Golbing

This 2004 movie (not related to the 1948 film of the same name) features a set of rejuv’s in a halfway house who are jump started into a music career with a chance encounter with a severely austic piano genius. They play some rockin’ blues which really drives the drama on. It’s not serious drama but certainly does qualify for good family enterntainment, especially if your family has a musical bent.
The character Wesley (William Lee Scott) who finds and befriends Vernon the piano player (Lucas Black) has a back story with a blues man (cameo’d by one of my favourite Blues men: Taj Mahal) that I think is artfully left subtle. The fact that he passes on this unidentified but obviously powerful influence is one of the best parts of the film for me.
Worth watching.

I was on course for the past few days in Toronto and I took the train in on both days. The course was on SQL Performance Tuning and was quite interesting and I learned a lot. Blah blah blah. On the train I reflected on how much I hated commuting to Toronto when I was working there. I tried to recall the good with the bad but there wasn’t all that much on the good side. Some great people (like Donato and Cathy and Peter), yes. Some great times. But those friends I made I will likely always have. And the times keep on turning up great every now and then. But the one thing I really miss? Well that has to be Mustachio’s Eggplant on Foccacia sandwiches with tomato sauce and hot peppers. Now you may say, those who haven’t tried it I mean, “Eggplant?” “Gross!” I admit that I’m not crazy about eggplant myself. But Oh man. It’s the best lunch in the world.
I only have 30 minutes for lunch so I rushed down there on Monday… no luck. You see? It had been too long and I had forgotten that the market wasn’t open on Monday’s. Doh! But I went back today and oh! I sat in a small park in the sun and ate the best sandwich in the world. Ambrosia for lunch! Still crazy good after all these years!
Extremely Highly Recommended.

The yellow horde
show themselves on our New Soil
alien that they are.
Roman Invaders!

Very little can eradicate
loads of 2000 seeds
per annum.
Bed Wetters!

Their thrice cursed
genetic loopholes
tap into our perfect greens.
Foreign Asexual!

Inviting toxic chemicals
still best dealt with
knife trickling white blood.
Rudest Ruderals!

Normally so calm
I rage long battles
with this … this salad.
Toothed Interlopers!

And as I see you vibrant green, bright yellow,
I have a thought that scares me.

Maybe I should stop alienating them
The white man, I am largely, not so rooted here either.

Respite is but a brief moment and my knife snicker-snacks!
It’s not alien… it’s just too damn aggressive!

-2008/05/09-

This six hour movie was made in 1994 from a book by Stephen King that would take even longer to read I imagine (I’d like to make the attempt some day).
A military-engineered flu vectored through the air kills nearly everyone. Only a few are left and these dream two extremes. An elderly black woman (the prophet) living in a corn field or The One who walks alone (the demon). The dreamers have to decide which side they want. In the end a stand must be taken.
King does an interesting job in contrasting good with evil and the difficulty of prophecy. He (only briefly appearing in the Langoliers) has a little more time acting in this one… he’s not bad either.
I enjoyed this, but not as much as the Langoliers.

This 1995 movie based on a book by Stephen King was nothing that I expected. I didn’t expect to enjoy it at all but I did. The story was very interesting and does not sit easily in the horror or psychological thriller or science fiction or Mystery genres. Perhaps it is all four.
At 179 minutes, it isn’t short, but it seems to flow very well. This is helped along by an excellent cast including Dean Stockwell as the resourceful Mystery Writer Bob Jenkins, Patricia Wettig (Laurel Stevenson), David Morse (Captain Brian Engle), Mark Lindsay Chapman (Nick Hopewell), Kate Maberly (wonderful as the young blind woman Dinah Catherine Bellman), and Bronson Pinchot as the psychopath Craig Toomey.
Recommended.

Michael Caine (Cutter) opens this movie by introducing the 3 acts of a magic trick: The Pledge, The Turn and the third is, of course, The Prestige. The movie revolves around the rivalry between the young and ambitious magicians Roger Angier and Alfred Borden. One deadly mistake leads to a life long and equally mortal pursuit of each other’s throats and secrets. This is a very well put together film by Christopher Nolan (who also had Caine and Bale in Batman Begins) with much to be said for it. Hugh Jackman (Robert Angier), Christian Bale (Alfred Borden) and Scarlett Johansson (Olivia Wenscombe) round out an amazing cast. Two bizarre additions were David Bowie as Nikola Tesla and *Gollum* Andy Serkis as his assistant Alley. I never liked much of what Bowie has acted in before but I was very pleasantly surprised by his performance and Serkis’. They practically stole their scenes with Jackman.
Highly recommended but not for kids.

