Last night as a few of us were driving back from Ultimate, looking at all the former convents and Patrick was saying that most of the Plateau used to be owned by nuns. It reminded me of a post-brunch conversation I had a while back with some friends, sitting at the Café Cherrier, our minds numbed by a food coma. It went something like this:

- Hey, that’s a pretty big convent.
- Yeah.
- It would have housed a lotta nuns.
- Tons o’ nuns.
- Heh heh. A megaton o’ nuns?
- Well, maybe not that many. I mean, how many nuns are in a ton o’ nuns anyway?
- Well, there are 1000 kilos per ton, and so at about 50 kilos per nun, that’s only 20 nuns to a ton o’ nuns.
- So there would have been several tons o’ nuns in there.
- Oh yeah. But you’d need, like, 20000 nuns to make a megaton of nuns. Unless they were really fat.
- Hm, ok but if there’s a 1000 kilos in a ton o’ nuns, shouldn’t a ton o’ nuns then be called a kilonun?
- No, a kilonun would be 1000 nuns, not 1000 kilos of nun material.
- Oh yeah, 1000 nuns. So a kilonun is a lot more nuns.
- And a meganun is a million nuns. I wonder if there are that many left in the whole world.
- Maybe they have a nunometer at the Vatican or something.
- Yep.

So I come home today and there’s mail from Visa. My monthly bill? No. A new card. Well, I guess mine’s expired. Wait, there are two cards here. One in my name, and one in the name of some man I’ve never heard of.

Hmm. Call Visa, they access my account and assure me I’ve requested a new card (no) and added an extra authorized cardholder to my account (um, NO!!!). It takes a long time to convince them that hey, maybe someone’s doing something they shouldn’t be doing here. After a total of half an hour of holding and convincing two different employees that I don’t know this man with the strange name, they cancel my account and re-issue.

They also advise me to call Equifax to warn them that my identity has been stolen. They will flag my name and for the next five years, whenever they receive a request for credit in my name, they’ll call and check. A friend of mine to whom this happened told me that after his name was flagged, Equifax was calling several times a day, that is every time the fraudulent party tried to use his identity to apply for credit.

What’s creepy about this story is that I received the card at my place. Was this person planning on thieving my mailbox? What’s also creepy is how common this seems to be.

Things like these get to me. I know that’s obvious, but I mean, isn’t it easier to just get a job than to go to the trouble of coming up with plots like these (not to mention the risk involved), and preying on people?

Still, it could have been worse. There could have been charges made to the account. On some level I do consider myself lucky.

Hey, I won another one of those contests! That’s two in as many months, what are the odds? Last time, I won a haircut. This time, a cooking class at the Académie Culinaire. Not bad.

Well, gotta go, my Kraft Dinner beckons.

I suspect everyone else is out there enjoying the weather. Off to the cottage I go, see you Sunday morning!

About Schmidt

It’s weird. The preview for this movie made it look horribly depressing, and although the movie’s tone wasn’t entirely unlike that of the preview, it was surprisingly entertaining. I guess the humor is more of a mood thing, kinda like in Fargo, so it would have been hard to make it look funny in just a quick soundbite. Plus, I’m not a big Jack slave like most people seem to be, but I liked him in this. It wasn’t his typical role.

Perhaps in part due to my low expectations, I liked it. It’s a solid 8/10.

Das Experiment

Oh, man. This is a German movie based on Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment done at Stanford in the 1970s. Basically, students were assigned to either be guards or prisoners for two weeks in a mock prison. The experiment was stopped after six days because everyone started losing touch with reality, including the experimenters, and the guards became sadistic.

ANYWAY… this movie is based on that. My biggest criticism is that it completely exaggerates the reality of what happened. Yes, I know this is to be expected of an adaptation but it was way too much. The first half is absolutely captivating as it is true to the story, and the tension is very cleverly spun. But in the second half, the movie sadly becomes a big ol’ American action flick. It degenerates and keeps getting more and more violent, losing all of the well-crafted “psychological” creepyness of the first half. Not even the disturbing violence in Reservoir Dogs made me as nauseous as I got watching this movie. I was actually dry-heaving.

In other words I didn’t like it, in fact it totally pissed me off. What a shame.

Jackass

I didn’t want to see this, but I was outvoted by a cottage full of friends, so what to do? I must say I laughed my ass off at parts, and I was gagging at some.

Think of it as candid camera, but with an edge. For example, at one point one guy goes to the plumbing department of a Reno-Depot, and takes a dump in one of the toilets there, in front of the bemused patrons. Another guy sticks a matchbox car up his anus and goes to a rural clinic where they take an x-ray. The look on the face of the elderly nurse is priceless.

So, I’m not sure I recommend it, but when forced to see it I was amused.

