theMediaman.com

After lunch at First Markham Place, we did some shopping. I picked up a few DVDs and Leon picked up two movies. One of them, a movie called Infernal Affairs, has an English translation of the movie outline on the back. It’s so damn funny, I had to write it here for posterity.

Just remember, all punctuation and spelling (and invented words) are just as they appear on the DVD case.

Three match the meeting member clearlisten to the big guy to side, of seven year he have already rise toed the long.92 years police student the be compelled to drop out from school, make the the ,the in 2002, determination for fact for knowing a poison hand overing accepting the intelligence report, locking the tight target person the, pan outing the both parties’ intelligence report oo quilt , police activity failing, poison tra ding too not succeeding, doublebut return, exposing both parties all having act from insiding, causing the ghost of both parties’ clearance inside of heavy case set. The returns the with the clear destinies again close by, at have no the byroad itinerary to accept the rigorous test …

My favourite parts are seeing ‘the’ three times in a row, and adding past-tense to the word ‘to’ in order to make ‘toed’.

The Hulk Gets Dumber

“We thought that someone like Ang Lee who made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would be able to make a Stupid Summer Action flick. We had no idea that it would be so cerebral! Luckily, we’ve opted to enlist a writer who can make the sequel moronic enough to be attainable by the movie-going public, and even The Hulk himself… maybe even Movie Studio Heads!”

- Some Movie Production Company Fuckhead

Okay, I was starting to get really annoyed by how much that Jet song, “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” gets radio play. I used to praise Edge 102’s Thursday 30, because it meant that they could play the song only once in a three-hour period. However, since coming up with my own variation involving the woman I love, I can’t get enough of it (”I said you look so pretty and I want to make you my Simmie”).

The charity concert organized by The One Whose Name Must Not Be Written (”TOWNMNBW”) is still going ahead. January 31st at Long Weekend Bar in Newmarket (yay! alcohol!) will be the concert date. Confirmed bands are The Hellz Kitchen Show (which I’ve mentioned before), Pangea, Feebo and littleSUNDAY. All four have (or will soon have) interviews in NextDoorNoise.ca. TOWNMNBW even gets mentioned on The Hellz Kitchen Show’s web site news section.

While there’s no mention of it on the NDN web site, they are indeed involved. The web designer *ahem* hasn’t updated the site to make it fully functionaly yet. I… er… he is still dabbling in PHP in order to make a GTA Indie band BBS. Enough acronyms for you? WTF!

Final note on Indie bands, if anyone’s at a Salads concert, can you pick up a CD for me? I’ll pay you back. I looked in the HMV for their release, “Fold A To B”, and it cost $18.99. Way too much, considering that it’s an independent release - no label or nothin’. When I walked over to Sunshine Records, they had it in stock for a whopping $23.99!!! That’s more than ten bucks over what it costs to buy through their web site. This is a really good band, and I’ve regretted not picking up a copy of their album at the most recent concert I went to. It would be cheaper to buy a ticket to get into a show, then pick up a CD for twelve bucks at their table…

…and that’s just sad.

One final link. If my piano lessons growing up were this much fun, I probably would have practiced more than twice a week.

What a miserable way to start a Wednesday.

To tell the story properly, I have to go back to Monday when I drove my car to work in -15 degree weather. Not just outside the car, but -15 inside as well. The fan on my heater wasn’t working, so I had the window rolled down a crack so the windshield wouldn’t fog up.

Monday afternoon, something spontaneously started working right, because the air came back on as I was driving. Tuesday, when I left from work, I started the car and - nothing from the Peanut Gallery. No air. I had to drive home in another -15 degree Hell.

Last night, I washed my car on the off-chance that it was just something jammed up. Well, by trying to solve one problem, I caused another. When I pulled out of the driveway this morning (still no air) I turned onto the street without any problem. While riding on the packed snow, I pushed the brakes down hard to make sure that I HAD brakes. You never know after washing your car. Well, when I took my foot off the pedal, only three brakes released. The rear drivers-side was completely locked, and dragging behind the car like a dead leg.

At first I thought it might be a flat-tire, while in the back of my head (you know, that part that you don’t listen to except in hind-sight) I was thinking about how it seems somehow worse than a flat tire… like two flat tires maybe?

I started to pull over to the side. As I was doing this, I figured that I was close enough to home that I could just park the car back there and solve the problem off the road. So, I started a three-point turn… and that’s when things got worse.

