I don't normally partake in the ritual of New Years' resolutions - my life is a series of false starts and abandoned goals, why begin the year with a bunch more? - but if everyone else is doing something, so must I, unless it's Twittering or wearing those nasty earlobe stretchers. (Why? Why?) So I came up with four big ones: Cook more often, start a savings account, work out regularly, and write something daily. My writing muscle (much like its physical counterparts) is in dire need of some stretching and toning. While writing the previous sentence I wondered if the part in brackets should actually be between commas. Probably not a good sign.

Regardless, the cooking thing will be slightly more difficult to stick to, if only for my off-the-wall work schedule and the fact that I work at a restaurant, meaning a hot meal is only a few minutes away when I'm there. And it's free. But cooking is my therapy - it grounds me, makes me feel less straggled and flighty, and I'm in an immeasurably better mood during and after whipping up something for lunch or dinner. (Breakfast is another issue entirely. I have no patience. Cereal and coffee, please. Save that cooking crap till I've mainlined some espresso.)

Speaking of cooking, I watched Julie and Julia over the Christmas break. I expected better, because it seems like it should work: Blogger Julie Powell cooking her way through Julia Child's seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking while we glimpse episodes of Julia's life in France in the late '50s. But the movie doesn't give us a clear sense of Julie Powell as a person, let alone why she'd dedicate a year of her life to cooking every recipe in a doorstop of a cookbook and writing about her experience to an unknown, unseen audience. Rather than convey how frazzled and disenchanted with her life Powell had become, to the point that only the therapeutic power of cooking (and the encouraging spirit of Julia Child) could bring her back from the edge, the movie paints Powell as a whiny, stubborn drama queen who needs to get out more, and makes her blogging project seem arbitrary rather than the passion-driven mission it was. Near the end of the film, when Powell talks about how cooking through Julia's book "saved her", my immediate response was, "From what, exactly?" The movie doesn't show us. The role needed more muscle, more backstory, and a more self-assured, earthier actress than Amy Adams to play it. I've loved Adams in other roles, but she just doesn't have the presence to make Powell's occasional tantrums and snarkiness tolerable.

The Julia Child half of the film works much better, but perhaps that's because it focuses on a larger-than-life persona known to a generation of readers and television viewers, rather than a niche blogger with a greater need for context. Meryl Streep, unsuprisingly, does an excellent job in the role, nailing Child's warbly voice and spirited demeanor without making her a caricature.

The movie does score some points by making neither of these women out to be saints, and for depicting blogging (and cooking) as having worth and deeper meaning beyond its mundane methodology. But it's still thin, underwritten, and lacks a clear focus.

And that's my New Years' brain dump. Hope your 2010 is all puppies and flowers.

I am not in love with summer. I do not spend every waking moment of the four-month stretch after my March birthday anticipating summer, extolling the virtues of summer, basking in the glow of summer, lamenting the relative un-summeriness of this summer compared to last summer and/or the expected summer quotient given the current calendar month and the "long-ass winter we just had", reveling with sheer joy in all things summery - flip flops, beach trips, sunbathing, iced lattés, Sublime tunes, etc. - to the point of obnoxiousness, or dejectedly reminding all and sundry about the impending autumn and how "it feels like it was May just a few weeks ago, waaaah, what happened?" I have neither the physical fortitude nor the attention span to handle another month of summer's suffocating omnipresence, so I don't want to hear your moaning. Move to Florida if you love the heat so much. Me, I'd like to stop sweating for a day.

And if that day comes before September, so much the better, but I'll gladly wait until the proper calender autumn for the cooler air to make its triumphant return. Ah, autumn. A good crisp fall day is like a gift from baby Jesus to me. The leaves are turning, so summer's whitewashed color palette is giving way to richer, deeper hues and more interesting contrasts. I can stop fighting my natural coloring with pastels and primaries and start wearing jewel tones and black, in all of its various permutations, again. I can put away the shorts and flip-flops, which flatter my chicken legs and bony feet about as much as that animal on top of Rihanna's head flatters her facial structure, and start wearing jeans. Dark jeans. Dark jeans that can hug my legs and not create a second skin of sweat halfway through the day. And shoes! Shoes with socks! Maybe even a snappy blazer or a zip-up hoodie! Oh, it's like Christmas morning.

