Today's my birthday, so even though work (unexpectedly) arrived this morning, I didn't do any of it. Instead, I spent the day in leisurely fashion by watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (EE of course) through the new PS3, that up-converts DVDs to Blu-ray quality. And all I can say is, WOW!!!!!

I thought the film looked beautiful on DVD, but it's about a billion times more clear and crisp in Blu-ray form. I gather the trilogy is going to be released (again) in that format next year, but only the theatrical versions and not the Extended Editions, which is pretty silly of them. But the cool thing about this new technology is that it does up-convert your ordinary DVD to Blu-ray quality.

So get yourselves a Blu-ray (or PS3) today and see for yourself. You'll be impressed, believe me!

Chris had a furlough day today, so we decided to take in an afternoon movie. An Education is about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a bright 16-year-old schoolgirl in bleak, grey 1962 England; her parents (Cara Seymour and the wonderful Alfred Molina) are encouraging her to work hard at her Latin so that she can pass all of her A levels with flying colours and get a place at Oxford, where she will "read English" and, her father fondly hopes, find a nice man to marry. Her teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) thinks she's the brightest student she's taught in years, and wants to make sure she doesn't throw her life away by not going to Oxford, and the headmistress (Emma Thompson) is convinced she'll go far too. But then Jenny meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), a man more than twice her age, who takes a shine to her and charms her parents into letting her go out with him despite the age difference. David and his friends Danny (Dominic Cooper, who looks a little like Jude Law) and Helen (Rosamund Pike) take Jenny on trips out of town, even to Paris; they dine at fine restaurants, listen to amazing classical music, watch fascinating French films - everything an intelligent and interested young girl might find dazzling and wonderful. But David and his friends have some secrets of their own, and David himself is not what he says he is....

This is a wonderful small film, beautifully acted by everyone involved but especially by Carey Mulligan, whose luminous performance in this film has had critics comparing her, appropriately imho, with the young Audrey Hepburn. The screenplay is by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber, and the dialogue is precise and gorgeous in its own right. The director, Lone Scherfig, captures the bleak feel of early 1960s London, before everything breaks loose finally. Molina is absolutely wonderful as the grey and bleak father, Jack, who perfectly captures that same sense of fatalism - he finds no reason for things like "hobbies" except to be able to say on an application form to Oxford that one has a hobby, there's no reason to actually practice it, although it's important for Jenny to be a "joiner in" so that she can get ahead in life, and so her "hobby" of playing cello (which she need not practice) is also her "in" to the region's youth orchestra (which she can't quit because then she wouldn't be a "joiner in"). His convoluted and bleak worldview contrasts sharply with David's wide open and exciting world, and Jenny has no question about which world she prefers.

A great way to spend an hour and a half, very highly recommended!

Just sent off my order to Dell for a new computer, yay! I will be getting an Inspiron 537 Slim Tower w/Black Bezel, Windows 7 Ultimate (I wanted the middle one, Professional I think it's called, but Dell only offered the basic Windows 7 or the most advanced one; weird), with an Intell Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB dual channel DDR2 SDRAM memory, 23" full HD widescreen flat panel display monitor, ATi Radeon HD 4350 video card, 500GB Serial ATA hard drive, media card reader, Adobe reader 9.0, MS Office Basic 2007, integrated 10/100 ethernet network card, McAfee security, a high speed Av additional port and free Dell remote access.

If I knew what most of those things were, I'd probably be more excited - Chris says it's a WAY better computer than either of us have now! I'm getting a mouse and keyboard, but probably won't use them as I've got ergonomic ones that are much better; also didn't order any modem or speakers, etc., 'cause we already have them too. Still just under $2,000 Canadian, even with free shipping.

I just hope it all works! Ordering was a pain and took about 2 hours, when I'd expected to take maybe 30 minutes on it, but hopefully it'll be worth it when it arrives. Oh, Chris suggested I also get a Belkin Easy Transfer cable for Windows 7, which I did - evidently this permits you to connect the old and new 'puters to facilitate transferring stuff from one to the other. My first new computer for 6 years, it's probably going to be massively more powerful than what I'm used to....

Sheesh. What a week, eh? First applying for a job for the first time since September of 2004; then seeing a great band playing live; then having a telephone interview about the job that makes it seem quite likely that it's mine for the taking; then picking up the PS3 with BluRay (we watched an episode of "Planet Earth" on it last night and omg - not a phrase I use - it looked totally gorgeous, like you could just step into the picture and be there!); and today ordering a new computer. That's a lot of stuff all at once; I just hope my head doesn't explode from it all!

Just got back from my weekly grocery shopping, which took longer than usual because of having to wait in line longer than usual. Aside from the clerk at the 6 items or less counter (who also deals with returned bottles, lottery tickets, etc.), there was only one checker working during the time I was there. When I had my shopping done and went to check out, the line-up included one customer whose groceries were in the process of being rung up, a man behind that person with a medium-sized batch of groceries, and a completely full cart with no person attached. I pulled my cart up behind the latter, and a moment later a woman stepped by me and put one item in the loaded cart. And then wandered off again....

She was gone a long time, too; the first person was finished up, the man with the medium-sized load was being served and almost done, and I was just about to shove the loaded cart to the side since the woman hadn't come back, when she did come back, adding more items to her cart.

I really wanted to yell at her, and say, "Lady, you DON'T get in line to pay for your groceries when you HAVEN'T FINISHED SHOPPING YET!!!!!!"

I'm getting less and less tolerant of this kind of behaviour, I tell you. The woman looked to be in her 30s, so she certainly should have known better, too.

Back in June of 2007, I posted ( this ) about a wonderful little Irish movie called Once; I hope that everybody saw it (you can get it on DVD now if you missed it) because it's an entirely charming and heart-warming movie. And it gets the details about being a musician right, which is amazing in and of itself.

One of the things I most loved about the film was that the two protagonists, Guy (Glen Hansard) and Girl (Marketa Irglova), don't end up as lovers, a refreshing change from Hollywood-style movie endings; I was a bit miffed, actually, when I found out that Glen and Mar did become lovers in real life, at least for a time. They teamed up with Glen's long-time band The Frames, and they have been recording and touring as The Swell Season for the past couple of years. During that time, Glen and Mar's romance came to an end, but their musical partnership has continued, and last night they came to L'Olympia, a 2,000-seat venue used for live theatre and musical events. I expected a smaller space and a smaller crowd, figuring that not a lot of people would remember the movie after 2 1/2 years, especially as it wasn't a cross-over hit in the French population, as far as I knew. So imagine my surprise to find that when we arrived, 45 minutes before the opening act (Doveman) was scheduled to start, most of the middle section of the theatre was already full!

