Argh! Work is still slowly bleeding the life from me, so I haven’t been in the mood to write much here. I spend much of my non-work time lately flitting around the Internet, not actually doing anything or even completely reading anything. I’ve been drinking a lot of wine lately too — both in the classy connoisseur sense and the wino sense — which helps. As it turns out, wine that comes in a tetrapak is NOT necessarily bad, it may just be Australian.

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The thing about moving to a new neighbourhood, as I did recently, is you have to find new vendors and stuff. New electronics store, new dentist, etc etc. Soooooooo… I went to a hairstylist based on a recommendation from a LiveJournal community, okay? Look, I’m a child of the Internet. I can’t help myself. As it turns out, this place was like the independent movie of hair salons. My hair was cut by a paunchy Scandinavian with yellow fingers named Urs. He kept saying things like, “this is going to be longer on one side, ya, but eet will be funkee.” Oh! And when I arrived he handed me a smock (!), pointed at a very small room full of a very large dog and said sternly, “You put the smock on in there. The dog does not move.” I kept expecting him to challenge me to a game of chess.

It was awesome.

So my second local discovery was VideoMatica, an honest-to-god independent and foreign video place. We went in and looked around, and there were sooooo many movies I wanted to see, but one jumped out at me immediately: Manos, Hands of Fate, as screened by the MST3k guys. I’m not even sure what to say about this. It’s as delightfully bad as you would expect it to be, particularly the bits where everyone just kind of stands around because they either forgot what to say or the writers forgot to write something. Really, what do you expect for a movie made by a fertilizer salesman to win a bet? (Lots of background on the film can be found here).

I also watched Paprika, which was quite good. I’m kind of concerned now though because the dream music from the movie has been stuck in my head for a few days and at any minute I’m expecting to see a parade of singing household appliances and marching frogs. Although, actually, a little Japanese-style insanity would probably make my work week more bearable.

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How Cirque Du Soleil Works. I couldn’t find any exciting tell-all backstage reports (because you just KNOW those crazy Bulgarians and Mongolians are getting up to no good in between shows), but this is a solid overview of how the organization runs.

EnjoyNachos.com: your ultimate source for anything nacho-related.

I actually took a day off work today so I could stay home and.. get some work done. Being constantly interrupted by tech support questions is not conducive to programming.

Speaking of technical support, yesterday one of the more irritating recruiters in the office got quite demanding when her email stopped working for a few minutes. (We have a crappy email provider which I have no control over.) So I told her to shut down all her programs for 10 minutes to let them “reset”. When she called a few minutes later to say she didn’t think it was working, I replied that she hadn’t waited the full 10 minutes, and now she had to start over. Man, I love being an evil geek sometimes. (This is the same person who said that she didn’t like going to the local aquarium because there was “too much literature to read”. WHY MUST YOU BE SO RELENTLESSLY STUPID?!)

Long story short, I could use a new job but that would require me to work on my resume one weekend and not just get drunk and play video games.

Which reminds me: Wikipedia Wine Descriptors. This weekend I learned the difference in taste between “oaked” and “unoaked” Chardonnay. Well, that’s the official story anyway.. it’s a classy way of saying I drank almost two bottles of wine. Yay, grapes.