Musical Questionnaire

Because I missed last Friday’s Random 10, and because I think this might prove to be mildly entertaining, here’s an entirely different Random music posting.

Here’s how it works. As always, you load up all your music, hit the shuffle button, and start the music playing. Each song that comes up is the answer to each of the questions in the questionnaire.

Courtesy of Tony Pierce…

Will I get far in life?Return to NYC (Deus Ex Soundtrack)
How do my friends see me?Hospital Themes (Jesper Kyd)
Where will I get married?Vancouver (Genesis)
What is my best friend’s theme song?Steppin’ Out (Joe Jackson)
What is the story of my life?Here Is Your Paradise (Chris De Burgh)
What was high school like?Upside Down (Tori Amos)
How can I get ahead in life?That Don’t Make It Junk (Leonard Cohen)
What is the best thing about me?Bullet Boy (Massive Attack)
How is today going to be?Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd)
What is in store for this weekend?White of the Eye (Pink Floyd)
What song describes my parents?Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles)
My grandparents?Ultrasonic Sound (Hive)
How is my life going?Brain Damage / Eclipse (Roger Waters)
What song will they play at my funeral?Forever (Queen)
How does the world see me?Sweet Temptation (Jewel)
Will I have a happy life?Still Standing (Kyle Minogue)
What do my friends really think of me?Candy and a Current Bun (Pink Floyd)
Do people secretly lust after me?Before You Accuse Me (Eric Clapton)
How can I make myself happy?On The Outside (Oingo Boingo)
What should I do with my life?Walking on the Moon (Sting)
Will I ever have children?Sure Know Something (Kiss)
What is some good advice?Grey Seal (Elton John and Billy Joel)
What is my signature dancing song?Head On Collision (SFX)
What do I think my current theme song is?Diamond Shoal (Paul Ruskay)
What does everyone else think my current theme song is?Latin (Mike Oldfield)
What type of men/women do you like?Like To Get To Know You Well (Howard Jones)
What did you think of this meme?Gourmet Valse Tartare (Hans Zimmer)

FATE

Hello...? Fate...? Where are you? I know you're around here somewhere...

Yes?

There you are.

I'm not hard to find. I'm everywhere. I'm steering your life, and the lives of all those around you.

I know. That's sort of what I wanted to talk to you about.

Do tell.

Well, I'm curious. Is life this confusing for everyone on the planet, or do you have some grudge against me in particular?

What do you mean?

Well, it sort of seems as if my life has been on a strange, surreal, and occasionally terrifying roller coaster since, well, since around last August, actually.

Mm-hm...

And I'm just wondering if that's normal. I'm getting kind of dizzy.

Everyone has their own life to lead.

Right.

So, to answer your question, no. No, life isn't necessarily as confusing for everyone else as it is for you. However, there are some whose lives are more confusing as yours, so I suppose you should count your blessings.

That's one blessing. Counting up to one doesn't take very long.

There are others.

Such as?

I'm not going to do all your homework for you. Blessings are everywhere. If you can't see them, that's your problem not mine.

"Stop and smell the roses," you're saying.

Hardly. I abhore cliches.

But the underlying message...

Is awfully cliched.

Okay, fine, look. All I really want to know is this. Is this roller coaster thing going to go on for awhile longer? Or can I expect things to kind of slow down and get back to normal anytime soon?

That would be telling.

And that would be why I'm asking.

If I told people of their fates, where would the excitement be? The excitement, whether you realize it or not, stems from those roller coaster moments. Those moments of terror. Without them, life would be dull. It would be repetitive.

I don't mind dull and repetitive now and then. I'd sort of prefer it sometimes.

Do you see the sign that says, "Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back?"

Nope.

And there's a reason for that. Quit your whining. No one wants to hear it.

Fine.

Just remember. I'm only providing the backdrop to your life. The decisions -- how you choose to react to the things I provide you -- are entirely up to you.

I don't believe in free will.

Yeah, well, technically you only discard the notion of free will when time is viewed from an omniscient perspective. You still acknowledge that, given how we perceive time, the illusion of free will exists, and so you must continue to make choices.

But those choices can't be avoided. I'll make the ones I'll make whether I want to or not.

No. You'll make them *because* you want to. And that's why they're the only choice you can make.

And what's the right choice?

Right, wrong, who cares? Is it more right to eat corn flakes for breakfast, or toast? It's neither. They're just choices. I already told you, quit your whining, and get back to living your life. You used to complain that things were boring. Now there's some excitement and you complain about a roller coaster. I never took for you the type to never be satisfied.

So, no hints from you, then.

Not a one. Sorry. Look, I've got to go. It's been good chatting and all, but there's lots of world events I need to exert my influence on, so if there's nothing more you need to say...

No, it's cool. Take care.

Cheers, mate.

New Stickage

Stick Figure Drama #97 is now available. The shit, as they say, begins to hit the fan, as we march headlong to the 100th episode, and the death of one of the most beloved Stick Figure Drama characters.

Okay, that may not be fair. I have no idea which characters are the most beloved. There's probably only two or three people who even tell me that they read this thing. *BUT* amongst these two or three people, this character, who's going to die, is pretty popular, I've got to admit.

Sooo...yeah...

Stick Figure Drama #97. Read it. Laugh.

Pregnancy, hormones, and mind-blowing psychic abilities.

On the day that June Marie Darcy was arrested for murder, the road outside of her house was so flooded by people that it was no longer functional as a road. It had become a river of people, with a current that didn’t move in one particular direction, but instead in both directions, towards the center, towards June Marie Darcy’s front door.

The police who came to escort her to the jail where she would be held pending the official filing of charges against her had to park four blocks away and push their way through the surging river of flesh to find their way to her home. It took them more than 30 minutes to get in, and another 30 minutes to lead her back to their squad cars.

The protesters – for that’s what the majority of that crowd of thousands were – came from both sides of a fence that had quickly sprung to life to divide people’s reactions to June Marie Darcy’s murder of her husband, Thomas. One side felt the incarceration was a mistake, that her crime was forgivable, that the woman was pregnant and hormonal and, although no one thought that her husband had necessarily deserved to die, it seemed apparent that he had been pushing her buttons for awhile.

On the other side of the fence, the attitude was that the incarceration was too late, and if she had simply been taken off the street months ago and put away behind four concrete walls, Thomas would have been alive today, and alive in three more months, to see the birth of his first – and now, sadly, only – child. That side of the fence felt June Marie Darcy should have been locked up because when you have the ability to wipe out another person’s life with just a thought, you were probably too dangerous to be left on the streets.

From a short story I started dabbling with today.

I was actually inspired by drifting through old blog posts, stumbling upon a post I'd made about a weird dream I'd had involving a pregnant woman who had accidently killed her husband with her psychic abilities. At the time it seemed kind of silly, but as I stumbled upon it recently, it actually seemed like it might be an interesting backdrop for a story. The only problem is, I'm not entirely sure what the story is bout.

Though I don't suppose that's too big a crisis at the moment. I can dabble with the set up of it, try to fill in the backstory a bit, and see if I stumble upon a plot along the way. And just keep writing until I find one.

Though the last time I did that, it turned into a novel...

Bits and pieces

I was doing some reading on Kurt Vonnegut for a bit yesterday after finishing "Slaughterhouse Five" (and a bit again today) and found a fairly well put together unofficial site at VonnegutWeb.

There, I learned that Vonnegut had attempted suicide in 1985, with a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills. This I did not know.

I also learned that following the release of "Bluebeard" (which is the novel I dove into immediately after "Slaughterhouse Five" as it is the only other Vonnegut novel I have that haven't read yet) many major magazines and newspapers refused to review it. What I didn't learn was why. And after fifteen minutes of Google searching for answers, I still have no idea why they'd refuse to review it.

A refusal to review a book seems to be an attempt to make a significant statement, of some kind, about something.

Can't imagine what it was though.

In completely unrelated news, I found myself mucking about in Flickr yesterday, having all but forgotten that I had created an account and even set up some software that added a Flickr upload option to my context-sensitive right-mouse-button popout. So I made a Flickr page, and even uploaded some photos. Nothing interesting to speak of, just testing the interface out.

It's entirely possible this might inspire me to recharge the batteries in my crappy digital camera.

It's also entirely possible that I'll just forget about this Flickr account again. Even though I *did* take the time to link it somewhere near the bottom of the right-hand column (near my email address, if you want to go looking for it.

Confession

I think the reason I felt so compelled to write last night (a feeling which has lasted into today, by the way) is because I finally got around to reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" after starting it last fall, then losing the book when I was about halfway through. Having found the book again a few weeks ago, I slammed through it, cover to cover, in a few days. Then, yesterday, promptly started in on Vonnegut's "Bluebeard."

The thing about Vonnegut is that his style is so wonderfully, beautifully casual and simple, I find myself reading his stuff and thinking, "Damn, I wish I could write like that." Which usually leads me to think, "Hey, maybe I could write like that." Which usually leads me to think, "Hey, I should try writing like that."

Both last year's National Novel Writing Month Novel and the end of the world story, I think, could both benefit from a simple, casual style. I was even mapping out the next chapter of the novel in that style, in my head, before sitting down to finish the previous one. But, in the one page I did write, I got bogged down in boring details when a character started fumbling with a telephone because he was tired and hungover. It was the furthest thing from simple.

So I stopped.

Maybe tonight I'll take a crack at the end of the world story, if I have enough free time.

#300

Sooooooooo...

For those interested in that sort of trivia, this is my 300th post to the blog.

Looks more or less the same as all the other ones.

I've been sitting on this post for awhile, not wanting to fill it up with someone trivial or meaningless, which seems to be the sort of thing I've felt most inclined to blog about today.

