The Best Shows: Summer 2012

Back in September I posted an admission: I love television. I love it among other things, of course, but I think one can love TV without being an antisocial cretin. There are just too many high-quality programs these days.

Here's a revision of my previous list - some shows have fallen off my radar completely (The Office, Dexter), and some other new shows have caught me completely off-guard as being awesome (Sherlock, Todd & The Book of Pure Evil).

My Absolute Favourite Shows - currently on the air
- Breaking Bad
- Curb Your Enthusiasm
- Metalocalypse
- Todd and the Book of Pure Evil (easily the best new comedy on TV)
- 30 Rock (promoted from "well worth it" because Season 6 has been stellar)
- Sherlock (BBC)

Well Worth A Watch - currently on the air
- Game of Thrones (the show is incredible but the books are superior)
- Modern Family (still awesome, but demoted from favourites)
- Parks & Recreation (still awesome, but demoted from favourites)
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
- National Geographic's Drugs, Inc
- Eastbound & Down

Shows I Want To Start - when there's time
- Alphas
- Firefly (I've seen it before, but need to re-watch to fully appreciate)
- HBO's Veep
- HBO's Girls
- The Killing (Season 2 - I really enjoyed Season 1)
- The Wire

My All-Time Favourite Shows - now off the air
- Battlestar Galactica (SO GOOD - I recently re-watched the whole series again)
- The Sopranos
- Arrested Development
- Law & Order
- Law & Order: Trial By Jury (a one-season wonder that was better than most regular L&O episodes)

If you love TV and there's an awesome show you think lines up with my tastes, let me know. I'd love to hear about it!

Review: LaCité Apartments in Montreal

I'm at the end of a 14-month lease at LaCité Apartments in Montreal, and wanted to jot down some notes my on my experience here - hopefully this can help a random Googler decide if they want to sign a lease here. 

Here's my pros and cons, anonymous internet friends! 

Pros

• Awesome location. Close to McGill and the downtown core. It's a 20 minute walk to the Centre Bell, 10 minutes to St Laurent Blvd, and 10 minutes to Place Des Arts Metro station. 
• Clean, well-kept, high quality units. I posted some pictures of my apartment here and here. As tenants move, I think they're replacing old ugly carpets with faux-hardwood like my unit - looks better, in my opinion. 
• Amazing in-building services. The four LaCite buildings share an underground shopping complex with a grocery store, pharmacy, post office, barber, bank, liquor store, gym, cinema, and restaurants. 
• Concrete walls & floors ensure decent sound insulation. You can't hear voices or footsteps, but you can hear your neighbours if they're pounding their bass, or dropping bags of glass marbles on their tile floors. 
• The process to sign a lease is pretty straightforward, and the woman who helped me was very nice. 
• Overall the building's administration was really great and helpful. Because the LaCite complex is so big (1,200+ units) they have to play by the rules - they're less sketchy than some smaller landlords might be. 
• Underground parking is available (but I don't have a car, so I can't vouch for if it's good or not). 

Cons

• Rent is more expensive than other buildings in the area, but you're paying for the convenience of the location, the underground services and the administrative overhead. 
• The building administration slips a "Happy Birthday" note into your door frame on your birthday. Presumably they have this information from copying some form of photo ID during the lease-signing process. While this is a well intentioned gesture, I found it creepy because I didn't authorize them to use my personal information in that way. 
• LaCite staff tell you they will never enter your apartment without your explicit permission. This is not true. Due to the size of the complex, they equate "slipping a notice under your door" with "receiving your explicit permission". Yearly smoke detector inspection notices are slipped into door frames that say (paraphrased) "someone will enter your unit some time next week, just FYI". The most stunning to me was when a LaCite agent let an interested future renter into my apartment without my permission while I was in Saskatoon for Christmas. Their justification was the two notices that they slipped under my door.... while I was out of town, unable to read them. When they saw the unopened notices, they didn't phone me to get my permission to enter - they showed my apartment to the stranger anyway. This is unacceptable to me - I don't think anyone would be comfortable with the idea of a stranger checking out their home without their knowledge. 

Would I rent here again? Yes, overall it's been a wonderful place to live. But I would have a second lock installed on my door (an option available to tenants) and not provide the administration office with a copy of the key. I'd be happy to leave it unlocked for smoke detector inspections, but I would absolutely leave it locked during long absences. 