We were lucky, actually, because we were early enough to get seats only about 8 or 10 rows back, on the left-hand side but not too far from the middle aisle, so we ended up having a good view of the stage. I was particularly pleased because by about 7:45, the management had opened the balcony to audience members, and it got completely filled in too. The audience (around us anyway) was largely young and francophone, which also surprised me.

Maybe everybody was in on the secret we knew; that the music these people make is so filled with emotion and heart that it's impossible not to be moved. Certainly by the time the band took the stage, just after 9 PM (following an okay 45-minute set by the lead singer/songwriter of Doveman, playing piano on his own without a band backing him - but he has one of those breathy whispery vocal styles that basically inhibits any emotional expression other than depression, and his lyrics weren't good enough to make him stand out from a zillion others like him these days - he told funny stories between songs, though), the crowd was already half in love with just seeing Glen and Mar - and the rest of the band! - so when the pair of them came out alone, sat on the floor of the stage and played "Lies" (if I remember right) from the film, with her playing a small Casio and him on guitar, well, the audience was already with them heart and soul.

And it stayed that way for the rest of the 2 1/2 hour long (!) set, which included the two of them singing alone together, Glen doing some solo stuff, the full band playing and singing, and even a solo violin piece by Colm Mac Con Iomaire which was quite amazing. Even more incredible was Glen doing a couple of numbers not only by himself, but by himself after unplugging his guitar and turning off the microphone, singing and playing just as if he were busking in the street with no amplification whatsoever - and you could hear every note, he's that powerful a singer and player. (The acoustics of the place are so-so, certainly not good enough to create that effect if he wasn't able to do it on his own.) Just stunning!

They went through about 2/3 of the songs from Once, and half a dozen from their new album, Strict Joy (btw, GET IT NOW!!!!!), not to mention covering Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" (they "larned themselves" that song when they realized they'd be coming to Montreal, Leonard's home town). Of course the first encore of the evening was "Falling Slowly," the song from Once that won the Oscar; but they also sang an old Clancy Brothers song after noting the remaining Clancy brother is on his deathbed in Ireland now. Because that was a bit of a downer, they ended the evening doing an a capella rendition, audience singing along, of a Dylan tune (which escapes me at the moment, but I always think it's a Grateful Dead song 'cause they covered it but it wasn't "Cripple Creek").

With various songs throughout the evening, Glen schooled the audience in choruses he wanted us all to sing, particularly on "High Horses" and "Back Broke" from the new album. Now I don't know if it was an auditory illusion brought upon by sheer joy of the energy feedback between band and audience, the absolute lovefest going on all night, but I swear I have never heard an audience sing along and sound as good as we did last night. Sure, Glen as a seasoned performer could have just been saying it when he thanked the audience for how amazing we sounded, but I don't think so - he's the sort of person who wears his heart on his sleeve (and in his voice, how that man can sing full-out the way he does night after night and not lose his voice entirely is beyond me) and I think he said it because it was true. It was obvious how much the audience loved the band and how much the band appreciated and returned that love, and the whole evening was warmer and more full of joy than I can remember experiencing at a concert in a very long time.

If they come anywhere near your town (and ms_alis, they're doing dates in the UK and Europe in the New Year), you really owe it to yourself to see them. These folks are just wonderful and even though I'm totally dead today from lack of sleep, I'm incredibly glad we went.

My favourite time of the year, Autumn, has arrived, and so have many new books!

( Footprints of the Devil, by Olive Etchells. )

( Two of the Deadliest, edited by Elizabeth George. )

( Memoirs of a Master Forger, by William Heaney. )

( The Dying Earth, by Jack Vance. )

( The Eyes of the Overworld, by Jack Vance. )

( Cugel's Saga, by Jack Vance. )

( The Monster In the Box, by Ruth Rendell. )

I look at the Saturday job listings every week, in the faint hope that there might be something suitable for me - I've lived here 13 1/2 years now, and can cite, oh, 6 possible jobs listed in the newspaper throughout that whole time. There was one today, though:

"Typist/dictaphonist needed. Work from home. WordPerfect. Flawless English required. Legal experience, French assets. Send Cv to...."


Well. I know WordPerfect - haven't used it in years, and don't have the program itself anymore, and I don't even know if it's possible to buy it now - but I do know how to use it. My English is pretty damned flawless, and I've had medical-legal experience over a very long period of time, which includes a lot of legalese (albeit Californian, not Quebecois). The French, well...but they only want it as a positive asset, not a requirement. So.

Here's a rundown of my work hours since April, citing hours per 2-week pay period: 23.75 hours (my highest in ages, from April 1 - 15); 11.00 hours; 20.50 hours (but that's the ENTIRE month of May!); 10.75 hours; 14.75 hours; 18.25 hours; 18.00 hours (the latter two all of July, a better month than June obviously); 14.75 hours (ALL of August!); 10.25 hours; 15.50 hours; 17.75 hours; and, just billed for the latter half of October, 16.00 hours.

I don't know if the ad today represents a full-time or part-time job - frankly, I don't want a full time job anymore, and with Chris's income I don't need one either. But part time? Well, I'd say I've got time to horn in another part-time job on top of the one I'm already doing, don't you think?

I've just got to work up the confidence to apply, keeping in mind that not having the WordPerfect program myself anymore could be a deal-breaker....

ETA: Just sent off my resume, along with a cover email, for this job. Ack!

Yesterday our street was partially blocked at the intersection with Notre Dame while City workers ("les cols bleu" in French, or "blue collars" - the manual laborers employed by the city; I like the French term, it sounds far more dignified than "laborers" or "blue collars" even) started work on repaving our block. This is work that has been going on around us since, oh, April I think, but this is the first time it's come to our actual street instead of the surrounding streets.

As far as I can tell, there seems to be no great need to repave our road, although since I'm not a driver, I'm hardly a good judge of that. But certainly there are none of the potholes and slip'n'sliding cover-overs of potholes that were rampant in our old neighbourhood in NDG. In fact, all the City services here in St. Henri are about a zillion times better and more efficient than in our old neighbourhood of NDG. This despite the fact that St. Henri is a much poorer neighbourhood than our part of NDG, Monkland Village, which paid much higher taxes to the City. I hesitate to say that this is because St. Henri is more francophone and Monkland Village (NDG as a whole) is much more anglophone, but you know. Just sayin'.

