I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

BOTTOM LINE AMERICA, I NEED A DVR OR SOMETHING...

2008-09-06T04:56:00.002Z

Tonight was the first "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" segment on Late Night with Conan O'Brien since I got my 26" Toshiba HDTV (26HL37) in late April (it's only 720p, but nothing in that size at the Merivale Road Future Shop was full 1080i/1080p HD). Since I got it, I haven't been able to hook my ancient Panasonic VCR into my television properly, or, technically, I can, but the cable connection refuses to hook up to the VCR anymore, so I have to hook it directly into the TV. As a result, I wasn't able to tape the "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" bit (something about a white, ball-shaped mushroom Pierre found on his lawn), and I'll have to wait until I can find a clip of it online to write a transcript.

If I'm writing a new blog entry anyway, you might as well look at some of my recent drawings (click on them to get to the Flickr page where you can see the full-size version).

A Ferrari Testarossa drawn in oil pastels:

The Camaro Concept car that played Bumblebee in the Michael Bay Transformers movie at the Woodward Dream Cruise drawn in oil pastels.

A Ferrari F430 Berlinetta drawn in oil pastels.

Incidentally, I spotted the exact same F430 the other day, and I love the car, but it was rather badly parked across two parking spots.

And, finally, a Ferrari 360 Modena Spider drawn in Prismacolor coloured pencils.

I'm hoping that I can get some art-related job (maybe even study to be a graphic designer just like Pierre Bernard), or, even better, sell my own artwork for cash. I'm looking into ways that I can do that, but I have to be wary of scam art selling sites. I actually have a DeviantArt page where you could buy prints (not that I've made a cent off that yet), but I don't think it's a serious venue to sell the originals.

DRAWING DAY, 2008.

2008-06-08T19:45:00.002Z

I was going to work on a couple of oil pastel drawings that I've been working on for a while on Saturday, but then I found out that someone had declared the first Saturday in June to be Drawing Day, so I decided to create an original drawing from scratch to mark the occasion.

This is a drawing of the GT Club #13 Ferrari F430 Challenge Stradale race car based on a photo that I took at a Ferrari Challenge race in Mont Tremblant, Quebec, in June of last year.

It's not as detailed as I usually like to draw, though that's partially because I'm drawing on a much smaller sheet of paper (12"x9" sketchbook paper) than the poster board on which I usually draw, and there's one error that I find glaring in that I neglected to draw the shadow for the side mirror, but I am pleased with myself in that I was able to draw a drawing that looks semi-photorealistic when viewed from a distance from scratch in just one afternoon and evening, when most of the pictures I draw take me weeks, if not months. Because I gave myself a mental deadline of midnight, I was just somehow able to focus more on getting the job done, even taking a couple of breaks to attempt to beat that goddamned difficult final mission of Grand Theft Auto IV. (I'm fine with the shootout in the abandoned casino, because I use the rocket-powered grenades on the cars that the goons are hiding behind, and I know to take out most of the shooters hiding inside the casino by shooting through holes in the roof before I enter, it's chasing the boat on the motorcycle where I fail.)

It was also nice working with Prismacolor coloured pencils again, after doing several drawings in crayons and oil pastels. Maybe this will inspire me to finally finish that drawing of a Ferrari 550 Maranello on Preston Street during last year's Ottawa Ferrari Festival that I started working on last July but keep on getting frustrated at tiny background details (though I've done a lot more work on the drawing compared to the way it looked in the following photo from the end of July).

PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE.

2008-04-12T05:25:00.004Z

Finally.

Graphic Designer Pierre Bernard Jr. has actually made several appearances on NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien since the Writer's Guild of America strike ended in February, but it was all for side stuff, like about the phone message to the NBC caterer that he left about something sharp in the meat pasta, or the time he was one of the Late Night staff members featured in the wet short sketches.

Tonight, we finally got the first official "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" segment of 2008, so here's my usual transcript.

From I WANT TO EAT...

La Bamba: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

Conan O'Brien: Hey there, Pierre, are you comfortable and angry?

Pierre Bernard: Comfortable and furious, Conan.

Conan O'Brien: Then go ahead, Pierre, and speak for America.

Pierre Bernard: Okay, here goes.

Every week in the mail, I receive coupon fliers from local stores telling me what's on sale in my hometown of Mercer County, New Jersey. The only problem is the only fliers I receive are supermarkets like Family Dollar and ShopRite. What I would prefer are fliers for stores like Best Buy or Michaels Art Supplies, since I'm alway buying electronic gadgets, sci-fi DVDs, and multicolored pencils.

Recently, Best Buy had a special-priced 2-disk DVD of the film, I Am Legend, but, by the time I found out about it, it was regular-priced and it had no bonus disk. The residents of neighboring towns knew about that sale in advance from their Best Buy fliers, while I was left in the dark like a fool.

I called a 800 number for the distributor in my area, Red Plum Publishing, to complain, but nothing has changed.

Don't get me wrong, I do sometimes use the supermarket fliers, like when ShopRite had a sale on Hot Pockets and Arm and Hammer Sensitive Skin detergent, or when Acme had a sale on Pop Tarts, the variety pack, 10 boxes for 10 dollars, making them a dollar a box, which was such a good deal I bought 30 boxes.

Bottom line, America.

Red Plum should distribute a wider variety of fliers in my weekly neighborhood supplement, so I could save as much on I Am Legend as I do on Pop Tarts.

Conan O'Brien: Alright, well, thank you, uh. Thank you, Pierre. I'm sure there's at least one or two other people in the world who know exactly how you feel.

Pierre Bernard: Stay strong, my brothers.

La Bamba: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

Conan O'Brien: Alright, we'll take a break. When we come back, Oliver Hudson is here. Stick around, everybody.

Kind of a middling effort, at least on the obscurity-meter, but I still appreciate seeing Pierre sit down in his armchair again.

Pierre, I'd still love it if you did complain sometime about Mattel no longer making the 100% Hot Wheels 1/43 scale Ferrari models in the plastic display case anymore, forcing me to buy more expensive Ixo models instead, and how Mattel no longer seems to ship the 1/18 scale Ferrari models to Toys R' Us or Wal-Mart anymore, just speciality model stores where everything is usually at least twice as expensive as what you'd pay at Wal-Mart.

Or about how McDonald's just got rid of the Deli Sandwich selections (at least in Canada), so I can no longer order the Southwest Chicken, the only kind of spicy chicken sandwich they've had since the Cajun Chicken burger around 1999.

I did some more art, went to the 2008 Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow, and visited Montreal last weekend, but I'll wait until I have more pictures uploaded to Flickr before I write anything here, if I get around to writing anything here.

I am pleased to see that Pincourt Blockbuster is still there, despite the dramatic drop in business they must have endured after I moved to Ontario.

I also walked all of the way to Sainte Anne de Bellevue just to get a few shots of the suspension span of the Galipeault Bridge before it gets torn down and replaced with a boring highway bridge later this year.

THE GREAT CRAYON EXPERIMENT (UPDATE)...

2008-02-20T05:43:00.002Z

In December and January, I was working on a couple of drawings for The Great Crayon Experiment art show that was held at the Blankspace Gallery in Seattle on February 7^th.

Here were my two submissions:

"A crayon drawing of an RCMP Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor on Rideau Street in downtown Ottawa."

and

"A crayon drawing of a Ferrari Enzo at the Woodward Dream Cruise." (or "Ferrari Enzo Ferrari F60", if you want to be super-picky about the full name of the car).

The Ferrari one took me ages to finish, so I didn't get to send the two drawings off until February 1^st, and I spent $52 Canadian shipping it via Purolator Courier just to ensure that it would reach Seattle in time for the show.

February 7^th came and went, and I hadn't received any word as to whether they had received my submissions. I knew I wasn't going to get them back, as all drawings were to be sold off to benefit something called 826 Seattle, some kind of non-profit writing centre that helps kids develop their creative writing skills, but, still, I was damn well hoping that they had received my drawings and put them on display, otherwise the hours upon hours I had spent drawing both of them and the $52 I had spent sending them there (not to mention the at least $30 I spent on various Crayola products) would have been all for naught.

I was slightly disappointed that the art show had received no mainstream media coverage that I could find using Google News, and the only blog reaction I could find was this one from a Blogger nicknamed "Poppy" that didn't include any pictures or mention any specific pieces on display.

Finally, on Saturday, "King Leroy" posted some pictures of the Great Crayon Experiment art show in the Blankspace Flickr photostream, and I could finally see my work on display somewhere other than my basement (or... erm... YTV's The Zone, for those of you that remember my "sending 'PJ Fresh Phil' Guerrero and 'Snit' Sailor Moon fanart using my real name despite already being 21-years old at the time" stint back at the end of 1995 and early 1996).

Anyway, I probably shouldn't post Blankspace's pictures of the show here without permission, but I'll link to a few of them.

I don't think they had gotten quite the full coverage of the walls and ceiling that they had hoped for, but they still got a strong outpouring of submissions. More than I had expected, to be honest.

The one piece on the ceiling was a Crayola'd take on Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Here 's an interesting assemblage of a few half-melted Crayola crayons "floating" in the middle of the gallery.

Note the donation box shaped like a giant crayon.

They had these bench things that kids could draw on.

Oh, what's the guy with the backpack looking at? (I presume the guy with the crown is this "King Leroy" fellow.)

Yup, it's my RCMP police car drawing. What I find interesting about its placement is that it's directly over a couple of penguin drawings; one of the Linux mascot penguin, and the other one looks like one of the missile penguins from Tim Burton's Batman Returns (which is still my favourite Batman film, and, yes, I have seen Batman Begins, which is a pretty good film but I prefer the spectacle of the Burton films over the relative realism of Christopher Nolan's take on the character, even if I'm fully aware that the Nolan films are probably closer to the serious comics the hardcore Batfans generally prefer).

This one's not at the gallery, but here's my fat cat, Ember, also showing her appreciation of the drawing.

But what about the Ferrari drawing?

Yup, it was there too. You can also see the payment scale: "Good Art: $1-5, Super Art: $5-12, Awesome Art: $13-[Infinity sign]". I don't want to sound too narcissistic, but, if anyone paid less than $13 for either of mine, I'm reporting them to the FBI Art Theft program.

And, finally, two Hawties posing in front of my Ferrari pic. Would they be so happy to be pictured with it if they knew the horrible truth about the artist?

Want a weird twist? Apparently, "Poppy", the Blogger I mentioned earlier, bought the Ferrari picture to hang in her kids' bedroom. She (yes, "Poppy" is a she, I presume it's "Poppy" as in the flower) left a reply in my previous post telling me as much. It's not quite where I imagined it ending up, but, as long as it's on the wall of someone who appreciates it, it was worth the effort.

THE WORKS GOURMET BURGER BISTRO...

2008-01-20T23:34:00.000Z

Since my youngest brother is in town from Vancouver, my sister and her husband took my parents, my brother, and I to dinner at The Works Gourmet Burger Bistro, a local Ottawa gourmet hamburger chain.

The exact The Works location at which I ate was the one located in the strip mall at the corner of Stonehaven Drive and Steeplechase Drive, in the Bridlewood neighbourhood of Kanata.

The Works has a public utilities theme, with an exposed ceiling, valves and pipes on the walls, a toilet painted construction site yellow for some reason, and salt and pepper shakers shaped like light bulbs... well, real incandescent light bulbs, not those fluorescent spiral things. In a couple of years, kids born in this decade probably wouldn't even recognize the salt shakers as fake light bulbs. With this decor, I would have called the restaurant chain "The Electric Company" were it not for fears that Children's Television Workshop lawyers might come a-knockin' with cease-and-desist letters in their hands. The whole visual motif is so industrial that James Cameron could film the climax for a Terminator sequel in there, perhaps with one of the T-800's getting impaled on the long spindles they use for the towers of onion rings.

The Works has around 50 or so different burgers on the menu, and most of them have colourful names, named after local places and icons, with the contents of the burger not so obvious, so you pretty much have to read them all to determine which burger you want. It's a somewhat amusing read, but not too utilitarian if you want to make a quick choice, but they do give you a good ten minutes to go over the menu.

I wanted a spicy chicken burger so I ordered the Rockcliffe Grinder, which is a chicken burger which is both marinated in Cajun hot pepper sauce, like the sorely-missed KFC Zinger, and which also comes with a little cup of spicy mayo, as used on the pretty-damn-good-but-not-as-great-as-the-Zinger KFC Spicy Big Crunch, and served with a plate of fries in a baking pan. I opted to put the mayo on to the whole chicken breast patty, and, holy Trogdor!

Adding the spicy mayo makes it easily a four-out-of-five on the five-alarm scale, meaning I could eat it all without abandoning it halfway through but I have a fairly high tolerance for spicy food. I'll put it this way: the Rockliffe Grinder with the spicy mayo is easily an alarm-and-a-half above even the improved Wendy's Spicy Chicken Filet Sandwich.

I would have doused my throat in Coke after eating it, but the thing about The Works is that they had the clever idea of serving all of their soft drinks in Fire-King measuring cups rather than in normal glasses, and the disadvantage of using measuring cups is that you can see exactly how much you're drinking, which, if you're somewhat watching your weight like I am but can't stand the nastiness of diet cola, is quite a psychological disincentive against ordering refills, and I had already had drunk a whole litre of Coca-Cola by the time I had finished eating the Rockliffe Grinder, so the only option left was to suck on the ice cubes from the empty Fire-King measuring cup.

It didn't give me heartburn after, so I suppose I can call the Rockliffe Grinder a successful eat.

Speaking of successes, on the way home, I decided to test out a recent buy, a cheap-ass $79 Venturer Portable DVD player from Wal-Mart, with a foldable 8" LCD screen. I mainly got it so I could watch anime in my bedroom (or hotel room) without even having to leave my bed, but this particular model (model #PVS3388) also has a laptop-style two-hour rechargeable internal battery. I watched an entire episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, specifically chronological episode 11, "Live Alive" (a.k.a. the "God Knows" episode), and the audio only skipped once, and only for a split second, the entire car ride home. It actually performs much better in shaky conditions than the Sony portable CD Walkman I bought from Zellers last year, even if the DVD laser is supposed to be much more delicate than the CD laser. I have half a mind to bring this DVD player with me to work, to watch anime during breaks, at least on days where I work at least six hour shifts.

YUP, AN ELECTION IS COMING IN CANADA...

2008-01-13T03:08:00.000Z

The federal environment minister, who is also our local MP (Minister of Parliament) for the Ottawa West-Nepean riding, John Baird and his wife were handing out re-usable cloth shopping bags at the Merivale Road Food Basics supermarket this afternoon.

Since I doubt John Baird likes to waste his Saturday afternoons being a free bag dispensing guy at the local discount supermarket any more than I like to work a rather grueling and very busy six-hour shift pushing shopping carts on Saturdays (and I don't usually work Saturdays, but I think most of the cart pushers that they hired in the autumn quit), and since the bags he was handing out were emblazoned with his name and some vaguely campaign-ish slogan about his green credentials, I take this as a sure sign that the Conservative Party machine is revving its engine for an early spring election, which will presumably be triggered when the Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc Québecois vote against the federal budget.

Even though I did vote for Baird in 2006, and will vote for him again barring the sudden emergence of a viable libertarian alternative to the Conservatives, I was too shy to really talk to him or ask him if I could take a photo of him (and I didn't get a good opportunity to get a candid shot of him "pressing the flesh" with the customers).

This blog isn't dead, but it's been hibernating as I've been busy.

My current project is drawing serious Crayola crayon drawings of automobiles which I shall submit to an art show called The Great Crayon Experiment at the Blank Space Gallery in Seattle.

Here's the first drawing in this batch, of an RCMP Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor on Rideau Street in downtown Ottawa.

It's based on this photo that I took in early December.

I drew that drawing on the floor, like a little kid. Fortunately, for Christmas, I got a tilting drawing table that's large enough to hold the large sheets of poster board I draw on.

So now I draw my crayon drawings the grown-up way. :P

The drawing on the table, which is based on this photo of a Ferrari Enzo that I spotted on Woodward Avenue in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham during the Woodward Dream Cruise last August still isn't finished, but I've added a lot to it since I took the photo of the table a couple of weeks ago.

I'm at the most frustrating part of the drawing process, where most of the "big" parts of the picture have already been drawn, and I'm now drawing in those annoying tiny details that are especially hard to draw in crayon compared to coloured pencils.

I wanted to draw at least five car drawings for the art show, but, since it's at the beginning of February, I doubt I'll get more than three done in time (though I'll draw more to add to my overall portfolio).

A BIRD IN THE HAND

2007-09-07T15:10:00.001Z

A bird in the hand...
Originally uploaded by Steve Brandon

I was pushing carts into the Food Basics store on Merivale in Nepean where I work when one customer informed me that someone outside the doors was trying to speak to me. I went outside, and he pointed out this bird on the ground. He called it a woodpecker, but I was pretty sure it was a chickadee. It was sitting there, unable to fly away for some reason, and he was afraid someone would step on it, or that a car would run over it, and he was concerned for all of "God's Little Creatures". I told him that caring for an injured bird was a little beyond my area of expertise, but he said that it's beyond his area of expertise too. I told him that I'd take it to the little wooded vacant lot behind Colonnade Pizza, but that's all I could do for it. He didn't seem quite satisfied with that answer, but our store doesn't have a birdcage, and if the bird is so weak that it doesn't resist me picking it up, it's not likely to survive much longer, regardless of whether or not I somehow perform emergency avian surgery.

He was wondering if the store had some kind of policy for injured birds, but I said I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Then he saw Arif (a cashier and assistant manager) walking towards the store and asked him if he could do anything, but Arif told him that he doesn't know what to do either.

After that, the man went away, and I arrived at the vacant lot. I wasn't too sure where to put the bird, so I held my finger near low-hanging branches of various trees to see if it wanted to climb on. Surprisingly, it seemed content to rest on my hand, so I finally got to one of the wooden posts that separates the vacant lot from the end of Eleanor Drive and nudged it off.

I then headed straight towards the customer washroom to thoroughly clean my right hand, since it pooped a tiny bit on my pinky finger (the streak visible in the photo) and I didn't want to get Chinese bird flu.

I checked the post again half an hour later, and the bird was gone, so I guess it regained enough strength to fly off. Either that, or a hawk got it.

Uploaded by Steve Brandon on 7 Sep 07, 11.00AM EDT.

PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

2007-09-06T05:09:00.000Z

Yeah, Late Night with Conan O'Brien's graphic designer Pierre Bernard is not the only person you haven't heard from for a while, I know. But this entry isn't about me.

Incidentally, as the person who has committed himself to chronicling Pierre Bernard's rants, I narrowly dodged a bullet. Before Tuesday night's episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien, I fell asleep in my armchair, playing Test Drive Unlimited on the PlayStation 2. I was just too tired after trying, and not quite succeeding, to keep up with the demand for shopping carts during Food Basics' one day sale, where the flow of people coming in the store far exceeded the flow of carts I could push to the front of the store at any one time, and way more people than usual were leaving the carts everywhere but the corrals where they're supposed to be put. So, if this had aired one night earlier, I'd have missed blogging about it for the first time since at least 2005.

Here's where I started taping...

Conan O'Brien: ...phic designers, Pierre Bernard. There he is. Pierre says he knows how America feels and he's ready to articulate our anger for us. So here he is, once again, in a little segment we like to call "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage".

La Bamba: (singing) PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

Conan: Hello there, Pierre, are you comfortable and angry?

Pierre Bernard Jr.: Comfortable and furious, Conan.

Conan: Then go ahead and speak for America.

Pierre: Okay, here goes.

Last weekend, I attended a comic book, sci-fi and fantasy convention called Dragon*Con. DragonCon isn't as famous as San Diego's Comic Con, but, in my opinion, it far exceeds it in quality.

I was especially excited about getting my Dragon Con convention badge, a four-by-six laminated picture of a purple-winged dragon holding a sword and a lightning bolt. Plus, the badge came attached to a cool orange and black neck brac- necklace. Unfortunately, I ran into a serious problem when I tried to pick up my badge.

First, I got into what I believed to be the right line, only to find out that it was for people who had already pre-registered for DragonCon on the Internet. I then was sent to a lower level where I was forced to wait in a very long line to pay my admission fee and then another very long line to register and finally pick up my badge. Luckily, I had brought along a Chick-fil-A sandwich with fries and fruit punch, but, with all the people around me, I became too self-conscious to eat it.

After standing in line for two hours, you can imagine my shock when I was finally handed, not the four-by-six dragon badge with the orange-and-black neck string, but a little business card-sized plastic badge that I had to pin on my shirt. I didn't even have the whole dragon on there, just the head, and that was almost covered totally by my ID information.

I asked the girl who gave it to me why I didn't get the dragon with the wings, sword, and lightning bolt, but neither she nor her supervisor would give me an answer.

It cost me eighty-nine dollars to attend DragonCon, so I can't understand why I got such a crappy little badge.

Bottom line, America?

The sponsors of DragonCon should give all convention-goers the four-by-six dragon badge they deserve, or at least reimburse me for my uneaten fish filet... chicken filet sandwich.

Conan: Thank you, Pierre. I'm sure there's at least one or two other people in the world who know exactly what you're talking about.

Pierre: Divided we fall, my brothers.

La Bamba: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

Conan: Fish filet, chicken filet. Alright, we'll take a break. When we come back, Alan Alda's here. stick around!

Hmmm... Pierre, if you're reading this, and I know you do from time to time, I have a suggestion for the next installment. Try and convince Mattel to make sure that there are no duplicates in each shipment of the Mystery Hot Wheels cars with the blacked-out blister pack where you can't see what you're buying.

Anyway, when I have a little more energy than I've had lately, I'll write a definitive account of my General Motors-sponsored blogger-and-or-Flickr-photographer junket trip to Detroit to see the Woodward Dream Cruise last month, but here are a few photographic highlights.

Me, in the front seat of a carrot-coloured Chevy Camaro convertible concept car. (Photo taken by Alicia of GM Blogs.)

The Hummer H2 that played Ratchet in the Transformers movie.

And the Camaro (which was really a modern Pontiac GTO with a Camaro shell on top) that played Bumblebee (since Volkswagen wouldn't let Michael Bay use a New Beetle).

Larry Shinoda's Mako Shark Corvette concept car from 1961 that was the basis on which the first generation of Corvette Stingrays was designed.

The 1973 AeroVette.

And the 1968 Astro Vette, which is like the bastard offspring of a 1969 Corvette Stingray and Speed Racer's Mach 5.

These Corvette concept cars were all on display at the GM Heritage Center in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights.

