Just in time for valentine’s day… the Star Trek (inspired) CORSET!
Beam me up…
The day the muzak died…
Per CNN:
MUZAK, those lovely people that bring you in-elevator or on hold kenny-g-esque (or strings) versions of popular songs is filing for bankruptcy protection.
Let us all hope this means that the next time we call Visa or Rogers we won’t have to listen to Katy Perry’s “I kissed a girl” as interpreted for Alto Sax and Oboe.
But sadly upon closer inspection they appear to merely be restructuring debt and not folding.
30 Rock – St. Valentine’s Day
As the follow up to the brilliant “Generalissimo” from last week, “St. Valentine’s Day” had a lot to live up to. While it didn’t quite hit that high water mark it still managed to make me nearly do a spit take a few times.
Liz and her hot-as-a-cartoon-pilot new flame Dr. Baird (Jon Hamm from Mad Men) end up having their first date on Valentine’s day, and what starts as awkward takes leaps and bounds into disaster area as accidental boob spillage, twosie seeing and family neuroses ensue. Our heroine and her new beau decide to embrace the trainwreck and try to get everything bad out of the way on the first date… thus far it works and we save the inevitable lemon-implosion for another episode.
Meanwhile in TGS-land, Frank’s one line of the episode hands off responsibility for a new blind NBC employee to Kenneth, who instantly falls in love and is speechless (I loved Tracy’s throwaway joke about Dotcom’s first meeting with Grizz’s Fiancée). Tracy plays a Cyrano of sorts, filling in the words he imagines Kenneth would say: “Yes indeedy corncobs!” After not seeing TJ’s crew for a bit Dotcom had some great moments tonight (he speaks french!) Needless to say, Ken does not end up getting the girl. Blind girl asks to feel is face and when she gets to his chin (or lack thereof), she beats a hasty retreat… ouch…
Salma Hayek continues her guest run this week with her nurse Elisa having issues with her catholicism and Jack’s very intense lack thereof. When forced to take confession rather than go eat a $1000 dessert, he manages to send the priest crying for backup. Priceless, as were the McFlurry jokes though I can’t imagine what McDonald’s must have paid for that. I honestly don’t think Elisa’s hardcore religiousness out of nowhere was very believeable, but it did make for some great jokes, including Liz’s “If I had those knockers, I’d thank god too.” I think we all should thank god for Salma Hayek’s breasts personally.
As a rule I’m not a huge fan of the episodes where A B and C stories are more or less completely separate, but the pacing and gags in this one made it work pretty well. Jane only had one bit this episode but it was priceless as, after Tracy introduces her as Michael McDonald, she proceeds to butcher McDonald’s horrid over the top schmaltz. I still find myself hoping we can go back to the writer’s room a bit, I miss Twofer and Ceri and more Frank… We especially need more Pete, is Scott Adsit off doing something else? I thought Morel Orel was done with.
Favorite Line of this episode: “The Patron Saint of Judgemental Statues”
A solid A- episode with some great moments.
In the words of Frou Frou the talking cat
There’s no place like home…
There are varying degrees of culture shock that one gets upon moving away from one’s birthplace for the first time. Maybe you moved to Europe for school and you’re learning a new language (or multiple new languages). Perhaps you went to Australia for a year to find yourself (more likely to find beer and people of loose morals of the gender of your choice.) Or perhaps you only moved to Ontario…
As most of you who read this blog know, I recently (temporarily) moved to Waterloo Ontario to take an internship at Research in Motion inc. proud manufacturers of BlackBerry and BlackBerry related products. Is it whiny and lame of me to complain of culture shock moving to southern Ontario from Manitoba? Yeah, probably… but it’s more a combo of wistful homesickness and culture shock anyway.
Waterloo is an incredibly white town, somewhere around 90% of the city is very white, mostly of Germanic descent. The universities thankfully break this up a bit, bringing a more diverse student base, especially of asian backgrounds. As someone from Manitoba however, the absence of any significant aboriginal population is somewhat jarring. I was actually specifically told that I might want to consider not broadcasting the fact that I’m Metis as this area doesn’t have the greatest reputation of friendliness towards first nations people. I’m not entirely surprised as the city is fairly affluent and definitely seems to cultivate a wholesome whitebread image.
The weirdest things have been making me home sick… I’m the first to claim that Winnipeg drivers suck, but at least we’re relatively friendly. People in southern Ontario like to come very close to running down a pedestrian in a parking lot at least once daily, and will NOT come to a stop at crosswalks even if you’re already halfway across. When people pass you on the highway, they will cut back in front of you within 2 feet of your bumper, even if the lane is clear ahead and there is no one on their tale. One of the weirdest things that I still find jarring after two months is the sheer length of light patterns. Pressure plates seem to be non-existent here and many of the intersections near my place have light patterns in excess of 90 seconds.
