Eddie Izzard

So as I mentioned on Friday I was off to see Eddie Izzard's new stand-up called Stripped. He was hilarious, truly, truly hilarious. He is so quick and crazy that it takes some serious keeping up to understand what he is talking about, but if you let him take you down the path you end up in a beautiful hilarious garden of funniness.

His last couple of tours didn't receive the best of reviews so I think most people weren't sure as to whether he would be back on form, but I would highly suggest you go check him out. He is playing again at Massey Hall tonight and I will add a link to the site in case you want to get tickets.

The entire show was based around the history of the world. It was kind of a creationist vs scientist based show and if you are of the religious persuasion I would suggest sitting this one out. Luckily for me I happen not to be, and enjoyed the show tremendously, I found myself laughing very hard through most of it. I have to admit my favorite part was when the audience groaned at one of his jokes and he looked out into the audience and said 'Toronto, Fuck off'.

I think I admire him because he is so quick, he manages to wrangle everything he says together no matter how out there his opening statements tend to be. When he pantomimed a sharks vs jets, west side story style dance-off between flying fish and birds I realized perhaps being a complete maniac wasn't such a bad thing, and had to re-evaluate where I fall on the crazy person chart. I've been told I'm an 8, but if Eddie Izzard is a 10 I am definitely sliding down the scale.

Eddie Izzard has always been funny, one only has to mention the words Cake or Death to have die hard fans giggling themselves silly. For those of you who don't know Cake or Death, first, shame on you, and second here is a way to catch up 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNjcuZ-LiSY

No...I'm waiting for you to go watch it before you continue reading
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I'm right about him being funny aren't I? Yes, yes I am

Happy Monday to all of you...

Meryl xxx

Massey Hall tickets for tonight: http://www.ticketmaster.ca/Eddie-Izzard-tickets/artist/851852

Alphagetti

Alphaghetti is actually more delicious than it is given credit for, but anything edible shaped like letters seems to have a bad rep. In honour of Alphaghetti and the fact I am going to see Eddie Izzard on Sunday night this blog will be an alphabetical list of my favorite stand up comedians.

Beginning with:

A...Alan Carr / Alan Cochrane / Simon Amstell
B...Bill Bailey / Rob Brydon
C...David Cross
D...Dylan Moran / Dawn French
E...Eddie Izzard / Ed Byrn
F...Frankie Boyle / Nick Frost
G...Ricky Gervais
H...Russell Howard
I...Robin Ince
J...Jack Dee / Justin Lee Collins
K...Louis CK
L...Lee Evans / Mark Lamarr
M...Michael McIntyre / David Mitchell
N...Noel Fielding / Nick Swardson
O...Omid Djalli
P... Peter Kay
Q...Carolin Quentin
R...Ross Nobel / Russell Brand / Ricky Gervais
S...Sean Lock/ Sue Perkins / Jerry Seinfeld
T...Tina Fey
U...Umm
V...Vic Reeves
W...Robin Williams / Robert Webb
X...Really X?
Y...Gina Yashere
Z...Alex Zane

OK so this got way out of hand, apparently I don't understand the concept of one comedian per letter, it's a distribution thing, they all seem to start with the same letters. Truth be told I've watched a lot of stand up, it is one of my favorite things in the whole world! Making other people laugh for a living must be the best job in existence, not for the money, well, unless you are Ricky Gervais and can turn down a million dollar gig in Hong Kong, but just because you are spreading happiness and good energy.

Talking of happiness and good energy, my computer is fixed, which means this will be the last blog I have to type up on my phone, god these keys are tiny. A big thankyou to Rick who fixed it for me, you are my computer hero! :)

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend sunshine babies

meryl x

NEWS Review

So yes I'm reviewing the NEWS, figure that one out. The word news consists of the letters N. E. W. S - each letter representing a different direction, respectively North East West and South, so how on earth I ended up watch a 25 minute segment on the weather and a further 10 minutes on lawnmowers last night I'll never know.

