Before I start, let me say that this is now like some sort of bizarro-world or some kind of strange freaky alternate parallel universe world, or some sort of tear in the fabric of the space time continuum... world, or maybe something on the level of the union of interstellar Herbig-Haro objects and Bok gobules at the exact occurance of a Syzygy in our very own solar system. The point is, it seems my back-to-back championships/double blog posts now make me the triumphant"quote-unquote" (yes i just did that) lead blogger on what has become a neglected site.

I guess i don't much to say other than show off some space vernacular that i looked up on google 5 minutes ago to impress you. Life is good, i dunno. Here are some top things:

1. I ate some Ontario peaches and cream corn. Also some Ontario peaches and cream, MMM!
2. Annie lives in Waterloo now!
3. I got accepted into a part time MBA program!
4. The profanity-screaming lady across the street doesn't wake me up in the morning anymore!
4. I learnt some space words today!

I have hidden some gramattical gems, or easter eggs, or rather, glaring errors in this post. See if you can find them! IT'S A GAME!

Newfie-land

"Welcome to the Rock"

So as some of you folk may know, I recently went away for a week to Newfoundland. A good friend of mine from home worked in Africa for a few years at a college, and met this Newfoundlander gal there (of all places), and they got married! I stood up in the wedding as the best man, and since my parents were also good friends with theirs, they came too.

It was a fun trip... here are some highlights:

St. John's:

I flew in to St. John's late Saturday morning (early?) without a hitch. After getting some much needed sleep, my parents and I decided to explore the city. We visited signal hill, a pretty neat site outside of the harbour, where the first wireless signal was sent across the Atlantic (such a nerdy family):

Standing on signal hill, St. John's. Coolness tip: my "hands in the pockets" stance.

Later that day, we went whale watching. There were a bazillion whales, and I was kind of hoping one would jump out of the water and eat another jumping whale, but it just didn't happen. We were lucky to see so many, and saw some porpoises (dolphins) as well. I tried to capture them on film, but the combination of my slow camera and their breakneck speed made that incredibly difficult:

This is a whale. Well... its tail. To my surprise they didn't jump all the way out of the water or eat each other.

We also toured the city, and visited George Street, allegedly the place in the world with the most pubs per square foot. I maintain that Hess Village in Hamilton would give that a run for its money, but we enjoyed the atmosphere, great folksy music, and some good food and drink.

Cape Bonavista:

After visiting St. John's, we traveled through many small villages and towns along the coast up to Cape Bonavista. We visited local museums, and stayed at a Bed and Breakfast in a place called Harbour Grace. To our surpise, in this town of probably a couple hundred, Stockwell Day was coming to this very Bed and Breakfast that evening for a press conference to discuss a possible prison build that was promised to the town in the 80's. After the moratorium on cod fishing in the '90s, many Newfoundlanders had lost their livelihood, and towns like this struggled to survive economically:

Fishing village. Probably mostly shrimp and crab in this place.

After a long day of mulling whether or not to pie Stockwell Day in the face, interspersed with enjoying the coastal scenery, I had to decide against such a noble charade for the sake of the town, and not getting a record for assaulting the Minister of Public Safety. We had a chat before his presentation, he seemed like a decent guy, but he is still a lil' bit evil for writing a letter to the Wall Street Journal condemning Canada's decision to not go to war in Iraq in 2003:

My Dad and I with Stockwell Day, whom I was tempted to pie in the face.

Lewisporte and the Wedding:

The wedding was a lot of fun. The guys had a bit of running around to do, but things weren't bad, and we managed to enjoy the driving range. All of us aren't golfers, but it was fun to whack our balls. Ha:

Bobby (L, groomsman) and Andrew (R, groom)

Things went pretty smooth with the wedding. Ceremony went well, lots of good food and stuff, and I did a speech. Usual wedding fare I suppose, and a really good time.

Twillingate:

Allegedly the iceberg capital of the world, and known for whales, we saw neither in Twillingate. I guess it was just bad timing, but we actually managed to spot an iceberg along the way in our travels, and we got our fill of whales in St. John's. It was a beautiful town, and we enjoyed a hilarious dinner theatre that was put on by the locals - a home cooked meal with lots of crazy Newfie skits, probably one of the funniest things I have ever seen... i highly recommend it.

