Monthly Archives: May 2011

An Idiot Abroad.

This is my mode of transport when I travel in the fall. Actually that’s IF I travel in the fall. There are some possible opportunities coming up that I’d be an idiot to pass up on. But as of now the plan is overseas in the fall to try and bring the smoulder to the European film industry…or work at HMV over there. Either way…

I’ve been tempted a few times this week to jump ship to another show with offers. But alas my morals got the best of me. I made a commitment, I may as well see it through to the end. Although the options given to me were extremely tempting…

My co-worker who’s on IMDBPro just informed me of my rank. My highest rank was 142,000 and now I’ve gone down to 1,024,375. Sonofabitch. Wait until these Alphas episodes kick in then maybe I’ll get to 141,000. I don’t even want to know how many people are on IMDB who are ranked. I’m probably so fucking low, but whatever. Who else has a profile with a killer mustache like mine?

I saw a story about a fat dude who died being cut out of his chair cause he was grafted to it by maggots and what not. I shared that story with a co-worker and she told me about a worse one when a fat woman was found dead and grafted onto her toilet. I can imagine it wasn’t pretty when they detached her.

That pretty much sums up my attitude at work. I find that it helps. And I think everyone should adhere to the wise words of Spider-Man (despite him being an inferior superhero to Batman). There would be a lot less stress in the world.

I went to see Pirates IV over the weekend…slightly intoxicated. And I have to say, I did enjoy it. It’s a decent franchise and I really enjoyed the first three despite the weird turns they took halfway through the series. Although my problem with the new one is none of the magic or mythology is explained whereas there was at least an attempt to explain the magical elements in the first three films.

One great thing about the new one is Geoffrey Rush’s character. He has the most interesting and entertaining character in the storyline. I think they should do a spin-off film of his character.

You know what else is exciting? This:

This will be the only reason I go see Cars 2 in theaters.

Song of the moment:

I’m in this routine now where I wake up, and immediately throw on pants and walk out the door to Coffee Culture before I fall back asleep. I get my coffee come back, do a little webernet surfing then go to the gym, then work. My stumble to the coffee shop probably gets confused to the passersby as a hung over stroll. This morning it wasn’t until I got back to the Burrow with my coffee that I noticed all my hair standing straight up, and my fly was down with my shirt poking out of it. Real class act today.

I’ll leave you with this…

I can hardly contain my excitement.

BRRAHHHHMMMM! (I’m told me spelling out the Inception boom is getting annoying. Well..fuck you.)

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Tramampoline! Trambopoline!

Mother said this to me in an e-mail today about our hounds:

“Dante hurt his hip last nite chasing the ball…poor fella cried all the way home and couldnt get into bed.  I hope he’s ok when I get home today.  Lolita has her summer hair-do, she looks amazing…but what a little shit she is….every time at the park, she looks at me and as I scream NO…she runs thru the mud swamp in the bowl…not once, not twice, but 3 times at least! grrrr”

I went from “Aww poor Dante” to laughing about what a jerk Lola is. Here’s the two of them. Dante is on the left, Lola on the right. It’s near impossible to snap a photo of both of them sitting still.

So what time is it now? 11PM. Only about five or six more hours until my long weekend finally starts. I feel like taking next Friday off and having a short three-day week. Wouldn’t that be the bees knees?

Top stories today in the news, the impending rapture tomorrow and that a wrestler died. People around the world must look at our North American news culture and just shake their heads. Not that the UK tabloids are any better than ours, in fact I thought I read somewhere they were worse. But what takes priority of news broadcasters here in the US and Canada boggles my mind and makes me happy I didn’t pursue journalism.

Yes…as I wrote that I thought to myself “Well it’s a great idea I didn’t do journalism and instead work in the film industry, while everyone else I graduated seems to be working somewhat normal hours with decent pay in a journalism job”. Mustn’t complain.

An AD asked me to stop putting her on hold for so long because she didn’t want to get brain cancer waiting on her cellphone to talk to whomever she was wanting to talk to in the office.

