Thing One: It's supposed to be a cold winter, and I believe it: this time last year we hadn't even blanketed the horses. In fact, Mitzi got her blanket for my birthday in February, because up until then she hadn't needed one.

Thing Two: Remember our lovey cat and pony video? Well, thanks to that, I think I have learned that the Swedish for "barn cat" is "stallkatter." So if I get sued by the real band named Kowalski, I can change their name. Do not ask me why a band from Nova Scotia, composed of people of Acadian, Celtic, Chinese, and Indian heritage would name themselves after a Swedish barn cat. I'll worry about that if I need to. (I suppose one of them could have run into the term somewhere, liked it, and proposed, "Well, Jordy might be Swedish...")

(Oh, and also: Thing Three--sorry, we've gotten past The Cat In the Hat here--I forgot to mention Saturday was the second anniversary of the Strange Disappearance Of the Cursed Corolla. Not that I am still expecting it to turn up.)

Someone on a writing list made me think of car chases. So here is gratuitous Bullitt content:



Best part of the movie. By far.

Death Proof is now available on DVD. I think I prefer the idea of the two Grindhouse movies together forever, but the extras on this sound mighty tasty.

My brother has reminded me that today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Formula One driver Gilles Villeneuve, after a crash during qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix.

Okay, Grindhouse? Best mindless (heh, in the sense of actual brain-eating) fun I have had in a movie theatre since... well, ever, really. (The first Pirates Of the Caribbean movie actually had a coherent and complicated plot that rewarded further consideration. This one? Not so much. NOT THAT THIS IS IN ANY WAY A CRITICISM!!!) I don't expect I'll get a chance to see it again on the big screen because the numbers have been so bad, which is only proof that people are idiots!!!

Oh, and also, we got the Hobo With A Shotgun trailer which I guess has been all over YouTube for months, but I missed it because I was looking for footage of horse races and cutting competitions. The film probably looked a little dirtier than it would have if it was a first-run movie back in the seventies, but it definitely had the feel (and the voiceover had the sound) of the psycho-killer-we're-expected-to-root-for movies of the era. (I still clearly remember the voiceover for at least one of the Death Wish movies--which incidentally were the total opposite of the message of the book, but that's a post for after I get my hands on a copy of the book.)

Anyways, this whole entry is chock-full-o'-spoilers, and I apologize to unwary Facebook readers since the cuts won't work. (I think I'm well past the cutoff for the import blurb anyway, but just in case--HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. Although really, how can you spoil a thing like this?? Just get your damned popcorn and enjoy the fun.)

( Well, I'm a barrel of laughs with my carbine on/ I keep 'em hoppin' till my ammunition's gone. )

Then there were several trailers for movies like Werewolf Women of the SS, Don't! (the British contribution to the fun, judging by the presences of actors like Lee Ingleby and Lucy Punch), and Thanksgiving ("this year, there will be no leftovers!") and then on we went to Death Proof.

( Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/ But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars. )

So: should you see this movie before it leaves the theatres? Oh hell yes. Get the big popcorn, and make sure you save most of it for the second movie. Apart from everything else it'll give you something to hide behind during the juicier parts of Planet Terror.

Oh, and I must have the soundtrack, just for the Grindhouse theme. Truly, this thing is a masterpiece from one end to the other. No, really.

...but it turns out the Honda Jazz--what Canadians call the Fit--is available to Australians in yellow! And purple!

Just for that we're taking Joel Plaskett home. You can't have all the best colours and him as well.

Think of the dealerships! They'd look exactly like adorable paved Easter baskets!

... it occurs to me that, in the scene where the Challenger comes up out of the ditch and sort of lunges back onto the road, forcing the police car to swerve--

--the car looks more like a shark than the mechanical shark in Jaws did. I mean, the 1970 Challenger actually has kind of a nice, if overly-serious, face, but there was definitely something very sharky about that underslung jaw.









(Yes, I do seriously think like this. And people wonder where my characters get it.)

