Final verdict on The Listener: 7.5/10.



This is a mixture of a medical drama/cop show with a sci-fi element that works surprisingly well. Additional bonuses: (1) Craig Olejnik starring as the hot paramedic lead and (2) the fact that it's unabashedly Canadian, featuring and making references to familiar Toronto locations.

Here's hoping for a successful run in the US and a resulting season 2!

You can tell what kind of guy he is when you look at his Twitter page and notice the people he's following include Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and Karl Rove.

Being Erica is such an endearing and quirky show. It's one of the best Canadian produced shows that I've seen out there, and I highly recommend it to any and everyone:

6 reasons why you should be watching Being Erica.

. Snow + road construction = people forgetting common sense when driving. Hate having to be on the road when it's like that out there.

. I think things are finally getting resolved with the York U strike. Doesn't affect me in a direct way, but many of my friends go there and it has screwed up their entire academic year. If it were possible, I'd say these teaching assistants should be fired. Because seriously? We're hearing of thousands and thousands of jobs being laid off week after week in all different sectors of society right now. Meanwhile, these people are being offered a whole bunch of cushy benefits and a hefty pay raise but are seemingly greedy enough to continue demanding more while the economy obviously SUCKS!! And doing this for their own benefit while totally disregarding the 50,000 students they're putting in a dangerous situation - especially those meant to be graduating this spring.

. Gilmore Girls re-runs make me happy. Particularly if they're from season one. Gold.

. Also watched this really cool interview Newsweek did with a collection of Oscar-nominated actors (it's an annual roundtable thing). People like Brad Pitt, Robert Downey Jr, and Frank Langella gathered together, swapping tales across the table of getting into the business/politics/past experiences like old war stories. Highly recommend watching it here if you can't pick up a hardcopy. (Also amusing: Anne Hathaway attempting to come up with genious annecedotes but not quite succeeding, and in the process calling RDJ 'dangerous').

. Need: A vacation. A better mode of transport. More time in general.

They've been showing the closed doors of Rideau Hall on the news all morning, while bringing in various political pundits to discuss what the possible outcome of all this might be, just waiting for the doors to open and some sort of announcement to be made.

And now they're reporting a decision will be made within the hour. We'll see. But so far: all eyes on the news.

ETA: The outcome: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper shut down Parliament on Thursday in an unprecedented attempt to keep his government in power. Governor General Michaelle Jean, who represents Britain's Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, granted the unusual request to suspend parliament. Had she refused, Harper would have had two choices: step down or face a no-confidence vote Monday he was sure to lose.

So apparently there is no longer any doubt and indecisiveness concerning the future of Gilmore Girls. As of today, it’s been announced that the show will in deed be ending with this season’s finale – which airs in precisely two weeks. Here’s hoping that this very prolonged decision doesn’t hinder the deliverance of a suitable finale. After seven years of following the ups and downs of this show; witnessing Rory dreaming of Harvard at Chilton and suddenly becoming Yale-bound, Lorelai going from Chris to Max to Luke to Chris to Luke again (note that I’m not bothering to list the cringe-worthy Jason from Season Three here), and of course, everything from the Stars Hallow bid-a-basket festival to the 24 hour dance marathon – we deserve a really good finale. So David Rosenthal, you better deliver.

First snow fall of the year. :D

...And five midterms next week. I'm going insane.

It's only been a week since school started again, but I'm already feeling the stress. I've been called insane and crazy for the amount of courses I'm taking this semester, but dropping them really isn't an option for me at this point. I'm finding all of them interesting, so I don't mind having to do tons of work. But the never-ending readings we get assigned in every Psych class really suck.

However, this bit of news just brightened up my day considerably. :)

Conan O'Brian talking to Yahoo about the Emmys:

Some hit shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives were snubbed this year. Can you make up some awards for them so they don't feel too bad? I'm backstage much of the time, and there's a large table of Emmys back there, but nobody's really guarding them. This is frontier justice — I'm just handing out Emmys to people who I think deserve them. Hugh Laurie, I've told him to meet me in the parking lot behind the Shrine Auditorium and I'm giving him — it'll say Technical Emmy for Lighting, but he can get another nameplate. And who can stop me? I suppose the Academy, or anybody with a little bit of muscle mass. Or even a particularly tall girl.

Hahaha.

I’ve been doing my best to resist spoilers ever since I decided to read a full spoiler filled summary of the season two finale of Gilmore Girls way back when. I discovered that Christopher was having a baby with Sherry, Jess was back in town and that Rory actually ended up kissing Jess by the end of the episode. Needless to say, when I actually watched the finale on TV, I wasn’t surprised by any of it. Reading spoilers had taken away all of the fun.

But there’s all this buzz right now about the season premiere spoilers of House. And I’m very tempted to click on that easily-accessible spoiler link...

