The Two Sides of Condo Living

We live in a generally very quiet condominium development. It consists of four, four-storey condo buildings all facing a central courtyard. The worst noise offenders that we hear are the occasional late-night whoops and drunken loud-talking from some d-bags and their girlfriends who probably have a beer bong on standby, the upstairs humpers, and a yappy little shitdog that can’t keep its shitmouth closed, piercing the early morning quiet with its shitbarks, like some kind of malfunctioning shit alarm. But on the whole? It’s an oddly uneventful housing complex.

The downside to this: there’s no good neighbours to peep on. There’s no one walking past their windows in their underwear - of either gender; no chiseled guys barbecuing in the summer or fine ladies working on their tans on their patios. It makes me wonder if I’m the only one in this complex who’s dedicated to the cause of unwarranted accidental nakedness. I do sometimes walk around the apartment sans pantalons, and while our windows are covered by a screen of white gauze, I’m sure when I stray close enough to the glass it’s entirely obvious that I’m sporting the M for Mature look. If in fact I’m the only one doing it, so be it. Someone’s gotta be the weirdo. In the two and a half years we’ve been here, though, there’s been nary an exposed thigh to be seen.

Make it stop!

I know it’s like moving to Norway and complaining that I don’t like the snow. Or eating an entire bag of baked Cheetos then complaining that I don’t feel good. But holy Jesus Christ, it’s been raining since Remembrance Day. Yeah yeah, it’s Vancouver, what else is new, right? Well, a couple more days of this and I’ll actually have a need to read the Bible.

To learn how to make an ark, you see. 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits, apparently.

Because of all the rain.

Speaking of Jesus:

Where The Wild Things Are

Being a former food critic, I realize how subjective reviewing things can be. I may have rated a chicken club sandwich highly in the past only to be told by my peers that the sandwich was far from their favourite. What can I say? Not everyone likes the same things. And the same can be said for movies. There are motion pictures that I love and others despise (2001: A Space Odyssey, anyone?) and there are movies friends have liked that I find putrid (Gummo?). C’est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.

On the weekend the ladyfriend and I visited a cinema-house (one not showing New Moon, thank gawd) to take in Where The Wild Things Are, a Spike Lee joint Jonze movie based on the revered children’s novel. Children’s movies are probably the genre that really shouldn’t be taken too seriously when it comes to reviews: a bunch of middle-aged white guys who couldn’t hack a career as a screenwriter really have no place writing about whether a movie for young people is ‘good’. Remember, these are the people who would rather kiss the ass of Quentin Tarantino or whatever film Daniel Day Lewis chooses to act in every four years. So to see the average review score of WTWTA at 71 out of 100, a respectable but not overwhelmingly good score, you can’t really take it at face value. Take a sample of one of the worst reviews, which said “The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.” Seriously? One can judge the true soulfulness of a book with 10 sentences in such an absolute fashion? It’s more than a bit preposterous.

I happened to love the movie, and so did my special ladyfriend. It was touching, it ended in an unresolved manner, it never pandered to children or ‘talked down to them’. It was a movie that celebrated being a nine year old without being overly fantastic or sweet. I fully recommend seeing it, whether you remember the book or not. There’s a great article from GQ about Spike Jonze’s attempt to make the movie what it is; it’s a long read but well worth a look. In it, he says, “I didn’t set out to make a movie they could put in the children’s section. I set out to make a movie that was about being 9 years old.” In my opinion he succeeded. And I think that’s what a lot of the mediocre review(ers) failed to grasp.

Caviar Dreams

It’s coming up on three weeks since I brought home our new vehicle, and it’s started to sink in just how ‘ghetto’ our previous cars have been. I mean, on one hand, all we’ve ever looked for in our vehicles were things to get us around somewhat safely, using reasonably low amounts of fossil fuel, and wouldn’t cause us too much grief in terms of reliability. Well, if you combine all the cars my wife and I have owned in our driving years, we managed to hit all of those targets except the reliability one. We’ve never really put things like air conditioning, or power locks, or comfortable seats, or even cup holders on the list of things we want in a car. And the only two from that list we wanted from our latest car were A/C and cup holders (seriously, when you’ve never owned a car with cup holders, and finally do, it’s like Christmas every time you drive).

As luck would have it, the Suzuki we now drive came with A/C, power windows and locks, power side mirrors (which I find frivolous, but whatever), dual vanity mirrors, dual map lights, an ignition immobilizer, an MP3 CD player that increases and decreases volume levels auto-magically to compensate for road noise, six airbags, an ‘outdoor’ thermometer, and a fuel consumption calculator. All of which is nice, but hardly any of which were anywhere near must-haves when I was looking for a car.

The sad part is, being the first car either of us have had that is newer than the mid-90s, all these features are actually pretty satisfying. I can’t say our lives are better in any way by having these things - although six airbags is at the very least comforting - but I’ll admit, they are nice to have. And they’re all features that are standard on base-model Suzukis; had we gone with something else in its class, it would have meant shopping for a high-end model for multiple thousands of dollars beyond my price range.

I’d gladly trade most of those extra features for a car that’s reliable for the next eight to ten years. Thankfully the thing’s still under warranty for another three and a half.

Show Me The Funny

For the moment, let’s just ignore the fact that I am home on a Saturday night watching television.

I turned on Saturday Night Live for the second time this fall mainly due to the guest star: January Jones, from Mad Men, was featured. I figured, hey, it can’t be any worse than the season premiere hosted by ridiculously hot but marginally talented Megan Fox. Tonight’s episode certainly wasn’t worse. But it was not at all better, either.

SNL is probably the one show that, due being on the air since the Taft administration 1975, every generation believes theirs was the funniest. It’s hard to quantify: my parents remember the early seasons, with Ackroyd, Radner, and Murray as the best it ever was; I’m more apt to think the Hartman/Farley/MacDonald era as the top of the pops. But I have to wonder if the current generation can ever look at the current cast as being even remotely entertaining. The two shows I’ve suffered through have made me laugh approximately … never. Tonight’s comedy? Some lame Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde gay jokes and some fart noises. People get paid to write that? Look, I like fart noises as much as a lot more than the next person, but come on. Nothing on SNL right now can even bring a smirk to someone’s face. Where have you gone, Opera Man? I’m honestly not sure anyone on SNL right now can even be called funny, although Andy Samberg might come close.

In the end I guess SNL doesn’t have to be funny. What else is NBC going to air at 11:30pm on a Saturday? Is there even anything on other channels to compete with?

Smashed!

For the second time this year, someone broke into our vehicle (the old one). However this is the first time someone’s smashed a window in order to do it. It was the rear driver’s side window on our removable hard top that was smashed to bits. As with the first time, though, nothing was taken. The perpetrator - or ‘perp’ as they say on the streets - rooted through our roadside emergency kit, took out the flashlight, removed the batteries … then left the batteries on the bumper.

Naturally we’d be much more upset if the Asuna was still our only vehicle. Since we have a new one, though, the Asuna was left in the visitor parking (where there’s at least one act of vandalism/break-in every month or so) and now we’re just faced with deciding what to do with a car that was worth hardly anything before having its window broken. I’ll be taking it to a glass shop for an estimate but I’m sure the cost of replacing the window will not make economic sense, considering we would be thankful to have sold that vehicle for a thousand dollars.

We’re also frustrated that the car was broken into twice and wasn’t stolen. Can’t someone take pity and steal/torch that P.O.S. as a favour?