Fantasia is ovah!

Well Fantasia just wrapped up this Wednesday. Fantasia is North America's largest (and best) genre film festival. It features a wide range of horror, martial arts, giant monster and other international movie craziness. It lasts about 3 weeks in the middle of the summer here in Montreal and basically takes over my life during that time. The first two years I was here, I did 30 movies. This year, I only made it to 20. A big part of that was because I was out of town for the first long weekend and missed a couple crucial Hong Kong movies as well as some others that I will have to wait to come out on DVD.

One of the best parts of Fantasia is the audience. They are totally into it. The people are already pretty hyped at the beginning of the movie, but if it's good, they go crazy. You can risk missing some chunks of dialogue due to laughter or cheering (like when a particularly nasty bad guy gets offed). I always think it must be so amazing to be a director or an actor and be present when your film is screened at Fantasia. A lot of these movies are very low-budget, quite obscure and probably can't hope to do better than maybe get a small DVD distribution. So when you get a packed house of people laughing and cheering at your work and then you get to come up afterwards for a Q&A, you must be so totally psyched.

And the audiences are the best for the midnight showings. They always have one on Friday and Saturday night, usually following one of the more popular films. A lot of people are there for both, but you also get some more trendy members who aren't such hardcore film geeks but have heard about the film through the local media. People are dressed a bit more styley, sometimes tricked out in whatever is the genre of the movie (goths or anime fans, for instance). You can also tell that some people have been partaking their recreational drug of choice (and I often bring my handy flask).

The midnight shows tend to be the crazy over-the-top movies (like a screening this year of Troll 2 or Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl) or something really freaky and hardcore that may be too much for the evening audience. Three years ago, someone passed out during a particularly gory moment in Neighborhood Watch. After it was over, when Mitch Davis was introducing the Q&A with the director, he explained what the kerfluffle was about and the audience exploded in cheers. We all felt quite proud.

Unfortunately, I wasn't so happy with this year's midnight selections. Plus, I was taking it easier in general. So I didn't get to experience a really zany midnight showing. I did have a wonderful festival overall. There were at least 4 films that I would say were outright excellent. Of them, I would strongly recommend that you check out Private Eye, a Korean movie about a private detective who joins up with a young medical intern in pre-WWI Seoul to hunt down a murderer of high-ranking officials. Well-written, with excellent direction and acting, it just captured a real sense of adventure and escapism.

The other movie, that will probably make it to an arthouse circuit was Terribly Happy, a Danish neo-noir about a cop who makes a mistake and gets sent to be the sheriff of a small town in Jutland. Shit gets weird. This movie strongly reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, the Coen Brothers Blood Simple. Really satisfying and well done. Talk about creepy rednecks. We North Americans don't think they have them in Scandinavia. This movie will disabuse you of that notion.

And my hats off to Mitch Davis. He is one of the main programmers and he works hard all year to bring the best stuff to us. He only does about a dozen write-ups or so in the program (of something like 120 films) but those are the movies you should seek out. Thanks, dude!

Bing-Ring.com versus Google

Well for the first time, I accidently used Bing-Ring.com, Microsoft's newly branded website. I wanted to figure out how to turn off the pernicious automatic updates in Adobe Acrobat. I was using my boss's computer (trying to speed it up) and he unfortunately only had Internet Explorer installed. Bing is the default search engine in the little box in the upper right hand corner and I didn't realize that until it was too late. Here are the results:



As you can see, none of the links returned offer any direct solution to the problem. Possibly, in the first link I may find an answer in that thread in those adobe forums. Even weirder, the third link has nothing to do with Adobe at all and is specifically a windows-oriented site.

Here is Google's result:




Practically every single link there gives me the kind of answers I am looking for.

Obviously, this isn't a scientific test but it basically confirms what I had suspected. Microsoft's search engine sucks.

But let's talk about their marketing for a moment. Let's see, they have the biggest name in computing and instead of using it, they hire some retarded band of consultants who probably did a bunch of "brainstorming" and "market research" and "focus groups" and then came up with a generic sounding name with a bunch of arguments justifying why it will help catch eyeballs and attract people to the site.

Hey geniuses, how about "Microsoft Search"?

Note to the consultants: In Canada, a bing-ring is a vulgar term used most often by adolescent males. It refers to the ring of feces surrounding the base of the penis after that penis has performed an act of sodomy. Another job well done, Microsoft!

I ask you all from this day forwards, when referring to this mediocre search engine, to use the term bing-ring.com until Microsoft wakes up and takes it and its heinous ads off the market.

2 more signs of the oncoming apocalypse

I'm happy as a clam these last three weeks being thoroughly immersed in the best film festival in the world: Fantasia. My only complaint is that the blogging and reviews that are usually done while the festival is going on are really poor this year, especially in english. If I'd known Dread Central (who usually do a great job) was going to mail it in this year, I might have offered to do it myself as I have plenty to say about the festival and the 18 movies I've seen so far.

I'll talk about Fantasia later, I just wanted to take a moment to share a couple mini-rants with you today.