A part of me wants to write about how complicated it is to find a way of understanding the world, of trackign down meaning in the world, while your busy juggling an existential perspective, a need for scientific measurement, and a desire to connect with divinity. I want to write about how I am often envious of people who have very easy, very simple, world perspectives. Who don't question things. Who simply live inside of their little boxes that they've defined for themselves or, sometimes, allowed others to define for them.

This attitude I will call "Anal Sex and Wheel of Fortune Syndrome" in honour of a story I wrote a few years ago.

The thing is, I'm not sure what more there is to say beyond: "I have no answers, but to this day, I seek them. And I hope one day I will find them, but as each day goes by, leaving me no closer to them, I fear this mission can only end in failure."

Beyond that, I've had a burning desire to write *anything* -- though, by this, I'm not referring to the blog. I dug out and dusted off last year's National Novel Writing Month novel, with a few vague memories of where I was planning to go with it, but I only managed to toss out one page that was okay, but left me with the sense that each page following would be worse, because I hadn't reconnected with the identities of my characters yet. So I dropped it.

I thought about opening up my unfinished short story about the day that the world was going to end, and how on that day the world held the largest party of all time, where they destroyed everything they could get their hands on, including -- in some cases -- themselves, only to find at midnight that due to technical errors, the destruction of the world would be postponed for a week.

But...

But, in spite of my burning desire to write, I don't have the energy. That one, I thought, I might actually have some luck with. And that's what turned me off of it. I thought about how much was still left to do on the story, how I hadn't even finished the countdown to the first scheduled destruction, let alone gotten to the point where the narrator was wandering through the carnage, exploring the devastation, simultaneously in awe of and disgusted by mankind's potential for self-destruction.

So I just skipped it.

And now, of course, in a perfectly appropriate turn of events, it looks as if my internet connection is down, which means this blog post -- the only thing I've written today, in spite of the endless, burning desire to write -- isn't likely to get posted either.

(actually, it would seem to have just been a burp in the cable modem, as a reset of that has gotten me back online. although now I've lost my train of thought)

In the end, I don't suppose this is any more of a significant way to honour the 300th post than any of the other miscellaneous bits of gibberish I'd bee thinking of posting about. It's writing about nothing at all. Writing about the absence of writing. Self-referrential creation of the most egotistical variety.

Writing about nothing at all, and assuming people want to read it.

I'm not sure what to think.

I'm thinking about a blog entry I read about half an hour ago.

I haven't ready tony in weeks. Maybe months. And when I stop by for a visit tonight, what awaits me at the top of his blog isn't his usual scathing political commentary, or a tale of sexual adventures with Anna Kournikova.

It's a story of a 20-something man in Oklahoma who killed and mutilated a 10-year-old girl. His neighbour.

And I can't stop thinking about it.

And I'm thinking, as I always have, that there is a very fine line between men and monsters. I'm thinking that the inhuman walk among us every day and we don't know it because the thing that separates us from them is tiny, almost invisible, and yet it is everything.

I'm thinking, as I have for years, that sociopaths would make fantastic actors, either on stage or in front of a camera, because they act every day of their lives.

I'm thinking that it's incredibly strange to live in the 21st century, where we can take a peek through a tiny window into the existence of a criminal, a murder, because, at least at this moment, his blog is still up and running.

I'm thinking that, at least to the outside world, he seemed so...normal. But then, that's the problem, isn't it? The raving and drooling psychopaths are easy to spot, easy to avoid.

I'm wondering what that tiny line is, that tiny string, that thiny thing that separates us from them, I'm wondering what that really is. Can we see it? Can we know it's there? Is it something that some of us are born with, and some not? Or is it something that we all have at the start, but which, in some of us, breaks?

I'm wondering how someone -- anyone -- can, as the Police Chief of Purcell, Oklahoma described in a press release, "plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones."

I'm wondering how that same someone could write an entry -- albeit a short one -- in his blog while a little girl was dead in his closet.

I'm wondering if I have ever met anyone with this sort of potential in them. I'm wondering if I ever will.

I'm wondering how I could possibly tell.

I'm wondering if this is some sort of sad, sick, result of the fact that we, as a species, are essentially broken. And I'm wondering, if that is the case, is there any way we can be fixed?

My thoughts tonight are with the family and friends of 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin, and with the entire community of Purcell Oklahoma. They are -- I can only assume -- even more lost and confused by this than I am.

Random 10

I know it’s Easter Friday and all, but somehow I almost forgot that it was, you know, Friday. Silly, silly, silly me.

1. Over Our Heads – Jon Brion – Finally something has come along to break the endless cycle of Alabama 3 tunage. And that something was the “I ♥ Huckabees” soundtrack. I’ve had a copy of “Knock Yourself Out” since I saw the film, and actually toyed with using it somewhere in the Monkey House exit music (probably along with a neat jazz-piano version of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”) but ended up choosing two Apocolyptica tunes instead. But I digress. The point is this: This wonderful, mellow, eerily cheery song about how life is sad, death is inevitable, and any grander meaning is “Over Our Heads” is my current favourite track form the soundtrack.


2. Chris DeBurgh – One More Mile To Go – Don’t think I’ve heard this one before, which is weird, because I didn’t think I’d done any CdB downloads without listening to them. Definitely sounds like a Chris DeBurgh song, though. Funny that.


3. Ani Difranco – Independence Day – I think I am most fond of somber, acoustic style stuff as opposed to her more upbeat, or more overproduced material. This song is just ridiculously perfect with a bare minimum of instruments.


4. Depeche Mode – Black Day – Track three of unknowns for tonight. This is a weird one for Depeche Mode. The music seems mostly comprised of an electronic harmonica or something. Actually, this now seems like some kind of weird remix of something. “Black Celebration” maybe? I’m not sure.


5. Genesis – Second Home By The Sea – This is one of those songs that really shouldn’t have been split from its other half. The two parts of the song really should be played together, and yet by splitting them, you’re allowing radio stations and random playlists to muck with the proper musical experience. I suppose I could just edit the two tracks together into one…but that’d take too much work. Easier to just complain.


6. Peter Gabriel – Games Without Frontiers (Massive / DB Mix) – One of my favourites from early Gabriel stuff. It’s been awhile since I heard the original, but seems to have a much, much heaver drum track on it. (Oh, wait, I think I just realized that the “DB” in “DB Mix” probably stands from drum and bass…)


7. Sheryl Crow – All I Wanna Do – The song that introduced me to Sheryl Crow. And one which seems to have a sound unique to just about anything else she’s done. I think the notion of kicking back at the bar while everyone else is at work has a sort of appeal to most folks. I know it does to me.


8. U2 – Grace – Hearing U2 tonight reminds me of this news story, which I read this morning. Which doesn’t have anything to do with this song, but I thought it was interestingly nonetheless, and it wouldn’t have gotten a mention in my blog if not for the song. So it’s kind of connected in that way. It also seems like a fitting song in the context of the news story, actually.


9. Oingo Boingo – Can’t See (Useless) – One of the better tracks off the last of their studio albums. Unfortunately, this is the live version from their “Farewell” tour which isn’t quite as strong as the original. Still, a great song.


10. Oingo Boingo – Outrageous – And from a Boingo song performed during their final tour comes a Boingo song that, from the sounds of it, came from very early in their career. Man, I love their stuff. Have I done a Boingo random 10? I can’t remember now.


11. McFadden & Whitehead – Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now – Unless my memory is mistaken, this is from the “Boogie Nights” soundtrack. Though the more I listen, the more I think I’m mistaken. I don’t know. I haven’t seen the movie in awhile. I tried to watch it the other night, but got tired. I have to stop getting the urge to watch movies at 1:00 a.m. I think. Particularly movies that are longer than 120 minutes.

And that’s it for tonight’s Random 10. Thanks for coming along for the ride. Cheerio and good tidings.

Small and insignificant "Dinner and Drinks" update

I chatted briefly with one of the executive members tonight about the play. His take?

It was a good read, but he didn't think it would work on stage.

Interestingly, his concern was, of course, with the content, but not about the audience's reaction -- rather with finding actors and actresses willing to deliver the lines. Which is actually something that hadn't considered me.

Scene One is mostly free of vulgarities, but is the bleakest and most depressing of the scenes.

Scene Two has a smattering of vulgarities, for both the male and female roles, but nothing too, too heavy (well, not for me at least, but I work at a newspaper where f-bombs are exploding constantly).

Scene Three has more vulgarities than I could possibly count, but interestingly they almost exclusively belong to the female. The male gets away with acting mostly uncomfortable and embarassed.

Unfortunately, the two from the first scene don't get off that easy. They may not have vulgarities, but they *do* have a ridiculously over-the-top makeout scene at the end of Scene Four (which is a sort of epilogue that wraps up their story, and manages to end a depressing play about dysfunctional relationships on a relatively positive note).

Still no official word as of this point. Just felt like sharing that new perspective.

Stickage #96

Another week goes by, and other stick figure drama, and we are yet one more week closer to the historical Episode #100 of everyone's favourite crappy stick figure comic strip.

I've got to admit, this strip, as much as I think it worked for what I needed to do, was kind of a mess. I had to change the title, because an intended "Apocolypse Now" reference didn't actually make it into the dialogue. I also had to scrap an "extreme" joke of some kind. PLUS "Weird Bob" is supposed to look like he's crouched over, talking to Petey the imaginary karaoke-singing badger, but you can't really tell that because the word balloons are on top of his legs.

Plus, Weird Bob's dialogue is incredibly hard to read in this, because it doesn't have anything to do with what myself or the paramedic are talking about. He's just kind of off to the side.

But what he's saying is VITAL.

