I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

2005 "FIRST PERSON PERSPECTIVE" NARRATIVE INDEX...

I don't usually care to do any sort of year-end retrospective, but it's been an odd year for me, 2005 having been my first full year in a new city. And I do mean a full year, since I haven't technically left the city limits of the amalgamated city of Ottawa, drawn in 2001, since I went with my mother to pick up the dogs from the kennels after our move in December 2004. I haven't even crossed the bridge to go to Hull/Gatineau in Quebec. I still don't fully feel like an Ottawa citizen yet, and I still think of myself as an anglo Montrealer at heart, but I suppose I have to get myself out of the "just moved here" mindset that I've been stalled at for over 12 months now.

I could tell the story of my year, but I don't really need to. I already did as it happened. At least 90% of the things worth writing about (not that absolutely every entry which I'm about to link to necessarily falls under the "worth writing about" category). This will be every major narrative entry, not entries that were about other things besides telling a story about myself. I'll tack on the tail end of December 2004 as well, since this "year" effectively started for me when I moved.

All dates are representative of the days the events within the posts happen, not necessarily the date I wrote the entry (which I often do after midnight, and I have the posting time set five hours ahead, to Greenwich Mean Time).

DECEMBER 2004

*HIGHLIGHT!* December 17^th, 2004: Wherein I talk about my move to Ottawa (a flashback post, written in December 2005).

December 19^th, 2004: Wherein I make my first post from Ottawa (nothing much to read).

December 22^nd, 2004: Wherein I visit a Loeb supermarket and make my very first trip to an Ontario Beer Store.

December 26^th, 2004: Wherein I talk about my Christmas presents and a Boxing Day "Christmas Dinner" at my sister's house.

JANUARY

January 9^th, 2005: Wherein I make a trip to downtown Ottawa to see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, browse the Rideau Centre and Chapters bookstore, and walk around near the Ottawa River.

January 12^th, 2005: Wherein I apply for an Ontario Health Insurance Plan card.

January 16^th, 2005: Wherein I make my first visit to Merivale Blockbuster Video.

January 27^th, 2005: Wherein I investigate a rather curious noise I hear at night (only to find out it was just the radio).

FEBRUARY

February 3^rd, 2005: Wherein I ponder attending the anime club at University of Ottawa.

*HIGHLIGHT!* February 4^th, 2005: Wherein I drink a can of malt liquor and attend an anime club (on different days).

February 12^th, 2005: Wherein I help my brother shop for a DVD of the Boris Karloff Frankenstein film, and I buy the final volume of Super Gals! (of those volumes currently released in North America).

February 14^th, 2005: Wherein I get a most interesting Valentine's Day card from my parents.

February 23^rd, 2005: Wherein I receive my OHIP card rather quickly.

February 27^th, 2005: Wherein I watch the Oscars and also discuss a trip to Red Lobster.

MARCH

March 8^th, 2005: Wherein I have computer problems, and also am tempted to buy the Incredibles DVD early from my local Zellers.

March 16^th, 2005: Wherein my cat, Ember, goes missing.

March 17^th, 2005: Wherein I walk around the neighbourhood, handing out posters of my missing cat.

March 18^th, 2005: Wherein I go to Blockbuster and then walk all over my neighbourhood at night using my GPS unit to navigate, looking for my cat.

*HIGHLIGHT!* March 24^th, 2005: Wherein my cat returns home late at night, after being missing for more than a week.

March 30^th, 2005: Wherein I go clothes shopping and then have a job interview at a grocery store (which I didn't then identify, but it was Farm Boy, by the way).

APRIL

April 2^nd, 2005: Wherein I list some complaints I had about the McDonald's on Rideau Street.

April 8^th, 2005: Wherein Farm Boy fails to call me back, and I submit a CV to IKEA (who never called me back either).

April 30^th, 2005: Wherein I talk about my lack of success at finding a job and a trip to the doctors I had a week or so earlier.

