Isabella Rossellini will not be making an appearance

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The other night at the pub talk turned to laminated lists. You know, the top five celebrity lists that are so set in stone that you may as well laminate them.

I realized recently that I could never laminate mine. You never know what could happen. After being #1 on your list for some twelve years someone could, oh I don’t know, marry a skeezy old French dude for his money. Or something.

If I were to write up a list right now, it’d probably look something like this. In no particular order:

  • Scarlett Johansson
  • Jennifer Connelly
  • Tina Fey
  • Parminder Nagra
  • [TBD; position recently vacated by Ms. Hayek]

Lots of candidates for that last spot, but those four are in a league of their own.

[tags]laminated lists, scarlett johansson, jennifer connelly, tina fey, parminder nagra, salma hayek[/tags]

Maybe Howard Hughes rides the rocket?

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It’s warm outside. Crazy warm. July warm. Thanksgiving is supposed to be the start of sweater weather, but we’ve actually got the fan running right now. 32 degrees? That’s nutty.

.:.

I forgot to mention: yesterday, on our way to meet CBGB for breakfast before the ladies went shopping, Nellie and I saw a water bottle rolling around the floor of the subway. Except it wasn’t filled with water anymore. It was filled with something yellow. I double-checked the label (from a distance, naturally) and it wasn’t apple juice or ginger ale or anything else. The water had been replaced by…well, I guess someone just couldn’t hold it.

.:.

Today’s been a day of high-caliber relaxation. We slept until 10, and have spent the entire day catching up on our TV backlog. THE ENTIRE DAY. Oh, and I may have been too harsh in my indictment of the new TV shows…Dirty Sexy Money isn’t bad, and Life is actually pretty good so far. Anyway, today’s one of those great vacation days…no school, no work, no planning, no errands, no stress…just chilling and regeneration.

.:.

Yesterday — which wasn’t exactly stressful either — we watched Shut Up And Sing (imdb | rotten tomatoes), the documentary about the Dixie Chicks following Natalie Maines’ dig at President Bush just as the Iraq war kicked off. It was, as advertised, very good. There wasn’t much new information (to me, anyway) and the uproar wasn’t quite as intense as I had thought — or it wasn’t portrayed that way, at least — but there was lots of interesting subject matter: details of the backlash, their disgust with the country music establishment, and the recording of their most recent album. Bonus: Rich Rubin and his dreadlocked dog make an appearance! Oh, and Natalie Maines is my girlfriend du jour.

[tags]toronto weather, pee in a bottle, dirty sexy money, life, dixie chicks, shut up and sing, girlfriend du jour[/tags]

I'm surprised we didn't get two Ugly Betty rip-offs

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Back to a North American diet & schedule = half a pound gained.

  • Original weight: 233
  • Weight last week: 221.5
  • Weight this week: 222

I only got to the gym once this week and haven’t been eating well, so this isn’t a big surprise. Must be a little more diligent about both. Must must.

.:.

We went out for dinner and a drink with CBGB last night and bored them to death with stories of France. We went to Volo, in part because I wanted to avoid seeing the Leafs-Canadiens game until I could get home and watch it on the PVR, and Volo has no TV. Or so I thought; turns out there’s a small TV above the bar, but I was able to avoid looking at it for the whole night. Finally, though, I heard someone say “it’s tied 3-3 going into overtime” so I just gave up and watched. The Leafs got a makeup call in overtime and scored on the power play, keeping Leafs management jobs safe for a few more days at least.

While I hate seeing the Canadiens lose to the Leafs, it’s not a bad result for Montreal to leave a hostile building with a point, especially when their goaltender had an off night, they were turnover prone and their opponents were playing desperate hockey, despite being only three games into the season. Most other teams would have shelled them last night, but Toronto’s D let them stay in the game…Montreal even hit the post in overtime on their own power play. Anyhoo, it’s on to a tougher test next week: Pittsburgh Tuesday.

.:.

I have to say, this season’s new TV shows have been rubbish so far. I decided to give a few a try and, while I haven’t yet sampled the entire list, I’ve been pretty disappointed.

  • K-Ville: cops in post-Katrina New Orleans. Interesting premise? You bet. Sadly, it’s formulaic and predictable and an utter waste of a great actor: Anthony Anderson.
  • Bionic Woman: I love Katee Sackhoff as much as the next guy breathing human, but she’s not in the show that much. The star, Michelle Ryan, is stunning but she can’t act. The special effects look dopey, the supporting characters are awful cliches…ugh. This show was the biggest disappointment of the season.

