I love movies, don’t get me wrong, but the Toronto Int’l Film Festival is beginning to grate on my nerves. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see The AGCO go after these big “schmoozefest” parties for liquor infractions like they did for the Church Street bars during Pride?

“Your honour, on the night of Friday September 9th, I did willfully see David Cronenberg walk between licensed and unlicensed zones at Sassafraz with an open container of alcohol in his hands. As well I observed a Mr Downey Jr. obtain an unspecified amount of cocaine from the stomach of a woman in the ladies’ washroom via his nose. Also, Nicole Kidman was wearing a gown that was in fashion last season and should be given a citation for that… just because.”

“Guilty! 30 day suspension! For all of them!”

So exactly why would a gay person want to be part of this organization? So rife with understanding and compassion.

And they couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate picture.

The Guardian is reporting that Siemens has developed a paper thin TV screen for cheap (about $50/metre). The screen is powered by paper thin batteries and can receive a charge remotely but currently the screens aren’t expected to last much longer than a few days.

Scan ahead a few decades with me and indulge my imagination: You’re lost in the city. You extend your arm and your sleeve accesses the nearby access station wirelessly. You touch your appointments icon and an arrow appears across your forearm directing you to where you want to go. With an abundance of cheap video I suspect that written language will die or at least be pared down to a base level and we will rely on sound and symbol more, cutting out the need to s-p-e-l-l everything out. Visual communication will be reverted to a curious mix of Nintendo icons resembling Celtic runes/Egyptian hieroglyphics, created for fast download and maximum impact. I can imagine English being morphed into a video-Esperanto.

Think of it… Graphic Design will superceed English language lessons in school. Crazy! It’s a future I could live with.

Proof that you should leave hairy chests alone.

Is it wrong that I wanted to laugh hysterically when Harry Potter said “When Voldermort and I touched wands in the graveyard…”?

There are some pretty boring people out there. My fave commercial played before Harry Potter and the Advancement of Story: the Virgin Xmas cell phone ad (the one with the stuffed reighndeer). While the girl hissed like an angry cat, the people behind us tsk-ed and poo poo-ed it, not “getting it”. They later revealed (in conversation during the trailers) they all worked as lawyer underlings, so no big surprise that their humour is stunted.

My other fave commercial is the Future Shop hommage to a Kraftwerk video with two shop clerks repeating “get it for less…guaranteed!” over and over. Funny!

I bought short cropped cop’s leather gloves yesterday, like the ones Ponch wears on C.H.i.P.S. Sexy.

MLT was a good time last night. The music was fun from song one and the comedienne was funny. She was no Elvria, but funny. No surprise that the body and not the brain was voted Mr Leatherman Toronto. Two people on stage made a point of scolding the gay community for letting drugs take over. Finally. Backbone! And what was up with closing one of the washrooms right when the place started to fill up and putting a washroom attendant in the only open one? Sharkboy was shooed out of the women’s despite the fact that there were about one woman to 100 men at this event. Methinks its time to move that venue or to suggest some changes in policy. I gave the evening 8.5 out of ten.

And speaking of music: remember when I was all drooly over Dayglo radio? Its back under a different name: Nigelradio.com! (that’s iTunes>Radio>70s & 80s> Nigel Radio (80s With Attitude). They’ve even salvaged the same station ID movie samples from Dayglo!

I am not work-burdened right now. The company has turned it’s crazy must-get-it-done-now gaze away from me and settled upon the poor two hapless print slaves and has demanded that a couple brochures and newsletters get done before the world cracks in half or something. I’m left to my own devices and I am rewriting meta tags on this, the last slave day before Xmas.

The previous web staff thought it was ok to just reuse the exact same words for the meta description and keyword tags for all 3500 pages of our company site. That’s right, our company’s site is ranked somewhere right beside “The Last Page On The Internet”. It’s a slow process as that I have to actually read the travel drivel describing toasty Tunisian landscapes and far-off exotic souks that syrupy drip over the HTML that is our site.

Needless to say I want to get out of here.

Tonight, Sharkboy and I are dining with Da, the WriterBrother and the Punk Neice and then driving to Montreal at 5am tomorrow morning where I will sit nursing a spiked egg nog as the French relatives talk around me. Then we get into the car and drive to Brockvegas to see my Mum for lunch, grab my WriterBrother and hit the Thousand Island Casino. We’ll be back in the city on Sunday night. Thankfully I have Mon/Tues off to decompress.

I hope you get every single present you ever wished for and greedily eat everything on your plate. Happy Christmas-Xmas-Kwanza-Festivus-Haunuka-PaganSolstice-bla-bla-bla!

Update Sharkboy just sent me this list of things he and his co-workers are saying loudly to get out of the office early:

Me: Elana, thank you for a great year, you can go home now
Me: Well, looks like Marketing is leaving, maybe we can leave too.
Me: The phones have been so quiet since lunch, that’s a sign.
Me: Did you notice how empty the parking lots are? Everybody’s gone home early!
Me: Did you finish all your shopping? Would be good to go now before everybody leaves work at 5 and fill out the mall…
Me: They were saying on the radio that the traffic is heavier at 3pm today than it’s been all week, I guess a lot of people are leaving early.
Me: I can’t believe the coffee place closed early today.
Me: I have so many things to do at home before dinner tonight.
Me: I guess I’ll clean the desk, not in the mood for anything else right now…

I sent back:

Try this one:

Did you see that movie last night? A Christmas Carol? Boy that boss turned really nice, eh?

And just now I got from him:

I guess my talking to everyone and not really being at my desk got me in trouble… Anyway, long story short, I was just told that if it’s that quiet, I could go home.. hehe