A blue Shelby GT500 Mustang almost exactly like the one that Rally Vincent drives in Kenichi Sonoda's Gunsmith Cats manga, except without the white hood stripes.

A star-spangled '57 Chevy.

A Budweiser beer can car that poured out free samples... but it was only root beer.

A jaguar-spotted Jaguar XKR.

A whole buncha AC Shelby Cobra 427's.

An Austin-Healey 3000 Mk II, about my favourite 1960s car that isn't a Ferrari, a Corvette, a Mustang, or a Shelby Cobra.

And, finally, the first Ferrari Enzo Ferrari (yes, that's the full name of the car) I've ever seen in person.

OTTAWA ARSON SUSPECT CAUGHT IN NEPEAN?

2007-07-18T04:27:00.000Z

From Andrew Seymour of the Ottawa Citizen:

"A fire that destroyed a camper trailer and damaged a neighbouring house is believed to be one in a series of five fires that were deliberately set early Tuesday morning.

Ottawa police said it appears an arsonist set fire to the trailer parked in the driveway of a house at 732 Claude St., near Cummings Avenue, before the flames spread to the home's roof.

Two people who were in the house when the fire was discovered at about 3:25 a.m. were awakened by the smoke alarm and escaped without injury, police said. Damage is estimated at about $100,000.

Ottawa police Det. Perry Biddiscombe said the fire followed a similar one on May Street in Overbrook at about 1:30 a.m., where a number of recycling bins were set ablaze.

Deliberately set fires were also discovered at residences on Trojan Avenue, Hendon Way and Bowmont Street."

My mother worked late on Tuesday evening and will start early on Wednesday morning, so I had to fend for myself for dinner, and, as is often the case, "fending for myself" can be defined as "going to McDonald's or Wendy's".

Just before I reached the Wendy's at the corner of Merivale Road and Meadowlands Drive, I spotted a fire engine outside the Rogers Video at the side of Merivale Place, the strip mall with HMV and Winners.

I could see some wet pavement, as though the Ottawa fire department had put out a fire in the parking lot instead of in the building itself. I wondered if there had been an engine fire, though I didn't see any burnt-looking cars.

So I went to Wendy's, had my usual #6 Spicy Chicken sandwich combo (yummy, though they were out of the little ketchup cups, so I had to splurt ketchup onto a napkin), and, since I didn't quite have the urge to rent anything from Blockbuster, I decided to walk straight back home.

On the way back, I noticed the fire engine was gone, but two Ottawa Police Service Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor cruisers had taken its place. I saw a strange configuration of limbs to the left of the cars. It took me a moment to figure out that I saw more legs than arms because one of the owners of pairs of legs was handcuffed and was put in the police car on the right. Meanwhile, a couple of other police officers were shining flashlights into the dumpsters at the side of Rogers Video, so I deduced that's where the fire was.

I tried taking a picture using the 2 second long exposure setting on my Kodak EasyShare C643 Zoom, but I didn't want to cross Meadowlands and get too close on the odd chance that the guy being arrested wasn't the only suspect, and I had nothing to rest my camera on for the long exposure, so you can't really make out too much of anything.

The two cars on the left are the police cruisers.

I walked home, told my mother what I had seen, and she seemed to think that it might be related to the arsons which she had heard about on CFRA 580AM. I suppose that's possible, though Nepean is on the other side of Ottawa from Overbrook, the area where the other fires were set.

At least this incident gave me something new that is actually worth blogging about. I've been fully intending to write both about my trip to Montreal and then Mont-Tremblant to watch the Ferrari race and about my not-so-great Canada Day experiences this year, but they'd both be fairly long articles and I'm a terrible procrastinator, which makes me averse to using Blogger at all until I can focus enough on writing.

In other news, I went to my niece's 1st birthday party at my sister's house on Saturday and ate more than my fair share of General Tao Chicken and Orange Beef from the Fortune Express Chinese restaurant in Kanata, but everyone else ate the egg rolls before I could get one, so it evened out. I gave my niece a stuffed horse doll that I had bought at the Kanata Wal-Mart, since they didn't have that much in the way of stuffed toys suitable for a one-year old and I didn't feel like giving her an Elmo or a Barney, and also since I remember that she had been fascinated by a sign with a horse for some kind of whiskey at the Glen Scottish restaurant on Hazeldean a couple of weeks prior.

Also, my parents are in the process of getting new passports because my 94-year old grandmother in Wimbledon has some kind of superbug and probably won't survive a couple of weeks. I have been wanting to visit London again myself, but I will have to stay home and take care of the dogs while my parents attend the funeral (if there is one... ya never know, she might pull through and get that phone call from the Queen on the occasion of my grandmother's 100 birthday). But I might be going on a trip to Detroit in August... I don't know if I should give details, but a certain automobile manufacturer has invited several photographers at Flickr to attend the Woodward Dream Cruise classic car parade, and they'll pay for airfare and hotel! If I go, and I can't think of any reason to refuse this offer, it'll actually be my first trip to the United States since 1993 (which was just a day trip to visit Mountain Lake Public Radio (now "North Country Public Radio") in Plattsburgh NY).

BONUS SONG: Here I am singing "Ichigo Complete", the opening theme song to the Ichigo Mashimaro (Strawberry Marshmallow/苺ましまろ) anime. (Original version here.)

FERRARI FEST... HELL YEAH!

2007-06-16T15:43:00.000Z

Select your music.
Passing Breeze
Splash Wave
Magical Sound Shower

I don't have much time, but here's a sampling of digital photos I took yesterday of Ferraris on display on Preston Street (Corso Italia) in Ottawa's Little Italy neighbourhood courtesy of the Ottawa chapter of the Ferrari Club of America.

A Ferrari 550 Maranello!

A Ferrari 328 GTS!

A Ferrari Testarossa (as featured in Sega's Out Run)!

A Ferrari F355 Spider (as featured in Sega's Ferrari F355 Challenge: Passione Rossa)!

A Ferrari F430 Berlinetta (plus my 1/16 scale radio-controlled Ferrari F430 Berlinetta from Silverlit).

And the rear ends of a Ferrari Dino 308 FT4, a Ferrari Testarossa, a Ferrari 360 Modena, and a Ferrari 308 GTB (panorama assembled in Autostitch).

Here's a link to my Ottawa Ferrari Festival album at Flickr. I'll add a lot more pictures after I get back from Mont Tremblant.

Bonus:

It's not a Ferrari, but this car was also parked near Preston street.

A DeLorean, as seen in Back to the Future. This is the first DeLorean that I've seen in person since about my 17th birthday in 1991, when I spotted one in the parking lot of the Complexe Pointe-Claire strip mall.

CARS AND GIRLS...

2007-06-15T05:14:00.000Z

You can tell that summer is practically here already. I've spotted a lot of classic cars over the past week.

First, I spotted this 1937 Ford "Tudor" (Two Door) on Meadowlands Drive near Merivale Road while waiting to take the OC Transpo 86 Elmvale bus home after work.

Then, on the weekend, there were several classic cars on display in the central atrium of Billings Bridge Plaza that were somehow being used to promote the Billings Estate Museum.

An honest-to-god 1958 Ford Edsel (or, more precisely, since "Edsel" was a marque like Mercury or Lincoln and not an individual model, a Canadian-made Edsel Ranger with white "Teletouch" automatic transmission buttons on the steering wheel).

A 1929 Ford Model "A".

And a "Supercharged" Auburn 852 Speedster, one of the few true sports cars made in depression-era America.

And, finally, on Thursday, I spotted this 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS in the parking lot of the Food Basics supermarket on Merivale Road. 1970 was the absolute pinnacle of the Chevelle's existence, when the engine was upgraded to a 454 cid V8 engine, making this one of the most powerful of all the muscle cars.

This car was polished so shiny that my camera caught all sorts of glare.

But I'm going to have the mother of all car-spotting experiences this weekend with the only make of automobile that truly matters. First of all, it's Italian Week here in Ottawa, so the Ferrari Club of Ottawa will be displaying some of the most beautiful cars in existence on Preston Street in Little Italy this weekend. I'll have the opportunity to photograph these cars on Friday evening. Unfortunately, I'll miss the other events, like seeing the cars actually being driven fast on an impromptu circuit on Preston and Carling, not because I'm working, but, rather, because I'll be on my way to see the Ferrari Challenge race on the Mosport International Speedway in Mont Tremblant, Quebec. It's been 5 years since I last saw a Ferrari Challenge race at the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix, back when they were still racing Ferrari 460 Modena Challenges (here are some of my photos from the Montreal races in 2000, 2001, and 2002). While I couldn't quite afford to go to the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix this past weekend, I received quite a nice tax refund, and, in addition to the money I'm making from my job, I was able to scratch together enough scratch to take the bus to and from Mont Tremblant, as well as finding cheap accommodations there for one night (technically, it's still considered "low season", so a motel room can be had for only about $70 Canadian at the cheapest). Though, the fly in my perfect weekend ointment is that I have yet to actually get accommodations... I tried to book online, but the motel didn't get back to me, so I'll have to make a couple of phone calls tomorrow or, at worst, stay in the youth hostel (which is a little risky since I will have my camera equipment with me). I'll post a few pictures here, but the bulk of the photos will only be displayed in my Flickr account, though I'll create a couple of new albums and link to them from this blog.

Changing subjects, I saw something weird at Billings Bridge Plaza last weekend:

After doing a little shopping for film and another SD card for my digital camera (and taking the photos of the classic cars), I went to the Billings Bridge Transitway stop to take a bus downtown to go to the University of Ottawa Anime club. Just as I crossed the pedestrian bridge from the plaza to the Transitway stop, I spotted a police officer talking to an OC Transpo security agent girl, and the officer told her to get in his Ottawa Police Service Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor for some reason. I snapped the picture seen above and then walked through the Transitway station to get to the platform for the northbound buses. As soon as I walked out on the platform, the same Crown Victoria sped by as though it was on its way to a crime scene. A few minutes later, I got on the 97 bus towards downtown, and, between the Billings Bridge and Pleasant Park Transitway stations, the bus slowed down. At least two more Crown Victoria police cars plus an OC Transpo security Chevy Impala had pulled over a bus, one of the long New Flyer D60LF articulated buses, and I spotted a police officer leading a handcuffed man, who looked to be in his 40 or 50's and of Canadian native extraction (presumably Mohawk), to a waiting Crown Victoria. The whole "perp march" made it look like a serious arrest, but I didn't see anything about it in the news or on Google News, so I guess it was probably for some minor infraction, like pick-pocketing.

Changing subjects again, as to why I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks, I'm getting out of the house more, and, when I'm home, I'm usually too exhausted to be too creative to do much more than play videogames, and I've had a lot on my mind, especially girls.

Eh, seriously, I had all but forgotten what it's like to be infatuated with a girl I (am trying to get to) know in person and not just from chatting on the Internet. It's been several years since I've even had a remote chance to get to know a girl well. The last time was with this Vietnamese-Canadian girl I had a class or two with at Concordia University in the autumn of 2000 (and that was a girl that actually seemed to like me, but I was too gutless to make any serious move, and that was about the same period when I was really slipping back into serious depression that lasted on and off until I finally got proper help for it after I moved to Ottawa).

Obviously, I'm not going to say anything about what little I know about this girl, well, young woman (yes, she is an adult). All I can say is that the chances of anything beyond mild acquaintanceship happening is minimal at best, with several big strikes against me before I even get out of the starting gate (since I'm lousy with small talk and, while I indeed have lost some weight in the nearly two months since I've been working, I'm still not exactly a prize catch), but I think I might have one or two interests in common with her that I hope I can get over my usual intimidation factor and break the ice with.

Oh, I don't think I mentioned it yet, but I've succumbed to the pressure and joined a couple of social networking sites. I got a MySpace account because a couple of people I know from online are there, but I've noticed that a lot more people that I know from real life, especially from high school, are on Facebook rather than on MySpace (or, at least, are much easier to find on Facebook), so I have a Facebook profile too. Feel free to add me on either service (not that anyone likely will, since most people would have bailed out on this boring article long before they got to this paragraph).

In closing, I'll leave you with not one, not two, but FIVE cover versions of Sailor Moon songs that I sung on Thursday evening just because I felt like doing it.

Me singing "Moonlight Densetsu", the main Sailor Moon theme for the first four seasons.

Me singing "Heart Moving", the first Sailor Moon ending song.

Me singing "Princess Moon", the second Sailor Moon ending song.

Me singing "Otome no Policy", the third Sailor Moon ending song, used in the second series, Sailor Moon R.

And, lastly, me singing the techno-riffic German Sailor Moon theme song.

RECENT OTTAWA PANORAMAS...

2007-05-31T07:05:00.000Z

I'm sorry that I haven't had the energy to write much lately, but I've been out and about taking photos, and here are a few recent panoramic shots that I assembled in Autostitch.

A late "blue hour" shot over the Rideau Canal, with Parliament and the Chateau Laurier hotel in the background.

Taken from the pedestrian bridge near Somerset Street.

People boarding an OC Transpo New Flyer Invero bus as seen from inside a bus shelter at the Billings Bridge Transitway stop.

A panorama of OC Transpo buses parked between routes in the bus waiting area of the Hurdman Transitway terminus.

Ottawa Senators fans gather outside Ottawa City Hall on Wednesday, May 30th, to watch the Sens play against the Anaheim Ducks on giant television monitors showing CBC's Hockey Night in Canada.

The Sens lost 0-1.

As for me, work has been going well, except I got a uniform golf shirt (that's about one size too small for me, but I wear a long white t-shirt underneath so it's not that much of a problem), and, while my hands tanned a while ago, my arms are now a vivid sunburn pink, so I had to buy a bottle of Coppertone SPF 45 sunblock.

Also, would it be breaking the Great Atlantic and Pacific Company of Canada's rather lengthy sexual harassment policy that I had to read before I became gainfully employed if I admit that there's a girl at work that I find rather pretty? I'll leave it at that for now.

PICS OF SENS FANS CELEBRATING IN OTTAWA...

2007-05-20T22:26:00.001Z

On Elgin Street (nicknamed "Sens Mile" on this occasion), Wellington Street, and Parliament Hill.

Saturday afternoon's partying was a little premature, since the Ottawa Senators had just won the Stanley Cup semi-finals series against the Buffalo Sabres, but it's the farthest the modern version of the Ottawa Senators have ever got thus far.

I wasn't even planning on photographing this partying, I had just gone downtown because I wanted to check and see if the downtown branch of the Comic Book Shoppe had received (and whether they'd break street date on) the deluxe collector's box version of the first volume of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and also because I hadn't been downtown in over a week.

When I was at the Comic Book Shoppe, checking out the anime and manga selection and character collectables, someone yelled out "Sens Win!", and a couple of people started cheering. I stayed around in the store for a couple of minutes (and scored a Haruhi Suzumiya "UFO Catcher" plushie and a Sailor Mars keychain) and walked east on Nepean Street towards Elgin. I knew I would see quite a few happy people, but I wasn't really expecting a whole impromptu parade up Elgin.

Here are a few photos I took. You can see more in my "Ottawa Senators Celebration, May 19th, 2007." album at Flickr (and I have more photos to add).

MANGA REVIEW: GUNSMITH CATS: REVISED EDITION, VOLUME 1.

2007-05-04T04:34:00.000Z

I had been wanting to read Kenichi Sonoda's Gunsmith Cats, but I hadn't seen it in comic book stores in ages, and Chapters/Indigo doesn't seem to carry the older, flipped Dark Horse/Studio Proteus editions of manga.

But it's finally been re-published in a double-length, unflipped "omnibus" format.

I had seen the three-episode OVA series years ago, so I knew basically what to expect: bounty hunter action with beautiful girls, lots of guns, cool cars, fanservice, and some comic relief, all set in a fairly realistic version of Chicago. Kenichi Sonoda is (was?) an animation character designer who branched out into manga, so his drawing style is a bit more anime-like than most mangakas draw.

The cars look great, especially Rally's Shelby GT500 Mustang. Sonoda draws cars as accurately as Kosuke Fujishima did in You're Under Arrest. Assuming the artwork is completely unflipped, there are one or two instances where Sonoda accidentally drew the cars driving on the left side of the street, like in Japan but unlike Chicago, but this should only bother you if you're a super-nitpicker like I am.

Sonoda is also a mega-otaku when it comes to firearms, even though private gun ownership is almost completely illegal in Japan, and some of the gunsmith "shop talk" gets a little too "inside baseball" for my limited interest in guns, but, on the plus side, if you have a little patience, it's quite educational, like with Rally's explanation, complete with diagrams, about why she prefers the original Czech military CZ 75 handgun to the export versions (the original version was made out of the hardest-grade steel ever milled for a handgun, but the export version of the CZ 75 lowered the grade of steel to western standards to be more cost-effective and, as such, Rally claims it's far less accurate).

It's a little more violent than I expected from the cute art style and what I remember of the anime; villains get their hands or feet blown off, and there's one sequence where the daughter of a defense attorney gets kidnapped and Sonoda shows her on a bed, obviously having just been raped, barely able to mutter "Daddy" to her father on the phone shortly before the kidnapper puts a bullet in her skull.

I like this manga for the most part with one huge reservation, and it's something that's usually a major selling point for me: I'm oficially creeped out by the fan service. I saw the 18+ content advisory warning on the back cover and I assumed it was primarily for gratuitous nude shots of Rally Vincent's big and bouncy brown boobies, and, yes, you get that in abundance. I don't have a problem with that kind of fan service. I actually wholeheartedly endorse that kind of fan service.

The problem with the fan service is regarding Minnie May Hopkins, Rally's sidekick. She's a 17-year old ex-prostitute (well, usually ex) who is drawn like a 14-year old and she's not exactly chaste. I wouldn't have a problem with this aspect of the story if it had some kind of dramatic point about abuse and exploitation, but Minnie May's entire troubled background seems to serve only as a flimsy excuse for Sonoda to draw an underaged-looking character in somewhat graphic sexual situations. One sequence with her performing oral sex on a silhouetted man comes very close to breaking obscenity laws in certain jurisdictions, and there's a wholly unnecessary sequence where she masturbates for two pages just to set up a cheap "she didn't know she was being watched" gag. That's not even the creepiest part... Minnie May's primary love interest is a 35-year old ex-bomb maker who came to know her as a prostitute four years prior to the start of the story. Do the math. (35 - 4 = 31 and 17 - 4 = 13) And he's supposed to be a sympathetic character.

Overall, Gunsmith Cats is quite possibly the best American action movie-inspired Japanese comic book that I have ever read, but you should at least be aware of the more salacious aspects of the storyline before you pick it up.

In my "to read" pile, I have the first volume of the much more recent Gunsmith Cats Burst manga, which started publication over a decade after the original manga series (I think the original was published in 1991, while Burst started in 2005). It looks to be about the same thing as the original manga, but Sonoda seemed to have streamlined the character designs and (thankfully) toned down the Minnie May fanservice. (I also have the first volume of Nana.)

STEVE BRANDON SINGS AH MY GODDESS! WEEK!

2007-05-02T21:41:00.000Z

It's now early May, and, while most of the world awaits the return of Spider-Man on the big screen, I'm more excited for the return of a Japanese comic book heroine of a more divine nature to my DVD player.

That's right... Peorth. (Eh, Keiichi can keep Belldandy... she's an overrated doormat anyway. Peorth is cuter and more playfully sexual.)

Anyway, to celebrate ADV Film's release of the first volume of the second Ah My Goddess! (Aa, Megami-sama) TV series, Ah! My Goddess Season 2, Vol. 1 - "Everyone Has Wings", this upcoming Tuesday, I think I'll sing a whole bunch of songs in "moon language" from the anime franchise.

Today's song is the full-length version of the 1993 Oh My Goddess! OVA series ending song, "Congratulations". I couldn't find a decent MIDI of this song, the two MIDIs that show up on every site being either a piano version of this song or a version that takes way too many liberties with the instrumentals, so I'm just singing along to the version recorded by the "Goddess Family Club", the group comprised of the seiyuu (voice actresses) for the three main Goddesses, Kikuko Inoue (Belldandy), Yumi Tohma (Urd) and Aya Hisakawa (Skuld). Believe it or not, it took me two hours to record a version I was semi-satisfied with... I actually tried singing in falsetto at first but couldn't keep it up for quite the whole song, so the final version is just me singing in a slightly effeminate but still male (re: gay) voice.

Steve Brandon singing "Congratulations".
(Lyrics and translation here.)

CLEAR CHANNEL SHUTS OUT CANADIAN LISTENERS...

2007-04-27T18:04:00.000Z

Dang it, starting today, San Antonio-based Clear Channel seems to be limiting access to the live audio streams of its stations to American listeners only.

After I got home from work, I went to the home page of KOGO San Diego to listen to the final hour of Rush Limbaugh. I clicked on the "Listen Live" link as I do every day, but, instead of the media player window opening up, I got the following message window.

That's never happened before. So I tried KOGO's sister station in Los Angeles, KFI, and got the exact same Licensed Content Access Request window.

Blargh! I can listen to Rush Limbaugh elsewhere on non-Clear Channel stations (Chicago's WLS works for me), and I may, now that I'm working, finally get a new Rush 24/7 subscription, but it's still very bothersome for me since I also enjoyed listening to local San Diego hosts Mark Larson and frequent Limbaugh guest host Roger Hedgecock. And I won't get my daily fix of Corky's Pest Control commercials! Damn you, Clear Channel. (Shakes fist!)

WHAT NBC NEWS SHOULD HAVE DONE TO THE PHOTOS...

2007-04-22T05:56:00.000Z

An obvious compromise between showing the self-pics that Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC News in his multimedia package and not wanting to give Cho Seung-Hui the posthumous glory he wanted to achieve by having NBC air the photos would have been for NBC to judiciously apply the Late Night with Conan O'Brien ASS stamp.

And, for the "Too Soon" thought police brigade, the brand of Internet sarcasm I practice is all about tearing the fucker down at the earliest possible moment before he can gain the kind of personality cult that exists around Columbine killers Dylan Kleibold and Eric Harris, since the only brand of earthly justice you can give to the bastard now is ridicule and mockery.

EH... THAT WAS PROBABLY A BAD IDEA...

2007-04-21T16:36:00.000Z

The you-know-what about you-know-who got a little more mainstream attention than I was seeking, so I took it down. I thought the writing was so attrocious that it seemed like a clever idea at the time to perform it as blog filler, but, now, maybe not so much. And that's all I'll say about that.

