I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

ANOTHER CHAPTER IN MY JOB SEARCH.

Most of this week, I was working hard on my drawing of Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery (and I may have it ready by Monday, though no promises). But on Wednesday afternoon, my mother and I travelled around three different areas in south and western Ottawa to drop off CV's.

South Keys

Our first stop was the South Keys Shopping Centre, which is a strip mall of many huge big box stores. We were both there mainly to apply at the Chapters, but, since there was a Future Shop there, I decided to try submitting my CV (after browsing the anime DVD selection, which was adequate but didn't have the 3^rd Tenchi Muyo! Ryo Oh-ki OVA series, and the Game Boy Advance games). They took it, but said the proper way was to apply to Future Shop online.

I then walked over to Chapters, which is a Chapters I've been to before, but not since 2002, when my mother and I drove to Ottawa for the day to visit my sister to celebrate our coincidental shared birthday at a Red Lobster. I don't honestly remember what the selection of manga was like in 2002, but, dayamn, it's improved. It's the best selection of English language manga I've seen in a Chapters bookstore since, well, ever, occupying almost two whole sides of a chest-level double-bookshelf display (one of the four individual bookshelves also has some American graphic novels, but not many), comparable almost to the selection of manga you'd get at a well-stocked English comic book shop, like the Comic Book Shoppe, for example. More impressively, and this is something I've never really seen done at any kind of bookstore before, they made a valiant attempt to separate the shounen manga (boy's comics) from the shoujo manga (girl's comics), only putting a few titles in the wrong place, like they put Chobits with the shoujo titles, which is easily understandable since, although the comic was aimed at an high school-aged boy audience in Japan, it's from the four woman artistic team, Clamp, who mainly specialize in shoujo manga. They didn't have the manga I'm looking for, Planetes by Makoto Yukimura, but that one is a seinen manga (comics for a more mature male audience), the kind of manga that mainstream bookstores don't seem to carry as much as most of the new manga readers seem to be on the young side, and I've never seen it in English at any non-comic book bookstore. The French manga selection at the South Keys Chapters is non-existent, as far as I could tell, but I didn't really see any French books, period.

Anyway, I submitted my CV, and they made me fill out a form, saying things like which hours I'd be available, so I indicated pretty much any time, any day except Saturday, since I would like to continue going to the anime club.

On the way out of South Keys, I also put in a CV at the South Keys Cineplex Odeon cinema, a nice-sized theatre with fairly large screens, by Cineplex standards, which I saw George A. Romero's Land of the Dead at several weeks ago (which was pretty good for a zombie flick, though nowhere on the level of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, one of my all-time top eight greatest live-action films, and not even quite on the level of the Dawn of the Dead remake). One thing I like about that particular cinema is that, besides the normal concession stand, there's this self-serve area where you can buy Coca-Cola branded soft drinks from a fridge similar to the kind you find in dépanneurs... erm, I mean, "convenience stores" (gotta remember that I'm not in Quebec anymore), so, although I have yet to encounter a fast food place or cinema where you can order Vanilla Coke straight from the fountain (how popular does Vanilla Coke have to get before they'll add it to the "fountains"?), they do have the bottles of Vanilla Coke in the fridges, so now I can finally have the perfect moviegoing experience drinking Vanilla Coke without having to sneak it in in my bag. (Bottom line, America: Cineplex, Famous Players, and AMC need to start putting Vanilla Coke in their fountains.)

R.I.P. James Doohan

It wasn't the first place I'd heard about it, but, when I was in the car, CFRA radio was discussing the death of James Doohan, Star Trek's chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, from pneunomia complicated by Alzheimer's disease. It's sad to see him go, but I can't honestly say it's a surprise. While I don't think his Alzheimer's got to be quite as bad as Ronald Reagan's, since the guy was able to appear at the unveiling of his Hollywood Walk of Fame "Star" last year and still seemed relatively lucid, all I can think of is his completely pointless, out-of-the-blue cameo in the cheesy Knight Rider 2000 TV movie from 1991 (which is included as a bonus in the first season box set of Knight Rider, the only reason I own a copy of this TV-movie-pilot-for-a-follow-up-series-which-never-materialized on DVD). Even 14 years ago, he seemed a bit "confused", and you could tell that, while he still had almost all of the marbles he was born with, the first few were beginning to slip off the top of the pile.