I have a theory. The theory is this: in the early seventies, a budding filmmaker named George Lucas sold his soul to the devil. The devil said, “you will make three of the most groundbreaking films of your time. These films will define pop culture for a generation. You will enjoy the success and worship of fans the world over for 25 years. But THEN…”

It’s paytime. For all of us. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not just jumping on the “it’s cool to hate Lucas” bandwagon.

I thought Episode One really felt like a Star Wars movie, with the sand and the robes and Obi-Wan and the music, and what were people complaining about so much?

Episode Two I had more trouble justifying to myself, seeing as he messed up what could have been Vader’s descent into evil. But still, it revealed some interesting background about intriguing characters, and the fight of the Jedi against the Clones was cool. So what if they used excessive CG for absolutely everything? So what if Hayden Christiensen (Anakin) couldn’t act? After all, it only makes it more believable that he sired Luke!

But no. For all my will to think for myself, I must finally own that George Lucas can’t make a good movie. His descent into mediocrity is the sad, chilling spectacle we would have liked to see in Anakin’s turn to the dark side.

I’ve held my sale-of-Lucas’-soul-to-the-devil theory to myself for a while, but today it is theory no more.

The proof? According to the imdb, Lucas now insists that all the characters in Episode 3 sport mullets. Mullets! You know, coupe Longueuil, hockey hair! I can just see George arguing with the devil about this:

“Now come on, I gave you CG Yoda! Midichlorians! Anakin and Amidala rolling in the grass! …”
- (heheh) I do come up with the best ones, don’t I? But I gave you AT-ATs, Boba Fett, Light Sabers and Vader turning out to be Luke’s father. You never would have thought of that. I gave you the inspiration NOT to direct Empire Strikes Back”.
- Jar-Jar Binks, Lucifer.
- Mullets, George.
- Greedo shoots first?!
- Mullets.

It’s the only explanation.

(picture from the Shore Fishing and Casting Club International)

10 pm: walk down the street, up the Jacques-Cartier bridge, watch the fireworks.

Midnight: walk up the street, to Parc Lafontaine, and watch the cops use smokebombs to evict Tent City.

Ah, Montreal…

This wasn’t a great film, but it wasn’t, as I had expected, a complete anal raping of the franchise either. And that was a pleasant surprise.

Good points:
- Action, lots of it, and the movie is generally well-paced. T3 is only summer blockbuster this year that didn’t bore me at any moment.
- I liked the ending.
- The music contributes greatly to making the movie “feel” like it’s part of the Terminator series.

Bad points:
- The story is basically “more of the same” as the two previous movies. Not too much in the way of new information.
- The Terminatrix is menacing, but very unoriginal. She acts exactly like the T1000 in T2. But her weapons really aren’t as cool as his were.
- The image quality and directing also both suffer from the comparison with T2. It looks like a made-for-TV movie.
- All the comic material is a rehash of the other two movies, though it still manages to be funny. But still, can we stop with the “I’ll be back” jokes already? They’ve had 11 years to think up new funny material!

It all comes down to what I always say - movies of this type are generally only as good as their villain. And this one loses big points because of that.

On every non-business trip I’ve ever taken, I’ve had the Canadian flag sewn onto my knapsack. In Bali, the flag led to my meeting a fellow Canadian at a time when I was pretty homesick. I joined him and his Scottish and Dutch companions, and travelled with them for a week. They took me off my planned itinerary, I discovered places I wouldn’t have without them, and with them I had some of my most memorable laughs.

In Norway, a local musician approached me on a train, as his band had just gotten back from playing in British Columbia. He took my map of Oslo and marked all the good out-of-the-guidebooks spots, including a wonderful, almost-secret bar called the Mir Station. Through this acquaintance I ended up spending several days merrymaking in Oslo, and went camping on an island in Oslo fjord with about twenty locals. My friendship with Rune endures to this day.

Anyway, there’s been a little debate going on for the past week between T and I. He feels I should not wear the Canadian flag on my knapsack on the upcoming trip to Morocco. He says Canadians are the third most sollicited nationality in that country, and labelling ourselves as such is asking for annoyance.

On the other hand, having the flag has always opened unexpected doors for me. It also allows me to avoid being mistaken for an American (no offense, but I’m sure Americans don’t want to be mistaken for anything else either), which might not be bad in an Arab country right now.

I know we’ll be speaking mostly French, but we’ll obviously be using a lot of our American-sounding English too, for example with other tourists. And there’s no way fair-skinned, blue-eyed T will ever pass off as a local, so we’ll get sollicited anyway.

What do you think? To flag or not to flag?

(picture from www.canadianmoose.com)

I recently had the pleasure of welcoming a host of Montreal bloggers to our new digs, at the housewarming party. Shown here, left to right, are Bill, Ed, Martine, Karl and Patrick.

Other blogger hotties present, but not shown in the picture, included Stephanie, AJ, Benita, Dave, Drew and Steph. It was a wonderful evening full of exotic people and interesting conversation. Check out more pictures here.

(thanks for the pics, AJ)