Author Archives: Rob MacD

Never one to indulge, overly, in self-promotion (this flaw, by the way, is the only reason [so I keep telling myself] I’ve never become as famous as I’d have liked), I nonetheless feel compelled to tell the world about a couple of things I’ve been involved in that will be presented at the upcoming Reel Island Film Festival, November 12-16 in Charlottetown.

The first is the 22 minute film Florid. It’s a black comedy about 4 bums (“We’re bums, not assholes!”) who, in the dead-cold of a Charlottetown winter, get the idea to move to Florida and bum in warmer climes. The movie records their endeavours to raise the capital necessary for the move. I play one of the bums. I also co-wrote (along with good pal, Dave Stewart, who directed). This project took far too long (over 3 years, I believe) to complete and has some rather significant plot holes. Yet, beyond all that, it’s a pretty funny, warped movie.

The other involvement is in the showing of the pilot for a TV series called Cinemaniax created and produced by good pal Dave Moses. The format has, I believe, changed somewhat since this pilot production, but the concept was: 3 teams of 2 film-makers are given an idea for a film, some actors and some equipment. They then have 2 days to write, film and edit their short movie, afterwhich the 3 films are presented to an audience which votes for their favourite. Good ole Dave Stewart and I were one team for the pilot, Team Smithee. I believe the 3 short movies created for the pilot are still available for viewing at the Cinemaniax website. The Team Smithee entry is called ‘With This Job’. We didn’t win.

The recent renewed interest in drug-enhanced athletes has me wondering whether drug-testing of athletes should just be dropped altogether. Afterall, the cheaters will always be ahead of testers, always using the newest and so-far-undetected drugs to enhance their performances. With the recent investigaions, it’s now to the point where practically any athlete who excels, whether professional or amateur, is assumed to be cheating, even if tests imply innocence. The sad thinking now is that that individual just didn’t get caught.

Obviously, athletes can’t be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs carte blanche. “Have at it, girls, whatever it takes to be the fastest, strongest” would eventually turn into nothing more than a Hulking freak show. Not to mention the miriade of side effects such embibing would cause.
I wonder if artificial performance enhancing would eventually level out, though? Would there be a line in free-for-all open-knowledge drug-enhancement that athletes wouldn’t be willing to cross? “I want to win, but I don’t want seven toes”. Of course, there’ll always be someone else who will be willing to go that extra step to gain the slightest advantage. And if that person goes that far, then others will have to follow suit, repurcussions be damned, otherwise, they’ll be left in the dust.

I think we all (even athletes) would like a sports world where athletes test the *natural limits* of the human body and mind. I don’t think there’s any way we can have that world. Drug-enhanced athletes are here to stay. So, what do we do?
If we allow athletes to use steroids and other enhancements, ask them to declare what they’re on, without fear of reprisals or sanctions, how far would they take that freedom? How far would we, as spectators, allow athletes to take it before we say ‘this is foolish’ and stop caring? The problem is, once we reach that plateau, athletes will stop declaring the ‘too foolish’ enhancements, yet still take them, and then we’re back to exactly the place we are now: a sports world where we’re all suspicious of any feat of strength or speed or grace.

She just makes me mad.

I am witnessing an odd event happening outside my window.
The street in front of our house has the slightest decline. The hill is not so steep that you couldn’t push a car-that-does-not-start up it. Believe me, I know.
There are currently 5 girls, about 12-14 years old, taking turns pushing each other, in a little red plastic wagon, down this slight hill. Two or three will run and push the rider and wagon afterwhich they go maybe 30 yards on their own. Then they pull the rider and wagon back up the hill for another girl to take her turn. Another indicator of just how slight the hill is: a girl pulling the wagon back ‘up’ can pull the wagon and two riders as well. This is not steep.
Now, what is unusual to me about this event is that it’s 5 girls. Five boys doing this wouldn’t seem odd. Even if, say, 2 of the 5 were girls, it wouldn’t seem that odd. But it’s five girls. I think this is great. What also strikes me as odd is that they chose this part of this street. About a minute away there is a street that has a slightly steeper hill.

Somewhere, I’m sure, there are 5 newly-teenaged boys Easy-Baking.

I am picky about the (so-called) reality shows I watch. I refuse to watch any that attempt to match two people in some false true-love ending (even though I’ve only spent 31 days with you, and in those 31 days, I’ve also spent time making out with 11 other women, I really do love you, contestant number 3. Will you marry me and share in the million dollar prize?). There is something dirty and whore-ish about those. I also don’t watch the ones where the object is to dupe the contestants (what Gwendolyn doesn’t know is that her 12 potential male suitors are in fact transvestites!!!… go ahead tv-hollywood, take that idea). And the contests of foolishness and fear are also shows I’ll not watch (tonight’s fifty thousand dollar winner will be the contestant who is brave enough to shove razor blades and spiders up their butt!!!)

