well, what can you do eh?

last night i totally screwed up and forgot to go to work. well, it's no so much that i forgot to go as much as i just messed up my schedule and didn't go in. and the really crummy thing is that on wednesday when i did work - i wasn't supposed to. what was i thinking?

i think i hate canada customs. it seems like every time i get a package, they feel the need to destroy... errr i mean open the package, then CHARGE me money for having opened it. why should i have to pay for them being retarded? maybe they just really wanted to see my new shirts or something. dirty bastards.

but at least i have my t-shirts. they say obnoxious things on them. i will wear them to work.

not amused, but strangely productive

on those days where i am compelled to come to the office early, i generally find myself ridiculously productive. it's good for my boss, but not so good for me in my effort to do as little as is humanly possible for my money.

the unfortunate thing about this morning is that a large number of other staff decided that today would be a great day to hop into the office for an early friday. for example: the girl with the really (really) annoying voice was in shortly after 8 whining constantly "i'm so hungry this morning, i skipped breakfast to get here early today."

all the while i'm thinking "okay, you've spent nearly 15 minutes complaining about being hungry - you could have had breakfast and come in 15 minutes later and kept your mouth shut." but i think that's just me being a prick.

the bottom

this is the bottom of the tree frog

i'm going to name him archibald

there's been a fruit fly hovering around my desk all night. i'm not entirely sure as to the reason why because i have no fruit. but then again, maybe he's not a fruit fly, maybe he's a paper fly and he's here to try to steal my paper.

or maybe he's not even a he. this could be a she, and perhaps by writing about this bug as a male i have angered it further which might cause it to fly around my desk even more.

maybe i should just squish him.

the great cricket hunt

for the better part of the last week, much of my limited time at home spent not watching movies has been spent hunting down crickets. why might i be hunting down crickets? well the answer is simple:

Hippo the tree frog eats crickets. every day i put a dozen or so crickets in his terrarium for him to chow down on, and usually he's pretty good about finding and eating most of them. occasionally one or two escapes and manages to get under a piece of furniture, temporarily escaping a date with the tree frog's sticky tongue.

by my count this week, i've lost two crickets in the feeding process, meaning that theoretically there should have been only two crickets hopping around the house. one of them i know has been under the fridge chirping for three or four days straight. he was introduced to the bottom of my shoe last night (under normal circumstances, i'd just catch them and throw them back in with the frog - but this one was pissing me off).

somehow, i found three other crickets this morning. well, i shouldn't say that i found them - rather the cat found them. it's kind of funny watching a 20 lb cat bouncing around the living room after a cricket. the good thing is that he's smart enough not to eat them. he tends to just hold them under his overly fuzzy paws until he's ready to start bouncing again. thanks to his keen and non-lethal cricket catching skills, hippo had three more snacks added to his plate this morning.

standing in a line-up yeah!

sometimes when you go to Tim Horton's, you get to spend a great deal of time in line. the people in this picture decided it would be best to pay for their order in change, then change their order. the people in line behind me thought it was funny that i was taking a picture as blatantly as i was and said loudly enough for them to hear, "why don't you use one of the wad of $20 bills that you've got their so the rest of us can order before we die of old age?"

leeches, the symbol of ireland

last night the first movie on the list of things to do was Attack of the Giant Leeches. oddly, it isn't the first time i've seen this movie (as i own it on DVD). it happened to be on television last night when i got home from work, and since i happened to be feeding the various amphibians in my house, i decided not to change the channel.

what we have here is a horrific tale about people disappearing in the swamp, being MURDERED by mutated over-sized leeches. i sat and thought about it. "what's the animal you're most afraid will kill you at some point in your life?" i asked myself. the answer i gave myself was "giant leeches!"

