Platform 327

By the way, I finally got around to watching Donnie Darko yesterday. I guess it was okay. Maybe I’ll have to see it again sometime. I got a little bored in the middle of it and started tidying up a little while it was on. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood for it. There were some cool parts in it, but the time-travel ending (or was it time travel, or was he dead the whole time like Jacob’s Ladder?) kinda ticked me off. Maybe it’s just a reaction to too many bad Star Trek time-travel storylines. Or maybe I just hate the dark, sullen teenager I was and, by extension, dislike Donnie. Whatever. I’d rather watch Harvey.

In all, my movie watching this weekend was generally pretty dark, as I also saw two animated features starring the Dark Knight. Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, for an American animated film, was pretty good. It was based on the Batman animated series from the ’90s, so the art was incredible and the animators actually went to the trouble of giving characters some depth.

Batman vs. Dracula, however, wasn’t great. But that’s okay, because I wasn’t expecting much from it. I actually was expecting it to be from the 1970s Superfriends-era Batman with a title like that. Unfortunately it was from the latest The Batman cartoon that I’ve never really liked for various reasons. It’s Batman fighting freakin’ Dracula, for crying out loud. Throw a little humour into the thing instead of taking it so seriously. The gravity of the whole thing just made it dumb, with no element of fun whatsoever.

I don’t know what my next movies are going to be. I still have to return these to Zip.ca.

Too bad I’m not a good golfer. But at least I got outside and had fun.

BTW, when I got home, I noticed that my neighbour had left her keys in the door when she went into her apartment. I knocked on the door, her yappy dog went off, and I heard her tell the yappy dog to be quiet, but she didn’t answer the door. Fuck it, I tried.

Anyway, one reason why it was a good day to golf is that I made a lot of headway on my “professional” site yesterday. It was thanks to one of those moments that made me feel absolutely brilliant and really damn stupid at the same time. I discovered the Toronto Public Library’s extensive newspaper article database, which included all of the stuff I wrote when I worked for the Osprey Media newspapers. Not only did they have the stuff from Cobourg Daily Star, Port Hope Evening Guide and The Sudbury Star, but I also found out that several of the stories I wrote for those newspapers ended up in places like the North Bay Nugget, Kirkland Lake Northern News, and the Elliot Lake Standard. Thanks to avoiding a whole lot of typing by using the old cut-and-paste, I got close to 40 articles online yesterday, and now officially have every article that I published in this century available on my site. I even found some articles that I’d lost my printed copies of.

And now another Monday looms, so it’s time to get to sleep.

Maybe I’m selfish, but there’s a TTC strike and I really don’t care. I’ve got a 15-minute walk to work, a 2 minute walk to groceries, 5 to my doctor and my bank… Living downtown is expensive, stressful and noisy, but it’s damn convenient.

I’ve also been suggesting work-from-home strategies at my office for a long time. Who knows, if this strike goes on for a few days, maybe some of my low- to no-cost solutions will be adopted and they might figure out that working from home, at least a couple of days a week, can be a good thing for us.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go out for a walk and survey the chaos.

Did some more work on the ol’ “professional” site again. Today I entered in all the stuff that I had published in June of 1995. That was the month Arvin was in India and left the operation of The Spill Magazine to me. Not only did I redesign the thing, to the whole layout, get everyone’s articles in on time, wrangle some ads (paying ones at that), and deal with the printing and distribution, but I also managed to get my regular “net.buzz” column written, put a feature article together, and get 4 CD reviews into the issue. And I managed to get articles published in What’s On Queen and What’s Up Toronto Magazine/Enternet Online as well.

I must have been unemployed that month.

Happens every once in a while. Does it happen to everyone, or just to me? There are days when I hear one song, and I can’t stop listening to it all day, sometimes for many days.

Today’s song addiction can be found here. I suppose, as song addictions go, it could be worse.

You know when you tell companies to stop calling you with “courtesy calls” and special offers, stop calling on your cell phone, stop calling you at work, and they still do it? That’s what Rogers has been doing to me for months. Yesterday, I finally told one of the telemarketing drones to take me off of the marketing list for all offers, or I would cancel my account.

