Since a couple of months I’m regularly visiting a workshop in Improv Theatre.
Improv theatre is a form of improvised theatre were people go on stage without a script and react to each other and create spontaneous scenes.

The basic rules of improv are “Be positive” and “Don’t block other people’s ideas”. Both are things that I’m not very good at in real life. So it doesn’t come natural to me. But —maybe because of that—I like it a lot and I’m slowly improving. So maybe I’ll be performing on stage soon. I won’t tell you exactly when that will happen because it sure will make my stage fright even worse.

The workshop is held every Sunday afternoon and afterwards there is a show with around 12 performers, most of them participants of the workshop. The performers ‘compete’ —in a very gentle way— with each other by playing scenes together that are rated by the audience. One by one they are eliminated until there is only one left, who is then declared the winner.

So even though you won’t see me performing yet, I’ll invite you to join me as an spectator and enjoy the other performers, some of them are very good and outrageously funny. It is much more fun than hanging in front of your TV all night.

Sunday Night Improv
Théâtre Ste. Catherine
264, rue Ste. Catherine E. (between St. Laurent and St. Denis, Metro Berri-UQAM)
Every Sunday at 8 PM until 10-ish
Admission $5.

Hope to see you there soon! (All three of you.)

O, and here is an article from Montreal Magazine about the event.

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When I cycled to my doctor yesterday on the Maissoneuve bike path I noticed this sign when I entered the borough of Westmount. Apparently cyclists need to wear a helmet there, I’ve no idea since when.
Now I do think wearing helmets in Montreal’s traffic is generally a good idea. I always wear mine especially since my accident, but I do think it is a good idea to introduce this requirement in all the boroughs on the island of Montreal at once.

In the current situation Westmount is an island, and legally inaccesible by the majority of cyclists that don’t wear a helmet.

Of course I saw a lot of people breaking this by-law and I’ve no idea if it is enforced. But having laws that are just laws is worse than having no laws at all.

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Exactly seven years ago the iPod was introduced. It was also the morning after the first night Alison and I spend together. We didn’t realize then that both events would have so much impact and longevity.

Happy anniversary iPod and Alison! May the seven-year-itch be gentle on all of us.

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After yesterday’s Canadian elections (aiaiai, the Conservatives won a lot of seats) it is now time to pay our full attention to the presidential elections of the United States. The elections are three weeks away and Alison has already received her absentee ballot. Last time (4 years ago) she received her ballot 9 months too late. It had been “mistakenly” sent to St. Thomas, one of the US Virgin Islands and it took a very long while to finally reach us. And it didn’t even arrive in a bottle.

Anyway, Alison is a dual US-Canadian citizen and it’s time to vote. Just as with the Canadian election, her vote doesn’t really matter. I don’t think McCain has much chance winning in the state of New York, but if they’ll ever use the popular vote for statistics it might show up. If they actually open those absentee ballot envelopes. I heard they are only opened and counted if the outcome is too close to call.

Alison always lets me vote since I’m more au courant of the political news than she is. [Okay, that's not true, and she wasn't happy with it. See her comment below.] Not that the choice at hand is particularly difficult this time around.

But filling out the ballot actually is difficult. So maybe my American readers can help me. Let me explain. I’d have expected to find entries for the candidates of the parties on the ballot: Obama for the Democrats, McCain for the Republicans and maybe one or two others that are running as independents. But instead there are 10 choices for president and vice-president. (click on the picture above to read the entries)

McCain & Palin have three entries and Obama & Biden two, and then there are no less than 5 independent candidates, four I’ve never heard of and Ralph Nader.

But why does McCain/Palin have three boxes? So their chances would triple? To confuse the uneducated or first-time voter? I’m well educated and I do find it highly confusing.

Of course I’m going to vote for that one, but which box on the ballot should I check?

Should I choose: Democratic Electors for Obama/Biden or Working Families for Obama/Biden?

What is the difference? Will it affect the outcome of the election?

If you have the answer, please let me know in the comments. Thank you.

