This sucks. My friend who sits next to me at work is going to be gone for 2-3 months. She was my source of daily entertainment, so it’s gonna be a quiet spring. As far as the other two people with whom I’ll share a pod (as of Monday), one is on vacation in Pakistan/Dubai and the other only works part time in this office, so it’ll be a tomb in here next week.
First Stanzi deserts me, and now T-Bone. Was it something I said?
I have now ripped all1 of my CDs to my hard drive, and moved them all2 to my Nomad. The song count is currently 6,992 songs and I still have 10+ GB left.
1 except for about 20 that I may sell rather than rip
2 except for the soundtracks and ‘various artist’ discs. i still have to fix the tags for those.
I gotta say, I’m impressed with Scoble. Agree with his politics or not (and I do, at least on this issue), to publicly call out your employer (who happens to be a multinational corporate giant) on a moral issue takes big brass ones. He did it in a respectful way, mind you — no calling of names or overt invoking of Godwin — but it’s getting massive attention, inside and outside the company, so the guy’s gotta be feeling like a punching bag tied to a lightning rod right now.
This raises an interesting situation: will companies employing known bloggers now hesitate to make an evil or dilbert-like decision? It’s one thing for the public to disagree, but if employees protest their own company’s decision, that looks bad. So one of two things will happen: employee blogs will push companies to be more socially responsible, or companies will disallow employee blogging. Unfortunately, I think I can guess which way this is gonna go…
Gah. I had a work breakfast thingy this morning, and the “pancakes” with “maple syrup” are still terrorizing my guts.
Since I started keeping this infernal blog, I realized that I can go back and figure out which movies I’ve seen and when. So I decided to do just that, and in so doing, determine the ten best movies I saw last year. The only criteria is that I watched them last year; they weren’t all necessarily made in 2004. Oh, and no DVD sets; that’s the only reason The Wire isn’t topping the list. And so, in alphabetical order only:
If only I still had time to read novels, I could do a favourite books post. How about favourite chapters of accounting or finance textbooks? No?
Man, we’re having good luck this year. Tonight’s film Street Fight (hot docs | PBS) gave us our third great result in as many nights. This one focused on a 2002 mayoral election in Newark, and showed us the ultra-dirty back-alley rumble that is small-town — or, in this case, medium-sized-city — politics. And this between two Democrats!
The audacity and rampant dishonesty was eye-opening, but hardly shocking considering the eye-gouging and crotch-punching that featured so prominently in last year’s federal election. It was very shocking, however, to learn how much these guys have to spend on campaigns, even at a fairly low level.
Informative, entertaining, sometimes exasperating, and so well worth watching. We both gave it 4 out of 5.
Plan for today: clean up, shower, meet CBGB for breakfast, work on accounting assignment, take recycling downstairs, get groceries, dominate world (kidding), clean up remaining MP3s and transfer to Nomad, book flights to the farm for July, beat cats (kidding, mostly), read through daily pile o’ RSS feeds, catch up on emails, go to the gym (kidding, almost certainly), attend third hot docs flick, eat dinner, tackle stack of magazines, sleep.
Or something like that.
Umbrellas: best invention ever. We lined up again tonight, this time at the Bloor Cinema, in the pouring rain to see The Cross And Bones (hot docs | toronto.com), a documentary shot in just 15 days in Drumheller, AB. Imagine a scenario where scientists studying the dinosaur bones, Christians performing a passion play, and hundreds of bikers all gather in a town of 6,000 for a few weeks. It veered from absurd & hilarious to sad and a little depressing.
The coolest part: the two most sensible and accomodating people in the whole movie were the Jesus understudy and an enormous biker with a Fu Manchu moustache.
4 out of 5.
Man, Air Miles sucks. I’m booking three months in advance for a flight to Halifax, of which there eleven that day. Air Miles only has seats on the earliest and two latest flights, nothing on the other either. The three available flights are all so early or so late that no normal human would want to take them.
Argh.
Pretty good start to the Hot Docs festival. Last night we saw Murderball (hot docs | imdb | rotten tomatoes) at the Isabel Bader theatre. It had gotten a lot of hype from the local newspapers & weeklies, but we weren’t disappointed. Far from it, in fact. It was even better than advertised: funny, intense, inspirational, informative, engaging…everything you want from a film, and everything you wish TV could be on a regular basis. The characters in this film will stay with me for a while. They have issues, just as we all do; theirs are bigger, but that means they’ve had to do more to overcome them and get on with their shit, and that makes them compelling. The filmmakers did an incredible job to show us that.
To steal a term from Bill Simmons, there were a few “chill moments” in Murderball, but another occurred after the credits during the Q&A (captured perfectly, as always, by Sam at Daily Dose Of Imagery) when one of the directors acknowledged Jeff Adams in the crowd. It was something to see him in person, and nice to see him give the film a thumbs up.
So write this one down now. When it comes to theatres or gets released on DVD, put down your money. It’s worth it. Speaking of money, last night confirmed something for me: a festival pass for Hot Docs is, hands down, the best $60 you can spend on entertainment in this city.
I gave it 5 out of 5 on my ballot. If I’d had a pen I’d have written in a 6 and circled it.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 