First of all, there is a new behaviour I've noticed at Fantasia and this is losers who show up for the show after the show has started and the house lights are down use their cellphones to light their way. I must use the greatest restraint not to spring from my seat and dash their cursed little toys over their head. I mean, c'mon, you are too fucking lame to let your eyes adjust to the darkness? I know part of this phenomenon is because someone thought it was a cute and clever re-application of the cellphone. Well it's not. It's weak and annoying. It's distracting to other moviegoers and infuriates those few men left in the world who have any balls left. If your night-vision is so poor that you can't see the stairs in a dark theatre, you need to stop leaving the house altogether. Better yet, please just kill yourself.

The other, far more disturbing thing I noticed is that it now appears to be impossible to buy underwear in any quantity. Now I'm sure this was always the case for homos, metrosexuals and Night At the Roxbury-types who buy designer underwear (just typing those two words together makes the bile rise in my throat), but now even Hanes and Fruit of the Loom brands come in friggin' two-packs! Two-packs! Who the fuck buys their underwear two at a time? I can not even imagine a scenario where a male would need to buy only two pairs of underwear, unless maybe you are on the road for a weekend business trip or something and forgot to pack your underwear (or soiled yourself getting too drunk with the clients). It's just another example of branding and commodification working its way down to every level of consumer good so that we have more packaging (and thus more waste) and an excess of false choice. Underwear should be sold in a minimum of 7 per pack, to make a solid week of having clean underwear. I even looked online (though I will look harder) and all the sites there sell only two-packs, with the occassional 4-pack of coloured underwear (which no man should wear unless they are boxers).

In New York, on Orchard street, you used to be able to get packs of mistake underwear for a really cheap price. They had some small error that made them not good enough to go into the main distribution channel, but I could never tell what those mistakes were. I don't know if those stores are still there, but does anybody from Montreal know if there are any places like that here? This used to be a shmata town, so possibly.

I love life, but fuck the world is a discouraging place when you are surrounded by untermenschian losers and an economic system that encourages their behaviour.

How to express "you should" versus "you must" in french

Learned an awesome and subtle new french tip today.

In english, we say "you should do something" which is a step down in severity from "you have to do something" or "you are supposed to do something".

In french, the verb for those two states is encompassed by "devoir".

You make the distinction with tenses!

For the case where you are suggesting something, you use the conditional tense.

For the case where you are demanding something, you use the present tense.

So the girlfriend of 2 months would say to you "tu devrais te trouver une job".

(you should get a job)

Whereas the girlfriend of two years would say "tu doit te trouver une job!"

(you must get a job!)

[Note: "une job" is not proper french. Worse, I just found out that in Québec it's "une job" and in France it's "un job"!!]

My response to Alberta's $1 billion dollar budget deficit

EDMONTON and CALGARY -- Alberta, long the envy of the nation with its vast energy resources and overflowing treasury, is about to post a stunning financial setback - an estimated $1-billion deficit, one of the largest budget shortfalls of any province this fiscal year.

Albertans learned for the first time yesterday how dire their economic situation has suddenly become after Finance Minister Iris Evans announced the debt-free province has entered a "sharp period of recession."

She said Alberta, which hasn't posted a deficit in 15 years, is expected to shed 15,000 jobs in coming months as its economy shrinks by 2 per cent.

Read the rest of the fun here.

Um, I told you so?

I mean, come on, everybody and his dog with any brains was pointing out how obviously overheated the Alberta economy was and that efforts should have been made to both cool it down, so it would last longer and to put down money for when it ended. The response of the government and the majority of Albertans was that the rest of the country was jealous, that finally it was time for "Western" values to be listened to in Ottawa, blah blah blah.

Now normally, I don't like to make fun of governments and regions being in debt. It's always the poor and the people who are already struggling who suffer in these situations. What is so infuriating about Alberta is that it wasn't just a case of a bunch of greedy, short-sighted assholes signing away the future of the province to a bunch of multinational oil companies and taking a huge personal cut on the side. No, this was happening during the height of neo-con cultural indoctrination and propaganda. So now instead of simple lying and prevaricating, the Albertan government and all the people making out like bandits got to walk around acting like they were actually part of some political philosophy and what they were doing was morally correct and to the benefit of society overall.

It still blows my mind how these "conservatives" have abandoned entirely the fundamentals of conservative financial behaviour. Spend wisely. Save your money for a rainy day. Balance risk and security appropriate to your future needs. Husband your resources. And so on. All that stuff has been tossed out the window. They are decadent, wasteful and greedy but at the same time get to act all righteous about social issues, as if they themselves are living some morally superior lifestyle. I think that if you are holding a credit card debt that you are not able to pay off that month, you should not be allowed to have any socially conservative viewpoints. How can you rail against abortion, immigration or gun control when you can't even afford to pay off your home and you are driving around in a new pickup truck that you don't need and don't own. This goes from the individual level right up to the government itself.

When things get really bad, and you want to complain and whine, take it to the big oil companies to whom you gave all your profits in the first place. Maybe they'll lend you some money to get through the hard times.