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While walking in residential Nepean, in the street where Alison’s parents live, I heard and saw this beautiful woodpecker. It was hunting for insects in the tree by waking them up with a lot of noise and wasn’t shy at all. I could approach the tree within a couple of metres and it still wasn’t flying away.

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Anthropomorphism at work.

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Today Amazon brought me a package. In it were two books: one on programming and the other one is a cookbook. And what a cookbook it is. It is thick, and of coffee table format. The first 50(!) pages are filled with essays about food, cooking and the Alinea restaurant, and then follow another 350 pages with recipes, ordered by season.

It is self-made and self-published by the folks of the Alinea restaurant in Chicago. They couldn’t find a publisher so they did the publishing themselves. The chef wrote the text himself, the designer who designed the restaurant, their website and their house-style, designed the book, even though he never had designed a book before. His sister/wife/partner (I couldn’t find what their relationship is, but they share the same last name) made the photographs, even though she was also an amateur at that. But they took almost two year to make this book and during that time they sure got the hang of it. The dishes are real food, made during the daily prep in the restaurant, and not in a pantry kitchen in a food photographer’s studio with fake ingredients that just look good and don’t wilt. After just browsing in it for an hour or so I almost want to book a ticket to Chicago. I’m salivating.

The recipes all look quite simple, often requiring just between 4 and 10 ingredients. O wait, that’s is just one part of the dish. A dish often contains 4 parts but the recipes for those parts can be prepared ahead, all recipes end with phrases like “Store in airtight container”. The final part of the recipe contains instructions how to assemble and serve them as beautifully as in the restaurant. O boy do they look gorgeous.

I’m not a real foodie, I’m too poor to dine in expensive restaurants and too lazy to make elaborate recipes just for the two of us. I do cook (and like doing it) when we have friends over but that usually eats away (no pun intended) a whole weekend, including tidying up the house. We should do it more often, however.
Festive meals like Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving are mostly spent with Alison’s family and the food is traditional turkey dinner (with nut-loaf for us pescatarians). But maybe I’m going to break that tradition soon.

And now for the best part: the book only cost me 35 dollars. I pre-ordered it a month ago on Amazon and received it today. But strangely enough the book is still marked as ‘not yet published’ so you might still be able to pre-order it for this amazing low price. (I feel like I’m on the shopping channel now: “But there is more…”)
The normal price in bookstores is $56. Even at that price it is a steal for an impressive book weighing just shy of three kilos.

Order Alinea at Amazon.com

O, and please also take a look at the Alinea book website for more pictures.

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Finally I made time to move loglog over to a new content management system, so I can use some new and nifty features. I spent many hours fine-tuning style sheets and modifying impenatrable PHP-code, and photoshopping images and this is the result. I hope you like it.

You can re-arrange the boxes to the right by dragging them, and you can collapse the ones you don’t want.

I categorized a good many of the old posts, but I haven’t finished that gargantuan task. Still 500 posts to do… I’ll continue doing that later.

I also use Gravatars on this site. These are small icons that you can use to represent yourself when you leave a comment. Set one up for yourself (it’s free and there aren’t even ads on their site) at the Gravatar website.

If there are any problems, please don’t hesitate to let me know, either by leaving a comment or by sending me an e-mail.

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A while ago I bitched about the exorbitant surcharges of ticket monopolist Admission. I eventually went ahead and bought my tickets for Sigur Rós at a small music shop in town, and they charged me a much lower price. But even on their tickets Admission put a 2 dollar fee.

And today was the day of the concert. Since Alison didn’t want to go I’d tried (albeit a bit late) to sell my second ticket to someone, but nobody wanted it or they had already made plans for tonight.

So I bluntly told Alison she had to come and she grudgingly complied.

