Blogosaurus Vex

Today I went by myself to see Whiteout, a movie I just heard about yesterday when I was planning how I’d spend my free afternoon.  It’s a crime drama set in Antarctica, and if you tried to make a movie just for me, you couldn’t  have come up with a better concept.  I love survival stories and Antarctica is the very best source of these; I love crime dramas.  I love these two genres so much I am prepared to forgive them a multitude of sins – but this was not a good movie.  I enjoyed it – but it sucked.  So, don’t go see it unless you too have an enduring love affair with murder in the cold.

It starts with an entirely gratuitous scene of what can only be described as soft, soft core porn as the lead actress (someone or other) strips down to her panties, helpfully bends over to turn on the shower with her bottom pointed at the camera, and then treats us to an extended but steamed over view of her body naked under the faucet.

Then the movie starts.

I guessed the bad guy within a minute of his appearance on screen – both of them.  The main cop figure has (of course) a chip on her shoulder which causes her to freak out if she thinks anyone is questioning her ability.  The fights in the snow are hard to follow.  The ending is so anticlimactic you probably shouldn’t even call it a climax.  And, strangest of all, despite a crazed axe murderer being loose in the tiny, claustrophobic setting of a research station on Antarctica, all the staff except the protagonist and maybe two other people are in major party mode because they are about to cut it really close to an incoming storm that might stop them from evacuating the continent before winter sets in.  Um… okay.

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I just got home from watching District 9 again.  Husband hadn’t seen it and I was curious to know if I would hate it as much the second time through, as my alarming minority position as a hater had me wondering just what the hell everyone else saw that I didn’t.

So, I must say that I liked the movie much more this time through.  And my harsh judgments of it are significantly lessened.  In fact I am not entirely sure what pushed my buttons so hard during the first viewing – only my analyst could say for sure.  In any case I would now say that though I probably won’t care to see it again, it wasn’t as bad as I initially thought and I even enjoyed it.

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I spoil here so if you don’t want the spoilin’, best be moving on.  SPOILERS.

Read the rest of this page »

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We saw Star Trek last night and, though I will not spoil, I will say I loved it.  I was a long time viewer of the original series when I was but a wee thing, and I think they did a fabulous job with all of the characters.  I’m a leeetle wary of Simon Pegg’s Scotty, who’s got a flavour of slapstick that reminds one of Jar Jar Binks in a bad way, but I suspect this is more related to scarring from That Shitty Movie and less to do with Star Trek itself.

I will say that I had forgotten that my very first celebrity crush was Spock, and the new guy playing him was so very, very Spock-like that I am a dizzy schoolgirl in love all over again.  I’ve always had a soft spot for the stern, intense types – which perhaps explains Husband rather well!

Anyway, I will probably go see it again and I think you should see it too.  Very enjoyable!

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<whining> You guuuuuuys…… I miss caaaaaable!

It’s been… what… a long time since Husband and I got rid of satellite.  And basically it was a good thing.  I got off the TV teat and did a lot more other things.  I stopped feeling like a pimped out commercial watcher.  And most of the time I don’t miss it.  But yesterday I hung out at Mel’s house and we just loafed on the couch watching reality TV and it was AWESOME.  Of course I can’t just sign up for Mel to be streamed into my house at all times so the replication won’t be quite right but I can get satellite back.  Do you know how many cooking shows are on TV?  Also the loads of reality shows that provide endless opportunity to analyze the participants, psychology-wise?  And the crime shows, my god, the crime shows!

I am considering it.

Also, we are celebrating easter by eating milk chocolate.  I know!  It’s totally not vegan!  But do you know how disappointing vegan chocolate is when you’re after an easter bunny?  I figure one or two days a year of chocolate indulgence isn’t a big deal.  I had some Toblerone at Christmas too.  It’s not  like it undoes all the vegan eating of the last 15 months.  We do a pretty good job of staying strictly vegan, but recognize it’s not fully possible.  And everybody eats chocolate at this time of year.  (This is pathetic, who rationalizes like this?)

Anyway I am having Mr Solid for breakfast and loving it.  Huzzah!

Also our landlord was here yesterday.  He is very responsive and when I told him the grout is melting out of the shower stall in the main bathroom he got a tile guy here in short order.  Naturally I enlisted Husband’s help and we cleaned the apartment to sparkling as part of my ongoing (though probably futile) effort to convince him that we are so clean and so responsible that it is nothing short of malicious to prevent us from getting a pet.  So far he seems unmoved, but he did ask what we thought could be done to update and modernize the apartment so it doesn’t look dated when he ultimately sells.  I suggested an OVEN for crying out loud BUY US AN OVEN but he just reiterated his position about the advantages of extra storage space in the kitchen, at which point I gave my oft-rehearsed speech about how anyone who cares enough about cooking to need extra space certainly needs an oven more, and anyone who doesn’t want to use it could store things in it… but we’ll see.  I’m not hopeful.

And I finally bought new canvas runners.  And little tank tops that were on sale for five bucks each.  And one of those plastic things that holds your book up and open on the kitchen counter so you can read your recipe without having to weigh the book pages open with buckets of change and vitamin bottles, which inevitably results in the jar getting knocked over and pennies getting into the dough.  And a book about polygamists, who could resist that?  So now I am going to read.  Enjoy your easter!

Posted in Domesticity, Personal, Reading, Watching | 1 Comment »

This morning I made some pancakes from one of my recipe books and they were just horrid.  Rubbery and thick and bland.  I only ate them to get at the syrup!  Husband liked them but he likes everything, so that doesn’t count.  So, there will be no recipe pictures today.  At least not of pancakes.  I’ll be making a kalamata olive and caper pasta later on which might make for some good photos… we’ll see how it goes.

