Category: TV

Awoogula

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I must be in a quirky mood. Both the new Regina Spektor disc and Hidden Cameras disc are really good. Metacritic generally agrees about the former, as does Pitchfork. The AV Club really digs it. Awoo, the Cameras disc, isn’t officially out yet, but eMusic seems to carry their catalogue so I’ll happily download it in the fall when it’s released.

.:.

I have never seen an episode of Leave It To Beaver. I have never seen an episode of The Brady Bunch either (that I recall; I think my brothers watched it when I was a kid), nor have I ever watched an episode of Gilligan’s Island.

I don’t think this is particularly odd; these shows all aired before I was even born. However, mentioning to people that I haven’t seen these shows usually sends them reeling in disbelief.

[tags]regina spektor, hidden cameras, leave it to beaver, brady bunch, gilligan’s island[/tags]

64.84%

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Comin’ up on the 2/3 mark of the course. I’m taking an hour to start putting my portion of the report into something humans can read, then eat, then circle back with the rest of the group. I’m mostly keeping the cold at bay…just have to hold on for another 43 hours or so and I’m all good.

Must…tear self…away from Simpsons episode…

[tags]mba, simpsons[/tags]

Baura? Len?

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

It’s been a big day for TimmyD. His application for British citizenship has been approved. Now, let’s hope he hasn’t bollocksed it up by not checking the post often enough.

Geez, scolding just sounds so much better when you’re British…

.:.

TimmyD was also so kind as to pass on a rumour about Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant wanting to do more episodes of The Office. They’re right about the NBC version of The Office though; it’s gotten better and better as it’s gone along. I think they’ve actually done an even better job with the whole Tim-Dawn / Jim-Pam (or “Jam”, if you’re a TV nerd) thing than the British version…of course, they’ve had many more episodes to build the tension.

.:.

Ben Harper is lost to me. His last…well, several albums (including his newest, Both Sides Of The Gun) haven’t done anything for me. I remember standing in my living room in my first apartment at Yonge & Sheppard, setting up my new stereo, when this song called “Faded” came on MuchMusic; I snappedlostit and ran out to find the disc. But since that disc…nuthin’. However, more people seem to dig him now than back then, so he’s doing something right for the masses (including Laura Dern, so you can’t blame him too much). Just not for me.

[tags]british citizenship, the office, ricky gervais, stephen merchant, nbc, ben harper[/tags]

What were people expecting?

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We went to see The Da Vinci Code (imdb | rotten tomatoes) this afternoon, just so that we’re not the only people in North America who didn’t see it this weekend. It’s been getting rotten reviews, so I was a little surprised that I didn’t mind it. I mean, it wasn’t a triumph of filmmaking or anything…it was just the book put onto the big screen. That’s it. That’s all. It was nothing more or less than the book (save a few minor alterations). This wasn’t The Godfather or All Quiet On The Western Front; this was a summer book made into a summer movie. Anyone expecting groundbreaking cinema or religious enlightenment was looking for the wrong thing and judging the movie on the wrong merits. It’s a decent, slightly-more-intelligent-than-average summer movie. The fact that it’s getting worse ratings than R.V. suggests The Da Vinci Code is bearing the critics’ hipper-than-thou wrath.

.:.

Umm…I think I know where 24 is taking place next season…

[tags]da vinci code, 24[/tags]

Elaborate, expensive porn for women

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Salon talks about how Grey’s Anatomy is “just elaborate, expensive porn for women“, which would explain why I couldn’t stand the 30 seconds that I watched once.

.:.

The Toronto Star asks whether Jon Stewart is helping or hurting.

But is his sarcasm turning those who watch him the most — young adults — into giant cynics with a diminishing trust in politicians and the institutions of democracy?

One new study, published this month in the journal American Politics Research, says yes. Reseachers have connected The Daily Show to lower opinions of politicians and greater cynicism toward the mainstream media and the electoral process itself.

My own opinion? It’s not Jon Stewart that’s making people cynical…governments and news media are doing that all on their own; Jon Stewart just calls bullshit. Maybe, though, he’s speeding things along…

[tags]jon stewart, grey’s anatomy[/tags]

"You got an ATM on that torso lite-brite?"