I got pretty angry about it, I wasn't in the best mood to be watching the News anyway. I wanted to see if they were talking more about Top Kill, and thankfully as of this morning it seems like the whole procedure has worked. It is funny, as soon as I read the article in the paper I imagined there must be a room full of BP executives high fiving each other and sipping champagne. There is a lot of work still left to do, but stopping the oil pump leaking is certainly a great first step.

Anyway back to the NEWS. In Canada it is not uncommon for the weather to become news, and I kind of understand it when it is snowing. Snow can create traffic and road closures, people can freeze to death or slide of the road, I get it, it's news, but hot?! Last night someone was paid to walk around and ask people what they though of the 31 degree weather, and you will never guess the responses they got. It was the most ridiculous montage of people saying it's hot I've ever seen. There was a jogger who thought it was hot out, a man who worked at a dry cleaner who thought it was hot out, some students who thought it was hot out, and some old lady who was walking her dog in the park, she also thought it was hot out. What a waste of f*cking time.

I happen to know the police are in the middle of a shootout in Kingston, Jamacia because they want to extradite a drug lord, I know there is a war going on in the middle east and England is having problems with it's new coalition government. I know that the G8 and G20 are starting plans for their upcoming conferences, and that there were new terror threats in India. I am also abstractly aware that behind closed doors corporations are doing evil things to further control of the population, and government officials are using our non-transparent system to spend Canadian Citizens money on bigger houses, yet when I want to get informed I've got ten idiots picked off the street agreeing with eachother that it's hot outside.

Yeah, I think you can tell I wasn't happy, there is a specific section for weather right at the end of the news where I would have happily watched muggles embrace the heat, but with so much going on in the world I can't understand why they would fill the opening slot with fluff? My disposition took a turn for the worst when they put the lawnmower segment before the oil spill. I was calming down about weather-news because I assumed they would be talking about BP straight after the break, but they didn't. Instead they had a man mowing grass, in the city no less! They put a comparative grass segment before reviewing deaths in Kingston, to steal from Ricky Gervais 'I just don't get it'.

My poor roommate once again gave me a pitying look and asked why I was still watching, but it's honestly because sandwiched between all the stupid idiot news there are stories that I've been following. Plus I haven't seen such a stupid evening of news in a while. The last time I got this angry the newscasters were following the story of the building in Toronto whose roof lit on fire, but they were reporting on it a week later after it had been put out and nobody had died. If news isn't current then it's no longer news, it's history.

As I just mentioned, and on a more positive note there is no more oil gushing into the Gulf, so I'm going to take this small success and realize getting all hot and bothered about Toronto News is silly. The News is pretty regulated now so I don't exactly imagine they will have the expose stories of old, fluff is kind of the only thing they can do without someones say-so and even that I'm not so sure of.

The Internet is a better source for information it may be inconsistent but at least it's still free media. Not my blog obviously, it's the ramblings of crazy person, but under pressure I could find fifteen people in my office to agree it's hot - voila I'm a professional.

Meryl

PS: Bonus point for anyone who can tell me where the image at the start of this blog is from

Clue - Scorchio.

Supplementary Blog

Sometime my timing is pretty bloody impressive. This is an article just put up by the bbc

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10159626.stm

It show exactly how BP plan to stop the oil leak.

I just high fived myself

Slick Work BP

So I think I'm suffering from some sort of bank holiday Monday jet lag, because today is Wednesday not Tuesday and yet yesterday was the first day of the week. It's got my whole sleep patterns wonky. It's the weather too, it is excruciatingly nice outside, well I'm assuming so, I've only seen it through the window. Global warming is a terrible, self inflicted problem that is going to get us all killed, but warm weather in the summer is a nice silver lining to an increasingly dark cloud.