This morning, on my cell phone and at work, Rogers gave me a “courtesy call.”

This evening, I courteously cancelled all of my Rogers services. Sure, they’ll probably keep calling me for years, but at least I won’t be paying them to do so. Fucktards.

Well, after years of listening to the heckles of the general public, I’ve finally seen all three of the Lord of the Rings movies. Just finished watching Return of the King a few minutes ago.

I don’t see the appeal.

God damn, but those are long movies. Long, slow and boring. Dreamy faux-Celtic music and slo-mo shots of horses running into battle for 15 bloody minutes. Booo-ring. Even the parts that didn’t start out boring dragged on so long that they got boring. Epic battles in movies are cool. Three in one movie (more if I slept through any) is a bit much. Yes, we’ve seen your pretty digital special effects. Can we move things along now, please? And the end of each battle ended with the following scenario: “Oh, we’re fucked! We’re all gonna die! Oh, wait a minute. These new guys just showed up! We’re saved! Again!” The worst part was when these dragons entered the battle on the side of the bad guys. The good-guy army is standing there, bracing for impact, when all of a sudden a giant bird shows up and smacks into a dragon. “The eagles have come!” someone shouts. Eagles? Where the fuck did these giant eagles come from? Seven hour movie, and you can’t even set up a scene that explains giant fucking eagles before they swoop down from the sky? Fuck this.

Yeah, yeah, I know. “If you had read the books, you would have known that the eagles were introduced by blah, blah, blah, when they talked about this and that in whatever place.” Well, I didn’t read the books, I saw the movies, and a movie that makes no sense just sucks (unless, of course, that senselessness is somehow funny).

On the bright side, I’ve seen all three movies now, and don’t have to see the looks of mortal shock on people’s faces when they tell me, “You haven’t seen Lord of the Rings? What’s wrong with you? You gotta see those movies, man. Go on. See those movies.” I saw them. They sucked. Go away.

Fuck, I’m gonna be cleaning LOTR fan-boy comments out of this blog for weeks once Google gets hold of this post…

Next on my movie list is Donnie Darko. No, I haven’t seen that one either. And I think I’ll wait a few days before I do. LOTR: Return of the King is enough movie for a week.

I just did some more work on my professional site. Today’s work covered the month of May, 1995. From The Spill Magazine, there are reviews of Cluster, Dark Archies, and Hayden; a feature article on the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, and an installment of my net.buzz column in which I spent far too much time writing about Courtney Love. From What’s Up Toronto Magazine aka Enternet Online Services, there’s a review from a band that had a bunch of Bourbons in it called Don’t Talk, Dance.

Part of the Bourbons article included a snippet of what their online presence was back in 1995. This included an announcement of a then-upcoming online appearance on the old Prodigy Internet Service. Reading that, I suddenly remembered that I had a hand in that event. I was working for Prodigy, doing my jazz music portal for them, and I contacted the Canadian Prodigy rep, hooked him up with one of the members of the band, and got the Bourbons set up with a Prodigy account.

It’s amazing the things you forget about, eh? That would have been really good resume fodder back in the day. I wonder if I actually used it.

Who says I’m not a patriot? Here’s a picture of me wrapped in the flag… for some reason. And yes, I think that is the same flag that later got stained with candle wax after some goon crashed our Canada Day party. And yes, that was the night I later got mugged.

Why am I posting this photo, exactly? Fuck the Maple Leaf.

Today, Cool and I decided to hit the ol’ driving range and do a little Sunday golfing. Our plan was to head out to a range where we’ve gone Sunday golfing before. Of course, things rarely go as planned.

When we got to the range, we were told that the driving range now has new hours: Monday to Friday, 10am to 3pm. The rest of the time, what was the driving range will be an indoor soccer pitch.

Fuckers.

Then we headed off to another course, on the off chance they might have opened up their range. The sign said “Opening April,” but to their credit they didn’t specify which April, so I suppose I can’t complain.

So what was intended as a Sunday of working on my swing turned into an afternoon of driving around in Cool’s car listening to his latest speed-metal compilation, and then hitting a pub for lunch. Well, at least we managed to have some fun. And it was a great day for cranking up the tunes with the windows rolled down.