Don't get me wrong, every once in a while a day that feels like it's trapped inside a sauna can strike my fancy. I like being in the sun - it's a refresher after being stuck inside during the winter months - but up to a point it becomes a kind of slow torture, that point being about 28 degrees Celsius with no breeze. Then every action becomes an effort, every movement an inch further away from "comfortably warm" to "sweet Jesus how much sweat can one human body create why is no one else as visibly dewy as I am OH MY GOD AIR CONDITIONING MY KINGDOM FOR AIR CONDITIONING". Isn't this Canada? When did London, Ontario relocate to the surface of the sun?

Y'all can worship summer; my faith is firmly rooted in the Good Book of September and Beyond. Your move, Mother Nature.

The more I think about it, the more Juno feels like the kind of movie Ghost World, The Royal Tenenbaums, or Little Miss Sunshine should have been: an indie comedy that manages not to drown in twee, affected cleverness. At the very least, Juno strikes a better balance than those others between writerly quirk and honest emotion - just when you feel like the title character (played by Ellen Page) is too precious a wiseacre to handle, along comes a revealing, hearfelt moment to stave off any impending eye-rolling. Credit must also go to Page, who somehow makes Juno's every sarcastic one-liner utterly believable - you buy what she's selling, where a more self-consciously Hollywood actress would have inflected every line with a knowing, ironic air.

Most importantly, though, Juno MacGuff is a 16-year old girl, and she's written like one. Diablo Cody (who deservedly won the screeplay Oscar) doesn't turn the character into one of those impossibly mature know-it-alls that so thoroughly permeate the teen movie genre. Juno puts on a cool, no-nonsense exterior, but when emotions start roiling and the drama of her life comes into sharper focus, she clings to childlike hope; asking her father to convince her that everlasting love does exist, that perhaps fairy-tale romances have a grain of truth, she's a kid again. Juno is the most fully-realized, authentic vision of a teenager that's been seen on a movie screen in a long time, and for that if nothing else, Juno deserves props. All the rest - the laugh-a-minute dialogue, the hip/sweet soundtrack, the pitch-perfect suppporting performances from Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, and Alison Janney as Juno's infuriating yet lovable stepmom - is just gravy.

Finally got around to renting it last night. I liked it, but I didn't love it, and I can't quite figure out why. Some parts drag a little, for sure, and too many of the funny bits seem tacked-on. There are more pop-culture references than you can shake a stick at, most of which are extraneous and self-indulgent - it's almost as if writer/director Judd Apatow wants everyone to know that he's watched more movies and TV shows than you could ever hope to, but Apatow doesn't really strike me as that type of writer, so...what gives? The guy is hugely talented, adept at penning scenes that drip with realistic awkwardness, and unlike too many mainstream comedies, his feature characters that ring truer to life than most dramas can manage. (Except in the case of Paul Rudd here - I just couldn't get a bead on his character, which I think is a case of underwriting. He has a bunch of funny lines that don't add up to any kind of cohesive picture of a person. Apatow must have thought that Rudd could take a bare-bones outline of a character and run with it, but...not so much.)

My point is that Judd Apatow doesn't need to go the Seth MacFarlane route of pop-culture references disguised as hilarity (much as I love Family Guy, that kind of comedy can't last for a 90-minute feature, especially one that aspires to something a bit more human and emotional like Knocked Up). He's plenty funny on his own merits, and he picks great actors to work with: Seth Rogen is perfect as the shlub with a good heart, Leslie Mann is hilariously oddball, the band of stoner geeks are funny without trying too hard, and Katherine Heigl is a knockout. I've never watched more than five minutes of Grey's Anatomy and generally don't give a rat's about Heigl's inability to censor herself when giving interviews, but I think it's safe to say the Emmy win was no fluke - she's plain terrific in Knocked Up, running the gamut of emotions while staying nicely under-the-top and grounding the movie with her Everygirl sense of relatability. And the scenes between Heigl and Rogen are, unequivocally, the best-written in the movie, and a reminder that when Judd Apatow is on his game, he's pretty close to untouchable.

So Knocked Up needed a more tight-assed editor and a writer who wasn't afraid to let the situations (and characters) speak for themselves as a rule, rather than the exception, but overall I enjoyed it. I think Apatow has better movies in him - truly great ones, the kind that don't need a million "fuck"s and masturbation gags to goose laughs (damn these extended and unrated DVDs). I'm looking forward to seeing what he does next once he gets the Superbads and Walk Hards out of his system.