LaCite website: http://montreal.lacite.ca/apartments.html

Software that is Awesome: f.lux (or Flux)

Stop what you're doing. Download and install this program on your computer right now: f.lux (for Windows, Mac and Linux)

Your computer monitor is designed to behave like the sun - blasting out a full array of bright colours. That's fine during the day, but at night, computer monitors can look WAY too bright and blue, which strains your eyes (or worse, gives you headaches and sleep issues!).

Flux reduces eye strain during evening computing sessions by matching the colours on your computer monitor to the lighting conditions in your room and the position of the sun. You install the software, tell it what type of lights you have in your primary computing location (incandescent/florescent), and tell it your geographic location. DONE. Flux does the rest, "warming up" the colours of your monitor in the evening.

At first, you might find this software incredibly annoying. You may be tempted to think "my computer practically looks orange at night". I urge you to try this software for at least two weeks if you use your computer regularly in the evenings, or a month if you're an occasional nighttime user. I hated Flux at first but now can't compute at night without it. Over time you get used to the software adjusting your on-screen colours automatically, and you even come to depend on it for sanity. I accidentally messed up my settings a few weeks ago, and dropped everything I was doing until I fixed it. I just can't compute on a brain-scorching bright blue display at night!

I absolutely recommend this nuisance-free, hassle-free software to everyone out there.

Best Reality Show - Storage Wars

In the last seven days, I've become obsessed with A&E's Storage Wars. This is a show where people bid on "abandoned" storage lockers (read: some poor schmuck can't pay their storage unit rent) and get to repossess all of the contents inside.

The only catch is they cannot walk inside of units that they're bidding on, nor can they open any boxes until they own it.

So when you pull open one of these doors....

... and you see a classic motorcycle, you bid up to the reasonable resale value of the classic motorcycle. But when you open the door and you see a bunch of boxes, how do you know what is inside!!?!?!

Sometimes they find art, sometimes jewellery, sometimes a safe with cash inside! Sometimes a locker is purchased for $500 that turns out to be worth tens of thousands of dollars. But, other times a promising locker turns out to be full of someone's old clothes and hangers - in other words, worthless.

That is really the key premise in Storage Wars: What's in the boxes?!?! Nothing else on the show really matters. The four "professional" buyers that the show follows around are unlikable. Some own thrift stores, consignment stores, and some are collectors, but they're all terrible people. The cut-scene commentary is really cheesy, and the grudge-based up-bidding gets a little tiresome. Each 22-minute is at least 50% non-box-opening filler. But each terrible episode still has some of the magic - that insatiable curious itch that begs to be scratched - what is in those damn boxes??!!!

One of Robyn's sisters interned in a Grade 8 class and said all of her Grade 8 boys loved Storage Wars. Every guy I know who has seen it has enjoyed it. Is needing to know what is in a bunch of boxes intrinsically programmed into male DNA? Or are there females out there who also just want to know the contents of boxes?

My Christmas holidays have been great so far. I have taken a small break from watching Storage Wars to post about Storage Wars. Well, back to work! There are still boxes of unknown contents to be discovered!

Best Pizza in Saskatoon - Il Secondo

Robyn and I grabbed lunch today at Il Secondo - a bakery just off Broadway Ave, across from the Bulk Cheese Warehouse. In a word - delicious!

Everything is made fresh and the pizzas are the classic Italian style, baked in a wood-fired oven. I can honestly say the crust was the most perfect crust I've ever had - lightly crunchy on the outside, soft and delicious on the inside.

I also had an excellent latte, and it was only $3.75 - pretty decent as far as latte prices go! It would be five bucks at Starbucks.

I think we'd both highly recommend Il Secondo to anyone who loves a great pizza! The only downside is that their evening hours are still limited (they are a bakery, after all). So be sure to go there for lunch sometime.

The Best Shows

I am not afraid to admit that I love television - I think there's too many high-quality shows these days to ignore. It's now the fall and there's tons of great stuff coming back to the tubes.

My Favourite Shows - currently on the air
- Breaking Bad
- Curb Your Enthusiasm
- It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia
- Modern Family
- Parks & Recreation (Season 1 was weak, but 2-3 were awesome!)

