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  • Pennies To Feed The World!

    After nine years of filling up a 40 oz bottle of Absolute Vodka with pennies, it was finally full.

    Time to count the change!

    Let’s recap some past events involving me counting change. Like when I counted my beer bottle of change in which the beer bottle was the size of a small dog and there was $1000 in it. Awww yeah!

    So I know that pennies don’t really amount to much but I had these visions of having at least $50 from it.

    In the end, it took me three hours to count out $24. Ah well. It had to be done. I’m glad this will only occur every nine years.

  • Music World Closing

    It just hit me this morning that the music world (ha, I just caught my own pun) that we live in is changing drastically.

    Music World across Canada has filed for bankruptcy and will be closing its stores unless someone swoops in and saves them.

    What does this mean to all of us? Well, Sam The Record Man shut its doors sometime in the past year. While I never frequented Sam The Record Man (they didn’t have many stores in Ottawa and when they did, they just didn’t have the prices that Music World or HMV do), it had quite the following as my cousin Troy can attest to as he mentioned how he used to find old Metallica imports in the shop down on Younge Street.

    Back to Music World, I am pretty bummed that this store is closing shop. I usually hit up Music World in the mall over HMV because they tended to have better prices on their new releases. I also like checking both stores all the time to compare. It was my thing. Now, all I’ll have to go to is HMV. While I enjoy HMV’s crazy combo item sales (like BUY TWO FOR $20!), I felt Music World had more of the music fans working in it. You could talk about an album with the employees and see what they thought.

    Where does this put the world of music stores? It’s a strange world we live in where there are reports of CD sales actually increasing due to downloading of music, but in the end, I guess it’s still not enough to help the record shops stay open?

    Now we’ll have HMV in the malls and that’s about it. Other alternatives are electronics stores like Best Buy and Future Shop which aren’t that bad when it comes to new releases and they are actually priced great. But what about smaller communities that can’t afford a Best Buy in town? I feel bad for the teens of Kapuskasing who are growing up with downloading because all they have is the craptacular music section at Wal-Mart…the store which bans certain albums from hitting their shelves. Ugh. I always cringe when I go home and peruse their music section. Half of it consists of those 20th Century Greatest Hits packages!

    What’s the future in music retail? Well, if HMV eventually caves, I think you’ll see the resurgence of local record shops which will specialize in albums. Sure, it will be more expensive (ack!), but maybe it’s worth it for the personal experience you will get when entering the local music shop. I always enjoyed going to AVE (I think that stood for Audio-Visual Entertainment) in the Model City Mall. The people working there always had some good thoughts on what I was purchasing. I also remember someone telling me how CD singles would be gone within the year. Oh, how wrong you were…how wrong you were.

    Side-note Rant – Let’s talk about the Future Shop in Orleans. Newly opened up, this place sucks. I’ve been there twice on ‘new release day’ but they don’t have all their stock out! I had to wait 30 minutes for them to fish out a Pearl Jam DVD that had just come out. I went there last week to pick up the new Beatles Help film and it was nowhere to be found! Argh. Mike also had a hard time when going to purchase an external hard drive which was in the flyer. When the helper (can he really be called that?) said there were none there, we made him look in the database to find out there were 17 in the store. Then when he took off looking for them, we saw him chatting it up with his buddies for 10 minutes! What the heck?

    Future Shop in Orleans – shame on you. If you have commercials indicating that customers run to your doors on new release day, the least you can do is have the stock on the shelves and not in the stock room.

    Back to the original thought of this posting – I am sorry to see Music World leave. Although I must admit their cataloging system was like a code you needed a decoder ring to break.

  • Review: A.I.

    Mike and I watched A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) last night after a great raclette meal over at Eric and Annie’s place.

    I had picked AI up at some garage sale at work a few years back and didn’t think I had seen it. Considering Vero is scared of anything to do with robots, I had to resort to my non robot hating friends to watch this film.

