Putting the Id back in idiot

2002-12-13T16:26:00.000-05:00

The angst-o-rama of earlier is abating...slightly... but here's the skinny, as reported in an e-mail to my darlin' Mel earlier on...

Sorry I was in such a foul mood today...I didn't really feel like explaining
while other people were in the office, but I spent all morning basically
re-typing somebody's 12-page resumé, which was boring and frustrating, because the software'd crashed and I lost about two pages of it and had to re-do them.

Compounding this, running into Nancy (ex-girlfriend I don't like) last week led Scott to feature her as his column subject this week (she's still quite active in the English community, and part of lots of committees and groups and blah blah blah)...so while I was toiling away re-typing this totally pointless document that nobody needed and there was no point in even doing -- 80% of it was English in the first place, so "translating" it was a joke -- while I was doing this, Scott was talking a desk away to the girl that dumped me and trashed my self-confidence, listening to her list off all her achievements so he could give her a half-page of glorification in the paper tomorrow.

All of this led me to wondering what the hell I'm doing with my life,
retyping other people's resumés and renovating a house instead of doing, well, interesting stuff, and a very bad mood.

2002-12-13T10:42:00.000-05:00

Putting the Id back in idiot

Just finished typing 4,500 words of Pfizer resume. Basically, a long, long, long list of publications that the most boring, tedious, bloody irrelevant person in the world has published over the last 20-30 years of her bloody boring, irrelevant life. Christ almighty, the only thing more boring than neurologists is...nothing. There is nothing more boring than a career neurologist.

Nada.

This is the first time I have ever hated my job.

Yeargh.

2002-12-13T10:32:00.000-05:00

Talk About Comics :: View topic - Gun control

I was listening to the news last night, and apparently Canada's gun control law, being 500 times over budget and rather unweildy, is in danger of being shuttled off. And I say, "dag nabbit."

Listening to proponents of the law blither away with weak defences of it, I felt they missed the core component of gun control that I really like:

If something can enable a real stupid person to kill me from over 50 feet away, I'm all for keeping track of it.

I mean, you could throw a rock or a stick from a few dozen feet, but you'd have to rely pretty heavily on (a) surprise, (b) luck, and (c) your ability to hypnotize somebody from a great distance, making them completely unable to duck. Rock- and baseball- and knife-throwing all require a fair amount of skill and/or chance, and none of them usually travel faster than the speed of sound.

I've also read a bit of history in my day, and never have I run across somebody going on a "bow-and-arrowing spree" or a "rock-throwing spree" or a "pointy stick rampage." The gun (and pretty much any other explosives-using device such as the hand grenade, land mine, and Pumpkin Bomb, if you're Green-Goblin-inclined) is the only way I can think of for a card-carrying lunatic to do me in without me getting some sort of half-decent shot at defending myself.

Let me paint two parallel scenes here:

Scene One: Madman with knife decides to attack me.

Me: "Golly. That fellow with the knife seems to be walking over here rather briskly, and foaming around the mouth. Perhaps I should kick him in the groin, or run away, or prepare to defend myself, or call the local constabulary."

Scene Two: Madman with gun decides to attach me.

Me: "Golly. That -- arrgh!"

I think that pretty much sums 'er up. Granted, there are lots of legitimate uses for firearms, such as, um, putting down Old Yeller, and killing the man whose wife you're sleeping with on a hunting trip and making it look like an accident. Come to think of it, there aren't really a lot of uses for firearms except for blasting away at unsuspecting wildlife, which is something else I could really do without.

Those who oppose the gun registry generally oppose it because they say it's an infringement on their right to own firearms. In secret. It's an infringement on their right to cache lethal killing devices in their basement. Just in case, you know, there's a big secret-lethal-killing-device party over at Joey's house and you don't want to be left out. Why the heck SHOULDN'T I know who in my neighbourhood has firearms? At least then I'll know who to smile at.

