And this is my post for the day

I get the feeling that if I lived next door to the strikingly white, bearded spokesperson for Canadian Tire all my life’s problems would be solved. He’s just so earnest and helpful it makes me want to kill myself instantly.

I’ve also noticed that car commercial narrators read $29,995 as “twenty-nine-nine-ninety-five” as if we will be fooled into thinking it’s somehow NOT five bucks shy of thirty THOUSAND dollars.

The episode of Star Trek original series on Space today was the one with Kodos the executioner. I have actually never seen it before today. Every time they said the name ‘Kodos’ it made me chuckle and want to give my cat another morsel of dampfkneudel. Last night Marmar and I went to Ursula’s for some delicious cuisine, including said german dumplings and some yummy soup. Oh and some crazy giant grapefruit called a…pommello? We brought some grape tomatoes (not to be confused with tomatoe grapes) and some broccoli. Yvonne, Caleb, Ian, Tiffany and Ursy’s mom were there and I got to watch Ursula get poked full of various needles, some supercharged with electricity, another administering C’Plus into her vein. So, fun night all ’round, including a good hour plus walk back to M’lo’s.

Tonight I am going to see some anime shorts as part of the VIFF with Yvonne and Marlo. Melange de shorts are always the best part of film festivals. Often you can just wait to see features when they come out in wide release, or on video. Shorts, on the other hand, are what film fests are all about, as far as I’m concerned. When we went to pick up our tickets at City Square last night it was an agonizing multi-step problem.

Let’s first have a look at a normal movie ticket-buying experience:
Step 1 – figure out what movie to buy tickets for by looking at the marquee
Step 2 – wait in line
Step 3 – swap money for tickets

Compare with VIFF:

Step 1 – (and this was my fault for having a bad memory) figure out what movie we were buying tickets for by trying to interpret 2 different schedule booklets.
Step 2 – Fill out a form with my name, address, phone, email, and specifics of what movie we were going to see, including the ‘movie code’ for the film.
Step 3 – wait in a different line with our form in hand
Step 4 – Hey we’re at the front of the line! Great, now we can…oh no…stand and wait some more while the lady inputs the information from the form into a laptop computer
Step 5 – fill out the membership card
Step 6 – swap money for tickets

And all that only after I had to have Yvonne explain the different ways I could get to see a VIFF movie, and the risks and hardships involved. Now, it’s a given that I’m an idiot, but come on – I just want to go to a theater and see a movie! I’m willing to show up an hour early to get a good seat. I’m not too keen, on the other hand, on jumping through a series of flaming hoops, each more flamingly hoopy than the last.

I’ve generally given the VIFF a miss over the past few years, but this has only been because I’ve been traditionally swamped with work this time of year. The only movie I saw at VIFF in recent memory is Volcano High, and I think that was 2 years ago. I hope tonight’s cinemafeast will be just as good!