Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

Tonight I leave for Portland via Abbotsford. The HP Lovecraft Film Festival is there and Andrew (the film-fest-putter-onner) is good enough to supply Marlo and I with an air mattress and free passes for the weekend. That’s is truly fantastic. The only crappy part is taking the Greyhound to and from Abbotsfjord to meet up with Warren. I wouldn’t have done it if Marlo wasn’t coming with. I spent hours and hours and hours and hours on the Greyhound between 1996 and 1999 going to and fro Chilliwack for band practice by myself. It gave me time to read but there are just too many drunk adults and sober babies on board. And they all make bad noises and bad smells.

Anyway, I won’t be back in town until Sunday, so just forget about any promises I made to you, or you think I made to you, until then.

I get the feeling that if I lived next door to the strikingly white, bearded spokesperson for Canadian Tire all my life’s problems would be solved. He’s just so earnest and helpful it makes me want to kill myself instantly.

I’ve also noticed that car commercial narrators read $29,995 as “twenty-nine-nine-ninety-five” as if we will be fooled into thinking it’s somehow NOT five bucks shy of thirty THOUSAND dollars.

The episode of Star Trek original series on Space today was the one with Kodos the executioner. I have actually never seen it before today. Every time they said the name ‘Kodos’ it made me chuckle and want to give my cat another morsel of dampfkneudel. Last night Marmar and I went to Ursula’s for some delicious cuisine, including said german dumplings and some yummy soup. Oh and some crazy giant grapefruit called a…pommello? We brought some grape tomatoes (not to be confused with tomatoe grapes) and some broccoli. Yvonne, Caleb, Ian, Tiffany and Ursy’s mom were there and I got to watch Ursula get poked full of various needles, some supercharged with electricity, another administering C’Plus into her vein. So, fun night all ’round, including a good hour plus walk back to M’lo’s.

Tonight I am going to see some anime shorts as part of the VIFF with Yvonne and Marlo. Melange de shorts are always the best part of film festivals. Often you can just wait to see features when they come out in wide release, or on video. Shorts, on the other hand, are what film fests are all about, as far as I’m concerned. When we went to pick up our tickets at City Square last night it was an agonizing multi-step problem.

Let’s first have a look at a normal movie ticket-buying experience:
Step 1 - figure out what movie to buy tickets for by looking at the marquee
Step 2 - wait in line
Step 3 - swap money for tickets

Compare with VIFF:

Step 1 - (and this was my fault for having a bad memory) figure out what movie we were buying tickets for by trying to interpret 2 different schedule booklets.
Step 2 - Fill out a form with my name, address, phone, email, and specifics of what movie we were going to see, including the ‘movie code’ for the film.
Step 3 - wait in a different line with our form in hand
Step 4 - Hey we’re at the front of the line! Great, now we can…oh no…stand and wait some more while the lady inputs the information from the form into a laptop computer
Step 5 - fill out the membership card
Step 6 - swap money for tickets

And all that only after I had to have Yvonne explain the different ways I could get to see a VIFF movie, and the risks and hardships involved. Now, it’s a given that I’m an idiot, but come on - I just want to go to a theater and see a movie! I’m willing to show up an hour early to get a good seat. I’m not too keen, on the other hand, on jumping through a series of flaming hoops, each more flamingly hoopy than the last.

I’ve generally given the VIFF a miss over the past few years, but this has only been because I’ve been traditionally swamped with work this time of year. The only movie I saw at VIFF in recent memory is Volcano High, and I think that was 2 years ago. I hope tonight’s cinemafeast will be just as good!

The Pentagon announced that it will issue microwave pain guns to its forces in Iraq. [Daily Telegraph] The United States military was planning a large new offensive in Iraq to prepare for the scheduled January elections. The Transportation Security Administration announced that it plans to force airlines to provide personal information about passengers so that it can test a new system for identifying potential terrorists. Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, was refused entry to the United States because his name appears on a list of terrorism suspects. More flaws were found in Diebold Election Systems’ electronic voting machines. [Wired News]

The Israeli government seized 80,000 cans of dog food that had been labeled as foie gras. [Haaretz]

The BBC canceled a satirical cartoon series called “Popetown,” which featured corrupt bishops and depicted the pope jumping around the Vatican on a pogo stick. [Guardian, Associated Press]

Jimmy Swaggart said that he would kill any gay man who “looks at me like that.” [The Advocate]

Wal-Mart agreed to stop selling The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a nineteenth-century anti-Semitic forgery, on its website.