MAY

*HIGHLIGHT!* May 5^th, 2005: Wherein I take a very long walk home from downtown Ottawa and discover a lot of interesting things.

*HIGHLIGHT!* May 8^th, 2005: Wherein I overcome my gasoline-powered lawnmower fears and mow the lawn, and then go to Mother's Day dinner at Broadway Bar & Grill in Kanata.

May 12^th, 2005: Wherein I am not satisfied with my mock job interview at a job interview workshop, and also go on another shopping trip.

JUNE

*HIGHLIGHT!* June 30^th, 2005: Wherein I present my Piccadilly Circus drawing.

JULY

*HIGHLIGHT!* July 1^st, 2005: Wherein I go to downtown Ottawa on Canada Day to take pictures and watch fireworks on Parliament Hill (and I see a guy puke at McDonald's)>

July 7^th, 2005: Wherein I get a haircut, fail to get an ice cream cone at Dairy Queen, and then go to a job fair at the Corel Centre.

July 8^th, 2005: Wherein I travel on a bus with some unpleasant passengers, explore Bayshore Shopping Centre, search for a McDonald's, and see Fantastic Four.

July 16^th, 2005: Wherein I travel to an unidentified bookstore to purchase Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (I couldn't identify the bookstore because the clerk broke the embargo and read the book so that kids couldn't spoil the twist for her, but it was the now closing branch of Leishman Books at Hazeldean Mall).

July 20^th, 2005: Wherein my mother and I travel around several different shopping areas in suburban Ottawa to hand out CVs, mainly at Chapters stores, and I react to the death of James "Scotty" Doohan from Star Trek.

July 31^st, 2005: Wherein I discuss my drawing technique.

AUGUST

August 3^rd, 2005: Wherein I have a job interview at the South Keys Chapters.

August 13^th, 2005: Wherein I... I mean, "someone else who is not me"... remove the yellow security strip from a Blockbuster DVD because they accidentally left it on.

*HIGHLIGHT!* August 18^th, 2005: Wherein I go to the first day of the Super EX fair and watch a show by Las Vegas stage hypnotist Fernandez (and offer my suggestions on how to spice up the show a little).

*HIGHLIGHT!* August 22^nd, 2005: Wherein I present my Trafalgar Square drawing.

August 30^th, 2005: Wherein my uncle dies from Leukemia, and I discuss Hurricane Katrina and my Covent Garden drawing.

SEPTEMBER

September 1^st, 2005: Wherein I travel to Ottawa International Airport to see off my mother, who was travelling to her brother's funeral in England, and also my brother cancels a trip to New Orleans.

September 4^th, 2005: Wherein my cat curls up on my bed.

September 5^th, 2005: Wherein I have a pleasant dream of exploring a bookstore interrupted by a congested nose, and I go to a barbecue at my sister's.

September 7^th, 2005: Wherein my mother brings me two cans of Carlsberg Special Brew strong beer and a large Cadbury Orange chocolate bar from England (written almost a week later, for reasons I don't remember).

*HIGHLIGHT!* September 10^th, 2005: Wherein I present my Covent Garden drawing.

September 23^rd, 2005: Wherein I travel to a job fair in Orleans, and buy two Canadian-themed chocolate bars from a different Loeb's supermarket.

*HIGHLIGHT!* September 24^th, 2005: Wherein I go into the Rideau Street Chapters, forgetting that I have volume 9 of Mihona Fujii's Gals! manga, which I had purchased several weeks prior, sticking out of my CD carrying case, so I have to "fake shoplift" it to get it out of the store.

*HIGHLIGHT!* September 30^th, 2005: Wherein I link to the only "complete" piece of animation I've ever done.

OCTOBER

October 4^th, 2005: Wherein I post an image of a gigantic mushroom that grew in our backyard.

October 14^th, 2005: Wherein I go to a job fair to Costco and go shopping in Bell's Corners.

*HIGHLIGHT!* October 20^th, 2005: Wherein I attend a group job interview at the Kanata Centrum Chapters (and make a couple of snarky comments about the other candidates).

