Today, Saturday May 7th, 2005, is Free Comic Book Day, the fourth such
annual event in which comic book shops across North America give away
free comic books to anyone who enters their stores.
Since it’s a bright spring day here in Accordion City, I thought I
might do some busking today. I think I’ll also take a peek at the
nearby comic shop, Silver Snail.
With the increasingly warm temperatures, sunnier skies and the
certainty that Mother Nature isn’t going to fake us out this time, I’m
looking forward to being able to hit the streets and bang out some
new tunes on the ol’ squeezebox. It’s been far too long since I’ve
played and longer still since I’ve posted a good accordion-related
entry. I’ll have to fix that.
Hopefully the local buskers won’t raise the bar on busking outfits like the artist shown below:
Okay, now we’re taking this “tree-hugger” thing a bit too far. Click the photo to see a larger version.
(Apparently this person is a big indie rock star, but damned if I know who he is.)
The letters to the editor page in this week’s eye in response to last week’s editorial (which I wrote about here) are pretty good. My favourites:
Whatever possessed eye’s editorial board to vomit such venom against
the Catholic Church? (“This is not a democracy,” Editorial, Apr. 28.) Is it
now open season on Catholics, or is this the first in a series denigrating the
world’s major religions?
So eye
does not believe in transubstantiation and the assumption of Mary. So
what? What happened to good old-fashioned manners, whereby we respect
the religious beliefs of others rather than pour scorn on them?
You
then ridicule the Church’s position on human sexuality — in
particular, birth control and condoms. While not defending the Church
on this, I think eye is hardly the credible critic. What is eye’s
contribution to enlightened human sexuality? Take a voyeuristic peep at
your nine pages of so-called adult-only graphic and in-colour girlie
classified ads aiding and abetting prostitution and the degrading of
women as sex objects for sale.
Please spare us any more of your bad manners, chutzpah, irony and hypocrisy!
— G. Lee
In your editorial regarding Catholicism, you left out a fourth option: dissent, stay Catholic and fight for change.
— Christina M. Babcock
In
the end, I suspect — having been on the editorial board of a student
paper myself (and really, eye is a student paper writ large and backed
by Torstar) — that the eye editorial board will simply let out a
collective self-satisfied huff and go about their merry way, as will
some of those who write in either to support to decry their position.
Based on the comments to my entry on the matter, the intent of the editorial purported by this entry in the eye blog and my eternal
optimism, I hope that it at least got some people thinking about the
role religion plays in some people’s lives.
I’ll leave you with the words of the Dalai Lama from his April 25th, 2004 presentation (I attended, and my notes are here) at SkyDome — er, make that Rogers Centre — here in Accordion City. He talked about his take on the meaning of the word secular:
Not rejection of religion, but respect all religion and respect non-believer.
Peace out, y’all.
Mike “M.” Doughty, formerly of Soul Coughing, coiner of the clever phrase “rampant Corganism” and whom Wendy got to
meet recently at a Berkman Center event, asked an audience to hold up
their cell phones while he took some picutres:
He should’ve tried to get them all to make their phones ring Fur Elise. Click the photo to see Mike Doughty’s blog entry.
There are more photos on his blog.
I wonder if somebody yelled “play Freebird!”
Chris recently posted this picture taken somewhere in my neighbourhood on a file-sharing site…
— the location of the vegetarian speed dating night — is a vegetarian
restaurant on Queen Street West, not far from my house. Speaking as a
happy eater of meat, I like the food there; it’s good enough to change
vegetarian dining from sanctimonious misery to a tasty and satisfying
side-dish-only meal. Fressen is also German for “eat”, or more
specifically, “eat heartily” or “gorge”. Not without some frickin’ meat, bubby.
I once dated a vegetarian and often took her here. In between bites of
their delicious portobello “steak”, I’d tease her — a biology major in
college — by reminding her that evolution would never have happened
without carnivores: “After all, it doesn’t take much brains to sneak up
on a carrot.”
Being a Time Lord gets you chicks!
Aside from the obvious reason of seeing Wendy, I wish I could go to
Boston this weekend to attend the Time Traveler Convention at MIT
taking place at 8:00 p.m. this Saturday.
Although the convention site makes a reference to a clever line by “Cat” from the webcomic Cat and Girl…
“Technically, you would need only one time traveller convention.” Click the picture to see the whole comic.
…there has already been one. Back in the late eighties, Spy
magazine put out an open invitation to time travellers to meet at their
offices for cocktails. Presumably, no chronal cruisers showed up.
Although I can’t attend — and neither can anyone who hasn’t RSVP’d
yet; the event is booked solid by people from the present — I’d like
to contribute by offering these two time-travel themed MP3s. Enjoy!
theme as Serge Gainsbourg would’ve done it. It helps if you know a
little French and are a little familiar with Serge’s work. [6.6 MB MP3]
While looking up some links for the Star Wars Holiday Special
(see these posts), I stumbled across Stomp Tokyo’s review of a terrible
Bollywood rip-off of the Christopher Reeve Superman movie. How could I possibly resist a movie with a review that is best summarized like this?
Faced
with the daunting task of bringing a legend to life for the Hindi
film-viewing populace, these actors do their utmost to defile the
source material in every way imaginable. The only way they could have
made it any worse would have been to stuff things down Christopher
Reeves’ breathing tube.
Better
still, they link to a clip from the movie, which is summarized below:
In
an attempt to let Superman do something in the movie, the scene moves
to an airplane. Both Gita [the “Lois Lane” character] and Mr. Odious [The reviewer’s nickname for the mandatory obnoxious comic relief character] are on it for some reason, so
it is naturally hijacked minutes later. But first, wackiness ensues!
Mr. Odious needs to go to the bathroom, but it’s occupied. Ha! He
stands there for a few minutes, his face in positions of anguish as his
bladder distends. (We think that was anguish — it’s difficult
to separate all of Jagdeep’s [the actor who plays “Mr. Odious”] different facial contortions, since they
mostly resemble what any one of us looks like after a hammer has been
dropped on our foot.) When he is finally released from his watery
torture, he is waylaid by an amorous woman who introduces herself, in
English, as “Ms. Muscle Woman from Zambia.” Hilarious! Kill us!
When the hijacking arrives, it is a great mercy. One of the baddies
punches Mr. Odious! Yay! Mr. Odious falls into Ms. Muscle Woman’s arms
and a full two minutes of “comedy” follows. Boo!
Superman saves the day by dragging the plane to an airfield, as
represented by shots of a transparent airliner superimposed over aerial
shots of Bombay at night, inter-cut with shots of Jor-El casting his
arms about. It must have taken a while to get the plane to the airfield
— by the time they land, Bombay’s nighttime has become mid-afternoon.
Superman then enters the plane, dispenses some poorly edited justice to
the terrorists, and the scene ends abruptly without an encounter
between Superman and Gita. What the –?
Unlike Spider-Man India, this isn’t an authorized Indian version of a popular American hero.
A scene in which Superman rescues a hijacked plane. Note
that Superman can’t be seen and the plane is shown at a ridiculous
angle in relation to the background.
Herve Villechaize taunts Superman: “Welcome to my Kyptonite Kitchen, Man of Steel!”
I downloaded the movie clip and posted it to the temporary download locations listed below. Enjoy!