Category Archives: Culture

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s Cheaper

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Strap on your tinfoil hats and fire up your conspiracy theories because it looks like the “obesity epidemic” is actually a government plot to save money on health care. A new study finds that contrary to what I, and lots of other people thought; a thin non-smoker actually costs the health care system more than an obese person, or a smoker. The main reason is the smokin’ fatties die sooner, of course. Clean living folks survive long enough to get really expensive diseases it seems, and it’s dragging down the health care system, dammit.

So comrade, it seems that the socially responsible thing to do would be to turn off that damn treadmill and grab yourself a hoagie. You are nothing less than an enemy of the state if you don’t. Give me a light while you’re at it. You are helping your country, if not yourself. Tomorrow there will be a rally of puffing plump patriots marching (well actually more like a slow saunter) on Parliament Hill holding signs that say something, if we could only read them through the drifting haze of aerosolized cheese and smoke. The signs are a little heavy, they must have used real cardboard since most of them can’t seem to hold them up for very long. They are chanting too, but it’s a little breathy and too low to make out what it is. It’s a powerful display of sloth and fury.

Join us! It’s for the greater good, after all.

Flight of the Conchords Season 2

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Finally found some confirmation that there may in fact be a second season of Flight of the Conchords, which is only our favourite show ever.  Apparently the lads have some serious writing to do since they apparently exhausted almost all of their material on the first season. 

Here’s hoping the lads can come up with some gems, I don’t doubt there will be goodness.  Stay tuned.

Lego Millenium Falcon

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Wilson knows I’m a slight LEGO geek, so he sent me this link of a time-lapsed video of someone building the LEGO Millenium Falcon (from Star Wars, Nikki).

The video is almost all I really wanted, I would have liked to make it myself, but I definitely don’t want the thing in my house forever. I just want to build these things once and then they can go away. I wonder if anybody else has that compulsion, maybe there’s a business to start there, renting huge LEGO sets to people. Inventory would be a bit of a problem….

Anyway, here you go, for your viewing amusement.

Canadian Bacon

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A brief rant: why the heck did Canada get saddled with being the worldwide source of peameal bacon for the Americans? Who decided it would be called “Canadian bacon” forever? It’s not called that anywhere else in the world. In fact, I would take a guess and say that most Canadians would probably just prefer regular old bacon to peameal bacon for breakfast. If we were peameal gobbling gluttons I could understand the label, but that’s just not the case. Do we refer to burgers from McDonalds as American Big Macs? Of course we don’t, because that would be silly.

Now cut that out, Yanks. Don’t get me all riled up like that. With this Canadian bacon-induced blood pressure of mine, I’m liable to pop any second now, it’s not healthy to be all excitable and agimatated. Yes I said agimatated, I make up words when I’m frothustered.

Weekend Update

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Nikki had a little weekend away as we do every 3 or four months.  It’s a big part of staying sane and together for us, I would highly recommend it especially for those of you with kids.  Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details of us being lazy and eating and drinking (although I highly recommend Vittoria Trattoria which we enjoyed tremendously), we saw a couple of movies which I thought I would share with you.

First off we saw P.S. I Love You, which is a chick flick of the highest order, but with a couple of notable things.  First off, it wasn’t ridiculously sappy.  It was sad sure, but they made it with a good dose of humour that I appreciated.  Secondly, they made very good use of some pretty good music that was integral to the story.  The main character was an Irish guitar player and singer, so there was a classic Pogues song at his funeral, and happily they had a fun Steve Earle song (Galway Girl) for a key scene in a bar.  So, guys you can probably stand this one, I did and survived to tell the tale.

Secondly, I then made Nikki come with me to see Cloverfield, which was clearly her penance for taking me to see P.S. I Love You.  Not to say that this was a bad movie, we both agreed that the parts we actually saw were very good.  The problem was the decision to have the “handheld camera” effect for the entire movie.  It was meant to add realism and grittiness and, for Nikki especially, it added nausea and not much else.  It was kind of frustrating since this is a really fun monster movie, when you can figure out what they are trying to show you.  I enjoyed it more than Nikki, but really I don’t think that the movie was any better for the camera effects.  Indeed, when they make the sequel (and they will, that much is clear from the lack of answers in the first one) I hope they abandon that part and show us the good stuff with some clarity.  They really came up with a great story, or what little they decided to show us, I think there’s lots of story left to tell.

So there you go, movie reviews for ya.

Some skin in the game

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Being a good little capitalist, I am motivated to some degree by money.  I’m sure that most of us are in some way, more or less.  Money isn’t everything, but it definitely helps some things along.

So, I think these two things are very appropriate.  First yet another high tech alarm clock, but this time I must say it’s got a very good solution to the problem of sleeping in with the snooze button.  Basically you configure the SnuzNLuz to deduct a preset amount from your account and donate it to a non-profit organization you hate every time you press the snooze button.  It connects to the web and yanks real money from your account automatically.  As the tagline reads:  “Wake up to the smell of…Animosity…”.  Not a bad idea for chronic snoozers, but there’s not much fear of many donations in my house.  Sleep is the scarcest resource there.

 Then it’s off to stickk.com where you basically wager against yourself that you will achieve a goal.  Pick a goal, set a date to achieve it and place a monetary amount against that goal.  If you succeed you get your money back, if you fail your money goes either to a charity or to a pre-determined “enemy” of yours.  It’s brilliant.  The idea of entering into a contract with yourself to actually get something done is something I really like.  It’s not easy sticking to goals sometimes, this definitely takes it up a notch.  The best part is you determine a third party referee that is the judge on whether or not you actually succeeded in your goals and has to report in to the website or you have “failed” for that reporting period.  Goals are the usual; lose weight, quit smoking, exercise regularly, etc or you can make up your own goals. 

I really like this, I have actually signed up and I’m thinking of creating a commitment to get to the gym at least 4 times a week.  It’s pretty fun, I suggest you give it a try.