Done! No more dissections, lab tests, boring lectures on plants & fungi or even more boring textbooks on plants & fungi. After four exhaustive months, it feels really good to not have to worry about Biology coursework. I have about four weeks of summer vacation until uni starts up again, and I plan to enjoy them fully. This means seeing old friends that are home for the summer. ♥

Finally saw The Devil Wears Prada with the sister last week. Probably the best movie I've seen all summer. Go out and see it, if you're into chick flick type movies. :D

Insane, insane weekend. A mixture of work, birthday parties, amusement parks, job-hunting and shoe-shopping. It seems as though everytime I attempt to set aside time to do my school-related work, it never ends up happening. I'm a week behind on readings and have an exam coming up at the end of the month. But it's summer and the end-of-school spirit is in the air for everyone else here so it's starting to get to me too.

I'm off to get some much needed sleep...but before I go:

a Happy Birthday goes out to Hugh Laurie. :D

( What Were We Thinking? )

Bob Herbert, a journalist from the New York Times, expresses this far better than I ever will. Everything that he's just summed up and written so beautifully in that article voices every thought that's been running through my head for so long now about this war that we're engaged in.

These words were passed along to me by Jesse Carmichael, who wrote along with them "I want to take a moment to pass along these words to you so that you may pass them along to someone else and they can pass them along and hopefully more of an opposition to violence can be felt in the world." Words can be powerful that way. More powerful than war.

This war seems to have no purpose and isn't doing anyone any good. I don't understand why the Bush adminstration is backing it with so much emphasis
when there are real tragedies happening in other parts of the world where our help and concern is needed much more. The tragic situation happening in Darfur (savedarfur.org/) right now is being called a holocaust in our time. If only there was a way to reach out and make an impact to stop these events.

It’s been crazy. My first year of university wrapped up a few weeks ago. It’s strange how quickly the past eight months went by. And my two week vacation went by even faster. Unfortunately, I didn’t spend it away in an interesting place (there was a possible trip to England in the works which just didn’t end up happening) but that time off school and work gave me the chance to see some people I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet up all that often throughout the year, so seeing them again was nice. ♥

But those two weeks came and went, and now summer school has officially started. Everything’s extremely fast-paced, meaning that we’re given a test about every other week. And this happens to be the week from hell. I caught the flu somehow over the weekend, extremely odd considering that it’s May. And I’m getting my wisdom teeth pulled out this Saturday. It doesn’t help that whenever I mention this to anyone, they feel it’s necessary to remind me of the extreme discomfort and pain I’ll be feeling for days afterward. So NOT looking forward to that.

Moving on. The CW announced their fall lineup. And guess what? Related & Everwood didn’t make the list. I had a feeling that Related wouldn’t be picked up for another season since much of the cast had already signed on for new projects that didn’t have anything to do with the show and the episodes towards the end had started dragging down. But I loved the concept behind the show and will still be sad to see it go. But Everwood, seriously? That show was so good, I don’t see how they cancelled it and kept One Tree Hill. Who makes these decisions anyway?

Might be spoiler-y to some, so my thoughts are below the cut...

( The Season Finale )

I can't focus and therefore can't seem to study. The weather's so nice out and there are so many things I'd rather be doing right now than looking at my Psychology notes. :(

A couple of hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin shared with the world the secret of his success. Never leave that till tomorrow, he said, which you can do today. This is the man who discovered electricity. You think more people would listen to what he had to say. I don't know why we put things off, but if I had to guess, I'd have to say it has a lot to do with fear. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, sometimes the fear is just of making a decision, because what if you're wrong? What if you're making a mistake you can't undo? The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can't pretend we hadn't been told. We've all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still sometimes we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today's possibility under tomorrow's rug until we can't anymore. Until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin really meant. That knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping, and even the biggest failure, even the worst, beat the hell out of never trying. - GA

This show has some of the best monologues on television.

Gwyneth Paltrow gave birth to a baby boy today, Moses Martin. Chris and Gwyneth seem to have a thing for uncommon baby names don't they? Well, Apple grew on me after a while so I'm sure Moses will do the same, it's a lot better than the other rumored baby names though - Capone and Mortimer.

Exams are really starting to get to me. Lately my life has just been consisting of school and work and nothing else. So I’m eagerly anticipating the day of my final exam where I’ll be able to shove away all these notes, textbooks and binders and not look at them again for a couple of weeks. (I’m signing up for summer courses since I’m one credit behind so it’ll only be a short vacation). Studying and exam season itself isn’t what’s really getting to my head. It’s knowing that soon first year will come to a closing and I’ll be on a deadline to decide what I plan to major/minor/specialize in and I’m not really anywhere close to figuring all of that out. It seems to easy to say “follow your heart and what you’re passionate in”, but is that really going to get me anywhere in the end?

Anyway, enough school talk. FanForum hasn’t been working for me since last night (so FanForum friends reading this – is the same thing happening with y’all?).

I downloaded a few episodes of Freddie last night, I never really pictured Freddie Prinze Jr. in a comedic role, but the concept of the show sounded good. So I decided to see what it was all about and I really like it…maybe a huge factor in my liking it is because of Freddie Prinze Jr. ;)