Well Worth A Watch - still on the air
- 30 Rock
- Dexter
- Futurama
- The Office

Shows I Want to Start (when there's time)
- Alphas (supposedly like Heroes, but done it's superheroes done right)
- Game of Thrones (I want to finish the books first)
- The Wire

My Favourite Shows - now off the air
- Arrested Development
- Battlestar Galactica
- Law & Order
- The Sopranos

If you can think of a show that I'd like like, let me know! If you suggest Big Bang Theory I will smack you in the mouth.

Awesome Products: Mighty Wallet

On my lunch break today I jotted a quick reminder to myself down - on my wallet. Doing so reminded me what an awesome wallet I have, and by remembering that (and the fact I have not been posting very often on my blog!) I decided to start highlighting a few products I think are awesome in a series of posts aptly tagged, "Products That Are Awesome".

I'm not going to turn my blog into a series of advertisements, but I AM going to post about why *I* like certain products (you might not like them for the same reasons!). They might long posts about specific products - like today's post - or short posts about generic products, like a wok (I love mine!).

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The Mighty Wallet by Dynomighty Design is a recyclable wallet made out of a single sheet of folded Tyvek. The material is familiar to most people as the untearable material of airmail envelopes.

The design is simple: there are two inner pockets for credit cards, two pockets for bills and receipts, and two outer/side pockets. There is no change pocket.

Each compartment is very easy to access on a daily basis - there is no digging around in sub-pockets of sub-pockets. When you flip it shut, the Tyvek-on-Tyvek makes a satisfying "thwack" sound.

The day I loaded my wallet I was uncertain about the side pockets - the business cards I had loaded into the sides had a tendancy to fall out. However, after a few days of "breaking in", the Tyvek will shape itself to your pockets and wallet contents.

As a material, Tyvek has some cool properties. For one, it's super strong - this is not a paper wallet you could tear in half (many have tried). Also, you can write on it or tape things to it - like my Sobeys card!

Mighty Wallets come in a ton of different designs. I rock the "classic" envelope - I like the designs with whitespace, for writing on. Some designs generate lots of curiosity, and I've scribbled the website on the back of old receipts for cashiers a few times. If you don't want cashiers gawking at your wallet, there are many designs that look like a plain wallet and aren't attention-grabbing.

The most brilliant feature of the Mighty Wallet is its thickless - or lack thereof. Empty, it's as thick as a few sheets of Tyvek, so it's basically as thick as what you keep in it. The folds of the wallet expand as you load it and fall back into place as you un-load it. You can treat it like a George Costanza wallet and keep a year's worth of receipts. Or - ladies - you could carry just a credit card, some cash, and your ID and it would fit in the tiny pockets on your without bothering you.

My wallet is about 3/4 of an inch thick when loaded. 

At $15 apiece, it's a bargain for the cool factor, but it's legitimately useful - I am confident saying this is the best wallet I have ever owned. It's cheap enough to buy in bulk for mass Christmas presents. I've been using mine for a year now and while it looks worn, it's not going to fall apart any time soon.

Grab Mighty Wallets from http://www.mightywallets.com/.

Great Documentaries

A year or two ago, I went on a huge documentary kick. As a kid and young(er) adult, I hadn't seen many documentaries I enjoyed, but suddenly started discovering them at a very rapid pace.

Here are a few I've enjoyed - some popular, some obscure - in alphabetical order. If you're ever looking for an interesting non-fiction flick, I'd recommend one of these:

The Battle of Chernobyl (watch online at this link) - A fascinating, edge-of-your-seat documentary about the events leading up to the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and how the local (and eventually, international) authorities saved the world from an even bigger disaster. There is tons of great historical footage and all of the science-y stuff is explained clearly. This is a fast-paced documentary that watches like an action movie. If you watch one movie from this list, watch this one.

(Bonus reading: check out the New Confinement Chamber that's being built over the old protective sarcophagus at Chernobyl.)


The Devil and Daniel Johnston - All about the rise and fall of a genius singer-songwriter who produced a massive amount of art (music, lyrics, drawings, and more), made an enormous impact on the indie music scene, but faded into pseudo-obscurity due to crippling manic depression and mental illness. I'd never heard of this guy before a friend recommended this film, but after watching it I can say with certainty that Daniel Johnston deserved to have this movie made about him!

Helvetica - Don't tell yourself that a movie all about a font (ie, a typeface) won't be interesting. This documentary covers the creation and evolution of the Helvetica typeface and how it has permeated art, business, and popular culture. Plus, once you're done, you'll never be able to un-notice this font (kind of like once you know about the secret arrow in the FedEx logo, you'll never un-notice it).