Thing is, Montreal is notorious - in its own mind anyway - for incredibly bad roadwork; not just concrete overpasses collapsing suddenly as happened a few years back, but in terms of very modest and ordinary work such as paving the road. Now it's definitely true that the climate here is tough on any kind of road-surfacing materials, both because of the extreme fluctuation in temperature between summer and winter, and because of the periodic freeze-thaw-freeze cycle that happens at least a couple of times each winter; as a result of both, the road materials tend to expand and contract with a far greater frequency than happens in more even-tempered climates. But that's not the whole of it; the City is rife with corruption in most contracts, and it's long been known that it tends to buy cheap materials at inflated prices from contractors. So you've generally got really bad road-paving materials, stuff that's going to warp and cave very quickly, and you pile it onto roads in a climate almost designed to cause problems with the roads. The result is horrendous potholes and patchwork all over the place and just bad roads. But I thought the road here looked just fine....

Then again, I lived in San Francisco for 16 years, and it was always a source of quiet amusement to note that the road repair cycle in that City was to start at the foot of Market Street, at the Embarcadero, and repave Market all the way to its conjunction with Castro Street, a movement of repair that would take a year or so (since workers could do the work all year round, not like here where outdoor work is suspended from the end of November until April, at best); after which they would start back at the Embarcadero again, going up Market Street on the way back to Castro. I never heard a good explanation for this pretty much constant work on that particular street, and I can't say that I noticed a ton of roadwork being done on other streets in the City over the years.

Which just goes to show, every city has its own special quirks, particularly as regards road repair {g}.

Have I mentioned lately that I hate, hate, HATE my current computer? It has been giving me the Blue Screen of Death periodically for the past few months, and it's gotten incredibly slow in execution and constantly tells me I've got something wrong (which the programs then tell me can't be fixed), and I've just had it up to HERE with the damned thing. I decided some time back that I've got to get a new machine, but Chris and I figured we'd wait until Windows 7 was out and enough feedback had occurred to determine that it was reasonably stable before getting the new machine.

I'm not interested in upgrading, especially because I use Windows XP and I've heard that upgrading from that system to Windows 7 is pretty rough, but also because I hate hate HATE my computer! It was the best thing since sliced bread back when I bought it, almost exactly 6 years ago now (November 2003), but 6 years in computer terms is, what, 150 in human years? A lot, anyway, and my machine is clearly corrupt and decrepit by now, despite various anti-virus, firewalls, etc. etc. etc. stuff that's on it.

Thus far, I've heard reasonably good things about Windows 7, but I thought I'd post here to see if anybody has any stories, positive or negative, about the new system.

In a related development, I got an email from McAfee the other day telling me my "subscription" with them was automatically renewed, unless I canceled within 60 days. Well, my understanding is that the latest McAfee will be bundled with either the computer itself (probably from Dell, they've been reliable in the past) or with Windows 7, so obviously I don't want to renew my current version - plus, evidently they've been charging almost half of the total cost (US$30 out of $US80 per year) for some "parental control" feature, and since I'm not a parent I clearly don't need that feature (and didn't know until this current email that I was being charged for it).

I think I'll be getting the Windows 7 Professional version - I think that's the name, it's the middle one of the three versions, more powerful than the basic home version but less so than some ultimate one that sounds like only NASA programmers and super-geek gamers need; since I do work at home, the $100 or so more that the Pro one costs is likely to be worth it to me. Plus there are some networking features that Chris says are good. (BTW, he may well upgrade too in the near future, but I suspect he'll just do an upgrade versus buying an entirely new machine, as his is newer than mine and he's added upgrades as needed.)

Speaking of which, I'm not sure of exactly what hardware I need; I use an MS ergonomic keyboard (which is silver and black, WayCool) and a Logitech ergonomic mouse (which has a single button on the side that automatically double-clicks on items instead of forcing you to click twice). These both work well and are, in fact, necessary for me, but both are quite old (not as old as 2003, but I'd say at least from 2005 or 2006 at latest) and I don't know how they'll work with new-generation PCs. Anyone with knowledge or advice on that count would be helpful too! (Particularly on the keyboard as, not surprisingly, it's quite difficult to find an English-language ergonomic keyboard in the stores here in Quebec - I eventually found this one at Bureau en Gros {Staples in the US and ROC}, but it was the only model in the store, and there were none at all at places like Future Shop. Having the French keyboard {with accented vowels and consonants, that is} could be kind of interesting, but probably would fuck up my typing skills in no time at all! So I'd rather know beforehand if I should order a new ergonomic keyboard from abroad or just keep my old one.)

Anyway. We're looking at replacing this crusty rusty machine within, oh, the next 3-4 weeks, so any advice is welcome!

Aside from going to the movie yesterday evening (reviewed in my last post), we spent yesterday going to the Atwater Market for fruits and veggies (esp. stuff for making fajitas, meaning avocados in particular, and for doing up a potato-leek soup base that I'll make and freeze sometime this week), and then heading off downtown. We like eating at a restaurant called Lesvos and the people there know and like us because we've been there so often (and we're good tippers and not-difficult customers); the parents of the family-run resto recently bought an auberge in Ste. Agathe in the Laurentians, the Auberge du lac des Sables, right on the lake front, and as one of their best customers, we just received an email invitation for a special offer at the hotel - 2 nights, with two breakfasts and one 5-course dinner at their new Lesvos restaurant in the auberge for $92 per person, which is actually less than half price. The rooms look lovely, we know the dining room is gorgeous and the food will be terrific (it being the same menu as the Lesvos here in town), and the setting could be quite stunning, depending on the weather. The offer is only open until the end of November, but since my b-day is coming up....Well, our immediate goal in going downtown yesterday was to check at the bus station if there's a bus to Ste. Agathe from Montreal. Turns out there is, but it lets passengers off about 3 1/2 kilometers from the hotel, so we'll have to inquire at the hotel about having a cab sent to pick us up. We need to see if a friend can feed the cats for two days, but if so, hopefully we'll get to spend a couple of days in the Laurentians before it gets too cold!

To check the place out, see http://www.aubergedulac.com and click on the photos!

Ran some other errands downtown too (books and DVDs needed to be bought, after all), and had coffee and a muffin in the train station food court, which is on our way from downtown to the Orange metro line, which takes us home directly; there's a lovely eating area at the train station, where all the walls are painted as if library shelves, with the titles of books written in English or French on the spines of painted books, just a very pleasant place to have a coffee. After a bit of time at home following that, we headed out again to the movie and dinner at another restaurant and after-dinner "refreshments" at the nearby apartment of one of our friends who came to the movie - we didn't get home until after midnight and not to sleep until after 1 AM. Hence no surprise that we slept in past 10 AM this morning!