I haven’t gotten to Life, The Big Bang Theory (which I hear has a laugh track…how 80s chic!) or Dirty Sexy Money yet but I’m not hearing great things about them. Most other new shows Nellie’s watched have been shite as well. I’m about to give up on Heroes, and I’ve already walked away from 24. Even Friday Night Lights is scaring me a bit…the first episode of season 2 was drifting into O.C. territory. That’s network television for you though. The next season of The Wire can’t arrive soon enough.

[tags]fatblogging, canadiens, leafs, k-ville, bionic woman, life, big bang theory, dirty sexy money, the wire[/tags]

pH rising

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For the two weeks I was in France I barely drank any diet pop. That was a pretty change for me; I usually drink 2 or 3 cans of Diet Pepsi in a given day.  However, nobody likes acid reflux, and while I’m not one of those people who believes the urban legend about Aspartame causing brain cancer, I do realize that pop consists of little other than chemical-polluted water and there are better things I could be drinking. This week I’ve had just one can per day, and by this weekend I should be pretty much phased out of it. I might have the occasional one, but I think my days of 3+ cans are gone.

Let’s see if work and the MBA (and the lack of sleep those things can produce) cooperate with that plan.

[tags]diet pepsi, aspartame[/tags]

All is as it should be

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Huzzah, the Canadiens won their opener. On the road, no less. I kind of watched the game in between pages of finance, and finished reading just in time to see Ottawa beat Toronto in overtime. That’s pretty much a perfect hockey night as far as I’m concerned.

.:.

Today was the first chance in months that I’ve had to make a dent in my music inbox. I picked apart the new Interpol and Rogue Wave albums, and got about halfway through the new Fiery Furnaces before I felt dizzy and twitchy and had to stop. Here’s the pile as it stands today; some of these have been on my hard drive since April.

  • apparat . walls
  • asobi seksu . asobi seksu
  • avett brothers . emotionalism
  • band of horses . cease to begin
  • biffy clyro . puzzle
  • bloc party . a weekend in the city
  • blonde redhead . 23
  • c’mon . bottled lightning of an all time high
  • good shoes . think before you speak
  • handsome furs . plague park
  • idlewild . make a new world
  • les savy fav . let’s stay friends
  • magic numbers . those the brokes
  • matt pond pa . last light year
  • maximo park . our earthly pleasures
  • metric . grow up and blow away
  • okkervil river . the stage names
  • prolapse . ghosts of dead aeroplanes
  • prolapse . the italian flag
  • raising the fawn . sleight of hand
  • rush . snakes & arrows
  • the maccabees . colour it in
  • various artists . drive xv
  • various artists . ok x
  • worker bee . divorce your legs
  • yeah yeah yeahs . isis ep

I need an intern.

[tags]montreal canadiens, interpol, rogue wave, fiery furnaces, intern[/tags]

It's still The National out in front…probably.

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“Harmonium” by Rogue Wave is challenging for my favourite song of the year so far. Candidates to date:

  • The National . “Fake Empire”
  • Arcade Fire . “Intervention”
  • The Besnard Lakes . “Devastation”
  • Kings Of Leon . “The Runner”
  • Okkervil River . “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe”
  • Grinderman . “No Pussy Blues”
  • Matt Pond PA . “Reading”
  • Vampire Weekend . “Walcott”

.:.

Went for a run this morning, for the first time in almost a month. It’s funny how quickly you get out of the flow…I felt pretty awkward. I stopped after about 1.5 miles; I could feel a “dumbass” injury coming on.

[tags]best songs of 2007[/tags]

Tory, zzzzz, ole!

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Would-be Ontario premier John Tory has (kind of) changed his mind on funding for faith-based schools. However, current premier Dalton McGuinty ain’t buyin’ it. Neither am I.

.:.

I thought I was over the jet lag but it’s only 9:48 and I’m barely awake. Then again, it could have something to do with all the corporate finance I just read. That shit could put a SpeedBeaver to sleep.

.:.

The NHL season starts (for all intents and purposes) tomorrow night. I have called Rogers and added RDS to my channel lineup. Though I am filled with the same delusion as any sports fan the day before puck drops, I have steeled myself for yet another season of red, white and blue mediocrity.

[tags]john tory, dalton mcguinty, speedbeaver, nhl, montreal canadiens[/tags]

"I'm with the band!"

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I’ve uploaded some of my favourite France pictures to Flickr. Here’s the slideshow. Nellie deserves all the credit; I have no eye for photography.

