Okay, why is Kurt Russell having lunch with the Stanley Cup? And why does it have arms?! He’s feeding it with his fork! I mean, seriously–what the fuck?!?!

Sometimes, as a writer, I get the urge to write about scary things. There’s all kinds of scary things we both know and don’t know about–plenty for me to easily plumb in my writings for the next several years. Other times I see something that makes me think, “What the fuck do I know about true horror?” Then I cover my eyes with my hands, curl into a ball and weep quietly for 15 hours.

Yeah. Sleep well, all.

1) One of the best books I bought last year is Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? by Liz Prince. I swear, every time I pick it up I don’t put it down until I’ve read it end to end again. I also don’t stop chortling to myself until it’s done. The reason it’s so compelling (and funny), though, is that anyone who’s ever been in a relationship founded on doing incredibly nerdy and embarrassing things with their partner while no one else is looking (and sometimes even if they are) will see themselves reflected over and over again in its pages. And let me assure you from personal experience that it’s amazingly cathartic and satisfying to realise there’s other people like you out there… people who say dorky things while they surreptitiously grope their partner’s privates. Yes, both a cheap and side-splitting read—if you say no to that then you’re no fun and I don’t want to know you.

2) I got interviewed for an upcoming issue of Vancouver Magazine on the grounds that I’m an Asian hipster. Anyone who knows me will find that hilarious. I do.

3) While checking the stats on theg33k.com, I discovered that one of the search strings that led to it was “g33k = infinite beauty”. This is not only incredibly awesome, it’s also true.

I’m being less communicative lately because I’ve been writing. That’s a good thing. No, in fact, that’s a great thing. It’s really nice not only to have a concrete project to work, but to be doing it with one of my oldest friends. I know I keep teasing you with these extremely vague hints about this thing I’m doing, but you’d better get used to it—it’s still another three weeks and counting ’til launch.

Personal:
- Woke up this morning with Mrs. C back in town for the first time in several days. Took our time getting up and finally got our asses out the door and down the street for some pho and Vietnamese iced coffee. I’m sensing the start of a new winter tradition. Seriously, if you need a weekend pick-me-up on those grey Vancouver Sundays, coffee with condensed milk and a big bowl of steaming hot soup will do you just right.
- After that we went to T&T and bought Asian junk food (green tea chocolates! who knew?!) and Chinese New Year decorations. Now a magnificently gaudy golden fish filled with candy graces our coffee table. I have no idea what we’re going to do with it after the New Year’s rung in. What do you do with a giant plastic gold koi? Oh, we also got little drip coffee filters so we can make our own Vietnamese coffees without having to go up the street. So we can get wired in our own home. Ahhhhh.

Books:
- I usually really like the Culture Shock series. It’s a series of travel guides that’s pretty much only concerned with the culture, customs and etiquette of the various countries in question. And usually they’re pretty unbiased and even-handed—great for research and getting a feel for a place if you’ve never been. I’ve got to say though, the guy who wrote Culture Shock: China not only has his head lodged WAAAAAAAY up the Communist Party’s ass (please, please stop kissing Zhu Rongji’s backside—I understand you think the sun shines out of it, but honestly it’s getting tired) but he has some pretty odd conceptions about Asian history in general. Like the passage about Chinese Buddhism where he states: “From China, it passed over the eastern Seas to barbarous Japan where it civilised the unruly islanders and became known as Zen.” Riiiiiiiiiiight. So Chinese Buddhism is responsible for civilising the barbarous Japanese, huh? I’m glad there’s no bias in there. And I’m sure the Japanese would have nothing to say about your trite assessment of their culture.