Other than that, I’ve been busy with work and sickness.  Yesterday I spent most of the day barfing and groaning on the couch, too sick to read but happily not too sick to watch Inspector Morse.  I had a fevery day a couple days ago and apparently that was just the appetizer for yesterday’s full meal deal.  What a day!  Yeesh!

Today my plan is to recuperate further, and perhaps take a little drive with Husband in honour of the crisp, sunny weather.

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So I just got back from moving my little brother to university.  The trip was exhausting, not only because my little brother is going away, but because my dad was in pain and tired and that turns him into crabdad.  Crabdad is unable to see the upside of anything, particularly my brother’s decisions to forget some necessary paperwork and failure to scout out the campus in advance so we’d know where we were going.  Among other things.  The less said about this trip the better.

The other thing I thought I’d mention is a great little talk I saw on Edge today.  (I’m sorry, the link leads only to the introduction.  You have to scroll down past another little article to get to the actual video of his talk.  Sorry.  Edge has weird navigation.)  The speaker is a professer called Clay Shirkey, and he talks about how people like to produce and share in addition to merely consume, using Wikipedia and television watching as examples.  It’s really interesting for many reasons, but the one that stood out for me was the shocking, enormous volume of hours people waste watching TV every year.

I think TV is an enormous waste of time, 99% of the time.  Of course I find paying to be pandered to with advertisements unpalatable.  (Really television networks are selling audiences to advertisers, not shows to audiences.  The shows are merely hooks.)  Most shows are crap anyway, even so-called news or educational material.  There is almost nothing on TV you couldn’t learn better with the internet or a library card.  Or a phone and a bus pass if you’re gutsy enough to go meet someone who knows about the field you’re interested in.  And entertainment shows are worse – if aliens come to earth with a cosmic death ray and use TV programs as the criteria by which to judge our societies, we’d have no grounds for complaint if they blast us to mist.  There’s no way around it – most shows are mind bogglingly stupid.

But whatever, sometimes people just want to veg out or be mindlessly entertained, and I guess that’s okay.  I do that too.  What gets me is the amount.  Watching TV all night is such a disservice to yourself!  Watching TV all night, every night, and on weekends?  My god!  Think of all the things we could accomplish as a race if we didn’t spend sixty hours a week in front of the tube or using the computer as a TV analogue.  If we tried to learn, or do projects, or spend time with other humans in collective endeavours. Or if we relaxed by taking a walk with a friend?

I mean, what is your life for if you spend half if it in a state of passive reception for American Idol and its spiritual siblings?  Why are you here?  What will be your legacy to humanity? “Here Lies Bill: He Sure Liked CSI.”  Even if you are a talentless nobody who will never create beautiful music or art or cure cancer or anything of lage scale value, isn’t it better for you to engage with your life than drool onto the couch cushions every night?  Great societal outcomes are great, sure, but on the intrapersonal scale it’s your effort to be and to engage that engenders personal greatness.  I’m pretty sure I’ll never be written about in history books.  Lord knows no one would ever buy a painting I made.  But it’s really important to me to live my life in an active way.  That precludes spending five hours a night watching TV.  And that’s okay!  Crowding out TV to read and quilt and spend time talking with my husband is exactly the point!  (If you find this paragraph interesting, this is a neat book to start thinking more about related issues.)

Anyway.  It would certainly be a massive improvement if we all worked on projects like Wikipedia rather than spent all night watching TV.

And that’s what I think about that.

Posted in Existential Angst, Ranting, Watching | No Comments »

So I finally got my computer playing videos again (Puck’s tip was the winner), so I’ve been watching some Olympics coverage on CBC.  And I must say, the coverage is SUCKING hard.  It’s about 75% lame emotional-manipulation interviews, ads, montages, and other such nonsense, with just a hint of the actual competitions here and there. I want to watch the actual races, not just the final ten seconds of each race spliced in with a bunch of boring news-anchor chit chat.

Where can I watch Olympic coverage online that doesn’t totally suck?

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Husband thinks I’m ridiculous for deciding to do the discretionary eating challenge for August.  We had this conversation in the bathroom, where I was soaking in the tub and he was eating dinner.  I don’t think anyone who eats in the bathroom is in any position to judge what I do, but that’s another issue.  I was telling him about it and the discussions that had gone on around it – sustainability, ecology, nutrition, mindfulness, and so on.  And he pretty much poo-pooed it.  In part because we already live pretty close to the goals (pop excepted), so in that sense it won’t be much of a challenge, and in part because something very important is about to happen:

Football season is starting.

Holy cats!  I sat up in the tub with alarm!

We don’t have TV any more.  This means we have to go out to watch a game, and the only place “out” where games exist is pubs.  Pubs don’t like it when you show up and don’t order food and drink.  But I can’t miss games!  What’s the point of having time off school if I can’t waste it watching football?  My two football instructors are potentials here, since both have enormous TV’s and cable – though Esan has a proper job and a new bride, which probably makes Monday night football at his house a no-go.  Z is the other choice, but he doesn’t like to let me come over lest I be shocked at his bachelorly housekeeping standards.  I keep telling him about my colony of pink mold in the bathroom but it doesn’t change his mind.

Still, it’s only one month.  This is not a forever change – surely at some point I will go back to restaurants.  (Though as I have said, it is a disturbing trend that whenever we’ve eaten at a vegetarian restaurant the food is inferior to that which I make at home.  This was never a problem when I ate meat.  Just sayin’.)

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We just got home from Cirque du Soleil, and I just have to say, it was probably the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life.  It was so much more amazing than I expected.  At times I could hardly believe what I was seeing – how can people do all those things? It was utterly delightful.  My cheeks are sore from all the spontaneous smiling!  Just… wow!

If you ever get the chance, you owe it to yourself to check out this show.

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