Once the car had stopped with both drivetrain wheels on the packed snow at the end of a neighbour’s driveway, the tire on the back had a solid grip on asphalt. The semi-bald, winter tires “on ice” were no match for the strength of the 6 month old all-season.

So now my car can’t move, it’s on step 2 of a three-point turn, it’s blocking half of a driveway, and half the street… sitting perpindicular to the line of traffic. To top it off, the location was about 75 feet from a sharp, 90 degree turn. My biggest worry was that someone would come whipping around the corner and not be able to manuver around this unusual obstruction.

After I went back inside my house, I called Laura to let her know that I’d be late for work. Then I called CAA and was told that there was a 90 minute wait. So I went back out to the car to see if there was anything I could do.

After screwing around with it for about 10-15 minutes, one of the residents of the house I was stuck in front of came home. Adam, nice guy, and he helped me troubleshoot my problem. He was driving a Sunfire, and apparently the rest of the family cars are Pontiacs. Even his relatives drive domestics.

Thank gawd I didn’t get stuck in front of a house with BMWs or Hyundai’s in the driveway. I could see it now. “My car has lots of problems in the winter too!” Well, yeah, that’s because you drive a Hyundai. This is a Ford.

Anyway, after letting the car warm up the brake assembly by conduction, pumping the brakes a few times, giving a number of strategic kicks to the wheel rim, then popping it into neutral and rocking the car - I finally heard a “click”. Now the ZX2 tried to run me over as the front of the car rolled down the few feet of driveway - luckily that was stopped quickly enough.

So I put the car in a safe place (off the street) and let it continue warming up before heading into work. I called CAA to cancel the worthless tow-truck help. It was probably more than they deserved, but I figured that there’s some poor slob who really needed a truck and that will now it will arrive 5-10 minutes earlier than scheduled.

So after all that, I drove to work in -10 weather because my fan still isn’t working. I’m in surprisingly good spirits. I came into work feeling miserable. Miserable and cold. I can’t remember what I was talking about, but it was to Jen, my co-worker, when Simone called. I had sent a generally-directed venomous email with a much shorter version of the story above before leaving home (bet you wish you had read that one, eh?). That seemed to lock in my good mood.

Now I’ve got a wicked headache, my feet feel frostbitten, I have to spend more money on my car, and I can’t get this damn smile off my face.

Shit.

Monday was my first class at Ryerson. I’m a student again.

When I talk about ‘the last time I was in school’, I don’t typically include my time at the International Academy of Design. Most of the stuff they taught there, I already knew. Some of the things I picked up have since been forgotten for lack of real-world use. I even wound up teaching some of my less experienced classmates. That was basically a $15 ‘G’ piece of paper that let me get a decent job in the GTA.

Back on track, the last class I took at Waterloo was over five and a half years ago. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, Simone wasn’t even in post-secondary at that point. Now she’s just that close *pinches index finger and thumb close together* to getting her own degree.

In this last year, I’ve really picked up on video editing and composition. There have been a lot of chances at Livewire to explore that creative direction. However, when I found that my usual process of self-teaching had reached its limit, the next logical step was University courses.

While Ryerson is the obvious choice in film production, I took a look at a few other schools. However, everything I needed seemed to be nicely prepared and packaged at Ryerson. So here I am.

The first course is Film Technology I - this one’s on Monday night. It’s more along the lines of good ol’ celluloid than electrons and hard drives. However, one of the reasons I wanted a structured environment was to expand my field of knowledge, not just improve on it.

The first class was mostly just an introduction, but the professor, Peter Garretsen, gave us a good idea on the “Idea to Finish” process of filmmaking. He threw a few questions out to the class. One of them I should have known - he asked “what’s the first step in making an idea into a film?” The question seemed familiar, but I still didn’t get the answer… Demographic! I should have known, since the answer is the same in the New Media industry.

Luckily, I was the only one who knew the answer to “who were the first to use film to record live television shows?”. When you’re a movie/tv geek like I am, the answer, “Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball” was easy for me.

The second class is Film and Sound Editing I. I haven’t met the professor yet, but it’s pretty cool to have profs with pages on IMDB. While I know a lot about the “hows” of editing video on a computer, I’ll be more interested in the “whys”.

umm……. (insert witty final comment here). Ahh… never mind. Next entry will probably be more interesting.