It seems like a good day for Mary Gauthier’s “Mercy Now.”
Month: July 2010
Monday various
- Maybe you’ve seen these clever Old Spice commercials, or these responses to Twitter fans? But have you seen this terrific parody? Well, now you have. [via]
- I’m not always in love with Improv Everywhere’s “missions,” but this was pretty cute. How is it that I never seem to run into these things in Manhattan?
- John Sclazi discusses Canadians in Science Fiction Because, you know, there are.
- Also coming soon to Canada: Netflix streaming. This was part of the exchange deal for Tim Horton’s, right?
- And finally, last week I mentioned how this “I Write Like” meme that’s been going around was kind of dumb and inaccurate. Turns out, it’s probably also kind of a scam.
“You’re talking about dreams?”
So, what did I do today?
Well, first thing this morning, I was woken up by Tucker, our dog, who was barking downstairs. He’d apparently thrown up his breakfast, I’m assuming shortly before his plaintive barks woke me from my dreams. (My father had gone to the store not too long before that, and I don’t think that’s something he could have missed on his way out the kitchen door.) I took Tucker out into the yard — I was still barefoot and in my pajamas — and when we came back in I cleaned up the mess. He threw up again later, but I didn’t get the honor of clean-up that time thankfully. Tucker seems fine now, so I don’t think he’s actually sick or anything, but hopefully he’ll keep down tomorrow’s breakfast.
After that, I watched this week’s episode of Burn Notice — which I enjoyed, even if the show has been better in seasons past — and I worked on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. I didn’t finishthe puzzle, not quite yet, but I’m close. I did a little bit of writing — on my own, since my writing group wasn’t meeting this week — and I read a little bit. I also went to see Inception, continuing something of a Leonardo DiCaprio mind-bending movie weekend. I liked it, even if the movie is a little slow and too cold at times. But it’s very clever and engaging, and an expertly pieced together puzzle box. I liked it a lot.
Though Ken Jennings is right: this is kind of weird.
And that’s about it for my Sunday.
Song of the day
I went to see Inception today. So here’s “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison.
“We gotta get off this rock, Chuck.”
This morning, I mailed out copies of Kaleidotrope to contributors and subscribers, which is a fun way to kill an hour and spend a couple hundred bucks. While I was at the post office, I picked up my thank-you gift from this year’s MaxFunDrive, which had arrived in the mail. It’s a flash drive, signed by Jonathan Coulton, containing his complete discography, which is really cool. I also got a Jordan, Jesse, Go! T-shirt and some cute stickers.
Then this evening, I watched Shutter Island, which isn’t a perfect movie, or even too surprising in its revelations, but it works really well. And it’s great too see Martin Scorcese, who at this point in his directing career has nothing to prove, continually trying new things. For all its excess, it’s clearly the product of man still in love with making movies and the possibilities the medium affords him. Scott Tobias describes the movie like this:
Shutter Island may initially seem like a nerve-jangling genre piece in the Cape Fear mold, but it’s more like Scorsese’s The Shining, a horror show where it’s sometimes hard to tell the haunted from those doing the haunting.
I’m sure I must have done something in between those two things — post office and movie — but it seems like mostly a blur of sitting around, watching some TV, reading, playing with the dog, and the usual Saturday stuff.