2002-09-12T11:15:00.000-04:00

Talk About Comics :: View Forum - Killroy and Tina

More post-Sept.-11 brouhaha on the Killroy and Tina boards...full thread above under "Upside Down."

Here's my mad meanderings:

***
akhmed wrote:
I'm writing from New York City, where the general consensus is that the attack last year constituted a casus belli -- for those of you who aren't familiar with Latin or nineteenth century geopolitics, that means a cause for war. We were attacked by an organized entity who will, unless harried and pursued, will continue to wage war against us. There is no effective diplomatic response, especially if one wants to have safety and security in the short term.

(mighty snippage)
***

Your points are all good, and well-taken, but I'm afraid I have to differ from New York's concensus view (were you polled?).

I'm not familiar with "just war theory," nor nineteenth-century geopolitics, so you'll have to bear with my wooly thinking, but my problem with your primary statement is this:

Terrorism isn't war. It's terrorism. As Noam Chomsky said, "War is two armies fighting." The idea that war has been declared on America is an unfortunate misunderstanding...war hasn't been declared. War is a state of conflict between two defined groups, and only one group is so far defined: America. By re-defining terrorist acts as "war," the Bush administration is attempting to define the opposing side in the "war" as "anybody that doesn't like America." It takes two to tango, and by saying that "America is at war," Bush is free to roam the Middle East and force people onto his dance card. Spoooooky.

I also have a very personal take on the situation...which goes like this.

Essentially, a bunch of nuts who hated America's foreign policies blew up some very large buildings. America retaliated by bombing the country where a percentage of these nuts and their alleged leader lived (not governed, just lived) "back to the stone age," destroying said country's system of government and creating a new one that was more to their liking.

I live in Quebec, Canada. We have a fair share of nuts, too, very few of whom believe that violence is necessary for Quebec's just and destined separation from the rest of Canada.

It's not hard for me to extrapolate this situation thusly: Quebec separatist nuts blow up a large building that, to them, represents the oppression of Canada's federal government, killing lots of people. Said federal government retaliates by carpet-bombing the hell out of the entire province, killing thousands and thousands of people including, oh, say, me.

They then hunt down and kill the provincial government and set up a new one.

Something about this falls neatly into the "bad idea" category for me.

The extrapolation of the "war" argument is "all those who might harm America must be hunted down and exterminated regardless of any innocents that get killed because they happen to be in the way." Which starts tending away from "war" and more towards, well, "Crusade." Which brings to mind, oddly enough, the last major wholesale slaughter of the citizens of the Middle East by Christian Westerners...funny, that.

2002-09-11T10:21:00.000-04:00

Boy oh boy, I've been waiting a while for this. Y'know why? Because from this day forward, people will have to refer to last September 11 as SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH, TWO THOUSAND AND ONE, and maybe that'll mean people won't bloody name-check it so much.

Point two, just for clarification:

Being in a building when somebody blows it up does not make you a hero. It does not make you an angel. It makes you a victim, absolutely yes, but y'know what? As far as I'm concerned, working in the World Trade Center actually elevates your odds of being scum by about 300%. People that worked in the WTC were probably not, let's face it, saints. Odds are good most of them were materialistic greedheads and officially Part Of The Problem. 3,000 people dead? Statistically, a few were most likely rapists. Definitely several mysoginistic bastards in the bunch, perhaps even a murderer or two. Were any of them thieves, charlatans or uncharitable bastards? For Pete's sake, it was a building full of lawyers and stockbrokers. Take a wild guess.

But now they're heroes. Because a building fell on them. Hoorah.

Well, hooray for September 11, 2002, and the growing awareness that maybe America As A Whole Had It Coming. I wouldn't wish such a horrible death on anyone, but if the Yanks are fool enough to let Dubya charge off to war in Iraq, they're gonna get more. A lot more. And I for one won't be surprised an eensy weensy bit.

2002-09-06T14:22:00.000-04:00

CIA World Factbook 2001

Something ka-ree-pa-hee...