I learned a couple of things tonight:

• Sigur Rós does not have a female lead singer. He just sings at a very high pitch.
• Sitting far away from the stage on a stand does not improve your connection to the performance, but is more comfortable.
• Even though Sigur Rós plays very quiet music on their albums, live on stage they are much louder.
• Sitting far away does not protect to said loudness.
• A last-minute visit to Jean Coutu to buy earplugs and cough drops proved extremely worthwhile.
• A prohibition to bring alcoholic beverages also means that water bottles will get confiscated.
• Water on sale on the premises is $3.75 and will be delivered in bottles without a cap to promote spillage.
• A prohibition to bring cameras doesn’t mean there isn’t an abundance of cameras (I didn’t dare to bring mine, hence the bad iphone-made picture above).
• Meeting a familiar face in the audience does give a lone soul a sense of belonging.
• I had a good time.
• To her surprise Alison liked it also. She even wrote about it.

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I missed the 5 year anniversary of loglog on the first of September. My first post on loglog —which I wrote in Dutch back then— was about the preparations for my move to Canada. I moved 11 days later, on September 11, 2003 and that date was not chosen by coincidence.

Without the events of September 11, 2001 I probably wouldn’t have been in Montréal today. I was in Toronto that day, investigating if I could relocate to Canada. My plan was to spend a 3 month period to see how living in Toronto would be and to find out if there would be any work for me.

I had just attended the wedding of Dolph and Mansa, a Dutch friend-of-a-friend of mine and his Canadian wife, and the first couple of weeks I could stay in their apartment while they were away on their honeymoon. The apartment was on the 14th floor in the flight-path of Pearson airport and I could actually see the pilots when they started their landing.

The morning of the attacks on the WTC, I was checking my email when I received an email that a plane had hit a building in New York. I ran to the TV and ten seconds after I turned it on I saw the plane hit the tower. I thought it was a replay but from the commentary I soon understood it was a second plane. I didn’t stop watching TV that day. New York City felt so close, even though I had never been there.

The week after that Toronto, with some sort of delusion of grandeur, was afraid to be the next target. No planes were landing anymore, the CN-tower was closed and I was all alone in a foreign city with nobody to talk to. My meetings with prospective employers were cancelled and I decided this was just not the right time for a try-out. I already hated it for its americanism and urban sprawl, and now everybody was very tense and it was even worse. I wanted to go home.

Dolph, coming back from his honeymoon, convinced me to pay Montréal a visit before I would fly back to the Netherlands. He said it was good to just experience Montréal so I could decide if it was worthwhile to come back later.

And so I travelled on the train to Montréal with all my luggage. Way too much luggage.

When I arrived in Gare Centrale and schlepped my luggage from the railway station to the Metro ówho designed all those narrow passages and stairs?ó I noticed the atmosphere was so different than in Toronto. It was more European, the people friendlier and less stressed and I felt like in a warm bath. I spent two nearly sleepless nights in a youth hostel and met a guy there who knew a place were you could rent a room per month. I decided to stay a little longer than originally planned. I got myself a small room, installed telephone and ordered an internet connection. All for only one month, but I wanted to see how it would be to live in this city, and not just being a tourist.

Via my Internet connection I kept in contact with friends in the Netherlands, with some clients and even did some programming work for a client in Montréal. But I didn’t know anybody and felt rather lonely, so I put up an ad on an Internet dating site.

Alison was the only person that replied. We met for lunch and she fell in love with me over a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. My first bagel ever.

Partly because the encounter with Alison I ended up staying for almost two months in Montréal. While waiting almost two years for my visa I visited many times. In the end of August 2003 I finally got the green light and it was not a hard decision to pick September 11, 2003 as the date of my official arrival in Canada as a landed immigrant. Just to make that date a bit less evil; to give it also a positive side.

Since then lots of things have happened. I wrote about some of them on loglog, but many things I kept to myself. Sometimes because I was too lazy, sometimes because I didn’t feel like it and sometimes for such trivial reasons as lacking a suitable photo.

Five years in Montréal is a good occasion to make up the balance. What is my current life compared to what it was 5 years ago? What has changed? What is still the same? Which of my expectations have come true? Which haven’t?

I’ll write about that in the next post.

That post may contain Too Much Information, in which case you should just skip it. It also might just vanish from this site someday, in which case I got either second thoughts, cold feet or was abducted by aliens.

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