However, even given all that, I think I have finally figured exactly how this phase of the compuzilla storyline will be coming to a close (and coming to a close in only three short weeks). I've had a vague idea for a few months now, how it was going to end, but I think I've reached the point where I know exactly what the next 12 panels of the strip are going to be.

A part of me is even considering burning through the next three strips, just to make sure I don't forget anything. They won't see print until it's time for them to see print, so if I get better ideas there'd still be time to fix them. But better to get the idea I have down right now, for fear of losing it.

Plus, I seem to have been on an absolutely ridiculous creative bender lately.

(PS: Speaking earlier of Weird Bob's conversation with Petey...a special prize to anyone who can figure out any of what Petey is trying to say, before the reveal next week)

I did a silly, silly thing...

A man and woman are seated at a table. The woman is just eating the last few bites of her dinner, the man is already finished – his plate is pushed aside and he has a clipboard leaning against the edge of the table. He is studying the pages on the clipboard intently, a pen in his hand.

GEOFF: I’m taking the pots.

SHARON: I want those.

GEOFF: They were a gift from my mother.

SHARON: You never cook.

GEOFF: Yes, but they were a gift. From my mother. Who’s now dead.

SHARON: Great, you want to honour your mother’s memory by letting the pots she bought us as a wedding gift collect dust?

GEOFF: You never even liked my mother.

SHARON: I like the pots, though. They’re nice.

GEOFF: This isn’t up for debate. You’re not having the pots my mother bought us. I’ll buy you another set.

SHARON: Fine.

So, against my better judgement, I submitted an original play as a "workshop" production to run during Stampede.

Ironically, this had been a plan of mine from the start, though my plan was to pitch an entirely different, full-length play. Getting that one written didn't pan out, sadly.

I considered a variety of other play projects that I could tackle instead, as the deadline to propose something for summer got closer and closer, never once thinking about this particular project. It had completely slipped my mind until a friend reminded me of it.

I loaded the 1/3 complete document up about a week ago, read through it, and found that the creative wheels were running again. So I started working.

And working.

And working.

And before I knew it, the silly thing was almost finished.

It's currently called "Dinner and Drinks" and the selection above comes from the opening of scene two -- of four scenes in total. It's one act, somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes depending, I guess, on how it's directed.

The tricky thing is this: I don't want to direct it. And, while I have approached sdomeone about the directing job, I don't currently have a director.

I'd be more than happy to act as a "mentor" to a first time director, because I'll be at every one of the rehearsals anyway, but I want to be there as a writer first and formost. The point of a "workshop" production is to actually get the words on stage, to get real people delivering them, so the writer can find out what works adn what doesn't, find the bits that are good and cut out or change the bits that are bad, find the problems with facing and get them repaired.

Text on a page is one thing. Text out of a person's mouth is something else entirely.

I'm excited about this. I'm also petrified. And, strangely enough, I'm not sure which terrifies me more -- the idea of having the proposal rejected, or the idea of having the proposal accepted, and dealing with the fact that at some point in the near future, my own words will be on stage, and there will be at least some people in the audience hearing them, reacting to them.

But then, I guess, it's all about taking chances, isn't it? It's all about breaking out of the safe zone. Otherwise you become a zombie.

I know you’ve been hurt in the past; we both have. I know a part of you has given up on love; a part of me has too. I know you just want to stay where it’s safe, where there’s no danger, where there’s no chance of getting hurt; I know all those things because I feel them too. But where it’s safe, there’s no life. There’s no passion. There’s no fire. If you stay where it’s safe, you stop being alive, and you start to just kind of exist. You eat food without tasting it. You drink wine without savouring it. You walk through life like a zombie.

From the fourth scene (I guess I'm not that terrified of my own words if I'm quoting myself this relentlessly -- gee, Todd, egomaniacal much?)

It's a funny play, in parts, or so I hope. But it's also awfully vulgar. I'm not sure how much of the vulgarities can be cleaned up in a polish -- I know I can sometimes get off on a particularly nasty mind-set and overdo the nasty words, and that might have been the case here. I won't know until I sit down with the script and red pen.

But the plan -- to my knowledge -- is to stage it for three days at Stampede, and I figure that even an amazingly vulgar play should be able to attract a decent crowd for three days, if it's got a local author attached to it. I'm sure there'd be more than just a few people interested in seeing what sort of silliness local columnist Todd Sullivan has come with for a play.

Oh man, they'll be surprised.

I'm not sure how long it'll take before I know whether "Dinner and Drinks" is a go for Stampede, but I'm sure once I know, this spot right here will be the location of the official announcement.

Big deal, you're doomed to die...

So what you’re never understood?
Big deal you’re doomed to die
Oh, oh
Nothing ever lasts
It all gets torn to shreds
If something’s ever lasting
It’s over our heads
It’s over our heads
- Jon Brion
Over Our Heads

I finally got my hands on a copy of the "I ♥ Huckabees" soundtrack and, just like any other time I get my hands on some really, really nifty music, it's been on just about constant replay for the last two days (though I only played it once at work today, for fear of driving my coworkers nuts).

Additionally, it makes for really, really great writing music, as it's mostly instrumental, so not a lot of lyrics to get into my head and interfere with my own word creation process.

Brion hasn't done a lot of soundtrakc work -- on top of "Huckabees" there's "Magnolia," "Hard Eight," "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and "Punch Drunk Love." Of them, "Magnolia" is really very, very good but "Huckabees" is a stand-out, and easily my favourite, and a favourite among soundtracks in general. It's strangely and uniquely arranged in a way that manages to somehow drift easily between the happy and the sombre.

I suppose that's what happens when you compose a soundtrack for a film billed as an existential comedy.

Slack off

In a rare (and therefore oh-so-exciting) third post for an evening, I've decided to finally get off my ass and add the "Slactivist" blog to my linkage section. It's been a huge favourite of mine for longer than I can remember now, and it's embarassing how long it's taken me to link it.

Fred Clark offers a thoughtful, honest, and meaningful Christian perspective on everything from current events to his regular disection of the "Left Behind" series of revalation-inspired novels. And it's a perspective that even a dreadful, heathen-like, "spiritually ambiguous" type like me can appreciate.

Consider this linkage update in honour of Easter.

And thus completes my trilogy of same-day spirtually-related blog posts.

Goodnight and good luck.

And while we're on the topic...

While we're discussing spiritual significance, let's talk about Easter.

I sometimes have a tough time at work dealing with religious holidays -- as I'm sure more than just a few of the people who work in the advertising industry do. As with any sort of largely recognized holiday -- Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter -- people want to put thematic elements in their advertising. They want graphics that mesh with the theme of the appropriate season.

And as such, during easter, I find myself at our online clip-art service, searching for easter-related clip-art. And inevitably what I get is a bizarre fusion of rabbits, chocolate eggs, and crucifixions. And the three don't mesh together in my head very well.

For some reason, the "Santa Claus / Birth of Jesus" elements don't collide quite so violently in my head. Maybe it's because the birth of Jesus is a far more peaceful story, maybe it's because there are elements of "gift giving" in the birth story, and maybe it's just because Christmas is now so overly commercialized that it wouldn't surprise me to see a corporation toss a Santa suit on a replica of Jesus if they thought it'd help them sell a few more toaster ovens.

Easter is different though.

Jesus' involvement with Easter is not pleasant. It doesn't carry with it the sorts of feelings one gets when one thinks about cute little bunnies hopping around in lush, green fields, laying chocolate eggs while they cluck like a chicken.

That sort of image is cute and fuzzy and it warms every but the most frigid of hearts.

Jesus, on the other hand, was nailed to a cross, the cross then stuck in the ground so he was hanging on those nails, and left to die a very slow, excruciatingly painful death.

Not so warm and fuzzy. Unless, I suppose, you're the Hannibal Lector type.

Yes, there's the whole "resurrection three days later" element to Easter, and that's kind of warm and fuzzy. Not to mention the whole "dying for your sins" bit, which also has its share of warm fuzziness.

But neither of those hints of warm and fuzzies can compare to: Man. Nailed. To. Cross. And. Left. To. Die. Painfully.

Simply put, I don't get this modern, North American version of easter. It confuses me. It makes my brain hurt. And quite frankly, I can't wait for it to be over so I can go back to searching for clip-art images that don't force my mind to try to merge two very, very different sets of imagery into one single, confusing, troubling idea.

(Note: This notion was very, very close to being the basis for my column this week, but I ultimately went with something safer, and something less potentially prone to offending the Christian readers that a "spirtually ambiguous" type like me might actually have. For those Christian readers who might have stumbled upon this subject at this location...um, Hi! Hope you're not prone to taking offense to things like this...)

And there's two of my favourite films on the list!

I can't remember how I found the site anymore, and it's been in my bookmarks for a few weeks, but I decided it was worth drawing your attention to Arts and Faith's list of 100 Spirtitually Significant Films.

Yes, there are some obvious picks in the list -- films like "The Passion of the Christ," "Jesus of Nazareth," and "The Last Temptation of Christ." But a lot of the list is made up of some really interesting choices. Films like "The Straight Story," and "The Elephant Man," by David Lynch, Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," and "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," from the always bizarre mind of Charlie Kaufman.

I guess it's the word choice in titling the list that's relevant -- that these aren't necessarily "religiously" significant, or significant ways specific to certain faiths or denominations, but "spirtitually" significant.

Just from glancing at the list, it looks like more than half of it is made up of foreign films, providing a much wider examination of spirituality than in focusing just on what Hollywood outputs, which is nice.

Oh, and for the record, my two favourite films that made the list -- "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Magnolia" are also my first and second favourite films, period, of all time. Magnolia was kind of a surprise, especially placed at #27.

