Author: Peter

Newspaper puzzles (10 letters)

The surest sign that a person has a large ego is that he does the crossword in pen.

I’ve done the crossword in the local newspaper on a regular basis for years, but I’ve found that I have to keep making it harder on myself in order to keep enjoying it. Initially it was as simple as not crossing off the clues I’d finished, but that’s no longer enough of a challenge; I’ve moved on to things like only filling in puzzles based on the “across” clues and doing them in spirals from the outside to the middle. Yet even with the extra level of difficulty, it’s a rare occurrence to take more than my seven-minute morning break to finish one off.

The most recent variations are two sides of the same coin: solving crosswords while driving (with someone else reading clues and filling in the puzzle—I may be crazy, but I ain’t stupid!) and solving them in my head, without filling in any of the squares. The experience of the former is sort of like playing a trivia game, except you get a bit of a sense of what sections of the puzzle look like and can use that to come up with answers. The latter is something I realized I could do while watching coworkers fill in puzzles; it’s become sort of a parlour trick at the office.

Lest this entry appear overly boastful—and with a quote like that at the top, how couldn’t it?—I freely admit that the Newsday crosswords are really pretty easy once you’ve gotten the hang of them. I haven’t gotten anywhere near this point on the New York Times weekend puzzle! But my experience does make me wonder if the reported benefits of this sort of activity start to tail off as the perceived difficulty does.

Not clowning around

One of the great things about going to smaller events—club concerts, fringe theatre, and the like—is the chance to actually meet and talk with the people you’ve just seen perform. At last summer’s London Fringe Theatre Festival I had the opportunity to do just that with Rachelle Fordyce, an actor from Winnipeg who performed a clever, surreal mythologically-based play called netherwhere : etherwhen. Since then I’ve been reading her weblog about being in and around the Canadian theatre scene.

She’s currently in Toronto attending a Clown Through Mask Workshop, which has given rise to an interesting series of posts. Friday’s entry describes two exercises, the first of which sounds like a variation on a meditation technique I learned years ago. At the ’05 Fringe I had a short discussion with a director (also from Winnipeg, although he’s moved here) who’s familiar with the structure and etiquette of using masks in the theatre; from Rachelle’s descriptive journals it sounds like this course is very much about teaching and preserving that tradition.

Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’

As strange as it may seem, there are actually people out there on the internets—most of whom I don’t work with—who read the drivel I occasionally post to this blog. There are very few among those sorry souls who have actually announced the fact, however, and I think having such poor taste deserves some public ridicule: so thanks, Paul! If this sort of thing keeps up I’ll have to change my theatre bio from writes an unpopular weblog to writes an only slightly unpopular weblog.

Seriously, Paul Gorbould’s gor[b] has been on my own blogroll indirectly for quite a while now, via Planet CBC. (Here’s a piece that I think will give a good idea of why I read gor[b]: Paul’s remembrance of Lister Sinclair.) It’s kind of strange to know that someone at my favourite Canadian institution is actually reading what I write, not just about it but everything else.

(Don’t) Call me

Take away most of the iPhone‘s extras—phone, camera, wifi—and drop the US$600 price (including required two-year cell contract) and you’ve probably got a nice, reasonably-priced media device that I’d consider buying; it’d probably be on par with a current video iPod, if the memory capacity were bumped up sufficiently. I don’t need a lower-resolution camera than the one I’ve already got, and I don’t need to be connected to the net 24 hours a day (which, granted, is only about 3 hours more than I am right now). Frankly, I don’t need video playback either, although it’d be nice to replace that functionality with some more open and/or lossless audio codecs.

But most of all I don’t want a cell phone! Don’t use one, don’t need one, don’t want one. Can’t think of anything less desirable that doesn’t involve physical pain.

It’s an impressive bit of tech, cramming all that stuff in there, but it’s not for me. Given the level of similarity I’ve discovered I share with the average consumer, they’re gonna sell billions of these things.

Shout out

Attentive Petroglyphs readers will have noticed a new commenter a couple of posts back. That would be Tammy, discoverer of this world map game (53!) and someone I just realized is a former co-worker. I guess it’s not really surprising that I wouldn’t have known that, though, because—believe it or not—I never met her once during her two stints at the company.

All of which is a long way of wondering if there are any other ex-work folk out there blogging? A while back Mike found one site owned by one of our California-based cohorts, but that’s been about it.

The CBP returns!

Well, it appears to have disappeared from the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine, so I guess it’s time to trot out a little bit of history. My university buddy Bob Kapur (the very same) put together Bob’s Celebrity Body Parts Game back when the web was young. No clues, except to remember that this is a 1995-era quiz, so if you’re tempted to guess Lindsay Lohan for any of the pictures you’re wrong! Enjoy Bob’s hard work!

Children of Men

This afternoon was mostly taken up with a viewing of Children of Men. No spoilers here unless you’re really sensitive to things like knowing that it takes place in England. Some random impressions:

  • It’s one of the most realistic, and therefore effective, near-future representations I’ve seen; I read some of the headlines in the newspapers on the windows where Julian and Theo meet and I can absolutely envision them happening in the next twenty-odd years.
  • Jasper has a line of dialogue about a future-past event that I’m certain was the seed that started the whole storyline.
  • I was surprised twice at where Jasper’s story went, given one of the stories Julian told about Theo’s past and an event that was telegraphed as a red herring later on.

So was Children of Men any good? Clive Owen (Theo) was, definitely; Peter Mullan (Syd) and Michael Caine (Jasper) were entertaining; and although I was initially annoyed by Pam Ferris (Miriam) and Claire-Hope Ashitey (Kee) they grew on me and had me caring about what happened to their characters. And it’s a great concept; a somewhat familiar one, but turned on its head. But the last act left me cold. From the first scene, and for the rest of the first two-thirds of the movie, I was completely bought-in, yet somewhere around the bus ride I started to lose the vibe and by the end it seemed to just be going through the motions. (The soundtrack under the abrupt closing title card was a nice touch, though.)

A solid three stars out of four. Readers of Mr. Ebert’s will recognize the use of his scale, and should also remember his caveat about comparing artistic works using absolute numeric values.