I can’t believe how stupid this looks.

And with panic spreading faster than the virus, the once clean and healthy city of Toronto became the pariah of the western world. Restaurants, theatres and streets emptied, and incoming travel and tourism were virtually shut down.

Are they fucking kidding? I barely noticed! Not to diminish the deaths or the effort by the health care workers, but jesus…they make it sound like there were tumbleweeds blowing up Yonge Street! We still went to work, we still used the subway (there were just a few more people than usual wearing masks), we still ate at restaurants and went to movies and played in parks. These idiots are making it sound like the scene at the beginning of 28 Days Later where Jim’s walking around an empty London.

Not that I have a lot of respect for CTV to begin with, but it’s just sad that they have to completely stretch and distort everything in order to exploit the city. Then again, there’s certainly a big Canadian audience who’s willing to watch Toronto take it in the nuts…

My Nomad just served up Bruce Springsteen‘s acoustic rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (which gives me chills, by the way) followed by “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by The Band.

[update: my Nomad quickly put an end to that by throwing NIN‘s “Love Is Not Enough” at me]

Almost forgot…the other night we also watched Blue In The Face (imdb | rotten tomatoes), the companion piece to Smoke. It was a bit too jumpy and spazzy to really feel like a movie; it was more like a series of vignettes strung together, half seemingly random (explained away by Harvey Keitel’s Auggie as a bunch of bizarre things that all happened around the same time) and half as a love letter to Brooklyn. The spazziness was predictable since most of the film was improvised, but there some particularly funny bits: Michael J. Fox, Lily Tomlin, Madonna, Mel Gorham singing in front of the mirror, and Roseanne. It was also cool to see Jim Jarmusch basically laying the groundwork for Coffee And Cigarettes.

Amusing enough if you’ve seen Smoke, but not enough to stand on its own.

I meant to comment on the season finale of 24 earlier, but I think Salon says it pretty well:

The surprisingly strong fourth season of “24” ends with an anticlimactic “Pfffft!” — but at least we got the panicked, unethical president we so richly deserve!

Best thing about the episode: Mandy’s still alive and free (I think) to wreak sexy, sexy havoc.

I’ve been reading some things about personal computer security this afternoon. On my personal machine at home I run two firewalls, a virus scan program that runs in the background and does a full scan weekly, and two anti-virus programs (one of which also runs in the background, both of which do weekly scans). I’ve adjusted settings so that no one can change my registry without my knowing. I use Firefox & Gmail. I never open spam and never download strange attachments. I don’t run any IM software. My wireless router is restricted by client IP and protected with a WEP key. I do use a P2P sharing program, but it’s not Kazaa or anything like that.

Now, I’m probably in the top 5% of the general public regarding computer knowledge — not a hardcore programmer geek but not a novice either — and even with all the stuff I do to protect my machine, I still get thousands of probes, port scans & attacks, which means it’s happening to all of us. So, assuming that 5% number is accurate, you’ve got 95% of the population out there with god-knows-what happening to their PCs.

Yeesh.

Would it be wrong to make this my sig at work?

[via]

Could someone explain to me why one of the top stories in my google news view is that Ralph Klein almost — almost — poked the Queen in the head with an umbrella? Who cares? Ralph was probably drunk, fer chrissakes, and ten bucks says he’ll try to blame it on Paul Martin anyway, so why is this such a great honking affair? When will people realize that the Queen is just some self-important old woman of no consequence whatsoever, a truly boring holdover from an archaic tradition, and that a poke in the hat with an umbrella is of no more importance than what I had for breakfast this morning.

I’m pissed. Today I had absolutely nothing to do, so I was hoping to relax on the couch or go outside and enjoy the nice weather, but ever since breakfast this morning I’ve had a brutal headache and felt generally lousy. Maybe CBGB brought back a case of Dengue Fever from Cuba…

Right after we got home from the movie last night we watched the final episode in season 3 of Six Feet Under. As always it’ll take a while to sink in. We’ll probably watch it again after the list of borrowers are through with it, but for now it feels like season 2 did: a bit underwhelming. But I suppose that’s the whole point of the show, to be quiet and restrained and always leave a little too much bubbling under the surface, just waiting to boil over. Or even explode.

And now HBO’s gonna make me wait for a year to watch season 4.

Yes, it had some bad dialog, and yes, it smelled slightly of cheese in a few parts. But Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith (imdb | rotten tomatoes | metacritic) was without a doubt the best Star Wars movie to come out since Return Of The Jedi. In fact, it may be better than Jedi; I’ll need a few more viewings to really tell.

It had more (and better) action. The acting didn’t seem quite as wooden. The battle scenes were killer. They did a nice job of tying episode III to episode IV (albeit with a few continuity problems, but I suppose only geeks like me would notice those). They added wookies and beefed up the screen time for R2D2, while practically eliminating C3PO and Jar-Jar. And the plot seemed to have more flow this time; in episodes I & II it felt like we were watching set pieces being moved around a stage turn by clunky turn.

It wasn’t a great movie, but none of them were. I just think that Lucas finally made another episode with the same feel as the originals. So if this really is the last Star Wars movie that I’m to see, it went out on a pretty good note.