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

This weekend has been an exercise in comfort food. Last night we went to Fieramosca, just to relax after a long week. Nothing like a three-hour dinner to kick off the weekend, especially when it involves cheesecake.

It’s gotten to the point where they remember where we sat last time we were in, and to where the hostess is practically an old college buddy. I guess this is how Norm felt at Cheers.

Also: I love how, in all the times I’ve been there, I have yet to order off the menu.

.:.

After dinner we watched This Girl’s Life (imdb | rotten tomatoes), one of those DVDs that arrives from Zip (twice; the first copy was cracked nearly in half) and I don’t remember adding it to my list. Must’ve been a recommendation from someone. Anyway, it wasn’t very good; the lead actress looks an awful lot like Angelina Jolie, which made it easy to watch, but James Woods did such a convincing job playing her Parkinson’s afflicted father…which made it hard to watch. There were little bit parts from Rosario Dawson and Michael Rapaport, but the funniest one was Kip Pardue: both Nellie and I thought he was Sean Dugan, who played homicidal minister Timmy Kirk on Oz. She was disturbed by how well he cleaned up, when our lasting memory of him was burying Luke Perry alive inside a wall. Anyhoo.

.:.

The comfort food journey continue this afternoon after we’d picked up some food & drink at the Summerhill LCBO and All The Best, and stopped in at the Rebel House for brunch. It was a perfect day for some french toast on the patio. When he saw that Nellie had ordered a Dennison’s Weissbeer our server told us about the Press Club, a place on Dundas West that served a great Ephemere wheat beer…can’t remember if he said it was apricot or peach. Anyway, maybe we’ll check it out if we ever get down to Little Portugal.

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I’d heard some bad things about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ Show Your Bones, but after a few listens I really like it. I guess, despite whatever early press I’d heard, I’m not the only one.

.:.

This Michelle Goldberg article in Salon about the rise of “Christian Nationalism” in the US is fascinating and frustrating. These two paragraphs were the most compelling, and alarming:

“It’s not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his forty-five-year-old book ‘The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology,’ I shivered at its contemporary resonance. ‘The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith,’ he wrote in the introduction. ‘They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness.’

Fascism isn’t imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the ‘mobilizing vision’ of fascist movements as ‘the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it’ (his italics). The Ten Commandments has become a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American right.”

As she said, fascism isn’t around the corner, but I worry that we might be able to hear it in the distance.

.:.

Speaking of fascism (but the funny kind), check out this claymation video of the Emperor hearing that the Death Star had been destroyed. It’s funny if you’re even half a Star Wars geek. [via the movie blog]

[tags]fieramosca, rebel house, press club, yeah yeah yeahs, michelle goldberg, christian nationalism, death star[/tags]

"I think I'll leave it at that."

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SmartEconomist [free subscription required] estimates that the Iraq war has cost between $750 billion and $1.27 trillion, and could cost another $380 billion to $1.4 trillion…even if it stopped today. By their reckoning, $1.27 trillion would be the “moderate” estimate.

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From MSNBC: Even ringtones can be racist sometimes.

.:.

From the Star: this pollster has a pretty skewed view of our prime minister:

“The Canadian and U.S. leaders could not be more different…Stephen Harper is a genuine intellectual, brilliant in his understanding of issues. I think I’ll leave it at that.”

Still…while few Canadians would consider Harper a high-grade intellectual, he’s right about Bush.

.:.

Farewell, Veronica Mars. [warning…if you haven’t seen the season (series?) finale and you care at all, don’t read that article. spoilers abound.]

[tags]economics, iraq war, racist ringtone, stephen harper, dubya, frank luntz, veronica mars[/tags]

A pair of knockouts

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Last night’s episode of 24 was like an Oz mini-reunion. Kirk Acevedo (aka Miguel Alvarez) shows up as air marshal (prompting a “woo-hoo!” from my wife) and within five seconds is knocked unconscious by Jack. In another scene Blake Robbins (aka Officer Brass) meets with the business end of Chloe’s taser. So, welcome to the show guys. Try to stay conscious next episode.