    The scoop is that this film was the brainchild of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielburg for the longest time and then Kubrick passed away so Spielburg continued with the vision of the future where robots are a part of our society and one robot maker wishes to see if he can make a robot which can LOVE.

    So begins the tale of David, the boy robot who comes into the life of a family who think their son will never come back from whatever ailment he is suffering from. While the robot started off as being quite creepy in the fact that it just stood and started most of the time, the owners (parents) initiated the imprinting protocol which would allow the robot to love the parents. This is when David actually becomes like a normal kid which didn’t freak me out as much.

    However, it’s just not David’s day as the parents real son makes a recovery, comes back into their life and then David is jealous and ends up getting taunted into doing crazy things by the real son (like taking a lock of their mother’s hair to show how much he loves her).

    In the end, the robot gets booted from the house and then the real cool part of the film happens as you enter this Blade Runner-esque world where humans and robots interact but it’s all very film noir – you have thousands of robots being thrown into trash heaps because they are obsolete, you have flesh-fairs where they destroy robots by firing them through canons or dropping acid on them and the spectators cheer.

    It was all very marvelous and I love the imagery once they started looking at the universe outside of the parents home.

    While the concept was pretty cool, I really thought the ending was cheese – ala Spielburg endings. What can I say? I can’t knock the guy. He knows that he’s making a decent flick here about the hope of robots. It was like ET but for robots. 🙂

    While I was watching it I realized I had seen it before but really couldn’t remember the ending and at one point in the film, something in my memory triggered the fact that I was entering new domain in the film – as in, I had seen the film up until that point and for whatever reason had shut it off. It was strange for my brain to register the exact moment where I had last seen the film…which would have been years ago.

    Verdict: It’s a decent flick, but I prefer the darker futuristic movies (gotta check out Blade Runner – The Final Cut when it comes out in December!).

    iplaying: Surf City Eastern Block – The Arcade Fire (2007-11-08 Berlin, Columbiahalle)

  • Thanks


    Just wanted to send a thanks to those who have fought/do fight in conflict to better our lives.

  • Sloganizer

    Thanks to Sara for sending me this time killer. Create your own slogans!
    http://www.sloganizer.net/en/

    Here’s some of my faves that were generated:
    You better get inside Palmer.
    The Spirit of Palmer.
    Palmer for me!
    Oh my gods, it’s a Palmer.
    The view on Palmer.
    Every Palmer has a story.
    Palmerrific.
    Always the real thing, always Palmer.

  • World’s Saddest Cubicles

    http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2007/11/gallery_saddest_cubicle

    Stop yer complaining about your office! There’s now way they are worse than these ones!

    My favourite is how they put an IT contractor is a steel shipping container!

  • Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora – Part One of the Gentleman Bastard Sequence

    Wow. I’d like to thank Paul for inadvertently recommending this book via The Wolfshack. I haven’t read a book which had me wanting more in awhile. Sure, I dabble in the Star Wars novels if there are new ones, but they are the same old. This was a fresh tale of thieves and their swashbuckling ways.

    The story revolves around Locke Lamora, a thief in the fictional city/village/whatever you want to call it of Camorr where it plays like something out of an old role playing game like Quest For Glory – where they have thieving guilds, magicians and brute force. In Camorr, they are under the rule of Duke Nicovante and Locke Lamora and his fellows (The Gentleman Bastards as they like to call themselves) take it upon themselves to steal from the rich and elite to line their pockets with a small wealth. They start out as regular thieves but end up becoming con-artists in the process and thinking up more elaborate schemes.

    Scott Lynch (from reading his bio and whatnot) is a young chap…my age or thereabouts who wrote this marvelous tale. He doesn’t shy away from admitting that he is into video games, comic books, everything that is good in the world…so the book was like a familiar friend. The sense of camaraderie between Locke Lamora and friends made you feel like you are eavesdropping on a grand adventure. I especially liked how the author intertwined flashbacks at the appropriate times.