Just checking out the CIA World Factbook to confirm that the official languages of Togo, Benin, Ghana and Guinea are French (a translation gig at work -- do you translate Ministère de l'Eau or not? You don't if the French is the proper name, HENCE you have to know what the official language of the country is...)

Just for poops and giggles, I decided to see what the CIA was saying about Iraq these days.

404-PAGE NOT FOUND.

Huh?

Refresh.

404-PAGE NOT FOUND.

Holy crap, the CIA have already erased Iraq from their &?%$ Worldbook.

Refresh.

Bingo. Up comes Iraq, and all is well with the world.

It was funny, though, wasn't it?

Well, wasn't it?

2002-09-05T10:44:00.000-04:00

Back again! And READY TO RANT!

This'll cross over to I Shall Rule This Planet, for you continuity fiends.

So, for work, I had to watch to translate a hunting video last night, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, my conviction that all hunters should be rounded up and well, shot, is stronger than ever.

It's porn. Really. Think about it: a short film with bad production values and worse music, aimed at giving frustrated men vicarious gratification. Exploitative and entirely focused on trophies. And penetration, in a sense. Lots of "money shots," too. Cheap, nasty, straight-to-video porn.

The thing that really bothered me was the hunting methods. These guys travel all the way to the Yukon to kill a moose and a bear. How do they do it? They HIDE BEHIND A FUCKING TREE, SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY FEET AWAY, and SHOOT AN ANIMAL THAT HAS NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON. Very sportsmanlike, guys. What's next? Gonna lay a few land mines on a deer run? Hey, how about you get your buddies to (a) tranquilize Mike Tyson, (b) cut his arms and legs off, (c) tie him to a chair, (d) gag him, (e) tranquilize him into a coma? Then you can walk into the room, punch him in the stomach, and go to a bar and have beers and talk about your big fucking fight with Mike Fucking Tyson. Fuck, why don't you eliminate the middleman? Go dig up some fucking corpses and punch them a few times? Or run over crippled schoolchildren in a bloody tank? As long as you can do it from an obscene distance with no personal risk of any form of injury to yourself on a totally unsuspecting animal, you're a big man, aren't you?

Did I mention that they shot the bear from across a river? Hiding behind a tree, 650 feet away across a river. Jesus Christ.

So anyway, the movie ends, and our hero René has killed a large moose and a large grizzly bear, probably ejaculated several times into their dead-and-cooling mouths, and is heading back to Quebec with his trophies. "Hey, see that bear? I shot it from 650 feet away with a Remington while it was taking a dump. I'm a big fucking man. Maybe next year I'll buy a fucking SCUD missle and take out a beaver dam."

Please, somebody. Teach the bears to shoot. Or give me my own double-O license and my own high-powered rifle to act as the "animal's advocate." Even child-rapist-drug-dealers get defense provided for them; I think a moose deserves at least that much. Get ready for some instant karma, you cowardly fuckheads.

2002-06-25T14:12:00.000-04:00

SWEET BABY JESUS, NO.

2002-06-22T08:39:00.000-04:00

John Muir Exhibit

A perfectly beautiful word from a book of short stories I'm publishing for a friend; a senior citizen who wants to finally get this book out.

"Haar."

By context, I figured it was sort of a fog, but according to the link above, it's a type of thick, freezing fog that rolls off the sea and implies that a storm is on the rise. I'm doing the 24-Hour-Comic project today, and I think the haar might work its way into it.

Haar. Excellent.

2002-06-19T16:03:00.000-04:00

And you have to draw on this sadness; look into its grave and beautiful face and say slowly:

"I am alive, and I am living, and O I shall be dead"

and let sorrow wrap you in its willow arms. Your nothing is your forever, and only in the threads of the web beyond you shall you find what extends, and it is grief, it is grief, it is grief. Your sorrow shall survive you and reach beyond you; it shall touch lives in other lands; your sorrow shall be a dark monument to your life and will fill the space you once were, fill it a thousandfold and cast your life into infinite sharp-bordered shadow, harshly defined in the light of day and slipping perfectly between the black edges of night.