Which is why it's surprising we got as much done today as we did, given our late start! I managed to rake up a lot of the leaves that fell last week, removing enough of them that Chris was finally able to mow the lawn as well. I deadheaded the roses and trimmed back the rose bushes - I don't know if I cut them back enough, but I cut them back some at least - and did some other tidying up around the garden. Then to the balconies, where I cleaned the balcony furniture and between us we moved table and umbrella and chairs to the basement, and the woven hammock to its indoor resting spot for the winter. We've left out the first floor bistro table and 2 chairs for the moment, as we might still have occasion to sit out there before it gets too cold, but our second and third floor balconies are now bare, well, except for the remaining few plants on the third floor (gazanias, petunias and dwarf snapdragons are still producing, everything else is done and gone) and the refilled bird feeder on the second floor. I also swept the second floor balcony quite thoroughly, haven't gotten to the third floor yet for that as there are still too many planters in the way. I spent an inordinate amount of time simmering black beans that I'd soaked overnight in water, and chopping up veggies and making guacamole for dinner tonight; took quite a bit longer than my usual prep times for cooking, but it all tasted quite yummy, so that's okay! Add in email and bill paying and bankbook balancing, and, well, I'm only just now (at around 8 PM) getting the time to start reading, before "Bored to Death" comes on at 9:30 PM.

Shouldn't have any trouble sleeping tonight, despite not getting up 'til 10 AM; all that outdoor activity is enough to make anyone sleepy!

"A Serious Man" is the latest Coen Brothers movie and, as is their practice, it's completely different from their most recent couple of movies, "Burn After Reading" and "No Country for Old Men." This is perhaps more like some of their earlier films like "Fargo," in the sense that it's set in small-town middle America (in this case in Minnesota) and features the small stories of the people living there. Our focus here is on Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), an associate mathematics professor at a small university in the mid-1960s who's up for tenure and uncertain whether he'll get it. As a Jew, he's surrounded by a small but complete community of Jewish doctors, lawyers, fellow professors, rabbis, etc., within the larger goyish world. Early in the film, his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) informs him that she wants a divorce as she's developed an attachment to family friend, 3-year widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); his unemployed brother Arthur (Richard Kind) has been living for an unspecified period of time with the family, sleeping on the couch and hogging the bathroom at all hours while he develops his very cryptic, yet apparently workable, theory of probability; his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is especially frustrated by Uncle Arthur's behaviour with the bathroom as she's a typical mid-1960s teenaged girl and needs to wash her hair a lot {g}; and son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is about to be bar-mitzvah'ed if only he can manage to study his recitation of the Torah in-between moments when he's not running away from local tough-guy/pot dealer Mike Fagle (Jon Kaminski Jr.) to whom he owes $20, or getting high with his "Reefer Buddy" (the nameless character is played by Benjamin Portnoe). Unfortunately for Larry, a South Korean student (played by David Kang) who has failed Larry's midterm is desparate to get a passing grade in order to continue on to study physics, and that student leaves a packet of money on Larry's desk in an attempt to bribe him; and the young man's father (Steve Park) subsequently turns up to threaten him with a lawsuit for defamation of character because Larry has accused the young man of attempted bribery. In addition, his wife and her lover have convinced/forced him to go live in a motel while trying to juggle all these matters; he's tring to sort out legal issues concerning the divorce, which is complicated by the fact that Sy wants Judith to obtain a get, a religious divorce ceremony, not to mention that Arthur is facing criminal charges for a variety of offenses and of course has no money to pay for a lawyer. He is being pressured to get advice from local rabbis, but his attempts to do so result in no help, particularly when he is unable to obtain an appointment with the wisest of them all, Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell). On top of that, a sales rep from Columbia House is harassing him by phone because he's behind on payments for records shipped, even though he never signed up for that sales deal.

And these are only the beginning of Larry's troubles....

This is a wonderful movie, full of deft and terrific performances by a cast of people of whom most will have never heard - according to our friend Marguerite, one actor (I think it's Simon Helberg?) is on "The Big Bang Theory," and Alan Arkin's son Adam has a role as Larry's divorce lawyer, but that's about it for recognizable names or faces. Definitely a latter-day woeful tale of Job-ian proportions, but it's all handled so deftly that it is pretty much hilarious all the way through; yes, Larry's got problems piled on problems and they're just getting bigger and bigger as life goes on, but the way these problems are depicted by others to him and the way he handles them - well, can you say black comedy? Absolutely priceless!

Evidently some of this material is based on the Coen brothers' own experience of growing up Jewish in Minnesota in the 1960s (although presumably their family didn't suffer quite the extent of traumas piled onto the Gopnik tribe), and certainly much of the dialogue and, especially, the relationships between the various people all ring true. Add in some vintage Airplane use to great effect both on the soundtrack and as part of the story itself, and you've got a wonderful small film that deserves a lot of attention. Highly recommended!

We've got municipal elections coming up here on November 1st, and the race is getting uglier and more disgusting by the day. The current Mayor, who is looking for a third term, is contending with something like half a dozen investigations into various corruption charges within his administration; he defends himself by saying that whenever he's heard of any such allegations, he orders an immediate investigation, but the implication is that either he's corrupt himself and looking the other way (until the corruption comes out another way) or he's so incompetent that he has no idea what's going on in his own administration.

Then the chief contender is a former provincial minister under the PQ and a fierce separatist; she decided to take over the main opposition party in Montreal politics, shoving aside the previous leader who went from last Friday denying any contact with a suspected organized crime figure who is implicated in some of the current Mayor's investigations to on Sunday abruptly resigning from the party and his City Council seat (leaving no one in his riding to take over for his party; the voters in that riding are simply deprived of voting for a candidate in that party) and all this week making accusations of further widespread corruption involving political party fundraising in the city, including bribes given to members of his own former party. (BTW, he used to be a member of the current Mayor's party and after a falling out with him, joined the opposition.) The current head of the opposition refuses to respond to his allegations of corruption in her own party; but easily the biggest obstacle she has to overcome with respect to the Anglo community is the fact that she doesn't speak English and, even worse, when a minister in the provincial legislature, she is the one who drafted and created the forced mergers of several years ago, wherein outlying municipalities - suburbs, basically - of Montreal, Quebec City and the primary city on the South Shore, Longuieiul (I can't spell it OR pronounce it, but Chris works there!) were forcibly merged into the larger cities, thereby losing their autonomy (and a good deal of municipal funding). These forced mergers were at least partially undone after the Liberals came to power in provincial politics, but many people are still furious with this candidate over that.