NO, WAIT, I'LL SAY THIS AS WELL: Now is precisely the time for the evil fucker that did it to receive all of the Internet mockery he so richly deserves because I believe that the only way to prevent him from becoming another tragic antihero on the level of Charles Whitman to wrong-minded people is by making him a source of ridicule instead of the symbol of fear and terror that wall-to-wall 24-hour news coverage has already turned him into. However, my own attempt at doing so was poorly-conceived and executed and I am sorry if anyone misconstrued it as anything other than an attempt at de-glorification of a horrible human being and his twisted way of thinking.

ME... AT WORK (PLUS KAMICHU MINI-REVIEW).

2007-04-20T23:08:00.000Z

Yes, I wear a safety vest as I push shopping carts around a parking lot somewhere in suburban Ottawa.

I was aiming for an "in the cart" view of the guy pushing it, but you can't see much of the cart apart from a tiny bit of the handle, and I took this when I was on the clock, so I'm not exactly going to stand around trying to get the picture exactly as I imagined as I know they aren't paying me to do that.

It's a great job for me as I really need the exercise and experience, but it's a bad job for blogging because not much of general interest happens. I know that, usually, lack of general interest doesn't always stop me from talking about things in my life, but I can't think of a way to make talking about pushing around shopping carts interesting even to myself. The only "action" I saw today was a guy dropping a case or two of Diet Coke. Oh, and I found someone's bank card on a rug just inside the entrance to the store and handed it over to management. The woman came back to the store, she had the bank cancel the card but was still happy to see it again for her own piece of mind.

A week that started out with a moderate amount of snow falling on Ottawa ended with early summer-like temperatures in the mid-twenties on the ºC side of things, or the mid-seventies for much of the rest of the world. And the t-shirts hadn't come in yet, so I had to wear the fleece sweater since it's the uniform. My throat got fairly dry, but, I wasn't all that bothered by the heat. I paced myself and had a root beer during the break and, though I was still tired by the end of my four-hour shift, I wasn't exhausted like I was on Wednesday. Plus, don't guys lose weight a bit faster if they wear a sweatshirt while they exercise, or is that just a myth? Have Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman busted that myth yet?

After work, I waited around for my mother, who had conveniently decided to do some grocery shopping at the store. Normally, I help her with groceries, but I was still wearing my employee sweater, and, as I don't want to answer questions from random customers about the layout of a store that I haven't quite learned myself yet, I opted to just wait in the car.

Even though I haven't technically gotten paid yet, I stopped by the Anime Stop store on the way home and picked up a "getting started at work" present for myself, the first volume of Kamichu!, the anime series about a junior high school girl who somehow comes to know that she is a literal god, though not an Almighty God but rather a god of the Shinto variety with rather limited abilities. She has to juggle her normal teenage life with the responsibilities of Godhood and the lack of anonymity that comes with her sudden, somewhat unwanted, idol status, both literally and figuratively as she inadvertently displays her initially unpredictable powers to the entire nation of Japan in the very first episode, though she has an entire community of thousands of Shinto gods as well as the members of a family that runs a local temple to help her out. I watched the entire series at the University of Ottawa anime club over the last semester, and it's one of the better shows that I've seen over the past year. It's a series that could easily have collapsed under the weight of its own high premise, but it stays remarkably low key throughout (save for one aberration of an episode involving a Martian), always presenting Yurie as a normal girl with one aspect of her life being extraordinary but the other aspects of her life being rather ordinary. In that regards, it reminds me in a very good way of Kiki's Delivery Service, only involving a otherwise normal girl with some special abilities who is called a "God" instead of a "Witch", and, unlike Kiki's Delivery Service, the ending doesn't strike a false note, patching in unnecessary action for the sake of an exciting conclusion. Kamichu just ends anticlimactically with the main characters being about ready to move on to the next stage in their lives. And I like how Yurie's sudden divinity is never really explained, it just "is" and that's all you really need to know. And the animation is top-knotch for an anime TV series, with the menagerie of weird Shinto gods (and they have a god for nearly everything, even for various video disk formats) on those occasions wherein Yurie visits the land of the Gods looking for all the world like they had just stepped off the set of Spirited Away. This is easily a series from a creator (manga artist Besame Mucho) on roughly the same wavelength as Hayao Miyazaki, but it's a series I'm glad Miyazaki hasn't touched because the Hayao Miyazaki of recent years would probably try and add extraneous and scattershot levels of "meaning" to make the series seem like it has more to say than it actually does. If you ever decide to give this series a chance, just sit back and enjoy a very enchanting ride and don't try and decode meanings that aren't actually there.

A PLACE THAT I HAVEN'T BEEN LATELY...

2007-04-19T04:06:00.000Z

The line-up to see a movie at the cinema.

My big-screen-movie-watching drought has lasted five months. The last movie I watched at the theatre was actually Happy Feet, on opening weekend in November. Since then, I've been tempted to see some movies, such as Casino Royale, A Night at the Museum (mainly because my brother worked on it in some small capacity), and Ghost Rider, but not enough to gain enough inertia to not just wait to rent the DVD (and I still haven't even gotten around to renting Casino Royale).

I was ready to break my movie drought last weekend for one of three movies.

Unfortunately, the powers that be decided that Ottawa isn't a big enough market in which to release either the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theatres, even though the cartoon is a mainstay on Teletoon's Detour schedule in Canada, or Redline, which I know is almost certainly total crap as a narrative but, as "car porn", it's the first such film in quite a while to feature exotics (re: Ferrari) instead of just import Japanese "tuners".

(And, yes, I'm aware that Eddie Griffin totaled a Ferrari Enzo, perhaps intentionally, perhaps by accident, as part of a charity event-slash-publicity event for Redline, and that sucked, though, since it's only the front of a rear-engined car that was damaged, I doubt it's a total write-off. Most of the damage seemed to be the front panels, which can easily be replaced. He didn't split it in half as did Stefan Eriksson, that shady executive of the failed Gizmondo handheld game system. And Ferrari offered to repair that one, even though its parts were scattered all over a California highway, so I don't see why they wouldn't repair an Enzo where the damage is mainly cosmetic.)

Meanwhile, one movie that is playing in Ottawa is Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino's "double feature", Grindhouse. I can take or leave Robert Rodruiguez as a filmmaker... From Dusk to Dawn was a lot of fun, but the most recent movie of his that I've seen, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, I found to be just numbing, soulless violence despite the presence of Johnny Depp. But I'd pay to see it just for Quentin's half, Death Proof, which some people liked a lot less than Rodriguez's zombie and machine-gun-legged woman half, Planet Terror because there was too much talking and not enough gore in Death Proof to truly be called Grindhouse, but if it's more tongue-in-cheek than it is over-the-top violence, all the better for me as far as I'm concerned. And Kurt Russell is always cool, no matter what film he's in. Unfortunately, I haven't quite gotten around to seeing it yet because it's so long that the total theatre turnover time between showings, taking into account the amount of time it takes to clean the theatres and show trailers, is a whopping four hours, and all of the showings in Ottawa are either a bit too early (4 p.m.) or too late (8 p.m.) for me. 8 p.m. doesn't sound that late, but, since I'm reliant on the bus for transportation and there's no night bus to my part of Nepean, it's much too risky. A 6:30 to 7 p.m. starting time would be ideal, but no Ottawa theatre has such a time scheduled.

This upcoming weekend, my movie drought is going to end, as the first movie of 2007 that I've honest-to-good been anticipating for a long time, Hot Fuzz, from the creators of Shaun of the Dead, is opening in North America. I know it's probably not going to be quite on the same level as Shaun of the Dead, simply the best horror-comedy I've ever seen, as slapstick cop comedies are a much more trodden sub-genre than are zombie-comedies so there's less they can do that hasn't been seen before already, but I have faith in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright that the film won't be disappointing.

FIRST DAY OF WORK...

2007-04-18T21:53:00.000Z

...and I'm fricking exhausted.

I'm not going to say too much, but I don't think I'm putting my position in jeopardy if I give you the gist of what I do. I'm just a cart lackey, pushing shopping carts from the "corrals" (where you're supposed to leave the carts) or gathering them up from the parking lot where people leave them willy-nilly (what you're not supposed to do) and pushing them back to the main shopping cart area, between the outer and inner supermarket doors. Simple work, but repetitive and energy-depleting. But I'm not complaining; for a shy guy like me, it's one of the better positions as dealing with customers isn't really part of my job (the customers put the bags in the trunk themselves, though if I see someone having difficulty with that task, I'll probably offer assistance), and, for a chubby guy like me, every working day is like a four or five-hour workout, with bench-pressing, lifting (to control the carts), and some pulling.

The people at the store seem nice enough. The only real negative today was that one of the other minor tasks the cart lackeys have to do is take out the garbage from the various bins around the store. For the indoor ones, it's a simple task of taking one bag out and putting the other one in, but the outdoor ones frequently have the garbage bag slip out of position, so a lot of the garbage ends up at the bottom of the bin and it gets soaked by rain and gets totally slimy and goopy, but we're wearing disposable plastic gloves so it's not that bad. But one of the bins had this disgusting stuff in it that the chief cart lackey said was wet sand, but I thought it seemed like kitty litter myself, and I was digging it out and the middle finger of my right hand caught on something very sharp, which I very much hope was glass and not a used syringe, and blood started dripping and they had to administer first aid, wrapping my finger with paper towels and holding it under cold water for a few minutes and then putting Band-Aids on it. And the manager had to fill out work injury paperwork, which I thought was a little embarrassing for just a small cut.

But I get to work outside, and I get to see a lot of cars, so I can honestly say that there's much worse work than what I'm doing.

The next time I work is from noon to four p.m. on Friday... I know, really tough schedule, eh? Well, I've never had a proper job before (because I made bad choices and excuses and didn't try hard enough to find work in the past), so I have to ease into work.

Anyway, I feel like posting a couple of photos, though not of my workplace.

A cheery cherry red Volkswagen New Beetle showing support for the Ottawa Senators. I find one big difference between the Montreal and Ottawa hockey cultures is that, while Montreal hockey fans are generally more fanatical about the Canadiens than Ottawa hockey fans are about the Senators, Ottawa hockey fans tend to love flying flags from their cars. I don't remember seeing nearly the numbers of cars in Montreal flying Canadiens flags, though it could be that the NHL introduced the car flags the winter I moved to Ottawa two years ago.

For anyone who knows Merivale Mall, please note that the store I work at now is not Farm Boy, so this photo isn't an indirect way of showing you where I work without explicitly spelling it out for you.

A Toronto-bound Via Rail train with a General Electric P42 locomotive just out of Ottawa Station, crossing over Riverside Drive as it builds up speed.

A pretty good motion blur of a Porsche 928 on Elgin Street. My manual tracking isn't perfect, but the car itself is mostly in focus with a very blurred background.

This composite photo is kind of a glitch in Autostitch... I stitched together three previously-Autostitch'd segments of a 360º panorama of downtown Ottawa taken from Mackenzie King Bridge, but Autostitch wasn't sure how the images related to one another, so I got this weird lake reflection effect that I kind of like. (Here's the picture as it was supposed to look.)

A rabbit in my backyard.

APRIL SNOW...

2007-04-17T01:20:00.000Z

The rare April Nor'easter that dumped a lot of very late season snow on New England, upstate New York, Quebec, and the Maritimes also brought snow to Ottawa... nothing Ottawans aren't used to, but it was a good five to seven centimetres (around 2 inches), easily enough to re-whiten the ground without too many blades of grass sticking through.

And also enough to make the sidewalks in Nepean kind of icky (especially along Merivale Road).

On one hand, I don't mind getting snow in mid-April, since I always feel more comfortable in cool weather, so I fully approve of winter overstaying its welcome.

But, on the other hand, starting Wednesday, I will be working in a supermarket parking lot and wet, heavy snow and supermarket trolley wheels are not too happy a combination, seizing up the wheels and making pushing around one shopping cart almost like pushing around a Smart Car with the parking brakes on. And I'll have to push whole trains of carts around, so I kind of hope that we don't get a repeat performance this spring, at least not on the nights before I work.

Speaking of the job, I went to the Mark's Work Wearhouse (L'Equipeur) store on Merivale at Hunt Club Road with my mother to get a few pairs of black jeans, a belt, and some plain t-shirts... we split the expenditure between us, so I spent over $100 on two pairs of pants, and they weren't even Levi's 501, just Denver Hayes, the Mark's Work Wearhouse store brand. But they were "Made in Canada", so I'm really hoping that they stay a dark shade of black at least as long as the $25 Mexican-made Wrangler "comfort fit" jeans I usually buy at Wal-Mart. And it's an investment... I'll make back what I spent in less than a week.

And now that I'm working and am making a small amount of money the respectable way, I'm am thinking a lot more seriously about taking that weekend trip in June to Mont Tremblant, Quebec to see the Ferrari F430 Challenge race, as I mentioned that I wanted to do back in February. Even though I am bringing in a income now, I'm not Daddy Warbucks, Scrooge McDuck, Richie Rich, or any of the male members of the Ouran High School Host Club and won't be walking around with my pockets bulging with huge stacks of pink-and-red Canadian fifties or used-toilet-paper-brown Canadian one hundreds, and I have to be very mindful of costs, and would only be staying the Saturday night, if I go. I can get to Mont Tremblant by Greyhound/Voyageur bus, with a shortish layover in Montreal both ways. The Saturday trip is reasonable... I'd leave Ottawa at 2 p.m., spend an hour in Montreal in the late afternoon (probably killing time at the main Archambault book/music/video store on Berri, since it's only a block away from the central Montreal bus station), and get to Mont Tremblant a little past 8 p.m., which is great for me as I prefer eating supper after 9 p.m. anyway. The trip back is a little more problematic... since the whole point of the trip is for me to photograph as many Ferraris as I can, both on the track and on display, I wouldn't want to leave Mont Tremblant at 4 p.m., but the only option after that is at 9 p.m., getting back to the Ottawa bus station past 2 a.m., meaning I'd have to get a cab from the bus station to Nepean as there's no night bus that covers the Meadowlands/Merivale area of Nepean which is well-serviced by the 86 and 111 buses in the daytime, and it's at least a two mile walk to where I live from the OC Transpo Baseline Transitway stop.

The more painful part is the hotel rates... I want the most no-frills-other-than-normal-television-and-an-in-room-bathroom-and-shower accommodations available, and even the Comfort Inn starts at $79 a night, and I somehow doubt that's the rate for a Saturday night in June. And the Hostel International Mont Tremblant hostel isn't that much more reasonable... $67.50 for a private room. I could spend just spend $27.75 for a dormitory bed, but I don't know if that's such a great option if I don't want both of my cameras and my tripod to mysteriously vanish during the night. I'm not stupid enough to bring anything else electronic, but the cameras are kind of necessary for photography.

Let me say, my prior offer to split the gas and the hotel costs to anyone with a car in the Ottawa or Gatineau area who also wishes to attend the Ferrari Challenge race, plus draw a Ferrari picture based on any photo I take that weekend, still very much stands.

And, I must say, like everyone else, I'm horrified and saddened by the murderous rampage at Virginia Tech on Monday morning, but I don't have much else to say and to write a paragraph about it that's longer than this one merely for the sake of registering an opinion would just be trite.

PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

2007-04-14T05:16:00.000Z

It's been 3 months since the last one, so it was about time for another installment of "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" on NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Conan O'Brien: ...just look at the fury coming off of that guy. Well, yeah-heh-heh-heh-heh. Pure hate.

Pierre says he knows how America feels and he's ready to articulate our anger for us, so here he is once again in a little segment we like to call "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage"

Singer: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE

Conan O'Brien: Hello there, Pierre are you comfortable and angry?

Pierre Bernard Jr.: Comfortable and furious, Conan.

Conan O'Brien: Then go ahead, old chum, and speak for America.

Pierre Bernard Jr.: Okay, here goes.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a huge fan of Japanese anime, which I think is far better produced and more provocative than American animation. Well, a few weeks ago, at an event dedicated to Japanese anime, I was lucky enough to encounter seven young women known collectively as the "Babes of Anime". These beautiful ladies do voice-over work for several anime series including Trinity Blood about the Catholic church battling vampires and Bubblegum Crisis, which features sexy futuristic policewomen taking on monsters that ordinary law enforcement can't handle.

I'm particularly attracted to officers Sylia Stingray and Nene Romanova who often appear unannounced in my dreams, so you can imagine how excited I was to meet the gorgeous women who provide the voices for these characters, and, if that weren't thrilling enough, I then found out that there's a channel called the Anime Network that runs anime 24 hours a day. That meant I could hear these ladies' voices continuously every day while staring at my large collectible "Babes of Anime" poster, which is so hot it could melt paint off the wall.

Unfortunately, I was then shocked to learn that no East Coast cable provider provides the Anime Network. The Cartoon Network is available here, but they've been cutting back drastically on the number of anime programs in favor of live-action alternatives, and the best they can offer animation-wise is the talking butt detective show, Assy McGee.

Bottom line, America? East coast cable companies should carry the Anime Network 24 hours a day so I can always hear the angelic voices of Sylia Stingray and Nene.

Conan O'Brien: Thank you, thank you, Pierre. I'm sure there's at least one or two other people in the world who know exactly how you feel.

Pierre Bernard Jr.: Keep the faith, Amigos.

Conan O'Brien: Alright.

Singer: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

Conan O'Brien: We'll take a break. When we come back, Mary Lynn Rajskub is here. Stick around!

Ah, the Anime Network... I know ADV Films breaks even round about on the Video on Demand service, but I still wonder why ADV hasn't yet pulled the plug on the 24-hour linear feed, considering the pitiful distribution they've gotten for it. My suspicions from three years ago that they're bleeding money out the wahoo on it still haven't changed, though maybe they're keeping the linear channel afloat for now with the money that they don't seem to be spending on LAEM (the Live-action Evangelion movie, a.k.a. "investor money toilet").

Hey, Pierre, if your going to agitate for a 24-hour anime channel on east coast cable providers, don't bother with the Anime Network. A better use of your time would be trying to get YTV's upcoming anime channel shown in the United States, since I suspect YTV's channel will be the only anime channel broadcast in North America to be profitable in the long-term as YTV is not beholden to showing the anime of any one distributor, while ADV's and Funimation's anime channels eat each other alive south of the border, and YTV is run by actual cable people who can better attract the revenue sources they need to keep the channel afloat.

I also enjoyed seeing Pierre Bernard show up in a cameo appearance in a Hannigan the Salesman sketch on Thursday night, where Hannigan asked Conan if he wanted a Playstation 3, only to say that he didn't have a Playstation 3, but he did have a "Gay Haitian Lee" (Pierre Bernard in a vest and short running shorts). "He's all the rage in a Port-Au-Prince whorehouse."

Also, speaking of anime characters showing up in dreams, a couple of nights ago, I had a weird... well, not a whole dream, but a vignette within a dream where I was at McDonald's, and the lovely Keiko Kitagawa, who played Rei Hino/Sailor Mars in the live-action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, was in her Sailor Mars costume, serving me, only she could barely speak English, and she didn't even know how to operate the Coca-Cola dispenser, so I had to demonstrate to her the proper usage of a Coke dispenser. That's all I remember. Nothing dirty happened, though there's been a disturbing lack of sex on the whole in my dreams over the past couple of months, while, every night lately, I seem to dream that I'm back at university and am forgetting to do assignments and I forget my schedule and only show up in classes sporadically. I do have plenty of real-world experience with both not doing assignments and skipping the same class repeatedly, but I haven't seen the inside of a university classroom for three years, so I don't understand what's causing me to have these dreams now. (Not that I never want to go back, especially now that I'm not nearly as depressed as I was and wouldn't start slacking off again.)

EDIT (5:30 p.m.): I haven't found any video of last night's Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage segment yet, but here's a short interview with Pierre Bernard talking about the New York Comic Con and how excited he is that's he's going to be sitting in a recliner, being "serviced" by the ADV voice actresses.

EDIT II (April 18^th) Hey, Pierre, I noticed that you've visited this blog a couple of times over the past few hours, so may I recommend you an anime that I think you'd love?

Gunbuster! (Aim for the Top), the 6-episode OVA (direct-to-video) series from GAINAX (Neon Genesis Evangelion) featuring character designs from Haruhiko Mikimoto (character designer of the original Macross/Robotech series). I consider Gunbuster to be the pinnacle of that late-1980s sci-fi anime "look", with much nicer animation than most other non-theatrical anime of the same era. It's basically a story about girls fighting alien invaders in giant robots, but, at its core is a surprisingly poignant story about interpersonal relationships that get severely disrupted from the side effects of Einstein's theory of relativity, where the girls travelling through space faster than the speed of light age only months while the people they leave behind on Earth age years.

But it's not all dead serious... Gunbuster has the best "teenage girls take a communal bath together in space" fanservice scene this side of Plastic Little, The Adventures of Captain Tita, as well a lot of superfluous "bouncing" in those tight gym-suit style space uniforms.

The box set is a little pricey for just six episodes ($60 U.S. MSRP, though I paid less than $60 Canadian for it), but Bandai Visual/Honneamise gave it a really nice Japanese Region 2 DVD set-style presentation (and is one of the few overpriced anime sets they're putting out that is honestly worth the price).

BIG PERSONAL NEWS AND NEPEAN CRIME FILES...

2007-04-12T07:05:00.000Z

It happened kind of fast, but I am now gainfully employed. Part-time, for now, pushing around carts in the parking lot of a local supermarket on weekday afternoons, which is about as specific as I'll ever get because I'm not one of those dumbasses that's going to endanger his prospects of staying employed by talking too much about his job during his off hours. I doubt, once I'm working, that I'll even talk about the job at all since it's not really the sort of job where there is all that much to talk about. Unless I have a random celebrity encounter or even just a random Ferrari encounter. I've seen a couple of Ferraris on the streets of Nepean... their owners gotta shop sometimes.

Obviously, it's not the sort of job most 32-year old men have, but, in my particular case, I wasted much of my adulthood so far being depressed and my severe shyness and inability to sell myself and aversion to eye contact never got me past the job interview until now. I don't want to be too dependent on pharmaceuticals, but Citalopram really had helped me a lot over the past year to diminish the depression (also, thanks to seriously taking up photography as a hobby over the past year, I'm simply getting out of the house a lot more than I used to), and the job-finding counselors for people with severe emotional issues that I am seeing helped me get a foot in the door at this store.

I think I have the right attitude about the job; I really don't care about the social status of this particular job compared to my same-aged peers (one of the advantages of not socializing much is that I don't get those kinds of inferiority complexes). I merely see it as the first rung on the ladder, a rung I probably should have climbed 16 years ago, but a rung I still need to climb in order to get anywhere important.