Oh, Bon Appétit magazine. I want to like you, I really, really do. But just when I get to thinking you're Food & Wine for the less pretentious, you give me something like February 2008's "Green Issue". An entire issue devoted to the few, the proud, the enlightened among us foodies who consume only free-range meat, only locally-grown produce, and only organic, bio-degradable, sustainable, recyclable, low-carbon-footprintable, utterly eye-rollable products everywhere else in their lives. But for now let's focus on the food, and the derisible buzzword of the moment: "locavore".

Locavores are people who buy their food stricly from local sources - meat, produce, dairy, the works. People like Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon on page 27: a couple from Vancouver (of course; it's Canada's San Francisco) who spent a year living as locavores, saw the light, and wrote a book about it. A book that they presume holds interest for, you know, other people. And the rest of the issue continues in the same vein: profies of organic chocolate, rethinking the notably sustainable sardine, eco-friendly restaurants in major U.S. cities, a new "green" vodka on the market, designer bags made out of old coffee bean sacks (fair trade, naturally), etc. All part and parcel of the organic food craze, the vegetarianism of the 2000s.

And before I start sounding like a bitter naysayer, let me just yay-say this: I have no problem with organic food - the industry itself, the growing trend towards it, the people who buy it and the farmers who supply it. I love that consumers are concerned about the welfare of the animals that we too often unthinkingly eat, caring not where the meat comes from and what happened to it on the way to our dinner plate. I love that we can buy fruit and vegetables that haven't been sprayed to hell with pesticides and saturated with growth hormones - that we can taste a natural, pure, untampered-with Florida orange right at our nearest grocery store. What I can't abide by is the snobbery that so often goes along with said organic consumption, the notion that unless you're best friends with your dairy farmer and pick your own tomatoes you're somehow contributing to the downfall of the planet's resources - or, at the very least, an ignorant simpleton who might as well just chug the whole bottle of DDT if you're going to put supermarket broccoli in your mouth, for the love of crimony. Don't you care what you eat?

Yes, I do. I also care about not coming across as a self-righteous blowhard, and furthermore, I respect that not everyone lives in the Tuscan hills and thus can't always subsist on what's local and in season - that sometimes, you need to buy mushrooms that perhaps have had a bit of a road trip on the way to your grocery basket. But that's okay. We're not going to die, the sky is not going to erupt in ozone holes and the birds and bees will continue to chirp and buzz in their as-yet-un-clearcutted forests. Yes, it would be wonderful if everyone decided to demand more environmentally-friendly food and more humanely raised meat from here on out, but until such time, keep your preachy rants to yourself, your foodie memoirs in the drawer, and your superiority complex set on a gentle simmer.

For this month's Mixology Monday, Paul at The Cocktail Chronicles has suggested an interesting topic: Blog Love. In essence, this is where we highlight drink recipes that we've picked up from other cocktail blogs, as well as word or two about the drink blog(s) we love and why. Minimum 500 words, no grading curve.

I kid. At any rate, since delving into the world of amateur mixology sometime last year, I've discovered and bookmarked a wealth of food and drink blogs, all of them excellent. Paul's blog is just one example. I'm not exaggerating when I say that these bloggers are a rare breed: Well-read, well-informed, funny, sharp, unfailingly interesting and entertaining writers. Many of them are professional bartenders, many are simply home enthusiasts. Either way, they know their stuff.

One of my favorites is Married...with dinner, authored by Anita and Cameron, two self-described "San Fransisco food dorks" who know from great cocktails. One of their entries from a while back concerned the Painkiller, a delightful tropical highball that I think can only fairly be described as a Pina Colada on steroids. It's a nice little number to have in your repertoire for those times when it's hot outside, you've had a long day at work, and everyone around you is working your last nerve. Or for parties. Your guests will love you. And probably try to make out with you.

Despite the fair amount of fruit juice and other numbing agents, this drink is definitely one where you'll want to use quality dark rum. I ran out of my usual Black Seal and so had to make do with Captain Morgan - it was pleasant enough, but I'm sure Black Seal (or Anita and Cameron's recommended Pusser's) would make the drink fantastic. No complaints here, though.

