Hug-A-Harper-ite

Surprisingly, Harper supporters are just like human beings.

This may be difficult to understand, as they possess many negative elements. They get really excited by minuscule tax cuts. They think that building more prisons and imposing mandatory sentencing will reduce crime rates. And they'd rather base their policies on ideology than accurate statistics.

You may ask, how can a beautiful thing like humanity ever be associated with something so warped? So twisted? So evil? No one notices an extra 100$ on their tax return when they need to pay an extra 500$ in tuition/medication/transportation. Everyone understands that mandatory sentencing and prisons are a reactive solution, not preventative. And who doesn't love StatsCan? They make each Canadian feel uniquely relevant!

It's impossible, you must be thinking. No human being could ever support Harper. He is so cruel, so obtuse. So utterly devoid of logic and common sense. And he has beady little eyes.

Ah, but here's the thing. Just because we human beings have been blessed with a beating heart does not mean we should fault those who were born without.

Thus, I am proposing that each one of you seek out and adopt your very own Harper-ite! Show them how their lives can run on warm fuzzy feelings instead of cold bitter rage. Give them a great big hug and tell them "I know there's a Lefty SOMEwhere deep down in that cavernous shell you call a body."

Who knows? The warmth from your hug just might raise their reptilian body temperatures and bring their humanity out of hibernation.

Then maybe, just maybe, they'll vote Liberal (or NDP/Bloc/Green/Communist-Marxists/Indy/Pot/Rhino/etc...)

Eli - proudly supporting A.B.C.

Hi United States. Who is Arcade Fire? WE WILL TELL YOU.

http://whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com/

THEY ARE A BAND.

THEY SING SONGS. THEY PLAY MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.

If you haven't at least heard of them, then you know nothing about music. But that's ok, you don't have to know everything about everything. Such things would be impossible. As we see it, in order to move passed this anger, you have two options. Either:

a - Accept that your life is pitifully devoid of all things amazing, relax, and enjoy your top 40 playlist.

OR

b - Get OFF your lazy, cottage cheese ass, get ONTO this thing called the INTERNET, and figure out who ARCADE FIRE is!

Seriously. David Bowie knows who they are. U2 knows who they are. Kanye West knows who they are.

They are not a Quebecois conspiracy. They are not criminals. They are simply better than Bieber, Gaga, Perry, and your precious Eminem.

Get over it.

Eli

"Small and focused, but resonates far into the night"

Only Ian McEwan could cobble together so many words with commas, and end up with such mellifluous truths!

From Ian McEwan's 1992 novel "Black Dogs"

"He was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as multiplicity, a near infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than any one could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions... each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of postwar reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling - all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?"

Sweet Potato Mac 'n' Cheese

So today we decided to undertake this strange variation on a classic family recipe. "We'll just make a small serving of it" we thought, "just to see what it's like". We were (are?) clearly delirious, since the words "small serving" to an Italian have absolutely zero context. Nevertheless, this delirium forced us onward, and we proceeded with the following recipe:

1. Finely chop an onion and caramelize the bits in a frying pan with a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, and stupid amounts of butter. Rosemary/sage/oregano can be added here too.

2. Meanwhile, skin and slice (thinly) two small sweet potatoes. Bring a pot of water to a boil and cook the slices till they are shmoushy. Do not plop the potatoes in the boiling water, or you will splash boiling water everyone, including your hands (as we learned). If you do splash burning water on your hands, curse till the air is blue, then run your hands under cold water.

3. Drain the potatoes but SAVE THE WATER! You will be needing to cook the pasta soon, and why waste all that sweet-potato-watery goodness?

4. Mash the potatoes and stir in the caramelized onions.

5. Boil the sweet potato water (with a little more water added) and dump (carefully!) your macaroni (about 300g) into the water.

**At this point we looked at the proportions of onion/potato/pasta we have just started to cook and realized there would be nothing small about this concoction. Sigh**

6. Make your cheese sauce - everyone has their own way of doing this, but here's the right way. Alternate three spoons of margarine with about 5 spoons of flour in a large pot on low heat, stirring continuously. Add milk, a little at a time while still stirring, to thin out the sauce. Then GRATE YOUR CHEESE-OF-CHOICE LIKE A CRAZY PERSON (thanks to our cousin for the advice) and add it to the sauce.

**Don't forget to check on your pasta! No one likes overcooked pasta. Make sure you are good and ambidextrous before embarking on this madness as now you need to be continuously stirring multiple things.**

**Also, at this point, you should preheat your oven to 350.**

7. Once everything has melted into a gooey-cheese-mess of yumminess, stir in the sweet-potato-and-onion mixture till its even.

8. Take the hot mess off the heat. Drain the macaroni and stir it into the cheese sauce. Cover the top in bread crumbs. Pop it in the oven until the cheese bubbles.
9. Consume immediately.

Ok, so this makes TWO CASSEROLE POTS worth of mac 'n' cheese. We cannot eat this much mac 'n' cheese. We will TURN INTO a pot of mac 'n' cheese. Does anyone know if you can freeze mac 'n' cheese?

Fail. (But not in taste - its SCRUMPTIOUS!)

Eli

PS - We used a 300g package of mild cheddar, and about 150g of Gouda. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

On All Things Kitchy And Kitcheny...

We do not understand this habit (trend? craze?) of kitchen items that are shaped exactly like their designated use. Observe:
- Garlic pots shaped like a clove of garlic.
- Juicers made to look like lemons or oranges.
- Something called an Avocado Slicer with suspiciously avocado-like colours.