The wet snow/freezing night trap - Avoided!

We had a decent little snow fall overnight Wednesday. This was going on top of basically clear streets, sidewalks and stairs. We woke up to around 8-10 cm and it was supposed to drop another 5 cm or so throughout the day. It stayed quite warm though, making it a slightly wet and heavy snow, perfect for snowballs and making snowmen and other snow sculptures. It's very easy to clear this kind of snow from smooth surfaces, like car rooves. It clumps together and slides, so you can knock huge sections off with sliding motions. It can't stick to the sides either. In general there was very little work for drivers.

On stairs with rough carpets, it's a little tougher, but really not too bad. It's just heavier to move. I gave myself plenty of time in the morning to clear the stairs properly. The real danger with this kind of wet snow is that it melts down into the fibres of the stair carpet. When the temperature drops overnight, the melted snow freezes right down to the bottom of the carpet and clings, making it almost impossible to get off without using salt or the Sun God's own powerful rays.

We had a dinner date that night and I went directly there from work. By the time we got back home, the air was already much colder and the slush on the sidewalk had hardened into ice. Seeing all my lame neighbours stairs now covered in solidified and tenacious ice, in slippery, uneven clumps, I was quite worried about our own stairs. I knew it had snowed a bit during the day and I was worried that that was enough to leave a thin layer of icey death on our stairs, reducing my status significantly in the neighbourhood.

I was relieved to see that our stairs were even cleaner than when I had left them. I guess the wind and the warmth had overcome the falling snow and everything had melted or blown away, leaving just the lightest dusting on the carpet. There was one chunk of ice at the top of the stairs where the balcony above had deposited its own melting snow. The video below will show you the difficulty in getting this off.



Imagine if that was the entire stairs, like many of my neighbours! I like to mock them, but it could have easily been me, had I just said to myself, oh I'll do the stairs when I get home from work. The lesson is, always clear the snow sooner rather than later, even if there is more snow to come. Get on it, son!

Below you can see how clean my stairs are, other than the blemishes from the balcony above.

Obama pimpslaps Harper

Here is how it's going to go down tomorrow in the PM's office when President Obama comes to visit Harper for the first time:

[intro music "Big Poppa" by Edwin Starr from the Hell up in Harlem soundtrack]

Obama, sitting in Harper's chair, smoking a cigarette, using a framed picture of the Harpers as an ashtray, his feet on the desk. Harper is in the smaller chair on the other side.

"I don't give a shit about your goddamn "trade relations", mister Har-perr. I'm going to run it down for you one time, you dig? You are going to clean up your motherfucking dirty-ass oil and you are going to get it to me and my people. But that shit better be clean, you here? None of this jive-ass, stepped-on, carbon-producing garbage you been peddling around your neighborhood. I want you to pretend like that shit is my jelly sandwich that I take to the beach. If I bite into and it's got some sand gristle in there that I'm going to hurt my teeth on, I'm going to send my man Arnold up here to shove that sandwich up your ass and take a 50% discount. You with me?"

"Um, er, well—"

Grabbing his tie and yanking his face close in, "I can't hear you, honky! Let me tell you right now the only reason I haven't already slapped you hard upside the head is because I don't want to get whatever keeps your hair in that funky-ass shape on my hands. Now one more time. Are. You. With. Me?"

"Um, yes, I'm with you."

"I'm with you, who?!"

"I'm with you, President Obama."

Releasing him so he stumbles backwards, Obama leans back into the chair, takes a long drag. "That's better. We've got be clear in these kinds of relationships. Now, one more thing, about Guantanamo."

"Yes, I understand you are going to close it down."

"Not going to, motherfucker. That shit is already closed. Past tense. Shut down. Finito. And that means my Muslim brother Omar Khadr is a free man. He's going to need to chill out for a while, try and get his shit back together, you know? And he's going to be doing that here, in Canada, his nation. So you are going to make sure that happens. I want a nice crib, stereo system, ladies, all that good shit. And no trouble from the man. If any of your faggot-ass mounties with their gay redcoats get up in his mix, I'll come here personally and you know you don't want that."

"No, I really don't."

"You really don't who?"

"No, I really don't, President Obama."

"Yeah, that's right. You're getting it now. Oh shit! That reminds me, where can I get some weed? I know you all got some dynamite weed up in here."

Harper stammers, dumbfounded.

"Oh forget you. I can tell just by looking at your hair that you don't know where the weed is at. What about Iggy? He's one of them professor types. He can probably hook me up. All right, I'm done here. Remember what I said. Peace out."

Obama gets, up puts his cigarette in his mouth, does up his jacket and walks around the desk. Harper jumps up and then awkwardly reaches in the air for a high five.

"um, peace out, my brother."

Obama punches him viciously in the stomach. Harper crumbles to the floor. "I initiate the daps around here, mofo! You got that? You just concentrate on getting me that clean oil and we'll be straight. Now clean yourself up and go meet the press. I gotta go see if I can get my hands on some of that good island weed."

He steps over Harper's curled up body and walks out to the flash of lights.

[cue "Easin' in" from the same album.]