#lessambitiousmovies

Well, this oughta take up some space...

• Slight Trouble in Little ChinaTown
• 5ive
• Rocky Horror Puppet Show
• Keep the Volume the Same
• The Shawshank Awkward Ceremony
• Rickshaw Driver
• Life is Quirkily Attractive, You Know, Like Joan Cusack
• Annie Doorway
• The Pauly Shore Code
• I Am Kinda Famous
• The Devil Wears JC Penney
• PG
• Mild Mild West
• The Forest Brochure
• Night of the Slightly Under The Weather
• Shrek, For Now, Anyway
• There Will Be -- Well, It'll Leave A Mark, Anyway
• Good Morning, Guam (starring Robin Bills and Trees Whitaker)

And, just 'cause I might be doing it wrong:

• Friday
• Pleasantville

Thanks, try the veal, drive safe.

Antidisestablishmentarianism

So, for those of you interested in an update...

Atmosphere:

     The event took place in Tallulah's Cabaret, the bar adjoined to Buddies, which meant that both audience and participants were suitably fueled for a raucous evening. The place seats, oh, probably 150 people or so, and I'd say we were pretty much at comfortable capacity. Pretty much exactly the right amount of perversion in the air, too -- I mean, it's a room full of people who just paid money to attend a strip spelling bee, you know there's a decent lust quotient at work, but it never hit creepy. The vibe was pretty relentlessly positive and supportive, and the biggest cheers of the night were usually reserved for when somebody actually spelled something correctly. Good time had by all.

Contestants:

     There were 13 brave souls who took part, 7 men and 6 women. (There was a moment when an unusual bulge seemed to indicate a transgendered contestant, but later visual evidence proved otherwise.) There were varying degrees of readiness for what lay in front of them -- a couple of them looked like they had just stopped by on their way home from the library, while others had some specialty lingerie going on underneath. One guy showed up in a luchador mask, and stayed in character by Hulkamaniac-ing his shirt off when the time came. The amount of disrobing was totally up to the individual participant, with one girl dropping out completely after the second round (to disappointed applause, if there is such a thing). Everyone who stayed after that would be expected to get down to their underwear or to naked, whatever they were comfortable with, and there was probably about a 75% conversion rate. Obviously, there wasn't a whole lot of shy on stage to begin with, but it's worth pointing out the little known fact that people become 64% more confident and attractive when they're on stage in front of a room full of wildly cheering people. It's been proven by science, or possibly Girls Gone Wild.

Words:

     Well, there were 13 contestants who went through three rounds of one word each, plus a one-word spell-off at the end to determine the winner. Taking in to account the speller who dropped out, that means there were 39 words used in the competition. Four were spelled correctly.
     The organizers were pretty up-front about it -- they're here for the skin, so they deliberately chose words that would mess people up. To be fair, I think the people on stage were more interested in the strip part of the equation, so if you were looking for spellers you'd probably have better luck in the audience. You could often hear a buzz as people whispered guesses to the person beside them, but I'm guessing the scores weren't too much better than they were on stage. I consider myself a pretty good speller, and I can remember 7 that I would definitely have gotten: choucroute, algorithm, nebuchadnezzar, gusset, flibbertigibbet, verisimilitude, and detumescence. There were probably a couple of others that I might have guessed right at, but there were also a whole lot of others I had never heard of -- nisi, nuchal, and autochthonic, to name a few. It's not for the faint of heart.

Verdict:

     From a conversation overheard during a between-rounds break, it seems the organizer has done a few of these events in Montreal, but wasn't sure how it would go over in Toronto. Now that he's done one, and he's pretty confident that the cover charge will pay for the room rental and his train ticket back and forth, he'll almost certainly be reprising the event in the future. I could definitely be convinced to go again -- if it happens, I'll keep you posted.


Now, just for fun, I'll leave you with some spelling-related video.


UPDATE: I never really expected to be linking to the Toronto Sun in anything but an ironic way, but it's funny how life goes. We appear to have contrasting information on the size of the venue, but otherwise we're pretty in sync. Granted, she has a bit more biographical info/participant quotes, but I mean, come on, she was obviously cheating. She had a notepad.