October 26^th, 2005: Wherein I have a dream about a computer virus.

October 29^th, 2005: Wherein I accidentally miss an anime club meeting and go around browsing bookstores again.

October 31^st, 2005: Wherein I get into a discussion about anime with the Korean-Canadian girl who was cutting my hair, and then spend Hallowe'en evening applying for holiday retail work on Merivale.

NOVEMBER

November 4^th, 2005: Wherein I had a job interview at Zellers.

November 9^th, 2005: Wherein Shoppers Drug Mart takes a long time to develop a roll of film I had dropped off over a week earlier, and I also discuss, briefly, a job interview at Michaels the Arts and Crafts Superstore that I had the previous Saturday.

November 15^th, 2005: Wherein I get bothered by Best Buy's online application process, where I thought filling out the profile was a waste of time because the site told me afterwards that there were no positions available at the store I was applying for, only to change my mind about it when they called me back anyway for a telephone pre-interview (though that led to nothing).

*HIGHLIGHT!* November 19^th, 2005: Wherein I attend an anime convention (and dress up as the Thnikkaman from HomestarRunner.com).

November 25^th, 2005: Wherein I go browsing and shopping at the St. Laurent Centre for "BUY SOMETHING NICE FOR YOURSELF AND PISS OFF A COMMUNIST DAY".

DECEMBER

December 1^st, 2005: Wherein I get a Christmas "Holiday" card from my local Conservative candidate (and wonder who signed me up for the mailing list).

December 24^th, 2005: Wherein I have an exhausting time going shopping on Christmas Eve.

December 25^th, 2005: Wherein I talk about what I got for Christmas, including the Playstation 2 I've been playing most of the past week.

There were a few things I regret never quite getting around to posting about, like a visit to the Diefenbunker (the gigantic bomb shelter built for the government to survive a nuclear attack), which is a fascinating place (especially the super-shielded computer room the purpose of which is still not declassified), and my birthday dinner at the Barley Mow Pub in Kanata. There was also the job interview at Wal-Mart, which wasn't the most pleasant of experiences (though I'll talk about that one a little more in something else I'll post within the next day or two). But that's nearly everything else noteworthy.

All in all, I'd say I had a pretty good year, my favourite things being the drawings I did, joining the anime club, and generally exploring a new city. Not that it's been a perfect year by any stretch of the imagination: I was saddened by my uncle dying, and I am annoyed that I still haven't been able to get work.

Coming in 2006: I'll definitely have to find work. I'll see a neurologist in the spring. Maybe I'll find fame with my artwork or writings? I gotta try doing at least a weekly webcomic. And I really hope to get into Carleton for the fall semester (though whether I can get in is very hazy at this point, since I didn't really leave Concordia in good academic standing due to severe depression, and that's one thing I'll have to clear up with the neurologist). I hope to visit somewhere in the United States sometime too, because it's absolutely ridiculous that I haven't been to that country at all in the past 12 years, and I have never visited any American city larger than Burlington, Vermont.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 10:47 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

THE STRANGEST SWIFFER COMMERCIAL I'VE EVER SEEN...

(No, sorry, that was the one with the ambiguously gay soldiers who sang the Broadway show tune about getting "more dust and dirt right out of E Company". But this one comes close.)

I was watching the double rerun presentation of Lost last night, and, since CTV was showing something else, I was able to watch the actual ABC signal from Detroit for once (since CRTC regulations stipulate that, if an American television programme is simulcast on a Canadian channel, Canadian cable operators have to carry a Canadian signal in the American channel's spot).

Since I was watching the American signal, I actually got to see some commercials that I don't think are being shown on Canadian television. One such commercial was for the Swiffer Duster. It showed a guy cleaning all the hard-to-reach nooks and crannies in a living room with Swiffer's ingenious new device, which would normally be a good thing except the guy is, apparently, some sort of police detective and the living room he's in was the scene of some unspecified crime, probably a homicide, and the other police officers there are none too thrilled that he's wiping away fingerprints and such.

