Walking the Dogs

Last night I went out with my parents, my brother's girlfriend, her brother and his girlfriend. We went to a restaurant called the Smokestack and I had a calamari starter and then a six ounce burger with fries and salad, along with two pints of Grolsch beer. It was a nice evening. When I got back I watched the extra features on the Twin Peaks DVD set and later on I saw the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, which featured the debut of Matt Smith as the eleventh Doctor. It was a really good show, and I do think that Matt Smith will make a very good Doctor.

This morning my parents came round and picked me up and we went to a park where my brother's girlfriend, her brother and his girlfriend met us with their dogs. My brother and his girlfriend have a four month old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy called Hamish, and her brother and his girlfriend have a one year old Labrador / Springer Spaniel mix called Rueben. Hamish was absolutely adorable, he is really tiny and he was just running around investigating anything that caught his fancy, making friends with people and playing with the other dogs. He's a very friendly dog, and was just bounding around all over the place. Rueben was only interested in chasing after and fetching his tennis balls, and really did not care about anything else except chasing after the balls.

When we got back to my parent's house we had some sausage casserole which was nice. I got home at about half past five. Happy Easter!

A Delivery

I watched the rest of Twin Peaks last night and this afternoon. It was really good, but it all ends on a cliffhanger that was never resolved, due to the fact that a planned third season was never made. It would be really great if they did another season of the show or another movie to conclude it, but in a way it kind of works leaving it open.

This morning a Toronto Maple Leafs ice hockey tee-shirt which I ordered on Monday arrived, so that was good.

The Man with the Twisted Lip

Last night I listened to another radio drama based on a Sherlock Holmes short story. This was based on the 1891 story called "The Man with the Twisted Lip" in which Dr Watson is summoned to find the husband of his wife's friend, who is indulging a lengthy drug binge in a dangerous opium den. While he's there he meets Sherlock Holmes in disguise and becomes involved in Holmes' search for a missing person who he believes could have met at a bad end at the hands of the opium den owner and a mysterious beggar. It was a pretty good story and it worked really well on the radio.

I was also watching another couple of episodes of Twin Peaks. I read an interview with David Lynch a week ago where he said that he really doubts that there will ever be any more Twin Peaks, but he didn't totally rule it out. The movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me really didn't do very well, although I really liked it, even if it doesn't really make much sense unless you've seen the series.

Even though it was Good Friday today I still went to work. I usualy take a couple of days off over the Easter period, but since I have had so much time off recently I just went into work. The place was pretty much empty, but they brought some cakes round and I had a slice of cherry pie.

April Fool's Day

Last night I was listening to another Sherlock Holmes radio play based on an 1891 story called "The Five Orange Pips" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The story concerns a young man whose grandfather and his father had died seperately under mysterious circumstances days after each receiving letters containing five orange pips. When the man also receives a letter containing five orange pips he decides to seek the advice of Sherlock Holmes, who immediately recognises it as the work of a murderous secret society. It was a good story and pretty dark. Conan Doyle ranked it as seventh on a list of his twelve favourite Sherlock Holmes stories.

I was also watching another couple of episodes of Twin Peaks. Despite what I'd heard about the second half of the second series (the ones after the Laura Palmer mystery is solved) I think they've been really good, even if they lack the main story thrust which came with the central mystery.

It was a dull and quiet day at work, although it was enlivened a bit by the fact taht I did manage to play a bit of an April Fool's Day joke on a couple of people by convincing them that there was an island off the coast of Scotland that, due to a legal loophole and thae fact that it was too samll for anyone to live there, was completely outside the rule of law and that basincally you could do whatever you wanted. They were trying to find out how you got there when I let them in on the fact that the place doesn't exist.

The Engineer's Thumb

Last night I was watching another couple of episodes of Twin Peaks. One of them had a very amusing guest appearance from David Duchovny (from The X-Files) as a cross-dressing FBI agent.