There are two other contenders for Mayor - one is a female city councilor who has the advantage of good English along with her French (though to be fair, 3 of the 4 candidates speak English well or pretty well), but her main claim to fame is an attempt she made a couple of years ago to pass a bylaw that would prohibit one particular street musician, "the Spoon Man," from plying his trade at his spot of choice, in front of Ogilvy's, a high-end department store. People found her very mean-spirited in that attempt, and she eventually gave it up, but that didn't leave her bathed in a golden light, shall we say.

Finally, there's the party I most likely will vote for, Projet Montreal, whose leader is a separatist but states specifically that he's not interested in bringing nationalist politics into the administration of city. He has the advantage of having a trusted ex-judge, Gomery (who led the inquiry into the sponsorship scandal that so damaged the federal Liberals), keeping tabs on the party's behaviour and fundraising, to make sure it's all above-board and honest, and I believe this candidate is honest and, if not incorruptible, at least not corrupted yet. But he's not a politician, he's an academic, and while some of his ideas sound great (especially in terms of working on environmental issues), they might be more flights of fancy than realistic proposals. And, a few years ago when he was in academia, he published a book in which he stated his belief that the 9/11 attacks were organized or somehow sponsored by the Bush Administration. He says he wrote that because he wanted to be provocative in order to boost sales of his book, but he's never actually stated that he doesn't believe that particular conspiracy theory anymore. So he's a bit of a nutcase. But as far as I can tell, he's the best of a poor batch of candidates to choose from, sigh....

Ack! I never remember from one year to the next, but I think October 22 is pretty early for snow to be falling in Montreal - yes, it's melting on contact with the ground, but it's definitely not one or two little flakes, we're talking fat globules of snowflakes in large numbers....It's been way below normal temperature-wise for a couple of weeks now (with the odd day at a normal temp), but this is the first actual snowfall. Well. Also the first actual rainfall in some days too.

I haven't covered up my primrose lilac with burlap yet, hope this snow doesn't freak it out! And it's definitely time to cut back the rose shrubs for winter (I'm still undecided about covering them - it seems like a good idea, but friends who have rose bushes never bother and the roses are fine the next year; I don't know if covering them would do them more harm than good, as presumably they get less moisture under burlap all winter long).

Also last night must have been very windy, because when I opened the curtains this morning I found that TONS of leaves had fallen on our yard; I actually raked some leaves just on Monday, but this is really like a blanket of them, almost every segment of the yard is covered. Unfortunately Chris hasn't had time to mow the lawn in a while, so the grass is very long, and I found it very difficult to try to rake leaves with the grass that high; he can't mow it until it's dryer and rain is due off and on for the next few days. So maybe the leaves will just remain on the ground over the winter and emerge from the snow as mulch next Spring.

I started a Gardening Journal today, taking an old 10" x 8" notebook and, first listing all of our plants (but I forgot to list the ferns and grasses, dammit!) and their positions more or less in the garden, and then I added some general notes (i.e., that I don't know precisely where each variety of Spring flowers are in the three beds by the fence). We've got like 46 separate plants now, some of them in multiple amounts! My plan is to just jot down stuff as I do it - when I trim the rose shrubs, for example, or when I cover the primrose lilac - with the date noted. Dunno if it will grow and grow, this journal, or just fizzle out altogether, but I figured having a place where I keep all the info together is a good idea. I'm fairly methodical that way anyhow; I like making lists....

In other news, my bro Rich emailed me yesterday to let me know I could expect a box from Amazon.ca containing my b-day presents; amazingly, said box arrived today! And my mother let me know the other day that she'd sent my b-day presents earlier this week too, so I'm on the look-out for that one as well....My b-day is still, oh, just under 3 weeks away, and I've only just started to think about it. I nudged Chris today about getting in touch with certain friends who have a mother with a b-day close to mine; they always have a family do for that, and we try to organize it so that my b-day do doesn't clash with their mother's. Seems to me that we're leaving it kind of late this year, though....OTOH, usually I just have a potluck type thing at home, 'cause I like doing that, but I don't feel like preparing anything in particular myself this year and instead I've decided on a Japanese restaurant we all like - we've had New Year's Eve dinners there with the whole gang, so I know everyone else likes it and doesn't find it too expensive, which is of course always a consideration. But Chris needs to get on the ball about this pronto, because it's his job to set it all up. And he's kind of fixated these days on getting a PS3, partly for games but mostly because it includes a BluRay function which plays DVDs as well as the new technology only makes the DVDs look better than before. He just got both a raise and a bonus for some overnight work he and his group did the other week; the first after-tax increase in his paycheque happens to be just about the cost of a PS3. So can you blame him for being distracted {g}?

We had a lovely sunny day here today - not terribly warm, around 8 C (c46-47 F), but good for working in the garden. I took out the dead plants in the third floor balcony boxes - surprisingly, some dahlias, marigolds, gazanias, dwarf snapdragons and petunias are continuing to put out new flowers, so I left all of them intact (well, I moved the petunias into another box, to give the snapdragons more room), although I suspect they'll be done in another week or so. Also left the hanging baskets, and I'm not sure I'll take them in over the winter, I might just leave them out to be covered in snow and revived next year. Meantime, Chris was digging into the parts of two of the Spring flower beds that weren't covered by chickenwire, and when he was done with that, I planted the four iris bulbs (2 each of 2 varieties) and 15 giant tulip bulbs, which Chris then covered with more chickenwire and dirt, bringing some down from the plantless balcony boxes on the third floor because that earth is richer than our clay-y land.

The bulb-planting done, it was just a matter of figuring out where to put the sprouted plants in the back garden, the part that Brenda worked over so well in July - she left plenty of space for putting in anything we wanted, so we just found places for some 16 plants - many of which will have blue flowers, a fact that I kept in mind when placing them. I'm especially looking forward to the lacy hankerchief irises, which are pale purple and white, the photos look lovely, and the festuca (I think that's the spelling), which are kind of icy-blue-white spires, almost grass-like but in round clumps (I put those in front of the white-green daisy miller, between the lavender and the rhubarb); should be some great contrasting colours and textures in the Spring when everything comes to life! We also had a couple of grasses - diamond grass and lemon grass - among the "grab-bag" of miscellaneous perennials that I picked up, and we put them in with the few ferns, figuring that would be a good spot for 'em.

All told, about 2 hours of work and now all the planting's done for the year! I'm a bit sorry that we brought in the garden hose and turned off the outdoor water pipes for the year last weekend - we thought it best to do it then as temps have been going below freezing at night for the past little while, which is quite a bit colder than average for this time of the year - because it's been dry for a few days and I think I ought to water all the plants out there, but doing it with a 2-liter watering can will mean many many trips back and forth from the kitchen tap to the back of the yard! I of course watered all our new plantings thoroughly (before putting back the mulch in the case of the ones in the back), but it made me think I should do the same for the rest of the plants back there.