I do like a few reality shows however. The Amazing Race is my favourite, followed closely by Survivor. This current edition of Survivor is quite good. The producers and editors do a great job of focusing each episode towards its conclusion, maximizing suspense. Last night, going to Tribal Council, I was sure that Rupert had convinced the others, specifically Sean, to vote out Trish. Yet, when Sean went to write his choice for eviction, he said something “You thought this was your game. Well, now you’re gone, and the game is mine.”
I’m thinking: “Why are you saying that? You’d never say that about Trish. The game was never hers. You can only be talking about Rupert!” So, I thought he had double-double crossed Rupert and Rupert’d be gone. Of course, they did vote to evict Trish, and now blonde-haired John (who was in cahoots with Trish) is in deep shit.
This is why I like Survivor. They do a great job of manipulating the audience, without making the audience feel like they’re being cheated.

As we were watching Survivor last night, CB says “I don’t like that guy with the underwear.” Which guy? “The bald guy” On which tribe? “The guy that doesn’t do anything. The lazy one.” Who’s the lazy one? “The guy who’s scared of animals.”
I knew who he was talking about (Osten), but I wanted to see how long it’d take him to define Osten by his skin colour. He never did. I think that’s pretty neat.

I don’t like the word ‘blog’. Having been in this blog-world for a month or two now, there are acquaintances I now meet who will say something like “I like your blog.” or “I read your blog everyday”.
While I appreciate the compliments, and am somewhat thrilled that anybody at all bothers to read the nothingness I write, I nonetheless feel slightly embarrassed when I hear the word ‘blog’ in association to me. I think part of my dislike of it is that I’ve never been one who willingly participates in fad-ish things, and ‘having a blog’ is currently such a huge fad.
So, when I hear “I like your blog”, in a way I’m hearing “You’re a good Texas two-stepper”, or “That ChiaPet of yours is getting nice and hairy”.

Elliot Smith has died, of apparent suicide. I didn’t even know he was sick.

For those who don’t know who he was, he was a singer/songwriter who, I think, had more potential than he had success. Reading a few tributes/memoriums to/of him, apparently, he also had depression and trouble with alcohol and drugs.
His music was featured prominently in the movie Good Will Hunting.
I became a fan of his soft-sung music about a year ago. Apparently, he self-produced and pretty much played all the instruments (of which there aren’t many, admittedly) on his albums.

Two of my favourite songs of his are “Say Yes” and “Somebody That I Used To Know”. You could do worse than to download those two songs.

How close does this top ten list of scary movie moments compare to your own? What’s the scariest movie moment according to you?

Me? I think the linked-to list favours a few too many recent movies. And while there are many movies that have given me longer-duration scares, I’d have to say that the biggest scare I got from a movie was the ending of Carrie.

Also, for me, Halloween (the original) is pretty much 90 minutes of tension and nerves.

In the last week, I have taken to distrusting our sump pump. It seems to take longer to pump the water out of our sump-pump basin. There is also a curious gurgling sound that accompanies the sumping and/or pumping. A couple of times, it’s taken an interminable amount of time to run through its process. I believe the problem is that one of the stoppers (the one that is set to turn the pump off) keeps sliding up the metal pole. I believe I have fixed this problem with the sump pump.

In my attempted manipulations of the sump pump during this last week, I have learned to appreciate the brilliant simplicity of this machine. I suspect that the people who have invented and perfected the sump pump will most likely not be reading this post, however I feel I must offer a shout out to them: Well done, sump pump people. Well done.

We’ve all probably heard the saying “a million monkeys at a million typewriters” and how it’d take a million years for them to reproduce one of Shakespeare’s plays.
Well, someone created a Monkey Shakespeare Simulator (Java enables) to test the theory. You go to the page, and the program starts up, recording a simulation of the daily activity of thousands of monkeys randomly tapping at keyboards.
What it is checking against is the first page of each of Shakespeare’s works. So, if ‘Gloucester’ was the first word of one of the plays (not counting title, written by, etc.), the simulator would only acknowledge a match from a monkey that typed ‘glou’ as part of its random typing. In this instance, a result of 4 letters matched would be recorded.
Currently, the record is 8 letters matched. Or in other words, some simulated monkey managed to randomly type the first 8 letters to one of Shakespeare’s works. Not a great record.
Last night, I let the simulator run all night long. When I got up this morning, my simulated monkeys had been typing for over 30,000 days and had managed to tie the current record, as one of them had randomly typed the first 8 letters to “The Merry Wives Of Windsor”. As I write this post, I’ve had the simulator running, and its 50 million monkeys (and population growing) have, in 2000 simulated days, managed several instances of matching the first 7 letters from several of Shakespeare’s works.

Co-incidentally, over the night last night, the monkeys were successful in reproducing the complete text to Nils Ling’s “The Truth About Daughters”.