Have a court date with the Housing Tribunal vs. our old landlord. Carrie and I think we’ll nail the session, but who knows how these things work? I’m thinking it won’t be anything like Law and Order and I won’t have the opportunity to yell out “I WANT THE TRUTH!”
Perhaps I can blog live from the event…
iplaying: The Hardest Part – Coldplay (coming on tour again! Here’s hoping I actually get to go this time!)
Want to see a kid have the fear of God put into him? Go to Blockbuster and have the clerk tell you that if you don’t bring in that video game you rented, you owe Blockbuster $60 for the game. But you get to keep it.
Wanted to rent The Devil’s Rejects, sequel to House of 1000 Corpses (only one of the cooler horror films I’ve seen in awhile), but they were out. So why not purchase a few films while I’m there? I rarely rent movies anymore because it’s just as expensive as buying previously viewed ones.
Picked up The Machinist and Sin City. The Machinist has Christian Bale (aka the American Psycho, aka the dude behind the Batsuit with the big gruff voice) who is a favourite actor of mine. Eric and I sat down to watch the movie on a cloudy Sunday afternoon where we proceeded to get freaked out from the movie soundtrack. It didn’t help when a picture fell down behind us (which was leaning on top of the couch) and scared the bejeezus out of us.
Anyhow, the movie is excellent. For a long, long time, I didn’t know where the movie was going. But once again, one of those movies that pulls you in throughout the entire 2 hours and then the big payoff is the ending where you go “NO WAY! I can’t believe they did that!”.
5 stars, 2 thumbs, whatever you want to use to measure a success. Go see this flick.
Matt picked up a new pair of leather mitts while in Montreal at Simon’s. This was before he got told he wasn’t supposed to take pictures within the store.
Query: That’s the second time that day that he was told ‘No pictures tabernac!’. What’s up with that? Are they scared of us stealing fashion secrets. Pssst…you have a flyer! We can see your clothing outside your store!
Anyhow, Matt left these mitts in my car and so I thought I would let you all know how they fare in certain scenarios.
Scenario #1: Cold Weather Testing
Well, I put them on and walked outside for awhile. My fingers did not get cold at all. Two thumbs up (literally. They are mitts!). However, to give the ultimate test I went down the street to pick up some liquid nitrogen. I dipped these bad boys in and am happy to say that my fingers survived the ordeal.
Scenario #2: Hot Weather Testing
Chances are, you don’t wear your mitts outside in hot weather. But you never know. So I went ahead and fired up the BBQ to put a steak on and decided to use the mitts to flip the steak. My only beef with the mitts is that licking the BBQ sauce off your fingers doesn’t really taste that great when your fingers are leather. Other than a few grill marks on the mitts, I would say that the gloves protected my hands, but they did become very hot and sweaty. One (mitt) thumb up for that test.
Scenario #3: Cleaning up Dog Poop.
What can I say? I didn’t get any on my fingers. The mitts did their job.
There you have it. Matt’s mitts are excellent and I’m sure he will be happy with them as soon as he picks them up.
Went down to Montreal on Friday with Matt, Trish and Jennie. Shopped around for a bit…very cold that day in Montreal. We were caught inside this frigid wind tunnel. Ended up at Reuben’s for a nice Reuben sandwich which everyone enjoyed. One day I’m going to have to dig into the pound of smoked meat.
Went to the Bell Centre and managed to walk right up to the doors cutting past a 1/2 hour wait in line. Some people are stupid. Just go through the OTHER doors with the security guard waiting there.
Checked out Death From Above 1979 who were decent. May have to check out the rest of their stuff.
Queens of the Stone Age…what can I say about this band? I have SO many friends who are into this band. I can’t say they were a bad act…I enjoyed them. But would I buy an album? Probably not. Just doesn’t hook me in. Highlight of the night was when they finished off with No One Knows and messed up in the second verse, but instead of stopping right there, they cut into a 10 minute long jam session, then bring it back to the song. Brilliant. That’s a good live band for you right there.
NIN showed up on stage around 9:45. They had a semi-transparent curtain in front of them which managed to become the means of some great lighting effects. I’ve been telling people that NIN is one of those bands that give a visual experience as well as an audio experience. They had a great backdrop which played along with the With Teeth artwork nicely. My favourite lighting effect was when they had a line spreading across the backdrop and everytime it hit upon one of the solid blocks, the block became red. Very hard to explain in words, but think of how a virus works. As soon as the virus hits you, it spreads, and then continues onto the next victim.