I believe I should cut back the rose bushes for the winter - they've still got some opened flowers and some unopened buds on them, but I'm pretty sure the buds got frozen from the cold nights and won't actually open now - and we picked up some burlap today to at least cover up the primrose lilac bush/tree, which hasn't grown at all since I planted it in April, but which isn't dead; it's small and looks kind of fragile to me, though, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to put in one of the steel frameworks we bought for the tomato plants but never used, and to cover that with burlap, to give it some protection against the winter. That won't be for another few weeks, though, and I don't think there are any other plants out there that need some covering up. So, for the most part, I think we've got the garden to "bed," ready for winter now, yay! ('Course I have tons of leaves to rake, although not as many have fallen from the neighbour's trees that overshadow more than half our yard as had fallen by this time last year - maybe the cold snap scared them into staying on the trees {g}!)

We also checked out an open house for a friend today - this was advertised as a fully renovated Victorian house, 4-bedroom and 3 bath, just on the other side of the Canal from the Atwater Market; it's perhaps a 20-minute walk from us. Definitely a lovely street, lots of trees, and an A1 location, even closer to Atwater Market and downtown than we are in our house (it's also only a 2-minute walk from the Charlevoix Metro station on the Green Line, which goes directly downtown in perhaps 6 minutes from that location), and the house was quite nice overall. But the rooms were pretty small, there was virtually no closet space, the kitchen was dinky (if cunningly put together to fit everything into the small space) and the backyard was perhaps 1/3 the size of ours (albeit with a pond!). Great skylights, a couple of fantastic bathrooms and a decent location - meh, at an asking price of $599K? Nah, I don't think so! You're paying in large part for the location, but I don't think the building is worth that much. Still, it was lots of fun to just check it out, knowing that we were helping our friend Margaret by at least getting a look at it to get an idea of what's out there. Now that her mother's gone, she's planning to put the family house on the market early next year; she figures the family will rent for a year before looking for something to buy, but she's interested in this general area and we're happy to keep her apprised of what's available around here. Plus, after looking at the place we got to walk home via the Canal, something we haven't done for quite a while - and there were hardly any bicyclists on the bike path, strangely but thankfully! So we got lots of exercise today, too....

Saw this concert movie, "Rattle and Hum," as my pick for our Friday night film this week; I saw it when it came out, in 1987 or so, when I was about 28 or 29, haven't seen it since until tonight, at 50. I didn't remember the movie very much, except for a few images, and I'd completely forgotten about the Inniskillen bombing in Ireland which evidently occurred on the day when U2 recorded a live show for this film, playing "Sunday Bloody Sunday" with greater intensity than they frequently did, having been reminded so murderously about exactly why they wrote the song in the first place. Bono is kind of a joke now, a bit didactic, but back then he had real passion and let it show.

For me, The Edge has always been the crux of U2 - that shimmering, pure guitar sound that he got still gets to me every time I hear it, and I can still recognize an Edge guitar lick in, oh, one note, despite the fact that I stopped listening to them entirely after Rattle and Hum (a mixed studio and live album recorded in conjunction with this film, if I remember correctly). Hated Achtung Baby, which I think was the next album from the band (albeit some 2-3 years later!) and although Chris has Zooropa, I've never bothered to listen to it. Haven't listened to anything since, either, aside from incidental stuff I might have heard on the radio from time to time. Which means that for me, U2 is an '80s band - from Boy through The Joshua Tree, with Rattle and Hum as a kind of coda, that's my U2. But I'd forgotten how great they were live - I saw them four or five times between about 1983 and 1988, sometimes alone and sometimes with big Amnesty International shows going on then. They're a million times bigger now than they were 20 years ago; but 20 years ago, they mattered.

Which all reminded me about Sorka's recent meme about "most amazing rock concert you've been to" (or some such). I wrote it up here a couple of weeks ago, about the Waterboys in particular, but this film "Rattle and Hum" reminded me of someone else entirely: Peter Gabriel. See, back in the 1980s South Africa had this thing called apartheid, and black people were oppressed terribly under this white-ruled regime; lots of important musicians supported boycotts of the country and wrote songs about it (including U2, and Bono alludes to apartheid in "Rattle and Hum"). One of the best, if not THE best, song written about the situation was by Peter Gabriel. Yes, I'm referring to "Biko," a song about Steven Biko, a black journalist who was arrested, detained and murdered by white South African police in, um, 1977 I think it was. Fantastic song, incredibly moving and a song that probably on its own helped to create awareness among Western white nations about the evils of the South African regime (and there aren't many songs that can so influence politics and culture).

Getting back to the "best concerts" meme thing, I'd forgotten entirely about seeing Gabriel once at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, one of the largest venues in the Bay Area. As was his wont, he closed his show with "Biko," slowly leaving the stage himself, followed one by one by the members of his band, each of course leaving an absence of sound where they'd been playing. But the entire audience was still singing the chorus, "Biko, Biko, because, Biko," over and over and over. And over; the last member of the band (the drummer, I believe), left the stage and there was no sound left except the sound of thousands and thousands of voices singing "Biko, Biko, because, Biko," over and over and over and over. For something like five minutes straight, with no prompting from anybody. It only ended when the venue managers slowly brought up the lights....

Now that was a moment in rock, and political, history.

And it's not even my birthday (yet)....No, actually a bunch of stuff arrived today that I'd ordered, some of which are XMas presents for family. From National Geographic (or NatGeo as we call it), a beautiful inlaid backgammon set for my mother, a remote controlled actual flying pterosaur model for bro and sis-in-law, a coffee table book full of photos from Hubble for either bro or us (we haven't decided yet) and a lovely Bolivian scarf for me.

And remember me warning folks away from http://www.SpringGarden.ca in a recent post? Well, my order from them finally arrived today too! No, I never heard back from them with respect to the email I sent, and yes, we actually finished replanting all the flower beds last weekend, but....And, oh, I suppose the company can't be blamed for the fact that our temperatures here have been around 10 degrees (Celsius, closer to 20 F) colder than is normal for this time of year, and that some areas have already had snow (I saw one flake yesterday, but that hardly counts as snowing here in the city), but....