Also, my mother was surprised that the hosts on the radio were astonished to find out that James Doohan was Canadian, born in Vancouver in 1920. I don't think it's that surprising that a lot of people, even fellow Canadians, might not have been aware of that. If they'd never heard him out-of-character as Scotty, they might have assumed that he had been born in Scotland. More importantly, the cast member of the original Star Trek who gets most of the "Born in Canada" limelight is, of course, the Montreal-born William Shatner, and Doohan rarely got mentioned as even an afterthought.

Also, one of the radio guys made the stupid mistake of saying that Doohan was known for saying the line, "Beam me up, Scotty", which is a rather odd thing to say considering that, since Doohan is Scotty, he would be talking to himself. (James T. Kirk said variations of "Beam me up, Scotty", most of the time, though I am aware that the words "Beam" "Me" "Up" and "Scotty" never were said on any episode in that exact order.)

Pinecrest

Our second stop was Pinecrest Shopping Centre, another collection of big box stores in western Nepean which includes an IKEA. I had actually come to this shopping centre the previous week to go to Michaels, the Arts and Crafts Store, to buy a couple of Prismacolor coloured pencils and a set of Sanford artistic erasers for my aforementioned Trafalgar Square drawing. (Yes, I also went in the IKEA, which is like the IKEA Museum of Modern Functional Modular Furniture, especially how you're not supposed to deviate from the path.) My mother had pointed out that IKEA was hiring, but I remembered that they had requested in the Jobbank.gc.ca ad that applicants apply by e-mail or fax, so I didn't go inside.

We were both there mainly to apply to the Chapters, and I went to the back of the store and buggered around for a few minutes while my mother submitted her CV so we wouldn't look like a mother-and-son "package deal". This Chapters, which I had browsed the previous week, doesn't have quite the same selection of manga, but one really neat set of books I found on sale there are Shoujo Manga Techniques: Drawing Basics by Hirono Tusbasa (not Hirono Tsubasa?) and Nene Kotobuki and Shoujo Manga Techniques: Writing Stories by Mako Itsuki. Most books on how to draw manga, especially those from non-Japanese people, are near total crap, essentially teaching kids just how to copy the drawings in the book, but these two books, presented in manga format themselves, are a fairly complete crash course, covering an incredible amount of ground, giving a lot of useful information, especially on the writing side of things (because, you know, nearly any idiot can draw a simple cartoon character with big eyes and a mini-skirt; putting her in a story that other people besides your LiveJournal friends would actually want to read is another matter entirely). Definitely, if anyone I know is reading this and wants an early hint as to what I might want for my birthday, click on those two Amazon links. I'd consider buying at least one of them myself, but my GST Rebate cheque still hasn't arrived. Anyway, I submitted my CV to Chapters, but this Chapters didn't make me fill out a form, they just wanted me to write which hours I'm available on the CV itself.

Kanata Centrum

Our final stop was the Kanata Centrum, a collection of big box stores slightly different than the previous collections of big box stores we had visited. (Well, it is a bit different. It has the strip of big box stores, but it also has this smaller "village" of mainly eateries.) Before we went to apply at the places at which we wanted to apply, I had to have something to drink, since it was a very hot day and I was famished and my throat was dry. So, we went to the McDonald's in Wal-Mart. I was originally planning on just having a Coke and fries as I generally don't care to have a full fast food meal for lunch. But my mother asked me if that's all I wanted, and, since she was paying for it anyway, I thought that I'd make an exception this one time and I had a full Big Mac meal. Ah, eating a Big Mac and drinking Coca-Cola in a Wal-Mart; if only some of the America-haters from Concordia University could have seen me then. (Well, for them, at least there's this picture of me eating a French fry at McDonald's on Canada Day. Unfortunately, it's not in a Wal-Mart.)

While I was in the Wal-Mart, I decided to check and see if they had some of the mythical low-priced anime I had previously searched for in the Kirkland Wal-Mart. Wonder of wonders, the legends were true! One whole side of their bargain DVD display was devoted to anime, and most of the anime DVDs were purist-grade bilingual DVDs, not just kiddy TV dubs, all for an incredible price of either $6.88 Canadian or $8.66 Canadian. They had several titles a certain magical girl-loving friend of mine likes, including Saint Tail and A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, though only volume 5. (At that price, I might have taken a chance on Sugar, which looks cute in a way similar to Adventures of the Mini-Goddess, but only if they had the first volume.) In terms of Tenchi Muyo, they had Tenchi in Tokyo, but I already bought all of that six years ago, as those of you who read my old Tenchi in Tokyo reviews at Anime On DVD might remember. (Hmm... they seem to have lost my review of Volume 7 somehow.) I was hoping that they'd also have Tenchi Universe, my favourite Tenchi Muyo series (mainly for the definitive version of Kiyone, but also because I find the story generally a lot more cohesive with none of that backstory crap about certain characters perhaps being goddesses), since I only have up to volume 3 on DVD (though I have the entire series on VHS or LaserDisc depending on the volume), but that was nowhere to be found.

