There is a cartoon called Pocoyo that Rebecca and I like to watch with Pokey. Okay, I admit it -- Pokey sometimes watches it with us. I don't know why I find it so amusing, but there you go. Anyways, Season 2 should be airing soon, if it hasn't started already. I learned this from the official Pocoyo blog, which features behind the scene details on the Spanish children's cartoon. From that site is a preview clip, which you have to admit, is pretty slick, and I think rather humourous.

So there you go. That's Pocoyo, just so you know what I'm on about. We're looking into making Pokey a Pocoyo costume for Hallowe'en this year. They sort of look alike. I think it's the cheeks. Oh, and hey, wasn't Ellie's model strut great? Right out of ANTM. I couldn't have done better myself - just ask the girls in the Jared lab.

Edit: Also worth mentioning is that ANTM started up again. And there's a girl on there with a name like "Ridiculeuse". No, seriously.

I saw this movie about a month ago with Alan and Kevin and had been meaning to mention it in my blog. I was the dissenting opinion, and thought it was really good. Definitely a really cool premise. Al and Kev thought it was kind of 'meh'. But whatever. They don't know what it's like to be me.

 

Anyways, the premise of the movie is that there are a bunch of guys who wake up in a chemical storage warehouse, where it is clear that something went down. It is clear that there are two factions present: the good guys and the bad guys. What makes it interesting is that at some point when everything was going down, a cyclinder containing some noxious agent broke open, releasing a gas that not only knocked everyone out, but also caused temporary amnesia. How cool is that, thereby setting up the scenario where the characters know that the guys around them are either good guys or bad guys, but no idea who is who. So yeah, I'd definitely recommend it. The whole plot is a big twist.

There's been alot of talk about this next song... maybe too much talk. This song is not a rebel song, this song is The Hustle!

In the hour before Sunday's wedding between Michelle and Jeff, I was in the hotel room with Miranda, Corinne, Amy, Deanna and of course my wife Rebecca, researching the Hustle. I don't remember how it came up. Maybe it's because there's always some disco played during wedding receptions, so I was likely to get some mileage out of it, plus I was stymied in my last attempt to learn the hustle a couple years ago because the internet hadn't learned it by then. But along came Youtube, which fortunately had a tutorial.

So yeah, the hustle. It's funny. And pretty easy to learn. Here, let me show you (incidentally, this is not me, though it SOOO could be!):

The next one we have to figure out will be the Thriller dance. Except you can't really just do the Thriller all by yourself; it's not really all that impressive unless you have the standard pyramid formation, so I'll be taking applications to join the troupe. Call us! We do weddings and bar mitzvahs!

This evening, Auger and I went to see Spiderman 3. I had read some not so hot reviews on RottenTomatoes.com. On the whole, it got a passing grade (61% endorsed), but even the positive reviews came off as somewhat negative. So I went into it with lowered expectations, which I suppose meant that I was not so likely to be disappointed. It started off fairly well. The strange alien amoeba thing made for a slick costume. Now, I understand they were trying to convey that Peter's personality changed because of this alien entity, but at right about that point, the movie fell apart. It was as if their writers went on strike, and they replaced them with a large number of trained monkeys with typewriters. They likely didn't have the budget for an infinite number of monkeys, and certainly didn't have an infinite amount of time, which is just as well, because inserting Shakespeare's complete works into the middle of the movie would make it far too long. Eventually, the movie came around, and it ended with a good fight, redemption, etc. The very end was a bit meh, but whatever.

And I'd like to make one observation: how is it that I can spend at least 2 hours in any other situation (e.g., at work) without having to go to the bathroom, but stick me in a movie theatre and turn the lights out, and my bladder lasts about 90 minutes, max. The last half hour of most movies usually finds me distracted, wondering if I risk missing anything crucial if I leave to go to the can. One of life's mysteries indeed.

And with that, I am off to bed. Up early tomorrow for church, then off to Michelle's wedding. How do you spell mazeltof?

Those who have studied french in school will doubtlessly be reminded of this indispensable tool for conjugating regular verbs. But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. A few days ago, I predicted that I would end up missing the delivery of my Rogers digital cable box, and that they would require someone to sign for it. Sure enough, I came home today to find a UPS InfoNotice saying that they had tried to deliver the box, and that they would try again tomorrow between 2:00 and 5:00. This is particularly annoying because of all the time slots they could have chosen on their little post-it note, 2-5 is the one slot that is booked by my TA obligation. Hopefully, Rebecca will be good enough to return home by 2:00 tomorrow to sign for the damn thing.