Give it a look and see how many of your own favourite films made the short list.

Further choices

Having spoken with someone wise in the ways of theatre today, I'm beginning to more seriously consider proposing "Closer" for next season, regardless of it's potentially risque content.

And I swear it's only because it's a breathtakingly amazing play, and not because it'd be fun to hold auditions for the part of the stripper.

Really.

Delayed respects

Dear Warren Zevon:

It was only yesterday, I swear to God, that I heard your music for the first time. And, having heard it for the first time, I'm embarassed that I didn't hear it before, and more importantly, didnt' have the chance to have known your work before you left this world on September 7, 2003.

It's late, I know, but I hope you're resting easy.

Yet Another Stickage

This week's stick figure drama is up, once again preceding its appearance in the newspaper. As I suspect I've said before, enjoy it while it lasts, because I'll surely get lazy again one of these days.

You know, I'm having some real trouble drawing the paramedic's hair in this digital version of SFD...

Land of the Dead, in my head

Zombie dreams last night. But I was armed with a sawed off shotgun in order to properly deal with the masses of the living dead that ascended on the hotel (I think it was a hotel -- it seemed somewhat hotel-like) where I happened to be. A hotel where, conveniently, there was some sort of weapon exhibition going on, so there were fresh rounds for my shotgun just about everywhere.

One zombie was even nice enough to wait until I had finished reloading before leaping at me.

For the record, they were the old-school, Romero-style, slow shuffling zombies, and not the running super-fast from points A to points B zombies of modern films like "28 Days Later" and the "Dawn of the Dead" remake.

According to my favourite online dream interpretation site...

To see or dream that you are a zombie, suggests that you are physically and/or emotionally detached from people and situations that are currently surrounding you. You are feeling out of touch. Alternatively, it may indicate that you are feeling dead inside and are simply going through the motions of daily living

Not sure what it means to dream that other people are zombies. Perhaps I'm feeling like everyone around me is dead inside? Perhaps I subconsciously just wanted to lay some heavy smackdown on the undead? Perhaps we'll never know...

Choices

ALICE: Why did you do this?
ANNA: I fell in love with him, Alice.
ALICE: That's the most stupid expression in the world. "I fell in love" -- as if you had no choice. There's a moment, there's always a moment; I can do this, I can give into this or I can resist it. I don't know when your moment was but I bet there was one.
ANNA: Yes, there was.
ALICE: You didn't fall in love, you gave in to temptation.
ANNA: Well you fell in love with him.
ALICE: No, I chose him. I looked in his briefcase and I found this...sandwich...and I thought, "I will give all my love to this charming man who cuts off his crusts." I didn't fall in love, I chose to.

From the play "Closer" by Patrick Marber. Which, by the way, is fantastically brilliant and beautiful and ultimately sad and tragic -- everything that a rock solid story should be. Prince George is bring their production of it to the Zone festival this year, and sadly I think I'm going to have to skip it, in spite of how much I love the play -- because of how much I love the play. Because I reckon I might very well like to direct this some day, and I'm not big on having my directorial impulses affected by anything other than the text of the script.

But I'm getting off topic.

"Closer" is a play about four people looking for love in every conceivable corner and, ultimately, finding it nowhere at all. Loneliness and sadness are what await them at the close of the show, and I think there's something unfortunately true about that. That for far too many of us, the search for love leaves us with nothing at all to hold on to.

That truth is what ultimately moved me about the play. But there is an extra sense of truth in the bit I quoted above. And I guess the reason it struck me so hard was that I'd never really thought about it before.

I've long believed -- and openly told people -- that we, as people, don't have the luxury of choosing who we love. We dont get to decide who it is that stirs something in our minds, in our hearts, in our souls. These people do, for whatever reason, right or wrong. They do. And so we love them for that, because we have no other choice.

But there is still a choice being made, because we get to choose what we do with that love. We choose to pursue it, or we choose to let it go. We choose to let it destroy us, or we choose to let it empower us.

I'm not sure if that element is something I simply didn't realize, or something I'd forgotten about, but whatever the case, I'm grateful to "Closer' to reminding me of it, because it's an important part of the equation.

Test

This is a test to see if creating a new post will repair my apparently damaged blog.

Here goes nuthin'.

Random 10

Would you believe I just about forgot that it was Friday? Would you believe I just about missed a Friday Random 10? Well, yeah, of course you’d believe that, because I’ve done it a whole lot of times in the past. But not tonight. Not tonight.

1. Alabama 3 – Terra Firma Cowboy Blues – Yeah, more A3 to open the Random 10. I reckon I’ll get tired of this stuff eventually (and I’m already playing them a little less frequently at work this last week) but until then, I plan to gorge myself. Probably my favourite song from the recently acquired fifth album “Outlaw.”


2. Nine Inch Nails – The Hand That Feeds – A fantastically raging anthem for anyone with a burning desire to say, “Fuck off!” to the powers that be. A surprising theme from someone who usually writes about for smaller and far more personal agonies.


3. Norah Jones – Ruler of My Heart – Wow, I haven’t heard her stuff in awhile. I was binging on it for the longest time, and then *bang* nothing. Nice to have it just kind of appear out of the blue…


4. Alabama 3 – Woke Up This Morning (Acoustic) – It’s shaping up to be a hella cool Random 3, with a random A3 song popping up in the playlist. This is the song, thanks to its use as the theme song to the Sopranos, that introduced me to their stuff (though it wasn’t this acoustic version).


5. Adolescents – Amoeba – This sounds weirdly, vaguely familiar, but I am completely incapable of placing it. Kind of punk-ish. No idea why I have this on my hard drive.


6. Nirvana – Lithium (Solo Acoustic, 1990) – From, I think, a 3-CD collection of rarities. It’s kind of rough around the edges, sounding a bit like an early demo of the song. What’s interesting to me is that I recognize this as one of the Nirvana songs I’m quite fond of, but I’d have never known it from the title. Nirvana stuff I know only to hear.


7. Liz Phair – Johnny Sunshine – I can’ even remember what inspired me to download her stuff, but I recall having downloaded it, like some of it, quite a bit. Though this song doesn’t ring a bell.


8. Radiohead – No Surprises – A live version (and one that sounds more acoustic than normal) of a really freaking phenomenal song. Can’t recall right now if the original is off of “OK Computer” or “The Bends” but I’m currently leaning towards “The Bends.” Because, you know, that’s hugely important information.


9. Enigma – Waiting for the Hurricane – Not sure why, but I was thinking about Enigma’s stuff in the last few days. Maybe become some of their genre-blending reminded me a little of Alabama 3. Though I was thinking of something more from their first album than this which is from album number god only knows.


10. They Might Be Giants – Nightgown of the Sullen Moon – Ah, one of those great TMBG songs that seems to, at least for me, defy interpretation. Does it somehow minimize my enjoyment of it? Not at all. It enhances it…


11. Oingo Boingo – Capitalism – The original, and not the live version that I first heard. Musically it’s easily dated as originating in the 80s, but still a great song, and a great satirical stab at the greed of the decade that birthed the song. “There’s nothing wrong with capitalism, there’s nothing wrong with free enterprise, don’t try to make me feel guilty, I’m so tired of hearing you cry…”

Another stickage update.

Okay, so I did stick figure drama from home tonight for the first time in months. What that means is I had easy access to my FTP storage space for the images, and was able to upload last week's strip *AND* this coming week's strip.

Yup, that's right. You get the chance to check out Stick Figure Drama #94 before it appears in print. Enjoy it while you can. This won't happen often.

Be warned, though. The air frivolity will not last forever in this strip. Something dreadful is on the horizon. Something ominous. Something deadly.

That's right: In five weeks SOMEONE IN STICK FIGURE DRAMA WILL DIE.

And that's all the foreshadowing I feel like doing right now. Cheerio.

Random 10

It’s Saturday (and likely, technically, Sunday by the time I post this). An unexpected visit last night just as I was about to do the random 10 led to consuming beer until it was time for bed, thus forcing the postponement.

0. Alabama 3 – Converted (Remix) – I still can’t get enough of this stuff (though I’m beginning to wonder whether or not my co-workers are getting tired of hearing it). As much I listen to it, though, I can’t figure out whether their gospel-esque messages are sincere – such as the call to “go back to church” in this song (“Now this church I’m talking about, there don’t have to be a minister present; there doesn’t have to be any taking of any kind of communion; all you gotta do is be there, with the music playing, among all those people you love, dancing, and singing, right there in church…”). It’s certainly a message that rings true to me. On the other hand, they’ve also made references to the First Presleytarian Church of Elvis the Divine, so maybe there needs to be a grain of salt or two in the taking of their messages. And maybe it don’t much matter one way or the other.

1. Rick Nelson – Lonesome Town – Looking at where this has appeared in my playlist, this seems to be from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Soundtrack albums like this can be a great way to diversify your MP3 collection. If you’re interested in diversity.

2. Depeche Mode – I Am You – From one of those handful of downloaded but never listened to DM albums. Which is among my collection of downloaded but never listened to albums in general. Will I ever learn?

3. John Philip Sousa – Track 8 – Not sure what song this is, but it’s from a CD of John Philip Sousa’s greatest hits – and yes, he does, apparently have greatest hits. Was looking for marches to use in “Welcome to the Monkey House.” This one wasn’t used, obviously, otherwise I’d probably remember what it was. What *was* used was “The Stars and Strips Forever,” just in case anyone was desperately curious.

4. Classical – De Beers Diamond Music – Not technically classical music, in spite of the artist listing. This track was used in the first play I directed – “Some Things You Need To Know Before The World Ends: A Final Evening With The Illuminati” during the prelude to the sermon scene. It’s one of my favourite music cues from that play (that, and the use of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem during Reverend Eddie’s final showdown with death on the basketball court).