Painkiller
4 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
1 oz orange juice
1 oz Coco Lopez coconut cream (which I can't find anywhere here, so I used a different brand)
2-4 oz dark rum (I went with 3)
whole nutmeg

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into an ice-filled highball glass. Top with a grating of fresh nutmeg and a pineapple slice, if desired.


As for the 411 on my own blogging efforts: I've been writing this blog for about five years now, but it was only recently that I started blogging about cocktails, because it was only recently that I started exploring alcoholic drinks beyond beer and coolers (or "alcopops", for the American readers). Shortly after I turned 19 (the legal drinking age in Canada), I decided to try making my own Martinis, the gin kind, just to see what the big deal was - after all, which cocktail is more firmly engrained in the pop culture consciousness than the James Bond staple? I walked into a liquor store as a legal customer for the first time, picked out a small bottle of Beefeater and some Martini & Rossi vermouth, and mixed them up. I was largely unimpressed, although at that point I can't even remember if there was a proper cocktail shaker in the house, so I can only imagine the various faux pas I likely committed while making the drink, right down to the amount of ice I used. I may even have shaken the thing. At any rate, I quickly moved on to Black Russians and Chocolate Martinis, and continued drinking Corona and Smirnoff Ice like any good alcohol newbie.

Fast forward about three years, and after some enlightening bar-hopping and Internet browsing, I'm discovering the joys of Sidecars, Margaritas, Manhattans, Pina Coladas, Pegu Clubs, Mojitos, Daiquiris, and other sundry liquors and libations...including the authentic, proper Martini (a remarkable creature it is, too). I've boned up on my knowledge of bourbon and scotch, and find myself drooling at florid descriptions of obscure liqueurs and vintage cocktail ingredients. In short, I've been converted, and it's largely thanks to all the enthusiastic food and drink bloggers on the Web. I've listed my favorites in the Links section (although it needs an update), but there are a host of others that are only a mouse click away, each filled with excellent knowledge and smart humor. Check them out.

Listening to the radio the other day, amidst the ubiquitous (and awesome) "Umbrella" and the tiresome (if catchy) "Makes Me Wonder", I heard "Hey There Delilah" by the Plain White T's. You've probably heard it, too. Nice song, well-written and heartfelt, a little on the sappy side. But it's most notable for illustrating how much the Internet has changed the way we listen to music, and more importantly, how it has changed the music industry as a whole.

"Hey There Delilah" was released as an album track by the Plain White T's, a largely unknown indie act, in 2005. Now, two years later, the song is sitting at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, setting itself up nicely as the main contender to knock Rihanna's "Umbrella" off the top spot. I don't know how it got there - I'm not sure anyone does, least of all the band - but I'm willing to bet a pretty penny that three or four years ago, this never would have happened. "Hey There Delilah" would perhaps have become a fan favorite, charting somewhere in the 20s or 30s on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, but there's no way it would have found itself among the T-Pains and Fergies on the radio airplay spectrum. No, "Hey There Delilah"'s success is firmly rooted in the digital download revolution, which was made concrete a couple of years ago when Billboard starting counting digital single sales toward its formulation of the Hot 100, previously devoted to airplay and physical single sales only. People heard "Delilah" somewhere - perhaps a friend recommended it, or they read a positive review in a magazine - and they downloaded it in droves, and the snowball kept growing. It's the same phenomenon that rocketed D4L's "Laffy Taffy" to #1, despite the fact that it's one of the most lazily produced and ill-conceived rap tracks since the dawn of the genre. For whatever reason, people liked it (or they enjoyed it from an ironic standpoint - please God, tell me all those downloads were for the sake of irony), and the Billboard charts bespoke of the song's popular online demand. And lo, there it was every hour on 106.9 FM, driving me crazy.

The public is now dictating which songs make it into heavy radio rotation more than ever before, and they're doing it through the power of the Internet. For all the talk of how music downloads and iPods would deal a death blow to traditional radio, it seems the two have a more symbiotic relationship than the Chicken Littles of the the music industry would care to admit. Flukes become chart-toppers, indie acts have their day in the sun, careers are made or broken based on how many mouse clicks that "Buy Song" button receives today. It's exciting to envision what else lies in store for the ever-tightening relationship between the music industry and its consumers, and it's refreshing to know that if listeners would rather hear a different Gwen Stefani song than the one record executives choose as the next single, well, that's the one they'll probably hear. Bring on the revolution.