Today was a nice day. Mrs. C and I woke up in our own time, had a lovely breakfast (including smoothies!) while we watched an episode of my new favourite sketch comedy show Human Giant, went for a bike ride, flew a wind-up airplane in the park, browsed at the library, had a nap, played a little bit of Puzzle Quest and I am preparing for a casual evening of housework and maybe a movie. Dates with your beloved on sunny days are rad.

Anyway, you’ve been all “Chris dropped off the map over a month ago! Where’s he been?” Well, the simple answer is “just not spending as much time on the intarwebbs”. I have been:

- Working
- Going for long-ish walks
- Hanging out with Mrs. C
- Writing
- Reading
- Hanging out in Victoria
- Redecorating a bit
- Rooting for Vancouver, and subsequently Ottawa

That’s more or less covers it. It’s not exciting, but it is pretty comprehensive.

I wish I had more to tell you, but I am feeling tranquil and uninspired. So to make up for my blase entry I give you this classic Ren & Stimpy cartoon:

Because it’s discipline that begets love.

Boy, things have been busy for me in the past couple of weeks. Yes, the writing project is still taking up tons of time. It was supposed to be ready this past week, but plans got revised and scaled up and that basically meant revisiting previous plans and adjusting them accordingly. So, right now I’m figuring it’s gonna be another month or so ’til things are in place enough to start wildly blabbing about.

Aside from that there were two other things that loomed large on my personal radar:

1) Cory Doctorow:
On Thursday, Cory Doctorow of science-fiction authoring and Boing Boing fame came to speak at Simon Fraser University for their annual Leonardo Lecture. It was a riveting and timely speech entitled “The Totalitarian Urge: Total Information Awareness and the Cosmic Billiards” (which is online is audio form here) and the bookstore I am lucky enough to work at, Sophia Books, got to sell books at the event. So it was extremely gratifying to be able to help out and support the career of a writer/social philosopher that I respect very much. Even more gratifying was the fact that he is extremely personable, friendly and down to earth, talking to everyone and making himself available to sign books both before and after the speech. Nice guy.

But the REAL jaw-dropper came the next day when he dropped in to Sophia’s to sign some books for the store and chat. At the end of his visit, he presented my co-worker Sean and I with first draft print-outs of his next book, Little Brother, which he’d finished only two weeks before. THAT is fucking RAD. Categorizing the novel in broad strokes, it’s about the preservation of personal freedoms, hacking and being a teenager today. And it’s good. I was up ’til 5AM last night (this morning) reading it until I was in serious danger of passing out onto it. I’ll have finished it by tonight, and I’ll report back to you more tomorrow.

2) Saturday Morning Cartoon Party:
This is something I’ve been wanting to attend for a few years now but up ’til last weekend I’ve never had the chance (owing mostly to working shitty jobs that demanded I show up on the weekend). Every year, Toren Atkinson–extreme cartoon fan–throws a party wherein everyone shows up early in the morning and watches cartoons for several hours while ingesting all manner of sugary breakfast cereals (pajamas optional). Being the ‘toon fan I am, this year I booked off the date from any other engagements months in advance and Mrs. C and I made our way over to Toren’s house at around 8:15 or so, just in time for an episode of Galaxy Rangers, which was both awful and better than I thought it was going to be (since most things viewed through the rose-coloured glasses of childhood nostalgia are freakin’ AWFUL and you should take pains to avoid revisiting them if you have the chance).

Well, long story short, we were maybe the first to arrive and almost the last to leave (at just after 4PM). Our brains had melted and our guts were churning cauldrons of milk, refined flour and sucrose. I also managed to score a Darkest of the Hillside Thickets shirt I’ve coveted for years, so that was all to the good. In short, excellent times.

The crowning moment though (and I don’t care how sad you think this is), was the fact that after nearly two decades I finally got to satisfy one of my long-term junk food cravings: eating Frankenberry. Those of you who have constant and ready supplies of Frankenberry nearby are probably going, “EEEURGH! Why would you want to?!” Well, because it’s not available up here in Canadia (at least, not the part I live in). Here, it is a legendary foodstuff which apparently once roamed free in our breakfast aisles but was forced into extinction by General Mills. So, since my late teens, every time I went down to the States I’d poke around in supermarkets looking for it (as well as Squirt and Strawberry Powdered Quik–also not available in these parts), to no avail. But what should Toren manage to procure three boxes of? Yes, Manna from, well, not Heaven… maybe Albertson’s. Anyway, I got to toss back a few bowls of the stuff as well as one of Boo-Berry (although no Fruit Brute or Yummy Mummy, because apparently Toren isn’t cool enough to have access to a time machine). It wasn’t legendary tasting; my tastebuds didn’t explode with delight, but it certainly wasn’t bad and it was definitely satisfying. I even got to take a half-box home with me, so when the mood strikes me again I’ll be able to swiftly satisfy the urge.

Lately, there’s also the business of My Teeth:
A lucrative business, if you happen to be in the dentistry profession. The two fillings I got a week or so back cost me a grand total of about $50 or so after isurance kicked in. The four wisdom teeth which are getting extracted at the end of the month will cost about $1800+ upfront (and are probably only covered 50% by insurance). Plus, the two bottom ones are in DEEP, which means I’m recovering for 3-4 days afterward, and because of the scheduling I’ll have to take two days off work, which will cost me on my paycheque. So, yes: painful in a variety of different ways, and all the more ironic for the fact that they’ve never bothered me before.

Oh, and the Dishwasher:
We totally bought this dishwasher (it’s getting delivered later today), because Mrs. C and I are grown-ups now and we don’t have to our chores if we don’t want to. And we don’t want to–we want more time to do other serious grown-up things like watch cartoons.

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.