BLAMBLOG v7

The Ultimate Bore-er

2009-07-04T17:52:00.003-04:00

Some things are just baffling ...for example, why would anyone want to see the movie Repo: The Genetic Opera performed with a shadow cast? Of all the event notices that come through facebook, this is the one that floored me the most. Repo is not just a bad movie ... it's freakin' unwatchable.

I know, I watched it and my eyes started to bleed lard from the boredom.

I hoped I'd stumbled on a new cult classic -- or even non-classic -- but the experience ended up being the same as when I rented Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter. The Jesus flick turned out to be someone's dull home movie put together by people who'd never heard of the word "SCREENPLAY". Repo has a "script" and "effects" and "music" ... but the leaden tone that makes the film about as much fun as drinking cement. Imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show performed and scored by the leaders of North Korea. Even the surprise of seeing an acquaintance get murdered before the opening credits didn't help. Everyone I know gets murdered before the opening credits ...

Anyhow, go figure. If you're going to shadow a bad flick, why would you pick this over AVP: Requiem?

Bachelorette Dialogue

2009-06-30T12:48:00.001-04:00

An intro to 'The Bachelorette' at Notes From a Hack:

MOM: What a dumb premise. So contrived. You can't go out with someone for a month and then marry them.

ME: Mom, don't hate on love.

Jillian visits Kiptyn's family and their big house in Encinitas, Ca.

MOM: Oh, they've got some bucks, huh?

ME: Looks like it.

MOM: That mom is horrible looking. That's a nose job. And her eyes are weird from the face lift. Who's this?

Kid with a Walkman

2009-06-30T02:37:00.000-04:00

He had told me it was big, but I hadn't realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

Hudak?

2009-06-29T10:58:00.001-04:00

I did an editorial cartoon about the Hudak win for Torontoist.

Back to Outer Space

2009-06-26T01:03:00.000-04:00

Entertainment

2009-06-24T00:40:00.002-04:00

The original version:

And the inevitable, terrible cover:

SALT!

2009-06-20T01:58:00.000-04:00

From the Globe:

Canadians overall take in about 3,100 milligrams of sodium a day – more than double the recommended intake for any age group and significantly higher than the upper limit most people can consume without compromising their health (2,300 mg, or roughly one teaspoon of table salt).
...
What’s more, 90 per cent of children 4 to 8 years old were not only consuming more than the upper tolerable amount of sodium for their age group every day – they were exceeding the maximum safe levels for adults.

Iran Election

2009-06-19T12:55:00.001-04:00

This website and Twitter feed have lots of info.

Starts Friday

2009-06-17T16:38:00.002-04:00

Grindstone's The Baby Formula starts playing Friday at the AMC Theatre at Dundas & Yonge:

Two adventurous women in love are desperate to have their own biological child. They take a chance on an experimental scientific process and make sperm from their own stem cells. Pregnant with humour and unexpected twists, their journey tailspins out of control when their families discover there is no father.

It's supposed to rain all weekend, so go take in a fun flick!

Freedom of the Pressed

2009-06-17T12:51:00.002-04:00

I'm glad we don't live in Iran and, instead, live in a country where we can celebrate freedom and democracy and a free press and ... awww, crap:

Speculation spread rapidly that someone with clout put pressure on the paper to fire McCann for causing embarrassment. It wouldn't be the first time an Irving paper put its relationship with the powerful ahead of its journalism, critics suggested.
....
Efforts made over the decades to break the family's media hold have failed, despite the scrutiny of at least three federal inquiries. A 2006 Senate report stated that "the Irvings' corporate interests form an industrial-media complex that dominates the province" to a degree "unique in developed countries."

Send in the clones ... they're already here!

2009-06-17T11:53:00.003-04:00

How did they ever produce propaganda photos in the days before the Photoshop clone tool? Here's the image of the pro-Ahmadinejad gathering padded with extra spectators ... cloning that wouldn't have been necessary if the photographers had been placed a bit lower to take advantage of the giant flags.

At least they kept the cloning to the background, unlike this blatant image from a 2004 Bush-Cheney ad:

Old Time Toronto

2009-06-17T01:31:00.003-04:00

CQ left a comment directing us to his staggering archives of old Toronto postcards. There's a lot of them ... take a look:

Chuckman's Toronto Vol. 1
Chuckman's Toronto Vol. 2
Chuckman's Toronto Vol. 3
Chuckman's Toronto Vol. 4
Chuckman's Toronto Vol. 5

More Than Awesome

2009-06-14T22:28:00.002-04:00

If you didn't watch Less Than Kind (season 2 is on the way) because the promotion was Less Than Effective, you can rewatch the entire first season on the Citytv website. The swearing is bleeped online for some reason, but it's still one of the funniest shows on tv. Here's the teaser trailer ad thing:

And the 'Winnipeg Sucks' rant:

Modern Classics

2009-06-14T00:52:00.003-04:00

It's one of my favourite photo sets, so I was really happy to see If Celebrities Moved to Oklahoma linked again the other day. They are some of the most poetic images on the internet:

Mary Kate & Olsen (left), Travolta (right).