I think I'll improve my work ethic by watching all of the episodes of King of the Hill where Bobby gets a job and Hank doesn't like the lessons Bobby is learning, and the episodes when something happens to Hank's boss, Buck Strickland, leaving Strickland Propane under (temporary) new management that rubs Hank Hill the wrong way to the point that Hank thinks of changing careers, and the episodes wherein Dale Gribble decides to take oddball side jobs in addition to operating "Dale's Dead Bug" extermination.

Now to the Nepean crime files. (Insert Dragnet theme, otherwise known as "the Mathnet theme.)

My two big dogs are loud and like to bark. Usually, it's annoying, but, occasionally, it's justified. Sam, the black labrador-mix dog, started barking yesterday afternoon, which caught the attention of my father (who just happened to be taking a week off of work). My father looked outside and saw some random asshole, somewhere between the ages of 18 and 21, who was certainly not the mailman looking inside our mailbox. What was he after? Yesterday was the day that eligible people in our neighbourhood happened to receive their sales tax rebate cheques ($58 Canadian each), and Mr. Petty Larceny already had several of these cheques in his hand and would have helped himself to my own and my parents GST/PST rebate cheques had he not been spooked by the aural assault of my dogs and the visual shock of seeing someone actually home. I was home too, but I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Internet in the basement and probably wouldn't have gotten upstairs in time had no one else been upstairs. My father called the Ottawa Police. I don't think they've caught the guy yet but I'd imagine they'd have spread the word around to local banks to be on the lookout for somebody attempting to deposit multiple GST rebate cheques into the same account.

Also on the subject of local crime, one of the nicer cars in the neighbourhood is a gold Eagle Talon, which is really the early 1990s version of the Mitsubishi Eclipse released in the United States under Chrysler's now-defunct Eagle banner. On Easter Monday, I spotted this car from the bus, but, at some point over the past couple of days, it had gotten a presumably unwanted new paint job:

Ouch. If you love your car as much as I think this car's owner does, that's gotta be paintful to see.

I wonder if there's some kind of jilted ex-lover thing going on here, or whether it was just some random ne'er-do-well with a can of silver spraypaint, a desire to deface a thing of beauty, and an imagination so shallow that "Fuck you!" is the most creative sentiment of which he can conceive.

BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS, WHATCHA GONNA DO WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU?

2007-04-10T05:25:00.000Z

I've finally got some pictures of an Ottawa police car that has eluded my camera lens for the best part of a year.

While the vast, vast majority of the Ottawa Police Service's marked patrol car fleet is composed of Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor cars (in fact, I can't honestly say I remember seeing even a single marked Ottawa Police Chevy Impala in the two-and-a-half years that I've been living in Ontario), in 2006, Ottawa added a few Dodge Chargers to the fleet.

I first saw one of these bad boys responding to some kind of accident on Carling way back last July, but my mother's Ricoh Caplio camera, which I was using for digital pictures at the time, was still recovering from the unfortunate soaking it received when I got caught in a torrential downpour walking the 50 metres or so to my house from the bus stop on Meadowlands after arriving back in Nepean from Canada Day activities downtown.

I've seen several more Ottawa Police Dodge Chargers on the streets over the past few weeks, but they were moving and I just seemed to never have my camera ready at the exact moment they passed by, so I was elated to see this one parked right outside the doors near Toys R' Us in the St. Laurent Centre, on a median so I could get nice photos of it from all angles.

Look at that "stare". The Dodge Charger is the most "badass"-looking police car this side of those Lamborghini Gallardos that police forces in some European cities have. However, it's not quite as "badass" as some police forces; according to Wikipedia, the Dodge Chargers that the Ottawa Police Service uses aren't the ones with the Police Package 340hp V8 Hemi engine, they just have the base V6 engine, so they're less muscled than the V8-powered Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors.

But they look cool.

CROWNVIC.NET BOARD VISITORS: I wouldn't exactly say that the Dodge Charger police cars are "elusive". Other people at Flickr have photographed them, I just had a 9 month bad luck streak that finally ended Monday, though now I have a new target... a Gatineau/Hull Police Dodge Charger.

Please check out my Flickr Police Car album... there are lots of Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors (Ottawa, RCMP, OPP, Montreal, and Military Police) in there.

Speaking of digital photography, I was in Ottawa East partially because I wanted to feed my brother's cat (since my brother was spending Easter weekend in Toronto), but also because I wanted to get the cheapest possible SD memory card for my camera to tide me over until I figure out what I can do, if anything, to get a replacement for the 2.0 GB PNY Technologies SD memory card that died over the weekend (it's long past the store warranty, but I'm not sure about the manufacturer's warranty because I still need to find the fricking package).

I checked the Zellers website and found that there was one Zellers store in the Ottawa area that I had yet to visit, and it was just a block or so north of the St. Laurent Centre, so I'm not sure how it had eluded my Zellers-finding sixth sense until now. Unfortunately, the cheapest SD memory cards they had were 512 MB and were a good $10 Canadian more than I was willing to spend right now. And they didn't have any Hot Wheels or Maisto Ferrari model cars that I don't already have.

But I struck gold next door at ~~Radio Shack~~ "The Source by Circuit City", where I got the last clearance Centrios 256 MB memory card for just $18 Canadian (plus tax), $7 below my $25 Canadian (plus tax) cheapness threshold. I know 250 MB isn't much, but it means I can get 222 pictures at a time (not including the 30 pictures in my camera's internal memory), so fans of my photos of boring things in the Ottawa metropolitan area don't need to fret, the photos will go on. Even with as many pictures as I take, I think the only time I've even gotten close to taking 250 pictures at once was at the Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow last month.

Also, at the Source by Circuit City, there was a middle-aged guy, who I think was Italian or Greek, testing Karaoke speakers, and he actually wanted the no-longer-Radio-Shack store clerk to turn up the sound on the televisions just to make sure that the Karaoke noise drowns everything else out. I just thought it was a funny enough random request to mention here.

DEATH OF A MEMORY CARD.

2007-04-08T21:01:00.000Z

The second PNY Technologies 2.0 GB SD memory card I've had since getting my Kodak EasyShare C643 Zoom digital camera died on me yesterday.

It died in the same way as the first one, which I had for only 2 weeks before replacing: I took about 5 or 6 pictures in a row, and, when I tried looking at the pictures, the camera said "File format not recognized", which happens sometimes when it auto-trashes a picture, so I turned the camera off and when I turned it on again, I got the digital camera equivalent of the "Blue Screen of Death", asking me to format the card, which does nothing to revive it.

The first time, it could just have been a dud card, but, since it happened twice, I'm a little concerned that it might not be a problem with the card but rather the camera.

And these things are $60 to $70 Canadian, and I'm not all that sure that it's still covered by warranty (and, even if it is, I'm not sure if I still have the receipt).

By the way, yes, that is indeed supposed to be the version of the Grim Reaper from the Cartoon Network show, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. I originally considered using Momo, the cute grim reaper-equivalent girl from the anime Shinigami no Ballad, but her character design is much too complex for me to draw her properly in MS Paint (I mean, I'm sure I could do it, but I didn't want to spend all of Easter working on a single picture).

RIDEAU CENTRE PANORAMA

2007-04-07T19:39:00.000Z

I'm particularly proud of this Autostitch composite picture, which shows the entire Rideau Street side of the Rideau Centre, the main shopping centre in downtown Ottawa. While you can see cars chopped in half and ghostly people, as far as I can see, the composite of the architecture of the mall itself is perfectly merged... I don't see any seams anywhere. And I like the perspective distortion, which makes it almost look like a circular building, when, in fact, this wall is flat, and the two skywalks to the Bay department store come across almost like airline loading ramps branching out from an airport terminal.

Anyway, if you were wondering, yes, I did get the volunteer position. I don't think I should say what it is quite yet as I don't really know the people there yet and I don't know how kosher it would be to talk about anything going on, but I'll start showing up maybe a couple of times a week starting later this spring, and it will get me some much-needed experience for my resume doing something I'll probably enjoy a lot.

Psst... here's a photo of the Rideau Street Chapters bookstore that I took last fall. Maybe there's a clue there.

HAIRCUT AND OTTAWA IN SPRING.

2007-04-04T05:21:00.000Z

I got a haircut on Tuesday evening at my usual discount barbershop of choice, the Friendly Cuts inside the Merivale Road Zellers discount department store. Why did I get a haircut? Because I have a job interview of sorts on Wednesday... but it's a volunteer job, which is a good place to start for someone with nothing in the way of working experience like. I don't think I should give much in the way of details yet, but it involves data entry for an organization that ties in with one of my interests, and it might be good for making contacts with whom I can pitch some ideas I have. That's all I'll say for now.

Unfortunately, that picture is a little too honest. You can see my haircut, which looks great, but you can see the rest of my face, which doesn't look nearly as good as my full head of hair. Like every zit and blemish and some peeling skin on my nose that I didn't notice before I left. Also, you can see my pin of Peorth from Ah My Goddess!

Now, let's look at a few nice photos. Last Thursday, I went to an appointment with the job finding counselors whom I am currently seeing, and Thursday afternoon was the first really nice day of spring for photography, so, after the appointment, I went around both Westboro and downtown Ottawa, taking pictures against the backdrop of a crystal blue sky.

An Autostitch panorama of people boarding the O-Train at Bayview station.

An Autostitch panorama of OC Transpo buses parked at the Bayview Transitway station with the downtown Ottawa skyline in the background.

An OC Transpo Nova Bus LFS approaching the Dominion Transitway stop with the thawing Ottawa River in the background.

The Minto Metropole luxury condominium tower, the second-tallest skyscraper in all of Ottawa, looms over the Westboro Transitway stop as an OC Transpo New Flyer D60LF articulated bus passes under a pedestrian bridge.

The main Ottawa mosque, run by the Ottawa Muslim Association. (Eh, they're only mentioned once at Little Green Footballs, and only as one of many signatories on a CAIR-Canada press release condeming Israel for fighting back against Lebanon in that war that Hezbollah started last summer.)

There was a locksmith fixing locks on the door, but I haven't heard anything about anti-Islamic vandalism in Ottawa over the past week, so I assume that it was just routine maintenance.

The RH Coats building in the Tunney's Pasture government office complex, the fourth-tallest building in Ottawa according to this chart, and the OC Transpo Tunney's Pasture Transitway station.

An OC Transpo GMC New Look T6H-5307N bus, the most "old school" bus that is current;y active in OC Transpo's fleet, on Slater Street at Lyon in downtown Ottawa.

It was the first really nice day of spring, so I spotted some interesting cars on the streets of Ottawa, like this metallic blue late-1970s Pontiac Trans-Am, or Pontiac Firebird, if you prefer.

I like the weird patterns of reflected sunlight which I think is reflecting off of the Constitution Square Office complex onto the buildings in the background.

An Autostitch composite photograph of the Ottawa Crowne Plaza hotel, which apparently used to be called the "Skyline Hotel".

An Ottawa Police Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor on Lyon Street, passing the Ottawa Crowne Plaza hotel.

An Autostitch composite photo of Place de Ville Tower C, the tallest building in Ottawa.

An Autostitch composite of Tower C's relatively-stunted brothers, Place de Ville Towers B and A.

Bank Street looking south from near the corner of Bank and Sparks Street, and near the Bank Street McDonald's.

The guy in the Honda honked while I was taking the photo. I hope it was in appreciation... maybe he's a fan of my Flickr photos (or of this blog).

A yellow Pontiac Aztek taxi at the corner of Gloucester Street and Bank Street.

Some people find this car/SUV crossover vehicle "fugly", but I think it's cute in a weird way.

If Sega ever does another Crazy Taxi game, this would be a great candidate.

A slightly-distorted Autostitch composite of one of the L'Esplanade Laurier towers and a somewhat incongruous Shell station at the base.

And three different angles of Place Bell Canada, about my favourite tall building in Ottawa, mainly because it reminds me a bit of Rockefeller Plaza in New York from certain angles.

I'd post more, but I really need to get showered and get to bed. I'll talk to you after the interview.

COMMERCIALS I HATE.

2007-03-31T02:39:00.000Z

ROGERS WIRELESS NETWORK...

Thank you, Rogers. There's nothing I love more than being in an elevator, or some other such confined space, with a loudmouth dickwad whose ear and mouth is permanently fused to his cell phone. If it wasn't for your magical elevator-penetrating cell phone reception, how else would I know that the guy standing next to me is super-important? So important, in fact, that his important input is so importantly crucial to whatever big important project he's working on that the very important people to whom he's talking cannot bear to wait a whole half-minute to hear his important guy voice again while he rides the elevator. And, since he is so important that he doesn't need to be considerate of whether or not the other people in the elevator want to hear his side of the conversation, that must mean that he has a huge penis.

If I was the other guy in the elevator, I would be staring at him too. But not in awe. I would be looking at him just so I can see where his balls are so I can plant my foot in them to end his inconsiderate blathering.

THAT "YO MAMA" TEXT MESSAGE AD.

Yo' mama is so stupid that she listened to the "Text the word YO!" commercial and now pays $30 a month to get a lame "Yo Mama" joke text message sent to her cell phone every day, even though you can find millions of "Yo Mama" jokes for free on the Internet.

THIS ONE MAZDA COMMERCIAL

It's mostly just a standard car commercial, but it has this one line that rubs me the wrong way; (paraphrasing from memory) "Think of the car you want to drive... the car you really want to drive." But Mazda doesn't make sleek, superfast Italian cars with a yellow emblem with a black prancing horse on the hood. I don't see a Ferrari anywhere in that commercial, therefore the commercial is a lie.

Even if you don't like Ferraris as much as I do, are there any kids who, when asked of their dream car, say, (Rush Limbaugh fake kid voice), "Mommy, mommy, when I grow up, I want to drive a Mazda!" I don't think Mazda's even that popular a brand with the "Ricer" crowd... they seem to prefer cars like the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo or the Subaru Impreza.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MEGUMI HAYASHIBARA!

2007-03-30T22:46:00.000Z

Today is (or "was", since March 30^th is over in Japan) über-anime-voice-actress Megumi Hayashibara's 40^th birthday. Megumi Hayashibara is the most prolific and probably best know of all Japanese seiyuu (voice actors and actresses).

North American anime fans probably know her best for one of the following four roles:

Ranma-chan (girl-type Ranma Saotome) from Ranma ½.

Lina Inverse from Slayers

Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop,

Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

And that's only scratching the surface of her resumé. She was also the voice of Atsuko "Nuku Nuku" Natsume in All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, Pai in 3x3 Eyes, and Ai Amano in Video Girl AI, to name just three more of her title/main character roles, and she will soon be heard as the voice of Atsuko Chiba in Satoshi Kon's Paprika.

I also like her work in many female supporting character roles such as Achika Masaki (Tenchi's mother in the TV series continuity) in Tenchi the Movie: Tenchi Muyo in Love, and Christina Mackenzie in Gundam 0080: A War in the Pocket.

Megumi is also a successful J-pop singer, a radio show host, a registered nurse, and a wife and mother.

Happy 40th birthday, Megumi! (I hope you enjoy being middle-aged! )

Here is my birthday tribute to Megumi Hayashibara; I'm singing "Watashi ni Happy Birthday", the first theme song to All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku. Sorry about the quality of the sound... I need a new microphone.

(EDIT: I re-recorded a better version, with Megumi in the background.)

For comparison, here it is as sung by Megumi.

(Lyrics and translation are here.)

TOP 10 FAVOURITE CARS AT THE OTTAWA-GATINEAU AUTOSHOW.

2007-03-29T06:58:00.000Z

So I went to the Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow last Thursday... it was the second car show that I've been to in my life (the first was in Montreal in 2001, an event where I'm very, very annoyed that I didn't think of taking pictures), and it was fun... nothing really worth writing a narrative about. I showed up at the Ottawa Congress Centre, looked at cars, took a lot of pictures, and left. My only real annoyance, other than a near total lack of the "booth babes" you get at Japanese auto shows (Hyundai had a couple of young women, though not wearing anything tight or skimpy), was the total absence of Ferrari at the event, though I suspect my beef there is with Ferrari/Maserati of Montreal not thinking Ottawans are worthy enough to gaze upon their exquisite horseless carriages and not with the Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow.

Here are my photographic highlights:

Certainly, the main attraction for me in the absence of any Ferraris was to see a honest-to-god fully-restored original Shelby Cobra 427. As far as I can tell, it's an original and not one of the thousands of licensed kit-built replicas (it says "Ford" on the side plate), and it's great to see a Shelby Cobra that has a rear end, unlike those front-end-only Cobra replicas that WirelessWave cell phone stores use for attention-grabbing displays.

This silver first-generation Chevy Camaro was totally badass.

As was this Ford Mustang Mach 1.

And this 1970 Dodge Challenger, one Challenger I truly want to see "go at throttle up".

Speaking of Dodges, this photo of a new Dodge Charger in "Sublime Green" with a 5.7 litre Hemi engine is by far the most popular picture that I took at the auto show, with over 150 Flickr views in just the first four days that I had it up.

The Porsche 911 Targa 4 is the happiest-looking Porsche ever created. Its anthropomorphic "face" looks like the mutant offspring of Lightning McQueen and Sally Porsche, and would kind of look like Pikachu if you painted it yellow with red cheeks.

Ford had its A-list out.

The Ford GT in cherry red with white racing stripes, just the way I have it in Gran Turismo 4 and now Test Drive Unlimited (which has the expensive Ferrari license on the XBox 360 but not in the Playstation 2 version, grrr...)

And the Ford Shelby GT500 Mustang. If I had a Ferrari, I'd probably have this as my second car, but in the reverse colour-scheme, blue with white stripes, so it would be the modern version of the original Shelby GT500 Mustang that Rally Vincent drives in the Gunsmith Cats manga.

Ferrari/Maserati of Montreal might not have been interested in making the two-hour trip west, but John Scotti of Montreal's John Scotti Automotive did, bringing the "exotic" component of the show.

A gaggle of Lamborghini Gallardo and Murciélago cars. Yes, I know Lamborghini uses a bull as the logo, so I should probably say "a pen of Lamborghinis" or "a herd of Lamborghinis", but I think "gaggle" rolls off the tongue better.

And some Lotus Elise Exige cars in red and yellow.

Anyway, you can see dozens more of my car show photos in my 2007 Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow Flickr album, and I still have dozens of photos yet to post.

PET CHOW... PET CHOW... PET CHOW...

2007-03-23T16:20:00.000Z

...Rat Poison

From Mark Johnson of the Associated Press via the Guardian.

"Rodent poison has been found in pet food blamed for the deaths of at least 16 cats and dogs, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Agriculture and Markets said Friday.

Spokeswoman Jessica Chittenden would not identify the chemical or its source beyond saying it was a rodent poison.

State agriculture officials scheduled a news conference Friday afternoon to release laboratory findings from tests on the pet food conducted this week.

The deaths led to a recall of 60 million cans and pouches of pet food produced by Menu Foods and sold throughout North America under 95 brand names. There have been reports of kidney failure, some fatal, in pets that ate the recalled brands. The company has confirmed the deaths of 15 cats and one dog.

Menu Foods last week recalled ``cuts and gravy'' style dog and cat food. The recall sparked concern among pet owners across North America. It includes food sold under store brands carried by Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway and other large retailers, as well as private labels such as Iams, Nutro and Eukanuba."

Reminds me too much of the Saturday Night Live "Petchow Rat Poison" commercial starring Will Ferrell for me not to post this:

Petchow Rat Poison

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AUTOSTITCH MIRACLE!

2007-03-22T18:32:00.000Z

The past weekend, I discovered some (almost) magic freeware called AutoStitch, created by a University of British Columbia student named Matthew Brown. It's a full-fledged program, not a Photoshop/GIMP plugin, that assembles a set of single images taken from a single vantage point into a panorama, and it's completely automatic.

Here's a panorama that I assembled last year of the corner of Sainte Catherine's and Stanley streets composed of photos that I took in downtown Montreal last July.

I used a Photoshop plug-in that sphere-izes the individual component photos very slightly in order to make the edges match up a little better. It looks okay, but it's far from seamless, and it took hours of work.

Here's a Autostitch panorama comprised of the same source photos.

Click on the picture to see it full-sized and the improvements are instantly noticeable. The architectural components of this photo are as close to being seamless as you'll ever get from photos taken from this particular vantage point without using a fisheye lens. You can see some slight bending in the lines beyond the usual vantage point curving, but you have to really, really look to see it. This is because the software uses pretty sophisticated AI to not just attempt to match up edges as close as possible, it blends for total continuity between the pictures, almost as though the program recreated the entire scene in 3D.

Not everything on a city street is motionless, so the program rendered some of the pedestrians from the overlap areas as motion-blurred "ghosts", but that doesn't really detract from the image. In the middle of the intersection, there's also a chopped-off portion of a bicycle wheel, but that's the sort of detail you'd only notice if you go over the full-size panorama of the corner of Sainte Catherine's and Stanley Streets in downtown Montreal with a magnifying glass.

And the best part is that all I had to do is change the options to render this picture at 100% size and upload the photos into the program, and the program did the rest. It took a few minutes for the program to render the final image, but the important thing for a lazy guy like me is that the computer did it all. No cumbersome cutting-and-pasting, no "feathering", no "masks", no messing around with control points. Just simple "put photos in", "get panorama out" action.

AutoStitch is truly TEH BESTEST THING EVAR! Thank you, Matthew Brown, I'm going to take a lot more photos with panoramas in mind from now on.

Here are the Autostitch panoramas that I've already done at Flickr.

Speaking of photography, I'm going to the Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow at the Ottawa Congress Centre (in the bowels of the Rideau Centre/Westin Hotel complex) this evening, so check out my Flickr account over the next few days for, hopefully, some cool car photos, and I'll probably post a few highlights here.

ANIME FANS IN THE NEWS!

2007-03-22T05:47:00.000Z

It's time once again for my very, very, very occasional feature, "Anime Fans in the News", where I showcase fellow anime enthusiasts who have had some kind of impact on society at large.

Meet Mike Dobson, a freelance Canadian animator with an extensive resume, including working as an assistant animator on children's cartoons such as Little Bear, Rupert, Pippi Longstockings, Anne of Green Gables, and more, as well as working on animation aimed at a slightly older audience, like the Teletoon Detour series Sons of Butcher and the live-action/animated hybrid film Osmosis Jones.

