Gaiman Manqué.

Neil Gaiman knocks it out of the park in Vancouver.

Headline from the Vancouver Straight website.

 Reporting in from the paradise on earth which is Nanaimo...

Sorry, that's unfair to Nanaimo, but I'm just a little bitter. Had things gone according to plan, this is where the posting on Neil Gaiman's sold-out appearance at the Vogue Theatre last night would have gone - thanks to an advance warning from my friend Annie, I bought my ticket a month and a half back, and I had every expectation that it was going to be a brilliant evening.  I've mentioned Mr. Gaiman previously - he's quite probably the best living fantasy author around, not to mention being better than a lot of dead fantasy authors as well.  Vancouver was the final stop in Gaiman's North American promotional tour for his lastest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

As things have actually worked out, this is my posting on being sent to Vancouver Island for two days to collect subject matter at the Duke Point Terminal in order to develop site-specific content for longshore training in heavy lift truck, yard tractor, dock gantry and cargo checker.

Sigh... I believe this qualifies as "taking one for the team".  Oh, well - at least the sunrise at Nanaimo Harbour was lovely this morning.

- Sid

"Bravo for life's little ironies."

Although I'm desperately fond of Alanis Morissette, ever since she released Ironic in 1995 the whole concept of irony has gotten a bit fuzzy, so I'm going to need some help from the studio audience with this one.

Elysium, the long-awaited second film from District 9 director/writer Neill Blomkamp, is set in a dystopian 2154 where Earth has become a sort of global slum occupied by the poor and disadvantaged.  The rich and elite inhabit an orbital paradise named Elysium, after the heaven of the Greeks. 

With that in mind, I'm not certain if it counts as ironic for the Elysium street team to wallpaper large portions of the Main and Hastings neighbourhood here in Vancouver with posters, given that Main and Hastings represents the most visible group of the poor and disadvantaged here in Canada. (It may push it over into irony if you add in the fact that it's unlikely that most of the street people in East Van have enough disposable income for movies anyway.)

And if it is ironic, would it be more or less so if they'd done the same thing with Oblivion posters?
 

- Sid

Although in this case, "Rim" is not a verb.

Pacific Rim was really pretty much just two hours and eleven minutes of really good giant robot/monster porn, and like any good porn movie, the plot was just a feeble excuse to get the physical action started, some of the positions were really weird and uncomfortable looking but obviously necessary for the camera angles to work, there was a mix of one on one, two on two, three on two and two on one action, and of course there was a happy ending involving an Asian woman.

- Sid