Culinarily I’ve been having issues too, needless to say I can’t get anything George’s like here (though I’ve been pleased by being reunited with Popeye’s Chicken) and overall ethnic food wise the place doesn’t hold a candle to Winnipeg. The single greatest tragedy is the lack (at least that I’ve been able to find) of any true thai restaurants. Most of the Vietnamese restaurants in town bill themselves as Vietnamese and Thai food, but invariably their Thai dishes consist of a shitty tomato based Pad Thai and various Vietnamese style noodly bowls with “thai chicken” which near as I can tell just means they put extra lime juice or lime leaves in. If you’re especially lucky you might find a lackluster Tom Kha Gai soup. This wouldn’t be a crushing disappointment if it weren’t also very difficult to find Thai ingredients in the limited local asian markets. Proper thai curry pastes are nowhere to be found, much less something like Matsuman, but at least I can make some semi-proper pad thai. What I wouldn’t give to be able to head down to Vientiane tonight though…
You might think I should be thankful for the weather, but to be honest, other than the week of death back in January (Winnipeg: coldest place on the continent… beating out the ARCTIC CIRCLE) temperatures have not been far apart and we’ve gotten an absolute ton of snow that has made the wussy people around here hibernate even more. Even getting someone to go for a drink after work is like pulling teeth. I’m told things will get better here with the coming of summer and the festival season, but all I can say is thank god for movies and the internet. Regardless, summer brings Fringe back home and unless I can swing a trip back it’ll be the first festival that I’ve missed all of in well over a decade.
Matters are not helped by the fact that the famous southern Ontario attitude is alive and well here… Not long after arriving here I was shopping at best buy for a movie and happened to mention that I was new to the city and trying to keep myself occupied until I met some people. His response when he found out I was from Winnipeg. “So I guess things are a little more fast paced here hey? – – – Yeah that’s right buddy…Kitchener (population ~200k) is too fast paced for me, your towering downtown skyline of 3 or 4 buildings over 10 stories tall just blows my little prairie mind. Wake up, even Regina has a bigger downtown core than this dinky little town. I guess merely by being within 2 hours of downtown Toronto I should feel overwhelmed by the I AM CANADA aura that is the GTA.
Sorry, no dice.
Is it geekier that Bill Amend wrote this strip… or that I spent 5 minutes laughing at it?
Canadians are stupid…
…but at least it wasn’t a majority. Fuck you Alberta.
The 2008-2009 stanley cup champions are off to a slow start…
Starting slow seems like a perennial problem for my favorite team. This year appears to be no different.
After a pair of fairly brutal games against the canucks, the flames finally got their first win of the campaign against a rather hapless looking Avalanche team. This despite (again) giving up a 3-1 lead. I’m finding myself increasingly puzzled with this annual event, and honestly I really, really, hope we can do without it next year.
Team captain Jarome Iginla finally got on the score sheet, but Kiprusoff continued his very spotty play. I still maintain that Kipper can come back and dominate the league again, but if his october slide turns into another year long problem it may be time to look for a replacement. Sadly none of our young goalies are ready to step into the role (though we may have an embarassment of riches in a few years), so a solid aging vet (for a year or two) might be the answer.
Regardless of the slow start, and hey you never know, it might get Keenan fired, the flames will be a force this year. Bertuzzi has been a really pleasant surprise (though hopefully the phantom roughing/boarding calls will stop, how that dive at the end of the canucks game was called a penalty is beyond me) and the rest of the team appears to be showing some heart and grit and (dear god) secondary scoring (5 goals in game 2 with zero points from iginla???). If the defense can step up a bit and Kipper can stop looking like Dan Ellis we might just have a team here.
<3 Aaron Sorkin so damned much.
Despite the somewhat shaky nature of Studio 60 and the what happened to the West Wing when he got all coked up and had to leave… I love Aaron Sorkin. He’s probably my favorite Hollywood writer and the sheer force of oratory that he can write for his characters can leave me weak in my knees.
Recently as part of an interview (with the New York Times I believe, but they charge to read their archives so I can’t read the whole thing) Sorkin gave us a glimpse of how he thinks President Josiah Bartlet would knock some sense into Barrack Obama.
Here’s a choice excerpt:
BARTLET: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!