Anyway, on the way out from Wal-Mart, I noticed that they were hiring, so I asked at the front desk about submitting my CV, so they sent me to the Layaway Payment desk, where they made me fill out a whole application form. The guy at the Layaway desk pointed out that, if I indicate that I want to work nights, I'd get at least a dollar extra an hour should they hire me for the night shift, which is great for me since I'm an insomniac anyway. I don't mind sleeping in the daytime. I did it often when I was working on projects at the animation college and still had the apartment. And, although I don't drive and I never want to fuck around with the very spotty night bus service to get from eastern Nepean to Kanata, I wouldn't actually have to worry about the night buses since I'd get to Wal-Mart before normal service ends for the evening and I'd leave after normal service starts in the morning. I also put that I'd work in the daytime (preferably afternoons and evenings), to keep my options open. I'd be a pretty good employee for Wal-Mart. They can be sure that I'd be someone who would always vote against joining a union, something I don't believe in. (I think people ought to be able to join unions if they want to, don't get me wrong, but "freedom of association" only works when you also have the choice not to associate to get the job you want.)

I then walked over to the AMC Kanata 24 theatre and applied there, and they also made me fill out an application form, though I didn't mind because I'd love to work in a cinema. (They asked for my birthdate... I'm not sure if they're allowed to do that.) I thought I recognized someone from the University of Ottawa anime club talking to one of the uniformed employees as though he was also an employee, but, if it was the guy I'm thinking of, either he didn't recognize me or didn't notice me. I'm not sure if it was him, so I didn't say anything.

I spent so long applying at Wal-Mart and the AMC that I decided that it wouldn't be fair on my mother if I had applied to Chapters as well, which I was planning on doing. When I got back to the car, my mother was having a little snooze, so I apologized for taking so long, but I think she was happy that I managed to fill out a couple of application forms while I was there. She said that the Kanata Chapters told her that they weren't hiring until the end of August anyway, so it's not like I was wasting my time applying elsewhere.



On the way back, we stopped off at the Loeb near the Best Buy on Merivale. I asked her to shop there so I could go over to Best Buy to drop off a CV, but mainly so I could see if Best Buy had the first DVD of the 3^rd Tenchi Muyo OVA series I had checked for earlier at the South Keys Future Shop, but... not there, either. Damn, Funimation's distribution in Canada still leaves a lot to be desired. I also went to EB Games because I've been vaguely in the frame of mind lately that I might look into the possibility of perhaps purchasing a used RPG for the Game Boy Advance. But most of the used RPGs at EB Games were at least $20, which seemed a little steep for previously-played GBA games, if you ask me. I also checked, in vain, for a previously-played copy of Crazy Taxi or Crazy Taxi 2 (the New York one released shortly before September 11^th and also not too long before Sega stopped supporting the Dreamcast), but... nope. 90% of the used Dreamcast games they have are old NFL games, and there were a couple of Olympic track-and-field sort of games too. Now that I think about it, maybe I should have also checked the used PlayStation (PS1) games, since my PlayStation still works just fine. I dunno, I find PS1 games too new to be appealing as "old school", and they generally don't compare to Dreamcast games. And I have most of the RPGs I want for the PS1 (especially Star Ocean).

Eh... that's about it. As a reward for those of you who stuck it out through the whole utterly boring and pointless travelogue... umm... a page that has the entire You Could Be Mine video from Guns N'Roses (missing from the Guns N'Roses DVD with their music videos because Geffen was too cheap to pay for the Terminator 2: Judgment Day clips). Also, if that's not your cup of tea, try the Flash game Chaos Theory and see if you can get a chain reaction score of over 120.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:07 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

DRAWING #2 UPDATE #2.

Meh... I don't know what happened, possibly something to do with my loading the applet that lets you watch Google videos yesterday, but something really screwy happened to my computer, to the point that, when I tried opening Windows, I just got an error message about Kerio and, while I could see my background, nothing was happening. Windows wasn't even working in "safe" mode. And, weirder still, while I could get to the DOS shell using a boot disk, it wasn't reading the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives at all. Fortunately, my father was able to find a way to use Windows system restore from MS/DOS, and then managed to get Windows back to normal.