The weird part of this commercial happens right at the end. You can hear a voice over what the audience is presumably supposed to think is a police radio to indicate that this is a crime scene. I'm willing to bet that in the script, this is written out using a phrase like "indistinct chatter", except the voice on the radio isn't indistinct, and it isn't a police transmission. What it is should be easily recognizable to anyone who has ever flown an airplane, listened to aircraft frequencies on a radio scanner, or, in my case, played a modern version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. The voice fairly clearly identifies the signal as being either the AWOS/ASOS (Automated Weather Observation Service/Automated Surface Observation Service) or, possibly, the ATIS (automated terminal information service, which gives current weather and active runway information for the airport it's broadcasting from) for Denver International Airport (KDEN, tag code DIA).

What's the deal with that? Did Procter & Gamble not pay close attention to this commercial when they were proof-screening it? Is it really that expensive to produce mock "indistinct radio chatter" for a commercial, or, if they were just really cheap and were just recording random chatter off a scanner, couldn't they at least have limited the bands being scanned to police frequencies? Hearing a snippet of a random AWOS recording out of the blue at a "crime scene" is completely distracting, and, since "Denver International Airport" is quite clearly heard, even most people unfamiliar with AWOS would at least clue in that the radio transmission heard is something aviation-related. And they successfully established in just a few seconds that the living room was a crime scene; the radio noise, which came after the big "reveal", wasn't even necessary and would have been extraneous even if it had been real police chatter.

Incidentally, for you conspiracy theory wackos buffs, yes, it's that Denver International Airport, where the New World Order built the giant underground concentration camp in which the TACMARS-guided United Nations troops will imprison all patriotic Americans who refuse to submit to Illuminati or Reptoid control. I guess this means that Swiffer's an important component of the New World Order, and, if your local supermarket or Wal-Mart has Swiffers in stock, they're in on the conspiracy and should be avoided at all costs. But is it really any surprise that Swiffer and the New World Order go hand-in-hand? This product is distributed in North America by Procter & Gamble, after all, and Procter & Gamble is no stranger to conspiracy theories, what with the logo with the beard with the backwards 666 in it. (God, I love the New World Order über-conspiracy, because it's like finding links to Hanso Industries, the Dharma Initiative, and the cursed numbers 4-8-15-16-23-42 in the flashbacks in Lost except "real". Well, allegedly real, if you believe the tinfoil hat types.)

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:30 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

SELF INDULGENT CHRISTMAS SWAG POST.

Eh, it's "Boxing Week" and blogging is pretty light 'cause I got stuff for Christmas and I'm watching/playing it.

If the previous post seemed like it ended rather abruptly, it's because I had to go upstairs to hand out the presents I got everyone and then unwrap my own presents. And I got a pretty good haul of gifts this year; possibly the best since about 2000.

PRESENTS I EXPECTED:
(Mainly because I was there when my mother bought them after I pointed them out to her)

