The Seated View

Found this via A Somewhat Old, But Capacious Handbag (excellent name for a blog, by the way). Someone is building a replica of The HMS Beagle - the ship took Darwin on his journey to discover natural selection and changed the world. There is a website with lots of information, including ship plans and a blog about the progress. What a brilliant idea! Now, if I could only get on the crew... Earlier this month, there were a couple of days where I saw a commercial for a new product called Motts Fruitsations – basically, wee cups of applesauce blended with other types of fruit. Great idea, I like Motts, it's all good. Except the tagline at the end of the commercial said "with the surprising real fruit taste". Or something like that - I'm a little iffy on the details, intended to check the motto, but now can't find it - it appears to no longer exist. Probably for the exact same reason that I'm blogging about it. Call me picky but is it not re...

The Oscars are on Sunday and of course, I'll be watching. Every year, I tend to wonder why - the Golden Globes are so much more fun - but for a person who is mad about the movies, it's a command performance. Since the ANI (Accursed Neck Injury) has apparently meant a permanent departure from watching movies in the theatres, I haven't seen all of the nominees for best picture the way I used to, but in honour of this evening of glamour, recognition, painful tributes and endless speeches, today's post will be about recent rentals, starting with a smattering of nominated movies. Little Miss Sunshine . Dysfunctional family on a road trip. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Nonetheless, it's a charmer. Greg Kinnear is turning out to be a great character actor in a leading man's body, Toni Collette is always wonderful (for a very Australian movie, watch her in Japanese Story ), Steve Carell is becoming one of my favourite actors (I expected The...

Dear Enbrel, The first time I met you, two years ago, you changed my life and in so doing, gave me a second chance. You took away the pain and inflammation in my joints and the damp sogginess that had been part of me since I was four years old. And, just as astonishing, you took away the nausea that had also been part of me for over 30 years. It was like magic. Every day, I got a little stronger, discovering what healthy feels like and everyday, I fell more in love with life, feeling drunk with the intensity of it all, happier than I can ever remember being. You were everything I'd hoped you would be. That's not to say that there weren't some problems - nothing is 100% perfect, is it? It turned out that just as you intensified all the colours in the world, all the beauty, you also intensified everything else. There were drastic changes in the way I ate as my body no longer put up with any kind of crap and for a long time, I ate no sugar at all. That was OK - sugar i...

So, it's here. Valentine's Day. Second only to New Year's Eve in terms of its ability to convince single people that they're losers. On New Year's Eve, not only don't you have someone to kiss at midnight, but you're also encouraged to take stock of your life and find it wanting, whereas on Valentine's Day, at least it's just your love life that's in the toilet, not your entire existence. Don't get me wrong - a day for lovers is a wonderful idea, but when it's subverted and sucked into the maw of the moneymaking machine, it just furthers depression. Valentine's Day is everywhere - and has been since just after Christmas - and there are hearts and cupids and red and pink things everywhere and every single commercial on television seems to be about jewelry or happy couples or desperate, grasping attempts to make a product, any product fit into the holiday and every year it seems to just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And w...

A few weeks ago, I'd just come out of the grocery store when I noticed a strange smell in the air. At this particular geographical point in the neighbourhood, if it smells of anything other than vaguely downtown-ish, it's usually freshly baked/slightly burned bread from one of the bakeries in the market. This was not that smell. This smelled more like... well, it's sort of hard to explain, but the best description I can come up with is that it smelled as if God had farted. Vaguely puzzled, I didn't pay much attention and continued on my way home. As I headed towards the corner where turn onto my street, I heard a fire truck behind me and turned to look. I don't normally do that - when you live close to Toronto's busiest fire station, howling sirens is not an unusual sound. But turning around, I saw the unusual sight of the fire department’s Hazmat truck flying past me. I have never before seen a Hazmat truck in person and lets just say it piqued ...

Last week, there was a heartfelt plea from Rachel H. in the comments, asking me to use my apparently by now widely (well, at least in the comments of my blog) recognized powers to please, please make the snowing stop. And she's not the only one who's had enough (I always thought Canadians were a hardier sort - after all, it's only been about three weeks). The problem is this: despite a developing case of SAD making its appearance within days of winter kicking in, I am still enjoying it. I know. It's perverted. But there's something about the bracing northerly wind sweeping down the length of a long south-north street, seemingly straight from the Arctic, blasting through your body right into your bones, making your hands have that cold-bleached reddened look that causes them to buzz and hum as they warm up once you get inside. And when it snows, really snows? I'm as excited as a five-year-old with a new sled, exclaiming "it's snowing! It...

The lovely Lynn of the comments has for some time now been naggi... erm, strongly encouraging me to watch the new BBC version of Jane Eyre . I'll be honest: I'm not a huge fan of the Brontës. Ever since the first time I saw a film version of Jane Eyre, I thought that she was a hopeless milquetoast, the prototype for a doormat and while we are on the characters in that story, Rochester? At best he's a little mad, at worst he's an unmitigated jerk. Sure, I'm as fond of dark and brooding men as the next girl, but heroes such as Rochester and Heathcliff push it into dark and tortured territory to the point of being more than a little unhinged. Remember the adage: never lie down with someone was more problems than you. Even when I was young, before I learned that fact the hard way, I looked at Rochester and every instinct told me to run screaming for the hills. Yet Jane keeps coming back. These days, I would send her to a shrink. Give me Jane Austen, thank you ...