Mike Dobson also has his own animation studio, Evil Clown Animation, whose main purpose seems to be trying to shop around to animation production companies a character concept called Siobhan (pronounced "Shabon"), a scantily-clad, nimble, athletic warrior lady who seems to have cut from the same cloth as Aeon Flux, except in a swords-and-sorcery fantasy setting rather than a cyberpunk dystopia setting.

He posted a four-minute-long Siobhan pilot animation at YouTube. You can also see various other clips on his YouTube channel, including one where he boasts about Siobhan being a feminist hero, and another one where he talks about the general hand-drawn animation process (he neglected to mention one crucial part of his own personal creative process, but I'll get to that later).

In the description for Siobhan at YouTube, Mike Dobson talks about wanting to capitalize on the niche popularity of anime by blending the elements that make anime popular with a westernized animation style.

"As well, Japanese animation (anime) has gained a significant hold on the world animation-viewing public. There is still a vastly under-exploited North American film and TV industries response to the stylistic elements that have made anime a success.

Siobhan takes the best elements of the North American and Anime filmmaking traditions and molds them into cult classic material. The result will shock and entrance the animation-viewing public. We can make a character that the world will hear about."

Eh, looks like crude fanart. Siobhan doesn't really stay "on model" from shot to shot, and I doubt that's intentional like the way John Kricfalusi does it. Also, the stylistic elements don't remind me of any of the sorts of anime I watch, though I suppose that's largely because the most violent sorts of things that happen in animes like Ichigo Mashimaro are pillow fights.

But that's all neither here nor there.

Dobson also mentions his future hopes for Siobhan:

"Siobhan is an adult animated series concept with strong potential for videogame, comic and merchandise tie-ins"

Well, looks like Dobson will have to put his Siobhan merchandising plans on ice for a while as he'll be taking a hiatus from his animation career that will last up to fourteen years.

From CityNews Toronto:

"A Toronto animator who runs a company called "Evil Clown Animation" has been convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old girl and could face a 14-year jail sentence.

Thirty-seven-year-old Michael Dobson was found guilty of four counts of sexual interference after having a five-month relationship with a 13-year-old girl in 2002.

"It took a lot of courage for this young woman to come forward with these allegations. She spent most of her teenage years dealing with this court case and these incidents," said Crown Attorney Cara Sweeny.

"I know that she is relieved and pleased to have some closure in this matter, and that's certainly what this verdict is for her."

Currently the legal age of consent in Canada is 14 years old. Dobson met the young girl when she was only 12.

Despite her youth, the judge took note of her maturity.

"This young lady is 13 going on 19. I don't condone his behaviour in any respect. I found she was precocious beyond her years," he said during his ruling.

Dobson will be sentenced on May 18th."

The CityNews article doesn't mention this, but Global National mentioned that the sex acts occurred within the animation studio itself. So, evidently, one technique that animators can use to relieve stress is to diddle twelve-year old girls under the drawing table.

You do have to wonder how much of this Siobhan character is based on his lolita-esque girlfriend. Maybe the judge is right and the girl really is "precocious beyond her years" in more ways than one.

The most important question is, should they ever make a live-action Siobhan film, who would direct? Roman Polanski or Victor Salva? Maybe Gary Glitter and Michael Jackson will do the soundtrack? And Jeffrey Jones can make a special appearance as the tentacle monster.

EDIT (2:30 p.m.): Somewhat predictably, the prosecution isn't seeking anything even close to the maximum sentence.

From The Toronto Star:

"While I don't condone his behaviour in any respect, I found that she was precocious beyond her years," Gans said as he rejected a Crown motion to have Dobson assessed for pedophilia or other sexual illnesses.

She had in her makeup "more of the punk rock/Queen St. crowd than her years would suggest," he said.

Gans said Dobson was guilty of "abject stupidity" but there was no evidence of mental disorder.

Dobson denied having sex of any kind with the girl. The judge concluded it was his word against hers and "There were too many gaps in his recitation of events."

A prosecutor said she would seek a jail term of up to two years.

Dobson's lawyer will ask for a conditional sentence, often served as house arrest."

I guess Mike Dobson doesn't want to be anyone's "bitch" in the general population of a federal prison.

THE RETURN OF SHOULDER CAT...

2007-03-20T06:07:00.000Z

Eh, I never got around to auditioning on Canadian Idol. My mother didn't want me to embarrass myself. I can't say that I have an aversion to that, but I do have an on-again, off-again aversion to being in huge shoulder-to-shoulder crowds AND even though they said that they were guaranteeing that everyone who would show up would have a chance, I didn't want to wait in line for hours upon hours as though it was May 1999 again and I wanted to get to the (now-closed) Faubourg Sainte-Catherine Cineplex-Odeon cinema in downtown Montreal for 6 a.m. in order to wait 10 hours just to get tickets for one of the early Wednesday afternoon showings of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (which I did, though that was actually an exercise in redundancy as I managed to get midnight screening tickets to see the movie, in English, at the Cineplex-Odeon Carrefour-Dorion cinema without waiting in any kind of line) AND I managed to find other things I wanted to do this weekend, most importantly sleeping well into the afternoon.

I'm sure they'd have considered my performance bad, but not in the intentionally bad way I would have intended, just "boring bad" without any "train wreck" value that would make it worth putting it on the "Worst of" specials. The kind of bad when they'd just videotape over your performance after you're done rather than preserve it as the pinnacle of wretchedness.

Anyway, last week, my brother used Spring Break to visit his girlfriend in Toronto, but it would have cost too much to rent a car in which he could have brought along his kitten, Reginald (Reggie), so he just went by Via Rail and got me to make near daily trips to his apartment in eastern Ottawa just to "catsit", meaning I fed him and fussed him, and Reggie used me as a scratching and a biting post (just a little, not that much). But at least I got to play Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf on the Gamecube.

I swear, that cat can't seem to get enough out of climbing on my shoulders. And I mean, he jumps straight up from the ground. I don't put him up there. Our own cat, Ember, only did that once, the day we got her in 1996, and that was to gain my confidence, and I seem to remember that I was sitting on the carpet playing the Sega Genesis (presumably Dune). She never did the shoulder thing again and I can count the number of times that she voluntarily jumped on my lap with one hand (mostly for warmth during the week-long power outage after the 1998 ice storm).

Here Reggie is hiding behind my brother's TV unit, between a pile of VHS videotapes and the Nintendo Gamecube.

I like this shot, I caught him mid-meow.

Here he is climbing my leg. You can see that he's a long-haired cat, though I couldn't figure out the exact breed even using Wikipedia (probably a mixture).

And he's "shoulder cat" again, this time getting me just as I was about to leave.

He's like a furry black-and-white parrot.

His favourite perch, other than on my shoulders, seems to be on the radiator, especially on unseasonably cold days like we've been having in Ottawa this past week.

I think the shutter just snapped at an unfortunate moment, but Reggie looks really pissed in this photo. It looks almost like someone flattened his nose. (I don't know who that is on television in the background, I think it was a commercial.)

Reggie has a new favourite toy, the strap on my Kodak C643 EasyShare Digital Zoom camera.

And, finally, here I am fussing him. All-in-all, I had a cuteness-saturated week (topped off by my purchase of volume 3 of the Strawberry Marshmallow (Ichigo Mashimaro) manga, which I'm actually writing a review of since this volume really "pushes the envelope" in some respects).

In absolutely unrelated news, my Vancouver brother, John, was in a minor car accident the other day, when his Ford Mustang got slammed into by a minivan running a red light. He's okay, but the car, while still drivable, has significant damage to the passenger side door, which the minivan driver will have to pay for. I'd almost be willing to wager that the minivan driver a) was talking on a cell phone, and b) had a "Baby on Board" sign in the back.

I've taken quite a few pictures of Via Trains over the past week, which can be seen in Flickr in my Via Rail Trains set, but, since train photos always get me a couple of dozen views an entry, here are a few.

A Via Rail train with a General Motors F40PH-2 diesel locomotive in an unusual green livery, advertising the cellular telephone and communications company, Telus.

Another Via Rail General Motors F40PH-2 locomotive, this time in the usual yellow, silver, and blue livery, just pulling out of Ottawa Train Station on the way to Toronto.

Okay, not exactly a Via Rail train, but the Canadian National Railways #6200 steam engine on permanent display in front of the Canada Science and Technology Museum.

A Via Rail train with a General Electric P42 Genesis locomotive just out of Ottawa Train Station, passing by the OC Transpo St. Laurent bus yards on its way to Montreal. Taken from the St. Laurent Boulevard overpass (the Ottawa St. Laurent, not the Montreal one, duh).

And, last but not least, a very fine shot of another GE P42 Genesis locomotive cutting through the freshly-fallen March snow as it approaches Fallowfield station on the way to Toronto.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT CANADIAN IDOL...

2007-03-10T06:37:00.000Z

...but I might just try out for it anyway. Just for the hell of it.

Yep, I spotted that Ottawa Canadian Idol audition poster at the St. Laurent Centre on Friday, advertising that they will be at the Centre Court (the area near the Bay department store) on Saturday, March 17^th and Sunday, March 18^th from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., meaning, of course, that I'll probably get there around 3:59 p.m. on the Sunday, procrastinating late riser that I am.

On the odd chance that the tens of thousands of teenagers and twentysomethings will actually give me a turn at the microphone, I think I have the perfect song picked with which to ~~humiliate myself on the "Worst of" audition special on CTV~~ showcase my talents, and that is... "Save this World", the theme song from Sega's Phantasy Star Universe, sung by Kelli Sae.

I've already been practicing singing it.

I can tell you my motivations. It's not the money. It's not the fame. It's not the girls (or maybe Thai Ladyboys depending on the mood). I just want a Maranello. A Ferrari 550 (or 575, which is almost identical), perhaps the most straight-up handsome car ever to roll out of Enzo's factory. Goddamn it, I can live in a bungalow for the rest of my life, eat the same fast food, never get a big screen TV or a home theatre or anything too high tech, or a girlfriend. If there's a Maranello in my garage, my life would be complete. As long as it's red. And I'm making enough money off my "singing career" to at least pay for the gasoline and insurance.

Oh, another funny thing I spotted at the St. Laurent Centre today?

Softron Income tax agents. Well, they're not exactly gutbustingly hilarious in and of themselves, what I find amusing is their sign. If you know your Internet forum images insult memes, that's the exact same stock photo of an ecstatic office worker that has been made famous with the quote "Wow, old news is so exciting!"

Also, I went to the South Keys Wal-Mart on Wednesday to buy a couple of pairs of Mexican-stitched Wrangler and Levi's "Comfort Fit" jeans, and I couldn't resist the opportunity to make fun of their current advertising campaign:

TINY POST-OSCAR THOUGHTS...

2007-02-26T07:08:00.000Z

Well, congratulations to Helen Mirren for winning Best Actress in one of the few years I even cared enough about any of the Best Actress nominees to have an opinion for her spot perfect performance as Queen Elizabeth, portraying Her Majesty in the most reverential yet sympathetic performance imaginable. I'm not someone who got teary-eyed over the death of Lady Diana (it was an unfortunate, regrettable, and untimely death to be sure, but I wasn't part of her cult of personality so her passing didn't personally affect me in any substantial way) yet I loved that movie because, while it did present the Royal Family as being somewhat out of step with the mood of the general public over the death of Diana, it wasn't pointing fingers at them to castigate them as objects of ridicule; it was very fair in the way it presented their reluctance to participate in the public grieving.

Obviously, I would have preferred it if The Queen had won Best Picture, but I'm not upset that The Departed won. Nor am I happy that The Departed won. I'm just indifferent. I eventually got around to watching the film and, while I thought it was well-made for what it was with good performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, and Matt Damon (not so much Mark Wahlberg... he really didn't make much of an impression on me with this film so I don't know why he got a nod for Best Supporting Actor), I really don't get what the fuss was about, or, at least, why so many movie fanboys on message boards were jizzing their sweatpants over it. The Departed just seemed like a standard mobster/corrupt police/crime movie, nothing more, nothing less. I'm not a backlash bandwagon-jumping "hater" as some of the Rotten Tomatoes fanboys posting in this thread seem to think those of us who weren't too thrilled with this win we are, I simply find The Departed to be overrated. Crime movies just aren't my bag, I guess (except for Bottle Rocket, though they aren't exactly hard-boiled criminals in that film), and I'm especially not fond of "everyone dies" endings like The Departed has. That was a bummer.

However, one Oscar loss I'm very happy about is Brian Singer's mostly awful Superman Returns losing for Best Visual Effects. (And I really liked X2: Mutants United, not to mention the Richard Donner Superman film-and-a-half, so I don't know how Superman Returns ended up being so wretched other than a fairly good performance from Kevin Spacey, who was the best Lex Luthor he could possibly be with what he had to work with.) It was a farce that Singerman... erm, I mean Superman Retreads... erm, Returns even got nominated, since I thought most of the special effects shots were much too dark, looked like cheesy PlayStation 2 live-action-actors-with-cheap-computer-generated-backdrops videogame cutscenes, and, speaking of videogames, made Superman himself look no more realistic than Cloud, Sora, Lara Croft, or Solid Snake. And Metropolis looked nothing like a real city, especially in the aerial shots. I'm not anti-CGI special effects by any means, but I'll still take the low-tech obvious bluescreen (or, rather, greenscreen since the costume was blue) of the Christopher Reeve Superman films, since at least old-fashioned "practical" special effects had charm to them and weren't sterile CGI exercises that looked like rejected demo reels submitted to Squaresoft.

And what little I saw of Ellen DeGeneris, since I was mostly watching Heroes, eating supper, or playing the first Getaway game, which I bought super-cheap from a Toys R'Us clearance bin the other day, was very "meh": she didn't suck as bad as Whoopi as a host, but I far preferred Steve Martin, Chris Rock, or even David Letterman.

YEAH, I CALLED IT.

2007-02-26T03:08:00.000Z

"I hope Cars wins, but I suspect Happy Feet may pull an upset victory against Pixar, since Happy Feet is very environmentally correct while Cars, with NASCAR and "Larry the Cable Guy", might just be too "Red State" for the largely Democrat Academy."

Congratulations to Happy Feet for winning the Best Animated Feature Oscar, I guess.

I feel pretty much the same way as I did when Spirited Away beat Lilo & Stitch four years ago... I could see it coming when few others did, but I preferred the one that was thought to be a lock but didn't win, myself being one of the few Japanese anime fans who actually preferred Lilo & Stitch, since I found Spirited Away to be rather unfocused and scattershot compared to Hayao Miyazaki's earlier films, especially Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. Likewise, there was plenty to admire about Happy Feet, but the anti-fishing (not overfishing off the coast of Antarctica, just fishing, period) "message" was presented in a ham-fisted manner with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

I didn't see Happy Feet win because I was too busy watching invincible cheerleader Claire Bennett shoot the radioactive Ted Sprague with a tranquilizer dart (I think it was a tranquilizer dart) just as he was threatening to go "nova", thwarting a nuclear explosion (but still destroying her house) on the new episode of NBC's Heroes, which Global played a day early in Canada because of a 2-hour 24 tomorrow night.

THE BEST ANIMATED FEATURE OSCAR: A FEW THOUGHTS.

2007-02-25T18:50:00.000Z

Blargh, I spent pretty much all of last week stuck at home, sick with a pretty bad cold that sapped much of my posting energy. And, of course, I spent what energy I had left playing PlayStation 2.

Tonight is the Oscar telecast, meaning that I'll flick back-and-forth between that and King of the Hill reruns up to the Best Animated Feature award, after which I'll tune out. I really liked The Queen, and, while I think Helen Mirren has a good shot at taking Best Actress, I'm not interested enough to see her win, and I don't think The Queen will take Best Picture; my money, if I was betting, would be on The Departed, which was alright, with good acting from Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson, but I found the film itself to be a pretty standard corrupt police department crime flick. I suppose it's good that Martin Scorsese will likely finally win the Best Director statue that has eluded him all of these years, but I would have preferred it had been for The Aviator two years ago.

Anyway, about Best Animated Feature: since Luc Besson's "animated Troll movie" Arthur and the Invisibles (Arthur et les Minimoys) had been disqualified as an "animated" film for having more than the allowed 25% live-action footage, meaning that the total number of eligible films on the short list is just 15, one below the threshold for triggering the extra two nomination slots, the nominees were exactly what I thought they would be (and also are exactly the films, of those that had a realistic chance of getting nominated, that are most deserving of nomination).

Cars, John Lasseter.
Happy Feet, George Miller.
Monster House, Gil Kenan.

So I've seen all three of these, and, as such, I don't have to track down things like Open Season or Barnyard to have an informed opinion.

Cars, while not on the level of Pixar's The Incredibles or Monsters, Inc., is still my favourite film, animated or otherwise, in a rather weak year. The Michael Schumacher-voiced Ferrari cameo at the end (and, if you listen to the French dub on the somewhat-disappointing-for-lack-of-commentary-track DVD, it's also really "Schumi" in French too) kind of sealed it for me. And the film is fantastic eye candy with the ridiculous amount of detail put into the visuals, even by Pixar standards, even if the plot is essentially the Michael J. Fox movie Doc Hollywood with cars.

Happy Feet is another terrific-looking movie, with jaw-dropping visuals that really bring Antarctica to life. And for people who are wary of Robin Williams' vocal performances since Disney's original Aladdin, where Robin Williams feels he has to do a thousand impressions that have nothing to do with the plot just to keep the parents happy and to try and recapture the magic of the Genie, in Happy Feet he stays in character, or, rather, characters (he's the voice of both Ramon and Lovelace), delivering performances that are both energetic and restrained.

Monster House, while nothing too spectacular, was a fun movie that featured some advances in character animation: the animation of the kids was motion-captured, but, unlike a lot of previous attempts at motion-capturing actual performances, they avoided falling into the uncanny valley of zombie-like creepiness with the facial animation, striking a fine balance between "realism" and "stylization". A lot of people praised this film as being a return to the somewhat less sanitized "smart" kids movies of my youth like The Goonies, but it wasn't quite on that level. (The Goonies had statue penis jokes.)

I hope Cars wins, but I suspect Happy Feet may pull an upset victory against Pixar, since Happy Feet is very environmentally correct while Cars, with NASCAR and "Larry the Cable Guy", might just be too "Red State" for the largely Democrat Academy.

WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF IRONY?

2007-02-19T07:30:00.000Z

Walking around on the ice of a frozen lake for an hour with no difficulty, and then, after you get home, slipping and falling on the stairs. While carrying a mug of hot chocolate, which ended up mostly all over my sweater, my face, and my hair. I had to take another shower! Though I was fortunate and didn't break anything, and only got a couple of bruises. I did feel humiliated all evening.

I haven't posted my Saturday Winterlude pics, or the ones from the other Saturday for that matter, but I might as well post the Sunday Winterlude pics right now.

As I wanted to get back in time for the Sunday evening Fox cartoons, I didn't go to downtown Ottawa, just Dow's Lake, but I went there via Preston Street's "Corso Italia", since I was hoping, once again, to see a Ferrari.

I didn't see a Ferrari, but I did see the following.

A giant drill, on the back of a truck.

City of Ottawa Fire Station #2.

A cool blue Ford Mustang GT convertible.

An interesting-looking block of businesses, including Compiano Bakery, Casa Nicastro Deli, Night Club Paraiso, Pasticceria Reggina, and, of course, that most authentically Italian of all eateries, Domino's Pizza.

"Corso Italian" mural artwork in the Preston Street underpass under the Queensway.

The Ottawa headquarters of Open Text Corporation and a garage with the rather non-Italian name of Krishna Auto Repairs.

Stoneface Dolly's, a restaurant that seems to be especially popular for brunch.

Beer Art Treasures, a store selling beer paraphenalia (but not beer, because of the LCBO's Beer Store's monopoly in the Ontario market).

I don't know what the food's like, but Ristorante Il Piccolino has a very charming exterior.

There's other stuff on Preston, but a lot of it I've photographed before. Check my Flikr photostream for more.

I crossed Carling and reached Dow's Lake.

Prince of Wales Drive was blocked off to traffic... you can sort of see an Ottawa police officer directing traffic.

Meaning, of course, that there was a Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor car parked nearby, so I was obliged to take yet another Crown Vic pic.

Anyway, my primary interest in going to Dow's Lake wasn't to photograph skaters, it was to photograph horses being used for calèche sleigh rides around the lake. I took a whole roll of film photos of horses on Saturday, but I took them from the shore using the big-ass zoom lens of my Nikon F65 SLR camera. I also took a few digital shots with my Kodak EasyShare C643, but the horses were out of range of that camera's relatively paltry mechanical zoom, so I had to use digital zoom, and the pictures came out looking much too grainy and pixellated.

On Sunday, I got a little braver and actually ventured out onto the ice of the lake itself, to get close enough to the horses to take semi-decent digital shots.

I can't post every single horse picture that I took, but here's a good sampling.

A line-up of three of the four horses (no, I don't think their names are "War", "Famine", "Pestilence", or "Death").

I'm no equine expert, but I'm pretty sure at least one of those horses is a Clydesdale.

Here's the fourth, my favourite, returning from a trot around the lake.

It was getting colder, so the horse driver put on one of those horse-sweater things.

Another interesting thing about this particular photo is that it's the only one of the lot that even has a hint of horse penis. I was kind of hoping that I could get just one horse schlong shot, since a picture like that would likely be "Favorited" dozens of times at Flickr within a day or two. (The most "Favorites" I currently have for any picture at Flickr is a paltry six for my Piccadilly Circus crayon drawing, and that's been up since June.)

I suspect the horses have been trained not to pee while on duty, as I didn't see any tell-tale yellow snow in the main boarding area. Either that, or the horses just thought it was just too freezing cold to "whip it out".

The horse was licking the post. I think he was trying to eat it.

Here are a few shots of the horses trotting back towards the boarding area.

All four horses together.

All in all, I hung around for maybe 45 minutes, taking horse pictures.

I could have stayed for at least another hour and still made it back in time for the 7:30 p.m. Simpsons rerun, but I was beginning to get really freaking cold, so I left the ice before the sunset.

The steps back to "terra firma".

On the way to the bus stop to get the #3 bus down to Meadowlands and Fisher, I got an unexpected photographic bonus.

The O-Train (with a Bombardier Talent BR643 locomotive), going through a trench towards the tunnel under the Rideau Canal. These shots are rather different from the usual shots of it that I take from station platforms or the Scott Street bridge, where it's only surrounded by fields.

Finally, a shot of the sunset over the Experimental Farm and the corner of Baseline and Prince of Wales as seen through the filthy, sludge-encrusted front-side window of an OC Transpo New Flyer Invero bus.

EXTRANEOUS SATURDAY PHOTOS.

