We arrived late in Winnipeg so our scheduled 4 hour stop was cut short to one hour. I didn’t care too much since I’ve visited Winnipeg before ( Read here and the next posts about that trip).

We went on a short stroll through the Forks, where we saw the worlds longest skating rink, a cool bridge with ice on it so you could skate over it, and had a chat with a guy that ran a sound recording studio right in the middle of a shopping mall.

When I told people we were going on this trip everybody warned me that the part of the trip through Manitoba and Saskatchewan would be very boring because the landscape was all flat. So I feared the worst, especially because I hate the flat Dutch landscape.

So when we left Winnipeg I prepared myself for some boring hours and even thought of doing some work on my current programming project. But the landscape was actually quite pleasant. We travelled between rolling hills, covered with snow (although in Montreal there was more snow that in Winnipeg) all the way towards Saskatchewan when it got too dark to distinguish much outside our always moving picture window.

So don’t believe people when they say Canada’s prairie provinces are all flat. It’s a big flat lie.

Via illicit channels I stumbled upon a yet unreleased movie about the thesis subject of a fellow web-logger. I downloaded it, burned it onto a CD-ROM and gave it to her. And since I had it on my hard drive I decided to watch it.

“Noise” is about a man (Tim Robbins) who can’t stand the noise in New York, especially the blaring car alarms, and he decides to do something about it. I won’t give away the whole plot here, but it involves breaking car windows and cutting battery cables.

Now is this a subject that lies close to my heart. During my last years in the Netherlands I was kind of obsessed with cars. I didn’t mind their noise that much, but I couldn’t stand them driving through red lights, not giving priority to pedestrians and bicycles on crosswalks and generally breaking traffic rules. So I actually had more of a gripe with their drivers than with the cars themselves. But since they were hiding in the sacred cows it was easier to hate cars, period. This all originated to a few incidents I had where I told (or gestured) some cars that they shouldn’t drive over my toes and was subsequently assaulted and beaten up by the driver. And this, instead of making me more timid and restrained, made me even more vocal and focussed on car’s errors. I once threw my bike in front of a car to stop it from entering the one-way street I lived in from the wrong direction (this happened a lot because it was a huge shortcut between two main streets). And I could get totally worked up when I saw cars jumping red lights, even when they were far away from me. I was a totally self-righteous asshole, stopping for every red pedrestian stop light, even in the middle of the night when there was no traffic at all. If I followed the rules I could critique everybody else who didn’t.

This happened only when I was riding my bike or was a pedestrian. When I drove a car myself I could stand traffic violations much better. So for a while I drove to my studio, even though that actually took more time and was a hassle with parking.

During the worst period I couldn’t even watch out of my window, in fear of getting totally worked up over cars running in the wrong direction. There were days I couldn’t leave the house. I suffered from a special case of agoraphobia. During the nights I was plotting evil plans involving setting cars ablaze that were parked illegally and acquiring a rocket launcher to, as in Doom, blow cars into pieces. Just the thought that I couldn’t afford being apprehended because it would affect my immigration process, withheld me from actually doing these things in reality.

When I was visiting Montréal I had none of these symptoms, probably because I didn’t have to “defend” my territory, because I was a visitor. But even now, when I’m not a visitor anymore, I only rarely have the urge to fight cars. I even jaywalk sometimes!

Anyway, the movie wasn’t a masterpiece but watching it brought back a lot of not so nice memories. Not so much that I started to hyperventilate, but enough to cause a slightly elevated heartbeat. But I was also relieved that this period was over, that I was “normal” again.

When we paused the movie we heard the neighbours dogs barking very loudly and we started to laugh about the coincidence.

It became even more hilarious when two of our tenants came down and rang our doorbell complaining about our dogs. I pointed them to the neighbours house and had to close the door fast because I couldn’t hold in my laughter.

Seeing a Dutch film in our neighbourhood cinema with French subtitles is a strange experience. Hearing people around you laugh about jokes that you thought were typical Dutch was even stranger.

The movie was “Garçon !” (“Ober”) written, directed and played by Alex van Warmerdam, a Dutch multi-talent (he also designed the poster and drew the storyboard) who’s work I really like. His humour is quite absurd and harsh, and for Canadian viewers sometimes even misogynist and racist. I myself? I laughed a lot.

Sometimes, fortunately not very often, I get so mad that I break things. I rather break things than people so it could be worse. But it’s not exactly something I’m proud of.

This time it was a marble slab, used in our kitchen as a counter top. This piece was very old, older than I am, because it was the top of my baby dressing table.
I, and maybe all of my brothers and sisters, lay bare-bottomed on this marble when my diapers were changed. It was well cleaned before its new use as a kitchen table, don’t worry.

I also used it as a prop in “Musca“, the animation film I made nearly twenty years ago, and that I’ve recently put online.

And now I broke it, and not even by having wild sex on it. If only, then at least I had some fun while doing it.

I’m going to try to glue it, it’s a very clean crack.

Click for video [1 MB QT]

Today we made a shocking discovery. Inspired by a web-page were they told that the latest version of Apple’s video editing program iMovie had a time lapse function, I decided to make a movie of the dogs while we’re gone, and they are locked up in the kitchen. The results were quite scary. It seems that while we’re gone the dogs aren’t resting or sleeping, which is almost all they do when we’re around, but that they are nervously watching if we’re not coming back. If you click on above image you can see part of the video. One second of video correspondents to one minute in real time. You see Poupoune hiding somewhere out of the camera image (Why did I make that dog bed?) and Pepe looking up and watching around nervously and only getting naps of a couple of minutes. This goes on for the full 12 hours we were gone today. Longer than normal, but we went to the movies.
(We went to see Miami Vice, a very bad movie, BTW. To be avoided.)

We don’t really know what to do, maybe we’re going to lock them in the bathroom, where they have less distraction. I’m going to monitor with my dog cam, of course and see if it is an improvement. O, and in case you wonder why we have to lock them up, we have to because they are badly trained when they were young and tend to pee and poop inside during our absence and we prefer them to not do that on the hardwood floors or on the couches. The kichen and bathroom floors are much easier to clean.

[I’m too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]

Sinds kort is deze bioscoop gevestigd in Montréal. In een vrijwel engelstalig deel van de stad, vandaar het bordje ‘tickets’. Natuurlijk is zo’n engelstalig bord eigenlijk verboden volgens de ‘loi sur la langue française’ (die precies 30 jaar geleden is ingevoerd), maar blijkbaar komen de inspecteurs hier niet langs.

1 dollar voor een bioscoopkaartje, voor films die net uit de reguliere bioscopen zijn verdwenen, is natuurlijk geen geld. Het metrokaartje om er naartoe te gaan kost al bijna het dubbele. En dan moet je ook nog terug. De projectie was goed maar de zaal lag vol met lege popcorn zakken (ook 1 dollar) en cola bekers. Ach, voor die prijs mag je niet verwachten dat men de zaal voor iedere voorstelling schoonmaakt.

[I’m too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]

Eindelijk eens een keer naar een film in onze buurtbioscoop, het onlangs opgeknapte theater ‘Cinema Beaubien’. 10 minuten lopen, maar op de een of andere manier was het er nog niet van gekomen om er een film te gaan bekijken.

Maar als Nederlander naar een Duitse praatfilm (“Nackt”) kijken met Franse ondertiteling samen met een Engelstalige vrouw is hard werken.

De taalverwerkende delen van mijn hersenen waren dan ook ernstig oververhit.