I was also listening to a radio play based on an 1892 Sherlock Holmes short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called "The Engineer's Thumb", in which Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson investigate the circumstances in which a hydraulic engineer had his thumb severed. It was a pretty good one.

Today I went to work and it was pretty much another quiet and fairly dull day. The pain in my teeth from the filling seems to have gone now.

Teeth Healing

Last night I was watching another couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, which resolved the main storyline of the series despite being halfway through the second season, which David Lynch was very unhappy about. He later said that he never wanted to resolve the mystery, even at the end of the series, but the network put pressure on them to resolve the story early.

My teeth were feeling a lot better today and I was able to go into work. My tooth still aches and it is still pretty sensitive but it's not too bad. I've only taken one painkiller today and that was first thing in the morning, and I've been able to eat pretty much as normal.

A Filling

Last night I was watching a couple of epsiodes of Twin Peaks, which were really good. They were among the darkest episodes of the series that I've yet seen but they did have some great comedy moments in as well, especially David Lynch appearing as the loud FBI Chief. I saw a really good ice hockey game last night between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Penguins won five to four.

I took the day off work today and went up to the Cineworld cinema and saw Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese. The film, which was based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, takes place in 1954 where two US Marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) travel to an institution for the criminally insane on Shutter Island just off the Boston harbour to investigate the mysterious disappearance of an inmate. It was a very good film and very well-made it also followed the book very closely.

After the movie I wandered around for awhile before heading up to the dentist. I had to get a filling put in due to some decay on one of my teeth that had been revealed after my wisdome tooth was extracted last November. I had to get about three or four injections in my mouth to anaesthetise it and the whole thing took about forty five minutes. My mouth is still really numb and I know that it will be painful once the anaesthetics wear off. The dentist said that I would probably need to take pain-killers for the next two days.

Daylight Saving

Last night was pretty quiet. I watched some Twin Peaks and some ice hockey. The clocks all had to be turned back an hour last night for the daylight saving time, so that meant I had to lose an hour's sleep.

This morning I went along with my Dad to the Ocean Terminal shopping centre. First of all we stopped off at Starbucks and had some coffee and a muffin. Then we split up to look around. I got three books in the sales which were: It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock - A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler, Shout!: The True Story of The Beatles by Philip Norman and The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien.

After that we went along to my parent's house. The new issue of Fortean Times magazine ("The Journal of Strange Phenomena") had arrived during the week, so that was pretty interesting. In the afternoon I went out for a walk with my Mum to see if we could find any good branches for Mum to use to make her annual Easter Tree for the house.

I'm off work tomorrow and in the morning I'm planning on going up to see Shutter Island, and in the afternoon I have a dentist appointment to clean up the area around where my wisdom tooth was removed in November. I might need to get a filling with that.

Crazy Heart

Last night I was watching a bunch of back to back episodes of Twin Peaks. I've finished watching the first season and have started watching the second, which is the one that I have never seen before.

This morning I went along to get my groceries for the week, and then I went out to the Filmhouse cinema to meet my Mum. Then we went in to see the movie Crazy Heart, directed by Scott Cooper. The film tells the story of Bad Blake (played by Jeff Bridges), a once successful country music singer-songwriter who now makes a living playing in bowling alleys and small town bars. He also has a severe drinking problem. One night he meets a young journalist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who wants to interview him and the two eventually begin a relationship, however his personal problems threaten to ruin Blake's career and life. The movie won Academy Awards for Best Actor (Jeff Bridges) and Best Original Song ("The Weary Kind" by Ryan Bingham). It was a really good movie with some great music in it.

Tony Manero

Last night I was watching more of Twin Peaks on DVD. Later on I saw a Chilean movie on TV called Tony Manero, directed by Pablo Larrain, which is set during the 1970s and tells the story of a disco dancing psychopath who becomes obsessed with Tony Manero, the character which John Travolta plays in Saturday Night Fever, copying his dance moves, his look and style and everything else, and going to murderous lengths to become disco king. The movie blends gritty realism with dark comedy. In one memorable sequence the killer murders a cinema projectionist for showing Grease. Which is maybe a slight overreaction for not liking a movie.