it's one of those really (really) bad horror movies that depends on over-complicated explanations of seemingly simple scenarios. and being that it was likely shot on a budget roughly equivalent to what i spend on coffee in a given month - the special effects are... well ... special. it is kind of interesting when you get to see the leeches lair full of victims, but overall there's not a lot to be said. i wouldn't recommend going out and intentionally hunting this movie down, but should you happen to come across it in a box set of horror movies bundled together, it's a good one for beer and nachos to help you with your commentary.

after that piece of cinematic gold, i started watching Mission Impossible (can you tell i wasn't in the mood to think about movie plots?). i only watched the first half of it, but a lot of things struck me this time that didn't really occur to me the first time i watched it:

• if he was betrayed by the people he worked for, why did Tom Cruise just go back to the hotel and start using the computers and shit that he most likely got directly from them?
• Tom Cruise's "going crazy learning the truth" face when his boss guy was telling him about the conspiracy and why all his buddies got killed at the beginning makes me think he looks like he just got a lobotomy. i don't think it portrays "holy crap i'm freaked out" very well at all
• when Emilio Estevez's character is about to die - it appears quite obvious to me that if he'd ducked, or lay down that the big sword thing wouldn't have stabbed him in the head.

just sayin' is all. figure i'll watch the rest of it tonight. i haven't seen either of the sequels yet, and i likely won't unless someone can convince me that there's some sort of need to do that to myself. i try hard to limit the number of Tom Cruise movies i watch in a given decade and i'm already pretty close to my limit.

rejected by the devil, approved by trial audiences

last night's movies in this week of movie watching were filled with light hearted humour and silliness.

first in line was A Night at the Roxbury. a movie based on two saturday night live characters played by Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan that play these unpopular losers trying desperately to get into what they deem to be Hollywoods coolest club - the Roxbury. their attempts to get into the club lead them to meeting one of their idols - Richard Grieco - finding some ladies that think they're just acting retarded and are really rich club owners, and almost finding themselves torn apart by a woman. there's some really silly moments and hey... did somebody just grab my ass?

second on the list was The Devil's Rejects. at first i wasn't overly content with the quality of this movie. i think at first i was expecting it to be more of a horror film like the first film in the series House of 1000 Corpses, but it turned out to be more of a crime-thriller than a horror. there were some moments that left a lot to be desired - the "tutti-fuckin'-frutti" moment being one of them, but the movie was a little schizophrenic. there would be a brutally violent scene accompanied by some spastic light-hearted seventies music that both made sense and didn't all at the same time. brilliant performances by William Forsythe (who i barely recognized... he was really incredible in a completely different style here) and Sid Haig more than made up for the mediocre performances from Bill Moseley and Sherri Moon Zombie. overall, it was a fun and ultraviolent movie as long as you watch it realizing that it's not the horror flick you may have expected. i was a bigger fan of House of 1000 Corpses, but this movie was definitely on the "worth seeing" list.

not sure what's going to make it into tonight's movie-watching list. i have a bunch of low-budget horror movies that i still haven't watched, maybe i should tackle those.

mommy's asking daddy for a new dress

normally i wouldn't post a crude, ridiculous cartoon like this but...

who am i kidding, i'm pretty sure i put dumb shit like this on here all the time.

where do you think you're going Shaft?

i'm officially labelling this week as movie week, as it's been a while since i've attempted to spend more time watching movies than there are hours in the day. last night was a feeble attempt at getting on pace - only managed to fit in two.

first on the list was Shaft - not the Samuel L. Jackson remake, but the original. i haven't actually seen the newer version yet, maybe i should put that on this week's list. the dvd i have for this has kind of poor sound quality, it seems as though a lot of the dialogue doesn't line up properly with the actors' mouths, and the volume levels for the music and dialogue tracks vary in volume quite wildly. as far as plot goes, the story just seems to be a generic detective gets in trouble and must find who's really right kind of story, but throw that in with some of the most quoted and classic dialogue and you'll find a decent movie out of it all... "When you lead your revolution, whitey better be standing still because you don't run worth a damn no more"

