I’m really tired…not just tried…Sick and tired and I will beat the crap out of the next person who gives me a terrible news!

For God’s sake, somebody pick up the damn phone and give me a good news….I don’t know what and I don’t care about the subject! Just something pleasant….seriously…anything will do….

P.S. Thanks Martina…at least you’re winning and it always makes me happy…

Trunk Monkey!

Very Funny Commercial

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

Elephant Shoes

A modern look at love. 12 hours, 12 lifetimes... A half day relationship.

I rent the DVD as a Saturday afternoon entertainment, you know, a romantic comedy, not too cheesy not to heavy, to put you in the mood, but it was too damn good! Seriously, I’m impressed, big time!

If you haven’t seen this low budget, remarkably genuine, surprisingly surreal yet realistic, super creative movie, just take my word and do it. Believe me, you won’t regret. It’s just amazing!

How Golf was created, by Robin Williams

this is how it works
you're young until you're not
you love until you don't
you try until you can't
you laugh until you cry
you cry until you laugh
and everyone must breathe
until their dying breath

this is how it works
you peer inside yourself
you take the things you like
and try to love the things you took
and then you take that love you made
and stick it into some--
someone else's heart
pumping someone else's blood
and walking arm in arm
you hope it don't get harmed
but even if it does
you'll just do it all again

on the radio
you hear november rain
that solo's awful long
but it's a good refrain
you listen to it twice
cause the dj is asleep

on the radio...

Regina Spektor
On the radio (Begin to Hope)

Begin to hope

Although I’d seen her before in Conan O’Brien’s show, I have no idea if she’s already that famous or not. I’ve discovered the music of Regina Spektor about a week ago. in fact, her music and her lyrics are so original and strange, and to some extent weird, that it takes time to get used to her.

She reminds me of Bjork but a more liberated, more childish version of her (it’s hard to imagine anyone more liberated than Bjork, ha?!). The music, with simple piano tunes and cold peculiar chords is more strange than delightful. The lyrics are movingly eccentric and to me, quite charming. Her style of singing is genuinely unique and deliciously free and her occasional breathing in the middle of the sentences, like little children, is incredibly cute.

I’m not suggesting that you’d like her, but her music and her style of singing is so different from everything you’ve ever heard that you have to give it a try, at least for the sake of the experience!

Start with her older albums, try Daniel Cowman, Bon idée or prisoners from the album Songs and Whisper and My Honor from the album Soviet Kitch. From her new album, begin to hope, which is less experimental hence more enjoyable, fidelity, Apres moi and On the radio are my picks.

Enjoy her...

A must-see documentary about the Middle East conflict. Don’t miss it. It’s a bit long but worth every second.

The always-angry guy, George Galloway, in an interview with sky network, speaks out about the war in Lebanon!
Although I don’t quite agree with his position, it’s nice to hear something different and amazingly brave from a politician. The neutral and politically-correct stand of almost all of them makes me vomit these days!

Ode to an ass!

This Saturday morning, as I was walking in downtown, I noticed the overcrowded Crescent Street as if there was an event going on. (Cause there’s always something cheesy going on there!). As I got closer, I found out there was a motorcycle show, accompanied by the two remaining of the stereotype stupid American male’s trinity, bikini blondes and beer!

To be honest, I really find elegant women who ride motorcycles to work, quite sexy and also I would buy a scooter for myself if I was living in a city with a more humane climate, but that’s the extent of my interest to the subject of motorcycle and I’m not ashamed of that, even as a mechanical engineer!

As I was passing by, I noticed a big stand, loud music and some kinky-dressed models that were not just cat walking but performing a mélange of Modern Ballet and Latin dance on the runway. The mixture of the soft and expressive dance with the tough, red neck-ish! style of Harley Davidson’s models and clothing, had made such an ironically amusing situation that it was hard to be overlooked, specially by a photographer, carrying his camera!

So I stopped and took some photos which didn’t come out quite well due to my camera’s annoying shutter lag!

During the shooting ritual, a tattoo, which seemed to be a phrase or a quote, on one of the models upper thigh, somewhere close to her generously-proportioned butt, caught my eyes! So I took a picture from that tattooed phrase and its voluptuous canvas and put it in my flickr!

To my big surprise and only in 2 hours, 400 people viewed this photo which is almost 15 times more than average viewers that I have for a non-butt-included picture in a week! but before I let this little experiment annoy me, I remembered the wise advice of the butt-writing that “Don’t worry about the things you can’t control”

People of the world, you need to get laid….big time!

http://www.truemajorityaction.org/oreos/
Solving world’s problems for absolutely dummies.

