Pillow Blog: My Top 10 Criterion Collection Films

The Criterion Collection hosts a series of Top 10 lists on its site, so notables can tell you all about their favourite films in the collection. I'm not famous. I'm not even ambitious. But here are mine anyway:

• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
• Mystery Train
• Beauty and the Beast
• Amarcord
• The Third Man
• The Last Days of Disco
• Crumb
• Ivan the Terrible Pt. I and II (cheating? perhaps.)
• My Man Godfrey
• Ran

Feel free to clip and save for the next time you're lost at the video store!

Book Covers I Have Loved: Algoma, Dani Couture

I have a mad crush on Invisible Publishing and their covers. It's a smaller Canadian publishing house, but I think their design work can easily stand with anything the big guys are putting out these days. For example, this lovely, stark cover for Dani Couture's Algoma. In spite of the unity of its colour palette, there's something unsettling about the whole. Maybe it's the shakiness of the font. All I know is that I want to order this. And Jonah Campbell's Food and Trembling. Actually, why not throw in this sinister cover for kevin mcpherson eckhoff's Forge and make it a triad? Judging from this Chronicle Herald story (worth reading just to have Invisible's founder, Robbie MacGregor, make you feel really lazy), design credit should go to Megan Fildes.

3D Printing and Winning

Greetings from bed, dear readers. One of the many ways I fail as a woman (blow dryers? how do they work?) is that I cannot handle one day - one fully day - of wearing heels without having to take a recovery day the next. This is how I imagine you better-disciplined folks feel after a spin class or a half-marathon. I feel your pain in pursuit or outfit consistency. In spite of my aching limbs, I did manage to make it to Autodesk this morning (a Saturday morning, for Christ's sake) for 10 am to take part in the Ladies Learning Code 3D Printing Workshop.

I had unfinished business with 3D printers. Back when I lived in Victoria, I went to the Makerspace's 3D printing workshop. I was the only girl. I tried to print a cube. And I somehow managed to break the Makerbot printing a cube in such a way that a piece of it went flying across the room, to punctuate my incompetence. I had to make things up to myself and my gender.

Success! An important step in equality has been made. It's hard to see - and I really should have held out for a printer loaded up with coloured plastic - but that's an octopus on a pendant. No machines were harmed in its production. The people at the workshop, particularly Matt Compeau and Bi-Ying Miao of Hot Pop Factory, were great and I couldn't have successfully made this without them. So sign up for a workshop and learn something new. Or even just to get even with the past.

Book Pile for April 4 (And Introducing the Best Book Club)

1. Trying to Fall Back in Love With Toronto Text: uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, Edited by Jason McBride and Alanna Wilcox
2. Silly Little Thriller Book: Bulldog Drummond, Sapper
3. Serious Business NonFiction: Lenin's Tomb, David Remnick
4. Up With Science Tract: Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre

This will be the last exciting book pile I'll post for at least a month and a half, because from now on I'll be reading one book. At least it's a book that's about as thick as all four of these put together. I'm finally tackling David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I had a brief wave of genius pass over me, when I realized that the Best Book Club would, first, be flexible on how much of the month's book you had actually read, and second, feature booze. So I chose a book that would be almost impossible for anyone to finish. And I'm telling anyone who cares to join to bring two bottles of beer to my house next May. The bottles will go into a mystery bucket, and then the readers will blindly pick from the bucket, getting to try two new beers before we all babble about the book. I am, however, making Girl Guide-style badges for anyone who actually completes Infinite Jest, because that kind of accomplishment should not go unrecognized.