I’m irrationally excited about the premiere of The Sarah Silverman Program (Thursday on Comedy Central).

Wait, no, it’s not irrational: I think she’s totally hilarious and totally hot. Possibly in that order.

(Incidentally, the clip is from her movie Jesus Is Magic. If you actually laughed and didn’t come up with 102 reasons to be offended, I urge you to seek it out.)

I don’t think I tell my friends how much I love them often enough. But they are awesome. They are, I would further venture to say, super-awesome. Here are three reasons why:

1) I met up with Karlene for coffee at her house last week. We talked about music and comics and that was fun and cool, no question, but then she gave me art. For free. Art that she made. Her art. Now the art graces my living room walls.

I sense I may be losing you, so here’s pictures:

2) Lianne and Corin came over for January Christmas (to make up for the fact that there was no December Christmas between us) and they gave me An Even Scarier Solstice. More Cthulhiana for the ever-growing stockpile of horror and madness. Iä! They also gave Mrs. C the latest Bathroom Reader and she was suitably chuffed.

3) Graeme stopped by today to help me work on my website, fixing a problem in half an hour that I had toiled on fruitlessly for three or four. (My 1337-ness is draining away. I can feel it. It feels like Superman does when you tape a lump of green kryptonite under his chair.) And all I had to do was pay him in organic coffee and conversation, which I was more than happy to do. (Let me tell you–that is more than fair trade coffee. *drum sting*)

See what I mean? I am a lucky guy. Thanks, friends.

You know, for all my g33kiness, I never got into hard sci-fi that much. I read fantasy, modern fantasy and less science-based science-fiction, but I never spent too much time reading books on interstellar conquest and colonisation. Now I’ve got a new project I’m working out the details for and, as a personal challenge to myself (since I’ve never played in this particular sandbox), I thought I’d try my hand at space opera.

So, with that in mind, I trotted down to my friendly neighbourhood used book store and traded in some old books for a few new ones. I picked up:

- Armor - John Steakley
- Ringworld - Larry Niven
- Janissaries - Jerry Pournelle

Now here’s my question to you–my local literary advisor (Chris Brayshaw of Pulp Fiction) has recommended Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds to me as leading practitioners of the genre (and I will be picking them up at my earliest possible convenience), but do you have any favourites? Any authors or titles (new or old) that make you think, “Chris must read this if he is truly to understand the nuance of the space opera”? I’ve read the Wikipedia entry and it has a number of suggestions, but I want some advice from my trusted friends. Thank you.

EDIT: Mrs. C’s dad gave me some recommendations:

- Force of God and Anvil of Stars - Greg Bear
- Footfall and the Known Space series - Larry Niven

And my step-dad’s favourite series right now is the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, so I’ll probably be giving one of those a try soon.

Personal:
- I briefly skipped over the the hometown on the weekend where I met up with a few different people and talked about comics as an industry and a way to make money. There were good conversations had and I feel positive about my career path and those of my friends and acquaintances. I also bought more comics, but that’s gonna happen anytime I set foot in Legends (my favourite comic shop). (Sorry to any friends who didn’t know I was coming to town and didn’t get to hang out with me—I wasn’t over long enough for comprensive chilling out. I’ll try to make it back for some of that soon, though.)

TV:
- Battlestar Galactica has shifted timeslots to Sunday nights now, which means that I get to wake up on Monday mornings, brew myself a cup of piping hot tea, shuffle out to the living room in my pajamas and watch a new episode of one of the best shows on TV. *aaaaaaaaahhhh* Hear that contented sigh? Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays.
- Elsewhere, it looks like the TV Gods are smiling upon me (and the rest of g33kdom, I suppose) since not only is George Clooney producing a six-hour miniseries of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age for the Sci-Fi Channel (which Stepehsnon is writing the script for!), but HBO will be producing George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire as an on-going series. You may note that Diamond Age is the first Stephenson I ever read (and the book that made me a total convert) and that Song of Ice and Fire is my favourite book series of all time. I could stop drooling, but I don’t want to yet.
- Also, I watched the first few episodes of House, and for those of you who told me it was good, yes, it is.

So my week was mostly TV based. What’s your point?

Hard Candy, The Devil Wears Prada and Why We Fight.

You may start assembling your psychological profile now.

The thing about showing up late to the dance on cultural stuff is that you usually end up with a crapload of material to catch up on. Like Channel Frederator, for instance—the first all-cartoon pocast/internet cartoon channel. All of the best cartoon shorts from around the world compiled weekly into a 10-15 minute show that I was blissfully unaware of. And I have 64 of them now.

On the one hand I feel a little bit out of the loop (I mean, this has been going on for well over a year now), but on the other I’m fucking thrilled that I have over five dozen of these to kick back with. Hold my seat—I’mma go make some popcorn.

(P.S. If you’re into cartoon culture, their blog is amazing.)

Wow, it’s been a hell of a week. Not in a bad way, mind you, just in the way that everything decides it has to happen at once. Here’s the pertinent bits in point form.

