The Bloated Penguin

I work from home (primarily in my pajamas with a cup of a coffee), which definitely has its perks. I can get up and leave any time I want. If I really just don’t feel like doing anything, I just won’t do anything and I never have anyone around me to constantly remind me that I’m on a deadline, or that something is due within the next few hours. When I first started out this was great. I made my own schedules, left enough video game time and work life was peachy. But after doing this for a while now I’ve discovered that I not only need a more regular schedule, I actually need a project manager – or at least someone to help me keep track of what is coming up.

A perfect example of why I need someone like this is this weekend. Vancouver gets beautiful weather for like 2% of the year. During this time everyone drops what they are doing and heads outside to work on their blotchy tans and show off the guns at the beach – everyone except me of course. Because of my own disorganization and lack of time management, the one weekend that the sun decides to come out and play is the one weekend where I have to bare down and finish a crap-load of work for Monday. This is just me whining about it. Thanks for listening.

Rivals in real life and puppet form

The Muppets, Sesame Street, various movie characters like Yoda and practically everyone in Dark Crystal, Jim Henson and his brilliant puppets have been in and out of our lives since… Well, before I can remember. But I never really saw this coming. I’m a bit of a basketball junkie, but mostly just the college game; until this year. The NBA Playoffs have been amazing (yeah I just did that) so far. The Chicago-Boston series really got everything off to a good start and now my man D-12 is pummeling his way through LBJ to the Finals. Storylines aside, the marketing for the NBA and Nike have been especially good this playoff season. The Lebron and Kobe Puppet series has been great and the anticipation of where these two will show up next is almost as good as the games themselves. Below you can check out their four aired commercials as well as their brief promo for Sportscenter.

I’m sure at least a few of you out there have heard of a little company named Pixar. They make these really interesting looking cartoons and, yeah, a butt-load of cash while they do it. Anyways, their latest film UP features an old crickety man who travels around South America. I haven’t read the entire synopsis, but I have seen the cast of characters. Of course there’s the old man, and apparently there’s a talking dog, but what really struck me (and I have to thank Cyrus Matthew Daniel Howard for pointing this out) is that there’s this chunky kid in the flick that is strikingly similar to what I looked like at about age 9. I’m still sourcing actual imagery of when I was that young (I’m so old that digital photography barely existed back then), but if you have seen a picture of me when I was younger, you’d probably have to agree.

Now, honestly, I was way too cool to join the boy scouts or anything, so the resemblance is really only in the face and, sadly, body shape. Anyways, the characters is known as Russel so when you check out UP when it hits theaters, you might be able to make the connection. And I’m sure Pixar will chalk this one up as a mere coincidence – but I know the truth…..

Nissan Cube

Saw some interesting things yesterday while not working (oh yeah you read that right, I’m taking a couple days off). Anyways, took a trip to the local Tim Hortons cause you know, I’m Canadian and all and what did I see beyond the expected plethora of IceCaps? A brand new Nissan Cube. Now if you know me then you already know that I know less about cars than I do about taxes (which is basically nothing), but the Nissan Cube that rolled up was really impressive. After restocking my body with various flavors of doughnut holes, I came home and did a bit of research on the Cube. Found out that it is reasonably priced, but the most interesting part is that is was designed around a bulldog wearing sunglasses. You read that correctly, I found the info on the Cube website.

I probably won’t be purchasing a car anytime soon cause, well, I really have nowhere to go; but if I ever found a big bag of money, I’d consider it solely based on the fact that its a cube.

Later, back to the couch.

Here's an image of Ikea's fuck-up with their catalog a couple years ago

About a year and a half ago I made the big decision to duh-duh-duuuuuuuh – Buy a Home. My bank account took a huge hit, I talked about savings like they were some kind of prehistoric dinosaur and my diet pretty much consisted of 4 different flavors of instant noodles for a few months. BUT – it was all worth it. I now own a home and will probably never go back to “renting” anything ever again.

But amidst all of the cash saving, I had to make the decision to furnish my new home relatively on the cheap. All of those dreams of fully furnishing a home from EQ3 were slipping away like quarters into Donkey Kong. My only solution was to find a place where I could get free delivery and pick up everything relatively on the cheap. And, as you probably have already guess, this solution was a Swedish kid named Ikea. I know Ikea gets a bad name because

A) “Oh my god, you shop at Ikea?”

B) “You know their stuff is shit right?”

and C) “Do you really wanna buy your bed from a place that sells meatballs?”

