About a year and half a go, at the 2004 Hot Docs festival, we watched a documentary called Control Room, an interesting documentary about Al Jazeera, the US attitude toward it and, broadly, journalism in the Iraq war. It went on to have a pretty wide release and got some attention.

One of the more interesting personalities — an American officer named Rushing — became increasingly frustrated with defending the military’s position on the war, and it was visible during the documentary. I heard later that he’d resigned from the USMC, and I read today that he’s gone to work for…wait for it…Al Jazeera.

Fox News, of course, was quick to attach the word traitor to the guy. Idiots.

Bwa ha ha. My brother sent me this: The Official God FAQ.

Beautiful.

Well, it couldn’t last forever. The Canadiens ran into a Senators team that I think will win the cup. Too bad they couldn’t win their home opener though.

Toronto weather forecast: rain until Sunday. Guh. Could be worse though; we could be in the Maritimes, where they’re seeing rainfall records broken. Hopefully this rain coming toward us for the next week won’t reach them, and the ground will harden up soon enough to spread straw before frost hits. Yup, I’m a farmer’s son…

Ummm…no such luck, it seems.

Both the new(ish) Dandy Warhols and Sigur Ros discs are very good, excellent returns to form after somewhat disappointing discs last time ’round. I didn’t really mind () that much, but Welcome To The Monkeyhouse stunk to high heaven.

Welcome back, kids.

Yeesh…I just start to catch up with my movie watching and my magazine reading (merci, long weekend) and I realize that my musical inbox is piling up with albums I need to check out. Namely:

• gentlemen reg – darby & joan
• foo fighters – in your honor (argh…this one’s been here since Christ was a cowboy)
• various artists – this bird has flown
• grandaddy – excerpts from the diary of todd zilla
• broken social scene – broken social scene
• matt pond pa – several arrows later
• deerhoof – the runners four

And this doesn’t even count the dozens of random MP3s that make their way into my ‘_downloads’ folder.

The new Metric and Death Cab discs are in there too, but I just skipped the review and ordered those. I knew I would anyway.

I drink a lot of diet pepsi. A LOT of diet pepsi. Probably 3 a day. If that strikes you as bad, consider that I used to drink 4 or 5 a day, and it was real Pepsi. Nowadays I can’t even drink the real stuff — too sweet — but I get the occasional comment from someone about how the Aspartame’s going to give me cancer. This makes me want to smack them.

Snopes has lots of background on this, but I think the FDA sums it up nicely:

To date, FDA has not determined any consistent pattern of symptoms that can be attributed to the use of aspartame, nor is the agency aware of any recent studies that clearly show safety problems.

Or MIT:

Even daily large doses of the high-intensity sweetener aspartame, also known as NutraSweet, had no adverse effect on study subjects’ health and well-being, a visiting scientist at MIT reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last week.

“We conclude that aspartame is safe for the general population,” said Paul A. Spiers, visiting scientist in the Clinical Research Center (CRC).

Leave me and my dp be. Haters.

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. This morning my Dilbert calendar is the strip about a guy with the choice between throwing $25 million down a rat hole or taking a Russian rocket ship into space. The punchline is here. (sorry, I can’t be arsed to find the actual strip)

Fittingly, Gregory Olsen got back from his joyride today.

It’s funny how things work out sometimes.

Apparently the new season of The Shield has been on for at least a week, maybe more. I had no idea. I saw no ad, I received no tvguide-ish warning.

Dagnabbit.

We came home from the movies tonight to find something kind of disturbing: one of the cats (probably Michael; he has a thing for sleeping on my clothes) had dragged one of my t-shirts from the bedroom to the kitchen, leaving it sitting right on their food bowl. As near as we can guess, Michael liked this particular shirt (he’d been curling up on it when we left) so much that he crawled inside it, then managed to somehow start walking around. Maybe he backed out of it when he decided to eat. Who knows?

I always knew I’d lose some t-shirts to my wife, but man…that’s one freaky-ass cat.

I finally finished watching The Dreamers (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which I didn’t hate, but I didn’t like that much either. I think I’d have enjoyed it more if I knew more of the backstory about the 1968/69 strikes in France, or if Michael Pitt didn’t annoy me (He just…he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio with Angelina Jolie’s lips sewn on. There, I’ve said it.) so much. If constant nudity, gratuitous (occasionally bordering on icky) sex and astounding pretention don’t bother you, and if you’re a French cinephile, then it’s probably worth watching just to see how beautifully Bertolucci shoots a film.

Flightplan (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which we just finished watching, was kind of the same: not bad, but not good either. Too many clichés, too easy an ending, and apparently enough geographic discrepancies to annoy my wife no end. Meh.