 

And for those of you who forget the other meaning of boîte magique, you simply remove the -ER ending from the infinitive form of the verb (e.g., PARLER - ER = PARL) and tack on the ending that corresponds to the subject of the verb (e.g., JE --> 'E': je parle). It's a fact that most english speaking Ontarians under the age of 30 wouldn't know a speck of grammar (in any language) if they hadn't had to learn french.

I suppose you're reading this because you're hanging out on vacation and wondering if I got those fancy pants I was talking about. I did not, in fact get any pants for Christmas. I may have mislead you with my title, and for that, I am truly sorry. On Christmas morning, I opened up some good time stuff. I tried today to put my new gift cards towards a table saw, but alas, Rona was recently renovated and they seem to have sent out much of their stuff and junk to other places.

 

In other news, we did round 2 of the Jones Soda because we had an extra box of the stuff, and OJ had a hankering for it. John, Morgan and Alan were in attendance. Unfortunately, both John and Morgan seem to have suffered some kind of brain trauma that rendered the sodas palatable to them. Remind me never to let them cook for me.

 

What else, what else... hmm. Got lured in by some boxing day action. That TV problem I had? Solved it at The Brick. Also, my DVD player has taken to playing movies in black and white, so of course, I had to fix that one too. I will be going off-line and fleeing the country sometime in the next couple of weeks, before the creditors come.

I can file this under entertainment because now I have time to be entertained. Thank goodness my paper for that class is done with. And to boot, I'm hopefully going to be able to use some of that work in my dissertation proposal. Double-dipping is the key to success in grad school. Working on projects that do not ultimately help you get the hell out are not recommended.

 

The title of this entry refers not only to Snoopy's cliche'd stories but also to the circumstances surrounding the breakdown of our poor TV, which incidentally, is only about 5 years old. There was one night back in July when it was ridiculously stormy. I could probably go back and figure out what night it was because Alan was down for a visit, and Rebecca had to work that night. It was raining sideways, that's how crazy it was. Anyways, the tv first went on the fritz that evening. Al and I had rented a movie and were in the middle of watching it when the volume inexplicably went up. And then it started flicking through the TV channels. After some fiddling around with the remote (including removing the batteries to make sure the remote wasn't responsible) it eventually settled down. This has happened a few other times since then, most recently being the other day, when Rebecca went downstairs to watch her newly arrived Frosty the Snowman DVD -- this computer has a video card with a TV tuner on it. Because the cable comes in the room (for the modem) and the computers are all in this room, this computer has become our primary television. Thus, despite the fact that there's a dedicated machine in the rec room (which I finished specifically with the intent of making that the entertainment room), all the TV viewing is done in here. As a result, the malfunctioning of the TV (in the basement) hasn't been much of a problem until this week, when I was working on my essay. Fortunately, all the shows are on hiatus for the holiday break.

 

It looks like it might be time for a widescreen LCD. O cruel fortune.

I'm talking with Brad and Paul on MSN right now, which reminded me that I wanted to post something. This is actually Rebecca's observation. But she doesn't blog, except to post pictures of Jude and update her Christmas wish list.

So a couple of months back, Steve Irwin was killed by a wild animal. Sure, it wasn't even an animal that he was antagonizing; by all accounts, he was completely oblivious to the stingray that he just spooked. So I guess, it was kind of ironic. Like rain, on your wedding day, or something. Nonetheless, I'm sure everyone had an inkling that a wild animal would be somehow involved with his death. Well, the other day, we were watching Survivorman on OLN. Basically, this guy has a helicopter drop him off in the middle of nowhere, equipped with a utility knife and a boot (and 100 lbs of camera equipment). Settings have included a desert, the far north in late fall, and a swamp. Basically, I'm just waiting for the day where he's been dropped on a glacier, and gets buried in an avalanche. You should catch an episode some time, if the show is aired in your area. The thing that impresses me most is that, because he's there by himself doing his own camerawork, when you see him walk off into the distance, what he's done is set up the camera, filmed himself walking off, then come back to retrieve the camera then walked off again (carrying all that freakin' equipment while living on whatever crap he can forage for). It's insane.

 

I put this under the heading "Entertainment", but really, it's kind of the opposite. It used to be, back in the day, that Transformers toys were marketed with a 30 minute cartoon that aired after school. That's one of the reasons I got to be a decent runner: school got out at about 3:45, and the good cartoons started at 4:00. Running all the way home got me in front of the TV in time. I watched GI Joe, followed by the Transformers each day, and had a decent collection of both toys.