(sometimes you gotta get your Goth on)

NP: Bob Belden, "Black Dahlia"

2002-06-18T17:27:00.000-04:00

I Shall Rule This Planet
Well, I just have TONS of time, so I started a new blog for more focused ranting. I SHALL RULE THIS PLANET is my attempt to convince all of humanity that I can rock the hip-hop better than any other planetary ruling-type candidates.
Check it out!

2002-06-18T12:04:00.000-04:00

Issue 15: Part 1 of Finder: King of the Cats from Lightspeed Press

Maybe I've been focusing too hard on having a hard story to Reality:Red, the parallel-worlds story that's been running around in my head for several years now, wanting to get hooked up to an artist and turned into a comic.

I'm checking out some online issues of the über-excellent "Finder," and thinking that maybe just relaxing the story -- zooming in and out, picking up different threads around the wheel, and tying them together loosely -- might be a better approach.

It'd require a thorough re-working of the plot, but if that gets me enthusiastic and working on it again, it will be well worth it.

2002-06-17T15:58:00.000-04:00

TERMIUM Plus®

I

AM

BREAKFAST.

I have thrown off the shackles of mere "identity" and embraced my new self as Breakfast. I AM BREAKFAST. I may be toast, I may be cereal. I may be runny eggs. But I AM BREAKFAST. Whenever you eat a rasher of bacon scattered slapdash across a field of oatmeal, I am there. Whenever you spread huckleberry jam on an English muffin and bite deep into its golden body, I am there. Whenever you suck orange juice from a Mr. Cow mug and rejoice in its wholesome freshness, I am there.

I AM BREAKFAST. I am not limited to mundane physical form; nor am I necessarily a member of the Meat and Alternates or Bread and Cereals food groups. I am the glass of milk with that weird-ass shite powder you stir into it because you think it will help you lose weight.

It won't, by the way. I should know. I AM BREAKFAST.

I am the chocolate bar you grab at the newsstand because you want a sugar rush before that big board meeting. I am the smoke from the burned bagel that you inhale deep, wishing you had time to eat, as you rush past the crazy bagel-toasting man on speedway, pushing your moped to speeds you never dreamed of, you heartless bastard.

I AM BREAKFAST. I am the meal of kings, the most important meal of the day, What Gets You Goin'.

I AM BREAKFAST. GET CRACKING.

2002-06-16T16:50:00.000-04:00

Duex-Cinq-Huit: Journeys Into Obsession and Charm

Judas Priest; still kickin' time by looking at a'random other blogs. This person seems hooked on those "personality tests" all over the Internet: which Smurf are you? Which Fairy Tale character are you? Which heroin-addicted former porn star peddling coverless paperbacks on the streets of downtown San Diego are you?

Okay. I'm going to stop all this madness. Time to clean house. No, really.

Really.

Any second now.

2002-06-16T16:38:00.000-04:00

Ye gods. It's been a PHENOMENALLY unproductive Sunday, thanks to rainy weather and a very, very long jog this morning to escort The Mel to work at the Carrefour (the local mall she works at). I was tired when I got home, so I played Unreal Tournament and checked out Hostess Pie ads on seanbaby.com. Now I feel really bad about being so lazy, but as the British say, "sod it."

They probably don't really say that, actually.

Anyway, I've just spent the last half-damn-hour trying to figure out how to add the "blog this!" javascript to my Netscape bookmarks, and can't. Just can't. It won't let me. Stupid Netscape. I want to support the indie rockers of the browser world, but they have to start keeping up with the new kids if I'm not going to just switch over to IE forever and ever.

Not amen.

Anyway. Given that I give The Mel trouble (and I know you're reading this, sweetie, so you can count this as an apology) for not "giving me enough time to write and stuff" in the evenings, this is now her official Get Out Of Jail Free card the next time I start carping about not having enough time to Do My Thang. A Sunday totally blown on video games and jaw-dropping stupidity.

Well, I did put the underwear away. Right? Right?