…Yep. What a twat.

Anyone see this today floating around online?

I guess this is Bane from the upcoming Batman movie. I may have mentioned this before but Batman is my favorite superhero. I want to be Batman. But the closest I’ll ever get to it is that I definitely drive like Batman. Yet have managed to not get a speeding ticket once so far on this show. See? Elusive. Like Batman.

Although this looks pretty bad…

I’m currently watching Vancouver fuck it up in game three. Let’s see if they get their shit together before I finish this blog post.

OK Vancouver just made it 4-3 for San Jose. Here comes the smoulder. How about this…I won’t publish this post until the game’s over.

Tomorrow I go to pick up Tom’s marked up script he left behind and that will be my little project this weekend. Between drinking and watching all the Christians go to heaven whilst the other turns into a flaming ball of ashes.

Here’s a good story from middle school. I believe it was grade six and myself and a circle of friends (I was in that group that was between the cool kids and the ones who sat under the stairs, we were accepted but not usually invited out all the time), anyway we were eating lunch in the cafeteria and I had one of those stupid Sunny D bottles that you had to pull the tab to get the top off.

Anyway the tab was being a stubborn bitch and I ripped it as hard as I could and the top flew off and Sunny D poured right onto my crotch. Luckily I was wearing beige khakis so it was obvious I was not going to stand up and walk down the hall and down the stairs to my locker to get my gym shorts without being noticed.

I whispered “Guys, look I just spilled this shit on my pants can you help me get down to my locker?”

They agreed. So we walked in almost a hurdle down the hallway. I was in the center of the circle and I couldn’t believe what a great group of guys they were for helping me out.

So we get to the most crowded part of the hallway and one of them, I forget which as I was concentrated on making sure no one would look at my wet crotch, yelled “NOW!” and all of them jumped back and laughed and pointed so everyone would see me. I booted it to my locker, only to find that my gym shorts were not in my locker, they were at home. So I grabbed a hoodie and wrapped it around my waist. That’s right. I went the rest of the day with a hoodie wrapped around my waste like some retarded tennis player. And the worst part is that when beige khakis dry with Sunny D on them, the Sunny D stains. So it still looks wet even when it’s dry. That was the last day I ever wore khakis. Fuck you, Gap.

A few of those guys are still my friends to this day. Only a few though…

Damn. We lost.

Cheers.

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Kicked me height.

Tom has supposedly torn apart my first draft of the script. Can’t wait to see what idiotic changes he suggests we make to it. Kidding, of course. I wrote the damned thing at a bar I’m sure there’s loads wrong with it. Surprisingly I’ve found that while Tom and myself have a vast difference in taste in movies, we somehow came together with this pitch. Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it.

This one’s been stuck in my head the last few days:

OK enough music no body likes except me.

Driving home the other night I noticed that there was one of those disgusting clear spiders on my windshield. So naturally I just waited for it to fall off of my car once I got on the highway, except it didn’t. And this is when I realized it was on the INSIDE of the windshield right in front of my face. But now I’m on the highway going 130 km/h and I can’t just slow down to take care of him, nor do I want to open a window going that fast because I’m afraid he’ll just fly back into my face and I’ll then get in an accident.

So while we’re having this stare down, I move my arm to find the closest thing I can grasp to squish the basterd. I know, cruel, but if I didn’t take care of him he could have killed me by making me to swerve into another car. So at this point it’s my life or his. I find something and very quickly and swiftly kill him. Then I notice it’s someones paycheque I’m about to put in the mailbox. So someone is going to be getting paid with a lovely bit of spider guts on the envelope. I apologize to whomever that is.

So Lenka has now added a Toronto date at Lee’s Palace for June. Add this one to yet another concert I’ll be attending alone because no one in our small circle of Maritimers has the same interest in music as me. (What’s wrong with Australian pop?!)

Here’s a taste:

I also have a U2 ticket up for grabs. I thought it would be easy to unload on a friend from the east coast, then the buggers had to go and add a Moncton show to their tour schedule, so now I’m stuck. Brilliant seats though, guarantee it. E-mail me. I may or may not get back to you, depending on who you are. If I don’t respond, you should be offended. Kidding.

