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.
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.
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.
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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.
Not that I watch the Junos, but…you’ve GOT to be kidding me.
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.
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.
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:
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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.
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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.
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And now: the NBA all-star skills competition. God bless the PVR.
Have I missed something? Who the hell is Neil Entwistle?
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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.
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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.
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…
The Superbowl happened. Yawn. The Superbowl ads were on. More yawning. Not that I’m a big football fan anyway, but I used to watch the Superbowl. Now it’s just too…staged. It’s no longer a sporting event; it’s a circus with a football game attached.
I tried watching the first few episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD, but I just couldn’t get into it. It’s like watching an episode of Seinfeld with all the Jerry, Elaine and Kramer bits cut out. Same character, same neuroses, same whining. I couldn’t even finish the disc. Just sent it back. I’d probably have preferred to watch the Superbowl…
I really, seriously hope that this is a joke. Or just a wildly overstated artist’s impression. I’ll be living a few blocks from the intended landing zone of this alien monstrosity, so I don’t relish the idea of getting a neon sunburn after every northerly neighbourhood stroll.
BlogTO: equally freaked.
A few months ago I read that CBS would be broadcasting all the March Madness games online for free. Yesterday pc sent me the URL. God help worker productivity around the continent.
I think I’ll miss Selection Sunday as we’ll be on our way to (or wandering around) New York, but the papers the next day should be filled with coverage. I remember flying into Kansas City a few years ago on Selection Sunday; the next morning USA Today (not my choice; it’s what was outside my hotel room door) had a special March Madness section. I was in heaven. Actually, I was in Kansas City, but the pullout made it bearable.
Ah, Canadian politics. You can cut the hypocrisy with a knife.
Gmail is adding some cool new stuff. My GoogleTalk sessions are stored in the gmail history, and now they plan to embed GoogleTalk directly within Gmail itself.
There’s certainly no shortage of news about the Danish cartoons, but I found this article in The Guardian very interesting.
Muslim protesters infuriated by cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad raised the diplomatic stakes last night as Iran’s best-selling newspaper announced it would retaliate by running images satirising the Holocaust.
I think this is an excellent idea. Here’s why: it uses reason rather than violence to make a point. Granted, it may be an intended as an exercise in petty revenge rather than a thought-out appeal for empathy, but let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s the latter. Of course, on seeing such a cartoon in the Hamshari daily, any reasonable person would say, “That’s absurd, of course the holocaust happened, there’s loads of evidential proof, the Jews of Europe didn’t just up and move to Uruguay, etc., etc.” Said reasonable person would then wonder to themselves how any newspaper could publish something so offensive to so many people. And, of course, it would then dawn on this reasonable person that they’ve just described the very situation that Muslims found themselves in when they saw offensive caricatures of one of their holy figures, and the reasonable person would admit their own hypocrisy and shortcomings and realize the error of the Danish cartoonist.
This assumes, of course, that everyone is reasonable. 🙂 But unreasonable folks certainly aren’t going to respond well to the torching of embassies and placards about killing either, so why not try to change minds with reason and intelligence rather than armed mobs? The only thing this violence has achieved is to give some people (who don’t like Islam much to begin with) an excuse to point fingers and call names…like these fine folks who Antonia Zerbisias calls out.
OK, back to work.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 