Personal:
- Mrs. C has left for two weeks on business and I’m left holding down the fort. This means that I can get more writing done, but it also means that my best friend isn’t around for half a month, and that pretty much sucks. And it also means that I have to get groceries alone in the snow and that the cat is even more crazy because she misses her mom. Foo.
- But as I mentioned before, more time for writing, which is awesome.

Writing:
- And speaking of writing, I’m the new film columnist for This Magazine, so be sure to pick up a copy of the next issue when it hits the newsstands–it’s sure to be a keeper.

Tech:
- Everyone else on the planet has developed an acute case of logorrhea regarding the iPhone, so I won’t bother to go off about it, but I will say that while I don’t usually care for convergent technology (why do you want a 3MP camera in your cell phone? why?), this is pretty p0rny. Yes, I want one.

Cartoons:
- I know that Adventure Time was just produced as a one-off “Random Cartoon”, but can it please become a regular series? PLEASE. Because it’s truly awesomazing and Jake the Dog is my new hero.

Movies:
- Available online for free now: Darkon. If a documentary about weekend warriors (and by that I mean fantasy LARPers who do it mostly on the weekend) is at all intriguing to you, load up your browser with this. Laughs and sympathetic embarrassment abound.
- I just managed to find a copy of the hideously out of print, shot-in-Vancouver-when-not-everyone-and-their-dog-did-it classic film Ladies and Gentlemen… The Fabulous Stains, so I’m blissing out. Punk rock raditude.

Music:
- Dear Friends, you know I love metal, so why didn’t you tell me about Mastodon earlier? Like last year. Or before. Everyone else has been rockin’ and I’ve been missing out on the best metal in ages. You suck. Yours, Chris.
- Ghostface Killah’s last two albums are fucking dope.

Obits:
- Iwao Takamoto: the artist and designer behind such notable Hanna Barbera series as Scooby-Doo, Speed Buggy and Atom Ant.
- Momofuku Ando: the creator of the Cup Noodle (whose story is told in this surprisingly gripping manga).
Between cartoons and Cup Noodles these men forged my adolescence. RIP, gentlemen; you will be missed.

I just spent a half hour trying to make the clamshell iBook accept that it was directly connected to a hub and could in fact access the internet. It did not believe me and I eventually gave up in disgust. I knew there was a reason it had been living on a shelf for the past year or so.

Well, that, and it’s as slow as molasses in January through a 2400 baud modem. I’d have better luck haxx0ring teh intarwebbs with this:

Incidentally, yes, it is mine. Yes, it works. And yes, I’m pretty sure it does tap directly into the Matrix.

The Matrix from Neuromancer, by the way, not the other one.

I’m not setting a goal this year. There’ll be no “50 books by 2008″ or any such bullshit; I’m just going to read. However, I do think, simply for curiosity’s sake, that it would be interesting to keep a log of how many books I read over the course of 2007 (in full, mind you—no half-assed/half-read inclusions), with a brief rating (out of five) and succinct review. I’m including graphic novels in there because they’re books, and screw anyone who says differently. Do they tell a story? Are they bound? They’re books.

So, with that in mind and with the year a week down already, here are the first four out of the gate.

1) Charley’s War, V.1 - Pat Mills & Joe Colquhon (*****) An absolutely riviting and horrifyingly realistic depiction of life in the trenches during WWI. Anyone wanting a vivid summary of the horrors of war, the stupidity of the military and man’s inhumanity to man need look no further. Brilliant.
2) Pathfinder - Laeta Kalogridis & Christopher Shy (*) Vikings vs. North American Indians devoid of most necessary historical accuracies. Or a plausible plot. Infuriating and just generally awful.
3) DMZ: On the Ground - Brian Wood & Riccardo Burchielli (***) It’s Escape From New York for the 21st Century, and while that’s not a particularly original concept it’s solid writing (if not always spellbinding). For that and Burchielli’s evocative art (reminiscent of a less exaggerated Risso) I’ll read the next volume.
4) Whiteout: Melt - Greg Rucka & Steve Lieber (****) Greg Rucka is one of the most consistently amazing storytellers in the comic industry (and book trade) today, and Antarctic thriller Melt proves it again (though it came out several years ago) through fully realised characters and a razor-sharp plot. On top of that, Lieber’s amazing high-contrast art effortlessly recreates the South Pole. I want more Whiteout.

I like The Coup a lot. They’re not only a kick-ass hip hop band, they’re a kick-ass, funky, revolutionary hip hop band and I’ve been enjoying their stuff for years. So it was kind of awesome to find they’ve got a new album out and that it’s one of the best political discs to be released in ages. And then it was totally fucked-up and horrible to discover that a month ago on their tour they had a bus crash and lost most of the stuff they own—instruments, computers, pretty much everything but the clothes on their backs.

So, I just sent them some money through Paypal. Not much—just the cost of a CD, really—but at least I know every penny will go directly to the band in their hour of need.

I’m not trying to sound like a public service announcement or anything, but if you’ve enjoyed or do enjoy their music, it would be a cool gesture to toss a few bucks their way. I don’t know what it’s like to lose practically everything I own in a car accident, but can I imagine that if that happened every five or ten dollars would count for a hell of a lot. Their Paypal address is thecoupbuscrash@gmail.com, or there’s a direct donation button on their Myspace page. Peace.