2002-06-14T10:54:00.000-04:00

Head North: About Us - Matthew Shepherd

Found a living one: Matthew Shepherd, this one an actor/director/producer (like the "Reefer Madness" Matthew Shepherd, except not dead). Also some sort of internet maven.

I suppose when you search ON THE INTERNET for your own name, you'll get a disproportionately large sampling of internet-types, but it still seems, well, WEIRD. This guy sort of looks like the guy from City of Lost Children, but not as bulky.

The coolest bit is he worked for the now-defunct Stan Lee Media. STAN LEE!

2002-06-14T10:52:00.000-04:00

Google Search: matthew shepherd
It's bloody fucking eerie, doing a search on my name, how many Matthew Shepherds are dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Not only is there the Famous Gay Guy from a few years back (spelled Matthew SHEPARD, but In Death There Is No Spelling), but some ensemble actor from Reefer Madness! The Musical (no friggin' fooling) and a former Ontario cabinet minister.

There's a Matthew Shepherd internet geek somewhere in the UK, who I wrote a few weeks ago and never wrote me back, and that seems to be it. Not much else in terms of Matthew Shepherds on the Web.

Dead people and an Internet geek, and me. Ye Gods.

2002-06-13T11:24:00.000-04:00

Stoopid Pigeon

Sorry I haven't been writing lately; I've been working on a new drug that simulates temporal-lobe epilepsy for six to eight hours. It's meant to be taken immediately before a strong hit of heroin; inducing a perpetual sense of déjà vu within the subject and thereby extending and increasing the high. Instead of injecting the heroin, you inject it while feeling like you've already done it; instead of peaking, you peak while flashing back to a prior peak that is occuring simultaneously.

Once the new drug, called "shellshock," is off the drawing board, the plan is to synthesize it chemically with methodone and create a single-drug pathological agent that combines slight doses of heroin and methodone, and a large dose of shellshock. The prospective name for the combo drug is "Tardis," for reasons that should be obvious and if they're not, do a goddamn google search.

There is an eventual societal benefit to all of this, of course: the first is that if shellshock can be married to heroin and methodone, augmenting shellshock should also augment the déjà vu associated with a married methodone hit, making it a better drug for weaning heroin addicts. "Plain" heroin addicts on shellshocked methodone would recieve a different sort of fix that is less chemical (active ingredients of heroin) and more mental (temporal-lobe epilepsy). Weaning would therefore be easier and more effective.

The second aim of the research, which is a bit trickier, is to try to use shellshock with carefully-regimented hallucinogens to unlock psychic potential in latent psychokinetics. "Doubling" reality through simulated or stimulated temporal-lobe epilepsy while increasing the experiential aspects of mental constructions, combined with strong latent psychokinetics, may unlock limited time or space-travel abilities through the manifestation of "doubled" déjà-vu hallucinogenic projections.

But that's neither here nor there. I look forward to receiving my first test results, unless I already have. It's getting hard to tell these days.

2002-06-06T15:47:00.000-04:00

cowboy x people

Dammit, some son of a bitch stole the URL of my dreams.

COWBOY X!
COWBOY X!
YIPPEE!

Now that my girlfriend (the beautiful and talented Mélanie) is working more and more consistently at 8 a.m., I may start setting aside more time in the morning to write.

Or work out, or work on the house, or work on the small-press publishing thing I do from time to time, or work on the Townships webmagazine I keep discussing, or work on drawing, or work on just working in general.

Good lord.

It's a wonder I have time to eat.

2002-05-21T12:50:00.000-04:00

It's Tragic...

...how easily it is to succumb to flattery. Hound's Home, usually one of my favourite strips, linked to this one because they dropped a character in one of their strips (a much-used Man-Man trick), but...ugh.

NP: Saint-Germain du Près-Café compilation

2002-05-17T15:04:00.000-04:00

The FBI Files on "Mad" Magazine.

Now THAT'S worth checking out.

Continuing the story started below...

