I used to stay up late watching the random movies they show on CBC immediately before they sign off. I remember seeing the entry for Soylent Green in the TV guide and the fact that it was classified as “Sci-Fi” and figured I’d watch it. The first time I saw it (it turns out, Soylent Green is a common CBC late night movie) I thought it was ridiculous and lame. Nothing happened during the entire movie, until “Soylent Green is people!!!”. It didn’t really have much of a point.

The reason I say I’m lucky, is that when I later started watching comedies, many of them parodied and referenced the famous line. If I had seen the parodies before watching Soylent Green, there’s no way I could have appreciated the comedy as much. I would’ve heard the joke, watched the movie, thought “this movie is lame”, and then the joke would forever be in my mind as this back-ported kind of reference. Seeing the movie in my youth let me appreciate the humour.

I wonder how people who haven’t seen the original Star Wars trilogy get through life. Pretty much every popular form of comedy references Star Wars at one point or another. Do they just not get the jokes? Or is it that they’re so used to hearing the Star Wars references that they’ve pretty much pieced together the entire trilogy in their minds? If these people were to watch Star Wars now, could they get any enjoyment out of it? Would the jokes be funnier after having seen Star Wars?

Seriously. Everyone should see Star Wars. At least once. (And Soylent Green, too.)

QUESTION: Hypothetically, in the future, if a sex doll robot was indistinguishable from a human woman, and you weren’t in a relationship with a human, would you tap the robot?

Today, he posted the responses:

About 95% of the hetero guys said they would. The other 5% expressed a strong preference for lying.

Like you didn’t see it coming.

I ended up sleeping over following Linda’s going away party, since it was already 4am and I didn’t have any conceivable way of getting home. Don’t worry, I was on a completely different floor from the other three girls that were sleeping there that night. We were supposed to go to La Ronde, but because of the rain we just ended up lounging around the house all day. Being the only guy in a group with three girls is strange in its own right, but that’s not at all what this post is about. What I want to write about it what happened on the way home.

Linda dropped me off at Côte-Ste-Catherine Metro on the way to dropping off Roxanne. I entered the metro and went downstairs – being a Sunday evening, it was pretty quiet and still. The train came and left going in the other direction, and this girl came running down the stairs narrowly missing her train. She was pretty and cute, I couldn’t guess her height but I remember she was wearing blue jeans, a yellow top, possibly a jean jacket and a black choker. She had light blond hair, about shoulder length, and looked right at me with an exasperated “crap I just missed the metro” look on her face.

So I just smiled and shrugged with an “oh-well-what-can-you-do-that’s-just-how-the-metro-is” face. She grinned and shrugged back, and we spent an awkward minute or so exchanging glances and then trying to casually look away. It was weird. But what’s a guy to do? First of all, it’s the metro, and she was on the other side of the platform. Even if I did walk up the stairs, across the station and down the other side, I’m sure being approached in the metro is far beyond creepy. Not to mention the fact that having slept over last minute out of the house, I was wearing the same clothes as they day before and – despite a shower – probably didn’t smell none too great.

My metro came shortly thereafter and I could see her smiling at me with a huge grin through the windows of the speeding car, and as I got on she was still smiling at me through the doors.

I felt happy the whole ride home. Weird.

Did I miss something? Then leave a comment. :)

(And since I can’t think of anywhere else to mention this, if you want to have an avatar that appears in the comments next to your post, hit Gravatar and make an account using the same e-mail address you use when entering a comment.)

I’ve been googling around for some cooking lessons, but it seems that everything starts with stuff like “How to shop for vegetables,” or “How to chop things properly” and other pre-requisite lessons. Going through those things, I’ll be lucky if I come up with something edible by the time I turn 30. I’m hungry now, and I want instant gratification. One website pointed me to a book called the Kitchen Survival Guide, which was described as “for the true beginner, the person who has never cooked at all; who doesn’t know how to clean a kitchen sponge or whether ketchup should be stored in the fridge.” Sounds like it’s for me! (Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t seem to actually carry it, and by the time it got here I would’ve already starved to death).

Last time I posted about cooking, a lot of people gave me some suggestions and recipes, but I don’t think I have all those ingredients (I don’t even think I have chicken at the moment) – Angelo’s was downright confusing! I’ve decided what I need is the cooking equivalent of “Hello, World”: Something that you can get up and running in no time at all. It doesn’t do much, but at least it’s something.

Cooking for Engineers doesn’t really help, since they don’t really give any indication of where to start, and I don’t know what half the things listed on that site are. There needs to be a “Cooking to get food now: for totally useless people” resource.

Update: I realized something while toasting a bagel and putting peanut butter on it: Cooking requires a lot of forethought. You need to plan in advance what you intend on eating in the future and then go out, buy the ingredients necessary, and defend them from your housemates until such a time as you are ready to prepare and cook them. I don’t have the facilities for forethought. I can’t even think ahead a few minutes, let alone days.