Patlabor: The New Files DVD collection (as described in this entry)
Ah My Goddess TV series volume 2 (things pick up a bit from the often excruciatingly slow-paced, even compared to the manga, first volume as Belldandy's sister, Urd, and Keiichi's sister, Megumi, show up, but the comically mischevous demon girl, Mara, only appears in the preview for episode 11, on the third volume).
Slayers TRY complete DVD collection (not something I had originally planned on getting or even asking for for Christmas, but, when I chose my "surprise presents" at the Comic Book Shoppe the other week, my mother said I could have something else, and I noticed that all of Slayers TRY was only $50, so I went for it. Unfortunately, when I went back to the Comic Book Shoppe on Christmas Eve, I noticed that they now had the original Slayers series for the same price too, and I would have probably chosen that one, since I'm getting Slayers Try, the third series, pretty much "blind", while I had seen most of the original series at the anime club, and even have a couple of the ancient subtitled VHS tapes of it.)
King of the Hill: The Complete Fifth Season (well, duh, you knew I'd be getting this. Possibly the best single grouping of episodes from this show. Highlights include "The Perils of Polling", wherein Luanne embraces Communism and Hank ponders skipping election day (2000) because he thought George W. Bush had a weak handshake, "When Cotton Comes Marching Home", one of the few sympathetic Cotton episodes wherein Cotton has trouble getting time off from his employer to attend a Veteran's Day parade, "Chasing Bobby", wherein Hank's old Ford pick-up truck finally goes to "pick-up Heaven" (the real one), "Ho Yeah!", the one wherein Hank unintentionally becomes a pimp and faces off against the Snoop-voiced Oklahoma City pimpmaster Alabaster Jones, "Luanne, Version 2.0" (though the official website calls this episode "Luanne, Virgin 2.0), wherein Luanne becomes a born-again virgin, taking a vow of chastity until marriage, and almost marries the first young guy (voiced by Owen Wilson) that she encounters just because they're so eager to have sex, and "It's Not Easy Being Green", wherein Hank has to pretend to be interested in the environment to prevent the drainage of a quarry where Hank, Dale, and Bill accidentally sunk Boomhauer's Ford Mustang many years before.)
Beavis and Butt-Head: The Mike Judge Collection (40 select Beavis and Butt-Head shorts plus a handful of videos and a few other items. It's far from being a completeist set, but music rights costs would make a truly "complete" set astronomically expensive. My copy also came with a bonus disk in a plain envelope: the Holiday Bonus Disk with the two main animated segments from Beavis and Butt-Head Do Christmas, as described in this entry, but without the Christmas music videos, the viewer mail segments, and the burning log instrumental music bits.)

PRESENTS I DIDN'T EXPECT

Hickory Farms Truffles (they're okay, but too rich to eat more than one or two at a time)
HMV Gift Card with $50 CDN on it (semi-expected; I kinda still want either South Park season 6 or Lost season 1, but I haven't yet made any specific plans for how I'm going to use this and would actually rather just hold on to it for a while for DVD purchases I may not yet have really foreseen. Or maybe even CDs, if I find one of those anime soundtrack albums I want.)
My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror by Louis J. Freeh (I can't exactly say much of anything here about a book I haven't read yet, though I assume the title is self-explanitory. My mother also got me a deluxe wooden bookmark with a metal plate with two semi-cartoonish fish on it.)
Shaman King: Master of Spirits (Gameboy Advance game based on the manga/anime series shown on 4Kids TV. Not quite what I asked for, since I wanted an old-school Japanese RPG to play on the bus and this is more of an action game, but I'll still play it anyway. Straight action games can be fun too, just RPGs have a longer shelf-life due to their repetitive nature.)
Pee-Wee's Playhouse 2^nd box set (Seasons 3, 4, and 5 of the classic CBS children's series from my late preteen and early teen years. While I've seen clips of it fairly recently, I'm not sure that I've seen a full episode since about 1991, when Paul Reubens got arrested for "doing the Han Solo" at a Florida porno theatre. I'll try and ignore the fact that Cowboy Curtis is Morpheus from The Matrix (Lawrence Fishburne).)

And, the most unexpected gift of all:

Sony Playstation 2 (This was an incredible surprise: all three of my siblings took pity on me for playing a stone-aged Sega Dreamcast from ancient 1999 and banded together and bought me a brand new PS2, and it's one of those slim and top-loading "Playstation Two" units that's incredibly shrunken compared to the old PS2 units. It's actually significantly smaller than even my ancient Playstation 1 from 1997, which I didn't need to have on my TV unit shelf anymore since the PS2 is backwards compatible. It's exactly the size of this medium-sized paperback book I have of the Kosovo war. I'm hoping I can find a way to do a "region switch" on this unit so I can finally watch my Region 2 Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou ("Yokohama Shopping Log") DVDs on my television. I also got a used copy of Gran Turismo 4 and two 8 Mb memory cards, and my brother, John, is leaving several RPGs and The Getaway: Black Monday here for the time being. I may also go over to Microplay and see if I can get either Star Ocean 3 or Kingdom Hearts cheap. I guess I really do have great siblings sometimes.)