 

The toys disappeared for awhile, then came back. They had already gone to 100% plastic, but the rereleased line had no aesthetic value at all. No longer did they resemble any vehicles in particular; they all just became generic futuristic vehicles/machinery, though there was some group of animal-themed ones or something. I had stopped paying attention by that point, so this is just sort of a general impression, but whatever the case, they looked like cheap ugly crap. An aside: the He-Man toys would have been much better had they not been redesigned to look like humans with about 6 or 7 extra neck vertebrae.

 

Anyways, back to what prompted this entry: I came across the Transformers cartoon on YTV just now, and it is so crappy, I had to vent about it. I feel like that pleasant childhood memory has been touched in a naughty place by some dumbass marketing executive. You would think that, since they're using CGI technology that it would look at least as good as the old-school cartoon from the mid-80s. No such luck. Holy crap. They used animation techniques from conventional animation (you know, where the 'actors' do repetetive actions so that the same several frames can be used over-and-over to cut down on the amount of drawing that has to be done to fill one second of programming. It's CGI, people! The drawing is done by computers! Jeez. Also, holy crap was the voice acting lousy.  First off, it appears that the Autobots are now all Australian. But that's nothing compared with the voice actors' abysmal timing. It sounds like all the actors came in on different days and recorded the dialogue separately. The only other comparably bad dialogue timing is in the Ultramatic adjustable bed (sorry, no youtube reference) commercial where the actors are clearly reading cue cards, and seem to be inserting superfluous punctuation. I just can't express how crappy cartoons are these days. You'd get better production value if you just hired some decent voice actors to narrate as some kids play the Transformers video game that is almost certain to accompany the film that's slated for release next year.

 

Note, this I think, is my record for using the word 'crappy'. It is just that bad: It's the crappiest crap that ever crapped a crap.

A couple of years ago, Jones Soda co. released their Holiday soda pack. With flavours like Turkey Dinner, Mashed Potatoes and Green Bean Casserole, who could resist? Kevin, Alan, OJ, Pat, Rebecca and I were able to procure the holiday pack from Sobey's and had a fantastic time doing shots of the stuff (with alcohol chasers). It was awful. We want to do it again.

Rebecca's friend in Rochester, Krista, has gotten her hands on this year's installment and will be carrying it over the border when they come to visit. This will be so much fun. FYI, this year's flavours are:
Dinner Roll
Sweet Potato

Turkey

Peas

Antacid

I'm looking forward to posting pics. Hopefully one or more of my sisters can be there; there's enough in each bottle for 7 shots. You don't want to drink more than one shot of any of these. Trust me. Share the pain.

If you do not know the tune with the serious funk groove that goes along with the title then just ... just ... whatever. Don't speak to me.

 

Back before that attention whore Elmo took over, before they introduced the Baby Bear character which intentionally speaks with a speech impediment (children are supposed to emulate this?) there were a pile of really good muppet characters in really funny skits. My favourites always involved Ernie & Bert - who aren't gay (not that there's anything wrong with that). I could probably come up with a mini-thesis about the dynamics between those two, but that might be a little too involved.

 

Anyways, for awhile now, I have been bemoaning the fact that those classic sketches have been unavailable, except for really low-quality clips on youtube. In searching for Sesame Street DVDs on the internet, I found many other people had the same complaint. I grew up with those Sesame Street episodes, and I like how I turned out, my argument goes. Finally, the good people at CTW came around. Rebecca yesterday found a link to the Old School Sesame Street dvd on Amazon. If anyone is looking for the perfect Christmas gift for Rebecca, that would be it.

Thank goodness for bittorrent (but boo on Rogers for their bandwidth throttling). After seeing the preseason ads for Heroes, it looked like the kind of show I'd like to watch. But then I missed the pilot and second episode, and caught only the last half of the third. Thanks to bittorrent, I've been able to get caught up. Damn, that's a good show.

 

That's all for this installment. Rebecca just got in and I have to make dinner.

This one goes under "Entertainment" because this thing entertains the hell out of me. Rebecca knit a rabbit toy. I think she did the head slightly wrong because it's always looking upward. Some combination of this perpetual skyward gaze, and the face on the thing makes me laugh when I see it. So I call him Funny Rabbit. This amuses Rebecca to no end, but she has decreed that Funny Rabbit cannot come to the delivery room with us because it is "too much of a distraction". Well, I'll post a picture of Funny Rabbit, and you can judge for yourself. Funny Rabbit should be in a picture book, along with Alan's story of Papa Pedro and the Christmas Llama, which I hope to be able to share one day.