I had this horrifying dream last night about zombies. Weird as I worked on the zombie pilot back in March so I guess the nightmare’s a little delayed. But when I woke up grasping onto air (in my dream it was a baseball bat) and frozen stiff in fright, I woke up and immediately thought “That could be an episode if that series gets picked up” so I’m going to be working on that between working on the short film.

Thought that popped into my head walking to the gym and walking back home to go to work at 4PM:

What the hell job do these people have that allows them to sit on a patio in Kensington drinking beer on a patio at 2PM? My immediate thought, based solely on their “vintage” (moreso homeless looking) clothing is that they’re unemployed or live at home. But I’m sure SOME of them have to have a job.

Also, walked by Sin & Redemption and there’s middle-aged adults having pints in the middle of the afternoon. Shouldn’t these people be working at least a 9-5 during the week? The world’s gone mad. That’s probably why some morons think it’s going to end on Saturday.

So if you’re one of these religious nutjobs who thinks the rapture’s going to happen this week, I hope you’re living your life to the fullest. Looting porn stores, binge drinking, whores, the whole nine yards. I really hope you are, so that when it doesn’t happen (which it won’t) you’ll have to do thousands of Hail Marys or whatever they’re called to make up for your filthy ways.

I’m looking forward to this long (not really long) weekend. Getting home at 8AM on Saturday morning from work won’t feel as bad because Monday will be work free. Maybe I’ll actually be able to get some shit done instead of sleeping after a horrid work week…not likely.

This is how a conversation went between me and Tom today: (and this is word for word what was said via text)

Me: Can we do squash Monday morning? Are you back from NFLD then?

Tom: Not back til late that night. Gonna want to sleep in on Tues but that afternoon of mining (he means ‘morning’) after is good.

Me: Well, no I asked because it’s Victoria Day so I had it off.

Tom: Sorry that I’m ignorant of your schedule.

Me: You idiot, Victoria Day is a national holiday, dickwad, not just MY schedule. Pole smoker.

Tom: Yeah but I don’t know what other fucking mornings you have off.

Me: Me neither you fucking asshole.

Tom: I’m bringing back some Newfie beer. I’m going to drink it, smash the bottle, and shiv you in the eye.

Me: Before or after you fuck yourself in the ass with it?

Tom: After, because I want you to get sepsis.

Me: Well played.

I only gave up because I had to go out on the road. I could’ve kept it going. We’re bestfriends by the way.

Cheers.

- B.

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Keep the change you filthy animal

Woody’s sad because Toronto was beautiful all week while Billy was working and now that Billy is a mere few hours away from freedom, the forecast is absolute shit for the weekend. All I wanted was a patio all week and looked forward to the weekend to finally getting one, and if there’s a god (uh oh lower-case ‘g’) then he just flipped me off and said “That’s what you get for not believing in me, asshole.”

A homeless hippie scared the living shit out of me on my way to work. I was stopped at Front and Spadina in the gridlocked clusterfuck of a line to get onto the Gardiner during rush hour. And the bloody hippie fell onto the hood of my car and started wiping the windshield. Which was fine. He did a good job, I gave him a few dollars. He thanked me and went on his way. Cheapest car wash ever. Save the dollars you’d spend at an ESSO car wash and just find a homeless with a squeegie, you can pay whatever. You can NOT pay if you’d rather. But then you’d be kind of a dick.

This moment makes me miss Michael Scott immensely:

I miss my music life. And that’s all I have to say about that. Although now with Tom being laid off because he’s an incompetent twat who was solely responsible for the publication he was working for sucking so badly, maybe we can get The Station Agents back up and running. This time full band style, non of this folky-acoustic stuff that limited us.

Although he’ll probably want to focus on that little film project we’re trying to accomplish.