2007-02-18T08:24:00.000Z

I was feeling a little under the weather on Friday, but, on Saturday afternoon and evening, I was out and about again, taking pictures of Winterlude events at both the Dow's Lake and the downtown Ottawa ends of the "skateway" portion of the Rideau Canal.

I have way too many Winterlude pictures to post before I go to bed, so here are some of the extraneous pictures that I took on Saturday, ones that I haven't (at the time of this writing) yet posted in my Flickr account so this isn't just a copy-and-paste entry.

First, here are yet more shots of the OC Transpo O-Train (a Bombardier Talent BR643) pulling into Bayview station, but they're evening shots, so I got some nice, fluid motion blur that I can't get in the daytime.

I got down on the ground right near the end of the tracks to capture the precise moment that the "locomotive" becomes the "caboose", and its eyes turn "evil" (red).

A nice sharp shot of the middle of the train.

And more motion blur as the O-Train pulls out of the station heading back towards Greenboro.

Next, I went in the Daly Street tunnel under the Ottawa Congress Centre and the Rideau Centre, just to see what I could see, and I spotted something I had never personally been able to photograph before, a Ottawa Police Chevrolet Astro van that I believe is a honest-to-goodness "paddy wagon".

I guess it's parked in the tunnel to keep it hidden but handy on the odd chance that some kind of skirmish should break out on the Rideau Canal ice.

Not too far away, the Teletoon Hummer was still parked under the Ottawa Westin Hotel, but they moved it towards the front of the parking bay, so it was parked parallel to a Winterlude logo ice sculpture.

I got a picture of my favourite 6teen character, Nikki Wong, "standing" next to the Winterlude logo, just because I'm not one to pass up the opportunity to take a gratuitous shot of Nikki Wong.

Since I was nearby anyway, I decided to stop by the Rideau Street Chapters bookstore. I bought volume 8 of Bisco Hatori's Ouran High School Host Club manga, and I got a nice shot of the aperture in the second floor, looking down towards the first floor and the escalator.

Notice all of the names of Canadian authors, artists, singers, actors, and other notable people.

Finally, yet another shot of an Ottawa Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, on Elgin street in front of Place Bell Canada.

I'd say that taking pictures of Ottawa Police Crown Vics would have gotten old a long time ago, as I've got dozens, but they always seem to have a knack to show up in front of interesting backdrops. (I wish they'd drive around their new Dodge Chargers downtown, though, since I've yet to get even a single picture of one.)

DO CORVETTES GET SICK IN WINTER?

2007-02-16T08:36:00.000Z

At the end of January, my mother was driving to the Thrifty Rent-a-Car outlet on Bank Street south of Hunt Club Road to pick up my brother and drop him off at Ottawa International Airport so he could fly back to Vancouver. On the way, I spotted a particularly photogenic yellow Corvette C6 covered by snow in the parking lot of Jim Tubman Chevrolet, but I didn't get my camera ready in time to snap it, so I made a mental note to drop by there on foot at some point in the near future. On Thursday, I was photographing trains nearby anyway, so I decided to walk over there and I didn't find one photogenic Corvette there, I found two photogenic Corvettes there, sticking out of the snowdrifts from the previous day's snowstorm.

I think the Corvette on the left has a cold... it looks like it has a runny nose.

I bet they both wish spring would arrive.

I mentioned that I was taking photos nearby. To be precise, I was studying the Via Rail Canada track through Ottawa on Google maps to find a better vantage point for taking pictures of Via trains in motion besides the railroad crossing on Merivale, and I noticed that the Via tracks pass directly parallel to Data Centre Road in south-central Ottawa between Heron Road and Billings Bridge Plaza, and the best part of that is that it's directly on the OC Transpo 111 St. Laurent route, so I could get there essentially "door to door" from the bus stop near my house.

And, yes, it was indeed a pefect vantage point. I had to climb a tiny bit of an embankment, but there's quite a gentle slope leading down to the ramp leading to the Heron Transitway stop.

This is easily the best train photo that I've taken this winter, of a Via Rail train with a General Motors F40PH-2 diesel locomotive and Bombardier LRC carriages passing over the bridge over Heron Road. It's on the final stretch of its journey to the main Via Ottawa Train Station.

And the tail end.

Twenty bone-chilling minutes later...

Here comes the westbound late-afternoon Via train to Kingston, Toronto, and Aldershot. The engine is, once again, a General Electric P42 "Genesis" diesel locomotive (#920), the most common type of locomotive on the routes to and from Ottawa.

It's passing by the OC Transpo Heron Transitway station.

A sideshot. I pivoted a little too quickly, so I didn't get anything but the locomotive in this shot.

And this is more or less the tail shot that I wanted to get last week at the railroad crossing, with snow blowing in the wake of the train.

Data Centre Road definitely is the best place I've yet found in Ottawa for trainspotting... the only downside was, to get close to the tracks, I had to wade in a couple of feet of freshly-fallen snow, and I only wear ankle-high winter shoes, so the snow was forming its own insole in both shoes, especially under my ankle, making me feel like I was walking in high heels, and, for some reason the snow in my shoes was giving me an "ice cream headache". I tried emptying my shoes inside the slightly-heated tunnel in Heron Transitway station, but only got about half of the snow out, and it was still melting as I was walking around Heron to get to Bank Street, soaking and hyper-chilling my feet.

I got an unanticipated bonus on Bank Street:

Another Via Train with a GE P42 Genesis locomotive, but, by this time, it was much too dark for me to get anything other than a big motion blur.

TELETOON HUMMER AND YTV'S ANIME CHANNEL

2007-02-12T00:05:00.000Z

Yesterday afternoon, before going to the University of Ottawa anime club, I walked along the Rideau Canal, taking pictures of skaters skating along "the world's largest skating rink". I may or may not post those photos here (you can see some of those photos in my Flickr account, but, when I passed by the parking bay of the Ottawa Westin Hotel on Colonel By Drive, I saw something parked there that was definitely worth posting here:

The Teletoon Hummer, or the "Teletoon Humvee", if you prefer the nickname for the military-ready General Motors sports utility vehicle that isn't also a nickname for a certain sexual act, with the Ontario license plate number "TELETOON", which doesn't actually have a number in it at all, unless those "O"s are really zeroes. I presume it was in Ottawa for Winterlude.

The back of the Humvee has the characters from two popular Fox shows, Family Guy and The Simpsons. Reruns of The Simpsons are actually shown on The Comedy Network in English, but Homer and Bart are on the back of this Humvee because Télétoon shows them in French.

The driver's side of the Humvee features original Canadian animation shown on Teletoon, though the only one of this group I'm familiar with is 6Teen, the characters in the middle, with easy-going skateboarder dude Jude Lizowski and the cynical, counter-culture, socially conscious Nikki Wong shown here. I don't know where Jen Masterson or the other characters are, but I suppose that Teletoon didn't want the whole side of the Humvee dominated by one show.

This is the front... nothing much to say. It looks like a Hummer.

The passenger side features cartoons shown on The Detour, the Teletoon equivalent of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block. All three shows originated on Adult Swim: Aqua Teen Hunger Force (by the way, I want one of them Boston bomb-scare Lite Brite Mooninite signs), the stop-motion animation Robot Chicken, and The Venture Bros..

Yes, there is a day/night discrepancy between these photos. I went to the anime club and realized that I didn't take a photo of the passenger side, so I went by there again on my way to McDonald's after Kamichu! was over.

And, while I'm on the subject of cartoon cable channels in Canada...

Somewhat surprisingly, the CRTC has approved YTV's application to start a (largely) anime channel.

From the DigitalHome.ca blog:

"In Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2007-41, the Government regulator approved an application from YTV Canada, Inc. for a broadcasting licence to operate a new Category 2 specialty programming called the Anime Channel.

Anime is not new to YTV which began offering a video on demand service called YTV Anime On Demand to Rogers cable customers in 2005 and has since been picked up by several cable companies including Shaw and Cogeco.

Anime generally refers to Japanese animation which itself has been influenced by the drawing style of manga, or Japanese comics.

The proposal by YTV stated the station would include a minimum of 85% animated and related programming and a maximum 15% information-based programming. The channel would be targeted at adults over the age of 18.

A Category 2 specialty channel is a specialty digital television channel which cable and satellite television providers are not required to carry.

No word yet on any launch dates or programming."

I still have some degree of skepticism as to whether any broadcaster can afford acquire enough anime to float a 24/7 cable channel and whether such a channel would attract as much interest from advertisers as a children's channel with more varied content, but, if anyone can pull it off, it's YTV. I certainly have a lot more confidence in YTV's ability to run an anime channel that can gain more than a handful of viewers than in either ADV's or Funimation's attempts.

Since the YTV anime channel would not be a subsidiary of any North American anime distributors, it would not be beholden to any particular label and could theoretically deal with any distributor for any show that's been licensed over here, from Haruhi Suzumiya to Hellsing. And, since YTV did such a good job building an audience for female-oriented anime in this country by making Sailor Moon a big success relative to Sailor Moon's slim fortunes in the United States, you can bet that there would be a large shoujo contingent in their programming. (Considering that YTV already has close ties to Viz Entertainment, I wouldn't be surprised if the not-officially-licensed-yet-but-sure-to-be-announced-soon-almost-certainly-by-Viz Ouran High School Host Club is one of the launch series on the channel. And I'd bet Viz would still love to get some of their older properties like Ranma ½ and Maison Ikkoku shown on television somewhere.)

If this anime channel thing pans out for YTV, I wouldn't be surprised if cable operators south of the border start knocking on YTV's goopy purple bubblegum monster "Keep it weird!" door to start showing the YTV anime channel in the States.

The only problem is that anime fans in Canada would finally have a better selection of anime on television than anime fans in the United States, meaning the title of Jesse Betteridge's site, Zannen, Canada, would no longer be applicable.

PUBLIC NOTICE

2007-02-11T22:27:00.000Z

(Why pay for a classified ad when I have a blog that people can find on Google?)

Are there any Ferrari enthusiasts in the Ottawa, Ontario or Gatineau, Quebec areas looking for a traveling companion with whom to attend the Ferrari Challenge race on Circuit Mont Tremblant in Mont Tremblant, Quebec on the weekend of June 15^th to the 17^th, 2007? This year, there's not just the Ferrari F430 Challenge, but also a "Historics" race featuring everything from the 250GT to the Enzo!

I'm an amateur photographer and artist who lacks a car with which to get to the race, and I checked the Greyhound site and there's no direct bus service from Ottawa to Mont Tremblant (I'd have to switch at Montreal and wait a ridiculous amount of time).

What's in it for you?

Will split the cost of the hotel/motel room (reasonably-priced accomodations only, two nights maximum).
Will split the cost of gas.
I will give you a complete set of prints of every Ferrari photo that I take. (Allow 6 to 8 days for delivery.)
And, as a special "thank you" gift, I will draw a coloured pencil rendering of your favourite one of my Ferrari photos (will take a while).

Hey, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal, huh? All that and my companionship... not that that last part is all that much of an incentive. Just send me an e-mail or leave a comment on this entry if interested.

If no one's interested in taking me up on that offer, I would also be interested in attending the Ottawa Ferrari Festival track event at Calabogie Motorsports Park west of Ottawa on the Friday of that very same weekend... I'll pay for the gas to get to and from there. But I'd prefer to attend the Mont Tremblant race, since that's the Ferrari version of NASCAR, with cars that are much more glamourous.

MORE TRAIN PHOTOS.

2007-02-10T07:01:00.000Z

One thing that I've been doing the past week or so has been going around to several different places in Ottawa to take more train photos.

Last weekend, my brother Nick went to Toronto to visit his girlfriend, so he wanted me to check in to his apartment a couple of times to feed and fuss his cat, Reginald. Since he lives in the Elmvale area, I decided to stop by the main Ottawa Train Station a couple of times, to photograph Via Trains.

This is Ottawa Train Station, a Massey Award-winning structure designed by architectural firm John B. Parkin & Associates and built in 1966.

The interior is big, but not cavernous like Montreal's Central Station (Gare Centrale). ~~Also, it doesn't have a McDonald's.~~

I like the locomotive models that they have on display in front of the ticket counter.

But I wasn't there to take pictures of the interior.

Unfortunately, I got there around sunset both days, so only a couple of the pictures of the trains themselves turned out halfway decent.

A Via Rail General Motors Diesel F40PH-2 locomotive, pointing towards Montreal.

A Via Rail General Electric P42 Genesis locomotive, pointing towards Toronto.

That's all of the train photos I took last weekend that are worth posting, though, while I was at the station, I grabbed a Via Rail train schedule for future use.

On Wednesday, I had another appointment to see an employment counselor in the Mechanicsville area of western Ottawa. Since I was near Bayview station anyway, I thought I'd actually ride the O-Train all of the way to Greenboro so I could visit South Keys shopping centre.

Here are some shots of the O-Train taken from the Scott street bridge.

I took this photo of an O-Train on the platform at Bayview station, though it pulled out of the station without me, so I had to wait for the next one, but it's only a 15 minute wait, and I wanted to take some shots of the train from the platform anyway, so it's all good.

The first O-Train pulling out.

The second O-Train approaching the station.

The Bombardier Talent BR643 "locomotive" car has a definite "face", and it looks happy to see me.

I got brave and took a "candid" shot of people getting on the train, though it's not fully "candid" as the guy on the right of the photo seems to have noticed the camera.

This is the interior of the Bombardier Talent "locomotive" car, with the motor under the seats and the driver sitting behind a clear glass door. According to Wikipedia, these carriages are meant for "mainline" (re: Via Rail or Amtrack intercity trains) use, so the seats are a little more comfortable than most commuter trains.

Because of poor and/or incomplete planning, the O-Train currently only covers 5 kilometres (3 miles) and five stations from north to south, with the northernmost stop being in the middle of the Breton Flats and the southernmost stop being at the South Keys shopping centre, which is really just a big box store version of a strip mall. Hence, it's commonly maligned as "the train from nowhere to nowhere", but, in the middle is the Carleton University stop, so a large part of the daily ridership is university students going north or south to catch one of the Transitway buses at either Bayview or Greenboro.

The Carleton stop is also the only stop on the line with two platforms and double tracks, with the runs of the northbound and southbound trains timed so that the northbound train passes the southbound train. Here's a northbound O-Train passing us.

After Carleton, the O-Train passes over the Rideau River, the only semi-scenic view on the entire trip (it goes through a tunnel under the Rideau Canal.)

This is looking east. I think the unfrozen open water at the bottom of the photo is the top of the rapids approaching Hog's Back Falls, about 2 kilometres to the southwest.

And, before you know it, you're at Greenboro station and have to get off the train. I think I spent as much time waiting for the train as I did actually riding it, and that is not an exaggeration. The entire trip, for those you Montrealers familiar with the Montreal-Rigaud/Dorion line, is about the equivalent riding from Beaconsfield to Sainte Anne de Bellevue in terms of distance, or from Cedar Park to Sainte Anne de Bellevue in terms of the number of stations.

Since the wait between trains is so short, the O-Train only idles at the end of the line for two or three minutes before embarking in the opposite direction.

Bye-bye O-Train!

On Friday, I wanted to mail a parcel containing two manga (if you're curious, they're Ouran High School Host Club and Strawberry Marshmallow) to a friend in Massachussetts. Since I had the Via schedule, I thought that, while I was out anyway, I might as well stop by the railroad crossing on Merivale Road when a train was about to pass through. I decided to try and get there by 4:50 p.m., when Via Rail train #47 departs from Ottawa station en route to Kingston, Toronto, and some place near Hamilton called "Aldershot", but, first, it stops at Fallowfield station, in southern Nepean, at 5:07 p.m., meaning it crosses Merivale Road at about 5 p.m. sharp.

This is the Merivale Road railroad crossing, which is a little south of the portion of Merivale Road that I'm intimately familar with. It's below Hunt Club Road and Slack Road, between Capital Drive and Macfarlane Road.

For those of you bus otaku, that's an OC Transpo Daimler-Chrysler Orion VI bus crossing the tracks.

Here it comes. The above shot was snapped manually, but the following four shots were taken with the rapid shot feature of my Kodak EasyShare C643 camera, since the train's passing by much too fast for the camera to process each shot one-by-one.

The Via Rail locomotive is another General Electric P42 Genesis.

WHOOOSHHHH!

I wanted to get another shot of the train leaving a cloud of snow in the wake, but the train was moving so fast that I got the cloud of snow, but no train.

BONUS SHOT: A winter sunset in Nepean, taken at a vacant lot on Merivale at the corner of Slack Road.

FUN OTTAWA FACTS THAT I MADE UP!

2007-02-10T06:36:00.000Z

You might think that the centre of the city of Ottawa might be somewhere around Parliament or maybe the Rideau Centre, but that's not the case.

The actual City Centre is an eyesore building with a truck loading dock surrounded by fields located around 2 kilometres west of what neophytes think of as "downtown". Fools.

In a cost-cutting move, mayor Larry O'Brien slashed for police uniforms by 75%, forcing Ottawa police officers to have to resort to buying cut-priced name brand police uniforms from "last season" at Winners.

Also affected, the bus budget. Here's the latest model Chevy ~~van~~ "bus" from OC Transpo, bought second-hand from The A-Team. You'd be surprised how many people they can cram in the back. It's an uncomfortable ride, but really not all that different from riding the 95 Orleans bus in rush hour.

The Canadian Forces are still in Afghanistan, but the Army is also active on the home front, running a new daycare at the St. Laurent Centre. The LAV III (Light Armoured Vehicle) doubles as a playground apparatus.

NEW TEMPLATE, NEW LOOK.

2007-01-30T19:15:00.000Z

Bye-bye "Sanddollar", hello "Snapshot Sable".

"Sanddollar" looked great when I started using it in the summer of 2003, replacing whatever default template it was that was this blog's original template, but that was almost four years ago and now it was getting to look, if not outright decrepit and dated, certainly a little long in the tooth.

The blog has evolved over the past year into something a lot more visually-oriented, with half my posts being essentially picture diaries cum travelogues, and "Sanddollar" just seems better suited for dense text than it does photos. Lately, I've just been feeling as though I've been doing the digital equivalent of sticking snapshots into a paperback novel.

What really frosted me is that fewer and fewer of the pictures I've been posting have been showing up in Google Image Search, and Google Image Search's latest update, which has gone online this week, has forgotten most of the remaining pictures that I had left in the index. I'm convinced that something in one of the many alterations that I had done to the "Sanddollar" template on my blog has been repelling Google Image Search spiders, so I've decided to start afresh with a blank slate template.

One of the changes I'm making is that I am retiring the old link list, and it'll be a while before I'll post a new one, excluding links to other places I am on the Internet. It had become really bloated, and, while I still look at plenty of the listed sites, some of the sites were relevant to me three or four years ago but aren't so much anymore, especially now that I'm in a different city. Not that that is in many way meant to be a disparagement of anyone's site. Plus, I think at least a dozen of those sites are either gone or have changed URL's.

For now, I'll just have a link to the old links, which I will put at the bottom of this post.

Another change I'm making is that I'm retiring the PicoSearch search box. It served me well for a few years, but it was cumbersome for me to have to update the index manually, and, over the past few months, it has become redundant as the "Search" function at the top of the screen has gone from using Google, which is unreliable in terms of what it does and doesn't find, to being an internal Blogger search, which has a complete index of everything I've written here since 2003 and which displays the whole post. For my purposes now, Blogger's internal search engine is better in every way that PicoSearch.

And, with PicoSearch gone, you may be pleased to know that, for the first time in four years, I have enabled "Comments" in this blog. PicoSearch is what was keeping me from doing this before, for a complicated reason. See, when you have "Comments" enabled in Blogger, you get a separate page for each entry. The problem with PicoSearch for those of us free-loaders is that free memberships are limited to indexing 2000 pages, which I'd pass relatively quickly if I'd enable comments, while, if I don't enable comments, I can go for about 20 more years. But, if I stop using Picosearch, the 2000 page limit is no longer a problem.

I'll probably put a title graphic at the top of the page, but that requires actual work, so it will be a while.

CANADIAN BLOGS
Colby Cosh
Andrew Coyne
All AgitProp, All the Time Paul JanÃ©
DAIMNATION! Damian Penny
Segacs's World I Know Sari Stein
Adam Yoshida

AMERICAN BLOGS
COINTELPRO Tool- Manufacturing Consent Since 2002
G-Files (Jonah Goldberg fans)
Insta Pundit Glenn Reynolds
Little Green Footballs Blog
Miserable Failure (no, it's about Hillary Clinton...)

BORDER-HOPPER BLOGS
Being American in T.O. Debbye Stratigacos
David Frum's Diary @ National Review Online

COLUMNISTS, PUNDITS,

RADIO/TV HOSTS & OTHERS
Ann Coulter
Al Franken (real site)
Al Franken #2, LyingLiar.com
Al Franken #3, Frankenlies.com
David Frum (official site)
Sean Hannity
George Jonas
Rush Limbaugh
Michael Moore (real site)
Michael Moore #2 Moorewatch.com
Michael Moore #3 Bowling for Truth
Mark Steyn

POLITICAL
The Center for Consumer Freedom (Anti-Nanny State, anti-anti-Smoking Gestapo, & anti-Nutrition Gestapo)
Free Republic
Justice for Daniel Faulkner, the truth about cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal
National Review Online
Standing Tall, Justin Berzon's restored Twin Towers proposal
Team Twin Towers, for those of us in favour of restoring the majesty of the Twin Towers to the Manhattan Skyline.

CARTOONS (& COMICS)

JAPANESE, AMERICAN,

CANADIAN, & OTHERWISE

Anime Jump (Mike Toole & others)
AnimeNation
AnimeNation's "Ask John" column by John Oppliger
AnimeNation Forum (where I'm Kiyone)
AnimeNation Links
Anime News Network
Anime News Network Forum where I'm Tenchi
Anime News Network My "My Anime" list
Anime On DVD
Anime News Service
The Big Cartoon Database
Doctor Snuggles (official site)
Furinkan.com, about the works of Ms. Rumiko Takahashi (Urusei Yatsura, Ranma Â½, Maison Ikkoku, & Inu Yasha)
Jingoro.org, about Izumi Matsumoto's Kimagure Orange Road manga
Kevin Spencer (official site)
King of the Hill (official FOX site)
King of the Hill Information Site
Kiyone, the teal-haired goddess (from Tenchi Muyo)
the Miyazaki Mailing List @ Nausicaa.net
Mouse Planet (about Disney)
Natsume Maya (Anime News straight from Japan)
Nausicaa.net about the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli
South Park Scriptorium, scripts, episode guides, and much more!
South Park Studios, the official South Park site.
Tomobiki-cho, the Urusei Yatsura Web Site @ Furinkan.com
Untalkative Bunny Club @ Yahoo (semi-official)
Untalkative Bunny fanlisting (offical)
The World of Urusei Yatsura's Lum
Alex Weitzman's "The Animated World" @ bcdb.com
Zannen, Canada, Jesse Betteridge's page bemoaning the lack of anime on Canadian TV.