5. Erasure – In My Arms – Not sure where this is from, exactly. But it’s not familiar to me. Not a good random 10 thus far – one song from a play, one song not from a lay, and three songs I’m not really familiar with. Five songs to go. Let’s hope for some improvement.

6. Phil Collins – I Don’t Care Anymore – Ah, this one I know, and as much as I’ve lost some of my liking for Phil Collins over the years, I’ve still got a soft spot for this tune. Though maybe that’s just because I have a liking for anthems to ennui.

7. Level 42 – The Sun Goes Down – And from about the same early-80s era comes this song. This sort of falls between the cracks of my fondness for Level 42 – not entirely unlistenable, but still kind of pre-dating their really good stuff.

8. They Might Be Giants – Don’t Let’s Start – Though you can’t go wrong with TMBG from any era.

9. Track 6 – Curses to people who don’t properly fill out MP3 tags. It’s apparently the sixth track from Sheryl Crow’s “The Globe Sessions.” Let me just look that up. Okay, it’s apparently “Am I Getting Through (Part 1 and 2). Which I’m not familiar with. Either one, actually.

10. Cake – You Part the Waters – And so we end with another song I’ve never really heard, in spite of being a big Cake fan (speaking of them, I’m still looking for the perfect play to use their cover of “I Will Survive” in, because I just absolutely adore that song).

Cheerio. Let’s do this again next week, about the same time. What do you say?

Nightmares and dreamscapes.

Amputation
To dream that your limbs are amputated, signifies abandoned talents and serious, permanent loss. It indicates your feelings of frustration, powerlessness and helplessness. Sometimes amputation may also represent a situation that you have been ignoring and has finally reached a crisis point. In particular, to dream that your arms are amputated, suggests that you lack motivation. Dreaming that you legs are amputated suggests that you are limited in movements and where you want to go in life.

Foot
To dream that you injured or hurt your foot, signifies a lack of progress, freedom, and independence. Alternatively, the dream may suggests that you have taken a step in the wrong direction. In particular, to dream that your foot gets cut by glass, then it indicates passivity. You are hesitant or reluctant in taking the first step toward a goal or decision.

I had a rather unsettling dream last night in which I accidentally cut off my foot with a chainsaw. Of course, this didn't cause me much concern initially, and I simply stuck the foot back onto my leg stump, continuing on with my day.

But as time went on, I became more and more convinced that I should seek medical attention for this little ailment. I headed for the hospital, but by then, it seemed it would be next to impossible to get anyone to help me. Panic began to set in as it began to seem that I would not make it into surgery before the foot had reached a state where reattachment would no longer be an option.

Strangely, bleeding to death was at no point a concern.

When I woke from the dream, the sense that my foot was only marginally attached to my body remained. I spun it in circles, and probed the skin around the spot where it had been severed in the dream. I was also unable to return to sleep, convinced that I was going to return to my desperate and ultimately hopeless attempts to seek medical attention.

I'm not necessarily sure that those dream interpretations (which are courtesy of the Dream Moods web site) are an accurate interpretation of the symbols in my own dream, but I provide them for trivia's sake.

The explanation

I think I've always had a kind of love / hate relationship with spam. Hate because, of course, it's invasive, annoying, and ultimately ineffective to the people who are trying to make their millions by selling products people don't want to a public that couldn't begin to care.

And love because...well, because at the very least, you've got to at least kind of respect their dedication and admire their perserverance.

Last year, spam seemed to go through a phase where the composition of the emails seemed to have been outsourced to a company located in Japan, where the employees only had a very, very limited grasp of the english language. These sorts of spam messages were an amazing amount of fun to read, simply for their language mangling qualities.

Here's an example (yes, I kept one of these messages in my junk mail folder, because I love the stuff so much):

Our pills is a foremost fatbinding addendum that moves grease from the foods you eat!
It assistances you grow thin applying a quite various assumption than the spacious majority of diet medical products on the market.

Funny, no?

The broken english spam of last year, though, appears to be currently passe. Sadly, 2006's spam seems to, for the most part, be made up of messages containing jpg images of products and prices. Unfortunately, most spam blockers seem to be onto this, filing messages that contain only an image and no text as "junk mail."

And so more and more junk mail messages are arriving with text preceding the inevitable sales image. And, more and more often, that text is just random gibberish. Kind of like what I quoted yesterday, straight from a spam message.

But there's something appealingly random about the text. It's like the 21st century, marketing-based version of Williams S. Burroughs' cut-up technique. It's random, but if you stare at it long enough, can you find the unintended meaning? Is there a hidden truth that the author was not even remotely aware of?

No, probably not, but it's brilliantly fun to read the stuff anyway.

If you don't get it, I'll explain tomorrow...

miserably affirm, a adorn an proceedings, was whereabouts solar the was browse optician of destruction stubborn as machete of mystic or singles, opportunistic the of
urinate consideration at monastic of

administration shameless, fourthly
cuteness teammate, regardless to as shut bottomless ash, statutory rape hide-and-seek an red fresh crudely
flushed juvenile delinquent poll revolt etiquette shortsighted
pan is blackberry teach the it with seek a and
patriot, of fortress hurl biggie. sonnet, inveterate startling, the kimono the
duffel bag to abrasive the gas pedal of an owe commitment that understood linguistic is out-of-the-way restrictive, a the

Learning to be happy.

I think it's safe to say that just about everyone wants to be happy. Mind your, the pursuit of happiness does not offer a guaranteed success rate and, in fact, actual results vary dramatically from person to person.

However, if you're one of the ones whose success has been less than fantastic, there may be hope, at least if you're willing to attend Tal Ben-Shahar's Harvard University Course "Positive Psychology."

The program has quickly become one of the most popular on campus -- for obvious reasons, I think and while I'm sure the actual course involves a whole lot more than there, Ben-Shahar offers these six tips to the internet crowd looking to be happier:

1. Give yourself permission to be human. When we accept emotions -- such as fear, sadness, or anxiety -- as natural, we are more likely to overcome them. Rejecting our emotions, positive or negative, leads to frustration and unhappiness.

2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable. When this is not feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters, moments throughout the week that provide you with both pleasure and meaning.

3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account. Barring extreme circumstances, our level of well being is determined by what we choose to focus on (the full or the empty part of the glass) and by our interpretation of external events. For example, do we view failure as catastrophic, or do we see it as a learning opportunity?

4. Simplify! We are, generally, too busy, trying to squeeze in more and more activities into less and less time. Quantity influences quality, and we compromise on our happiness by trying to do too much.

5. Remember the mind-body connection. What we do -- or don't do -- with our bodies influences our mind. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, and healthy eating habits lead to both physical and mental health.

6. Express gratitude, whenever possible. We too often take our lives for granted. Learn to appreciate and savor the wonderful things in life, from people to food, from nature to a smile.

There you go, the secret to happiness. Or at the very least, a few secrets towards maybe being a little bit happier. And every little bit counts, no doesn't it?

The full story's available over at NPR. Site discovered courtesy of the always awesome LifeHacker.

Rediscovering dreck.

Okay, so I sat down tonight to start reading "The Amityville Horror" again (reasearch...) for the first time since, well, probably the tenth grade at the latest, and more than likely closer to the seventh or eight. In the years since I first experienced the novel my perspective on the story has drifted from one of slack-jawed terror at the prospect of such an event being *true* to the realization that, at the very least, the tale was probably heavily embellished and, at the very worst, was an outright fabrication (regardless of George Lutz's continued claims that story is, in fact, true).

Of course whether the story is true is neither here nor there. I wasn't reading the book to prove or debunk anything. Like I said, it was a straight research outing, plain and simple.

I made it about 50 pages through before I put the book down, partly because I was getting tired, and partly because...well, to put it simply, I couldn't believe how dreadfully written it was.

Like really, honestly, brutally badly written. Like the author -- Jay Anson -- had never put together a novel before.

Which, in fact, he hadn't. Though he had been a journalist previous to penning The Amityville Horror, so one would've hoped he'd have some experience stringing information together in a way that made sense.

The first chapter alone made me dizzy. It jumped around chronologically so many times that I couldn't keep track of what day it actually was in the narrative until the family was actually moving into the house -- the only moment that had a date associated with it (Dec. 18, 1975).

In later chapters the narrator's voice shifts from the third person, to a first person narrative from George Lutz's perspective, though only for half a paragraph before switching back to the third again.

Lord, it made my head hurt.

The most interesting thing about it was that I recognized a lot of my adolescent writing style in it. Now I'm not sure if that means that the structure and storytelling style of the Amityville Horror was actually quite influential on me as a young writer, or if it was simply that my skills, as an adolescent, were almost on par with Jay Anson. Either way, I'm already dreading having to push through the next 250 pages of research.

Passing it on...

Picked this up from the Slacktivist blog, which is actually long overdue in its inclusion in my linkage section (I'll get to it one day soon -- promise)

When you see this, go to your own blog and post an anti-war song. Why? Because stuff like this can spread like a virus. And that can only be a good thing.

