Harper doesn’t look older, just mushier and with white hair

At the airport in Copenhagen:

“… And now I live in a bunker, 10,000 metres beneath the earth’s barren, storm-ravaged surface, with nobody for company but Conrad Black and the robotic exoskeleton that houses John Diefenbaker’s brain. And we can’t even play Scrabble because Conrad has every letter E in his mouth. At least now I’ll have time to read all these books that Yann Martel sent me … I suppose he’s dead now, probably eaten — MY GLASSES! NO-O-O-O!”

Ways York University Surprised Me This Week

• I left my beautiful umbrella in the grad lounge for 45 minutes. It was still there when I remembered it and ran back.
• That’s it. That’s all. But I was pleasantly surprised. Thanks for this one thing, York grads.

Hurry up with the Lady Gaga “Bad Romance”/Pan’s Labyrinth mashups

Guillermo del Toro has to be behind this.

I want to preserve this forever

Dear Facebook

Dear Facebook:

For days now, you have been suggesting that I add as a friend a girl I have never seen before. Her profile picture depicts her photographing herself in her bathroom mirror, MySpace-style. She’s wearing a jersey for a team and/or sport with which I am not familiar — perhaps soccer or rugby. She is clutching the jersey at the small of her back, pulling it taut, the better to accentuate her waif-like figure and reveal that she’s not wearing any pants. She has big, wide eyes, almond in both colour and shape. She could pass for any age from fourteen to twenty-four. Her bathroom is unspectacular.

I don’t know this girl, Facebook. I wish I did: she’s the kind of girl who wants her friends to see her in nothing but a soccer jersey. I would remember somebody like that. But not only have I never met such a person, we don’t even have any mutual friends.

Yet every day, Facebook, you “suggest” that we should be acquainted. The suggestion has long since been noted and it isn’t helpful anymore.

I expect this kind of thing from Twitter. But not from you, FB.

This Exists

From the jacket:

When the Imperial prison barge Purge — temporary home to five hundred of the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, rebels, scoundrels and thieves — breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space, its only hope seems to lie with a Star Destroyer found drifting, derelict and seemingly abandoned. But when a boarding party is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back — bringing with them a horrific disease so lethal that within hours, nearly all aboard the Purge will die in ways too hideous to imagine.

And death is only the beginning.

The Purge’s half-dozen survivors — two teenage brothers, a sadistic captain of the guards, a couple of rogue smugglers and the chief medical officer, the lone woman on board — will do whatever it takes to stay alive. But nothing can prepare them for what lies waiting onboard the Star Destroyer amid its vast creaking emptiness that isn’t really empty at all. The dead are rising, soulless, unstoppable, and unspeakably hungry.

Facebook Says You Never Call Anymore

The Facebook Team^® is now selecting people from your contacts that you haven’t interacted with in a while, and recommending that you “catch up” or “reconnect” with them. This seems to me a little invasive on The Facebook Team^®’s part. I don’t need them telling me, “You should really see what X has been up to since you last contacted him on 11/29/2008 at 20:58:07. But I guess you don’t have a minute to spare for your poor old friend X, what with your busy schedule of trolling other people’s photos, and writing droll status updates and then second-guessing and deleting them … Oh what, you didn’t think anybody noticed?”

C’mon, Team^®. I have Facebook so that I don’t have to contact those people and I’ll still be apprised of all the major developments in their lives: birthdays, marriages and backpacking trips to the Far East or New Zealand. That guilt was supposed to die along with the home phone and direct human interaction.

Zombies Need Love Too

Chester Brown, author of Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography and erstwhile Trinity-Spadina libertarian candidate, wrote a six-episode comic strip for Toronto’s smug “Live with Culture” series, called Zombies Take Toronto. It ran in NOW Magazine in 2007. It depicts one lovelorn zombie struggling to make a connection in the city despite his skin rotting off. He does so by taking advantage of Toronto’s vibrant cultural institutions. The Walrus read too much into it but rightly discerned that the author mightn’t have been altogether reverent of the establishment he was conscripted to exalt.

Whether he is aware of it or not, Chester Brown hit upon two somethings with Zombies Take Toronto:

1. Residents of Toronto revel in reflections of their city, whether rendered digitally, in ink or on celluloid; and
2. They especially love when the city is overrun by the walking dead.¹

There are a handful of obvious progenitors for this generation’s perennial (… undying?) weakness for apocalypse scenarios:

• paranoia regarding global pandemics in the offing — exacerbated by Toronto’s reputation as Coruscant, a city that is itself the entire planet, containing and subsuming every ethnic group in the world, and by stereotypes of immigrants as unclean;
• the return, post-Cold War, of anarchism as a viable threat to society, personified by the suicidal religious zealot; and
• (related to both preceding points:) brief, isolated glimpses of genuine chaos in westernized urban settings.

The factors above lend immediacy to a question fostered decades ago by the advent of nuclear destruction and environmental waste: What would happen to me in a post-apocalypse scenario? What if, after John Cusack flies his plane out of LA, I’m one of the schmucks left behind on the freeway? I suck at sports, even paintball — is that what it’s gonna come down to when the shit hits the fan?

Zombies Take Toronto was two years ago. Now a young upstart is imagining post-apocalyptic Toronto in the proportions that the premise deserves: Quarter-life Crisis (not long ago the awful title of an irritating Eye Weekly column, now the awful title of a graphic novel) will take place in the ruined downtown core, where a savage band controls the Rogers Centre beneath the shadow of a bombed-out CN Tower, and does battle with be-Vespaed gang-members from Bay Street. Because when the apocalypse renders their accounts obsolete, the wisdom of financiers will obviously translate to street smarts.

Also: everyone is dead except 25-year-olds for some reason (so close!), and the protagonists take shelter in the abandoned OCAD brick, which they are able to access via their powers of psychokinesis. Or something. The Road this is probably not.

Notwithstanding those dubious plot details, as a not-even-three-year resident of the city I feel I can speak for everyone when I say that I look forward to seeing it destroyed, its few remaining residents hardened by moral compromises concomitant with survival and reduced to battling over the spoils of their former civilization.

1 Apparently there is another Toronto Zombie Walk coming up on October 24th. As a zombie enthusiast, is one obligated to take part? Or can one see such things as embarrassing on a Trekkie scale and still count oneself as a fan? One, one, one one.

3 out of this blog’s 4 readers counting myself like Danish prog and Ryan is at least ambivalent

Mew, courtesy of Prefix Magazine: the blog that prefaces all of their posts with the name of the artist(s) concerned, making for lots of post titles like “Soulja Boy: Soulja Boy Arrested During Video Shoot” and “Billy Corgan, David Byrne: Billy Corgan, David Byrne to Participate in Jungian Red Book Dialogue Series”. Hey that one actually sounds like something I might like to read. At least Prefix doesn’t capitalize all their titles (looking at you, The Music Slut!).

Today is Thanksgiving. I have a great deal to do for school tomorrow and I don’t want to do it, which is why both my blogs have seen a good deal of updating this long weekend (for me).

It’s around 2:30. We’re scheduled to eat dinner in two hours, because our relatives are

(a) old,
(b) increasingly senile,
(c) afraid we are Werewolves, and
(d) desperate to dispense with the affair as quickly as possible so that they can hit the sherry and be asleep by 8:30.

Which schedule is peachy as far as I’m concerned.

Happy Thanksgiving

Two of three turkey dinners consumed. It’s time to start thinking about Halloween.

Fever Ray | "If I Had a Heart"