Photo by terren in Virginia, used under Creative Commons license

Best movies of 2012

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Just to be very clear, this is an incomplete list since we haven’t yet seen Zero Dark Thirty, Moonrise Kingdom, The Sessions, Skyfall, Lincoln, Django Unchained, Looper, This Is Not a Film, The Invisible War, Chasing Ice, Monsieur Lazhar, The Loved Ones, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, The House I Live In, The Queen of Versailles, Marley, The Angels’ Share, The Central Park Five, Bernie, Compliance, Life of Pi, Shut Up and Play the Hits, or Bully. Still, to this point in the year, here are my favourite movies in alphabetical order:

  • Argo
  • The Avengers
  • Beasts Of The Southern Wild
  • Brooklyn Castle
  • The Cabin In The Woods
  • The Dark Knight Rises
  • The Hunt
  • The Imposter
  • Safety Not Guaranteed
  • Sightseers

 

Photo by terren in Virginia, used under Creative Commons license

Best albums of 2012

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

In alphabetical order only:

  • Allo Darlin’ . Europe
  • Cloud Nothings . Attack On Memory
  • Godspeed You! Black Emperor . Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
  • Japandroids . Celebration Rock
  • Low . C’mon
  • Perfume Genius . Put Your Back N 2 It TEEN . In Limbo
  • Shearwater . Animal Joy
  • Van Etten, Sharon . Tramp
  • Walkmen, The . Heaven
  • White, Jack . Blunderbuss

Note that I still have to listen to this year’s releases by Lightships (update: meh), A.C. Newman, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Band Of Horses (update: rubbish), Bat For Lashes (update: rubbish), Beach House, Calexico (update: meh), Chromatics (update: meh), The Happy Jawbone Family Band (update: rubbish), Metz (update: meh), Passion Pit (update: rubbish), Grizzly Bear (update: meh),Tallest Man On Earth (update: quite good), Tame Impala (update: meh), TEEN (update: excellent!), Titus Andronicus (update: meh), and Ty Segall, and that I’m still working on Divine Fits (update: meh), Sigur Ros (update: good), and Swans (update: meh).

.:.

Photo by terren in Virginia, used under Creative Commons license

Photo by moviesinla, used under Cerative Commons license

“You have poor social skills”

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

We’ve been on vacation for a week now, and it’s been a damn good one. I’ve already posted pictures summarizing our time on my family’s farm: basically, it was lots of food, dogs, family, gifts, cribbage (final tally was 11 games for me vs. 6 for my dad), and quiet time.

We ended up returning to Toronto a few hours early on the 26th to get ahead of the storm headed for Ontario and Quebec, and so were well-rested for the 27th. A good thing too, considering how busy it got. We did more cleaning, bought Nellie a Samsung Galaxy S3, had some poor beers and super-hot wings at Les 3 Brasseurs,  watched Silver Linings Playbook (imdb | rotten tomatoes) which was a little better than I was expecting, finalized the sale of our old condo by picking up our cheque from the lawyer, and cracked open a bottle of Moet & Chandon Nectar Imperial before heading to dinner at Jacobs & Co.

Said dinner, by the way, was as exquisite as we’ve come to expect from Jacobs. We split a 20 oz. Wagyu ribeye from Wagyu Sekai right here in Ontario. We’d both had Wagyu beef here before, but this one was a whole other level of buttery richness. Between us we could only eat 7 of the 11 slices of steak; we  had to give up and bring the other four home. The sommelier suggested a nice Barbaresco to complement the beef. I’d never have thought to make that match, but it worked nicely.

And, after all that, we still have a four-day weekend (more or less) coming up. Bitchin’.

.:.

Photo by moviesinla, used under Cerative Commons license

Abdij St. Sixtus

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Last night: a much-needed break from unpacking, watching the news about carnage in a Connecticut school, and limping around on a broken toe. Our real estate agent sent us off for a meal at Politica, a resto bar off King West, his treat. Except the restaurant didn’t seem to get the memo, so the treat part fell through, but we still had a tasty dinner.

We kept the evening going by skipping over to Crush for a couple of wine flights. Most of what we tried was quite good, but the Eos Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 from Paso Robles was the highlight.

Somewhere between Politica and Crush we hatched a plan for a third stop: Bar Hop. I knew from a tweet earlier in the week that they’d scored some Westvleteren XII in the midst of the mad rush that overtook Toronto this week. We popped in, warmed up with one each (Mill Street Vanilla Porter for me, Sawdust City Lone Pine IPA for Nellie), watched a gaggle of woo-hoo girls come in and order shots, and then dropped the only-moderately-unreasonable $40 on a bottle of Westy. We’d had one while in Amsterdam earlier this year; I’d liked it but not loved it, and Nellie didn’t really remember it. This time around, my assessment was the same — while it’s very good, it’s far from my favourite beer ever — but Nellie really didn’t like it. “Dish soap” was her assessment, I believe. Oh well; it was an adventure (again) and a better bargain than lining up for a six-pack we’d struggle to finish.