As you may have gathered from my previous entry, I didn't see any movies this weekend. I haven't spoken to my brother so I don't know what his intentions are, or if he's into seeing more than one. I still want to see Young Triffie, although the reviews now out are less than promising.

On the other hand, I had a gleeful good time at Ghost Rider, so really, what do I care whether a movie is any good or not? (Or at least well-reviewed. I have been known to just love a movie whose reviews were bad, often for idiosyncratic reasons of my own. And I admit there are "great" movies I can't stand. One of these days I should watch Heat again and see if I still hate it as much as I did the first time I saw it.)

The other one on the slate is Grindhouse, which I understand opened to disappointing numbers over the weekend. At three hours it's a considerably larger investment of time than Young Triffie, so I expect that'll have to wait for the weekend. As noted I do like Robert Rodriguez (I laughed myself sick over Once Upon A Time In Mexico and just the idea of Spy Kids makes me happy) and the Tarantino part features a Challenger. Although, frankly, I have a copy of Vanishing Point if I feel the need to look at a great car for two hours. Tarantino is just not quite as clever as he thinks he is, or else I am impatient. (I saw a couple of interviews about the film last week, with both directors, in which Quentin was chattering and Robert looked patient. I received the irresistible impression that if they were in high school together Robert and Quentin's mothers would be friends, and Robert would look out for Quentin because his mother asked him to. And spend a lot of time fishing him out of trash cans and the like.)

Anyway, my brother likes Tarantino better than I do, partly because he knows an awful lot more about movies than I do so he gets a lot of things I don't. And I find, for some reason, that I have developed a soft spot for Kurt Russell, so there you go.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing it. I just have to remember to get the large popcorn. I keep threatening to get popcorn but this is a movie experience that would be pretty much ruined without it. Although I may have to close my eyes a lot to keep from losing my appetite...

Last night I went over to my brother's for dinner (he's a good cook--certainly a better off-the-cuff cook than me) and to watch one of the movies he'd rented. Our choices were Blackballed (never heard of it), Wolf Creek (I'll admit I'm more bloodthirsty than I thought I was, but I just don't dig movies where the point is to watch the victims being scared), and Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby, the Will Ferrell NASCAR movie. Hey, I like Will Ferrell, and I like car racing (although I prefer Formula One) and I hoped there would be one scene half as funny as the news team street fight in Anchor Man.

And there was not. There were a couple of funnyish moments (okay, the one where he has the knife stuck in his leg and they have to pry it out with another knife was funny) but for the most part it was difficult to see what the point of the movie was. I mean, okay, maybe it was just flat-out making fun of NASCAR and the people who love it, but... it wasn't insightful or clever or anything, it was just a bunch of dumb-as-rocks characters doing arbitrary things.

Ferrell's character wasn't even likable, or interestingly unlikable, so there wasn't any reason to give a damn one way or the other. Until the very end, when the story called for Ricky to become somewhat sympathetic, and he suddenly kind of was. It was totally unearned, it's just at a certain point Ferrell began playing him as likable and he's so good at that, I just kind of went along with it. Mostly, I suppose, because I wasn't invested enough to do much else.

I keep thinking I was missing something, though. Like there was a satirical point of view I wasn't getting. I mean, the arch-rival character is this gay French ex-Formula One driver (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) and he is, by default, the most likable person in the movie. From his entrance onward, only it didn't feel like the script intended that (his role is more the classic Noble Enemy Who the Hero Learns To Respect.) It felt more like the script gave no guidance one way or the other and Cohen decided on his own what effect to create. But it's possible my brother and I both just missed a crucial point somewhere.

Mind you, some of the exterior race shots were really good, the crashes were well-filmed, and there is an endless end-over-end that was pretty funny... but that was about it.

Anyway, by the end of the movie we ended up apologizing to one another for renting the thing and/or asking to watch it. I hope the next movies we see are a little better.

