I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

YOUTUBE PURGED?

I don't know if it's just that one or more of their servers is offline, but a freaking lot has been purged from YouTube.com, including all of the purloined Lost episodes that I mentioned the other day.

But it's not just Lost. The infamous missing episode 67 of Sailor Moon R, the episode, wherein Chibi-Usa befriends a plesiousaur, is gone too. As are most episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force (every episode that wasn't there in December, when I first noticed that a few episodes of ATHF were being hosted at YouTube, has disappeared). But what really caused me to notice the massive reduction in files hosted at YouTube.com was that there used to be way more than 5 videos in a search for "hypnotist", and I doubt that every single stage hypnotist who has had clips from audience members' videocameras show up at YouTube simultaneously decided to all send Cease & Desist notices to YouTube.com within a couple of days of each other, and I also doubt that stage hypnosis clips (as well as clips from those lewd-but-not-quite-porno Japanese variety shows with models hypnotized to have "orgasms" whenever they hear loud noises) are towards the top of the list of intellectual property/copyright infringement that YouTube is worried about. As such, I'm leaning more towards thinking that some of YouTube's servers are currently offline.

Or maybe it's just a problem with their internal search engine, as Sailor Moon episode 67 is still there if I click on the direct link from the article I wrote last month, it's just not showing up in the search results.



Minor items:

I still haven't heard back from Merivale McDonald's, though it could be that they're still in the process of interviewing people for the spring and summer positions and I won't hear anything for another week or two even if I got the job.

On Friday evening, I went over to the Glen Scottish restaurant on Hazeldean Road in Kanata with my parents, as my now-somewhat-visibly-pregnant (5½ months) sister and her boyfriend were buying us dinner. It's not a big restaurant, and it was Friday, so it was pretty crowded. We had to wait a good 15 minutes just for a five person table to be vacated. We skipped the appetizers and went directly for the main course. The menu was somewhat limited, though my sister told us that it used to be bigger, they just slimmed it down to their most popular items. The advantage of a streamlined menu is that they can serve everything freshly-cooked relatively quickly. I wasn't really feeling in an adventurous mood (re: I didn't feel like eating Haggis, and don't think I will ever, though, unlike Ottawa XPress writer Aaron Shaw, I've had scotch eggs many times, and I don't find it the least bit disgusting, though my mother makes it with ground hamburger beef instead of sausage meat), so I just went with the "breaded chicken filets", which the good-humoured server woman, who I'm 99% sure is the same woman as seen in the photo in the Ottawa XPress article to which I linked, called "chicken fingers", served with fries AND (fricking hot) onion rings. The chicken filets were excellent, seasoned with something green and powdery (basil?) and just slightly spicy, just the way I like it. The fries and onion rings were fine too. I washed it down with... uhh... plain Coke. (I wasn't in a beer mood, though my father, who wasn't driving was, and suprisingly, for a Scottish restaurant in Canada, they didn't have any Alexander Keith's. I almost felt like saying, "Out of Keith's? OUT OF KEITH'S!" in the voice of the Alexander Keith's Angry Scotsman, but, considering the character is about as popular as ebola-laced-AIDS now due to actor Robert Norman Smith's legal woes, decided against it.) Some people had dessert, but I opted just for a cup of tea. My mother had key lime cheesecake, and I got a tiny forkful of it and it was tasty, I just happen to be too fat already and wasn't going to have a slice of cheesecake after already having eaten a plate full of battered and fried food.

EDIT: Oh, The Glen actually has a website that wasn't showing up on Google yesterday for some reason. Glad I checked Yahoo search.



Also last night, since Late Night with Conan O'Brien was going to be a rerun anyway, I watched Noel Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which I rented from Merivale Blockbuster on Wednesday. I'm a big Wes Anderson fan, with Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums being two of my favourite films (Baumbach was also the co-writer of Wes Anderson's lesser-but-still-interesting The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), and Wes Anderson was the producer of this film, which I've seen described as being thematically similar to The Royal Tenenbaums, but set in a realistic New York as opposed to the hyper-stylized "New York" that the Tenenbaums lived in with characters that are much less cartoonish. Basically, it's just a film about the effects that a not-too-turbulent-but-still-traumatic separation and divorce between two parents (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) has on their teenage sons, with the parents getting somewhat territorial over which days the parents get the kids (not caring much, at least at first, for when the kids decide to see the other parent when it's not their "day"). Also, since the parents are sophisticated New York urbanites and writers, there are disputes over the ownership of books. The performances of all the actors, including Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kleine as the sons, were exceptional, with one not-too-graphic-but-very-disturbing school library masturbation scene showing one of the son's divorce-rooted psychoses manifesting itself in a very unusual way, but the film itself was actually very short for a drama, with the final credits starting only about a hour-and-a-quarter in, and I left feeling somewhat unsatisfied, like I had only seen two-thirds of the movie and was still wanting to see how the threads played out beyond the ending. Good ensemble cast chemistry, though.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 8:30 PM