I almost had to reformat the hard drive without backing up anything I've done over the past month or so, but, eh, I managed to put it off a little while longer. I may still do it soon, since there are some mysterious system malfunctions on this computer, like how the microphone doesn't work at all, even though the exact same microphone works on my other computer. I will probably reformat the hard drive anyway sooner or later, but, due to my procrastinator tendencies, more likely later.

Anyway, I also worked on my drawing of Trafalgar Square in London a bit.



It's coming along okay. I am pleased with the way the National Gallery building looks, even if the sections I've drawn are far from finished, and the tree at the right looks great. The statue of King George IV on horseback looks pretty decent, even if it's somewhat minimalist (and I had to draw it over because, the first time I drew it, it was a little too far to the right; thank heavens I bought a proper eraser). I wish I could put more detail on the people, but they're just too small to add that much detail to. Keep in mind that, on most monitors, the scan is a bit larger than the actual drawing, so all the flaws are more readily visible.

That's supposed to be the Reebok logo on the backpack, by the way.

Also, I thought this drawing would be finished faster than my Piccadilly Circus drawing, but it's already July 19^th, and I'm only 50% complete.

Speaking of the Piccadilly Circus drawing, one thing that this drawing has in common with the Piccadilly Circus drawing is that I'm finding I'm drawing two drawings at once: the buildings above, and the people below, and the "horizon" where the two main parts of the drawing meet never quite fricking match up properly, despite my measurements. I do like that this drawing has a couple more verticle elements to tie both halves of the drawing together, namely the statue on the pedestal and the fountain.

Thanks for reading this far, and, as a bonus for all readers who haven't bailed out on this article, please enjoy this page I found with clips from the Frantics' 1980s CBC-TV sketch comedy series, Four on the Floor. Yes, this is what Canadian sketch comedy was like before Kids in the Hall... oh wait, besides SCTV, I mean. Woo-hoo, I finally got to see "Brown Car" again after at least 15 years, and the video's just as trippy as I remember!

posted by Steve Brandon @ 2:11 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

POTTER-ING 'ROUND THE SHOPS!

(Word etymology time: I thought of the headline as a pun on "puttering", meaning "wandering around aimlessly", but, apparently, "pottering" also works quite well, seeing as how I was "poking around" a bit.)

My mother had pre-ordered Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from an area bookstore that is not Chapters, and, on Saturday, she went to pick it up. For reasons I shall disclose in a minute, I will not reveal the name of the bookstore or the shopping centre, but it's one somewhere to the west of Merivale Mall, to the south of Bayshote Shopping Centre, and to the east of the Kanata Centrum. My mother likes this particular independent bookstore, so, to support it, she pre-bought the latest Harry Potter book a month or so ago. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the bookstore called us to inform us about their special Harry Potter offer: buy $100 Canadian worth of books or more, and get the Harry Potter book free, so, since half the family has a birthday within the next month, she thought the offer was easily worth taking advantage of.

We got to the mall with the bookstore in it. It's a small bookstore, larger than the Coles in Merivale Mall in terms of floor area, but it's not nearly as densely-packed with shelves, and the entire store is wood-paneled, making it appear more upscale. I was hoping to take advantage of the offer myself as an opportunity to mooch, asking my mother if I could pretty pretty please have a volume of a manga. Unfortunately for me, this particular bookstore doesn't seem to follow current fads in the book market that aren't related to British books about young boy wizards, so it had nary a manga volume anywhere to be found, not even the teeny bopper stuff like Negima. My mother took some twenty minutes or so to get the books, which, for the obvious reason that my siblings sometimes read this blog, I won't mention, and for the less obvious reason that I didn't particularly take note as to what they were. At the cash, my mother was having a conversation with the bookstore saleswoman, who said that, even though this was a relatively small bookstore compared to the not-too-distant Chapters stores at Pinecrest and at the Kanata Centrum, they still managed to get at least 300 kids for their midnight Harry Potter event. She said at least 300 because 300 was the point at which the mall security stopped counting. My mother said that she wouldn't even watch the news until she'd finished reading the book because, last time, she had been spoiled for which character was killed, so then the bookseller told us a little secret, a secret which is the reason why I'm not mentioning the bookstore or the mall. She did what she wasn't officially supposed to do, and she took a copy when she received the shipment, even though, under the Bloomsbury/Raincoast embargo, she wasn't even supposed to have opened the crates until Friday evening, and read it, so that what happened to her last time wouldn't happen again. Apparently, a kid at the midnight event for the previous book had leafed through the end or something and told her exactly who would be killed, not knowing, or caring, that the bookseller wanted to read the book for herself. My mother mentioned that I had come across spoilers for this one on the Internet, but I was being nice and didn't ruin it for anyone who didn't want to know.

