Latest video at Junior Pigeon: This chicken recipe calls for one full pound of butter. And it’s delicious.
The vast majority of tourists visiting Venice never make it to the outer islands of Murano and Burano, which is unfortunate because Burano may be more beautiful than Venice. I’ve been to Venice three or four times and I’d never visited Burano until this past summer. I love how colourful the buildings are.
Blue cardigan and Muppet shirt (Animal shirt, more specifically): match made in heaven.
Snow… AND HAIL?! Damned Halifax weather. Biggest hailstone I’ve ever seen.
12 Steps To Success In ANY Field
By Vincenzo Ravina
1. DO something that matters. Drop the chaff from your work-life and focus on the good-times.
2. Leverage your social media CLOUT.
3. Make the most of what’s there by RAISING your profile.
4. MODULATE your vocabulary to include the most popular Google keywords, like ‘cats’ or ‘funny cats’.
5. STOP to smell the roses. Write reviews of how yesterday’s roses compare to today’s roses versus the roses from your childhood and ENGAGE with your SOCIAL AUDIENCE.
6. BE daring.
7. Dress the part. Model your wardrobe after what you see in your mindstream for what you’re projecting to BE in five years.
8. FIND your niche by choosing two things you like and mashing them together. For example: If you like mayonnaise and guitars, trying packing a guitar full of mayonnaise and then selling it to like-minded people on Etsy.
9. ENGAGE with your LIFE-SOCIAL MAYONNAISE GUITAR CONSUMER-FRIENDS.
10. Convert BUSINESS CONTACTS into LIFE CONTACTS.
11. DEVELOP your mantra. Mine is ‘BE successful’.
12. Make a BUDGET for supporting others in your SHARE-CIRCLE. REAP the benefits of success and share them with your SHARE-CIRCLE, like me.
Take these tips into your life and watch your LIFE-PROFIT increase tenfold. Have these tips worked for you?
That’s right. That’s what’s new. Two new buttons on the old Navigation Express Tool-Dongle (TM).
The first new addition is the “Creative Writing / Fiction” button. That will be seeing some new content in the next few months, as I complete my novel. But clicking there right now won’t sending you screaming into a contentless black abyss! NO NO NO. You’ll find Vampires Vampires and the Bittersweet Fudge-Bag, the picture book I wrote, and Ezra James Houndstooth-Clark’s Field Guide to ANIMALS of the WILDERNESS.
The second and final new addition is a link to Junior Pigeon, the site I run with Laura. It has been updated sporadically, but will be seeing a wealth of new content shortly!
I’ve also changed the colour of linked text on the site from grey to blue and removed some of the unnecessary buttons like the “Mobile” button, the “Twitter” button and the “Questions/Comments” button. You may also notice that if you come to this site by means of the domain Vincenzo Ravina Dot Com, the default landing page is now the About page, which has been ever so slightly updated with new information and links.
Fear and Loathing in Halifax: Another masterpiece from high school. It has a lot of swearing, so watch out. This one was for an assignment to make a film noir. My memory tells me that my original idea was for some kind of art heist and mystery, but we realized there was no way to pull it off, so we slapped together a bank robbery/drug/Tarantino rip-off thing and the actors punched up the dialogue by swearing a lot. The end result made little sense and gave me a lot of extra work to do, because I had to bleep all the cuss words in order for it to be accepted by the teacher.
Egotex: A film by my high school era self about a miracle drug. I made this for my film and video class and it is high art. I really wish I knew what music we used in this, but it’s a mystery lost to the ages. Hopefully one of you is a classical music buff. What music did we use at the end (starting at about 1:52)?
This was the best hostel we stayed at on our trip. I miss that terrace. (Click to enlarge)
Here’s the video tour:
If you liked Toy Story 3, you’ll love Breaking Bad
The following is a bunch of rambling thoughts that I typed down just after seeing the Breaking Bad season four finale. No specific spoilers ahead, just generally talking about the broad strokes of the plotting.
If there’s one thing that Breaking Bad is very good at, it’s ratcheting up intensity. It’s a slow burn. It sets up the card castle and then it blows it up good. Its main characters get themselves into huge messes. The show compounds those problems with more problems, then it locks everything in a room and eats the key. And the intensity builds to the point where you say, OK, that’s it. They’re completely and utterly screwed. It is impossible for the characters to extricate themselves from the train wreck. And then (spoilers) they do.
Just like Toy Story 3. The joy of Breaking Bad and Toy Story 3 is being brought to the point of black hopelessness before being immediately bathed in sunlight (although, not so much with the sunlight part on Breaking Bad). Have you seen Toy Story 3? If not, go see it. That scene in the incinerator is beyond words. And it’s the same way I feel when I’m watching Breaking Bad. And it is GREAT.
Sometimes people talk about emotional manipulation like it’s a bad thing, but all fiction is emotional manipulation, we just hate seeing bad emotional manipulation. We hate when we can see someone pulling the strings. That swell in the string section, they’re trying to make me cry and it’s so transparent. But emotional manipulation done well is so, so great. It’s a really good magic trick. There’s nothing better. Emotional rollercoasters are fun. More fun than real rollercoasters, I’d say.
Woody Allen and me
When I was a kid, I listened to a lot of “Weird Al” Yankovic. I still do, actually. But, a lot more when I was a kid. Anyway, listening to Al got me into parody, and I developed a blanket love for anything that parodies something else. That got me into Mad Magazine and Cracked Magazine (which was basically a Mad rip-off and bore no resemblance to the website it has become).
I used to go to the library and ask the librarians to direct me to parody books. And I remember in the Spring Garden Road Library, in the humour and satire area, that was my first brush with Woody Allen. I borrowed one of his books, Without Feathers. And it was hilarious. I didn’t get the references to Kierkegaard (I just thought it was a funny name), but I loved his absurd humour. I borrowed a lot of his books from the library. I must have been 10 or 11 or something. My writing at the time was heavily influenced by Woody Allen’s absurdity.
Mighty Aphrodite: This was the first Woody Allen movie I ever saw. It was in my Philosophy 12 Advanced English 12 class. The teacher, Mr. Wolno, was using it to teach us about Greek choruses (I think he probably also wanted to teach us that Woody Allen is hilarious). It had been a while since he’d seen the movie, so he was caught off guard by the swearing and sexual dialogue. But he left the movie on. My friend Cameron and I loved it, and so we decided to seek out further Woody Allen films. (I remember almost nothing about Mighty Aphrodite. I haven’t seen it since high school, so I don’t know if it holds up.)
Annie Hall: Cameron downloaded it and we watched it at his house during one of our free periods. I remember liking it, but being disappointed that it wasn’t as funny as Mighty Aphrodite. Of course, I’ve since seen Annie Hall several times and I was just an idiot then. Annie Hall is crazy-good.
I opened my gifts while all of you were dreaming of sugarplums. That’s how we roll in my house. Midnight Christmas. I’m writing this at 2:30 AM. Just finished the Muppet Christmas Carol (I watch it every year). By the time you read this, I’ll be sleeping in. This is an automatically posted post, you see. Just thought I’d wish you a Happy Merry Christmas, even if I’m sleeping.
