Toren Atkinson

TRANSFORMERS SPECIAL ADVANCE SCREENINGS TONIGHT AT THE RIO THEATER! TONIGHT! RIO! TRANSFORMERS! I’ll be there for the 8pm show – won’t you? ALLCAPS BOLD ITALIC!

Meanwhile… God creates AIDS, Man defeats God? [Potential Cure for HIV]

Since we got the eviction notice, we got a message telling us when they’d be power washing the windows and painting the building. So I guess they’re not demolishing the building (although it would be pretty cool if they gussied it up before they smashed it), just kicking us all out for the renovations. When I bumped into the guy from Evictions Canada (kind of like Elections Canada only even more sinister) he asked me how long I’d lived here. After his explanations about what was going on he thanked me for being so understanding. “After living here for 10 years I thought you’d be up in arms.” My response was, and is, that it’s kind of overdue. I had hoped to be out of here by now, but not just out of the building but onto the next chapter of my life (whatever the hell that may be, but I think there’s a house involved). And now I am, in a way, just unexpectedly so!

They got this cool thing on the internet – fake “reworked” trailers for existing movies. You’ve probably seen the one for “The Shining” which is great. This one below is my absolute favourite, and even though I have a vague policy about not putting up lame “hey look at this thing on the internet that everyone else has already told you about a million times” on my blog, this one’s really really good. Especially if you’ve already seen the film “Glengarry Glen Ross” and if you haven’t, you should.

Well, now you have to move it. Or sell it!
Yes, it’s true – they’re tearing the building down, or as near as dammit, so Stewie and I have to find a new place to live as of August 31st. I think I may have to have my birthday auction a little sooner than I planned to! Cuz buddy, I got a lot of crap!

Anyone have any leads on a place to live for a hard luck case? On my birthday, yet!

ARTHUR:
Old woman!
DENNIS:
Man!
ARTHUR:
Man. Sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there?
DENNIS:
I’m thirty-seven.
ARTHUR:
I– what?
DENNIS:
I’m thirty-seven. I’m not old.
ARTHUR:
Well, I can’t just call you ‘Man’.
DENNIS:
Well, you could say ‘Dennis’.
ARTHUR:
Well, I didn’t know you were called ‘Dennis’.
DENNIS:
Well, you didn’t bother to find out, did you?
ARTHUR:
I did say ‘sorry’ about the ‘old woman’, but from the behind you looked–
DENNIS:
What I object to is that you automatically treat me like an inferior!
ARTHUR:
Well, I am King!
DENNIS:
Oh, King, eh, very nice. And how d’you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers!

To think that I too, like Dennis, am thirty-seven. I should be in the Holy Grail!

And sure, I’ll probably have a birthday auction in September.

This is a photo of my brother, circa 1988ish…

Thank you, Facebook, for dredging up unspeakable terrors from times past….

I finally saw The Lost Weekend (1942) in its entirety yesterday. It’s a good movie. I think if they did a remake of it, but replaced alcohol with food, it would be more poignant to a lot more people, especially in this day and age. I was struck at how much it related to me in that way. Yesterday, after days of eating reasonably well and in moderation, I ordered and consumed an entire medium pizza, with Ben & Jerry’s tub of Vermonty Python ice cream for dessert. OH THE SHAME OF IT.

Just for kicks, here is a questionnaire from “Overeaters Anonymous” – a bullshit religious organization.

Are You a Compulsive Overeater?

Welcome to Overeaters Anonymous. This series of questions may help you determine if you are a compulsive overeater.

1. Do you eat when you’re not hungry?
2. Do you go on eating binges for no apparent reason?
3. Do you have feelings of guilt and remorse after overeating?
4. Do you give too much time and thought to food?
5. Do you look forward with pleasure and anticipation to the time when you can eat alone?
6. Do you plan these secret binges ahead of time?
7. Do you eat sensibly before others and make up for it alone?
8. Is your weight affecting the way you live your life?
9. Have you tried to diet for a week (or longer), only to fall short of your goal?
10. Do you resent others telling you to “use a little willpower” to stop overeating?
11. Despite evidence to the contrary, have you continued to assert that you can diet “on your own” whenever you wish?
12. Do you crave to eat at a definite time, day or night, other than mealtime?
13. Do you eat to escape from worries or trouble?
14. Have you ever been treated for obesity or a food-related condition?
15. Does your eating behavior make you or others unhappy?

Have you answered yes to three or more of these questions? If so, it is probable that you have or are well on your way to having a compulsive overeating problem.

I can’t imagine a person reading this who doesn’t answer ‘yes’ to at least three of these questions. Probably 1, 3, 9, 11, and/or 13. As for myself, I do eat when I’m not hungry, go on binges, have feelings of remorse, look forward to eating alone, etc. The latter half of the list (10-15) doesn’t really apply. (What troubles do I have to escape from, except for my habit of overeating?) I will go on stretches of eating well, and then I have cravings for pizza, chocolate, eccles cakes, ice cream, and chips (Miss Vickies, why do you conspire against me?). Sometimes I will satisfy those cravings in a big fat binge, best enjoyed by myself so that there are no eyes to judge my spiraling descent into gluttony. It happens, I try to rationalize it, I feel guilty, and it’s a real problem.

Now here’s their astoundingly unscientific “12 Step Program”

1. We admitted we were powerless over food — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to compulsive overeaters and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I don’t know where to start on how inappropriate that list is for solving any kind of problem, much less eating poorly. “A personal inventory”? What does that even mean?

Don’t you hate it when cool publishers lose thousands and thousands of dollars because their distributors go belly up? It happened to Green Ronin (publisher of our Spaceship Zero game book), and now it’s happened to McSweeney’s. The latter is having a big sale, and they have lots of excellent products, including these two squid shirts:

get it [here]

get it [here]

Wholphin is a quarterly DVD magazine featuring short films, documen- taries, animation, and instructional videos that have not, for whatever reason, found wide release. Recent issues of Wholphin have included films by Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Miranda July, Miguel Arteta, Errol Morris, and Steven Soderbergh, and per- formances from John C. Reilly, Selma Blair, Patton Oswalt, Andy Richter, a monkey-faced eel, and many others.