Not Strange Enough

            I was still sick when I got up on Monday morning. There was a lot of mucous in my throat that I couldn’t hork out, and during singing practice I felt myself having to shift my voice around it. Though I was a bit hoarse, I was able to sing all my songs this time. It was only after 45 minutes of French lyric memorization that my brain became fried and I had to go back to bed.

            I slept for a couple of hours but was still resting when I heard Sundar knock on my door for the rent. I didn’t feel like getting up, and besides I hadn’t gotten the money yet.

            After getting up, as I was eating some pieces of fruit to give myself the energy to go out to the bank, I went to look at something on my computer when suddenly my monitor blinked out. The “on” light was flickering but the screen was black. I turned the monitor off and then turned it back on but only for a split second did the viewer show my desktop before blacking out again. I tried tightening all of the connections but that didn’t help. I tried restating but that was also a non-result.

Finally I decided to try the Acer monitor I found up at Brock and Dundas back in the summer. It used all the same connections but the screen was still black. I tried to look for an “on” switch, but the most likely part, a horizontal strip of white plastic in the lower right hand corner of the frame, didn’t respond no matter how much I tried pushing on it. I tried one more thing, I reached underneath the strip, where something that felt more like a button gave way and suddenly the monitor came on.

The Acer is much less square than the Dell, which is wide and short and so everything on the screen is stretched out horizontally. I don’t really like it this way, but at least I still have a monitor. I also notice that there is a slight and momentary ghosting of the image on the screen whenever I scroll.

It was a struggle getting ready to go down to the bank. In addition to my feeling sick, the heat was on very high and draining my motivation to move.

I rode up the street to Freedom Mobile where I paid for my January phone plan. The clerk noted with amusement that my phone number has “911” in it. I’ve had that number for decades and yet I never noticed that.

Then I went down to King and Dufferin to take my rent money out of the bank. I was very surprised to see that the Bank of Montreal was closed. I guess this was because New Years Day came on a Sunday and so they took an extra day for a holiday. I didn’t know for sure if all the branches were closed, so I just decided to go to the supermarket and to check online later if there was a Bank of Montreal branch open.

I notice that the bike racks at Freshco have started to fill up with abandoned bikes again. I locked mine against the framework of the shopping cart dock.

I bought a case of clementines, some globe grapes, cinnamon bread, coffee, ground chicken, toilet paper and the ingredients for making baked beans: navy beans, bacon and molasses.

When I got home I checked and found that all the banks were closed this day, so the rent was going to have to wait till the 3^rd.

I went to bed again for a couple of hours. When I got up I fried the ground chicken and then added it to some udon noodle soup. I ate that while watching Doctor Strange.

Doctor Strange was my favourite comic book from about the age of twelve on. I would go as far as to say the stories and the art were consciousness expanding for me. I think that Benedict Cumberbatch did a good job as the character and they handled the doctor’s back-story fairly well, but ironically it was when the magic started that the magic went away. The portrayal of the ancient one, the monastery and the magical worlds were all disappointing. The visuals of the spells, the dimensional portals and the other worlds should have drawn more from Steve Ditko’s amazing artwork. In the comic each spell and portal were colourful and had interesting shapes whereas in the movie they all pretty much looked like fireworks. They shouldn’t have tried so hard to be spectacular but rather should have created more of an atmosphere of mystery.

As for the Ancient One, my complaint is the same as has shown up in the media since before the movie came out. I guess the director or producer’s logic was, “For the Ancient One let’s use somebody young and well known.” Tilda fucking Swenton? Really? The Ancient One is supposed to be a very old Tibetan man with a beard. Why mess with things like that?

The replacement monitor looks much better for watching movies. Most of the films are in wide screen format and this screen is actually filled up by the image width-wise and there seems to be higher definition.