Iocane Powder

After the AFI came out with their 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes list recently, Susan suggested to me that I should make a list of my favorite 100 quotes...all from one movie, 1987's The Princess Bride. That's a dangerous suggestion to make to someone who is both a serious procrastinator and a serious (well, silly and easily amused, anyway) fan of the movie...especially when there's work to avoid doing. :) Here's the list, put into order semi-arbitrarily, and subject to change on any given day. :)

( To the pain! )

Article from today's The Globe and Mail - Toronto Unlimited: A bad new brand for the city

(Note: It would probably tell you something that initially I read the word "brand" as "bland"...)

There was no applause, neither gasps nor boos, indeed no reaction whatsoever when the massed bureaucrats and consultants triumphantly unveiled Toronto's new brand identity, with logo and tagline, in the Distillery District last week. But it would be unfair to say that the silence was stunned.
     Instead it was the silence of typically Torontonian resignation: Sure the brand is bad, we silently reflected -- corporate, witless, uninspired. But it could be worse. Instead of merely banal, it could be embarrassing. So let us be thankful for small mercies.
     But that slow cringe curdled into a full cramp this weekend when the same bureaucrats and consultants rolled out our new brand in a two-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times. The ad's main message, titled "Toronto: an eclectic tour of an eclectic city," is more than embarrassing. It is all-out excruciating.
     It would take the rest of this column simply to enumerate the grammatical errors in those few short paragraphs, without even considering their pomposity, emptiness and pathetic dependence on idiotic clichés. Toronto is "perhaps" the most underrated city in North America, it begins, known mainly for cleanliness and politeness.
     "And while all these answers are true. It is barely scratching the surface. Toronto is one of those rare instances where its true unique nature makes it difficult to describe without being cliché."
     Thus our anonymous author -- likely one of the New York experts Tourism Toronto hired to provide us with an identity -- licenses himself to pile on the clichés, in the same tortured, unreadable style. The ad reads like an instant Google translation of a Japanese website. Its main message is that Toronto is a city of sub-literate poseurs with nothing, nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing to say.
     Truth in advertising, you say? Ouch.
     Although Mayor David Miller was unavailable yesterday, his press secretary went out of his way to provide "no comment" on the ad, volunteering in addition that both it and the entire $4-million branding effort is a project of Tourism Toronto, not the city, and financed largely by that group's hotel levy.
     Others are not so reticent. While the new logo may simply seem dull to the rest of us, more than one local designer considers it offensive. "It's really sad, it's unprofessional, it's backwards," sighed award-winning designer Art Niemi of Atlanta Art and Design. "But it probably represents Toronto perfectly. No one here ever seems to have time to find the best and the brightest."
     Mr. Niemi is especially nonplussed to know why the designers chose a 1920s Bauhaus typeface to represent modern Toronto. And the way the already weak logo is undermined by its transformation into musical notes and sperm-shaped balloons [Transcriber's note: ....huh?] drives him crazy. "To a graphic designer looking at that, it's as bad as if they misspelled the word Toronto," he says.
     The tragedy is that Tourism Toronto and its camel-making partners in this effort began by rejecting two entirely credible efforts -- both a new mark and slogan.
     The slogan, produced on the fly by a local agency virtually in the midst of the SARS crisis, was "You belong here." It was both an appropriately friendly come-on to tourists and a simple, affecting statement of the modern city's proudest achievement, its huge inclusiveness.
     Instead, we adopted "unlimited," which is meaningless.
     The mark was created in the same flush by Bruce Mau, not only a Torontonian but probably the most famous graphic designer alive. It was a striking, canted "T" built up from individual "pixels" that could be shaded or filled with imagery to convey any number of messages without undermining the strong presence of the basic device.
     The slogan quickly began appearing everywhere, graffiti-style, and Mr. Mau was ready to start printing T-shirts and shopping bags almost two years ago.
     But instead of taking a risk with something fresh, spontaneous and popular, the bureaucrats went to New York. It was an expensive trip, with excruciating results.

- by John Barber

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Heh. I like that part about the ad being like a Google-translated Japanese website. :)

Your Slanguage Profile

Canadian Slang: 50%

Prison Slang: 50%

Aussie Slang: 25%

British Slang: 25%

New England Slang: 0%

Southern Slang: 0%

Victorian Slang: 0%

What Slanguage Do You Speak?