My wife and I normally don’t respond to those enticingly free weekends away. Completely free they tell you… you only have to attend a sales pitch to buy in the world of dream vacations. Against our better judgment we swallowed the bait to go see the good life at Georgian Manor Resort in Collingwood. Putting aside the obvious allusion to P.T. Barnum I will say that my instinct was dead right. We didn’t get into the resort into late last night for reasons having to do with trying to get teenagers (and one preteen) packed into the car, ensure their newspapers were delivered, etcetera, etcetera.
We did enjoy the indoor pool (thought it was quite small and very old) and the kids enjoyed the cable TV, arcade and the buffet breakfast this morning.
But then it was our turn to pay the piper. The piper started out as a very nice woman who seemed sincerely interested in us. But she was trying to get us interested in their points system of enforced vacations. That’s why we were treated to the one night stay after all. She showed us a slick movie and some very nice suites (very different from the 2 bed hotel room with nowhere near enough room for the three kids and us). She showed us two different schemes for achieving their version of the ‘good life’. We could even ’sell’ the names of friends to get more points (i.e.: the pyramid scheme). Then she showed the cheap version which would probably better apply to us. She called over an expert to show us an even cheaper way to make some of our dreams come true. And when we repeated our ‘no’ we got the hard sell from a crotchety old geezer who said he respected our decision but showed us yet another offer. An offer we’d be crazy to say no to. Then he smilingly insulted our choice of ‘no’ to our faces saying that the offer was gone if we walked out… that any future deal would be like a Lada instead of the Cadillac we had just turned down.
Perhaps Karen and I should have thicker skins. Perhaps we should learn to be more dissembling. But we certainly felt the condescension and didn’t like it one bit. We were so angry that we left even though we could have kept ‘trying’ the facilities for the rest of the day if we wanted. I was so angry I didn’t notice that they made our mistake on our bill and charged us for someone else’s breakfast. Why not add to the injury?
What they’re selling is the whole idea of ‘a vacation’. They want us to invest significant sums of money (over $200 a month) so we can have 1 or 2 or more weeks of the ‘good life’. And then there’s the indignity of taxes, user fees, and more (probably way more that we would learn about to our eternal dismay if we had been lulled into accepting their deal). Hey: everyone deserves a piece of that vacation dollar after all.
I do like the idea of a vacation that is done no matter what… it is good for the soul and for family life. But a plan that extends past 2050 is a little much. Every family has their own mine fields to chart a course through and few, in my opinion, can be so flexible. We can’t and we can’t afford it. There are so many ways we can spend what little excess income we may have. We bought an electric guitar on the way home, for example. That was one of our $200 payments (and more) but it was, in my humble opinion, a much better investment that going along with someone’s idea of what a vacation should be.
In the final analysis this whole scheme was a terrific waste of our valuable time and I’m sorry we were sucked in. We would have been much better off staying at home.

There was a time. Long ago. When my wife was asked by a coworker at the Dartmouth Regional Library to audition for a musical being put on by the Dartmouth Players. Long story short: she not only gets the part but she gets the lead. Did I mention she’s an amazing singer. Well she is.
So the play is called Lady Audley’s Secret but that is another story… a theatrical one.
At one point in the play one of the male actors is presented with a cameo picture of Lady Audley. As a joke the stage manager replaced the silhouette of a girl with a newspaper cutout of a ghoul. The actor, who had the reputation of taking himself a little too seriously at times, was visibly shaken by the shock of the ghoul during a performance. When this was explained to me I’ll admit I thought it was very funny but this actor didn’t quite get the joke.
He was determined to get back at the stage manager. So he spent a significant amount of time experimenting with soap and water to mix with dry ice. Dry ice was being used at one point in the show to provide fog for dramatic effect at one point during the play. Well… on the final performance our intrepid actor (and amateur chemist) added his soap mixture and the fog was considerably less animated than normal. It looked like oozing puss moving slowly onto the stage. Every now and again a bubble would burst expelling a small pocket of fog. The stage manager was very upset although most of the audience couldn’t even see the problem.
And yes… I thought that also was exceedingly funny.

This 460 page novel by Alastair Reynolds is an excellent example of science fiction although he (or his publishers) call it a space opera. I don’t know that I agree. I don’t have anything against real opera (I love the Pearlfishers and Carmen and I’m all over that Ring of des Nibelungen) but space opera has the sound of something hokey or soapy or, worse, like something I jokingly wrote a long time ago. Pushing Ice is far from that. It’s an impressive work and just because it has good characterization, strong female characters and conflict doesn’t make it space opera. The science is believable, the shear scale is epic and I enjoyed the highly imaginative use of Janus, one of the moons of Saturn. This is one of the strangest satellites in the solar system and Reynolds gives a unique explanation for its oddly shared orbit along with brother (sister?) moon Epimetheus. Like the god it’s named after, it is a rather two-faced character in Reynolds’ story but satisfying even at its end.
The Welsh writer has some solid scientific background with the European Space Agency and maintains a website and blog. I liked his entry remembering the life of Arthur C. Clarke.
I will look forward to reading more from this author and recommend it highly.

Today is my 23rd anniversary so I naturally don’t have much time for golbing. Just know that I enjoyed some wonderful food at the Carden Street Cafe with my amazing Lady wife!