Fun With Josh

2009-06-13T01:06:00.003-04:00

Josh Errett (providing internet-based entertainments for half a decade) is back with a new dust-up that makes so little sense, I'm not even sure what it's about! It's the conflict equivalent of a joke on 'FRIENDS'. But that didn't stop it from making the pages of NOW, leading one person to ask in the comments:

Let me get this straight -- Josh Errett has written a piece of opinion journalism based on an opinion that he has not parsed.

He is right -- blaming is NOT a way to invite the greater public into the debate. Though neither is an unparsed, vaguely contextualized piece of opinion journalism with a poorly expressed opinion that is reliant on an opinion that the author admits that he doesn't understand.

Read all the comments, they're great. The lesson to draw from this episode is that -- in the post-post-9/11 era -- you can't just pick trivial fights on the internet anymore like a drunk in a bar. Most people are aware that what they type is stored online forever and they aren't going to start returning punches over a misunderstanding and risk saying something stupid that will still be lingering online when they're oozing their juices in a nursing home.

And if you're going to pick a fight, it helps if the fight is actually about something.

Pets

2009-06-12T12:52:00.000-04:00

Medlab sent in a link to this photo set ... I've heard that while AT-ATs make good pets, they're not great with kids!

Get Busey, Kids!

2009-06-12T01:59:00.001-04:00

Darryl found a way to turn tragedy into triumph:

Baby Time!

2009-06-11T14:24:00.002-04:00

Big congrats to Merv & Andrew on the arrival of Mackenzie!

Photoshop Disaster, Local Edition

2009-06-11T11:08:00.001-04:00

Over at Torontoist, a candidate (click to see the unaltered image) for Photoshop Disasters. PD's Photoshop Disaster formula is:

Badness equals quality expected divided by quality delivered.

They Grow Up So Quickly

2009-06-09T22:35:00.002-04:00

Eva just graduated with a PhD in Quantum-Astrology Biophysics. What an amazing field to be studying. It seems like just yesterday that she was a struggling student, trying to save the world ...

The Annex, August 2005

On Saturday, Eva joined me for lunch ...

EVA: . . . and when I looked at the photo, some mother was pointing at the sign saying 'Keep off'.

BLAMB: Ha ha!

EVA: It's busy out here.

BLAMB: The students are back.

EVA: I never left.

BLAMB: Look at them with their optimism for the future, milling about aimlessly, unaware of the horrible fate that awaits them.

EVA: What horrible fate?

BLAMB: They'll have to live in the world post-peak oil!

EVA: Boo hoo.

BLAMB: They probably haven't even heard of the concept of peak oil ... or China for that matter. They think the government is to blame for high gas prices. You're a scientist! Why can't you do something about this 'oil crisis'?

EVA: I'm just entering my fourth year. And I study proteins, not oil. You know, the economy is slightly less reliant on oil than it was a quarter of a century ago, so high oil prices aren't necessarily a bad thing if they continue to push us in that direction.

BLAMB: Maybe it'll get people out of their stinkin' SUVs.

EVA: I don't understand how people can justify an SUV.

BLAMB: It doesn't really matter, most of these students will probably won't survive the bird flu pandemic. You're a scientist! Why can't you do somthing about this bird flu?

EVA: [ groan ] I told you ...

BLAMB: All that knowledge and still you can't save the world. I guess PhD stands for 'Pretty Damn Hopeless'.

EVA: That's 'PDH'.

BLAMB: Pretty Hopeless .... DAMN!

EVA: Saving the world isn't my job. It's George Bush's! And he'd rather fight his silly war.

BLAMB: Ha! He's still on vacation. Wouldn't you be peeved if you were a soldier in Iraq getting bombed and shot at while your president was on a 5-week vacation? I wonder if the soldiers get cake in their rations.

EVA: Or oil.

BLAMB: You're a scientist! Why can't you do something about these terrorists and wars!

EVA: I'm on my lunch hour.

Pix

2009-06-08T13:07:00.002-04:00

The new Toronto Life arrived today with more cool illustrations by Kagan McLeod.

We Have a Shoe Museum ...

2009-06-07T12:46:00.001-04:00

... Why not a Toronto City Museum?

Busey Busy

2009-06-04T23:50:00.002-04:00

Truth in Classified Advertising

2009-06-01T00:15:00.002-04:00

I heard Nickelback on the radio today and it reminded me of how much I hate that dull, droning band ... then I saw this on the internet:

Nickelback only has one redeeming feature and that is that they're not the Dave Matthews Band.

Leslie

2009-05-29T16:31:00.005-04:00

Things have been quiet here on the blog for the past month because I was busy prepping preshow graphics for Hot Docs and then immediately jumped into work on a great gig creating an animated opening title sequence (and some graphics) for Leslie, My Name is Evil, Reg Harkema's (Monkey Warfare) new feature film:

Perry, a sheltered chemical engineer, falls in love with Leslie, a former homecoming princess, when he is selected to be a jury member at her hippie death cult murder trial.

Here's the trailer:

Leslie, My Name is Evil promo trailer

I've never done opening titles before -- and it was ambitious sequence for a first try -- but I love the learning curve and it's not often that you get to work on something that's as much fun as this. More updates on the flick later, once post-production is done ...