OTHER CARTOON LOVERS
(Yes, Anime = Cartoons)
"We love cartoons, we love all the action.
We love cartoons, how they dance and sing.
We love cartoons, they're the main attraction.
Cartoon heroes can do anything." (Muppet Babies)

"Arxane"
"UberDirector"'s UberDirectory
Amanda Wells ("Incisivis")

MOVIES, TV

& STUFF
CHUD - Cinematic Happenings Under Development
Roger Ebert
The Internet Movie Database
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes Forum where I'm Kiyone
My Rotten Tomatoes Journal

OTHER STUFF
Stuff? Were the midterms hard?

Fandom Wank, Mainly LiveJournal-oriented, but there's plenty of Anime Fandom mockery
F*ckin' Otaku- anti-fanboy
Homestar Runner- Cartoons, games, and stuff.
Jagged*Team Games, Anime & stuff
Maddox: The Best Page in the Universe (besides X-Entertainment, duh)
Something Awful, home of the "Weekend Web" column, as well as spoofs, Photoshop gags, and sarcastic reviews about all sorts of things, including Hentai games.
Strong Bad's E-mails
X-Entertainment Matt Caracappa (nostalgia page mainly for those of us who went through grade school in the 1980s)

Anime News Network where I'm Tenchi in the forum. Also check out my anime list.

Linked on Blog
Search Engine,
BlogWise, BlogHop,
Blogging
Ecosystem, YUL
Blog (Montreal
area bloggers),
BlogStreet

Technorati Profile

I'M HONOURED...

2007-01-30T01:24:00.000Z

...by General Motors!

Yes, last Friday, I had an appointment with a job-finding counselor at a centre for helping those of us with certain "issues" get work in the Bayview area of west-central Ottawa (which reminded me a fair bit of the Montreal suburb of Sainte Anne de Bellevue, with narrow streets and very similar architecture with boxy, two-storey residences).

Afterwards, I wanted to take a trip to the St. Laurent Centre in east-central Ottawa, but, after taking a few bus photos at the Bayview OC Transpo Transitway stop, but, once I got on the 95 Orleans bus, I realized that I had never taken the bus past St. Laurent, and I got the urge to take it all of the way to the end and check out Place d'Orleans shopping centre, the only major mall in Ottawa that I had yet to visit.

Place d'Orleans is like the slightly poorer cousin of the St. Laurent Centre, a few kilometres to the east. It has most of the boutiques that all "destination" malls have, the Gap, HMV, EB Games, La Senza, but it only has one fancy department store as an anchor, The Bay, and a Zellers, which used to be a Wal-Mart, while St. Laurent also has Sears and Toys R' Us instead of a Zellers. (Though, to be fair, that puts it on par with Bayshore Shopping Centre, which has the same HBC fancy/discount department store combo.) So, Place D'Orleans seems to be heavy on the mall events to bring more people a few extra miles out of central Ottawa to shop. Right now, they have a "car show" that's really just dealerships for the east end of Ottawa showing off a sampling of their current models in the mall itself. It's not exactly the Detroit North American International Auto Show or even the Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow, but you can still get some nice shots of not-so-exotic cars in an unusual environment.

I took this photo of a Chevrolet Colorado pick-up truck reflecting the skylight at Place d'Orleans. (It's on display courtesy of Mews Chevrolet, "Ottawa's One Price Dealer".)

(See this photo's page at Flickr for a link to the full-size pic.)

As with most photos of Chevy cars, and other General Motor cars, that I post at Flickr, I tagged it "gmfyi", in hopes that the person that searches Flickr for good GM photos would see it and put it in the official General Motors FYI blog.

And... uhh... for the first time ever, that's exactly what happened. My Chevy Colorado photo is featured as the "Photo of the day" on the GM blog. Bask in my reflected glory. You can touch me for a quarter.

Other, not so acclaimed, Orleans photos.

OC Transpo buses waiting in-between routes at the Place d'Orleans Transitway terminal.

The main entrance of Place d'Orleans shopping centre.

A lame escalator mirror self-pic at the Bay department store. Yeah, I still need to lose a few pounds, but I've been heavier than that.

Buses at the OC Transpo Place d'Orleans Transitway stop at sunset.

The Place d'Orleans HMV music shop, which seems a little bigger than most mall HMV's in the Ottawa area.

I like taking photos of HMV's so much that I now have a whole HMV set at Flickr. I've photographed all of the HMV stores on the Ottawa side of the river but still need to visit the one in Gatineau before I have a complete set.

The Anime DVD racks at the Place d'Orléans HMV store.

Not too bad a selection... much better than the Merivale HMV or even the Bayshore HMV, though the Anime Stop store in Nepean obviously has a much better selection of anime than any HMV store in the Ottawa area.

Shoujo fans might notice a title called Lady Oscar... that's the anime, otherwise known as Rose of Versailles, about a female who dresses up as a male to become a soldier in revolutionary era France. It's never been licensed for the English-speaking North American market, but, if you can read French subtitles, that DVD is Region 1 and contains the original Japanese dialogue.

A fabulous mustard-coloured Ford Mustang on display courtesy of Jim Keay Ford Lincoln Sales.

This shot of the Ford Mustang GT is almost as good as the shot of the Chevy Colorado, if I do say so myself. I wish Ford reps would search Flickr the way GM reps do, so I could be featured in the official Ford blog.

The food court at Place d'Orleans has a KFC... that puts at least their food court a notch above the St. Laurent Centre's food court.

Here's the weird thing about the Place d'Orleans shopping centre, it also houses the eastern Ottawa headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I believe the RCMP occupies much of the space vacated when Eaton's went bankrupt almost eight years ago (damn, it's been that long?).

And, while some Mounties still ride horses in some rural areas of Canada, I don't think the east Ottawa detachment has any stables in the parking garage.

I like the look of the deep blue twilight sky falling through the skylights at Place d'Orleans shopping centre.

Here's a famous fountain, if you're a Tom Green fan. This is one of the mall fountains featured in the classic "Scuba Hood" bit (where he takes money from the poor, in the form of the coins in the fountain, and gives to the rich, at the bank), which is about the funniest sketch on the original Tom Green Show after the "Tiger Zebra" one (where he hung his painting in the National Gallery of Canada... without permission).

The Ottawa suburb of Orleans at dusk. Yes, I went out of my way to take this shot with Wendy's and Tim Hortons in the frame.

The Bay department store as seen from the upper deck of the parking garage.

And here's the Orleans Blockbuster Video outlet, being passed by a motion-blurred OC Transpo New Flyer Invero bus. I love how blue, orange, and yellow dominate this shot, making the Blockbuster seem like a warm Hollywood oasis on a cold Canadian evening.

POLICE ACTION AT THE ELGIN STREET McDONALD'S!

2007-01-28T05:36:00.000Z

Elgin St. McDonald's, Ottawa. (Stock photo)

Usually, I go to McDonald's just for reliable sustenance, but, on Saturday evening at the Elgin Street McDonald's, I got a tasty meal and a free show! Starring police officers!

I got to the McDonald's on Elgin at around 10:10 p.m. after debating in my head as to whether I'd go to that one or the McDonald's on Rideau Street. I was thinking, after attending Saturday's screenings of the University of Ottawa anime club, I might head up to Rideau Street as I've been thinking about renting the PlayStation 2 RPG Tales of the Abyss and I saw they had it on the shelf when I was there the other day whilst someone lost Merivale Blockbuster's only copy months ago. But I decided against it as my brother had just got me that Shin Megami Tensei DEVIL SUMMONER yadayadayada game, so I thought it would be a little silly to rent yet another RPG while I'm still starting on that game and I've not quite finished Phantasy Star Universe (not to mention Star Ocean: 'Till the End of Time, but I need to start that game over as I encountered a game ending glitch). Not that any of this is particularly important to the story, I just wanted to emphasize that I was lucky that I decided to go to the Elgin St. McDonald's as I was able to witness the sort of events inspiration-challenged bloggers like me consider to be blogging "gold".

I ordered my usual Big Mac combo. Since the restaurant wasn't too busy, they made the Big Mac and fries "fresh", so it was piping hot for my cold, cold hands. I like it that way. I put the food on the table and got my napkin, straws, and ketchup, and squirted my own Coke into the cup (since it's a self-serve drink McDonald's).

When I was about half-finished eating my fries, I heard a knock coming from the back of the restaurant. A McDonald's employee was trying to get someone to leave the washroom. I heard her saying "They always seem to come here," "they", in this case, presumably meaning "random junkies/drunks off the street". There was no response from inside the washroom whatsoever.

For the next ten minutes or so, the employee just kept on knocking, enjoining the person inside to come out, with no signs of life coming from the other side of the door. Then there was fumbling around with various keys, with no luck. They also tried unlocking the door electronically using some kind of push-button remote unlocking system, but the door wasn't going to open. They mentioned calling the police in passing while they were still in the knocking phase, but, eventually, they gave the person inside a five-minute ultimatum, after which they were seriously going to call police.

I was starting on my Big Mac when the talk of calling the police got a little more serious, so I decided to eat it a lot slower than I otherwise would because, damnit, I didn't want to leave and miss the best part. After I was finished eating my Big Mac, I sipped the remainder of the Coca-Cola about a millilitre at a time, with long periods of time between the sucks. I decided to read volume 6 of Bisco Hatori's Ouran High School Host Club manga to maximize my loitering time. (By the way, Jesse, yes, Renge Hoshakuji does show up again in volume 6, so she's a recurring character in the manga and not just the anime.)

It took at least 10 minutes, by which time I was scraping the remaining food particles off of my Big Mac carton and sucking invisible Coca-Cola just to have a pathetic excuse to not leave, but, eventually, at around 10:35 p.m., the cops arrived on the scene, with two Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors parking on the northbound lane of Elgin St. (the other side of the road from the Elgin St. McDonald's), and one more Crown Vic cruiser was heading southbound, though I'm not certain if he was part of this police action or just a cop on normal patrol.

I tried to take a picture through the window of the police officers approaching the McDonald's, but it's hard to see them through the reflections.

Three police officers went to the front counter and asked the McDonald's employee, whom I assume was an assistant manager, where the problem was, and she led them towards the locked washroom.

They knocked on the door a few times, telling the occupant inside that they were the police and he/she should open the door. Still nothing, so one of the officers squatted down on the ground, peeking under the door, and he said that he could see a woman inside lying face down on the ground.

Since the door was deadlocked, I was kind of hoping that they'd just blast through the lock with their service pistols, but, then again, I remember a recent episode of Discovery Channel's Mythbusters where they did just that, and that method doesn't work as well in real life as it does in the movies.

But policemen don't need guns to open doors. They have their boots. One of the policemen started kicking the door, and, on the fourth or fifth kick, the lock gave. Not that you can tell from this photo that there is any kicking going on. I couldn't see much of the cop that was actually doing the kicking from my seat, just his kicking leg, and I got his foot when it was raised but it's mostly hidden behind one of the other cop's hands.

They opened the door, and I could see someone's legs and socks, and that was about it.

For a while, it looked like they were dealing with a corpse. She wasn't moving at all. I saw one of the cops try to peel her pants up and her socks down to check out her ankles (maybe it's a possible injection location?) and the leg was offering no resistance whatsoever.

The paramedics arrived, as did at least one firetruck.

This is another good photo for the Chevy Impala Flickr pool.

Three firemen entered the restaurant, one of them carrying an orange utility box. The guy sitting near me was wondering what use firemen could possibly be in this situation. I couldn't give an answer at the time, but it occurred to me later that they were probably there to smash open the door with an axe if the police had been unsuccessful in getting the door opened themselves. Once they saw that the door had already been opened, they were able to declare that their services were not required, to which the guy sitting near me said "No shit", or something to that effect.

The police lifted the body and turned her so that she was lying face up. While all of the movement of the body seemed, at first, to be initiated by the police officers, I eventually saw the leg move in what appeared to be voluntary motions.

Ambulances arrived at the scene. After I had left, I counted three of them when only one was needed... were they thinking that there might be a shootout or something?

Pretty much as soon as they arrived, I saw one of the policemen walking away from the washroom with his hand on the shoulder a woman, who looked dazed but who was able to walk away on her own. Surprisingly, she didn't look like a random street junkie. It was an Asian girl who looked to be a few years younger than me, probably in her mid-twenties, with short curly spiked hair, a shaggy brown mohair-ish sweater, and a pink scarf. Maybe she had overdosed, maybe she was piss drunk, or maybe she just had a seizure or something. There was nothing about her appearance that screamed "addict", but I know appearances can sometimes be deceiving. All I can say is that I don't know what happened before the door was locked, so I can't really judge.

I could have snapped a picture of the cops leading her away, presumably to the ambulance, but I didn't think it was appropriate. If she's a girl who just happened to make a few stupid mistakes with her life, I wouldn't want to embarrass her any further than she'd already be embarrassed. If what happened to her on Saturday evening wasn't due to pre-existing medical issues, then I hope finding herself face down on a McDonald's washroom floor represents her "rock bottom" point and I hope that she can get the help she needs to lift herself out of the pit and accomplish something worthwhile.

I left the restaurant just before 11 p.m., meaning that I'd have to wait for the OC Transpo 86 bus after the one I usually get on Saturday evenings, which gets to the stop on Albert St. at Metcalfe at about 10:55 p.m.

overdose OD drugs girl woman addiction drug addict heroin drunk drinking alcohol

O-TRAIN PICTURES...

2007-01-27T19:41:00.000Z

What can I say? Even if it's been the coldest week in Ottawa since last winter, I haven't felt as much like holing myself up in my warm basement and I've been going out more, going somewhere every single afternoon/evening since Monday.

Plus I've been playing videogames that I got for Christmas, and Januarymas, and my brother, John, is visiting from Vancouver. He got me Shin Megami Tensei: DEVIL SUMMONER, Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, one of those Japanese RPGs set in the real world, though in the Tokyo of the 20^th year of the Taisho era, which would be 1931 except this is an alternate reality where Emperor Taisho didn't die in 1926, bringing about the militarism of the Showa era under Emperor Hirohito. It's one of those titles that sounds super-dark, but the demons are wisecracking comic relief demons of the Disgaea variety, so the play is actually fairly light-hearted, but still really fricking tough. ("Wisecracking comic relief demons"... oh boy, what would the South African-born super conservative Presbyterian minister I had when I was a teenager, George A., say if he ever read this, I wonder?) I've been alternating between playing that, Phantasy Star Universe (solo only, not online), Tokyo Xtreme Racer: DRIFT (a cheap-ass bargain bin title that I got from the bin at Wal-Mart, though, for no-frills, down-to-the-basics, drift racing without the annoying voice-overs of Need for Speed: Carbon, it's good at what it does), Sega Classics Collection (mainly Columns), and, still, Out Run 2006: Coast 2 Coast).

My brother took two daytrips to Montreal, but I didn't go on either. I had an appointment with a job-finding counsellor on Friday and, on Wednesday, I just plain didn't know. Bah, and I was hoping to get some more pictures of Montreal in January to suppliment the ones I took five years ago.

I'm working on a couple of articles, but, since I want to go to the anime club this afternoon, for now, just enjoy these photos of the Ottawa OC Transpo O-Train, the train from nowhere to nowhere, pulling out of Bayview station on the Breton Flats. I took these from the Scott Street bridge.

For those of you trainspotters who are curious, the train is a Bombardier Talent BR643 low-floor diesel multiple unit train.

There aren't that many passengers yet, since it only goes from a field to a shopping centre (South Keys), so there's only three cars, including the locomotive cars on both ends.

SNOWY DAY IN THE OTTAWA SUBURBS!

2007-01-16T07:24:00.000Z

NOTE TO "CHAD": I replied, please check the bottom of the page for this specific entry.

Finally!

Winter has properly arrived in Ottawa, about a month too late. Not that I don't believe in global warming to some degree, but global warming is gradual, it wouldn't delay winter a whole month compared to the preceding year. I guess it's the El Nino affecting the jetstream or whatnot.

I had to take back Crank, an action movie starring Jason Statham, to Merivale Blockbuster. (Like with most Jason Statham movies, it's got good car porn, so it was enjoyable on that level, though the camerawork was a little too gimmicky.) So I thought I'd use the opportunity to take some pictures of a wintry Nepean.

My house covered with snow. Incidentally, my parents pay to have a snow-clearing crew plow the driveway, though they hadn't yet done it at the time I took this photo (a little after 4 p.m.).

Here's an excavator dumping snow that it cleared from the parking lot of an apartment building on Inverness into a big pile. (I looked up the make and model, and I think it's a Case 570M XT Turbo loader/tool carrier.)

An OC Transpo New Flyer Invero bus heading east along Meadowlands Avenue pulling up to the bus stop in front of Inverness Park. (I'm not getting on because I'm heading west, I'm just waiting to cross the street.)

Aaaannnnnndddd.... an OC Transpo Nova Bus MCI Classic. I don't see that many of these 1980s-era buses on the road in Ottawa to begin with, and even fewer than that have the modern OC Transpo maple leaf livery. (A few of the Nova Bus MCI Classic buses on the streets of Ottawa still have the OC Transpo livery from the eighties and early nineties.)

I got on the westbound 117 bus and got off at Merivale Road.

A snowplow clearing the parking lot of Merivale Zellers.

Here's traffic in front of the dual-bannered Wendy's/Tim Hortons restaurant.

You could say that the Tim Hortons donut shop is now itself frosted and glazed.

Here's a snowplow in front of the Merivale/Meadowlands Esso station.

You see several different types of snowplows in Canada. Some are just dumptrucks with a lot of attachments, but the kind seen in this photo are more specialized kinds of units, used when they just want to scrape the roads and not dump it elsewhere.

They kind of remind me of giant insects, like a praying mantis, for some reason.

There was another scraper plow just like this one at the Esso station. I think they use it as their base of operations for the Merivale Road sector.

There are huge piles of snow at the edge of the Merivale Place parking lot (that's the strip mall with the Shoe Company, Mexx, Sport Mart, HMV, Winners, etc...).

I dropped off the movie at Merivale Blockbuster, but decided against renting anything new, as I still haven't finished watching/playing the DVDs and Playstation 2 games I got for Christmas. (Yeah, I know, I still haven't written about Christmas... I'll get around to it soon, honest.) Also, it will be pretty frickin' cold the next couple of days so I'd rather not commit myself to having to return something before the weekend.

Snow-covered Merivale McDonald's.

Note the plow-equipped pickup truck at the drive-thru window. I guess he was clearing the parking lot and wanted a coffee.

Damn, I've taken so many photos of this particular McDonald's over the past year, as though it's Angkor Wat or something.

Since there was still around half an hour of daylight left, I thought I'd avail myself of the opportunity to take a few pictures of Merivale Road businesses that I've never photographed before (or ones where I wanted a better shot than what I already had).

Speedy Muffler.

Malabar costume rentals (which replaced the rather nice Indian restaurant that, unfortunately, closed soon after we moved to Nepean).

Audiotronic.

Labels (which I think is a store that sells brand-name clothing remaindered from other stores, like Winners. In other words, it's the second-run theatre chain of the clothing store world) and Smarty Pants (a "children's consignment store", whatever that means).

Merivale Road has several baby strip malls in the parking lots of bigger strip malls. This one has Popeye's (which I think is a meat store with no relation to the American fried chicken chain of the same name), Pho Thi "Noodle Soup" (I guess that's Vietnamese), Topper's Pizza, and a dental clinic.

The main road entrance to Merivale Mall, with the recently-expanded Shoppers Drug Mart and the 2nd floor YMCA/YWCA in the background.

Montana's Cookhouse and Bar.

Best Buy and Linens n' Things.

And the baby strip mall with the Second Cup café, Quiznos Subs, and that Alterna Savings pseudo-bank thing.

There's actually a second Esso along this stretch of Merivale, at the corner of Viewmount Drive. I'm not sure what the point of having 2 Esso stations only about 300 metres from each other is. They're even on the same side of Merivale Road (the southbound lane).

Somehow, I never got around to taking a photograph of the Merivale Harvey's franchise before. Maybe that's because I seem to be one of the few meat-eating Canadians who prefer his hamburgers fried instead of flame-broiled.

That's enough of my tour guide to Merivale Road for one day. I know your spines were tingling with excitement just looking at my National Geographic-quality photography.

I didn't feel like going home right away, so I decided to take the 111 bus to Lincoln Fields because the only way I could possibly top the adventure I just had was with a trip to... Wal-Mart.

Light streaks from rush hour buses at the Lincoln Fields Transitway stop.

I walked along Carling to the Lincoln Fields shopping centre.

This is the interior mall entrance to the Loeb supermarket.

Notice something a little out of place here? Keep in mind that I took this picture on January 15th, 2007. Three weeks after Christmas Day. Over a week after Epiphany (which is the last day of Christmas, for those of you in Rio Linda). Or is it still Ukranian Christmas until the 18th?

Woo-hoo! The second batch of 2007 Hot Wheels has hit stores in Canada! Mattel hasn't given us any new Ferrari Hot Wheels that I could find, but I did find three new paint schemes, a straight yellow F430 spider, a straight black Ferrari Enzo, and a black-with-flames Ferrari 333 SP (one of those racetrack-only models). I also bought a metallic blue Porsche 911 Matchbox car while I was there, and, altogether, they came to just five dollars.

Here's a picture of the interior of the Lincoln Fields Wal-Mart as seen from the in-store McDonald's. I don't think Wal-Mart permits in-store photography, so I was taking a huge risk... that a clerk might get snippy with me. If you want to play "Where's Waldo?", there are three clerks in this picture alone.

McDonald's still has the normal "Thank You" trash bins, but they also now have recycling bins, for those of us who want to paw through our garbage like a common raccoon, to paraphrase Mr. Burns.

By the way, in case you're wondering, I only had a Junior Chicken sandwich, not a Big Mac. I'm sure that's maybe a whole dozen calories healthier!

Another super-bold Wal-Mart picture, of the checkout line. I think this was the split-second that no one was looking at me. I like taking candid pictures, but I'm too shy to ask for permission, so all of my candids are of the backs of people's heads.