One of the options for next week is, of course, Young Triffie. The other is Grindhouse, the Tarantino/Rodriguez thing. I was undecided about that one because I don't really care about Tarantino one way or the other (I do like Robert Rodriguez) but my brother was very persuasive:

"There's a Challenger in it..."

Yeah, well, it had better come through without a scratch, Quentin. That's all I'm saying.

(1) Coney is not my only elderly pet getting checked out today--the "Check Engine" light came on in the car yesterday so I took it in this morning to be looked at. It's running fine, and sounds fine, so I am hopeful the trouble is with the light rather than the engine. However, after a quarter of a million kilometres, why take a chance?

(2) Matt Mays didn't win the Juno he was up for last night, but Jim Cuddy did, so I have no complaints.

(3) I stayed up until midnight watching a double episode of The Amazing Race only to discover the knights-on-horseback stunt I was waiting for was (a) at the very end of the show, and (b) merely involved suiting up in armour and leading a tall but very gentle horse half a mile. The most difficult thing about the task was walking in steel shoes without breaking your toes. Which, come to think of it, was probably not at all easy. And the one cousin who ended up leading the horse was damn lucky he was goofy but gentle.

(4) Update: Just got a call from the auto shop--yeah, there was a problem with the engine. They can fix it today. We won't discuss what it's going to cost, all right? Still--could've been worse.

(5) Q-104, the local rock station, held its "pay-for-play" fundraiser over the weekend (for a fund that helps sick kids' families cover expenses the province and their insurance doesn't stretch to.) I tried several time to call in on Sunday and got busy signals. The radio station sent one of their guys out into the street with a bucket to ask for donations from passersby (there is a point to this) and at exactly the moment the outside guy reported he'd just gotten a donation from some guys in a van who turned out to be in a band called Gloryhound and the Skyhawks, I got through on the phone to ask for "Peace Frog" or "Friend Of the Devil." (The station played both for me.) Later I wished I'd had the presence of mind to point out the connection between those songs and the in-the-street donation, but I am just not that quick. I guess I'll stick to librarianship as opposed to PR as my profession.

(6) Still have not done my taxes. I guess I should think about that soon.

A little while ago I walked out of my building to my car (I'm posting from the public library.) I was a little preoccupied over something that happened at work that I didn't handle well but hope is fixed. And the lot is pretty dark.

So I absently walked up to a little car and was pulling out my keys when I realized the car was silver, but it wasn't Silver. I glanced down the row and didn't see her. Perhaps understandably, I nearly had a myocardial infarction on the spot.

Turns out there was an unfamiliar black truck parked in the space between me and her, and since (a) I wasn't expecting the truck, and (b) it was dark and so was the lot, I just didn't register its presence for a second. Silver was right where she was supposed to be, and after performing CPR on myself, I am fine.

But for a second there I sure wasn't...

from my automotive poll post:

Apparently, I am the only person in the world who leaves her car in gear at a red light. (Blame that on catastrophic thinking: I almost never stall out, but I keep thinking that I'm in a hurry I'll stall and hold up traffic and die of embarrassment.)

The Germans, for some reason, get more love in this poll than the Japanese. Silver and I don't understand that.

I may also be the last person on earth with a soft spot for the Lada, which led to the Russians getting no love at all. Tragic.

(When I was in Texas I was talking to a coworker about possibly getting a car--I didn't, I don't have the nerve to drive in Dallas traffic--and somehow I ended up telling him about the Lada. We discovered that the four-wheel-drive Niva, my favourite model which someone at home had in bright sky-blue, also comes in an upgraded model called the Cossack. My friend asked whether that particular model came only in red. Smartarse.)

Although there seems to be some concern about the eventual fate of my transmission--actually, I think the only genuine issue with my habit is wear on the clutch--most poll-responders correctly identified the possibility of theft by jackasses as a far more urgent issue.

No, this isn't a post about Halifax drivers and their habit of running lights. I'll leave that to someone else.