So they seized Bin Laden’s porn stash. Didn’t that guy have four or five wives or something? The more we learn about him, it seems like he was just another guy…except with a deep hate for western culture, and was willing to murder thousands and thousands of innocent people. Other than that though…

Kidding, obviously.

The Canucks play their first game in the western final on Sunday night. Looking forward to this. I truly believe this could be their year. I remember as a kid watching them play the Rangers in the final back in the ’90′s and the disappointment that swept our city when they lost. Them was tough times, I do declare.

Speaking of BC. Here’s a photo I found on my last visit:

Myself and Lucy. What’s important to note here is my hair. I don’t know what that is. Also those slippers look awesome. Oh and I probably licked that mixer batter thing after Lucy had a go at it. I’ve never had a problem sharing with animals, humans though…fuck them.

OK a little rant…I fucking hate these hipster twat photographers (they don’t take pictures of twats, they ARE twats) who think they’re legitimate photographers because they have a $500+ camera and can take really nice photos of INANIMATE objects.

“What’s this photo of?”

“A coffee cup with some coffee in it. But see what I did here?”

“No. Other than the obvious. Which was take a photo—”

“No but I used a [insert stupid name] lens and then I took the exposure to [insert douchey camera term] and then I turned off the autofocus and [insert perverted joke about touching himself while crying under a cold shower while listening to Vampire Weekend].”

How fucking hard is it to take a photo of something that’s NOT MOVING? We get it. You can click the button and take a photo of a wall or a flower. Go fuck yourself.

I can only imagine that career photographers (you know, the ones that use skill they’ve learned for years and actually get paid to do it professionally) hate these people.

When I’m having a drink on my front step, and I see a guy in a purple hoodie, skinny jeans, fedora, and thick-rimmed glasses (with no lenses, by the way) and he’s taking a picture of the sidewalk, I can feel my face contorting into what can only be a mild stroke.

I think they should triple the cost of SLR cameras. This would weed them out wouldn’t it? The real photographers from the self-proclaimed ones?

Rant’s over.

Let’s end this on a good note. Here’s a dog.

This is Dante. You can’t see it but he’s chewing on a ball twice the size of a tennis ball. Jaws of life on this one.

Cheers.

- B.

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“Get out of my offive”

Mother sent me photos of our family friends’ two new pups in Vancouver. Be amazed at how awesome they are.

Awwwwwwww. I could write a really crappy direct-to-video Disney movie based on these two. It would be like Homeward Bound. Except I would have them use those really awful digital mouths when the dogs talk to one another. The unfortunate thing is that movie would probably make a killing.

Here’s the formula:

Two new puppies from a shelter are adopted by a nice white suburban family. They take the puppies on a camping trip and somehow get separated. The two dogs…hmmm…let’s name them Buster and Lucky. So Buster and Lucky are adopted but neither of them like each other. But now lost in the forest and trying to find their way back to their family, they have to work together. They encounter oddball forest creatures (raccoons, woodpeckers, a dumb moose, whatever) and eventually grow to like one another. There’s a lot of Looney Tune sound effects when they slip on a mud puddle or bump their head on a tree trunk, you know.  Then eventually one of them, let’s sayyyy Buster, gets separated and falls into a hunters abandoned trap. A cougar is about to eat poor little Buster when Lucky jumps in to the rescue. Blah blah blah, they find their way back to suburbia and love one another by the end of it. The end.

I imagine this would be the reaction to watching that movie if it were ever made:

So far Tom has said nice things about the first draft, I’m not holding my breath. Just waiting for him to rip into it on Saturday. Eventually we’ll draw pistols and duel at dawn on Sunday. I have yet to look over the draft myself and start marking up what changes need to be made. Another thing that concerns me about this project is casting. I know we’ll have the manpower to crew, and the money to finance this thing, but casting for these specific characters will be difficult. Especially when, so far, we won’t be paying. Isn’t there some sort of saying that “good talent doesn’t come cheap”? Wait, that can’t be right if Will Smith is the highest paid actor today…or is he? I don’t even know. I also don’t give a shit, all I care about is what I get paid (which isn’t much, ho ho ho).

