I thought there was an advance showing for Indiana Jones on Wednesday night, but it turned out I read the paper wrong, and it meant Thursday at noon. This was akin to telling a six year old that tomorrow is Christmas, only to break it to them in the morning that Christmas is actually the next day, and they aren’t getting any presents. And you hate them.

So after crying myself to sleep, and pouting all day at work on Thursday, I finally got to see it last night. Indiana Jones is basically my personal Jesus, so this was a big event for me.

I have mixed feelings about the movie. A lot of the writing was awkward, too much CGI was used for my liking, I wasn’t really feeling the science fiction angle, and there were some incredibly cringe-worthy moments. I don’t want to spoil anything, but you’ll know the parts I’m talking about when you see it; they have George Lucas written all over them.

Despite its shortcomings, I still really enjoyed myself. Although, if the movie was an hour and a half of Indiana Jones putting on his hat from different camera angles, I would probably still buy the DVD, so I might not be the best critic in this case. Once I would have been outraged, and felt they desecrated my all-time favourite trilogy, if they brought out a fourth installment that wasn’t amazing, but now I can see it as just being a chance to revisit old characters without it tarnishing the memories of the original.

You should see it if you’re an Indy fan. I may have to go watch Raiders of the Lost Ark now.

10 Free E-books for Writers

The first two are great resources that I've spent time going through in the past. I haven't had a chance to look through the rest yet.

Fully-functional NES controller coffee table

This is actually pretty cool.

Tours Where You Get to Be Indiana Jones

A company that organizes vacation itineraries for you and throws in random encounters - robberies, kidnapings, ghosts, etc. I guess you need a pretty vivid imagination for this.

Holy Crap: MacGyver Blockbuster Film Coming!

Please let it be so!

The end of a long weekend is always a sad event. This weekend was Victoria Day in Canada, in which we honour ex-Queen Victoria, and the current Monarch, with Marching bands, fireworks, and sleeping in.

This was my fourth time in Victoria during this event, and I’d never made it down to the parade, so I figured I’d drop by this year. I decided to take some photos, but in traditional parade fashion, my camera died within the first ten minutes. This has happened at the last three parades I’ve attended.

Soon after arriving at the parade, standing in the chill air, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, I suddenly realized why I’ve missed the last three; I don’t like parades. Standing in a giant lineup, that never moves, while people slowly drive by, laughing and waving at me, is what I imagine hell would be like if there was such a thing.

Putting my cynicism aside for a moment, it was fairly good. A lot of schools and organizations got involved and seemed to put in a lot of effort.

One of the groups involved was Homes for the Homeless, or something like that, which was basically a group of homeless people scaring children and screaming that we need to make legislature listen. The cause is certainly valid, as anyone who spends any time in our downtown core will know, but it just seemed out of place in a parade or at least improperly executed. The funny bit (maybe funny isn’t the right word) was after they finished their march, they came back up the opposite way asking the crowds for change.

After my coffee sunk into my system, it was a pleasant way to spend the morning. I think next year the five minute television coverage from the local news will probably suffice, though.

A friend sent me this today, and I thought I’d share it here. It’s animated graffiti, and it must have taken an awful lot of work. You can find more of his surreal graffiti and drawings on his site.

A friend is trying to get me into mountain biking, so I went to the hill with him last week. It turns out that in order to ride down the mountain, you must first ride up the mountain. Our two hour ascent (probably 45 minutes for someone in any shape at all) nearly killed me.

We took a double black diamond run back down, because my friend apparently hates me, but I took it slow and had a lot of fun. It’s definitely something I’ll look into pursuing, but I’ll need to get in much better shape for it. I haven’t really used my biking muscles (i.e., legs) in over ten years, so I find it exhausting. By the time I get to the top of the hill, I’m almost too tired to enjoy myself on the way down.

Halfway down the hill, someone behind us took a six foot drop and landed chest-first on his handlebars. He didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but he must have been fairly bruised the next day. This incident really didn’t help my mental well-being for the second half of the ride, but I made it all the way down without falling. I had a minor incident where my shorts somehow got caught on my handlebars and I ran into a tree, but nothing serious happened.

When we got to the bottom of the hill, I rode my bike onto a wooden platform about three feet in the air, fell off the side of it, and landed head-first on the gravel, scraping my shoulder up quite nicely. I made it all the way down the bloody hill, only to eat dirt in the parking lot. Figures.

Struggling Writer passed this meme on to me several days ago, but I’ve been too busy wallowing in dental and financial self-pity to do anything productive (or blog), but here we finally go.

The rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to your blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I feel like I alluded to nearly everything remotely interesting or weird about myself in the life roadmap I did a while back, but I’ll have a go.

1. My parents are both psychiatric nurses. When I was in elementary school, my dad was working as a counselor in a detox centre and my mom as a nurse at the local jail. I took great pleasure in telling anyone who would listen that my mom was in jail and my dad was in detox.
2. When I was in my late teens, I wanted to give stand-up comedy a try. I even started to write a set. I had about a minute and a half of some of the worst observational comedy you’ve likely heard. I can’t remember any of the jokes, and I know I wrote them down somewhere, but I have no idea where.

   I lost my nerve and never did pursue that ambition, and I’d rather never see the jokes again, but I’d like to find and dispose of them as soon as possible. Once I become a famous crime-fighting novelist, I’d rather not have those popping up in the tabloids.

3. I played soccer for about fourteen years of my life, quitting when I started university. The last few years I’ve been telling myself I’ll get back in, but I never end up doing it. I’m a little worried to find out how bad I am now.
4. Other people’s interests rub off on me very easily. I’m either open-minded or a sheep, I’m not sure which, but if someone is enthusiastic about a topic or an activity, I want to become involved as well. I had to stop watching the Discovery channel in order to follow-through with my chosen degree.
5. One of my arms is longer than the other. Or my shoulders are lopsided. Or my tailer isn’t very good.
6. When I was growing up, nearly all of my friends had some strange physical party-trick they could do. One had two double-jointed elbows, another could flip his eyelids inside out, another could roll his stomach in waves. I desperately wanted a similar skill, but I couldn’t manage anything. My body just worked as intended.

   That all changed one day when I was stretching out my fingers. Someone commented that it was gross how they went back so far. I thought everyone’s fingers did that and was thrilled that I suddenly had something with which to disgust the girls on the playground. Unfortunately, I was nearly twenty when this was pointed out to me and would probably have been arrested if I had entered a playground and told the kids I had something interesting for them to see.

7. It’s 1:00am, and I just remembered that nearly my entire wardrobe is sitting wet in a washer downstairs in the closed laundry room, and I work in the morning. That’s unfortunate.

I’m not sure who has done this already, or who wants to do this, so I’m just going to list seven weblogs I enjoy. Feel free to do this if you want.

1. An Unreliable Witness
2. Schizogeny
3. Attack! of the Killer Weblog
4. Kyklops
5. Absolute Vanilla
6. The Ill Man
7. The Scottish Lemon