Each Small Candle
by Roger Waters

Not the torturer will scare me
Nor the body's final fall
Nor the barrels of death's rifles
Nor the shadows on the wall
Nor the night when to the ground
The last dim star of pain, is hurled
But the blind indifference
Of a merciless, unfeeling world

Lying in the burnt out shell
Of some Albanian farm
An old Babushka
Holds a crying baby in her arms
A soldier from the other side
A man of heart and pride
Breaks ranks, lays down his rifle
To kneel by her side

He gives her water
Binds her wounds
And calms the crying child
A touch gives absolution then
Across the great divide
He picks his way back through the broken
China of her life
And there at the curb
The samaritan Serb turns and waves ... goodbye

And each small candle
Lights a corner of the dark
Each small candle
Lights a corner of the dark
Each small candle lights a corner of the dark

When the wheel of pain stops turning
And the branding iron stops burning
When the children can be children
When the desperados weaken
When the tide rolls into greet them
And the natural law of science
Greets the humble and the mighty
And the billion candles burning
Lights the dark side of every human mind
Each small candle
Each small candle (repeated)
Each small candles lights the dark side of every human mind
And each small candle
Lights a corner of the dark

Rest In Peace, Mr. Chocolate Salty Balls...

I’m not sure if it’s just that I haven’t seen South Park in a long, long time, or if it’s the fact that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were ridiculously “on” this last week, for the premier episode of their tenth season, but…holy crap, I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard in a long, long time.

I’ve said for years that Parker and Stone are the finest satirists alive today, and nothing could make this fact more obvious than this past episode of South Park, wherein they satirize their own internal conflict following Isaac Hayes’ apparent decision to quit the show after last season’s skewering of Scientology.

I say “apparent” because, as more and more of the story comes to light (http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,188463,00.html) it seems like things might not be quite so simple.

And yet, even in the situation gets increasingly complicated, Parker and Stone hit the nail right on the head with their response to the whole situation. Criticizing Isaac Hayes through Chef, while still leaving him enough wiggle room to say, “Hey, I didn’t say that!”

You can find the original, apparently inflammatory, anti-Scientology episode at http://youtube.com/watch?v=SSj9gc36Bw8

This week’s episode might be a little tougher to track down, but if you’re running BitTorrent, you could possibly find something over at www.torrentreactor.com

Also, return of the Stickage

In the interest of nurturing new fans of this crappy little comic strip (Hi Elise!) I've finally gotten around to posting the six Stick Figure Drama strips that will bring the online archive up to date with this week's newspaper strip.

If I can share a little secret...I've actually had a lot of fun with these last six strips. Weird Bob is so fun to write for, particularly as the narrator of the story. The weirdest stuff just comes out of his mouth, and sounds completely natural.

He's actually bordering on my favourite character in the strip, actually.

Just wait until you meet his brother, Lefty...

Return of the Crap (Also, 10 Random Songs)

So I’m nervous.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I did one of these. Thanks to the play and all the corresponding stresses and business, so there’s that.

And then last night, just for fun, I loaded up and listened to a random playlist…and I’m not sure if it was my mindset or what, but it seemed like nothing but *crap* came out of Winamp. Which makes me nervous about tonight.

Is this going to be 10 songs of crap, for real? I mean, I’ve been using the word crap for awhile, in conjunction with the Friday Random 10, but is tonight the night that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I guess we’ll find out shortly.

1. Beck – Lost Cause – I’ve gotten on a crazy Beck downloading frenzy lately, having heard almost none of his stuff except this song and Guero. I’m still lacking the album that contains this song, which is about the only one left that I’m desperate to get my hands on. Because if the whole album is as good as this song is, I’d have a hard time imagining a better album.


2. Sinead O’Connor & Sharon Shannon and Friends – Anachie Gordon – Clearly from the massive 10-CD O’Connor thingy that I downloaded. Peacefully acoustic. Or acoustically peaceful, depending on your approach.


3. U2 – Bad (Live) – This sounds like some classic U2 that I’ve never heard before. The name seems familiar, so I have the sense that I’ve known that this song exists, but it doesn’t sound familiar, exactly. Only to the extent that many U2 songs from certain eras simply sound like U2 songs from that era.


4. The Beatles – Polythene Pam – Don’t know this one. Doesn’t seem to do much for me either, actually.


5. Richard Ashcroft – Science of Silence – Wow, haven’t heard this in awhile. I think this came from some kind of “best of the year” download, of which I only kept a few songs. But this is a great one. “We are on a rock, spinning silently; won’t you get close to me.” Good stuff.


6. Onion Radio News – A New Starbucks Opens in the Restroom of an Existing Starbucks – Not technically a song, but whatever. The Onion is freaking brilliant.


7. Depeche Mode – Any Second Now - Sounds like older Depeche Mode that I haven’t heard before, as opposed to newer Depeche Mode that I haven’t heard before.


8. Information Society – Come With Me – A bizarre 80s techno band from Minneapolis that had some success with their first album, a moderate hit with their second (which I actually preferred), then kind of disappeared from view from their third. I think there was maybe a fourth, but people stopped caring by then. This is one of two or three of my favourite songs from from the “Hack” album. It’s good to hear it again.


9. Roxette – (I Could Never) Give You Up – You know, I’m not ashamed when cheesy early-90s crap like this comes up, as long as it’s cheesy early-90s crap that I’ve heard before, and actually enjoyed.


10. The Beatles – Another Hard Day’s Night – I don’t think I’ve ever heard this before, but holy cow is it brilliant. The early hit “Hard Day’s Night” approached as an instrumental with Indian instrumentation. Wild.


11. Alanis Morissette – Hands Clean – I kind of like this song, in spite of spending a few years working with an anti-Alanis co-worker, and the fact that it’s apparently pseudo-biographical about an affair she had with an older man.

Okay, well, that actually wasn’t too shabby. And hey, what do you know, it’s actually Friday night too. Who’d have thunk it!?

[EDIT]

1. A3 – Disneyland Is Burning – Okay, I had to tack this #11 track on, because A3 is pretty much my current favourite band, is this is among the songs that I’ve only acquired in the last week or so, so it’s still novel and amazing and brilliant. And it just happened to pop up as #11. I’m sure I’ve said it before – If you haven’t heard A3 (or Alabama 3, technically) then you’re doing yourself a massive disservice. Too often referred to as “The best band you’ve never heard,” which would be kind of cheesy if it wasn’t for the fact that it was so incredibly true.

Random TMBG Random 10 (or 15)

So a friend asked me the other day to make her a They Might Be Giants mix CD, because she’d never heard their stuff, and was only familiar with their work through my occasional references during the Friday Random 10.

So, bored tonight, with too much time to kill now that the play is over, I decided this would be a fine time to start compiling the songs. Which, I’ll admit, is going to be a challenge, as she has requested an audio CD and not an MP3 CD, which limits the amount of songs I can use. Given that TMBG tend to write shorter than average songs, I could probably get 20, maybe 25 on a disc, but that’s still only a tiny slice of their back catalogue. How, I wondered, would I choose the songs to best represent them?

Loading my entire TMBG folder into an MP3 playlist seemed the easiest idea. And then, I thought, if I was going to do that anyway, why not have a random random 10 at the same time?

I’ll likely listen to far more than 10 songs, of course, but I’ll likely cut this list off at 10, for fear of becoming bored. Or – worse yet – becoming boring.

1. Man, It’s So Loud In Here – A personal favourite. Satirizes the growth of annoying dance music in the strangest of places by being a song that uses a lot of annoying dance music tricks. Probably the best – or, at the very least, the most layered – example of musical satire I can think of. This one is definitely on the list.

2. Meet James Ensor – “Meet James Ensor, Belgium’s famous painter…” are the words the song begins with. Who else would write a song about an obscure, Belgian painter? Anyone? No, didn’t think so.

3. Hello Radio – Vibraphones and weird crunchy guitars playing what sounds like sulphuric acid jazz…

4. Yeh Yeh – A catchy tune from one of their later albums, but nowhere near good enough to make the short list for the CD.

5. Hypnotist of Ladies – And what hypnotist wouldn’t be?

6. S-E-X-X-Y Remix – The irony is that a TMBG remix sounds exactly like the sort of music they were busy satirizing in “Man, It’s So Loud In Here.” Is it possible they were making fun of their own remixes?

7. Purple Toupee – Sometimes a TMBG song is just so far over my head, or so far into the bizarre, that I have little say about it. A song about a purple toupee? Uh, yeah, okay. Still, great song.

8. Lie Still, Little Bottle – Very bluesy. An ode to a bottle of pills held in a shaky hand. Kind of sad, in a way.

9. I Should Be Allowed To Think – A call to freedom of thought. In a very TMBG way.

10. Dig My Grave – I love this song, and I couldn’t even begin to tell you why. It’s going on the CD.

11. I Palindrome I – How weird is that? This is actually the track that’s supposed to follow “Dig My Grave” on the Apollo 18 album. Not as good as “Grave” in my opinion.

12. Twisting – “She wants to see you again, slowly twisting, in the wind.” Kind of a painful, angry, lost love song. Which is sort of how most relationships end, I fear.

13. ’85 Radio Special Thank You – This thing is just indescribably weird. It’s TMBG talking about themselves, except I think everything they say is a lie. Also, it sounds like the tape that recorded this radio special was eaten by a wildebeest.

14. Kiss Me, Son of God (Alternate Version) – I’m not sure entirely why, but I *adore* this song. I’m not entirely sure what it’s about, except that it might be an attack on exploitational TV evangelicals. Plus there’s an accordion in it.

15. Whistling in the Dark – The chorus of this song has an annoying habit of getting stuck in my brain, and refusing to leave for days on end. I’m putting on the CD if only to see if others get the same curse that I do…

Okay, so I went to 15 instead of ten, because they were short. But now I’m definitely running the risk of boring both myself and everyone else, so I’ll cut this short. Cheerios.

Abort

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Those of you familiar with Hunter Thompson are likely familiar with the quote – which comes, if memory serves me correctly, from his most known piece, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” But, hopefully, even those of you who aren’t familiar with Dr. Thompson find a certain truth in those words.