Here's the back of a "sidewalk tank" (tractor snowplow) that almost ran me over in the Lincoln Fields shopping centre parking lot.

I'm not sure if this is one of those new Boss Mustangs or if it's just a regular "new" Ford Mustang GT with a Boss Mustang-inspired yellow-and-black colour scheme. In any event, if he's driving it around in winter, I really hope he has really good rust-proofing. That road salt will just eat it up otherwise.

The stairs at the Lincoln Fields Transitway stop.

And, finally, an OC Transpo Ford F-150 plowing/salting truck.

I hope that I have been successful in giving you a small taste of what a Canadian winter looks like in suburban Ottawa when the snow is still fresh and pretty. Personally, autumn is my favourite season of all, but it was getting very depressing how "autumn" was stretching into January, as it just seemed unnatural. Ottawa's not Toronto, Ottawa is supposed to be above the snowline!

PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE.

2007-01-12T06:26:00.000Z

Oh, wow, less than two months after the "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" segment wherein Pierre complained about not being able to get the 18" Betty Boop figurine in a black French Maid uniform, Pierre has returned to NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien with another rant, and this time he's complaining about something near and dear to my own heart.

Usual "I started taping during Conan's introduction, so I missed the 'Let's face it folks, there's a lot of anger in America...'" disclaimer.

Conan O'Brien: ...there's Pierre. You can just see the rage coming off Pierre there. Pierre... Pierre says he knows how America feels and he's ready to articulate our anger for us, so here he is, once again, in a little segment we like to call "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage".

Singer: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

Conan: Hello there, Pierre, are you comfortable and angry?

Pierre Bernard Jr.: Comfortable and furious, Conan!

Conan: Then go ahead, old chum, and speak for America.

Pierre: Okay, here goes.

Recently, I wanted to purchase a display case to house my extensive collection of Hot Wheels cars, including my new favorite, the Arachnorod, a half-spider, half-car hybrid. My Hot Wheels have been sitting in a room where I display all my Pez Dispensers and View-Master merchandise, and I thought it was high time they were displayed properly. I decided to erect my Hot Wheel display case in my bathroom, that way I could look at the cars at least once or twice a day depending on what I had been eating.

There are a number of display cases available, but each one has their own unique problems. One case has sliding panels, giving me easy access to up to a hundred and eight cars, but it couldn't display any Hot Wheels trucks. Another case could display both cars and trucks, but it held fewer items and it had these huge hinges on the front panel, which I found distracting. Also, because of the size of the case, I wouldn't be able to open the swinging door and access my Hot Wheels cars when I'm sitting on the toilet.

Because of these problems, I still haven't found a Hot Wheels display case I like.

Bottom line, America? We sent a man to the moon and split the atom. Can't we also build a Hot Wheels case that can house my cars properly in my bathroom, especially my Arachnorod?

(Laughter and applause.)

Conan: Thank you, ah, thank you, Pierre, I'm, uh, I'm sure there are at least one or two other people in the world who know exactly how you feel.

Pierre: United we stand, muchachos.

Singer: PIERRE BERNARD'S RECLINER OF RAGE!

Conan: When we come back, Artie Lang is here, stick around.

(It's a good thing this rant was relatively short, by Pierre Bernard standards, as I couldn't find my VCR remote and had to keep on walking back and forth between the VCR and my computer just to get it line-by-line.)

I don't know what to suggest... I started buying Hot Wheels again last summer, and, in the autumn, I bought a case for my cars at Toys R' Us,

but it's a carry-case, not a display case. And it doesn't hold trucks.

I display the nicest Hot Wheels I have (mostly Ferrari and Corvette Hot Wheels cars, with a couple of Porsches and Shelby Cobras) on top of my manga bookshelf.

I think the easiest solution would be to just buy a separate trailer-rig display for the trucks.

ADVERTISING IS TASTY...

2007-01-09T09:38:00.000Z

My niece, Gen, chewing on a flyer for the Audiotronic TV/audio/appliances/electronic store on Merivale.

This might be her first solid "food" for all I know. (She's almost 6 months old.)

Yeah, I know, even with the new computer, I've been neglecting to update this thing. I'll write a proper blog entry about what I've been up to on Tuesday afternoon.

HEY THERE, PIERRE, ARE YOU COMFORTABLE AND ANGRY?

2006-12-29T06:32:00.000Z

Because of my computer problems, which have been resolved (I'll write about that later), I haven't been on the Internet as much the past couple of days, and I hadn't checked the SiteMeter for this blog for two days.

I was a little surprised to see that someone found this site via Google searching for "life size statues animated cartoon characters", which was the subject of a recent "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" bit, which I transcribed in full.

Could it be someone who saw the sketch on NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien and wanted to see if such things existed and are for sale?

On a hunch, I clicked on the link for further information about the person who found this site, and this is what I saw.

Hmm... this hit isn't from NBC.com this time, but the fact that it's from Elizabeth, New Jersey kind of narrows down the list of likely suspects as to who my mystery visitor is, so I think I can say with about 90% confidence, welcome back to this blog, Pierre Bernard Jr..

I don't know if you ever saw my entry about your Betty Boop figurine rant, but I did your homework for you, and this is what I wrote back then:

Hey, Pierre, if you're reading this, here's a site that seems to be selling the French maid Betty Boop figure in a black outfit, and here's the contact information for Character Collectibles from the Van Group website:

Van Group
2551 Philadelphia Ave.
Ontario, Ca. 91761

Phone: (909) 923-6789
Fax: (909) 673-9699
www.vangroup.com

Customer Services:
If you have questions regarding: New orders, Previous orders placed, Product knowledge, Store locations in your area, Rep information, Consumer questions please click on the link below
Email address: csinternet@vangroup.com

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

2006-12-26T03:21:00.000Z

I've had an... uhh... interesting Christmas.

First of all, what do the "Godfather of Soul" James Brown and my computer's harddrive have in common?

As of Monday, they're both dead.

I'm not 100% sure about my harddrive, but Windows starts up normally for a few seconds, but then I get the mega-blue error screen of death saying "INNACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE" and it won't even let me boot into "Safe Mode" to see what the problem is. My father will have a look at it, but I don't think there's anything that can be done, not if it's a hardware problem.

Fortunately for me, I have another computer, which is the one I was using when I was living in the apartment part-time and attending that computer animation school. However, due to my not being nearly as security aware in 2002 as I am now, I got a trojan disguised as an IRC program from Kazaa which automatically came on everytime I logged in that I was never able to get rid of using anti-virus programmes, Spybot, or Hijack This. Eventually, I reinstalled Windows 2000 over the existing Windows 2000, and that disabled the trojan but the reinstallation screwed up a lot of the drivers, so the picture is in basic 800 by 600 16-colour VGA mode pretty much identical to safe mode and my CD-Rom burer became read-only for some reason. It'll probably be my main computer, but I'll probably have to re-format the hard drive and start over from scratch before it's ready to access the Internet. (I'm typing this on my mother's computer.)

Bottom line, even though I haven't exactly been a daily blogger lately, blogging will still be light this week until I can get up and running on the other computer.

I'd tell you about other things I've done over the past few days, but I can't get the pictures off my Kodak Easyshare camera without messing around with the wires at the back of this computer. (It has a docking wire for a camera, but it's for the Ricoh Caplio, which uses a plug that is annoyingly similar looking but about a millimetre too wide for the Kodak Easyshare camera.)

In the meantime, if you celebrate it in either a religious or a secular capacity, I hope you and yours had a wonderful Christmas experience (despite the lack of snow in North America east of Denver... by the way, New World Order conspiracy theorists, if there really is a huge underground United Nations-run concentration camp for patriotic Americans located under the vaguely swastika-like runways of Denver International Airport, you'd think they'd have opened up at least a few of the dormitories for all of those stranded passengers), and, if not, at least you get time off and triple pay.

Speaking of people who had to work on Christmas (with due compensation, of course), my father did, so we're having the bulk of our celebration on Thursday, when my brother Nick and his girlfriend can also join us).

TODAY IS CHRISTMAS EVE!

2006-12-24T09:07:00.000Z

I ask you, is there any better way to spend Christmas Eve than by watching the Christmas episode of Ichigo Mashimaro (Strawberry Marshmallow, episode 12, "Present"), wherein Miu Matsuoka dresses up as Santa Claus to keep the innocent and naive Matsuri Sakuragi believing in Santa just for one more Christmas, all the while sucking on a candy cane and listening to the second Sailor Moon Christmas album (Sailor Moon Sailor Stars Merry Christmas, Columbia Japan, COCC-13827)?

Okay, there probably is, but I'm a pathetic loner anime fan.

I'll have to finish my Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve, again, but I remember last year that the big box stores like Best Buy weren't abnormally busy. As much as I want to see the downtown lights, I'll probably stay in the suburbs because of the lack of crowds.

EGG NOG: "WE ONLY GET THIRTY SWEET NOGGY DAYS!

2006-12-23T09:33:00.000Z

...then the government takes it away again!" (Homer Simpson, "Marge Be Not Proud")

(Note: this is the non-alcoholic stuff I'm drinking. I don't even have any brandy to put in it.)

Dairyland Egg Nog: 10/10
Sealtest Egg Nog: I dunno, I haven't opened the carton yet.

DAMNIT, GETTING INTO THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT IS ELUDING ME AGAIN.

2006-12-15T03:08:00.000Z

And I'm not even moving at Christmastime this year.

It has been kind of warm for December in Ottawa these past few days, with daytime temperatures exceeding 5ºC (low forties). I'm not screaming "global warming" just quite yet, since we did have a colder-than-average November through the beginning of December, and there was enough snow to barely cover the grass on December 1^st, though that was followed by some freezing rain that didn't entirely melt the snow, but made it a slippery white glaze. That's gone now. I hope we get some real snow by Christmas.

Not helping much is the fact that this year's slate of Christmas commercials flat-out suck. I think the last great Christmas commercial I saw was Office Max's faux-Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer-styled stop-motion animation "Rubber Band Man" commercial in 2004. The only commercials I'm somewhat partial to are the Bell Canada ones with the beavers, but that's mainly because I'm happy to know that the unjustly-fired-from-Saturday Night Live Norm Macdonald got steady work. (But didn't he used to do Clearnet ads, before that company merged with Telus? Has Norm switched cell phone "teams"?) Also, in the most recent Bell Beaver commercial, they're in some kind of shopping concourse with a directional marker on the floor that I easily recognize as being that in Place Ville Marie in Montreal, near the underground entrance for the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and the escalator to Central Station. I know it's been two years Sunday since I moved to Nepean, but I still get homesick for Montreal, even if I did visit in July.

I so very much miss the old Fran Drescher Old Navy "Holiday Hotline" Christmas commercials. Yeah, they were bad and annoying, but in a tongue-in-cheek "fun to hate" kind of way. This year, the Old Navy Christmas commercials are just bland and forgettable. ~~"Tis the season to be jolly. What do I see? Boughs of holly."~~ EDIT (December 17^th): Oh, pardon me, I was confusing the boring generic Old Navy Christmas tune with the boring generic Telus tune. The Old Navy one is the one that begins "You want to party 'till dawn." Well, that's how bad the Christmas commercials are this year that they're all merging together in one bland mental wallpaper.END OF EDIT. Yawn... I didn't particularly care for the Old Navy carolers from their 2004 Christmas campaign either, but at least they didn't commit the sin of being forgettable.

One product that's getting heavily-pushed this year, particularly on American talk radio though I also see some TV ads for it, is the Garmin Nuvi personal navigator. "Give a... Give a... Give a... Give a... Give a Garmin." Right... the perfect gift to tell your loved one... that he or she's a freaking idiot who can't even find his or her way to the end of the driveway without satellite assistance. Am I an old fuddy duddy at 32 years old? I just don't see the appeal of the device. Of course, frequent readers of this blog, the few I have remaining, will remember that I'm a chronic procrastinator who still hasn't gotten around to getting his driver's license, but if I had a driver's license, I could easily imagine getting very, very annoyed very, very quickly by that robotic woman's voice nagging me every 20 feet. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I've always loved paper maps and atlases and have never had trouble navigating using them, even when I was just a wee tyke. I don't even get lost in the mazes that are European cities... well, except for this one particularly hot day in Paris when my brother and I were almost literally dragging our heavy luggage around town as we were looking for a second hotel to stay in in Paris as the first (nice) hotel we stayed at could only book us for one night as the second night was Bastille Day or the day before Bastille Day, though, we had maps, we just weren't using them, and I actually enjoyed the exploration process. But it's not like I couldn't have found where I was on the map in a minute or two if I had wanted to. I consider my ability to navigate the traditional way a source of pride, and I would hate to think that they don't teach it in schools anymore. I make some concessions to modern technology if I'm going to a part of Ottawa I don't know too well, and I'll look it up on Yahoo Maps "to find the dopest route", and I have an ancient (circa 2000) Magellan GPS device that just gives coordinates and headings, but that's as far as I ever want to stray from traditional maps. And aren't men drivers supposed to be able to find their way around town without getting lost? I thought getting lost while driving was mostly a woman thing. Is the popularity of the Garmin Nuvi a further sign of the emasculation of men in modern culture? Bottom line, America? Electronic navigation aids are for pussies. And maybe also Ryoga Hibiki, but he's excused from not being able to find his way because his mind is too preoccupied with trying to avoid switching to pig form.

Oh, another Christmas ad campaign that's getting on my nerves is the Virgin Mobile "Won't you come on down to the freakshow?" cell phone ads that has animation that doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with the products they're selling. A herd of animals followed by a woman with all her money flying out of the window followed by two businessmen types who put themselves through the paper shredder only to emerge intact, making angels in the snow? What the heck does that have to do with cell phones? It's not even all that much of a generic, religion-neutral "Holiday" commercial either. And, yes, I remember that, only a couple of weeks ago, I defended the Erin Esurance ads even if the animation doesn't really have that much to do with online auto insurance. At least they have a coherent narrative I can easily follow. And Erin Esurance is an attractive cartoon character that I would like to have sex with or see having sex with other hot female cartoon characters. The "Freakshow" Virgin Mobile ads just have ugly animated photocollage characters, the sort of which I've never found attractive.

Speaking of Erin Esurance, why couldn't Ghostbot have animated a Christmas-themed Esurance commercial with Erin fighting yetis and evil scientists with "black ice"-making machines, to illustrate how Esurance covers all your winter-related driving woes. Or she could at least do a PSA seducing men away from driving drunk after their holiday parties. Or, better yet, do an Erin Esurance Christmas special that would be aired only in Japan, so they could do shower scenes with full "side-al" nudity.

Oh yeah, someone I know couldn't find the downtown Ottawa Chapters bookstore. He says that he walked around the entire block with the Bay and he thought that there was no Chapters store there and that my brother was making the entire downtown Chapters location up.

Well, I guess Chapters is easy to miss, what with that LARGE STOREFRONT on the most major commercial intersection in the city (Rideau Street and Sussex Drive).

Not to mention that, if he really went around the entire block, he somehow also missed the second Chapters entrance, at the corner of Sussex and George Street.

Oh, maybe there is someone out there who does need a Garmin after all.

BEST NIGHT FOR FOX CARTOONS EVER!

2006-12-11T01:42:00.000Z

Yes, that's right, you heard me. Even though King of the Hill doesn't start until January.

What made it so damn special?

First, on The Simpsons, Homer's reading a Harry-Potter-with-the-names-changed-for-legal-reasons book to Lisa but he read the "Everyone dies" ending in advance and didn't like how it turned out so he made up his own ending, which included the Harry Potter stand-in girl and Homer-as-Dumbledore driving off in a red Ferrari F40. (Actually, by modern Simpsons' "Oh, how far we've fallen since the golden years over a decade ago" standards, this was an above-average episode, with a relatively not-that-far-fetched A-plot about Bart taking advantage of his new-found friendship with Nelson Muntz for protection, and a nice B-plot about Homer, who wasn't acting too stupid for a change, attempting to bond with Lisa, which is a subplot they've done many times before, but it's always welcome.)

Minutes later, on American Dad, we get to see Klaus the goldfish's fantasy about fleeing from assassins with Francine Smith by escaping to an underground lair, where they get in an orange Ferrari Testarossa to fight Mexican vampires.

So both episodes get perfect 10's from me for that completely superficial reason. The only way this evening could get any better would be if Family Guy could write in a Ferrari 288GTO somehow.

Speaking of Family Guy and Ferrari, I went to the The Source at Circuit City store (ex-Radio Shack Canada) at the Rideau Centre in downtown Ottawa the other weekend, and, evidently, Stewie Griffin has his eye on the same (radio-controlled) Ferrari F430 that I want for Christmas.

Though he can't take it away from me since he's trapped in that infernal plastic prison.

Which reminds me, I think that Pixar's Cars deserves to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar for many reasons, not the least of which is because we get to see a Ferrari F430 at the end. But now I'm facing a conundrum. I wasn't all that interested in La Femme Nikita director Luc Besson's first "animated" (actually, a CGI animation/live-action hybrid) feature film Arthur and the Invisibles (French title: Arthur et les Minimoys) since it looked to be too much like an unofficial remake of the 1980s DiC cartoon The Littles (which itself was a Franco-American co-production, with the animation done in Japan, obviously) starring Troll dolls. But, when I first saw the trailer in front of Happy Feet, I noticed that they show clips from one scene with mini-Arthur and two more of the "Invisibles"/"Minimoys" in what appears to be a miniature Ferrari 250 GTO, possibly the most iconic Ferrari of all time, with the Ferrari logo clearly visible on the hood, so now my loyalties are torn, since Arthur and the Invisibles is one of the 16 films on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' short list of eligible films for this year's Best Animated Feature Oscar, and, while I doubt AMPAS will nominate Arthur and the Invisibles (since it's getting too minimal a release too late in the year to make much of a dent in the Academy voters' consciousnesses, and also since Cars and Happy Feet have all the momentum, with the other one or three nomination berth(s), depending on whether or not the two extra berths are activated, likely to be given to films distributed by Sony (Monster House and/or Open Season) and/or Dreamworks (Over the Hedge and/or Flushed Away), in the unlikely event that it is nominated, will my love for the Prancing Horse logo make me root for it? Eh, no, even then, Cars still has the edge, since the Ferrari in Arthur and the Invisibles doesn't have a voice provided by none other than Michael Schumacher himself. Though I'll grant that some of those female "Invisibles" look kind of hot for characters that initially looked like Troll dolls to me.

IS IT 1986 AGAIN?

2006-12-06T07:28:00.000Z

It would be pretty cool if it was... I could see Ferris Bueller's Day Off on the big screen again (I was lucky enough to see it with my parents when it was new), or hop on a jet to Japan and watch Project A-ko, one of the best anime films ever animated (though it's not generally recognized as such because it lacks depth... but it more than makes up for that in terms of pure energy). I'd probably drop a whole bunch of quarters into the original Sega Out Run arcade game (though I'd have to get used to not being able to drift, like you can in Out Run 2006: Coast 2 Coast). And I'd get to see the premieres of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, Alf and Sledge Hammer! again!

I'd be 11 again, which would probably be a pretty fun age to live over, if I hadn't found school to be a miserable experience, but, if I had the wisdom of hindsight the second time around, I'd know to be a lot more positive and to talk to people more. The thing that would suck would be that a lot of the people I talk to on the Internet would be about... uh... 1 year old, not that there was much of an Internet available to the general public back then.

Anyway, I know it's not 1986, but, considering that it's not 1986, why is this commercial back on Canadian television all of the sudden?

I did not know this back in 1986, but French Quebeckers also knew "Danny McGee", but they knew him by the name of "Ti-Paul des Bois" (Roughly, "Little Paul of the Woods").

I think I know what's happening. Kellogg's Canada wants to start a new marketing push for Raisin Bran cereal. But what's the hook? The gimmick with Raisin Bran now is exactly what it was 20 years ago, that there's two scoops of raisins in every box. So, they could spend millions producing a new advertising campaign to tell Canadians what they already knew... or they could spend absolutely nothing and push the nostalgia button by showing commercials from 20 years ago. (Okay, probably not quite "nothing": I'd imagine that they'd have to upconvert the NTSC video signal to HDTV, or maybe just re-master it from the original film source if they still have it, and they probably used a tiny amount of CGI just to bring the Raisin Bran boxes up to date, but, relative to the cost of starting a new campaign from scratch, the cost of doing minor touch-ups would be a pittance.)

What's weird about this commercial is that, unlike, say, the Colgate Pump commercial that aired on American kid's TV during the same approximate time period, the "Sturdy Danny McGee was up his 59^th tree" Raisin Bran commercial is not one I'd have remembered off the top of my head without being prompted. Yet, when I saw this commercial for the first time in almost two decades, I knew exactly what it was, when it was from, and what it was selling hearing just the opening notes and the first few words of the commercial, before they even got to the first "Kellogg's Raisin Bran", so it's like the memory of commercial has resided in my head (along with many, many others) for the past 20 years, it just wasn't at the surface, yet it was brought back to the surface with just the slightest of cues, like some kind of really elaborate posthypnotic suggestion.

And I'm not the only person that this not-just-retro-but-completely-recycled brand-awareness-rebuilding marketing technique has worked on. Kellogg's seems to have been quite successful at building buzz with a simple-yet-brilliant idea: show a commercial for longer than a couple of months and it becomes stale. Stop showing a commercial after a couple of months only to bring it back two decades later, and it's an "event", somehow.

Not that this is the only "old" commercial ever seen on Canadian TV, but the thing about the Slinky ("For fun, it's a wonderful toy") and the Libby's Zoodles ("Have you ever gone hunting with a bowl and spoon?") commercials was that they didn't have the benefit of having gone off the air in the first place (at least not until the mid-90s or so when they were finally put out to pasture) for their comeback to be an "event".

If I were in charge of Kellogg's Canada, Inc., I'd probably buy whomever at the ad firm that came up with this "recycle-marketing" idea a shiny red F430, because even the cost of a brand new Ferrari would likely be only a small fraction of the money they saved by "recycleketing".

Sturdy Danny McGee was up his fifty-ninth tree, he said, "I work as fast as I can." when he suddenly saw TWO SCOOPS OF RAISINS in a package of Kellogg's Raisin Bran! Well, he rushed to the ground 'cause old Danny had found what's important to a raisin fan. Only Kellogg's puts TWO SCOOPS OF RAISINS with those nutritious flakes of bran. (So here comes Dan!) When he got to the truck, Danny sure was in luck. He was one happy man! Only Kellogg's puts TWO SCOOPS OF RAISINS in a package of Kellogg's Raisin Bran!