Scranton

ronebofh has asked me to rant about Edmonton. This won't come naturally to me, but let me see what I can come up with.

First of all, there's the name. Okay, it's not a bad name, but there's nothing special about it. But consider this--until 1912 it had a twin city, Strathcona, across the river, which it absorbed. Now, Strathcona is a much more intrinsically appealing name than Edmonton, isn't it? It's true that they already had made Edmonton the provincial capital, but that was less than a decade earlier. So that's my biggest beef--they picked the wrong name for the city in the first place.

Then there's the weather. It may not come as a surprise to those of you who do not live here that, as one of the northernmost major cities in North America(I think it's the northernmost, but I'm too lazy to look it up), it gets a little cold from time to time, generally in the winter. But really, what happens is that, as an inland town without a major body of water to equalize temperatures, it tends to vary wildly. Sometimes we got chinook winds from the mountains to warm things up, and generally the temperature varies wildly. It's been around -15 °C for the past three days, but before that we spent close to a week above freezing, and for the rest of the week it's supposed to warm up again. There's been at least one snow flurry here in every month of the year(not the same year, mind). In the summer it can get very hot and humid, and especially in this house, with our bedroom on the second floor, we lose a fair bit of sleep.

And it seems like we're on the fringes of civilization here. I've lived further north, in Grande Prairie, so I know it's not quite true, but it seems that way. I remember getting frustrated at all the big rock tours that never came to Edmonton. Usually they hit Toronto and Montreal, sometimes Vancouver, once in a while Calgary. But almost never Edmonton. ...Not that I've been to all the tours that have come to Edmonton, not even all the ones I would've wanted to see, but it's still frustrating sometimes. And forget about getting together with all you folks on the Internet, unless we shell out for a plane trip or something.

Edmonton is also at a bad latitude for skywatching, too. In the winter, it's generally too bloody cold to sit outside with a telescope, and in the summer, you have to stay up too late before it gets dark enough! Not that there isn't vast quantities of light pollution anyway. This is mostly a theoretical gripe, because I haven't made a real effort with my telescope more than once or twice(I need a better mount, I think).

...And that's all I can think of. The traffic sucks, but I suspect it's not much worse than most major North American cities, and better than some.

I may do a rave about Edmonton sometime, just to balance this one out, but not right now.

L'Homme Invisible

We've actually managed to rent and watch a few movies over the past couple of weeks. How did we do it? Well, dropping "Medium" and "House" off of our weekly viewing list(and officially giving up on "Desperate Housewives")has made our TV load much more reasonable...especially now that we're caught up on all those double episodes of "24". (Which we are watching quite contentedly on RDTV, thank you iamo.)

"Men With Brooms"...well, we'd been meaning to see it for a while, and of course we missed it in theatres, and had trouble finding it at the video stores. Sometimes they file Canadian movies under "Foreign Films"--sad but true--but there's actually a Canadian section, which I suppose is progress. It's a curling movie, which is to say pretty much a sports movie, but a Canadian sports movie. (Curling is, for the uninformed, a Canadian sport played by sliding heavy rocks down a sheet of ice, and fills the same cultural spot as, say, cricket does in Australia.) It features Leslie Nielsen in what must be his most serious role in years...which is of course not saying much. It contains about two too many shattering curling rocks for my taste, but apart from that is not too bad. It's a sports movie, leave it at that.

"The Village" we also missed in theatres, yadda yadda yadda. I confess that I more or less guessed at least one of the two major plot twists before the end, but then I tend to make lots of loony guesses at plot twists when I watch things like that. Very atmospheric movie, and Joaquin Phoenix doesn't talk a whole lot. Bryce Dallas Howard was extremely good. Sigourney Weaver's role was surprisingly small. Altogether I'd say that out of Shyamalan's movies, I'd still take "Unbreakable" and "The Sixth Sense" over his last two.

"Collateral" was really quite good. Tom Cruise wasn't too Cruise-y, playing a somewhat offbeat hitman, and Jamie Foxx's character was good too, making a believable progression throughout the movie. Though how the Oscar people can call that a "Supporting" role, I don't know. The DVD kept freezing on us, but our cheap player just does that sometimes. I swear we could probably already buy a better quality one than that for not much more.

Oh, and we got a "Blue's Clues" DVD for Simon and Luke. They seem to like it, anyway, and a few times we've played the game where somebody puts down three pawprints and then the others have to guess what the clues are for. We've had one for a few months now--I think Simon got it for his birthday or something--but I hadn't actually watched any of it until now. It's actually not that bad, and mostly because of the human character, Steve. I get a kick out of him, and it's hard to describe. There's a line in Meryn Cadell's "The Sweater", something about "the blank look that passes for intelligence, or at least the notion that someone's home". That's what Steve's got. He is often pretending to be listening to what the kids watching the show are saying, which is part of it, but he's just very earnest about the whole thing. He's fun to watch. And then he does these stupid little two-line songs, with a little dace that Joey Tribbiani could have choreographed...funny. They might pall after a while, of course, but for now I'd much, much, much rather watch "Blue's Clues" than "Barney". Tough call, that.