My mother had to get some items at Zellers, so I took the books back to the car, and, when I got there, I scanned through the end of the book, and, sure enough, the scans of pages 596, 597, and 606 I had seen in the days before were very much legitimate, however, they were from the American Scholastic edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the British edition from Bloomsbury, published in Canada by Raincoast where, in terms of format, the Canadian edition is an exact replica of the British edition, has pages which are a little bit denser in terms of text, so the page numbers were a little earlier.

I also skimmed the beginning, to see if my suspicions about Harry's aunt Petunia Dursley being a bit more than just the ordinary "Muggle" she wants everyone to believe she is are confirmed this time (still undetermined), and I do like that J.K. Rowling does flesh out a little bit how the "Muggle" government secretly deals with the magical world (and my mother was amused that Rowling mentions gerbils in tandem with the unnamed British prime minister, because Tony Blair has always reminded her of a gerbil somehow). Maybe I will give this book a chance, though I already have read the complete summary and list of major spoilers at Wikipedia.

After my brief skimming, I put the book in the trunk of the car and walked back to the mall to go to Zellers, where my mother was shopping. I wanted to see if this particular Zellers was one the Zellers where Tom Green got on the PA system by picking up the intercom receiver, pressing page, and saying things like "Tasty corn. Tasty, tasty, tasty corn.", but Tom Green's from Gloucester originally, so I think all those Zellers stores were in Ottawa's eastern suburbs, not the western suburbs I'm familiar with. I browsed the Hot Wheels and the cheap DVDs but didn't feel like buying anything. The funny event worth mentioning happened on my way out of the store; this one lady approached me and asked if I could help her check if all the parts for a highchair were in a crate. Puzzled and not really knowing what to say, I briefly said yes, until I realized that she thought I was a Zellers salesperson. Why did she think that? Because I was wearing a 1999-2000 era Arsenal Football Club jersey ("football", in this case, meaning soccer, for those of you in Rio Linda) which I had purchased the last time I was in England, and I guess it's bright red, like a Zellers uniform, so she got confused. Even though the jersey I'm wearing had the Arsenal FC crest, and, more importantly (and the reason why I bought it), the Sega Dreamcast logo and not the Zellers logo. Maybe she thought I was a Zellers employee advertising the Dreamcast, even though Sega pulled the plug on promoting the system about 4 years ago. Guess she just doesn't follow videogame systems.

After Zellers, my mother and I drove to an M&M's Meat shop, to get some frozen foods, including shrimp skewers, and then, on the way back home, I convinced my mother to make a pit stop at the Merivale HMV just so I could go in and check if the DVD with the first three episodes of the long-awaited 3^rd Tenchi Muyo: Ryo-Oh-Ki OVA (Japanese direct-to-video animation) series, continuing right where the 2^nd Tenchi Muyo OVA series left off in 1995, was in. I'm not nearly as pumped for this as I would have been some 5 or 6 years ago, back when I was writing Tenchi in Tokyo reviews for Anime On DVD, but I still want to buy it, even if it's largely out of nostalgia for my early days of being an anime fan. I know I haven't been collecting Tenchi Muyo GXP, but that's because it's 8 DVDs, while this series is only 2 DVDs, and also because it's a side-story. While I enjoyed the first DVD, it just wasn't as much of a priority for me as completing Super Gals!, and now, besides the new Tenchi Muyo OVA series, there are at least two other series I'd rather buy: Planetes and the upcoming Oh My Goddess TV series. Like Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, Tenchi Muyo GXP is one of those shows I'd buy if I had a job, but I don't, so I just have an "orphan" first volume. Anyway, because of Funimation's spotty distribution in Canada, the new Tenchi Muyo OVA series doesn't seem to be at HMV stores yet, or at least the one on Merivale. I'll try the Best Buy this week, and, if it's not there, I may as well go to the Comic Book Shoppe.

I did absolutely nothing else noteworthy this weekend, though tonight's Family Guy was hilarious, like how Chris Griffin somehow ends up in A-Ha's "Take on Me" music video and the very politically incorrect "Asiantown" sequence. ("You're watching CBS... Asiantown" and the normal CBS logo tilts and becomes a squinty, slanted eye.) Whoa-boy, is FOX going to get a lot of humourless self-appointed Asian community advocates on their case this week. I'm skeptical as to whether this episode will air intact again.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 9:50 PM 0 Comments Links to this post