Talked to a good friend in New Brunswick briefly today, we used to play in a band together and recorded each others music. He’s now in a successful electro-pop-house-whatever-you-call-it band. Later I then received a message from him informing me that his band The Arka Teks are going to be featured in this upcoming season of Rookie Blue (which yours truly worked on). Fantastic news. Congrats to him.

Here’s the song I think is going to be used:

Garry Shandling pointed out on Twitter that today is George Carlin’s birthday. He’s the only performer on my concert bucket list I had to cross off due to his death some years back.

People keep telling me I need to watch shows. “You have to watch Mad Men.” “You have to watch Breaking Bad.” “You have to watch Battlestar Gallactica.” “You have to watch How I Met Your Mother.” And so on.

I’ve seen five minutes of How I Met Your Mother and I can say one thing…I don’t HAVE to watch that shit. If you weren’t created in the ’90′s and you have a laugh-track on your show, it’s very unlikely that it’s in anyway funny or entertaining but more likely that it’s just plain annoying and stupid. Same with that other show…what’s it called…the one about the geeks? Fuck. I have no idea. It has the guy who played Darlene’s boyfriend in Roseanne though. I’m too lazy to look it up, but that show sucks too.

As with the others, I plan on maybe at some point sitting down and starting a new drama series post-LOST, but it’s hard to find the time to keep up with The Office and Breakout Kings. Although I’ll watch Alcatraz when that finally airs.

I realized today my playlist mainly consists of female singer/songwriters. Currently Lenka, Christina Perri, Diana Krall, Norah Jones and A Fine Frenzy are almost overtaking the Tron soundtrack.

Although this is a great remix:

Anyway now I’m just talking about nothing because I finally had a little downtime at the office.

Also $5 to the person who can correctly reference the title of this post. Scout’s honor.

Cheers.

- B.

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Michael Caine

This is great:

Today I went on a romantic Japanese lunch with  Tom. Going out to eat with Tom is like going to a dinner theater. I just sit back and watch him converse with the servers about his order specifications and questions about each platter and how they’re prepared. Only today was even better because we had this young timid new server who, under no fault of her own, wasn’t very good at English. So a lot was lost in translation, which made it more entertaining for me. The looks on their faces when they talked to one another, both in broken English at times, was brilliant.

This was one of the conversations:

Tom: “Don’t you usually serve tea?”

Waitress: “You want tea?”

Tom: “Well don’t you usually serve it?”

Waitress: “Both want tea?”

Tom: “Well not if I have to pay for it.”

Waitress: “So…no tea? Two teas?”

Tom: “…Nevermind.”

Also, the food was quite good.

I’ve officially, finally, passed the script to him, so I expect this weekend to get his copy of it back with sharpie marked all over the 11 pages. Then we’ll play squash, go for several beer and argue all afternoon, annoying everyone else who’s around us. All for the sake of accomplishing this short film.

Just watched this trailer, looks good.

With a few drinks in me, I’m convinced I do a good Michael Caine impression, but I have nothing on these two. They have an unfair advantage though, as they’re English…I do a mean Russian accent though.

Oh, and the Canucks made it through to the Western finals. The Stanley Cup playoffs are the only time I ever watch sports. It’s nice to see my home team doing as well as they can, hopefully they don’t fuck it up…they probably will.

Cheers.

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The Grind is a fickle bitch.

The weekend was short-lived.  But it was lived to its fullest.  15 Darcy held a SuperHero/Villain Keg party.  I dressed as “retired Batman” but I soon discovered my costume came across more like Batman’s mong step-brother who tried to dress like him.  Ah well.

Here’s a photo of us after winning flip cup. Josh went as The Incredible Hipster, Tom went as Wolverines secret lover, Biff.