    I haven’t read many novels this past year but I would probably say this will make it as my #1 of the year. I am tempted to pick up the second one, but the series is seven books long and the second one is the only other one out there. I feel like he is pulling a Harry Potter…the first novel was a self-contained story but left us with questions at the end which will undoubtedly be answered within the series.

  • Stopping Evolution?

    Trish sent me this article about a girl in India who had two legs and two legs removed, while keeping her remaining two legs and arms.

    While I do not disagree that she probably wouldn’t have the most normal life, I must question (on behalf of X-Men lovers everywhere) if science is interfering with evolution. What would have happened if she had two extra sets of hands? She could do everything twice as fast! It’s a thing of science-fiction, but it’s reality!

    Anyhow, I think we should start up a School for Gifted Youngsters so these people don’t feel out of place in society.

    Article is here.

  • Let There Be Light

    I am known in some circles as both stubborn, frugal and a procrastinator.

    For example, I still haven’t got that dent in my car fixed. At first, there was a method to my madness in that I did not want to get it fixed right away for someone to have dented it again. But now it’s been six months later. I should really get that fixed.

    Another great example of this would be the fact that in my bedroom for the past two years, the only light at night would be my small bedside lamp which definitely didn’t shed any light on what is lurking in the corner of the room.

    This is never a big deal to me during the summertime as there is enough daylight in the morning to scour through my dresser to find some matching socks.

    But when the winter hits, it is impossible to pull open the sock drawer to find a black sock, let alone any sock at all! It is a mess of fabric inside that drawer which I can’t see and I just feel around for something that feels like a sock, walk over to the lamp to ensure I have the right ones and if not, you’ll find a collection of socks on my bedside table under the lamp because I left them there in frustration.

    Considering this happened again the other morning, I finally decided to get off my ass and buy a lamp for the room. After hitting up four different stores with Mike, I finally settled on some four-lamp set from Wal-Mart. They have me by the hair on this one because:

    A) The only nice lamps you can find come in sets.
    B) I do not want one of those craptacular stand up lamps for $14 that everyone has (including me. I probably have three of them.) I want something that is timeless. Classic. Looks like Keith Richards puked on it back in the 70s.

    So I ended up buying this four lamp set and I think the tall lamp is a little crooked but Mike didn’t notice a difference. I also have two lamps that I really have no use for so I guess I’ll throw one of them in my office?

    But at least I can find a matching pair of socks in the morning.

  • Memory: Randy’s Big Chance

    I was just talking with my buddy about how I didn’t bother going to see Zeppelin and he says:

    “If jimmy page’s finger was still a-hurtin’ at the concert, you would have had the chance to get up on stage and replace him, dude! You blew it! ;)”

    This brought up one of my favourite stories of yesteryear. I was back home for the holidays and the night before Dad drove us home (for some reason I remember Randy and Carol in the car…don’t know why Carol would have been with us. Maybe getting a bus to Oshawa from Ottawa?) we ended up at the Sunshine with Double Time (was that their name?) on stage. Double Time comes through town a few times a year and they are a great act.

    So as the night weared on, I decided to hit the road as I was feeling good but a few people stayed over. Of those people, Randy stayed. Maybe Carol also? Carol, let me know in the comment section why the heck I remember you in this story! He ended up partying with the members of the band up in their room for the night and didn’t get home until 5 in the morning and we were picking him up between 6-7 in the morning!

    He was in rough shape when we were cruising out of town. He was recounting this tale about how he was showing them some stuff on guitar but he was so drunk that he couldn’t play at all and it was horrible! We all laughed when Dad brought up the fact that Randy blew his one big chance to make it big! Ha ha, we kept razzing him about that for the rest of the trip. I’m sure he looks back on that day and realizes he could have been touring with Double Time by now!

    iplaying: First Days of Spring – Neverending White Lights (Act 1: Goodbye Friends of the Heavenly Bodies)