Category: TV

Triomphant

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We just had our second amazing meal in as many nights. Triomphe, a newish restaurant next door to our hotel, was reaaallllllly good. Check out what I had:

  • Baby spinach salas w/ bacon lardoons, tomato, candied walnuts, stilton cheese and sherry vinaigrette
  • Maple glazed pepper crusted venison red leg with caramelized pears, sweet potato puree and brussel sprouts & mashed potatoes drizzled with truffle oil
  • Bittersweet chocolate truffle cake served with fresh whipped cream, berries and pomegranate molasses
  • A bottle of Jink’s Creek Shiraz (shared with Nellie, of course)

We made it home just in time to watch the Daily Show, which is surreal. 5 hours ago we were watching this live. Weird.

Mission accomplished

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We just left the Daily Show taping and we’re kinda hoarse from the laughing and yelling. It was really cool to watch, but very short. Like the host. Hoo ha!!

Anyway, very cool. Now we can relax for a bit before dinner which is, conveniently, right next door.

On line, online

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We’re waiting to get into the Daily Show. Being uber-prepared we’re 90 minutes early, but we’re about 20th in line. Doors open at 5 and we didn’t think to bring our books, so I’ve got some time to kill.

We started off the morning with some fast, greasy, diner food just down the street from the hotel before walking up 6th Avenue to MoMA. We blasted through that, taking in all the Picasso and Pollock and Warhol and Matisse and Rothko and Magritte (the last two being my favourites) we could absorb in a short amount of time.

Next up was Rockefeller Center, where we paid to go up to the 70th floor. There’s an open-air observation deck up there that gave us great views of the entire city. Since our last trip here only gave us the chance to go up the Empire State Building at night, this was a good daytime substitute. Too bad it was hazy.

But really, the reason it was hazy is that it’s been so warm. It’s been in the low 60s, which to the rest of the world is in the mid to high teens, I think. We’ve been enjoying the sunshine and lack of jacket.

Anyway, after a quick trip back to the hotel, a long stroll through Hell’s Kitchen to the Comedy Central studios and a quick bite to eat, here we are.

And now we wait.

"You're asking the wrong question."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We watched Omagh (imdb | rotten tomatoes) last night. I love Paul Greengrass’ films; he didn’t direct this one, but he did help write it. And Pete Travis’ style was so similar to Bloody Sunday that it might as well have been the same man. Interestingly enough, it arrived via Zip the day before it was released to theatres here in Canada.

The film is about the 1998 IRA bombing in the town of Omagh, primarily the aftermath and the families of the victims looking to bureaucrats for answers and finding none. It didn’t have the same gutwrenching build that Bloody Sunday did; it was meant to show the long, lasting desperation of the families, the juxtaposition of raw emotion against calculated politics. Highly recommended.

.:.

Off to New York in a couple of hours. We’ll be in the Daily Show audience tomorrow night; not that they show the audience, but maybe you’ll hear him pick on us out-of-towners.

"That's Protestant whiskey!"

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We watched the entire third season of The Wire over the weekend. It’s addictive, that show, which I guess explains why we watched 4 episodes a day. It seemed to wrap everything up in a neat little package; I don’t know if they weren’t expecting a fourth season (there will be one, by the way) or if they just wanted to start fresh.

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I gave up travel agencies in favour of airline’s websites 8 or 9 years ago, but recently more sites have completely changed the way I plan my travel. We’ve planned our upcoming trips to New York, Montreal and the Rockies by booking our reward flights on Aeroplan, researching our hotels using Tripadvisor and plain old Google, booking rental cars on Expedia, searching for image of our destinations on Flickr, seeing where our hotels were on Google Maps and ordering guide books from Indigo.

Hey CBS…howzabout you digitally insert these crackers up your ass?