Probably the iceberg that sunk the Titanic.

Twillingate at Twilling-ight..

Conclusion:

So this is kind of a long post. In conclusion, Newfoundland is pretty neat. A lot of the small towns are neat to see, but they are hurting for tourism as the closing of fisheries has devastated many communities. This means you kind of get some makeshift museums in 50-person villages that are a bit lacking in substance, and towns promoting themselves as things like 'the root cellar capital of the world'. A lot of young people seem to leave or go to St. John's. I didn't notice too many of them. It was still a great time though, Newfies are friendly if you can understand what the heck it is they are saying, and if you avoid to pick up their accent, you are lucky. I think I would really enjoy going to St. John's again, and if you love nature or seafood like myself, then the Rock is pretty awesome-sauce:

The most easterly point of th'Americas. East is relative anymore these days.

Another picture, from a camera. This one is in colour.

Wall-E

So Krista and I went to see Wall-E this weekend and we loved it. Loved it. I had every intention of writing a review but then I thought about something, so bear with me if this seems a little preachy.

The idea behind Wall-E is that we’ve consumed ourselves into oblivion, at least as far as Earth is concerned. The planet is literally covered in garbage and is now a desolate landfill that Wall-E spends his time compacting, stacking and sifting through for little treasures. The message is (theoretically) clear: waste is bad and will make things worse very soon if we don’t do anything.

The question is, is this a message or a plot device?

I was hoping for the former, I really was, because waste is a problem, especially here in good old North America. Yet in the credits there are ads for the new Wall-E video game. And one quick search for Wall-E over at toywiz.com give 40 results.

At shopping.com, you can get one of 22 shirts.

In ten minutes of searching I found 200+ Wall-E products including books, toys, clothing, posters, treat boxes (?), temporary tattoos, piñatas (ola, señor Wall-E!), magnets, costumes, invitations, and so on.

Think any of this will end up in a landfill?

Is it right to hold Pixar to task for producing these products? Many of these products are reusable and/or recyclable: clothes, paper, cardboard, etcetera. But realistically, much of it will be thrown out within two years. How many kids do you see running around in Toy Story shirts? Or even Monsters Inc. shirts? Technically, this isn’t Pixar’s problem: they’re in the movie business, and these days a lot of the movie business is merchandising (especially animated films, which are intrinsically seen as “kid” movies and have access to the lucrative parent market). But I would hope that a studio using the perils of overwaste as a plot point would do more to lessen the load.

I also tried running a search on Google using keywords like “wall-e” “environmentally friendly” and “merchandise”. I only got one hit back that noted any effort by Pixar to “green” the merch push for Wall-E: a cardboard recyclable slip for the soundtrack.

Like I said, I’m a big fan of the movie and will more than likely buy it on DVD when it comes out. I just wish Pixar had taken the concept past the screen.

Caleb's Plums (or, Kristi has 366 Days To Think This One Over)

I should also mention that after the camera turned off, Caleb drooled those plums all over the bathroom floor. HYGENE~!

The Magic Is Gone, Dear One (or, Why I Didn’t Like Prince Caspian)

I would make a terrible movie reviewer, if only because there are very few film genres that I enjoy. I don’t like horror, or thrillers, or most action, or dramas, “art” films, or anything with a lot of gore. Mostly I like comedies, sci-fi, fantasy, and the occasional rom-com. So if you liked Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, please don’t be offended that I didn’t I do not represent movie viewers as a whole.

Also, there are some big ol’ SPOILERS ahead, so if you don’t want the SPOILERS to SPOIL your movie experience, don’t read the SPOILERS.

SPOILERS~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~!




Middle East = BAD GUYS
All the bad guys are Mediterranean-leaning-towards-Arabic looking, except for Caspian, who is for some reason Spanish. Could the actors not have got together ten minutes before shooting and decided on one accent for them all to use? Caspian has Spanish and all the other guys are vaguely Middle-Eastern. You can actually tell which of the “nice” bad guys will turn out to be BAD bad guys by how Arabic they look (the baddest bad guy looks just like Saddam Hussein). According to Wikipedia they were going for a Spanish/conquistador vibe with the armor, etc., so I don’t know why they can’t all speak in Spanish accents. Not that it would have been much better to typecast Spanish people, but at least it’s not jingoistic.