The first time I read those words – and, beyond that, probably the first dozen times I read those words – the meaning was this: If you want to walk on the edge of life, be prepared to fall off the cliff. Because Thompson walked on the edge. It was where he was the most comfortable, and in his own way, it was where I think he wanted to ultimately see all of if from. Because you can see a lot of really fantastic things from the edge.

But right now, tonight, I feel like there’s an entirely different take to that quote. And I’m not sure if it’s one that Thompson intended and I’ve been too thick to get until now, or if it’s one that Thompson never saw coming and only exists in my head because I’m reading between the lines and applying to my own life philosophies.

But the take is this.

You buy the ticket when you’re born. It’s not an option – much like it’s not an option in the Thompson quote. You buy the ticket, whether you like it or not. And, having gotten your hands on the ticket, you’ve got not choice but to take the ride.

And that ride, of course, is life.

Life being – if I can get muddy and mix my quotes up – what happens when you’re making other plans.

I can even begin to guess why the Hunter quote has been in my brain lately. It’s a bit like a song you hear on the radio, that you can’t shake for the rest of the day, no matter how hard you try. I’m stuck. I can’t shake the words. And I can’t shake the truth behind them either.

Sometimes I get tired of the ride. Sometimes I want to cash in the ticket and get some money that I can dump on the hot dog stand, because sometimes you just want a hot dog, with lots of mustard. And some onions.

But you’re not allowed to do that. Because you bought the ticket at conception, at a point when no one asked you whether you wanted the ticket. Whether you wanted to play the game, or take the ride. And this ticket, my friends, is unrefundable.

You ride that train to its destination whether you like it or not.

This is the unfinished and unpublished piece that was almost (until I thought better of it) last week's "Offline" column.

It was written after the Wednesday night performance of "Welcome to the Monkey House" and after a few hours of drinking in the bar later. It also followed an hour or two of drinking at home, after the bar.

I didn't finish it because at the time I was sober enough to know that I was too drunk to send it without having given it a read the next morning while sober.

I didn't send it the next morning, when sober, because It was a little too close to the truth of what I've been feeling lately. And, within that, it was a little bit too sad sounding.

As a general rule, I'm not against sharing my thoughts and feelings in my column. I've opened up about a lot of different things, in a lot of ways that have been kind of scary at the time. But this time...this time I wasn't comfortable letting people into *this* particular feeling.

So there wasn't a column at all last week, becuase by the time I realized I couldn't submit this one, I didn't have time to write another one.

The "Buy the ticket, take the ride," thought is still with me, quite heavily. I'm still feeling, very much, like I should be living my life a bit more like that. Not wanting things, not striving for things, not making plans, simply taking the ride, letting life hand me what it hands me, and following that. Because I've had some very good things happen to me this year by living my life that way.

But it's a hard thing to do. And it can be very, very terrifying.

Though, I suppose you could argue too, the best parts of life are usually like that.

Waiting for the bus

Sometimes I think:

You're killing yourself.

As surely as if you had a gun in your mouth, or a noose around your neck, or a bottle full of pills in your belly. You're killing yourself. You're just choosing to do it in a way that's slow, and acceptable by society. You're killing yourself with liquor and cigarettes and food. You're living a suicidal, self-destructive lifestyle. Which is sort of the only way that someone who is terrified of death can kill themselves.

Sometimes, this is what I think.

And it's stupid, because I don't want to die. Death holds nothing for me. And yet, it's also *not* stupid, because in so many ways, life holds nothing for me.

I had an argument with a friend the other night, in which I explained that I felt that I was fated to a life of failure and misery because I lack the capacity for selfishness.

He told me that there was no such thing as fate.

I told him we were arguing semantics.

He told me that the most successful people he knew were the ones who cared about nothing but their own success, who were selfish, who were willing to go after what they wanted with a single minded ferocity.

I told him he was making my point for me.

For some reason, I can't shake the notion I have that what *I* want is the least important thing in the world. That what everyone else wants is far, far more important. That if there is a sacrifice to be made, the sacrifice should be mine.

I can't shake that.

No reason to stress, though, because in a way all of this is suddenly irrelevant. Because life is what happens when you're making other plans.

Song lyric of the moment

Don't know if i miss you
Do you miss the part of me that used to feel?
Maybe if i kissed you
You'd miss the part of you that used to need me
Maybe if i held you
Took some time to tell you
The only time i hold you now is in my dreams
Schemes we shared together
Sweet sunsets, rocking chairs,
Are looking just as faded as my jeans
- Alabama 3
The Thrills are Gone

That which doesn't kill you pretty much just doesn't kill you

“That which doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger.”

I’ve always kind of hated that line. I mean, it’s optimistic enough, sure. It’s a nice thing to think when bad things happen to you, which is why, I guess, some people tend to spout it at you when things go bad. But it makes what I think is ultimately a false supposition. And that is that self-improvement will always come as a result of adversity.

Personally, I think it’s perfectly conceivable to react to adversity with confusion: “What the fuck was that all about?” I think there are plenty of adverse moments that simply leave us broken, battered, and confused beyond belief.

Particularly if we’re seeking some kind of answer that might be contained in the adverse moment.

In literature, unlike in life, the lessons are often a whole lot easier to wrap your mind around, and perhaps it is because of literature that we’ve come to expect that lessons are contained in those sorts of adverse moments. In children’s books, the lessons are spelled out for you quite plainly. There is a very obvious “moral of the story” moment. Think of the story of the boy who cried wolf, as a really obvious example.

In adult literature, it can sometimes be a little more difficult to isolate the moral of the story. It sometimes requires some reading between the lines, because it would be considered kind of a literary sin to be too obvious with stuff like that. But quite often it’s there, and quite often you can find it without too much work. In Stephen King’s “The Shining” for example, the moral seems to pretty much be that it’s bad to be an alcoholic that tries to murder his family. Which, yeah, okay, solid moral.

But then you find an odd thing happens.

There are some examples of adult literature that don’t really seem have a moral at all. They’re kind of vacant, kind of empty, in that regard. They’re still entertaining reads, but because they are, in some way, about life – and because life quite often has no obvious moral to provide – there is no moral to be found between any of the lines. Except, maybe, that sometimes life is random and painful and meaningless.

Which, I guess, is kind of a moral in its own way.

When I was younger I used to prefer the first kind of story – the kind that had a moral of some kind, however hidden amongst the text it might be. Nowadays I tend to prefer the latter, because on some level I think it’s more honest. I tend to favour those sorts of films too (as in Magnolia – which has recently been upgraded to my second favourite film of all time) which, I think, is ultimately about the sometimes random, sometimes painful, and sometimes meaninglessness of life.

Of course, it’s equally about the sometimes random, sometimes wonderful, and sometimes jubilant sides of life as well. Because life is about both.

But one thing that life is not always about is meaning. Which is frustrating, because in spite of my fondness for ultimately meaningless art, I have a hard time applying that sort of approach to my life. When bad things happen, I ask myself, “What does this mean?” I ask myself, “What am I supposed to learn from this?” I find myself asking, “What the fuck was that about?”

And more often than not, there isn’t an answer.

And I want to tell myself that it’s because life is random and painful and meaningless, but I can’t because something inside of is convinced that if I look hard enough, if I try hard enough, I can yank a meaning out of it somehow. And then that random, painful, meaningless moment will have meaning, thus justifying my having experienced it.

Stupid. Futile. But a hard habit to break.

So the people who are inclined to say, “That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger,” I say, thanks, but not thanks. My subconscious is already convinced of this, regardless of how ridiculous it is. I don’t need any help thinking this way.

It’s a heck of a lot less optimistic, but I’d take, “That which doesn’t kill you only prolongs the inevitable,” any day. At least it’s a whole lot more honest.

Random 10 on Friday Part 5

I can not even begin to tell you how fuzzled my brain is right now. Less than a week to go until “Monkey House” opens, and it feels like there’s still a kazillion things to do. The program is about 90% complete now, having just done a bunch of work on it. I’ll need to track down some details from my Producer, and from cast and crew, before sending to press, but the majority of the ugly work is done.

Sitting here, post program work, I realize that it’s Friday night. And ka-boom, I realize I haven’t done a random 10. So, okay, it’s technically past midnight, but I haven’t slept yet, so as far as I’m concerned it’s still Friday.

1. Alabama 3 – R-E-H-A-B – After much searching, I finally tracked down the third A3 album, and while my initial reaction was a little bit cold, I’m starting to warm up to it. This is probably my favorite song on the album, thus far, and given that I can’t seem to get enough A3 lately, it’s no surprise that this is track zero.


2. Evanescence – Haunted – Early demo-ish sounding version of the song from their debut album. I think I must’ve downloaded far too much early demo-ish sounding stuff from them, as it’s just about the only thing that ever seems to come up during a random 10. Oh, and I guess I should as the question I think I’ve asked just about every time their stuff has come up – Is there going to be a second studio album? C’mon! Get to work!


3. They Might Be Giants – Critic Intro – This song is, to be frank, completely fucked. And I love it. The whole thing is just TMBG pretending to quote music reviews from magazines that don’t exist like “Aquarian Weekly.” These guys, really, are just too fucked up for words.


4. They Might Be Giants – Robot Parade – Two in a row, nice. This is apparently from their children’s album, but this version is apparently all adult-ized and stuff, by adding loud crunching guitars, would be my guess. Whatever the case, good song.


5. Shakira – Eyes Like Yours – I know she’s just put out a new album, but my bet is on the whole “One Hit Wonder” thing (or one album wonder, as the case may be). The song “Underneath your Clothes” from this album still kind of stick in the back of my mind, as it will be forever associated with a not-so-stellar date with a stripper / escort I met online. And that date failure will always kind of haunt me, because she was pretty goddamn hot.