King Corn - This one is almost as hard to explain as Helvetica! It's all about corn. Corn that we grow, eat, and turn into fuel and other products. The filmmaker grows a crop of corn all by himself, and follows his produce through its lifecycle, from seed to processing to product. This flick also covers a number of interesting (yes, interesting!) corn-related issues, like government subsidies for growers and the reduction in corn species produced today (about four, if I recall correctly, although there were hundreds of native species of corn when Europeans landed in North America).

Man On Wire - There are so many good things to say about Man on Wire. The story is amazing enough - it's all about a tightrope walker who spends years devising a plan to break into the World Trade Centre towers in New York City, fix a steel wire between the two towers, and tightrope-walk across. Like Battle of Chernobyl, this is a movie that will have you on the edge of your seat.

Rush - Beyond The Lighted Stage - This is the movie that turned me into a true Rush fan. A close and personal look at the history behind one of Canada's greatest bands. You don't have to be into Rush to find this movie interesting - it's a great story about three nerdy kids from Toronto who start making incredible music and hit it big writing wildly progressive music. A really great, engaging film - you feel like you know the band on a personal level after you've seen it.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated - An interesting look at the American movie ratings board, how movie ratings (G, PG, R, etc) are assigned arbitrary, how the ratings process happens behind closed doors, and who the mysterious organization hires to rate movies (and who those raters are connected to!).

Those are a few of my favourites! Leave me a comment if you've seen any of these, or if you know of another good documentary that I should get my hands on.

Movie Review: Inception (no spoilers)

I saw Inception on Monday night and if I had to describe the movie in two words, I'd say, "really good." It's definitely worth seeing. 

Is it #3 of the top 250 movies ever made, as it is currently ranked on the Internet Movie Database? Absolutely not (Rotten Tomatoes has a better consensus). I have no idea where the IMDB hype came from. But people should still check it out.

What I really liked

The coolest part about this movie was the premise - that you can steal people's secrets by entering their dreams and manipulating their minds. It sounds corny on paper, but it's well-executed in the movie. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a "best-in-the-business" type character - he's the best at entering people's dreams. The plot of the movie follows Leo and his team as they face the biggest challenge of all - not only entering someone's dream, but planting a thought without being detected in the subject's mind ("inception"). 

There's tons of action and the concept of entering people's dreams within other dreams creates tons of uncertainty throughout the movie as you ask yourself where the characters really are (reality, dreams, or dreams within dreams). The movie is thrilling, puzzling, well-cast, and the concept of entering other people's dreams forces the audience to question what their own reality is. For this feeling alone, it's worth seeing. 

I sincerely appreciated that the producers did not bullshit the audience on how this dream-entering is possible. While they talk sciencey mumbo-jumbo about what is and is not possible within dreams, and discuss the consequences of messing with someone's subconscious, the movie does not force you to swallow a BS pseudo-scientific explanation of how entering someone's dreams is possible. The process is never mentioned and the audience just accepts that if you have a fancy-looking suitcase, it's possible. As such, the audience is spared the type of insanely impossible science that made the Core such an unbearable (yet, in its own special way, awesome) movie. 

What I didn't like

Despite the cool concept behind the movie, the first 20 minutes really drag. No spoilers, but it's the typical action-movie, "let's assemble a team" sequence. Okay, let's track down an old professor. Now let's grab the smart guy, the charmer, the token black brown guy (Indian, in this film!), and an impossibly talented cute young girl. Sprinkle lightly with action. Postpone real story until team is assembled. 

Remember in Armageddon where Bruce Willis had to track down Billy Bob Thorton, Steve Buscemi, Ben Affleck, and the other space rig-pigs? Yeah, it's that scene. Or remember in Ocean's 11, 12, and 13 where George Clooney has to track down his team? Yeah, it's that scene. Robyn accurately described this sequence as "quite boring" and that if you saw it on TV, you'd probably change the channel. 

That's really my main complaint. It's slow to start, and there are a few eye-rolling moments in the film (not too many), but again, I have to emphasize that the incredibly smart, puzzling main plot forgives these few grievances. 

Verdict

Go see it in theatres; I'd say it's worth it. Christopher Nolan (of Batman Begins, the Dark Night, Memento fame) knows how to put together a captivating, original and overall enjoyable film.