Fortunately, almost all of the plants I ordered showed up in the form of cuttings and other already-growing things, as opposed to bulbs. Chris is adamant about not wanting to dig up the chicken wire yet again and then plant still more bulbs, but it turns out that we have some extra chicken wire anyway, so he won't need to do that for the bulbs that did come - 4 big iris bulbs and 15 giant tulip bulbs. All the rest - I can't remember them all, but we've got some blue rose of sharon, some ornamental grasses, something called something like sebecia, a bunch of stuff - I can plant in the big plot at the back, the area Brenda worked on this summer. She deliberately left a lot of space between plants so that we could add what we liked as we went along, so it's just a matter of digging through the mulch and some of the (good!) soil she laid down and sticking these plants in the ground. Which, despite the cold temps, hasn't yet frozen, thank goodness!

Many of the new plants, for some reason, are blue - not that they look blue now, I mean the flowers and leaves and whatnot on a lot of them will be blue, assuming they survive the winter and grow vigourously next Spring. As we've got red rose bushes and a bunch of yellow things that Brenda planted (including honeysuckle), and some purple too (lavender and Russian sage), along with a bit of white (balloon flowers and dusty miller) all in the back of the garden, it's really a matter of deciding where some blue would look best. And, of course, if we don't like the way it comes up next year, we can always move the plants - as a new gardener, I never knew you could do that, but you can as long as you're careful so that the poor plant doesn't go into shock and never recover!

Speaking of plants, the balcony plants are pretty much gone now - well, there are still flowers and so on, but they have all been blighted by frost over the past few nights. The coleus especially has completely died in, like, 3 days. The dwarf snapdragons and petunias are hanging on, but clearly thinning out and getting ready to just stop, while the zinnias, dahlias and marigolds all look kind of frozen (as do the new buds on the rose bushes in the garden). We'll be busy over the next few weekends both removing dead plants and taking the planters to the second floor balcony, where they'll be protected from the snow, and putting away the balcony furniture for another year. We barely used the comfy lounge chair and hammock on the second floor balcony this year, but we spent most Summer evenings during the week sitting outside on the third floor for at least a little while, and more time on the weekends at the ground floor outdoor table or on the grass in festival chairs. How long ago it all seems when you're dealing with daytime highs of only +4C (what, about 39F I guess), even though it was only last month....

Chris has been keen to see the sf film, District 9, for weeks, so having a holiday today, we chose to spend some of the day watching this film finally. I never had much interest in it, and sad to say Chris was quite disappointed....

20 years ago, aliens arrived in a huge mothership that still hovers above Johannesburg, South Africa, over a million refugees in bad condition. 20 years later, they are still sequestered in "District 9," separated from humans and living in what is essentially a slum. It's too close to J'burg for comfort, though, and the gigantic multinational MNU (MultiNational United, clever name) is given the task of relocating what are now about 1.6 million "prawns" (as the aliens have come to be called, because they slightly resemble those critters) to a new refugee camp some 250 miles away. Hapless Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, an interesting actor) is asked to head the team handing out "eviction notices" to the aliens, evidently an attempt to put a haze of legitimacy on the enforced removal of the prawns, but really his father-in-law, high muckety-muck at MNU (played by Louis Mannaar) and James Hope (Jed Brophy), primary mercenary for MNU are planning to massacre anybody who objects to the removal. Then there's the Nigerian gangsters living in District 9 and making lots of money off the prawns. All goes badly from the start, and when Wikus is accidentally doused with a mysterious alien "fluid," to his horror he finds himself being transformed physically into a prawn himself. What he doesn't realize is that the aliens brought weapons with them that only they can use because the weapons can only work through interaction with the biology of the prawns. Now he finds that he can use those weapons, and MNU is very interested in finding him, studying him and dissecting him - alive. Luckily there's one brave prawn who, with his young son, can help Wikus and, incidentally, save his race from genocide....

Some interesting ideas in this film, not least setting it in South Africa with its cruel history of apartheid as a statement all on its own, but oh, the execution was pretty excruciating. Despite the hype which suggests something more than an action picture, this really is pretty much an action game you could play on your 'puter or in an arcade - nonstop shoot-outs, along with the noise that entails and that horrible "hand-held camera" photography that just has the pictures on the screen jerking all over the place. This was produced by Peter Jackson, and it's easy to see how happy he was to get back to his gore-filled filmic roots, and the prawns and weapons and mechanisms (at one point there's a giant robot thingie that reminds one of nothing so much as a transformer robot - don't know how it wandered from that franchise to this movie!) are by our dear Weta friends, but it's very much not the type of movie I enjoy. I don't watch such films so can't say if this is done to a higher standard than your regular shoot-em-up mayhem; if it is, I'd hate to see an "average" film in this genre!

A pity because the film did have some ideas worth exploring, and I quite liked Sharlto Copley in the lead role.

We just spent hours and hours replanting our Spring garden, using the bulbs we dug up and dried out from last year plus a bunch of tulip and narcissi bulbs left by the former owner of the house (which may be too dried out to actually still grow) and a half dozen hyacinth bulbs just bought at Home Depot. Unlike last year, when I read instructions about depth to plant and spacing between bulbs, etc., and followed them to the letter, this year I just planted the bulbs higgledy-piggledy (the spelling may be wrong, but it's still a great old word!) in clusters and clumps and triangles and circles, and just any old way I felt like. I have no idea what might come up next Spring, but the patterns of the flowers should be interesting at least!

Of course, after digging up last Spring's bulbs, I had no clue as to which bulbs were for which flowers, so my planting rule-of-thumb this year was to put the larger bulbs toward the back of the beds and the smaller ones in front. My assumption is the larger bulbs belong to the taller flowers and the smaller ones to the shorter plants, and I don't really want the small flowers to be obscured by having large ones in front of them.

Chris did all the heavy work (mostly digging up the soil and putting in new soil and covering up the bulbs with soil), but he'd previously dug out a lot of rocks so that part was already finished. I was in charge of the planting and helping to put back the chicken wire (to keep squirrels and other critters from digging up the bulbs and eating them) and giving the beds a good soaking of water after it was all done.

BTW, I'd ordered tons of irises and other plants from Spring Garden, an online plant store based in Ontario, back in June; they say they will send the order when it's planting time in the buyer's region and not before, but I had trouble with them last year (which is why we planted Spring bulbs in late October) and never got some of my order from their other store (for veggies and fruits and herbs) at all in the summer! I hadn't received this year's order by last week, so I looked up my account online and lo and behold, there's no order listed at all! However, I have an email from them, sent back in June, specifically confirming the order. So I sent them email about this, back last Saturday. I have yet to hear from them, and by now it's too late anyway.

So take this as a warning - never buy bulbs or anything else from http://www.SpringGarden.ca, they're a lousy business!

