I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

RANDOM SCANNER FUN...

I'll try and get back to issue blogging this week, but, as weak as this may make me sound, I'm still emotionally recuperating from the move three weeks after, so I've been very distracted by the shock of being in a new place and just haven't quite been following the news as closely as I usually would. Not that I would have written much of anything about the massive tsunami disaster anyway, not that I don't find it horrific, just that I don't have anything particularly original to say about it, especially considering that the only person I know in that part of the world is in Kuala Lumpur, which was largely shielded from the worst of the tsunami by Sumatra. I decided long ago that, if I can't say something I haven't already seen expressed elsewhere, there's no real point in posting about it at all. Merely posting just to register my horror would be trite.

Anyway, I've been unpacking more stuff out of boxes, and I scanned a few things I found, which I won't post directly but which you can click on if you're interested.

Here's a drawing I did in Edgewater elementary school, probably in Mme. Mollica's class in grade four, when I was nine or ten. You can see my love for corporate logos, even as a young child. I think I even tried to emulate the Volkswagen font, which I know now is Futura, the same font Wes Anderson uses in his movies. The paper has aged badly and fractured around the edges, but I must have done this in charcoal, as it's still easy to see.

Here's one of only a handful of photos taken of me in my young teens. I think this was on the field trip I took to downtown Montreal, to the cruise on the Saint Lawrence around the Old Port, at the end of grade eight, in June 1989, so I would have been fourteen. Not a very flattering pose, and those glasses are huge compared to the thin light ones I wear now. I have no idea whose hand that is (maybe Kelly T.?) nor who actually took the photo (Jamie Smith, maybe?).

Okay, this isn't something old I found, this is just a scan of Ran Kotobuki from Mihona Fujii's Gals! manga dressed up in an especially amusing way. (It's from volume 6 of the French translation, which I bought on Sunday.) I think the afro is a wig, since it's gone a couple of pages later. In a weird way, Ran Kotobuki, in this panel, reminds me of Yankee Poodle from Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, not that Mihona Fujii would have ever encountered an American comic that obscure.

On Tuesday, I will be going downtown with my parents to apply for the OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) card, which will take a couple of months to process, so I better not get too sick. (Well, I think, in a pinch, I could always just cross the river and use my Quebec Medicare card in Hull/Gatineau.) My sister warned us that the office is as slow as molasses, so I'll bring lots of reading material and my Gameboy Advance. Maybe I'll see another movie downtown, but I can't see Sideways, which I really wanted to see since both of my brothers loved it and I also loved Alexander Payne's previous film, About Schmidt. I didn't get around to seeing it because I was so preoccupied with moving, and, this past weekend, it wasn't playing anywhere in town. Curses! Hopefully, it will make it to one of the second-run cinemas before it hits DVD.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 8:00 AM