Slow news day

And she stinks, too.

From anywhere to anyone

Hello.

I currently wait for my lady to arrive home from work, and since it is now technically her birthday, I wait to bestow gifts. What a goddamn sweetheart I am.

So, I bide my time.

If anyone still reads this, you've either talked to me today or live with me, and you also know that my computer, well, is garbage. I had trouble with it a few months ago, as I had chronicled; after a "repair", it's even worse off. Perhaps putting a brand new 300gb drive on a five year old motherboard may have pissed it off. Maybe it overheard my nefarious scheme to have my music collection ripped at the highest possible rate so I can hook it up to my home theatre and enjoy it. Also we must consider the fact that one cannot polish a turd. In the coming months, I hope to go from brown box to white box, as shown below:

Yes, I realize the unintentional creepy blackface freaks you out. It freaks me out too. We're in this together, don't worry.

Either way, I'm hopefully getting a MacBook. Sure, I don't need one, but I'm bored of the whole PC fiasco. Sick of updates, sick of viruses, sick of crashing hard drives and blue screens of death. On top of that, I actually have valid reasons: I want a laptop for travel, such as to Europe or class; I want to become more familiar with other platforms; I want to have blogging/editing/music programs that all jive together. I'm pumped about the damn thing and it's not because of the neat-o "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials. They're not pandering to me.

"Wait, hold the phone," you say, "did that hip cat say 'class'?" Yes, I did, and thank you for the compliment. I will (tentatively) be going to school in September...again. This time at a different institution, different program, shit, different city. Continuing my trend of "going to school in cities in which I have never been", I'll be taking the Journalism course at Niagara College. Why I said "tentatively" before is because I'm currently on a waiting list for the program, which makes sense considering I applied less than a week ago. I apparently have a 99.9% chance of getting in, so I'll just say I'm going to school. If I don't get in, I expect one solid week of binge drinking and sandwich eating, and you should too. You know what? Even if I do make it in, I will do it anyhow. That, friend, is my gift to you.

Some quick things to note:

• Dead Rising for the Xbox 360 plays like the longest demo ever. It is fun until you realize you don't care about the people you're supposed to save (and they slow you down anyhow), and you also find out that commanding them into a crowd of zombies is very helpful. I will say this for the title though: the weapons are some of the most satisfying in any game I've ever played (you haven't lived until you've scalded a zombie's face with a hot frying pan, or knocked off a leg with a bowling ball). 6.5/10.
• Read Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss. Quality book, really cheap at Wal-Mart too.
  
• Listen to Sounding a Mosaic by Bedouin Soundclash. I know lots of you may already have, but if not...well, hey.
  
• The cat ate part of my fucking sandwich when I was in the bathroom. I was gone for like a minute, and the fat loaf decides to go to town on my ham. Cat, if you are intelligent enough to know that the worst possible thing you could do is involve yourself with my sandwich, then you're intelligent enough to read and peruse the tubes of the internet. So I say this once with clenched teeth: you're lucky Elaine likes you and that it is her birthday. You are on thin fucking ice with me. Enjoy your kibble. God damned cat.

I should probably go, and, you know, wrap Elaine's present.

Good night, oxygen thieves.

Moment of Zen: Dinosaur parties and the legend of the gay biscotti.

Get off my deck, you old queens!

Do not misread the title.

Two months, in the grand scheme of things, is not a long time.

My first order of business:

To everyone who plays NHL 06 on Xbox Live:
fuck you, let me play as Edmonton once.

Seriously. Just because you have one or two of the Oilers in your hockey pool doesn't mean you have to be a dick about it. You saw me highlight the jersey, you saw me choose the old-school logo, so why'd you have to go ahead and be the same team? It is wrong. Two of the same person cannot coexist, let alone at once upon ice. Maybe I'm just being weird, but it simply will not do.

Also, you're all cheap bastards. The wraparound goal wasn't sportsmanlike in NHL 94, and my thoughts on it have not changed in the past 12 years. For more than a decade, you've been a dick.

Elaine and I went to see The Da Vinci Code last night. It seems that pretty much everyone hates it, but damned if I can figure out why. Okay, it's not that great a movie, and it does take some liberties in explaining what's going on. For example, in the book (correct me if I'm wrong), Dan Brown never says what is under the Louvre, it's only implied. The movie, in one epic closing shot goes down and pretty much says "Hey! Look! Look what we found! GODDAMN IT LOOK!" I know why they did this, and I'm not offended by it in the least: summer film-goers have to be treated as idiots. I don't want to say that the movie wasn't for critics, but they're really getting the knickers all a-twisted for nothing. The movie, when it's all said and done, is a watered-down version of the book, dialogue-heavy with not much focus on action. So is that the problem critics have with it? "NOT ENUF 'SPLOSIONS OR DEM BOOBS!" Pretty much.

I will break it down as such: The book, while entertaining, was not an intelligent book. The way Brown wrote it made the reader feel smart, not unlike how first round Jeopardy! categories like "Letters starting with R" and "Shapes, Colours, and Animals!" make people feel smart. He took ideas from tons of Grail legends and, quite cleverly, strung them together using an old painter (and general wacko) as the glue that binds. Using the Coles Notes version of the Bible and a dog-eared copy of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Brown made something that anyone who's heard of Jesus Christ and seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade can understand. The Da Vinci movie assumes that you've heard of neither, and works like a paint-by-numbers version of the book. It is simply an adventure movie that reads like a short story, and for critics to pan it as harshly as they have been seems like a waste of time. They go in expecting Citizen Kane, but with Jesus! and end up getting The Goonies Where Chunk Is Tom Hanks and the Old Lady is Magneto! (Which, come to think of it, would be fucking glorious.) My point is, they're letting the hype (that they themselves have wrought) and their expectations colour their opinion.