Is this mimicry supposed to be functional, or cute? We can't really see how a garlic pot shaped like a clove of garlic holds more garlic, then, say, a mason jar. And we can safely say that an orange-shaped juicer is not only redundant, but exclusive. Does one need to purchase a different-looking juicer to make lemonade? Do grapefruits get sent to the "back of the bus", so to speak?

Is this instead an economical decision - saving the cost of producing accompanying user instructions? Without the green and yellow colours, would one pick up an avocado slicer and say "what the bleeding holy cannoli does this thing do!!?" Possibly.

Is this simply a new way to trick the consumer into purchasing something "clever"? Or do the designers think such designs are, in fact, clever? Such things are anything but! What, we ask, is creative about a cheese grater shaped like a block of cheese? Not one bleeding thing, that's what.

Upon some intense google-image research, we find that some precious individuals have already moved beyond this cheap mimicry. Behold, a paper-clip heater! A strawberry-shaped mouse! A swan-shaped kettle!

We would like this to be taken one step further. We would like to push past the anarchy of objects-shaped-like-objects-they-are-not, and into the chaos of objects-shaped-like-objects-they-are-absolutely-not. Kettles shaped like toasters! Rolling pins shaped like carving knives! Spatulas shaped like fly-swatters! Can you imagine the hilarity of someone dumping their pasta into a colander, only to realize that they've dumped it into a lettuce spinner SHAPED like a colander? We can, and we want to live in that world. We want our oven to resemble our fridge, and our table to have a fake built-in sink. Brooms should be mops, and mops should be standing lamps, and standing lamps should be painted onto the wall. There is no end to the potential madness once one begins to travel down this glorious path.

Happy New Year everyone. May your days be filled with blissful chaos.

Eli

AVATAR

Shiny fluorescence = pretty.

Nominated for:
Cinematography - Mauro Fiore
Direction - James Cameron
Best Picture

Also nominated for:
Art Direction - Rick Carter, Robert Stromberg, Kim Sinclair
Film Editing - Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua and James Cameron
Music (Original Score) - James Horner
Sound Editing - Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
Sound Mixing - Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson
Visual Effects - Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones

Okay. So.

This movie is very... pretty, in a shiny, cartoony, little princess kind of way. I think is the most expensive child's movie ever made. It will be interesting to see what will be done with all this new technology when placed in more creative hands, but its a shame James Cameron is too egotistical to hire someone who is actually a talented writer. Maybe then this movie could have had some depth instead of just a pile of pop-spirituality and a whole lot of stock, gender-stereotyped characters...

And the voice-over narration... Sweet Jesus, why oh why must there be voice-over narration?!

That said, I do want a floating mountain and once of those big red flying things that swoop out of the sky and snatch up other, smaller things.

Best Picture? Absolutely not, but it will probably win anyway.
Best Directory? Please refer to the previous statement.
Cinematography? No. CGI is not cinematography.

Check out how many Avatar toys you can buy.

Eli

The White Ribbon

Children are creepier then I ever imagined.

Nominated for:
Cinematography - Christian Berger

Also nominated for:
Foreign Language Film

This creepy, quiet little German film is the latest from Michael Haneke, infamous for other such eerie and violent flicks like Caché and Funny Games. The film as a whole is unsettling, to say the least. It's good... not sure if it is something I would watch again (yes, it's that creepy...) but I don't regret watching it.

Not for the faint of heart, thought there never actually is any violence on camera. I still feel a little ill after watching it, and while this may be due to the half pint of lemon sorbet I've just consumed, I'm going to pin that on the movie.

I'm a little put off by rotten tomatoes having this weird show thingy, but it pretty much sums up the piece.

Eli

Invictus

Nelson Mandela harnesses the power of rugby to solve all of South Africa's problems - epic cheering scene ensues.

Nominated for:
Best Actor - Morgan Freeman
Best Supporting Actor - Matt Damon

This could have been so much more than your standard sports movie, but it isn't. The acting nods are completely unwarranted, unless looking stoic for two and a half hours is considered to be talent nowadays...

Like so many other movies I've had to watch during the last few weeks, this one has fallen victim to convention. The climax of the film teeters on the will-they-make-it cliche, even though the outcome of the world cup match is a matter of historical record. It's especially disappointing that not much else is explored, given the wealth of stories that could be told about such an incredible time in South Africa's history. Nope - this movie goes for the least interesting bits of everything. The camera work is generic, the writing is uninspired, and the acting is flat. Dull, dull dull.

I will say one good thing though, Morgan Freeman recites the Invictus poem way better then this creepy dude.

Eli

The Messenger

War really fucks you up.

Best supporting actor - Woody Harrelson
Writing (original Screenplay) - Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman

The film is a nice appendix to The Hurt Locker. Both take on their subject using a "realistic" approach, and this most definitely does the topic justice. The Messenger does its bit to lend its voice to the anti-war protest without getting too preachy or over-bearing.

This is an emotional roller coaster, and surprisingly understated given the amount of attention paid to grief stricken relatives. The whole film is very matter-of-fact in its presentation of grief, sadness, and post-traumatic-stress. It's very well written, and the acting is magnificent, especially Samatha Morton's middle-America Wal-mart army wife character (sheer-brilliance).

In whole, this movie should be seen by many people. Best writing? Sure. It was very, very good. Best acting for Woody Harrelson? I suppose, but I found him to be the weakest actor of the three main roles. Ah well.

Not that you can really tell that its here, but here's Samantha Morton being REALLY creepy.

Eli