Also this Christmas: I tried dragging out the old Noma Christmas tree from the shed in our backyard, but it was looking fairly trashy and we had somehow lost the base in the move, so my brother went to a store, probably Canadian Tire, and got a brand new artificial tree complete with built-in lights for only $50, since all the Christmas decorations were already being severely marked-down by last weekend.

My sister's fiancé was too busy with something important to come over to our house for Christmas dinner on Christmas Day itself, so my "Christmas dinner" ended up being a microwave "TV dinner", just like Coach Z was eating in last year's Homestar Runner "Decemberween" cartoon (though I was eating General Tao chicken, not Salisbury steak, and I like General Tao, so it's not like I was complaining). Incidentally, I was suprised that the Brothers Chaps didn't do a "Decemberween" cartoon this year, especially since they already took a two week break from Homestar Runner before Christmas.

My brother John also brought some DVDs from Vancouver, so I watched the first two seasons of Sealab 2021, the Flash-ish cartoon from Cartoon Network's Adult Swim that has never been shown on Canadian television. Pretty amusing stuff, especially the communication guy's James Bond villain-ish henchmen.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:56 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

(God, I love the Sailor Moon Merry Christmas album for its kitsch-ness. I already reviewed it here, though.)

Happy Christmas (or "Happy day before Hanukkah", depending on which way you swing) to everyone!

Yesterday was... tiring. Exhausting. I still had to finish my Christmas shopping, and it was the last day left to do so (actually, not quite: the Jumbo Video/Microplay store on Merivale is starting their Boxing Day sale a day early (re: Christmas Day), so I could, theoretically do some really, really last minute shopping there if I so choose). I was planning on hitting just Best Buy, since Best Buy is a pretty good one stop store for the sort of things I buy (DVD and games). Around 3 p.m., I left home for the walk over to Merivale.

The stores were quite busy, but not unbearably so. There weren't huge lineups for anything, even if it was Christmas Eve AND a Saturday to boot, because the stores had pretty much every single checkout open. Christmas Eve "last minute" shopping "madness" is overstated.

Anyway, like I said, I was going to Best Buy first, hoping that they'd have everything I was looking for. But, weirdly, they didn't have a single fricking copy of Miracle on 34^th Street (the original, not the 1994 remake), which my mother wanted me to get, in stock. So I headed right next door to Future Shop. (That's one really odd thing about Merivale Road, that Future Shop and Best Buy are literally right next door to one another, even though Future Shop is owned by Best Buy and both stores have a very similar selection of electronics, computers, movies, music, and games.) At Future Shop, I managed to buy the deluxe version of Master and Commander, complete with a fold out map and a little book on the making of the film, for my father, and the Friends 10^th season set for my sister. But still no Miracle on 34^th Street.

There was absolutely no line-up for the cash at Future Shop, and the Merivale Future Shop is one of those stores with a single line-up for multiple cashes (which were in these weird little cubicles that didn't look like normal checkouts, something I had quite seen before). I was quite astonished, because it's not like the store was devoid of customers.

I crossed the street to Merivale Mall, where I wanted to buy some Aspirin at Shoppers Drug Mart. Since I was there anyway, I decided to check out the large-sized (for a neighbourhood mall, at least) Music World and see if they had Miracle on 34^th Street. Nope, just the remake. I also asked if they had two art house films my brother John wanted, Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers and some Canadian film called The Saddest Music in the World, but... nope. (And my brother should have checked release dates at Amazon.com, because Broken Flowers doesn't even "street" until January 3^rd, 2006.)

I then went to Coles bookstore, thinking I might get John a Boondocks collection instead, since he says that he doesn't have any past Fresh for '01... You Suckas. But, I looked at the B's in the Humour section and... no Boondocks. Then I noticed that the authors and cartoonists were listed alphabetically, but... no MacGruder, Aaron either. I did buy my mother the latest For Better or For Worse collection while I was there, though.