My sleep schedule after a bunch of overnights last week was completely fucked.  Woke up every hour after midnight last night.  Suffice it to say it’s been a rough Monday. I had to pull over on the side of the highway and take a fifteen minute snooze as my eyes were starting to close somewhere around Islington.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could have the summer off from work and still get paid weekly?  It would be like grade school all over again except you’re of age to fully enjoy it and don’t have to steal liquor from your parents’ cabinet and replenish the vodka you took with water.

I’m about to send the first draft of our short film to Tom and let him mess about with it. He’ll probably ruin it. I expect there to be a lot of arguments over the next couple weeks as we work to finishing a production draft. But I’ll just give him a sausage injected with maple syrup and that should help me win any debate.

The main topic of conversation at Jer and I’s Sunday beer tradition was Superman vs. Batman.  And the overall conclusion is that Superman is a dick. Plain and simple. Batman is better and anyone who disagrees better have a damned good argument.

Enough said.

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The Flux Capacitor

Hey howdy hey!

I figured now is as good a time as any to write a new post so I can further procrastinate on doing actual work. I’m actually at work right now, we’re on day 5 of shooting and 4 out of the 5 I haven’t gotten home earlier than 4AM the next day. It’s so nice driving through the morning rush hour trying to get home so I can sleep in a bedroom with no curtains and the sun blazing down on my fucking head while the bell tower goes off across the street every hour and underneath it is a fire hall. Mustn’t moan though. Ah, fuck it. It’s my blog I can say what the hell I want.

Work work work is all I’ve been doing. That and a lot of planning as well. Some big changes hopefully on the horizon, but in order to make those changes happen I also must subject myself to the trials of P.A work so I can make the dough to fulfill the goal. Oh, and the goal is to leave the country in the fall. No biggie. Let’s move on.

Something big that myself and a fellow graduate who now works at the biggest weekly magazine in Canada, have developed is that we are going to be shooting a short film co-written/co-directed/co-produced by us.  It was funny actually.  We went to Einsteins to have a couple (scratch that several) pints and try to pitch a story to one another. We ended up pitching a few ideas back and forth, then he pitched this one idea that I thought might merge well with a story I had come up with a few years back. And voila. We have our film. Well we have the premise at least. A first draft was written (at a bar) a couple weeks back. So now it’s a lot of writing, discussing, arguing, and figuring out how to budget this thing. Making a film is expensive (d’uh), and asking our friends to work for free is also asking a lot. But we’re confident we can accomplish this despite the obstacles standing in our way. I will feel better leaving in the fall if we have this one film under our belts.

By the way I’ve been thinking about auctioning off my degree lately. How much would a bachelor degree in journalism go for? $25? $50? That’s probably too high.

There’s a dog at our post-production suite that looks exactly like Elmo. I miss that little fella. It’s sad that I remember the way his fur felt against my hands, but I’ll never be able to physically feel that again. I remembered tonight a moment we shared when we were speaking to each other (me swearing at him and him growling at me) and we got nose to nose. He never scared me, then he chomped on my nose. I think it was because I said “cunt” and he doesn’t approve of such fowl language. The mutt, bless him.

I’m disappointed music has taken the far back seat in the suburban truck of my life (awful metaphor). But with work and other bullshit spewing into my lap it’s hard to focus on songwriting. Every time I get a chance to pick up the guitar I have to put it down two minutes later. Ridiculous.

Here’s a song from an album I’m listening a lot to this week:

I love her voice. And her music is so damned catchy. It’s happy-go-lucky compared to the shit I usually listen to, which is mainly depressing and makes me weep as I drive along the Gardiner. Unless I’m playing Batman music. Then I drive like a maniac.

I’m going to keep this post short in the hopes that I’ll write more frequently.  The way the hours are going on this series so far, I’m sure I’ll have a lot of time.

Oh one more thing. Al-Qaeda finally acknowledged the death of Bin Laden, but the morons demanded his body be returned to his family, obviously they haven’t been keeping up with the news. Otherwise they would know HE WAS THROWN OFF THE SIDE OF A BOAT. No one’s going to take these guys seriously anymore if they can’t even pick up a newspaper and pay attention. Bunch of mongs.

Cheers.

- Billy Ray.

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