If it wasn't clear, my take on the movie is this: It's alright, not the best. I will likely buy it on DVD, and watch it maybe twice.

I now bite my lip in anticipation for X3. Go Dr. Frasier Crane!

I mentioned above that people at the theatre are to be treated like idiots. I would like to support my claim by stating that they are idiots. Come on, you come in the theatre, sit the fuck down. I don't mind if you've got a DS or Game Boy or someshit, but just sit down. I saw one kid with a soccer ball. Was the movie to be a FIFA-sponsored event? I don't know. Put the goddamn soccer ball away. It has no place in the theatre. Besides, who the hell let this kid in? How, as the ticket-taker kid, do you not notice a SOCCER BALL entering your establishment? Aside from fucking Pele doing his thing in the front row, we were surrounded by the standard-issue university frat wannabe. You know the type: American Eagle/Old Navy rugby shirt with the collar turned up, shorts (usually khaki or cargo), flip-flops, spiked/highlighted hair, little toughguy goatee, and if they have a hat on, it'll feature the logo for some (usually football) team, usually from a college not located in Canada. Basically the main demographic for Madden games. I'm serious, what the hell is wrong with you guys? It is 13 degrees out. Flip-flops and shorts are not cool at this temperature. Every time you come into my store, I pimpslap you. With my mind.

Speaking of people I dislike in my store, parents: please stop leaving your children with me. It does not please me. I see the parents come up to the store, and say "Alright, Cody/Hunter/Other Manly Name So My Child Does Not Grow Up Gay, you stay in the game store, I'm just going to The Bay, Transit, and Shoppers. Mommy needs new clothes, shoes, and meds." Does your kid know that The Bay is at the other end of the goddamn mall? Even running, it takes at least five minutes to get there. What can we do about the parents? Well, we tried turning off the systems. The kids just beg us to turn them on, because they're so bored. They then flip through the hint books, throwing off my meticulous order of Brand/Letter/System (it's not OCD, but close). Then they go and look at GameCube games, carry them to the PS2 wall, switch the games around, and move on to Xbox. Don't get me wrong, as much as I dislike the children, I don't blame them in the least. So we've started to tell the parents that they can't do this to us. You can't imagine the indignant faces they make, as if to say "Hah! You are in a game store! You're here to entertain my child, with games." Sorry, lady, it doesn't work that way. When I was a young buck, my parents wouldn't come into EB, they would sit out front as I proceeded to nerd it up. But there's the thing, they could always see me. If they wanted to leave, they'd say "Okay Daniel, we're going!" I'd protest a bit, and they'd start to walk away. Not five steps away, I'd catch right the hell up. Why? Fear. Was I a sissy? No. Maybe yes for other reasons, but not for this. Oh, shit, do I ever love video games, but if your parents are walking away, you'd damn well better follow. There's none of this fear in parents now, which absolutely blows me away. As retail counter-jockeys we can't tell parents to watch their kids, now we have to scare them. As sad as it is (and yes, I'm aware I don't have to, but for what it's worth, I give a damn about the kids a little bit), I ask them if they've heard of Lake Gibson. They stare for a second, usually say "good point", and get on with not buying anything. When I'm in a poppier mood, though, I tell them that the ball pit was taken out of the store a few weeks ago, but if they come back next week and leave their kids in our store we'll be happy to have them taken on a ride to the security office, where parents get to explain how it's not child neglect!

I may just make photocopies of this and hand them to children to give to mommy and daddy.

As far as I know, I've not made mention of our Elaine's cat in the blog. It is a cat called Chewie, partly named for Chewbacca, but moreso named for her penchant for chewing on my goddamn hand. Right now, she's currently stoned on the catnip, and passed out on the couch. I firmly believe that although she is sleeping, she continues to watch me. With malicious intent. I may post a picture of her in due time, but instead, let this placate you:


Awesome.

Check this out: I'm so proud. Bloody great. You have no reason not to use Firefox, unless you enjoy using unstable and unsecure browsers. Come on, kids, get with it. "Oh, wahhh, it takes up too much of the lol ram". Fair enough, but there are ways around it. "OHNOES it does not support [media type]!" Yes it does. They're called extensions. "But I don't know how to use it"/"it's very difficult!" I have no reply to this. Probably because if you think this, you're unable to read what I'm typing right now. So I can say stuff like people who aren't using Firefox for that reason are the lepers of the internet and should be exiled.

I hope you kids enjoy the new look of the blog. The new title bar is tastefully pretentious, I think. I would like to point out that I made the headphones on there from scratch in Photoshop. I think it looks pretty decent. I used my sexy Sennheisers as template. There are a few things I'm still trying to implement a bit better (new links, maybe a Frappr thing, also a Flickr box perhaps.) I'm open to suggestions.

I think I've done quite enough for this evening. Enjoy. I promise to post some more in the near future.

Moment of Zen: I'm afraid, Mocha Bear!