Taking all of this into consideration I decided to go against my better judgment and bought the majority of my furniture from Ikea.

Well, I’m a year and a half into my place and the Ikea products are starting to fall apart. This morning I spent 3 hours disassembling, then reassembling my bed. Last week I spent my evenings doing the same thing to all of my dining room chairs. I can only assume that this is not the last of it. Anyways, the point of this is, when you do things on the cheap, in the long run you’ll probably end up having to put in more work than you thought. Saving money is great, but for me, saving time is always more valuable. So for all of your Ikea pleasures, I give you some banned Ikea commercials:

A couple of days ago (during yet another dry spell of non-work at the ol’s company) I checked out the Vancouverite run by Jackson Murphy. What I found was so amazing, so inspiring and so repeatedly viewed that I had to steal it for myself. Check out this ad by Oasis:

Japanese ads have been floating around for a while now and most people who use what is referred to as the Internet are aware that they exist. They tend to use ridiculous over-statements and brilliant colors to express something you would never think of as related. Confused? Well lets break down the above video for an example.

Oasis is some kind of juice. They pride themselves on being non-water. So for this particular commercial they have decided to appeal to the younger, more rebellious crowd by showcasing Oasis as a forbidden drink by “The Man.” So like in all great stories, when the little guy is told what to do by an authoritative power, someone comes to the rescue. In this particular case, its Rubberduckzilla. Brilliant….

The adventure back into the corporate world is now officially over. I picked up my final cheque today and I’m out the door for good. I had a couple of exit interviews this afternoon as well, but the majority of it was just about complimenting each side. The reality is, I’m certain the company was not happy with their decision to bring me on board. Not that I’m incompetent or anything of the sort, but solely based on the fact that I constantly asked the questions everyone else either failed to ask, or were afraid to answer. But leaving under good terms is always best in my eyes. The last thing I wanted to do was leave in a burning ball of fire, so I think I accomplished this.

So whats next for the Ol’ Penguin? Well for starters I’ve been working on a contract with Suite101.com – an online publishing company devoted to helping writers become more successful through practice and teaching. Sure the product itself doesn’t seem uber-sexy, but what is very exciting is that I’m getting to work with an old mentor and boss. We haven’t worked together in almost a year and both of us have changed quite a bit in terms of technical capacity and managerial skills and I can already tell that the re-acquaintance stage is extremely enjoyable.

Couple that with the work I’m doing with the Stone Corporation and Big Park and my plate is still quite full.

Out.

I’m kind of a huge film fan. Basically my criteria is as follows: If someone spent the time to put together a feature length story, I’ll watch it at least once as long as I can find the time. Now obviously this doesn’t mean I’ve seen everything, but my DVD collection isn’t tiny by any means and I spent a vast majority of my time in theatres. Anyways, I popped in Inconvenient Truth last night after catching the bit of Futurama that Gore uses in his presentation (clip below).

But after sitting through about half an hour of it, I realized that since I’ve seen it already, there really wasn’t a whole lot more I could get out of it. Thus, I made a list of movies that I probably don’t need to see anymore for various reasons. Here are the top 5:

Fahrenheit 911 – Depressing, Scary and its’ basically been all over the news for the past five years.

300 - Stylized, Lacks Story and I think the only reason I was at all interested in this in the first place was because Zac Snyder was relatively new at the time and I heard some buzz about what he was doing.

Milk - Good Story, Satisfactory acting but I think the length of this movie really killed the momentum. Now that I’ve seen it once, I think I’d enjoy an actual documentary about Harvey Milk rather than watch Sean Penn.

Requiem For A Dream – Great movie, but the amount of squeamish scenes is too much for me. I’m not a huge fan of watching people wig out and inject things into their bodies. The scene where Leto loses his arm is also quite disgusting.

King Kong (Peter Jackson) – This was definitely more of a theatre experience than anything else. Jackson really knows how to take advantage of the big screen and because my home TV can be counted by inches, I don’t think it’ll be all that impressive. Also cause if I ever do want to watch it again, I could probably just head over to Best Buy and sit in their made-up sample home entertainment system and watch it for free.

So there you have it, the top 5 films I don’t think I’ll ever watch again. I want to make it clear that none of these films are entirely “Bad,” but at the same time, I don’t think I can actually watch any of them ever again. There are movies that you love in the theatre, then take home and it isn’t the same, there are movies that are flat out terrible that you regret seeing and there are movies that teach you something that sticks in your memory leaving nothing more for multiple viewings.

See ya’ll later.