God… this says what I want to perfectly that I’ll just leave it at that, except to say this. If you’re a woman, and you vote republican simply because of Sarah Palin, you are a moron. You’d vote for a woman who doesn’t believe in any real feminist issues and in fact wants to overturn Roe v. Wade and believes that abstinence only should still be taught in schools (nevermind that her daughter got knocked up.) Hillary was a self serving wench who got closer to getting the nomination than she had a right to. Having a man of colour in the oval office is at the very least equally as important as having a woman there. Don’t sacrifice your beliefs just to have a woman there. Wait til next time and a solid viable candidate (Nancy Pelosi maybe?,) because Joe Biden won’t get the nomination even if Obama goes 2 terms.
For funsies I recommend you check out Sarah Haskins over at the current… her consistently awesome Target Women segment did a Sarah Palin profile.
Yikes, what happened there?
Apologies for the interruption, the internet connection in Big Sky was the shit (I was only able to steal wireless from another condo at long range) so updating was so inconvenient that I became lazy. Who wants an update without photos anyway!
Besides which, time was pretty packed while we were there and evening mostly involved hopping in the hot tub then having dinner and flopping down on the couch to watch brutal NBC olympic coverage. I’m pretty sure posts would have been along the lines of “Big Geyser Pretty… water HOT!” anyway.
Old Faithful was fairly faithful, only making me wait a while during which I toured a lot of the lesser but awesome geysers. So many people get out at the parking lot and just see old faithful then leave that they miss a lot of the neater pools. As usual, death by korean or japanese tourbusload was around every corner.
Death was also around every corner on some of the paths, apparently the ground is only a thin crust in places an stepping on some section involves immersing your leg or entire body into water or mud superheated to the point where it can cook the flesh of your bones. To get that lovely mental picture out of your head, here’s a shot of an elk to make you go “awww.”
Also on this point of the trip was my second run at whitewater rafting, which was a blast as always. The river in question is known as the Gallatin, and while it was incredibly shallow at points it still gushed fast enought to be a lot of fun. The cute young lady guiding us was only a bonus.
Not me, but the same spot we rushed through the day before this was taken.
My friend Chris and his girlfriend Jodi came along with us on this ride as they happened to be passing through and we had a blast, I of course was probably the most soaked. This didn’t matter tons at first, but on the ride back to the lodge it became apparent that a recent wearer of my wetsuit had had a serious B.O. issue and the water was bringing back the memories so to speak. Given that this sign was at the top of the run I guess I should be lucky that’s all I smelled.
Got to love the grammar/missing word. I like to believe the missing bit is “is encouraged.”
That more or less wrapped up the trip though, not long after we headed back to Manitoba at full speed, stopping really only to see the Little Bighorn Historic Monument.
This is somewhere I’ve always wanted to go though I was expecting it to be typical American ignore the Native side completely but it was surprisingly fair. Unsurprisingly this is as a result of a fairly recent redevelopment that changed it from the Custer Memorial to the new name. The old views are still seen in some of the markers on the site, but in the tours given (and the audio tour you can buy for a nominal fee [highly recommended] you can hear the modern interpretation.
The classic view of the battle as some form of heroic last stand is without much doubt a total fallacy, the final lines shown by clusters of cartridge casings seeming to show Custer’s group disintegrating into total panic as his overconfidence led to the near total destruction of his command. The sheer cowardice of the cav and the stupidity of Custer in ordering a charge on a village that he had not even reconnoitered properly is really evident and it’s easy to see how an organized resistance from the skilled first nations shooters quickly caused panic in the cavalry troops.
What surprised me most was the Cavalry monument… I believe it was built around 10 years after the battle by the regiment and lists the names of those “who fought and died in battle against the Sioux.” From the years of bullshit and the media frenzy of the time I would have expected it to say something about a massacre or butchery as is far from rare on items of the time. Perhaps the regiment was being honest in saying they new damned well it was a true battle and honestly felt a little ashamed at the way things were being painted.
In any case I heartily recommend anyone checking out. It’s an interesting piece of history and a moment that marked the beginning of the end of any armed resistance of indigenous peoples in North America. It’s also a rather hot place generally, pack some water if you’re doing any of the hiking trails (and ankle boots as there are apparently rattlesnakes) but there is also a car loop that the audio tour covers.
NOTE: I wrote 80% of this on Aug 23, but I haven’t finished and posted it til now, my bad. School starting sucked. Regular updates to resume.
Goats!
Day 4:
I love Glacier Park in Montana it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth and features the “Going to the Sun” highway. This wild trip up to the top of the mountain is a bit rough on the old transmission but it’s worth it for views like this.