In Italy, an old woman was killed by a falling crucifix. The company that makes Hostess Twinkies and Wonder Bread went bankrupt. [Reuters] American researchers developed a device that uses spinach to generate electricity, and scientists [New Scientist] were hoping to use rat brainwaves to find people buried by earthquakes. [New Scientist] California banned necrophilia. [Scotsman]

I’ve come to learn that my favourite fruit is pineapple. Specifically, big fat chunks of fresh pineapple. There was a massive bowl of it at C&K’s wedding and I loaded up like nobody’s business. I think after that comes grapes - seedless of course, and green. Oh, but what about strawberries? O those berries purportedly made of straw! Delicious but sometimes secretly mouldy! Pray to your berry gods that the last berry in the basket is unspoiled, for last berry satisfaction.

At the wedding this weekend instead of a guest book there were piles of construction paper on the dinner tables. Naturally I was at a table full of gamers - Jon, Stewie, Neal, Shawn & Mariko, so there were lots of jokes about gaming. I.E. the wedding was actually a LARP, and we turned our table place name tags into mini character sheets, etc. One of the of the pieces of construction paper I wrote:

I try to pickpocket Shawn’s character

…and folded it up. Only gamers will get that. The rest of the papers we mostly doodled on.

Marlo and I were discussing the wedding. I think that if we ever do get married, for tax purposes or because we live in an Orwellian future, or because Marlo discovers that she is part Shangri-Lan and the only way I can stay there for more than a 6-month work visa is to be one of her many husbands, it would be a great excuse to throw a catered party at our parents’ expense. I would be dressed as Princess Leia and Marlo would be dressed as Darth Vader and the justice of the peace would be dressed as Grand Moff Tarkin: “I grow tired of asking this, so it will be the last time: Do you, Toren, take Marlo to be your wife?” and Marlo can shout “I’ll never join you!” And the wedding cake would be the Death Star, and all the guests would have to be in stormtrooper outfits and stand at attention while Marlo walks down the aisle to the tune of the Emperor’s March.

At C&K’s wedding reception some guy came up to me at our table and asked if I was Toren Atkinson. I gave confirmation. Then he didn’t say anything so I asked him why he asked, expecting that maybe he wanted to ask me a question or a favour or something, but his response was only that he had heard “so much” about me - that I was (I’m trying to remember his exact words but I can’t) a famous gamer (or maybe artist?) and a rock star and stuff. That made me feel awkward and I didn’t know what to say, so I tried to divert the attention to somebody else (in this case, Stewie, who was seated beside me). I don’t know why that sort of thing bothers me so much. I mean, I am proud of some of the accomplishments in my life, but being singled out and put on a pedestal makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the fact that this guy doesn’t really know me. I’m betting he doesn’t even know if I’m a good artist or a good musician, and he certainly doesn’t know about all the uncool, jerky stuff that I’ve done to balance out the cool stuff. Maybe it’s the fact that all the other people at the table were just as cool as me and I felt like I was hogging all of the spotlight. I mean it’s not like I’ve singlehandedly saved the panda bears or brought the country out of a recession. Maybe it’s that I’m too much like Marge’s art teacher - “I don’t take praise very well!”

What did I do this weekend? Friday night was Chris Slater’s stag party, where we ate pizza and pie, played video games (I played 5 different games - my favourite was some Final Fantasy version) and card games, and some got drunk. I did not. I saw someone’s nipple but that’s about as naughty as it got. And no, it wasn’t Iain’s.

Saturday I had a meeting with Tim Carter, went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow which I largely recommend with some caveats (see more below), and wandered around downtown with Marlo.

Today was Chris & Kathryn’s wedding. The padre mispronounced Kathryn’s name once and kept talking about God this and Jesus that but otherwise it was really great. I’m really happy for those two crazy kids, and there was tons o’ love at the reception. It was nice, and the food was amazing. I haven’t eaten that much meat in a long time - and it was all because of the two kinds of gourmet mustard and the horseradish sauce that went with the roast beef.

BIG FAT SPOILERS ABOUT SKY CAPTAIN: As I mentioned, I enjoyed the movie. Expectation is everything, and I didn’t expect anything out of the actors, so it didn’t trouble me too much that they came through on the promises of milquetoast acting made in the trailers. Still, I wanted to slap Gwyneth Paltry just to get some kind of emotion out of her. Mostly I wanted to see the movie because I love the genre and I wanted to see how they could pull off a movie that was almost entirely shot on blue screen. I had most of the same problems with the movie as Warren did (see blog link to the right) and I had a few more as well. I didn’t see the usefulness of using CGI cars instead of real ones (it was distracting). There were some really dumb bits, such as when Sky Captain punched and essentially K.O.’d robots twice his size. I guess the robots were made of balsa wood. There were general problems with the aircraft that you didn’t have to be an engineer to balk at - monoprop planes lighting safely on a few hundred feet of landing strip; planes not shattering when they hit the water surface at terminal velocity; etc. I also made some pretty good guesses which I expect a lot of other people did as well. The second time I saw the mystery woman, I knew she was a robot. As soon as I saw Totenkopf’s holographic face, I guessed he had been dead for a long time, and the evil plan was all his robots’ legacy. One of the things that I really did appreciate in the film is that nobody had any gratuitously revealing clothes. They stayed true to the genre on that and I thought it was classy that they avoided sinking to the lowest common denominator.