I also uploaded a video to YouTube. I’d had a bit to drink and decided it was a good idea to sit down at the drums for the first time in fifteen years. The guitarist was nice enough to humour me with a bass track, but I still sound quite rubbish. The shrieking you hear on the video is Nellie, who’d never seen or heard me play the drums. I sold my kit for tuition money the summer I met her.

.:.

I passed my most recent course. The marks went up today and I actually did a little better than I expected. I’m usually crap at multiple choice exams but I did ok this time around, and my other marks were good enough. Whew.

Three to go.

.:.

We chilled this afternoon by watching a light little film, Imagine Me & You (imdb | rotten tomatoes). The first half of the movie was so cute it hurt my teeth; the second half turned into a rather standard romantic comedy, but it was still kind of goofy and charming. Stunning female leads and a sapphic storyline didn’t hurt either.

.:.

Newsy bits:

  • December’s Spice Girls show in London sold out in 38 seconds, proving once and for all that drunk women with poor taste are quite adept at clicking a mouse.
  • John McCain has gone from embarrassing to…well, more embarrassing.
  • Did you miss out on the auction for Mogwai drummer Martin Bulloch’s old pacemaker? Well, fear not; you have another chance. Marty seems to replace these a lot. Next time he should get one with an audible beep; he’d never need another metronome or click track. Most Mogwai songs are around 80 bpm anyway…
  • Radiohead’s latest album pricing — where they let fans decide how much they’ll pay to download it — has gotten the attention of The Economist. George’s worlds are colliding!!

[tags]france, imagine me and you, spice girls, john mccain, mogwai, martin bulloch, pacemaker, radiohead, the economist[/tags]

Les vacances sont fini

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My parents have flown back to Nova Scotia, so the vacation is now officially over. We’ve set about recovering from the time away and resuming our daily lives. We both have tomorrow off and plan to relax a little, but soon it’ll be time for the office and the gym and groceries and bills and blah blah blah.

We had one last farewell to the festivities last night, having dinner at Fieramosca with my parents and my aunt and uncle from Guelph. Now every member of my immediate family, and Nellie’s, has been there with us at least once. It was, as always, a terrific evening and a good way to cap things off.

Actually, getting my parents to the airport on time was a bit of an adventure. We booked a car from Autoshare to drive them and Nellie went across the street to pick it up. After fifteen minutes she still hadn’t shown up (the car is parked right across the street) so we were all puzzled. Ten minutes after that I was starting to get a little worried, but five minutes later she appeared. See, the downtown core was slammed today: Nuit Blanche has shut down some streets and both the Toronto waterfront marathon and the Run for the Cure were on today. This meant road not only closures, but also that thousands of people who’d just finished running were trying to drive out of the city…and we were already thirty minutes behind our (conservative, admittedly) schedule. Calling a cab would’ve taken too long so we drove anyway; after crawling along Queen Street we thought we were home free on University…until we saw that Word on the Street was blocking the entirety of Queen’s Park. Apparently it’s festival weekend in Toronto. Anyway, after a slight diversion around WotS we booted up Avenue and cruised to the airport, arriving in plenty of time for their flight. We think.

.:.

I saw some really great places on our trip — highlights include the view from Domme, walking around the old centre of Sarlat, the rooms at the Relais Franc Mayne and pretty much all of Paris — but the five days spent at the chateau with so many friends and family, in such a phenomenal location, for such an auspicious occasion, is really what I’ll remember about the trip. It was just one great memory piled on top of the next. As I said before, it was a once-in-a-lifetime happening. I can’t believe it’s only been a week since we left. Already I miss it terribly.

.:.

One more good thing about France:

  • Original weight: 233
  • Weight last week: 227
  • Weight this week: 221.5

Yup…I actually lost weight, despite a steady infusion of pain au chocolate and booze. I may have lost even more than those 5.5 pounds but put a bit back on once I arrived in Toronto.

Clearly I need to spend more time in France.

.:.

Given how many times I’ve watched these two movies, I can’t believe I didn’t notice this before now:

“The (toy) bear that Jack Ryan brings home to his daughter at the end of The Hunt for Red October is the exact same bear that Bruce Willis brings to his son in Die Hard (both films were directed by John McTiernan).”

[via John Sakamoto]

[tags]fieramosca, autoshare, nuit blanche, toronto waterfront marathon, run for the cure, word on the street, relais franc mayne, domme, sarlat, die hard, hunt for red october[/tags]