From a Nov 2003 Guardian interview with the Fiery Furnaces: “Closing track We Got Back the Plague suggests that a brief outbreak of bubonic plague in New York last November was divine retaliation for George Bush’s increased majority in the recent mid-term elections.”

Guardian interview

…I think it would be Jon Stewart, Corin Tucker and Bill O’Reilly.

‘Cause even though Jon and Corin are only little, I’m pretty sure the three of us could beat the shit out of Bill O’Reilly. Give him the bootfucking of a lifetime, as it were.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Would somebody please just kill off David Palmer already? No one cares about his storyline this year. Better yet, kill off Sherry. She’s the one who keeps producing the screwball comedy plotlines.

While we’re at it, let’s just kill off Kim, Tony, Chloe, Michelle and Wayne as well. Just let Jack run around and shoot/beat/kick/smash the crap out of everyone.

I swear, I’m a pacifist. Honest. All I ask is that you don’t mess up my favourite TV shows, and don’t bounce the basketball through T-Bone’s legs.

From BBC News: Man sent gun in internet mix-up

A Canadian student who ordered an MP3 player over the internet from the US was shocked to receive a licensed handgun instead.

Brandon Buchan, 21, an English student at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, bid for the MP3 player on eBay, the Star Phoenix newspaper said.

The pawnshop that auctioned the device sent him an unloaded .22-calibre Smith & Wesson gun and a licence by mistake.

A Canadian customs official said not all parcels were X-rayed at the border.

‘I’m no hit man’

The package, sent by courier, was labelled as containing an MP3 player.

“I was really shocked to see it was a gun,” Mr Buchan told the newspaper.

“I’m not a hit man. I was mostly confused about it all. I thought ‘How did this end up here?’, and I figured it must just be a mistake.”

The third-year student called the police, who removed the weapon.

He also e-mailed the shop, who are arranging for his MP3 player to be sent to him.

Mr Buchan says he is keeping a photocopy of the gun licence as a souvenir of the incident.

Applicants for firearm licences in Canada are subject to background checks, and all firearms must be registered.

We rented 3 DVDs from the excellent Bay Street video this weekend:

Master and Commander was better than I expected. It had been built up so much, oscar nominations and all, that I half-expected Gladiator on water. But it steered away from cheesiness, for the most part, and the superhuman heroism was kept to a minimum. There were sections of dialogue that I missed completely, but the visuals more than made up for it. I was also surprised — pleasantly — by how the action in the movie was balanced with tension…single-ship naval battles back then were less like standing in and trading blows than they were like chases over hundreds or thousands of miles. A perfectly good weekend time-killer.

House Of Sand And Fog was bleak and beautiful. Or bleakly beautiful. Or beautiful because it was bleak. Or all of the above. Ben Kingsley seemed mildly over the top about 2% of the time, but spectacular the other 98%. Speaking of spectacular, Jennifer Connelly is becoming an excellent actor (I just didn’t like A Beautiful Mind, I guess, since I was never that impressed with her performance, nor with Russell Crowe’s, and she sucked in the Hulk), and she seems to have recovered from her heroin-thin stage to become ridiculously gorgeous again. She’s right up there with Salma Hayek now. Anyhoo, back to the movie: the ending was too contrived, but the first 3/4 of the movie were very good…even the visuals that broke up the scenes…shots of fogbanks rolling into San Francisco, clouds, ocean, sunsets…all gorgeous shots to break up the ugliness and misunderstanding. I could sympathize with both main characters, but also got angry at how they acted. Sounds like all the Israel/Palestine documentaries we watched last week…

The Cooler was one we wanted to see last year at the Film Festival, but it conflicted with something else. Alec Baldwin deserves all the accolades he got for his role, William H. Macy…is just always, always good. Always. And Maria Bello surprised me; all I could remember her from was Coyote Ugly, which wasn’t exactly The Godfather. In this, she seemed girlish and world-weary at the same time. Hopeful yet beaten.

All in all, a good movie-watching weekend (and a good weekend for movie watching…it’s been cold, grey and shitty outside all three days). And it was all topped off by a Team Canada comeback win against Sweden to claim the world hockey championship. The juggernaut rolls on…

from Now Magazine: Molson Amphitheatre, Aug 6.

