Welcome to the Jungle, says the evil prince?
Well then. That was a weekend to remember! Rebecca came up to visit again, with all the usual merriment and chaos.
Because everybody at work has been on my case about not having been there, we made the trek down to the mighty Salad King for yummy Thai goodness. Strikingly, there are only two salads on the menu; I have no idea why they call it that. However, the food is excellent (about a billion different Thai curries and stirfries), and the almost cafeteria-like setup (gigantic stainless-steel communal tables, shared benches, etc.) pretty much force you to make new friends. I can also report that Thai beer tastes...pretty much exactly like North American lager. However, it is Approved by the King, which surely means lots.
After that, we moseyed on down to Richmond and John (having to elbow our way through a crowd out front of Muchmusic, as apparently the cast of Twilight was in the building, and Twihards were blocking both Queen and John Streets) to climb the longest escalator I've ever seen (holy shit, four stories!) and see Quantum of Solace. I really don't understand all the critical hatin' on the movie; it's not "great cinema," and it wasn't quite as innovative and awesome as Casino Royale before it, but it was still a solid, entertaining action film. The new Bond girls were winners, the fight scenes were great, and even some of the oft-decried Mark Forster arty touches (oil is the new gold!) were pretty spiffy. I was satisfied, anyway.
For Sunday, I threw Rebecca at Jess for the day so I could go to work, and what a crazy shift that was. It was the perfect storm: the Santa Claus parade, the buildup towards Christmas, and a huge sale. The crowds were massive, and the lineup at my till never really ended. Thankfully, I was in such contagiously good spirits that not even the grumpiest of customers really got to me or got mad at me. In fact, the day would have gone off without a hitch had one of the head cashiers not made a counting mistake earlier in the day that made it look like I was hundreds of dollars off on my final totals. Cue a minor panic attack, until we dug the truth out of the back of the safe.
To conclude the awesome weekend (actually, this was the raison d'être for the weekend), Rebecca and I reunited at Lee's Palace (with a hilarious cameo appearance from Jess!) to see a concert at Lee's Palace. The opener was painfully, painfully bad; his voice was passable, but his songs were hopelessly cheesy and bland. After that, though, came a band I got into in the first year of my undergrad and still love: Ours. They aren't so much a band as a vehicle for the three-and-a-half-octave post-Buckley insanity of Jimmy Gnecco's voice, but damned if it doesn't all come together brilliantly live. Such a huge voice coming from a man who is probably less than 120 pounds (starvation? Heroin? Theories abound) just doesn't seem possible, and his chosen backing band is both tight and hilariously versatile (trumpet and bass at the same time? Why not?). I might've cowered in fear during the outro of "Murder," and all the songs from the first album (i.e. the ones the audience might've actually known) brought the house down. Why the hell is that band not more famous?
In fact, Ours was opening for somebody more famous: Lukas Rossi, that eyelinered dink from reality TV. Thus, I did something I've never done before: walked out on a show. It only took two songs (and the predations of a disturbing amount of local cougars trying to get closer to the stage) before Rebecca and I fled in terror. At least I got my money's worth from Ours.