Music:
-I had an awesome time the other night when my friend Billy came back to town. We went out for dinner (ohhhhh, minibrew beer) and drinks (ohhhhhh, single-malt scotch) and then wandered over to Pub 340 to watch her play a quasi-impromptu set. Billy and I go back several years—she played my 30th birthday party, which was totally the only way to get old—and I hadn’t seen her since she moved out east from Vancouver, so it was awesome to catch up. In addition, that night I also got to meet Devon (who was quite cool) and see Rio Bent, who are FUCKING AWESOME. Seriously, when you can rock that hard for a crowd of 30 people… wow. Anyway, yeah, Billy is one of the hardest working punks in show business, so be her friend on Myspace and watch her video:

Obituaries:
-Ian Richardson died this week. This will probably mean something to you if you watched a lot of BBC dramas and Shakespearean productions; it certainly means something to me. He is right up there in my esteem with Ian McKellen, maybe even a little higher thanks to his amazing performance as the one of the most Machiavellian bastards ever to hit the small screen—Francis Urquhart—in the House of Cards trilogy for Masterpiece Theatre. His Richard III was nothing to sniff at either. And, yes… *cough* … he was the Grey Poupon man. He will be missed.

It’s been a little more than a week since I last checked in, but here’s some of what’s been up with me.

Personal:
- I woke up at 7am yesterday morning, when the alarm went off. I dutifully got up and started puttering around the house half-asleep, dimly aware in the back of my mind that something was not entirely right, but unable to put my finger on it. After about ten minutes I figured out that it was, in fact, my day off and the alarm was for my wife. I went back to bed and slept restlessly for another couple of hours. That sucks.

Books:
- I’ve ploughed through a whole pile of graphic novels lately and I’ll be posting another installment of the books I’ve read pretty soon to catch up with the backlog.

Music:
- I saw Polysics last Friday and they were everything I’d hoped they’d be and more. Seriously, I haven’t had that much fun at a show in ages. Probably years. I could go off for pages telling you why they’re amazing, but in the interests of saving myself 1000 words, I’m just going to post a picture that my friend Brian did of Hiroyuki, the lead singer:

I Love My Friends, Cont.:
- Lisa surprised me after All-You-Can-Eat-Sushi on Friday night with another late Christmas present–two cases of Squirt brought up from the States. Man, I love Squirt and I love my friends. They are both good to me.

Writing:
- This is what’s been taking up the lion’s share of my time. I’ve been working on something original, neat and fun. It’s the science-fiction project that I hinted at a few entries back and it’s starting to coalesce into something tangible. There should be something concrete to show the world within the next month and I’m chomping at the bit to get it there. Right, back to work on it.

As a final note, though:

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.

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?

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.

So here’s how my New Year’s went down. There was:

1) Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
2) The Rifftrax version of X-Men (fuckin’ hilarious, BTW)
3) A Metalocalypse marathon
4) Cranberry cider (for that very festive hangover)
4) Bowmore Scotch
5) Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” at the stroke of midnight

And a very g33ky New Year’s to you. How was yours?

Well, it’s almost 2007 and everyone is doing their annual rundowns, so I suppose I should do mine, too.

I got married.

And that sums it up in many ways. I got married and it was awesome. A couple of writing projects fell through and I didn’t get as much personal work done as I wanted; I got hired at the book store and that was pretty great, but really, it’s the marryin’ part that’s going to stand out in looks back.

Yeah, there’s been some ups and downs in 2006. I met some good people at a short-lived and otherwise shitty job (Kelly, Miranda, Andrew, Christa — I’m talkin’ to you). After several years, I finally moved into a place that feels like my home (sure, I live here with my wife, but you know what I mean). Mrs. C quit her shitty job and immediately found a new and rad one (which, although it takes up much of her time and energy, has been beneficial to both of our states of mind). Sleater-Kinney broke up (and even though I don’t know any of them personally, it still sucks). We got a new book in the Song of Ice and Fire series (I know that’s not supposed to be a rare and spectacular occurence, but it still kinda is). I saw the last of my hometown crew get married (with me as the best man, which was pretty neat). The Mrs. and I started doing adult stuff like sorting out our RRSPs (which is still really weird).

So now we’re hanging out and waiting for the year to roll over. We’ve got Shogun Assassin, Meaning of Life and Buckaroo Banzai on DVD, a bunch of hummous and pita, and J is going to stop by soon with some single malt scotch. Low-key; good times. That’s about the best way I can think of to ring out a definitely interesting year and ring in one with an infinite amount of promise.

Howdy, 2007. Stop in and stay a while.