.:.

I’m glad someone else watched the Daily Show last week when that nimrod from the Wall Street Journal was on to discuss oil prices & profits. Core Econ points out the errors in her logic, which could have been avoided if she remembered that profit = revenue – expense.

.:.

I’ve pretty much had it with the recording industry. I’m tired (and apparently so are a lot of Canadian musicians) of “copy-controlled” discs that make it hard to convert the music to the format I want and won’t play through my Roku because of license bullshit. I’m tired of paying $10 a month for a music download service when they only carry one out of every five albums that I’m looking for, or worse yet, tell me that I can’t download music by a Toronto band because the site and the label haven’t got their licensing shit straight.

So here’s what I’m doing: from now on when I want to download an album, I’ll check my official downloading options (I still pay for eMusic); if I can find it and download it from there, great. If I can’t, I’ll download it using P2P software. I’m sick of this. It’s not as if the technology doesn’t exist for me to listen to music in this manner; everyone and their dog has an MP3 player, so the music companies should be falling over themselves to get us digital music. But all buggy whip manufacturers know is how to build more buggy whips, and they’ll just keep trying to bend the world to their will. I’m done being bent.*

* That didn’t come out how I planned.

.:.

[tags]24, daily show, economics, oil, filesharing, P2P, CRIA, emusic[/tags]

ScaryStupidScary

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I think that when my guy at Harry Rosen teases me for spending way less than usual, I have a bit of a clothes spending problem. And here I was proud of myself for walking out with only a pair of shoes (these ones, in fact).

.:.

I watched a pile of movies this weekend, most of which we’ve had stored on the PVR for a while and I just hadn’t gotten to (along with the fifteen or so still on there):

  • Warrendale (Allan King Films) was a CBC documentary made in the late 60s that the CBC refused to air. It was about emotionally troubled kids living together in a house with some (remarkably patient, by the look of it) caretakers, and seemed shocking in a few ways: the language the kids used (you’re used to any TV made during the 60s being scrubbed so clean that to hear a little boy screaming “fuck you!” over and over is startling), and the methods they used to control the kids (calming them during tantrums by wrapping up their arms and legs). It was also a little weird to see a teenage girl being bottle fed by the same woman whose face she was screaming in earlier that day. Interesting, certainly, but hard to watch.
  • The Rules Of Attraction (imdb | rotten tomatoes) wasn’t so serious, but it was depressing in its own way. I’ve come to learn that I don’t really like movies based on Bret Easton Ellis novels, and I’m also more certain than ever now that I despise the 80s; Ellis, if his books even remotely resemble an accurate picture of what things were like for rich college kids, has just given me more reason to despise them. I’ll say this for the movie: it managed to keep me from thinking about Dawson’s Creek every time James Van Der Beek was on the screen, which is no small feat.
  • I got back to the serious stuff with Ghosts Of Attica (imdb). I knew little about the Attica riots, since they happened four years before I was born, but if you’ve seen Dog Day Afternoon and you watch enough Oz you pick up a few things. It ended up being a similar story to a topic I’d discussed recently with friends: the Kent State massacre, which happened just 16 months before the Attica riots. The problem — social unrest and mass uprising — and the response — a violent overreaction by police — were eerily similar in both cases. Whatever horrible things the Attica prisoners did to get themselves thrown in prison (ignoring any bearing racism or poverty might have had on their incarceration), they didn’t deserve to be shot in the back, and the guards surely didn’t deserve to be shot in the same cowardly way by their would-be rescuers.

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We also downloaded the first season of Deadwood this weekend; I watched the first couple of episodes, but I’m just not as into it as Nellie is. She’s always had a bit more of a western fascination than I.

.:.

Now that basketball’s over with (for me, not the Raptors…although I think even I played later into the year than they did…) I’ve gone back to running. I only did two miles tonight, just enough to get back into it. My legs felt a bit tight, probably since I haven’t run on a treadmill in a while. It should be warm (and dry, more to the point) enough soon to run outside, but that doesn’t last long; by June Toronto’s too choked with smog and humidity to run outside. For me, anyway.