Then I stopped off at Shoppers Drug Mart and bought my Aspirin. I was also hoping to get some OC Transpo bus tickets, which my mother wanted me to get while I was there, but I misunderstood her beause she told me to buy them at the lottery desk NEAR Shoppers, while I thought that she meant the checkout that also does lottery tickets IN Shoppers, and this particular Shoppers didn't sell them. Oh well.

It was approaching 5 p.m., so I thought that there was a vague chance that I might be able to get Boondocks collections at the Comic Book Shoppe, which is something like a whole kilometre north of Merivale Mall, in the Bleeker Mall at the weird intersection where Merivale doglegs right and, if you continue going north, you're actually on Clyde. A kilometre's not really all that far, but, considering that, by that point, I had already walked something like a total of two kilometres already, mainly on snowy surfaces, my feet were already beginning to feel the strain. I looked around the Comic Book Shoppe for Boondocks, but, while this store has a great amount of stuff, they don't really do comic strip collections.

My ulterior motive for going to the Comic Book Shoppe was that I wanted to get John, as kind of a gag sub-gift, the first volume of Maki Murakami's yaoi manga Gravitation, which I thought he might... "appreciate". Unfortunately, the Comic Book Shoppe didn't have any volumes of it below volume 5. Instead, I opted to get John the first volume of Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita (the English title for GUNMN), since I thought he might find it an interesting read because James Cameron's live-action Battle Angel movie is finally going into production, and, as a film student, I know he's interested in all aspects of filmmaking, so it'll be interesting for him to get familiar with the original work so, in a year and a half's time (if everything goes according to plan), he can see how well or how poorly the Cameron film works as an adaptation.

Besides the movies, John was also asking for one of the Fatal Frame ("Based on a true story") series of XBox games, something about fighting ghosts by taking pictures of them with a camera, so I headed towards Jumbo Video, which has an in-store Microplay store. Dozens upon dozens of fricking XBox games, but not a single Fatal Frame game. (John, who is playing Stubbs the Zombie behind me on his XBox as I write this, says they're pretty obscure games.) One thing this store did have, though, is Crazy Taxi 2 (the New York one) for the Sega Dreamcast! They didn't have it the last time I looked, in September (when I bought the first one instead). But I wasn't "me" shopping... I'll save that for Boxing Day. (Incidentally, speaking of Crazy Taxi, did you know the game actually has an unbleeped "F-bomb" in it? It can be heard during the second chorus of the Offspring song "Way Down the Line": "And all the things you learn when you're a kid/You'll fuck up just like your parents did/It all just happens again/Way down the line." It's a little hard to decipher, but it's there.)

Jumbo Video didn't have a single copy of Miracle on 34^th Street for sale either. What's going on here?

My feet were incredibly sore, and I was losing my stamina rapidly, to the point where, if this was an Japanese RPG (role-playing videogame), you'd see the white "HP" numbers above my head indicating loss of hit points once every few seconds. So I headed into Wendy's for a really late lunch, and had a Spicy Chicken sandwich combo, which was good, though the fries were a little cold.

I picked up an application form for Wendy's on my way out, because my friend, Melissa, suggests that I should try the fast food places for work, even if it's a notch below even working retail.

My final stop was Merivale Blockbuster, since I had absolutely no energy left to shop anywhere else (not that any place except video rental stores were open by that point in the evening). Miracle on 34^th Street wasn't anywhere to be found on the main racks of DVDs for sale. But then... a miracle! It was on a small rack of Christmas DVDs. I also weeded through a giant bin of XBox games for Fatal Frame, but it wasn't there either. I had to settle to give him an IOU for his "big" gift from me.

On the way back, my legs were so tired that I wanted to take a bus the kilometre along Meadowlands back home, but I didn't have a single ticket, and I dropped some money on a cold parking lot pavement and got my jeans really dirty.

So exhausting!

posted by Steve Brandon @ 4:53 PM 0 Comments Links to this post