No, it's about German drivers, or rather German traffic lights. Some time ago libraryman was in Germany and he told me that he was a little weirded out by the traffic lights, which instead of the North American Green-Yellow-Red pattern went Red-Yellow-Green. Maybe there were two occurrences of yellow, I'm not sure. Red-Yellow-Green-Yellow?

Anyway, the explanation given to him was that, since practically everyone in Germany drives a stick, the yellow light was the signal to shift back into first gear. Because I guess most drivers pop the car out of gear when they're sitting at a light?

Okay, admittedly I am not as good a driver as your average German. (Or your incompetent German, if we're going to be honest here.) But I've been driving a stick pretty consistently since about 1987, and most of my family drives or has driven stickshifts, and I've never seen anybody pop the car out of gear at a red light. We mostly just sit there like idiots with the clutch deployed. (Although come to think of it I look for the yellow light going in the other direction as my warning to get ready to go.)

Is this just another example of how Maritimers can't drive? Possibly. But it's also an opportunity for my second-ever poll. Here we go!


Poll #926677
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

When sitting at a red light, I generally

All drivers should follow the customs of

By not shifting into neutral and sitting there stepping on the clutch, Coneycat is going to

I just found detailed instructions for how to pull a Rockford in a front-wheel-drive stickshift.

Not that I intend to, mind you. But I have big plans for Jordy and Vanessa.

...no point cleaning off the car last night--it's pouring out.

Really need to change windshield wiper blades, though. I think I'll stop in at Canadian Tire tonight and see if there's an obvious fit, or if I'll have to get out there with the tape measure.

It just occurred to me, it was one year ago Friday that I said goodbye to the Cursed Corolla. Not only was it a four-door automatic and not a Honda, it cost me way more in repairs than I paid for the damned car in the just-over-a-year that I had it. You can therefore understand it was not with unalloyed dismay that I learned it had been stolen from the parking lot of my apartment building.

By the time it was stolen I really hated that car, nearly as much as I love its replacement. However, it managed to more or less behave itself while driving the Cabot Trail in the summer of 2005, so maybe that's how I should remember it.

In fact, here we are on top of Smoky Mountain, courtesy of libraryman:



Wherever you, are, CC (probably in pieces all over the Maritimes), be well. And please don't come back.

Something I noticed a while ago actually, but only really registered the other day:

You know what I am not seeing on TV lately?

Ads for the Honda Fit.

You know what I've been seeing all over the roads of Nova Scotia lately?

Honda Fits.

I know it pays to advertise, but sometimes it apparently isn't necessary. And were I the sort of person who coined my own stupid folk expressions, I might go around saying things like, "That's as easy as selling Hondas to Maritimers!"

Fortunately, I am not that sort of person. At least not out loud.

Last night on the Rick Mercer Report, Rick paid a visit to the Depot, where the RCMP train. Among other things they took him to their driving school. And by golly, Rick got to do a reverse 180, which apparently James Garner taught to the stunt drivers on The Rockford Files. (Some car magazines apparently refer to that move as "pulling a Rockford" to this very day.)

It was cool. I wonder if you could do that move in a front-wheel-drive car? I'm strictly asking for research purposes. Honest!

... I do not want a big honkin' SUV.

I mean, even if I did want one I couldn't afford to buy or run it, and besides I'd feel too guilty. But my brother and his buddy rented a Ford Explorer (which they referred to as an "Exploder") for the weekend trip to Miramichi, and I got to drive it from Sackville NB back to Clayton Park. (Yes, I got the hateful stretch from Truro home.) I did like having those extra horses when I needed them, but I was always conscious of the "increased rollover potential"--it felt much clumsier and more top-heavy than my parents' CR-V or the old Sidekick. It also had power-assisted steering so it wandered much more readily than my Civic, which likes to be positively steered. Took a little getting used to, shall we say.

I guess I'm not going to change careers and become a bus driver any time soon.

I think I love this one.



Mind you, when I was having all the trouble with the CC I kept thinking, "If this car was a VW camper at least in addition to repair bills I'd have something cool to drive!" So I've always been a fan.