Douche on the Street #3

Mr. Machismo. On the first really fine day of spring I see a man of twenty something walking down the street toward me twirling his shirt around his finger. I grant you it was a fine day indeed, but come on. It was thirteen degrees. No one else of the hundred or so other people I saw in my twelve minute walk were shirtless, not even the androgenous guy/girl that asks for change all the time. The reason that you were shirtless wasn't because you were hot. It was because you could go shirtless and show off your muscles without being cold. That fact that you feel the need to show off your muscles in such a manner makes you a douche.

Random Thought

I never really know if you are awake until I do something to wake you up.

Douche on the Street #2

"I wear my dark sunglasses at night," is a hit song, not a creed to live by. Douche.

Twenty Five Things Later

Rules: Do NOT tag twenty five friends. Do NOT force them to do this too.

1. I have a teddy bear named Pookie.
2. Pookie has his own Facebook.
3. I have only ever broken one bone in my body – I chipped the knuckle of my left hand playing basketball. “Playing some b-ball outside of the school, when a couple of friends, they were up to no good, started breaking bones in my neighbourhood. I chipped one little thumb and my mom got scared. She said, ‘You’re going to the hospital to have that thumb repaired.’”
4. I am deeply in love with my home entertainment centre. But like all relationships, it could be improved with surround sound.
5. My Nanaimo bars and butter tarts are to die for.
6. I keep two blogs, one of which you will never read. The other of which you will probably never read, either.
7. Magic hands.
8. I once farted during an exam in a conference room with only four other people in it while seated on a wooden chair. It resounded. Then I did it again.
9. I’ve always wanted to jump off a bridge onto a moving train or passing semi.
10. I’ve always wanted to hop a freight train and just see where it goes.
11. I speak three languages, I have studied most of the collected works of Shakespeare, I can understand Chaucer and Beowulf, I have obtained a degree in English Literature, I have backpacked Europe – twice – and written a book about my adventures. Now I draw faces on cookies for a living.
12. I am addicted to Coke.
13. This is my fourth laptop charger in a year and a half. Blame Lily.
14. If I could, I would build the world out of LEGO.
15. The last person to call me was an automated message from California telling me the warranty on my non-existent vehicle has expired.
16. I like whiskey.
17. I like whiskey.
18. I see the sun for an average of probably three hours a day.
19. I have a wife and children living in Rio.
20. I lied about number 19.
21. I now habitually say California as “Cali-forn-ya.”
22. I wish people would put more effort into their insults. “Fag” or “bitch” doesn’t have the ring to it of something like “Thou art a syphilitic sore on the genitalia of society.”
23. I really just pretend not to have a sense of humour.
24. I feel more at home when I have no home than when I do.
25. I’m only doing this because Tabi has me whipped.

Changing the World one Malkovich at a Time

Have you ever been to a history museum that had different rooms for different periods in time?Behind saloon doors you can witness a wax re-enactment of the Old West. In the dark cave entrance you hunt stuffed saber tooth tiger skins with Neolithic man. Through sliding doors you stand on the bridge with Captain Kirk and his toupee.

What if there was a museum where you pass through the doors and enter not a mock up of a different time or different place in space, but that you went there. The door is a wormhole that bends to your will and you can enter your favourite nostalgic dream and contract the cholera or bubonic plague or Tribble fever or whatever the fuck it is you contract in the future. Wear the gut wrenching corsets of Elizabethan England, the drafty rags of a Medieval wretch, or the package bearing tights of the intergalactic space. Would you enter the rabbit hole? Or would you stay here with medicare and comfortable clothes? Live dangerously? Or just plain live?

And now for today's movie review. Being John Malkovich: Just fuckin' bizarre.

Just Plain Canadian

A new movie on the scene - which I haven't yet seen - has Josh Jackson playing the lead role of someone who does something. I have no idea who or what but one assumes he has One Week to live. In the commercial now being aired, Josh's character (who is aging well I might add) rolls up the rim of a coffee cup to read the words "Go west young man" (no punctuation). Any Canadian will immediately identify it as a "Roll up the Rim to Win" cup profferred by Tim Hortons (although Tim Horton's employees cannot distinguish winning tabs from those of rival coffee corp Country Style). And because of this, you know it's a Canadian movie.

Somehow coffee has become synonymous with Canada. We drink the most coffee per capita of any country. And coffee doesn't even grow in this country.

Irish Canadians

I am a Canadian of Irish decent as many Canadians are. This is oddly one of the few countries in the world that actually celebrates St. Patrick's Day. The local parade was held today though I missed it because I had to work, I managed to make it to my downtown apartment as it ended and its celebrants made their ways home. One particular onlooker had on one of those big floppy green and white Dr. Seuss hats. I thought to myself, I appreciate the fact that you are enthusiastically trying to celebrate my Irish heritage, sir, something of which I, myself, am awfully proud, but that hat makes you look like a douchebag. Please remove it and get stereotypically blue-blind paralytic drunk instead.

The Passchen

"But they get back together in the end, right?" I asked her.

"I don't know," she responded. And we still don't know because we walked away from the last half hour of The Breakup to go do laundry or something. Yeah... laundry.

"Marley dies in the end, you know," she said of Marley and Me.

"What? And this was supposed to be a kids' movie?" And it got me thinking about movies and what our expectations of movies are supposed to be. Because I wanted them to get back together. I wanted Marley to live. This was not purely for the sake of any emotional attachment one might have for the characters themselves. Rather, that's just the way that fun movies are expected to be. 

Then there's Passchendaele, Canada's war epic. I can't say as I knew exactly what to expect. The one I thought was going to die didn't I and the one I thought wasn't did. But in a war movie, usually at least one of the heroes dies in some vainglorious pursuit of king and country. So you know someone is going to die. There's the love scene, of course. A little gratuitous if you ask me. And the end.. I wouldn't have seen that coming in a million years, even though it was foreshadowed at least twice. It's a little graphic although not all that gory. In some artsy-fartsy way I gather it was making a comment on the futility of the war. The temporary ceasefire was an emotional thing to observe. But given the climate of modern society, I had expected the film to lean a little further in condemnation of war. While it certainly did not make things look rosy, though the mud ran red, Aesop would have taken "A man's got to do what a man's got to do" out of the story. 

Paul Gross' wooden Mountie character of Due South fame came off as a little... wooden. What worked so well in that show was a little lost in this one. Attribute it to shell shock, I suppose. It's not that his acting is bad, per se. The character is just a little too stoic to be a character that one forms a bond with. 

Likewise, Joe Dinicol's Train 48 naive character is warped into this picture. Though the kid is charismatic, he overacts a bit here. 

I'm not sure what it is about Canadian produced drama but that's typically what you get: a period piece that seems as wooden as you the sets. My mind harkens back to Anne of Green Gables and it's spinoff. It just feels like paper dolls dancing against a gorgeous, fertile background that is utterly Canadian. 

Still, while I had expected a little more from the movie, it's wasn't exactly disappointing. It was just... Canadian.