved loved loved it. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s friendly, and it has Hugo Boss shops on every other block. I got a distinct feeling of similarity between Austria and Canada in that both countries are overshadowed by their superpower neighbour, whose culture tends to dominate (or at least permeate) their own. I want to go back some day. Also, this has increased my already strong desire to visit Switzerland.
• Budapest I liked a little less, though I wonder how much of that was the halo effect from the unfortunate transit experiences we had arriving and leaving.
• Edinburgh was very much a hot and cold thing for me. Parts of it I loved, other parts I didn’t like at all. Nellie’s right, I think it’s very much like Halifax; if you live there for a while you get to know all the cool spots and learn the real charm of the city, but if you’re just visiting you may only see the less-than-flattering aspects. But what we saw, and what we saw of Scotland in general, was still a great experience. Same goes for the English countryside.
• London’s in my thoughts today, obviously. Two days ago we were wandering the streets where the bombs went off this morning. Yesterday we were chagrined at being on an express train when the Olympic announcement was made and we couldn’t share the moment. My brother and his girlfriend are there…safe, but surely shaken. I have the utmost faith in London’s ability to cope and rebound, but for now the attacks five time zones away seem too close to home by far.
• Speaking of my brother and his girlfriend, we’re tremendously grateful for everything they did. Hosting, organizing, driving, collaborating, laughing, guiding, providing…they made a great trip exceptional. Our memories will be as much of them as of the places we saw.
• The cats are frickin’ ecstatic that we’re back. One of them slept on my head all night.

That’s about it. Pictures are forthcoming; I dumped nearly 900 onto my hard drive. We’ll sort through them and put the good ones on display…somewhere.