6 03 2002
My birthday and The Week of M.E. (Mediaman Enthusiasm) has come and gone. I haven’t updated my website for a while since I dropped out of the habit a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been trying to accomplish other goals recently - work on freelance sites, cleaning my apartment (a massive job) celebrating my birthday, going to the Gorillaz concert, consoling Simone during a very busy time at school and just general havok around the Internet including the destruction of SPAMmers and stealing a website domain from a cyber-squatter.
Mom & Dad got me a new Telus phone for my birthday (more about that and its features in an upcoming entry) and one of those nifty ROOTS scarfs that everyone is covetting.
The Gorillaz concert was really different. Since it was the first show in their North American tour (first and last tour, apparently) there were a few bugs in the system. We got to watch it from just back and to the left of the “broadcast booth” where they cue up all the video to play on the big screen. Sort of like watching “The Making Of…” at the same time as seeing the end result magic.
In my humble opinion, they could have easily taken it up a notch with just a little effort, and it would have made a difference. They were almost there already. However, the real only disappointment was the lack of an encore despite the rowdy fans. The Boston show got an encore three days later, so why not Toronto?
Since the advent of my birthday week, my DVD collection has doubled in size. My deal with the devil has warrented four movies - The Matrix, The Princess Bride, High Fidelity and The Mummy: Ultimate Edition. Despite the fact that I already own the first three on VHS, they are three of my favourite movies. I figured they would be in my collection eventually, so why not now?
Simone got me a really old Jackie Chan movie, “Half A Loaf of Kung Fu”. You can always spot the oldest Jackie Chan movies when his name is spelled “Jacky”, his hair is much bigger and his dubbed voice has a perfect British accent. If the disc had subtitles it would be great to watch it in the original language since the dubbed script is sometimes horrible. But Chan is Chan and the movie is pretty good.
On a spending spree at Future Shop, I picked up my other favourite movie of all time - 2010: The Year We Made Contact. This movie is what got me into Astronomy and my facination with space. It remains my favourite underrated film even though The Princess Bride is a close second.
While shopping, I also picked up John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin” and watched it at Simone’s place on a Digital Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound system. The subwoofer effects channel makes you feel the gears shifting. This is the purest I’ve seen the film since it was in the cinemas… and possibly even better since Waterloo movie theatres didn’t always have 5.1 Surround Sound.
For Simone I picked up a nicely angst-ridden Nine Inch Nails live EP to get her through her busy week. Although I plan to copy it (F*** You, Hilary Rosen) I also picked up the Gorillaz G-Sides remixes and the new Chemical Brothers disc.