Give peace a chance

Give peace a chance
Originally uploaded by Mar-yam.

It’s a poster Maryam has made, putting some kid’s pictures together.

For everyone else, it’s just a bunch of kids, but for me, since I know lots of those former kids, veterans of the childhood now, Maryam herself, Kiavesh, Rana and myself (two times!), it’s quite fun to look at.

Even if you don’t know anyone here, I suppose it’s still nice enough to be enjoyed.

My Saturday!

Yesterday, I was introduced to this lazy chubby furry creature. She was sooooo adorable. A bit timid, but beautiful and funny. A cat to die for!

The sad part was my stupid allergy that I’ve developed to cats in Canada! I've tried my best to deny it but I’m afraid I have to admit and live with it.

Only two more allergies, to women and to wine, and I would welcome death!

Anyway, we went to a movie afterwards. It was Night Shyamalan’s recent film, Lady in the Water, in which he also acts too, and I want to say to him "Way to go Mr. Shyamalan! It needs a tremendous amount of talent to make such a load of CRAP!"

It was by far, one of the worst movie that I’ve seen in years. Words cannot begin to describe how much it sucked.

The first 5 minutes was promising, but later on, it got worse and worse and it finished with an appalling, shameful finale, a suitable ending for this horrendous, dreadful bullshit! In fact, someone has to tell this young director that instead of saving the world by inspiring leaders through your writing, what his character is supposed to do in the movie, try to read and watch some good books movies instead!

Now that I’m thinking, even the Sixth Sense wasn’t that good. It was only good enough for someone’s first movie, but in any case, Lady in the water was a eulogy for the promising director of Sixth sense, Period!

Anyway, don’t waste your precious time on this movie. It’s horrible by any standard and it’s not even scary or entertaining. it can be placed in a dictionary, right in front of the word, Disastrous!

Monster House

Monster House, a new animation directed by Gil Kenan , is a profound, different, multi-layered, well-executed and quite entertaining animation which has been specially made for 3D screening.

A very well-written scenario about a monstrous house who eats everyone who's messing with it and three kids who are trying to stop the house from eating children of the neighborhood, right before the Halloween, where a lot of them are expected to go there for Trick or Treat!

Apart from the astonishing animation and the fact that watching anything in 3D is way more fun, the design of the characters in the movie is incredible. The vicious house and the way it transforms itself from an old, wooden residence to a hideous monster, is truly noticeable, particularly the harmonious cooperation of the house's trees and lawns, to fulfill the vicious plots. The old man who lives in there, is scary even for someone at my age, let alone children and the three kids, not only are adorable but pretty believable too. The two boy’s restless efforts to impress the girl and their subtle competition over her, is genuinely funny.

Even the less important characters are equally interesting and well-portrayed. The cool, sexy, slightly bitchy babysitter, Elizabeth, is very alive and quite entertaining to watch. The super nerdy, video game geek is just hilarious and the two police officers, particularly the young, inexperienced black one, are seriously amusing.

To me, it was by far the best animation of the year (or any year) and although I still haven’t seen Cars, I doubt that anything can top the breath taking 3D experience of the Monster House, anytime soon.

5. My favorite 101

My only problem with the Alternative Rock is the mood it creates for me. Surely it’s not how it works for everyone but in my case, it illustrates a cold and gloomy image of the modern world, full of machines, wires, metals and insecurities. Unlike the colorful, vibrant and always joyous ambience of jazz (even in its saddest songs) or amazingly calming nature-like mood of baroque or delightful, nostalgic homey feeling of middle eastern tunes, the alternative rocks usually portraits a dark, depressing environment that I adore to experience briefly but I certainly don’t want to stay in it for too long to be frank!

Expectedly, you’d seldom see me in a concert where this genre is being played but you’d find fairly decent amount of alternative rock in my ipod’s Top-rated playlist.

Today’s pick is one of those favorites, from a stunningly good album called love is here from the band Starsailor. This is one of the rare examples of this genre that I surprisingly don’t mind listening to it for hours and although all the songs in this album are quite remarkable, my big-time favorite is Tie up my hands.

Our old friend, TinTin

A friend and a classmate of my sister, Nicolas, who’s a serious fan of B.D, pointed out a very intricate issue with regard to my, and a good portion of my generation’s favorite B.D of all time, the adventures of TinTin.

That interesting point is the surprising absence of female characters and feminity in general, in the whole series of TinTin comics.