The good: Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, The Flaming Lips, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Modest Mouse, Gomez, Le Tigre, The Walkmen, Elbow, Broken Social Scene
The bad: Morrissey
The I don’t really know/care: String Cheese Incident, Polyphonic Spree, The Coup, Bumblebeez 81, The Datsuns, The Thrills, The Secret Machines, Sound Tribe Sector 9, Wheat

From CBC: report: Conservatives want Don Cherry to run in federal election

What are the Tories thinking? Just as they get some momentum because of the sponsorship “scandal”, just as they have enough pull to actually accomplish something in the next election, they show themselves to be (in the words of Wayne Gretzky) a Mickey Mouse organization. First you elect Peter McKay, then you bend over for the Alliance party, and now you want to recruit an illiterate xenophobe. Bravo.

Is this the equivalent of American politicians aiming for the Nascar dad swing vote?

• My only must-watch shows: 24, The Daily Show, Sportsdesk
• The best show that never seems to be on: The Shield
• The best show that’s already wrapped up and out on DVD: The Office
• The show I’m only holding on to out of loyalty: The West Wing
• Shows I’d be addicted to if I had HBO: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and probably The Wire
• The only reality TV show I can tolerate: The Amazing Race
• Shows I watch if I have nothing else to do: ER, Law & Order, Jeopardy, South Park
• Constant re-runs that I use as time-fillers: Simpsons, old Law & Order
• What I spend most of my time watching, September through June: hockey & basketball

From the Michael Moore mailing list. Hopefully this won’t stop him from showing it in Canada, and ultimately in the US.

“Disney Has Blocked the Distribution of My New Film… by Michael Moore
May 5, 2004

Friends,

I would have hoped by now that I would be able to put my work out to the public without having to experience the profound censorship obstacles I often seem to encounter.

Yesterday I was told that Disney, the studio that owns Miramax, has officially decided to prohibit our producer, Miramax, from distributing my new film, “Fahrenheit 911.” The reason? According to today’s (May 5) New York Times, it might “endanger” millions of dollars of tax breaks Disney receives from the state of Florida because the film will “anger” the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. The story is on page one of the Times and you can read it here (Disney Forbidding Distribution of Film That Criticizes Bush).

The whole story behind this (and other attempts) to kill our movie will be told in more detail as the days and weeks go on. For nearly a year, this struggle has been a lesson in just how difficult it is in this country to create a piece of art that might upset those in charge (well, OK, sorry — it WILL upset them…big time. Did I mention it’s a comedy?). All I can say is, thank God for Harvey Weinstein and Miramax who have stood by me during the entire production of this movie.

There is much more to tell, but right now I am in the lab working on the print to take to the Cannes Film Festival next week (we have been chosen as one of the 18 films in competition). I will tell you this: Some people may be afraid of this movie because of what it will show. But there’s nothing they can do about it now because it’s done, it’s awesome, and if I have anything to say about it, you’ll see it this summer — because, after all, it is a free country.”

The closing night film at the Isabel Bader theatre was Control Room (hot docs | official site), Jehane Noujaim’s latest documentary. The premise of the doc — a look inside Al Jazeera during the Iraq invasion, and at how the US military controlled and spoonfed the western media — intrigued me enough, but I was completely sold after I learned that Noujaim had also directed and produced Startup.com (imdb | official site…in spanish?). Startup was a brilliant film, especially for someone who lived through the tech ex/implosion, so I expected a lot from this as well.

It hardly disappointed. While nothing could really match the previous night’s emotional kick of Death In Gaza, it afforded a good look at a side of the conflict we rarely, if ever, saw. It also reminded me of just how hypocritical Rumsfeld and Bush were in criticizing Jazeera. It did nothing the American networks didn’t do; it just did them for the wrong side.

There were even moments of unintentional hilarity…again, usually from the nattering gob of Rumsfeld, or sometimes a press flack. The two most interesting characters were an Al Jazeera reporter named (I think) Hassan, and a marine press officer named Rushing. Hassan was concise, intelligent and sarcastic, even in English. Rushing, while trained/ordered/expected to spout the party line, was obviously embarassed by having to treat so many intelligent reporters like addle-minded children. I mean, how do you convince reasonable journalists that American warplanes bombing Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi TV and the Palestine Hotel (home to many foreign journalists) all in the same day was an accident? Especially after bragging about the accuracy of the bombs? But he tried. He was an interesting character, and he at least seemed to be honest with the camera. I’m not sure you could even say the same about Hassan, or the head of Jazeera.

Did the film have a position to begin with? Of course. All documentaries do. But Noujaim saw a hole, a gap between what we were being told and what was actually happening. And she stood in that gap with her camera running. Lucky for us.