friday january 22

today i scrolled through twitter on my phone as i watched the raptors game on tv, unsuccessfully searching for a tweet i'd seen earlier in the day. while focusing on the tv, i felt my browsing finger inadvertently touch the screen and quickly looked down, worried that i might have accidentally liked a tweet that was unworthy of it.

as it turned out, i hadn't liked or retweeted anything, but i had selected the least-popular response in a "promoted" poll.

already dreading what the advertisers are gonna do with this information.

sunday january 17

today i looked at the mission: impossible ii trivia page on imdb. there were some genuinely interesting facts on there, including, for instance, that the song metallica had written for the movie was the one to leak early on napster, directly leading to the band's court case against the music-sharing service.

interspersed with these occasionally interesting bits of trivia, however, were a series of "facts" that might as well have been added by tom cruise's pr team and seemed designed to make him sound like a real alpha at director john woo's expense. while it may very well be true that cruise insisted on doing almost all of his own stunts and woo was nervous about it, the constant reiteration of this point and the weird editorializing ("woo admired cruise's courage," reads one piece of trivia) were jarring.

another item, which insisted that - contrary to published reports at the time - cruise was actually not acting like a "high-maintenance diva" by instructing extras not to make eye contact with him, and that those "star-struck" extras were simply ruining the shot, was also extremely suspect.

wednesday january 13

today i was watching jeopardy when "two middle names" was announced as a first-round category, prompting the following exchange between me and my girlfriend, who was across the room and didn't hear the category name properly:

me: "hey, it's you" (she has two middle names)

her (without any hesitation): "beautiful manes??"

monday january 11

today i had a baffling live chat with a rogers representative named sasha, who - after learning that i was using firefox as my browser - gave me a lengthy spiel about how 64% of people on the internet use google chrome, explaining that they simply couldn't prioritize the less-than-5% of their customer base that use firefox.

after explaining that my question had nothing to do with my browser and that i simply wanted to see if i could add starz to my existing hbo/crave package, sasha said: "what happens, when you say 'starz' in the remore (sic), then click 'ok' to subscribe?"

it became clear to me at this point that sasha thought my rogers equipment was far more advanced than it actually is. still, even though i was 99.9% sure i didn't have any sort of voice-controlled remote, i half-heartedly said "starz" into it and felt pretty dumb when, obviously, nothing happened.