Today was a pretty quiet day at work, and fairly dull. I was in early today which was good because it meant that I could get home early. When I got home I was kind of annoyed to find that I wasn't getting all the TV channels which I'm subscribed to, so I called the cable provider and it is fixed.

Twin Peaks

Last night I watched the first couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, namely the extended pilot episode and the first episode of the main series. The show is set in the small town of Twin Peaks in the north of Washington state, and begins with the discovery of a murdered teenager, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), wrapped in a plastic sheet by a lake. When a second teenage girl is discovered badly injured but still alive, the local police call in the FBI who send in Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) to investigate. As the investigation progresses, the dark side of the seemingly pleasant little town is slowly revealed, and so too are strange, otherworldly forces lurking in the woods which surround the town. The show blended murder-mystery, comedy, horror, soap-opera style drama and surrealism.

I was back at work today, and it was a pretty quiet day. I managed to get in at around eight this morning and I left at around five, so I managed to make quite a bit of time. I decided to take Monday off work, the reason is because in the afternoon I have an appointment with the dentist. It's basically just to clean up after I had my wisdom tooth taken out in November, but they will need to anaesthetize my mouth again. I figured that rather than leaving early I might as well just take the whole day off and go and see Shutter Island in the morning.

A Perfect Spy

Last night I got some beer on my way home from work and watched a few episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which were pretty good. I saw three episodes and the best one that I watched last night was called "The Case of Mr. Pelham", which was directed by Hitchcock himself, and was, unusually for the show, a supernatural story about a man who thinks that his life is being taken over by his exact double. A very similar theme was used for a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone a few years later.

I was off work today because we were on strike due to this big dispute about changes to the conditions at work. I went out and got my remaining Canadian dollars converted and used the money to buy the complete set of Twin Peaks on DVD. Now I'll finally be able to watch the whole series.

Back home I watched the last few episodes of A Perfect Spy, which was a really good show, if very bleak. It was made in 1987, and I doubt it would be made in the same way today, mainly because it is very slow-moving, which works for the story, but probably today they would want more action in it.

Breakdown

Last night I watched a few episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on DVD. The first episode, "Into Thin Air", was set in Paris in the early 1900s where a young Englishwoman (played by Alfred Hitchcock's daughter, Pat Hitchcock) arrives on holiday with her elderly mother, who falls ill at their hotel. The doctor sends the young woman to fetch some medicine, however when she returns her mother appears to have vanished without a trace and the hotel staff claim to have no memory of ever seeing either of them before. In the second episode, "Salvage", a young woman nervously awaits the arrival of a violent gangster who has just been released from prison (the gangster is understandably upset because she was responsible for the death of his brother), however what she does not expect is for him to give her thousands of dollars to start her dream business and for him to encourage her boyfriend to marry her. The third episode, "Breakdown", was directed by Hitchcock himself, and starred Joseph Cotten as a wealthy businessman who is severly injured in a car accident, so severly that all the doctors believe that he is actually dead, while he is very much alive but unable to move or communicate in any way. However he has to persuade them that he is alive before they start the post-mortem. Some of them are really good stories, and because they last less than half an hour, they are really good to just put on when there's a bit of free time.

I watched a pretty fun ice hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Boston Bruins on TV after that.

Today was my first day back at work after the holiday. It was a really long day and I was so glad to be out of there. There is a strike on at work scheduled for Wednesday, which at least will break up the week a little bit.

I was really excited to find out that the second season of Twin Peaks has been released on DVD. I really got into David Lynch films in around 1996 and I have really wanted since then to actually watch the whole of that show and never had an opportunity until now. I don't actually think the whole thing has been repeated, at least not that I've been able to see. I can still remember when it was first shown in 1990, and it was such a huge thing at the time.