I had no idea I even knew that much prison slang...and I also have no clue where I'd have picked it up in the first place, having never done any time in the big house as of yet. :)

All the small things

...that make this week, so far, not at all a bad week:

Monday: I finished (for the time being, unless I get more assigned to me) the accounting work I've been doing -- plus, I'm going to get paid for this, AND I'll be able to list this as a summer job on my résumé, too. Whee. :)

Tuesday: I did a bit of packing, but mostly I finally got to relax a bit. I mean, sure, I've relaxed a little on weekends, but never with that I've-got-nothing-else-I-need-to-be-working-on feeling. It's quite a nice feeling, really. I also got an e-mail telling me that, since I was one of the first 50 webmasters to post the Alanis Morissette banner onto my site (it's at the bottom of this page), I'm going to get the Jagged Little Pill Acoustic album for free -- I've already got it, but I can give it to someone who doesn't. Yay!

Wednesday: My free Kingdom of Heaven poster came in the mail for me. I got this for the same reason I'm getting the Alanis CD -- posted the KOH banner on my site back in May. Yippee! Sure, I may have been disappointed with the movie, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate a shiny new poster. :)

Thursday (a.k.a., today): Through dividing up 2 tasks between 2 people (seems like a logical method, doesn't it?), both Susan and I are both ticketholders for both Live 8 in Barrie on July 2 and the Tori Amos concert in August. Yippee! Of course, we're not even sure we're going to Live 8, but if we can, then we've got the tix. Something like this -- with a crowd as big as it'll probably be -- isn't usually my cup o' tea, and I still don't think it is, necessarily, but...I just figure I usually watch everything happen on television and I never actually take part in these big events happening somewhere else. I just watch them happen, but I don't go to them. So I figure -- hey, this is free, Barrie isn't SO far from here, my summer course won't even have started yet, and why don't I just try to get tickets and see what happens? No big deal if I don't. But I do...so...assuming we actually go, it should be interesting. Chances are I'd end up thinking, "Well, gee, I should have just stayed home and watched this on TV," but how would I know that if I don't ever go to anything?

The nice thing about both of these concerts is that they bookend my summer course rather than coming in the middle of it. My course goes from July 5 to August 11 and the final exam is the week after that. Even if we don't go to Live 8, I wouldn't mind starting off July watching the concert (OLP's gonna be there!) on TV, wearing my PJs. It'd be fun. :)

Friday (a.k.a. The Day After that is Tomorrow): Susan's coming over after she's finished work for the day and we're going to do some quality TV-watching (see, I told you I liked watching TV!). Quality as in -- we're going into the dark, musty vaults of yesteryear television and watching old Buffy and/or X-Files episodes. I say and/or because I'm not sure I've still got the XF tape Susan left here -- I mean, I HAVE it, I just don't know where. I suspect Mom's already got it packed away in a carboard box somewhere that's already been taped up. Whoops. I never watched The X-Files back when it was still on, but according to my fairly-accurate Amazon.com recommendations, I should like the show. It's recommended to me specifically because I rated and liked Buffy, Angel, Roswell, and Dark Angel -- not just one or two of those, but rather all 4 together is what got me the XF recommendation. Ha.

To share or not to share - that is the question

I'm toying with the idea of making a bit of writing of mine from a few years ago publicly accessible on the Internet, on Writing.com, but I'm not sure yet if I really want to. The "story" is only a page long in Word and it isn't even very good, but whatever. I just uploaded it to the site because I think it's a cool idea to have a writing portfolio. Even if it's online, and currently only accessible by me, and only comprised of one piece of so-called writing. Anyway, the story is about, um, styrofoam. Yes, I did just say "styrofoam". It's brilliant, I tell you. Really.

Anyhoo, it's so not, and I don't know why I'm even telling you all about this story-thing you can't even get to other than maybe because I have nothing else at the moment to post about on here and so this is all I've got. :)

Maybe something [good] will arise soon that's interesting enough for me to tell you all about...? Here's hoping.

The hills are alive

Not much to update you all on -- there hasn't been much going on lately, except that I did go to the Lord of the Rings symphony with Susan on Sunday, which was fun. I don't think I've ever gone to see a symphony before, or even regular concert bands, including back when I was in high school. I was always in the band, but I never actually went to see/listen to a band as an audience member. Huh.

Anyway, just wanted to point out that I've added a new music request section (look right) just 'cause I have more mp3s than I'll ever reasonably need, and if someone out there happens to be looking for one/some of those, I'd be happy to help out. And, of course, there is the self-interest aspect as well, seeing as how I've listed the mp3s I'm looking for, too. :) I'm just glad that there are Internet sites available like YouSendIt or SendThisFile that make it easier to send big files to people. Rah rah. Beats trying for 10 minutes to send a massive e-mail that doesn't even end up working anyway.

All righty, nothing else to report for now. Hope you're all well and doing well and all that.