Yeah, THIS is what Lewis was thinking…
I’ll be honest – I think I might have read this when I was a kid, but I don’t remember a lick of it. I have been talking with some friends who have read the books recently (Jenna, mostly) and they confirmed that there is nowhere near the amount of time devoted to battle in the books that there is in the movie. In fact, the whole castle attack was made up for the film, based on an offhand comment the mouse had in the books about wanted to attack the Telmarines. There seemed to be a real desire to turn this into a Lord of the Rings for kids, complete with a straight up theifing of the arrow stabbing scene in Fellowship (check Susan during the castle siege ). To my understanding C.S. Lewis was less about conflict and more about relationships. And I know, I know, a totally faithful adaptation of the book would have made a terrible movie since the Pevinses’ aren’t even around for the first four chapters, but then why would you want to make a movie of a book that wouldn’t make a good movie in the first place?

(PS – and don’t get me started on bringing the White Witch back. What purpose did that serve, aside from bringing back the best performer from the first film? Also, look for a cameo of Tilda Swanson near the end as a centaur)

Where’s Edmund?
From his first line in Caspian I was excited to see what Edmund was going to be about in this one. He’s a very rogueish and watchable character. But he gets thrown aside in this film and does very little aside from swordfighting a dwarf and playing with a flashlight. I understand they wanted to give the lion’s share (HIYO) of the screen time to Susan and Peter since it’s their last kick at the can for Narnia, but watching Peter throw hissyfits every fifteen minutes while Susan moons over Caspian didn’t really excite me. It sucks that Edmund’s (and to a lesser extent, Lucy’s) screen time suffers, especially since they’re going to be expected to carry the next film.

We get it. Aslan is Jesus.
SUSAN: “Why couldn’t I see Aslan?”
LUCY: “Maybe you weren’t looking for him”

Oy, vey. Caspian reaches into the Bucket o’ Popcorn Theology pretty consistently and pulls out handfuls vague sampler-worthy quotes that are disingenuous at best, out-and-out incorrect at worst. I showed you at best, and here’s at worst:

PETER: When’s Aslan going to prove himself to us?
LUCY: Maybe we need to prove ourselves to him.

That’s right. Jesus is Emilio Estevez’ dad in The Breakfast Club. You must win a wrestling meet before he gives you his love. There are no losers in God’s family.

So who liked it?

How I stopped the use of 'or' in blog post titles (or, how I just made an ironic mockery of myself but still managed to save Christmas)

And isn't it ironic... don't you think?

Yep, i just posted an overused quote. Who would have thought, it figures.

Ah well, can't say I don't post.

Bat Signal vs. Bat Phone (or, Batusi vs. Bat-Dance)

So I grew up with the Adam West Batman (remember when Batman used to dance?). As we all know, that series is considered to be the stupidest possible representation of Batman there has ever been. But there is one thing it has over almost every other Batman in every other medium: NO BAT SIGNAL. In those days, Batman was summoned by use of a translucent red phone known as the Batphone. Which made sense to me (and was cool looking when it went off).

I started thinking about this last night at the movies when I saw a trailer for The Dark Knight. There’s a quick cut of a scene where the Joker caves in the Bat-signal with an axe. And I was all like” hooray!” because the Bat Signal made no sense.

Like for example, what if someone decides to commit a crime on a cloud-free night? What is the Bat-Signal reflecting off of then? It’s just a beam of light in the sky. What if it’s a club night and they’re all using those Hollywood sky-spotlight things?

More than that, Batman’s whole thing is to stop crime in Gotham with his rep. Having Gordon throw up the bat-signal is a good way to tell every criminal in the city “hey, Batman’s gonna be over here for a bit so, uh, just…just try to not commit a crime or anything, OK?” He might as well hang a “back in 5 minutes” sign from the front door of the police station.

I have too much time on my hands, I think.