A free class of Wing Tsun Kung Fu happened on Wednesday and my shoulders are still sore from it. The sifu Ralph Haenel was a funny and a good teacher, but did he have to punch me in the chest so hard? It still hurts.

We (Marlo and I) are going to try out a different free class of Kung Fu, Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu downtown. Anyone who wants to join us is welcome, we just have to pick which Tuesday we’re going to go. Unlike the Wing Tsun, which went from 7-10 (10:45 if you count watching people getting their certificates, and I do count it, with no small amount of dismay), the Praying Mantis free trial lesson only goes from 7pm to 8pm, though we are welcome to stay past 8 and just watch the rest of the regulars do their thing. So if you’re interested, let us know! John Funk, the instructor, has asked that we call ahead to let him know that we’re coming on a given night so that he doesn’t have too many people in the class, which was a a small problem at Wing Tsun during certain parts of the lesson.

Five things you may not know about my time in school.

1. In elementary school I spent a great deal of time in the corner facing away from the classroom, or in the hall, or at the principal’s office. I guess I had cried wolf so many times that Mrs. Douthwaite (we called her Mrs. Deadweight) didn’t believe me when I said I was legitimately feeling sick. I had Kraft Dinner and grape drink for lunch at my friend Ian’s house that day, and it was not sitting well. When I asked to be excused I was refused. Excusal refusal. So I just sat at my desk and felt really sick. The girl in front of me turned around and saw my face, which was clearly death-on-a-pale-horse-white, and alerted Mrs. Douthwaite that I looked legitimately sick. At that point she excused me, but it was just a little too late. I got to the door and opened it, and there, coming out of her classroom across the hall was Mrs. Dare, my kindly first grade teacher. She said “hello Tory” and my response was to puke up the purple mass of half-digested KD.

2. I took two and a half years of post-secondary education. At UCFV they had this two year art program, but they screwed up the scheduling so it was actually impossible to complete the program in two years because they had scheduled two of the requisite classes AT THE SAME TIME. I already thought that school was a sham and I was really just going through the motions anyway, so when it became clear that they had fallen through on their end of the agreement as I saw it, I became completely disillusioned with the education system and never went back to finish my last course and get my certificate (for all the good it would have done me ). The only other courses I ever took was a course in creative writing and a course in cartoon voiceover.

3. I was and am kind of dysfunctional when it comes to ‘real life’ paperwork (taxes, applications, etc) so I never really applied for any scholarships or bursaries, even though I probably would have received something. It seemed like a lot of form-filling for what equated in my mind to be the lottery. Likewise I never applied for any student loan, and I have never in my life been in debt nor do I want to be, so I never considered spending any real time at any real school, tuition being as financially prohibitive as it is. I don’t think my parents had any money set aside for my schooling, and/or they thought it would be a good exercise in independence if I did it myself. If so, that backfired nicely. Furthermore, it’s been explained to me time and again what the difference is between undergrad, BA, PhD and all that other stuff is, but to this day I haven’t been able to wrap my mind around it. I think everyone should have a mentor and he or she should decide when the student is “graduated.”

Oh. That’s only three. Oh well.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia responded to the recent terror attacks there by announcing plans for a radical restructuring of the Russian political system that would end the popular election of regional governors and district representatives in parliament. [Lexington Herald-Leader] Many of those governors praised Putin’s plans; few politicians dared criticize them. Colin Powell expressed “concerns.” [New York Times]

Republicans in West Virginia told voters that Democrats will ban the Bible if John Kerry wins the presidency in November. [Associated Press] Dick Cheney said that electing John Kerry could lead to another terrorist attack. [USA Today]

Two Canadian lesbians were granted a divorce. [New York Times]

A schoolteacher was arrested for carrying a weighted bookmark in her purse as she attempted to board an airplane in Tampa, Florida. [St. Petersburg Times]

Scientists were developing a stinky robot that attracts flies, which it then digests and converts into electricity. [New Scientist]

The Cassini spacecraft discovered a new ring around Saturn. [2004-09-09] The Genesis space capsule, which had been collecting sun beams in outer space, crashed into the Nevada desert after two helicopters failed to catch it in mid-air as planned. [New Scientist]

British psychologists warned that people who keep diaries are more likely to suffer from headaches, insomnia, digestive complaints, and social problems. [New Scientist]

Social problems? SOCIAL PROBLEMS!?!