We had to go to Home Depot to buy more soil - we'd picked up 6 bags a few weeks ago, but decided to use three per flower bed rather than two, so we needed 3 more bags - and while we were there, we got more halogen light bulbs, which we also needed. One of the bulbs in the second-floor bathroom burned out, oh, 3 months ago or so, but we couldn't figure out how to get the old bulb out and put in a new one, so we took a photo of the offending light fixture and brought that photo in to the store to ask them about it. Turns out my guess, which I hadn't managed to get to work, was correct, and we just needed to remove a metal strip around the bulb and then the bulb comes out easily. We tried it, and it worked, and now we have a full complement of lighting in that bathroom again! Go us!

After so many accomplishments today, I'm looking forward to dinner at our favourite Greek restaurant tonight - bring on the flaming saganaki and the fantastic lima beans!

Monday is Canadian Thanksgiving - a fact that I've never yet gotten used to, despite this year being my 13th consecutive Canadian T'Day; Thanksgiving's supposed to be in late November, dammit! - and we've got a three-day weekend. Well, actually, we're enjoying a four-day weekend, Chris and I, because he had today off in compensation for the furlough day that he had to work a few weeks ago (he still has to take a furlough day, you see, but it was necessary for him to work on a day when most everybody else at his workplace was off). I had work come in, but only did about 1/2 an hour of it, I'm saving the real stuff for next week. We got our major weekend chores done today - groceries and going to the Atwater Market, although I think we'll be going back there again tomorrow or Sunday because they've got a mini-Oktoberfest thing going this weekend and Chris likes to sample free beer {g}. For the rest of the weekend - to Home Depot for halogen lights, birdseed, an appropriate hook to install so I can finally hang up my purse (after almost 2 years kept on the floor!), a possible run downtown to check out 2010 calendars (and, once again, how did it get to be almost 2010 already? anybody know?) and, the major task, replanting the Spring bulbs we dug up last month, planting them in new, better soil.

Oh, and I'm cooking a chicken - roast chicken with 50 garlic cloves, a simple recipe where you bake the garlic for a while, then stuff the chicken with it and some rosemary sprigs (got fresh rosemary today too), pepper the bird to your liking and roast for an hour or so; squeeze the juice of a lemon over the skin after the bird is cooked, while it's cooling enough to carve, take the rosemary and garlic out and serve separately (actually, I'm not sure if you serve the rosemary too, I'll have to check the recipe) with the bird. Yum! Accompanied I think by roast baby potatoes and beans and carrots. With what's probably the last of the season's strawberries for dessert. My mouth is watering as I type! Although T'Day is officially on Monday, we'll have this big meal on Sunday, as Chris doesn't like having a big meal any night before he has to be at work the next morning, he likes to sleep it off {g}....

Meantime, I'm having few if any side effects from the hydrochlorothiazide that I started taking on Tuesday - I'm at the lowest possible dosage (12.5 mg a day), and although I felt a teensy bit dizzier than usual on the first day, I've been pretty much "normal" since then. Haven't taken my blood pressure yet, I'm going to wait 'til I've been on it for a week, to give it a chance to kick in. I realized earlier in the week, though, that I'm having a bit more trouble accepting this medication from a psychological point of view, and I've figured out why: it's simply that although I've been on daily (or rather, nightly) medication, amitriptyline, for years and years, I take that med as a preventive rather than as something that treats my migraines - it just makes the migraines not actually happen, for which I am exceptionally grateful. Whereas, the HCT is to treat my borderline high blood pressure, which is to say it's something that I need to take if I want to control a physical disease process that can lead to heart attacks and stroke. If I stopped taking the amitriptyline tomorrow, I might get an increased frequency of migraines, but it wouldn't affect my longevity or general quality of life for the most part (and actually, it could well be that I wouldn't get an increase in migraines, as they tend to diminish with age, so studies have shown for people like me who started getting them as a teenager); if I stopped the HCT and didn't take anything for my creeping up hypertension, I could find myself regretting it very much indeed.

It's kind of strange for someone who has been pretty much healthy all her life to realize that she now needs to take medications to maintain good health, instead of relying on generally good nutrition, exercise, etc. Hard to wrap my head around, but I think I'm getting there now....

In other news, still stoked about Obama, not so much in the "he deserves it" range as in the fact that it shows how much the international community feels hopeful about the US again. I don't think most Americans either realized or, if they did, cared about how seriously tarnished the American "brand" became internationally in the years of Shrub, so even though there are certainly legitimate outcrys of "but he hasn't actually done much yet!" internationally, overall the international attitude seems to be quite happy while the internal-US mood seems more negative than positive about this honour. Since I'm also an American, and Obama is, therefore, my President too, I'm proud of our President, and so should all Americans be. IMHO.

It's Chris's turn for tonight's movie pick, which he thinks will be "Changling," the movie from last year with Angelina Jolie as a distraught 1920s-era mother. We missed it in the cinema when it played, although we'd wanted to see it then; it's really nice having The Movie Network now, which shows films quite soon after they leave theatres, and in HD at that. So now the only remaining question for the evening is, popcorn or not?

(I just posted this in uppityliberal's lj, but I liked my wording enough that I'm reposting it on my own blog {g})

I think that this award is more about symbolism and hope than for actual real-world accomplishments (thus far, at least). OTOH, Obama has brought quite a few enemies together to at least agree to talks (including getting Iran to talk about its nuclear ambitions and let inspectors in), which has, as others have noted, very much changed the tone of international relations. And you can't get to peace without fostering a desire for peace, right? Shrub did the exact opposite of that, and certainly the international community is heaving a sigh of relief that he's gone.

From my point of view as an ex-pat American, it's interesting to hear comments from Americans living in the USA, who as a people are notorious for an absolute focus on the USA only. Most Americans forget that there are actually other countries in the world, and I think this prize is also a recognition that Obama is one of the few Americans who believes the rest of the world matters, too. I'm looking forward to listening to CNN's "The Situation Room" later on today, as they'll be sure to have all the squawking as well as the praise. (BTW, has Cheney sounded off yet, does anybody know?)

Someone on the Nobel committee pointed out that they gave Gorbechev the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, not so much for actually dismantling the USSR (which didn't happen for some years after that), but for getting that concept underway and for opening the Soviet Union to more of the rest of the world than earlier rulers there had done. This award to Obama could be seen in the same light - it's not so much what he's specifically done yet, but rather it's for what he's working toward, with the more-or-less enthusiastic support of most of the rest of the world, if not of half of his own country.

In any event, I say congratulations! Also I'm pleased that he's donating the award money to charity, it'll be interesting to see which one(s) he picks....