Since I haven’t brought any of my vast B.D collection with myself to Canada, I had no choice but to refer to my memory which in this case, due to my childhood’s excessive reading of every book of Tintin, is credible enough I suppose! So if my memory serves me right, I can’t think of any female character whatsoever but the fat, annoying, pain in the ass, Bianca Castafiore! The rest are all men, both good and evil. Tintin, Haddock, Tournesol, Doupont et Dupond, Nestor, Seraphin Lampion, General Alcazar, Rastapopoulos and the list goes on. Even the dog, Milou, is obviously a male dog.

And that’s not all. There is no romance, no fling, no recollection of any relationship in the past, neither for Tintin, nor for any of the major characters in the story.

I’m wondering, how Hergé have managed to eliminate the whole concept of feminity and everything around it like love, romance, sex, relationship or even a simple flirting, from such a diverse and popular B.D, without anybody even noticing it or feels the absence of it.. Well at least, none of my friends, most of which are die-hard fan of Tintin, had ever mentioned it before!

As I’ve already talked about , I don’t have my Tintin collection with me and I’m not going to Chapters for it, so if anybody remembers anything that contradicts this theory, please let me know.

Final word is, up to now, I was thinking that those college year’s poker nights were the only time that I had so much fun without the presence of any female character. Turns out that I should add to it, the whole experience of Tintin reading!


P.S. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a geek, I’m just interested in this issue as a social phenomenon. :)

Sunday afternoon, the guy is lying down on the grass, enjoying his B.D. In this world where we can order movies via pay-per-view, our books online and our pizza on the phone, it’s nice to go out to read, to sit in a café to write and to walk, outside this stupid metallic cages we call “our convenient cars”!

A Scanner Darkly

I do not recall the last time I’d seen so many geeks together in one place! Was it in the screening of the last Harry potter or the third episode of Lord of the rings?! Anyway, the theatre was more like an international Geek convention! It reminded me of Sharif University’s faculty of software engineering, except here, girls were slightly prettier!

The latest work of Richard Linklater, A Scanner Darkly, which is an animation based on Philip K. Dick’s novel with the same title, is the story of an undercover detective, played by Keanu Reeves, living in Orange County in the near future, fighting against the traffic of a brain-destructive drug called “substance D”. This hallucinogen, is an organic substance, derived from a blue flower, and unlike the novel, this fact is disclosed so early in the movie.

The rest of the story is the interaction between this undercover detective with himself and also with his girlfriend (Winona Ryder) and his two roommates, all of whom severely addicted to the Substance D.

A scanner Darkly is an irritatingly dark movie with a seriously gloomy and depressing atmosphere that perfectly suits the style of the animation being used. The story is surly, and to me deliberately, hard to follow and to be honest, boring at some points due to the excessive use of dialogues, but has its own hilarious moments and also moments to ponder about.

Robert Downey Jr. who plays a mentally damaged, always high, comically wise-guy addict, shows a spectacular performance. I don’t know whether playing in an animation qualifies someone for an academy award, but this magnificent performance certainly deserves to be considered.

And I don’t want to begin talking about my lovely adorable Winona Ryder. I enjoyed every second of her presence, even as an animation character. In fact, when she’s high, she’s even sexier!

Finally, the idea of the scrambled suit, a dress worn by detectives that covers their identity was a marvelous idea in the novel which has been executed stunningly brilliant in the movie!

It should be noted that A Scanner Darkly is the first movie that has been worked entirely by the technique called Rotoscope, in which a motion picture, made by real actors, is sketched on later and turned into animation. The technique has been used quite frequently before, even by the same director in the movie “Walking life”, but never so comprehensively to generate an entire motion picture.

Altogether, an unforgettable experience, a masterpiece which will give an ultimate pleasure to anyone with a bit sense of fantasy, interested in comics or animation, or anyone tasteful enough to appricaite so much talent that has been used in making this breathtaking piece of work.

And a word about this director. What amazes me is how someone could be able to make some of the sweetest, most romantic movies of all time (before sunrise and sunset) , the way one feels he’s been deeply in love his entire life and yet have the ability to enter such gloomy, geeky, dark science fictional realms ( Scanner Darkly and Walking life) like he has been a nerd, or more, a nerd with severe addiction to narcotics all along the way! Add to this, some fantastic comedy like School of Rock and Voila, you have a genuine genius indeed.

I can’t wait to see his latest, “fast food nation”, which is a loosly based on Eric Schlosser's great work.

If you think money can’t buy happiness, you don’t know how to spend!

From a gorgeous brunette’s T-shirt, in the bus

Life is short, Play more

A commercial for Lingerie

This one is a piece of art. Magnificent!