6. Depeche Mode – Somebody – This is kind of a weird song. It starts kind of sweetly…like a traditional love song, where the singer lists all the things he’s looking for in a partner. But by the time you get to the end of it, it’s something completely different. In the last few lines, it’s almost like every kind thought and gesture in the rest of the song had just been thrown out the window. One of the better DM songs, in my opinion.


7. Peter Gabriel – Here Comes the Flood – Can’t say I’ve heard this song before (wow, like that’s a surprise).


8. Shania Twain – Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You) – Damn, you know, I made it so long without any embarrassments in this list, and now they creep in two weeks in a row. What can I say, I’m a download whore.


9. Fiona Apple – I Know – A coworker I had a few years back turned me on to Fiona Apple’s stuff, and it was only later that I realized that she had, at one point, been dating a director I’m quite fond of – Paul Thomas Anderson. Which is not to say that I’d have been more inclined to like her music if I’d known she was involved with a filmmaker whom I thought made fantastic films, just that coincidences are weird sometimes.


10. The Smashing Pumpkins – Muzzle – Album downloaded for a song or two. Nuff said.


11. Alexander Brandon – Duclare Chateau / Paris – Ah, music from the video game “Deus Ex.” Hearing this stuff always makes me want to play it again. Hands down the best game I ever played. Ever. Period.

Oscars 2006: Okay, so I did it

Good Lord, it's too late for this. I should be in bed.

Unfortunately, I made promises to a friend to convert some audio from a minidisc to a CD. Well, three minidiscs to three CDs. One is done, one is in progress, and one -- I think -- will be done tomorrow morning.

What that means, though, is I'm, sitting here with at least another hour to kill, and not a heck of a lot to do. So, in spite of the fact that I really didn't think I was going to get this out, here it is.

If you want to see my pics for the top six awards (best actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress, director, picture) you'll have to check the column. This blog post is for every other category.

And so, let's begin, in no particular order.

ANIMATED FEATURE
Howl's Moving Castle
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Winner: Wallace & Gromit
I haven't heard of "Howl's Moving Castle" but I seem to recall hearing at some point that this was an odd year for the animated feature category, because none of the films had been traditionally animated. Which, I've gotta admit, is pretty cool. I have huge support for anyone doing something non-traditionally. Traditions are made to be broken just as much as rules are. Having said all of that, I'm putting my support behing Wallace & Gromit because, I dunno, they seem to have quite a following. I've never seen any of their stuff myself, so I can't speak with any conviction, but apparently it involves cheese, so there's bonus points there, as far as I'm concerned. Plus, I hear "Corpse Bride" wasn't quite as good as "Nightmare Before Christmas" so...well, "A" for effort, I guess, but try again.

ART DIRECTION
Good Night, and Good Luck
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
King King
Memoirs of a Geisha
Pride & Prejudice
Winner: Good Night, and Good Luck
Okay, I might as well get this out of my system now. I'm not seeing much going in King Kong's favour at the Oscars. Peter Jackson has already had his massive love-fest with the third Lord of the Rings film, and while I'm sure it's an honour just to be nominated, I don't see too many awards heading his way anytime soon. Quite frankly, I'd be kind of pissed if he had a major Oscar clean-up again. Or am I maybe one of the few that thinks he might be just a *little* overrated. What was I talking about? Oh, right, the award for Art Direction. "Good Night, and Good Luck" creates a paranoid, McCarthy-esque, early-60s feel, complete with the oh-so-artsy black and white photography. Haven't seen the film, but I heard it looks very much like a 60s-ish live television drama, with limited sets, which in a way is probably perfect for the material. With an artistic approach like that, risks were clearly taken, and sometimes those risks are honoured.

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Batman Begins
Brokeback Mountain
Good Night, and Good Luck
Memoirs of a Geisha
The New World
Winner: The New World
Terrance Mallick is one of those funny filmmakers who often has years between projects. His last film -- "The Thin Red Line" -- hit theatres seven years ago, and before that it was twenty years back to "Days of Heaven." He's clearly the type who's very careful with his work, and doesn't do something until it's completely, perfectly ready. He'd also be the type to be very careful, and very particular with his cinematography. Though I suppose it's possible that it might go to "Good Night..." just because it's black and white. But that'd be kind of sad.

COSTUME DESIGN
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Memoirs of a Geisha
Mrs. Henderson Presents
Pride & Prejudice
Walk the Line
Winner: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
It's usually a good bet to go with the historical epics in the costume design category, because they tend to really stand out in their era-accurate costumes. "Charlie" seems to be the underdog in this category, but I'm gonna support it. Tim Burton had a fantastic vision for this film, and it was a vision that -- by necessity -- found its way into the costumes. They're weird, but they're wonderful, and I'm willing to bet that they'll win.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Darwin's Nightmare
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
March of the Penguins
Murderball
Street Fight
Winnter: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
I made a mistake last year by picking the popular documentary (Super Size Me) following the win of Fahrenheit 911 the previous year. This year's popular pick would have to be "March of the Penguins" which took a lot of people by surprise, but I'm not going to be tricked two years in a row. As for my "Enron" pick...well, what could possible be more interesting or topical than a film about that company, really?

DOCUMENTARY SHORT
The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club
God Sleeps in Rwanda
The Mushroom Club
A Note of Trumph: The Gold Age of Norman Corwin
Winner: The Death of Kevin Carter
Okay, c'mon, it's the documentary short category -- you haven't heard of any of these films either. So let's just accept that any prediction is going to be yanked out of your arse. Having said, that I stumbled upon Kevin Carter's name a day or two after making this prediction, and read a little bit about his story, and am now convinced that, at the very least, this would probably a very, very interesting film. As for why I picked it...well, it seemed like an interesting title.

FILM EDITING
Cinderella Man
The Constant Gardener
Crash
Munich
Walk the Line
Winner: Munich
Okay, so Munich is going to be mostly passed over by the Oscars. Sorry Steve. Good try, maybe next time. Still, I'm inclined to think they'll have a hard time passing over the film entirely, so this is one of those categories where they could toss the film a bone and say, "Hey, thanks for being there."

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Don't Tell
Joyeux Noel
Paradise Now
Sophie Scholl - The Final Days
Tsotsi
Winner: Sophie School - The Final Days
I don' tknow who Sophie Scholl is, but any film about someone's final days simply has to be interesting on at least some level.

MAKEUP
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Cinderella Man
Stars Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith
Winner: Narnia
I can' really make any logical, sensible judgement about whether or not Star Wars' makeup was better because the movie just sucked so much ass. Massive amounts of ass. There was so much ass sucking going on it was unbelievable. So, fine, Narnia wins.

ORIGINAL SCORE
Brokeback Mountain
The Constant gardener
Memoirs of a Geisha
Munich
Pride & Prejudice
Winner: Munich
Well, there's no Danny Elfman in the list of nominees this year, so I'll give it to John Williams. And I'll give it to Munich because the music is probably all emotional and complicated and stuff. Like the film. Yeah.

ORIGINAL SONG
"In the Deep" - Crash
"It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" - Hustle and Flow
"Travellin' Thru" - Transamerica
Winner: "In the Deep"
I actually saw this film, but have no recollection of the song. But, you know, there'll probably be an award or two tossed in its direction, and this one of the places where they could get away with the toss.

SHORT FILM - ANIMATED
Badgered
The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello
9
One Man Band
Winner: Badgered
Because badgers are funny. If not this one, then "9" because numbers as title as funny, especially if they're not spelled out.

SHORT FILM - LIVE ACTION
Ausreisser )The Runaway)
Cashback
The Last Farm
Our Time is Up
Six Shooter
Winner: Six Shooter
Mostly just becauese it sounds kind of violent.

SOUND EDITING
King Kong
Memoirs of a Geisha
War of the Worlds
Winner: War of the Worlds
This is one that could easily go to Kong, but I'm still predicting that the Academy is going to pretend like Peter Jackson simply doesn't exist after devouring the Oscars last year.

SOUND MIXING
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
King Koong
Memoirs of a Geisha
Walk the Line
War of the Worlds
Winner: Narnia
Have I mentioned that I've seen this film? Have I mentioned that I found it spectacularly average? And really, that's kind of the worst thing a film can be. I mean, if you're going to be good, then be *good*. And if you're going to be bad, you know, be *bad*. Still, mixing together all that battle sound probably gives it the upper hand.

VISUAL EFFECTS
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
King Kong
War of the Worlds
Winner: War of the Worlds
Same as with Sound Editing -- I think they're gonna ignore Kong.

SCREENPLAY - ADAPTED
Brokback Mountain
Capote
The Constant Gardener
A History of Violence
Munich
Winner: The Constant Gardener
As much as I'd love to see "Violence" get it, because it's adapted from a comic book, and because it's a Cronenberg film, I think this'll be another tip of the hat to "Gardener." But what do I know...

SCREENPLAY - ORIGINAL
Crash
Good Night, and Good Luck
Match Point
The Squid and the Whale
Syriana
Winner: Crash
Having seen this film, I've got to admit that it's only real strong point is the screenplay. In so many ways it just seemed like an average, trying to make a profound point, kind of film. But the screenplay is fantastic. It manages to just kind dabble in the interconnectedness of things without going over the top. And did you know that the screenplay was written by the guy who created the slightly cheese-ball "Canada-Meets-US" television drama "Due South"? I shit you not.

And so there it is. My crappy Oscar predicitions, now officially released to the general public so I can mocked and scorned and ridiculed when my predicitons turn out to be completely false. But I'm okay with that. As I think I've mentioned a time or two in the past, it's been a real long time since I cared much what other people thought of me or, apparently, my opinions about the Oscars.

Seeya later.