Breathless

One of the real downsides of living on the 36th floor is when the elevators break. That's quite a climb and not a welcome thing after a long day at work.

Thumbs Up

I saw both Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Walk the Line this weekend and highly recommend both of them.

I thought this new Harry Potter was the best of the series. The first two were okay, and I really liked Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but I thought this one was even better. It was well-paced, beautifully filmed, and dang exciting. Lots of edge-of-your-seat moments and some pretty scary parts.

The performances in Walk the Line were both fantastic. I've never been much of a Reese Witherspoon fan, but she was awesome as June Carter. Joaquin Phoenix was very convincing as Cash, and the fact that neither of them sang before starting work on the film is simply amazing. They both sounded great. I also learned that June Carter wrote "Ring of Fire", a song you can't go to Lovejoy's in Austin without hearing at least twice from the jukebox. Did not know that.

First Snow

Yesterday in the afternoon we had our first snow of the season in the city. It snowed for a few hours and accumulated at most about an inch. Though the temperature didn't get above freezing all day, the streets and sidewalks are still pretty warm, so not too much stuck around there.

National Transportation Safety Board Research

My mom sent this to me, and I thought it was pretty funny....

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recently divulged they had covertly funded a project with U.S. auto makers for the past five years, whereby the auto makers were installing black box voice recorders in four-wheel drive pickup trucks and SUVs in an effort to determine, in fatal accidents, the circumstances in the last moments before the crash.

They were not surprised to find in 44 of the 50 states the recorded last words of drivers in 61.2% of fatal crashes were, "Oh, Shit!"

But the states of Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Kentucky were different, where 89.3% of the final words were, "Hold my beer, I'm gonna try somethin'."

Brrr....

It was 30 degrees on my walk to work this morning with a wind chill of about 18. Apparently I'm going to think that's warm come February.

Sportscentre

Yeah, I don't think I need to say anything more.

Winter Sports

Winter is almost upon us. It's apparently been a very mild fall, but we should start having highs just above freezing pretty soon.

I've gotten a lot of advice from folks on how to handle the long and harsh winter, and I think some of the best has been to engage in winter activities. I'm already planning on learning to snowboard. Ontario has a bunch of hills that, while not great, are perfect for learning. So I expect to be making a bunch of trips to Mount St. Louis and Blue Mountain over the next months. I'm also thinking about learning to ice skate. The free public skating rinks have already started opening, and there's no way I'd go to one now, seeing as I've only been ice skating a few times in my life. You can take lessons, though, so I'll probably be doing that soon.

If anyone has any advice about skate buying, I'd love to hear it.

Remembrance Day

Friday was Remembrance Day in Canada, which is the same thing as Veterans Day in the U.S. I thought it was interesting, though, that Remembrance Day is much more important here than Veterans Day at home. A significant majority of the population of Toronto has been wearing poppies for the last week, and there were loads of television specials and ceremonies to commemorate the day. We even did a minute of silence at work.

Considering the number of wars and conflicts that the U.S. has been involved with in its history and with the general "Support the Troops" sentiment, I think this contrast in observance is pretty interesting. I wonder why this is.... Could it be that by having a more actively engaged military, people in the U.S. are not so focused on the events of the past?

Overheard in Toronto

Last night on the streetcar on the way to see fingerstyle guitar master John Knowles, I sat in front of two older French-Canadian women. They were loudly debating (in English) what movie to go see, and their conversation was hilarious. Things I learned:

• Richard Gere and Tom Cruise are sissies.


• George Clooney is a real man.


• Nicole Kidman looks like a walking skeleton.


• Something is wrong with Renée Zellweger's mouth.

They ended up choosing Good Night, and Good Luck, which I hear is quite a good film (and stars George Clooney, of course).

The concert, by the way, was fantastic. Knowles is great musician and player and a genuinely funny guy with tons of great stories about hanging in Nashville with the greats. It's not often you get to hear someone tell stories about how he was hanging out with Chet Atkins, Les Paul, and Lenny Breau, and how Lenny pawned the guitar that Chet gave him.... If you are a reader in Toronto and like fingerstyle guitar music, you should check out the Toronto Fingerstyle Guitar Association. They're bringing some great players to town at amazing prices.

Random Stuff

A few random things:

1. Does anyone know how to format text and pictures in Blogger correctly for Firefox and Safari? If you've noticed, the formatting of my posts that include pictures is less than ideal if you're using one of those browsers. Internet Explorer 6 shows the pages like I intend, but Firefox and Safari don't. I've tried linebreaks and new paragraph tags to try to make the text sit correctly in relation to the pictures but haven't gotten anything to work.


2. There's a new tanning salon in my neighborhood. Its name is "Tanada".


3. Toronto's own CN Tower is a member (a "member tower"?) of the World Federation of Great Towers. Wow, that's quite a federation they've got there. I wonder if our next FEMA director will have been its executive director....


4. Check out my friend Tino's pictures from the wedding in Alpine. He's an amazing photographer and got some great shots.


5. While you're on his site, you should also check out Tino's pictures from Vietnam. These blow me away every time I see them. He should work for National Geographic.

Stewed Meat

Last night I made a delicious carne guisada from Robb Walsh's The Tex-Mex Cookbook, which is something every person who can cook and who professes to like Tex-Mex should own.

Anyway, while it was cooking, I called my friends Omid and Amy in Austin. I mentioned to Amy that I was cooking up some carne guisada, and she asked me whether I thought it was possible that I was the only person in Canada cooking carne guisada at that exact moment. I thought for a second and agreed that this was indeed a possibility. It's a pretty regional dish, which means there probably aren't that many people in Canada who even know what it is much less would make it at home.

Tejas del oeste

Well, it looks like it's time for me to quit my job and move to West Texas. I went out there for Marty and Tex's wedding, and let me tell you, that place rules. Despite the fact that I've lived in Texas my entire life, it was my first visit to the part of state that actually looks like the stereotype of Texas. I'm already looking forward to my next visit.



At the barbecue before the wedding, we got to chill with good friends like Big John, who brought his impressive appetite all the way from Farmington, New Mexico.



Not to mention our very own New Orleans refugees, er, evacuees, a very pregnant Emily and Catfish Palit.



Now that's a serious outfit.



The wedding itself was quite the spectacle. About 400-500 guests on Marty's family's ranch outside of Alpine. The crowd was an amazing mix of Rice weenies and old Texas ranchers and oilmen in $5000 boots and white Stetsons. Congrats Marty and Tex!!!!!



The day afterwards, Oren, Julie, and I drove back to Midland via Marfa.



Marfa is a tiny little West Texas town that has become something of an artists' colony in recent years. The town is an odd mix of historical West Texas and Manhattan art scene.





And perhaps one of the coolest things I've ever seen is on US 90 outside of the even tinier town of Valentine: Prada Marfa.



Unfortunately it looks like it's been vandalized (again) since it originally opened at the beginning of October.

No, it's not actually a Prada store in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. It's an art installation that's a replica of a Prada store in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. Yeah.



All in all, it was a fantastic weekend and a wonderful trip. And that's even considering the fact that I got to meet a nice Texas State Trooper on Interstate 20 outside of Odessa ;)

From Midland it was on to Austin for some business meetings and good hanging out time with the friends there. Damn I love Casino El Camino.