Second on the list of last night's films was Talledaga Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby. i know, i've seen it before, but as i said i'm trying to cram in as many movies as possible. the version i watched was the "Uncut" version on DVD and i'll have to say that they should have left it the same as the theater version. it was still funny, but missing some important parts. the scene where Ricky Bobby steals the car as a little kid - removed. call me crazy, but that's a pretty important part in establishing the whole plot. all in all it is still a very funny movie ... "These two are two in a million, just like Carley's ta-tas"

what's next on the list eh?

the wire hanger scene was probably the most psychotic

growing weary of the same nonsense that seems to be plaguing the television universe, i decided to watch a movie last night. Mommie Dearest was the first suggestion made, and the first dvd to make it into the player. i own a copy of it, but had never actually seen it... or even heard of it for that matter.

it's based on the off-screen life of Joan Crawford and her adopted children Christina and Christopher. what it reveals is a true story that you watch and think "wow... hollywood is SCREWED UP." you get to see a glimpse into the life of an obsessive compulsive woman who adopts children to help promote her image and spends her life destroying them and herself mentally.

Faye Dunaway's performance was outstanding, but in my opinion better choices could have been made for the role of her daughter. all in all though it was a well done movie, and not nearly deserving of the awards for which it was nominated. definitely worth renting if you're in the mood to see the completely insane side of early hollywood. i'll not be putting any wire hangers in my closet from now on.

daylight butthole time

working on the day of the time change always sucks. i hate when the alarm goes off in the morning and you have to sit there in that tired, dazed just-woke-up state and try to do the math to figure out if you should have got up an hour ago or if you can sleep in for another hour.

<>

or in my case, try to decide if i had already set the clock so that it would go off at the right time last night.

< /nerd >

sometimes i love the news, and other times i hate it. most news agencies let out a major spoiler in the comic world in the last few days (don't worry, if there are any comic fans reading this, i won't spoil it for you yet). it's kind of like if the news said "yeah, harry potter dies in this book" the day it was released. fuckers. though i do think Nick Fury's going to get Bucky to fill in coming soon, but that's my theory.



that being said, sometimes the news can redeem itself. one instance of this would be that it has advised me that a man decided that since his divorce settlement entitled half of the property to his wife, that it would be a good idea to make sure that she got half.

a kitty shouldn't smell like cigarettes, it should smell like a kitty

by the way, if you haven't already seen the Trailer Park Boys movie, you should get your arse to the video store to go watch it. if you're ready for a movie with an abundance of bad language, drinking, drugs and rampant ridiculosity - that's what you'll get. for anyone who's not familiar with the Showcase series, it will give you enough introduction that you could easily start following the show without having to track down key episodes of the series in order to trace any character development. and the great thing is that for anyone who may not have the good fortune to be able to catch the series on television, most of the seasons are available on DVD.

totally off topic, i've been stuck in traffic for much of the last few days. we had a hella snow/freezing rain/ice storm on thursday that retarded the highway drivers, causing me to have a 3+ hour drive home. it did enough damage to the city that friday i could warrant working at home even though the weather was much nicer.

and what the hell is up with the gasoline situation? is it the same in the US with gas prices skyrocketing and supplies being ridiculously low, or is it only us canadians that are getting anally violated at the gas pumps? thank god i bought a Toyota Yaris. i'm lucky enough that even with all of the insane gas prices ($1.02 per litre this morning - that's about $3.30 per gallon for americans) i can get away with just topping up a small amount in the ol' gas tank and still be able to get myself around. it is pretty awful though that 5 out of the 10 gas stations between my home and my office are completely out of gas. most people are pretty much at the point that they just fill up whenever they see a station has gas. hopefully by the time my lease is up on this car, the alternative fuel engines will be much more popular. i'm personally cheering for the hydrogen fuel cells, but i think the hybrid technology's going to win out first.