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Reuters is reporting that CBS has begun digitally inserting products into TV shows (after they’re filmed) as a way of generating ad revenue. I suspect it’s the same type of technology networks have used to place ads in baseball games (on the backstop) and soccer matches (on the field) in recent years.

Not that product placement is new for the networks, but this just makes it all a lot easier. I guess they have to make up for the fact that everyone (myself included) TiVos shows and skips the commercials nowadays. Still, I’d rather they do product placement than run ads for an upcoming show on the bottom third of the screen while I’m trying to watch something.

The place is dead anyway

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Since Nellie’s sick, we’ve been laying low this weekend, which means we’ve watched lots of movies & recorded TV. Actually, because of her faux-OCD, Nellie’s holed up on the couch right now with the kleenex, her laptop and some downloaded Veronica Mars. But we’ve also watched:

  • XX/XY (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was something we’d never heard of, but IFC has been advertising it like mad. We both like Mark Ruffalo, so I recorded it. It wasn’t bad; a little whiny and self-interested maybe, but I’ve seen worse. I had to laugh at the tagline though: “There’s no room for honesty in a healthy relationship.”
  • Power & Terror: Noam Chomsky In Our Times (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a Japanese documentary that just featured a couple of lectures and interviews with Chomsky shortly after the 9/11 attacks. It was interesting to hear his take on things when feelings were still so raw…he asked for perspective (“The best way to stop the practice of terrorism around the world is to stop participating in it…”) but also contradicted those proclaiming imminent doom by saying that, all in all, the world is a much better place than it was even 50 years ago, and *far* better than it was two centuries ago.
  • But I’m A Cheerleader (imdb | rotten tomatoes) started off as a pretty smart and biting satire about sexual mores, religion and politics, but ended up degenerating into a plain old girl-meets-girl love story. Meh.

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I don’t get companies who treat their email address like a fax line. It’s not something you just check once a week, people. It’s a personal communication channel. You know, like a tel-e-phone? Catch up.

.:.

CBGB called us tonight from the pub around the corner and asked us to join. Since we hadn’t gotten off our asses all day, and since Nellie was feeling better, we did. They’d just left a chocolate-making class we gave CB for her birthday, and had loads of their own handiwork with them. We had chocolate-covered strawberries and truffles over pints of beer and nachos. Somehow it came up that they’d never seen Swingers (money, baby!) so we came back here to watch it. Then CB spilled tea on herself and we made her watch Family Business, which scandalized her. So not a good night for her.

.:.

And now: the NBA all-star skills competition. God bless the PVR.

Am I even awake?

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Have I missed something? Who the hell is Neil Entwistle?

.:.

Canada loses 2-0 to Switzerland in men’s hockey. In other news, wood does NOT float.

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If you’ve been watching CBC’s Olympic coverage at all, you’ve seen the ads for Yoplait Creamy yogurt. And you know that they are probably the most irritating commercials ever devised and set loose upon the world of man. Worse than the talking beavers. Worse than the McCain’s oeuvre. Worse than the horribly dubbed shampoo and deodorant commercials. Worse than Bad Boy. OK, maybe not, but…seriously. I’m thinking about PVR’ing the entire day so that I can skip the commercials and spare myself the pain.

.:.

Any now the guy who Cheney shot is apologizing to Cheney. It’s like I’m trapped in a nightmare of retarded news, commercials and hockey scores. He’p me.

Hunting is for pussies

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OK…I’ve managed to hold off on making fun of Cheney for the whole shooting thing…the White House delay in reporting it, the blame-throwing, and the, you know, shooting of an old man in the face. But the part that really gets me is this ranch they were hunting on: you drive up to a spot where a bunch of birds — who’ve been raised in pens and had their wings clipped — are placed, you get out of the car and you shoot them. How fucking sporting. Just when you thought Cheney couldn’t be any more of a shit, he goes and one-ups you.

[UPDATE] By the way, The Daily Show was a tour de force last night. Crooks & Liars has the video.

.:.

Oh, by the way…