I also enjoyed when the curtain came back down and they played a series of movies while the band played on. Movie highlights included monkeys attacking each other and George Dubyah ballroom dancing. At one point, the movie changed so it looked like NIN was playing behind a waterfall…then Trent swings his mic stand towards the curtain and the video appears to smash into pieces. Brilliant. I do hope there will be another live DVD for this tour. There HAS to be.
My highlight of the night was hearing Burn…one of my fave tunes and I don’t think it’s ever been played live (until this tour). I was freaking out.
Thanks to Christelle who hooked me up with an audio recording of the show. Awesome. I really enjoy her blog and what she does for her concert reviews. It gives me an idea of what to do with mine.
On a random other note, I’ve started hanging up pictures around the house and I started to frame up concert reviews from newspapers along with the ticket stub. I think it looks sharp and I like it better than hanging out inside my scrap book. I now have to search the world (aka Ontario) for newspaper clippings for the past 10 years. Good luck with that buddy. Hey, if any of you out there actually keep newspapers like the Toronto Star or the Ottawa Citizen let me know!
nowblissfullyenteringmyears: The Frail [Live in Montreal – 2005-11-11] – NIN, thanks to Christelle.
Sony BMG is going down.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5944643.html
Also, Mel has a blog now. Welcome to cyberscape. Enjoy your stay.
Live 8 DVD: Live 8 4 Disc Set holding virtually all the Philly and London concerts, interspersed with other highlights (like Neil Young!). They also have separate DVDs for the other countries like Canada. Yay! What’s my beef with this? You would think that if they are splurging to have an entire DVD dedicated to Canada, they would include the whole concert. Sam Roberts and Our Lady Peace (amongst others) get cut down to one song out of three that they played. I’m almost willing to just download the TV broadcast off the Internet.
Amazon Wish List: This year, I’m thinking of setting up a Wish List on Amazon.ca for Christmas. I’m thinking that 90% of the things I would want can be found on Amazon, and they offer decent prices. Books, CDs, DVDs, video games…pretty well whatever I want for the holidays. I recommend it to all of you!
Alternative Work Arrangements: I’m going to start working extra hours so that I can get every second Friday off. If any of you are able to do this at your workplace, I suggest it! I may grow tired of working 50 extra minutes a day, but the thought of an entire Friday off will help me get through it!
Last night after class I was standing at the bus stop freezing my ass off. I was listening to some tunes and didn’t really catch what was going on when a gentleman was addressing the crowd. I caught the end of his speech of being from Toronto and needing money to stay at the shelter. Heck, it’s only spare change, I’ll give him some…
My only beef with this gentleman is that when he walking across the street to ask some others for change, he thanked those who passed along some cash, but then he said “And thanks to all the others.” in a sarcastic fashion.
He also continued his sarcastic comments on how he appreciated how the people who didn’t give him any money helped him out SO much this night.
Robyn spied this on the wall at Kit Kat which was hilarious. Turns out that it is a play found here.
Who would have thought?
It was great seeing Ryan and Robyn in Toronto on Sunday. We met up to to the Ontario Science Museum for the Body Worlds 2 exhibit. The exibit has been on display in Europe for quite some time as the person responsible for the exhibit hails from Germany. Gunther von Hagens plasticizes dead things. There were literally dead people who had their skin removed so that we can see how their bones/muscles/ligaments fit together. They were placed into a variety of positions such as a ballerina, a woman doing yoga, a baseball player. The skateboarder was cool actually. They even sliced up people so you can see how all the parts of the body are put together. VERY COOL exhibit and I would recommend it to anyone who can handle a good dead body. To be honest, I didn’t feel like they were cadavers as they appeared to be mannequins.
New York Subway.
Miguel introduced me to the best gourmet burrito in the world. I introduced Vero and even though hers was too spicy, she enjoyed it.
I can still taste the goodness in my mouth.
If you are on Queen Street West, you MUST go try a satay lamb burrito. For those who don’t like the thought of eating baby lambs, try the chicken or the beef!
What can I say about Medieval Times? It was great!
You eat a chicken dinner with your hands, watch a show of horses running around an arena with knights battling each other. What more can you ask for?
Each section is assigned a knight to cheer for (we cheered for Louis du Rouge – the Red Knight) who didn’t fare too well, but we thought had the greatest potential of becoming the greatest knight there ever was.
They had full out jousting along with knights somersaulting off of their horses and taking their swords to each other’s throats. Excellent!
All in all, I thought $75 would be too much to pay for something like this, but I was not disappointed. Louis even threw Vero a rose! Awww.
Click on the photo above to take a look at the rest of the photostream.