We jumped in a cab to get home, a mostly uneventful ride…right up until our cabbie nearly killed a cyclist turning onto our street. Thankfully we’d had all that wine and trappist ale to steady our nerves, and yelled loudly and in time to stop him from creaming the guy.

St. Sixtus: patron saint of cyclists?

#100

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

I’ve never been a huge football fan generally, nor of the CFL specifically. I did support the Edmonton Eskimos as a kid — I distinctly remember them winning Grey Cup #75 back in 1987 — but was never obsessed with them the way I was (am) with hockey and the Montreal Canadiens.

However, when my friend CBJ asked us if we wanted to see the 100th Grey Cup right here in Toronto, well…how were we to pass that up? We let him do all the ticket-ordering work (and take in all the pre-game festivities in the days leading up) and met him for a little pre-game barbecue at Triple A in the quiet part of town on Sunday, before taking a slow streetcar to the Rogers Centre.

Thoughts on the game:

  • While I don’t generally back either Toronto or Calgary (the Edmonton bias still lingers), I was obviously pulling for the Argos because…well, home town.
  • The opening play from scrimmage was a Calgary interception, so it didn’t look good early on. But Toronto just put the pedal down in the first half and coasted from there. Calgary didn’t score a major until the final seconds, so the game wasn’t even as close as the 35-22 score suggested.
  • Chad Kackert was a monster. Jon Cornish was all but shut down.
  • It wasn’t a classic game, but any time you can see the 100th championship it’s pretty special. 

Thoughts about everything surrounding the game:

  • Seats at the Rogers Centre suck balls. Even the really expensive ones.
  • CFL fans are hardcore. This city was filled with people in BC jerseys, Edmonton jerseys, Montreal jerseys (okay, not many of those), Winnipeg Jerseys, Hamilton jerseys (okay, not many of those either) and Saskatchewan jerseys (TONS of those!), even though their teams weren’t in the Grey Cup. And the arena was filled with far more Riders fans than Stamps fans, even though Calgary was playing. Crazy.
  • Those same out-of-town fans, were scandalized, SCANDALIZED I tell you, by the price of beer. Obviously $9.75 for a tall boy of Bud is ridiculous, but we Torontonians are used to it, whereas it was a special sort of hell for all the prairie boys.
  • Also, one gentlemen I saw who was clearly from Hamilton seemed awfully concerned about all the “faggots” in Toronto, and made sure all of us in line knew that. I’m not sure why he thought all Torontonian faggots were at the Grey Cup, or why they were interested in accosting him in particular, but he seemed to have his reasons. My guess: insecurity and a terrible upbringing.
  • Strangest exchange of the night, with a man dressed/painted entirely in red, who spoke to me in the concourse on my way to buy a beer: HIM: “You look like a man on a mission! Are you looking for a pepperoni?!” ME: “Ummm…no.” HIM: “OK, I’ll help you!” ME: *slides quickly into nearest line* HIM: *Continues ranting about pepperoni all the way down the concourse, not noticing that I was no longer alongside him*
  • The entertainment was…well, embarrassing. Burton Cummings must have been wasted, because he fucked up “O Canada” twice and sang it over a clicky-beepy drum & bass line you expect to hear from a cheap Casio keyboard. Carly Rae Bieber Trench were a continuum of disgraceful lip-syncing over pre-recorded fluff; Bieber in particular got his ass booed but good. I know he was there for TV ratings, but they had to expect a CFL-football-loving crowd was not going to react well to that juvenile calliope. Thank goodness for Gordon Lightfoot, who actually SANG. And PLAYED. REAL. MUSIC. And REMEMBERED THE WORDS, Burton. Not one of these performers was from my era, but I can recognize the ones with an actual ability to perform live music.
  • Walking out of the Rogers Centre and through downtown Toronto with a lot of excited fans gave me a tiny, tiny taste of what would happen if the Leafs ever won the Stanley Cup. Fortunately, that will never happen.

Pics from the night:

Pre-game
Drunk Burton?
Small army of cheerleaders
Final moments of the game
Streaming onto the field
Celebration!

 

Photo by swirlspice, used under Creative Commons license

Oh, Nevada.

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Last week I read about a trend in the results from the latest US election on Joey DeVilla’s blog (via HappyPlace, via Fox News, all ultimately via the US Census). Basically, the ten most educated states (in terms of percentage of college grads) voted Democrat, while nine of the ten least educated states voted Republican.

Pretty stark, no?

Anyway, the census data also provided average annual income, and I like to see these sorts of thing in visual formats, so I plotted all fifty states, plus DC:

 

Looks like a trend to me. And there’s clearly a correlation between education level and income, so the fact that the bottom end of the trend is virtually all Republican while the top end is virtually all Democrats runs counter to the Republican insinuation that Democrat policies are geared to welfare moochers.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about those outliers, the especially-highly-educated Democrats are in Delaware, and the very-highly-paid Republicans are in Alaska.

.:.

Photo by swirlspice, used under Creative Commons license