Come sit for a spell

I was thinking -- I like to cultivate the impression that I am a well-rounded individual. I'm a theatre major who knows what Avogadro's number is, I can rattle off five Coen Brothers movies or the starting five for the Miami Heat, and I know both what the T in James T. Kirk stands for and what it's like to have kissed a girl. I mean, I tend to steer clear of politics, but if I was thrown into a random cocktail party and told to mingle, I could probably hold up my end of the conversation.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if, given a large enough sample size, certain patterns started to appear. Like, with all of these posts, I assume it would become apparent that I talk about some things more than others. For example, I haven't personally done the math, but those handy label thingies over to the right indicate that basketball and lacrosse pop up sorta frequently. And, if I just cast my mind back to the most recent missive, I have a hunch a couple more representative topics popped up -- namely, when I got all excited about a Rubik's cube giveaway, and when I discussed the prospect of people disrobing at a concert. If I had to guess, I'd say my oeuvre would skew heavily towards promoting the geeky and the people gettin' nekkid -- full frontal nerdity, if you will. (By the way, I'd love to take responsibility for coining that phrase, but no, I can remember Ben Seaver using it in an episode of Growing Pains around 20 years ago. Side note: I feel old.)

I bring this up because an event has come to my attention that seamlessly combines these two -- heck, if you allow 'competition' to be the umbrella my sports posts fall under, then I've hit the trifecta. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you -- a strip spelling bee.

Yep, that's correct, basically a strip poker game, only instead of cards, the contestants spell things. The very concept leaves me nigh-speechless. The other thing that I can hardly wrap my head around is that it is happening in Toronto, and in less than 48 hours from now, and that tickets to attend and observe this phenomenon are $10, well within my price range.

You understand, I have to go to this. It's not really an option not to. I mean, it's like if someone told you that they found a show where a monkey had been dressed up like a pirate and was going to be punching a cow -- you'd have to go. It's just non-negotiable. However -- this is where I discovered a touch of latent homophobia in myself. The shindig in question takes place at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, which has left me unsure as to the gender representation of the contestants. It's not the fact that I might be in for a night of all-male spellin'-and-strippin' that worries me, so much as the thought of looking like a single man who paid for the privilege of sitting by himself to watch a bunch of dudes get naked. I could take a deep breath and get over that, but if anybody here is interested in coming as my back-up, I'd feel a little more comfortable, all the more so if that person or persons possesses more ovaries than I do.

I would also whole-heartedly support any acquaintance who feels the urge to participate. You know, strictly for altruistic reasons.

Seriously?

Well, this is odd.

I understand that there have been something like 300 million of these cubes sold worldwide, so there's gotta be some sort of overlap with basketball game attending population -- but, really? Are these things so much more likely to garner casual fan attendance than the crazy bobbleheads do?

Huh.

Well, yeah, actually. I own two of the bobbleheads myself (a Bosh and a Calderon, if you must know), and I'm never sure where to put the damn things. If I can buy a $12.50 ticket and get a $29.95 retail value cube as well as the basketball game out of it, I may be sorely tempted.

I am, after all, incredibly geeky.

Just wouldn't have thought I was the target audience.

Capitulation to Geekiness

I've had this long post bashing around in my head for a while now, but I've taken four or five runs at it and it's not working, so I'm gonna put some filler up here, just so there's a buffer between two consecutive power rankings.

So, a while ago, I don't remember how long, I got a five dollar bill in my change. I suppose that's not all that unusual, but some artistic soul had decided it needed improving upon:

Kind of silly, but I liked it. I don't know, the vertical lines along the brow line remind me of a Roman centurion-style helmet, with the full manly gladiator beard. I got a kick out of it, so I never spent it, it's just been kicking around my apartment for months.

Now, I don't remember where I first obtained this objet d'art, but I'm gonna have to assume it was somewhere in my neighbourhood, because the local video store just bestowed me with this:

I gotta tell you, I had no idea Sir Wilfred Laurier had such malleable features. This makes me happy on far too many levels, and I can only hope this mad scribbler continues getting inspired, because these two bills are now out of circulation.