Talking of dark clouds, today I wanted to talk about the BP oil spill. (that was quite a segue) I want to know why it is taking one the largest, richest and biggest companies in the world over a month to block up an oil spill? Don't get me wrong pulling out solutions named 'Top Kill' sounded cool but knowing that it only has a 60-70% chance of working makes me wonder if perhaps 'Top Manslaughter' or 'Top Snuff' may have been a more apt description. It is causing havoc on everything and thousands of things are dying because of it, there has got to be a smarter solution than filling the ocean up with mud.

The whole donate your hair to the ocean seems a little lame, unless Rapunzel suddenly calls up for a donation but at least people are trying to do something. How is it that we are still so dependent on oil anyways, it seems like another lesson we just aren't learning from. Prince Charles has invented a car that runs on cheese and wine and still we have yet to see anyone take a serious stance on the electric car. The whole wine and cheese car is obviously a little ridiculous, you'd have one hell of an upper-crust new car genre if you took it too seriously, but there has got to be something blocking cars that run on electricity because it just seems like the way forward. It's massive corporations that are creating this road block, there is too much money and corruption in the oil industry for them to let it go. Maybe I will invent a car that runs of Mac and Cheese to appeal to a more modest, money conscious populous, the top of the bottom can use Kraft Dinner while the rest of us have to fill up with the No-Name variety. That's a weird thought even for me.

Anyway, if you do want to donate hair or fur and save some cute sea animal babies then Matter of Trust are the people to go to, here is the link to tell you more

http://www.matteroftrust.org/contribute.html

I hope the majority of you are not at work and are basking the beautiful sunshine, but if you are see if you can sneak in a drink on a patio, after all it feels like pimms o'clock to me. 

and then it Ends...

So welcome back from the long weekend peoples. I hope you all enjoyed the sunshine, the fireworks, and hopefully the drinking. I had a great weekend, and am less snow white coloured than I normally am, which will confuse the dwarfs but is making me fairly happy. 

Lets cut right to it shall we, Lost ended. Six years, hundreds of plot twists, a multitude of character deaths, and an empty coffin. It was sad. Like many losties, I'm unsure of how to feel about this last episode. I was convinced I would have pages to write on todays blog discussing all the crazy expose moments and final conclusions one could draw but I don't. It ended well, truly it did, it was sad and heartbreaking but also joyful and sweet. When Sun and Jin remembered it was pretty special, and when Jack jumped into the air to knock down the man in black my heart fluttered, but was it the ending I had dreamt of? I can't imagine any alternative way of ending Lost so it's not like I have a handy comparison I can use to measure whether it ended well or not. Everything was tied up, the flash side-ways were explained, and the show stayed true to the characters beautifully.

They had a close up of Jack's eye closing right at the end, and the juxtaposition from the beginning of the series with Jack's eye opening really made you feel they were telling you the very end of a well woven story. They showed Rose and Bernard, something I think we had all been hoping for, and they even kept Sayid and Nadia apart because they were doomed right from the start.

I have to watch it again, there were so many references I must have missed, and so many easter eggs I'm bound to find. It is a weird feeling when something ends, you really shouldn't have any emotional reaction to it, it is after all a television show, but you do. There is a strange end of an era feel about it, these are characters you put time into, and a storyline you enjoyed watching unfold. It feels a little like when you are a child and someone reads you a story. You lie there quietly listening to an incredibly fantastical story, wondering where on earth it could go next. When it is done, and that final page is turned over, an overwhelming sense of sleepiness washes over you, you pull the duvet up to you neck, turn over, and go to sleep.

I think the word I am looking for is closure. The final episode of Lost wasn't incredibly significant, it didn't blow my mind with unexpected answers, but it did give me closure. I did understand that this was the end that nothing else would be explained or would be contradicted and really when it comes down to it, what more could you ask for in a series finale?

I do wish I had got a lost cake though, I put a picture of one up on this entry but there were a tonne to pick from. This was the other one I was contemplating putting up, it's funny eh?

Yum Cake....Happy Tuesday

Meryl xxx

Genetic Blog

My mum sent me this....I'm starting to better understand why I'm such a freak.

xxx

PS: she titled it 'Dalek's can Fly!!'