Heinrich told me that the dead talked to him, but I refused to believe it. It was too predicable -- he was a friend, true, but he was also an emotionally-scarred grave digger who refused all forms of mechanical assistance in his gravedigging efforts. He spent an unhealthy amount of time near dead people, and having him tell me that they told him stories was a little too close to the part where he shows up in my bedroom at 3 a.m. with nothing but a shovel and a grin and tells me that the voices have issued him a special set of commands.

I mean, why encourage that sort of thing, right?

He kept insisting, though, kept blathering on about how the spirits would put words in his ear on those cold, lonely nights; always the cold dry ones, the ones where every exhale made a puff on the wind and a deep breath made your lungs crackle. He'd go on and on about it, and finally, I lost my patience. I'd had enough. Let's have a story, I said. Let's hear one of the stories the dead have told you.

So he told me.

I believed, six hours later, that Heinrich had been communicating with the dead, that they'd somehow hauled themselves out of the cold, cold ground and whispered leaf-dry words into his cauliflower ear. Heinrich could not have made his story up.

He had far too much imagination.

The dead, you see, are boring as hell. Heinrich kept me in my chair for hours and hours in the desperate anticipation that something in these miserable lives might be worth recounting, but it wasn't -- an endless litany of regrets and missed opportunities, a plodding recital of things that these pathetic losers should have done. "I should have kissed Mary Sue Becker on the tilt-a-whirl." "I should have taken the money." "I should have eaten another donut." The dead have seemlingly perfect recollections of every miniscule mistake they ever made, and repeat them endlessly. "I should have bought the Nova." "I should have turned left." "I should have taken the other way to work." And not just life-altering moments. Decisions that led to their deaths take no priority with the dead; just another footnote in the monolith of futile and desperate lives, grasping at Heinrich as the only possible audience in the world for their eternal and ceaseless carping.

I hated it. Not just because it was boring, but because it was so petty.

Years and years ago, I went to an insane asylum. I was walking down the street and saw a sign by the sanitorium gate: OPEN HOUSE TODAY. I'd never been to an insane asylum. I decided to check it out. I spent a couple of hours being given a tour of the place, seeing various rooms, the rec room, the gardens, and I even got to see a play being put on by some of the inmates. It had something to do with abuse, I can't really remember. It wasn't a very good play. I also slipped away from my tour group and spent a bit of time wandering around on my own, looking for all that medieval insane asylum equipment you see in the movies. I didn't find any, but I met a lot of crazy people. And it was one of the most profound disappointments of my life, meeting all these crazy people. I'd been raised on comic books, you see. I'd seen "Silence of the Lambs" and "The Fisher King" and countless B-movies where the villains were deliberately, divinely mad. Here, though, in the insane asylum, they were all shufflers, heads hanging and bobbing as they stared at their feet. Few spoke, and the few that did were either incoherent, or childlike, or pathetically friendly, like a kitten you've locked in a box for three days. It was a horrid experience, and I left not only feeling reduced as a human being, but shattered in my view of insanity. I'd always imagined it, fed by comics and films and TV and books, to be sort of a magical window to a superior reality, but these people were just lost and confused and frightened. Scared to death. There was no greatness to insanity, just people soiling themselves and bumping into walls. It was devastating. It felt like something precious had just been ripped out of me.

And that's the way I felt when Heinrich told me their stories, the stories of the dead. They shouldn't be that boring, that petty, that scrapingly mundane. There should have been greatness to them, some sort of majesty seeping through from the other side; some sort of "magic window to superior reality."

When he was done, Heinrich looked up at me expectantly. "That's just the beginning," he whispered, his voice aching to say more, to unburden himself of the litany of pathos that had been sunk into him every dead-black night of his adult life. I wanted to hit him for sharing what he had, to say nothing of what he wanted to share. Instead I just got up, shook his hand, said "that was the most stultifying six fucking hours of my entire goddamned life, and you can tell the dead I said so," and walked out the door.

I went home that night, and tried out impassioned frustration in the mirror for a full hour. I thought about what I would whisper, in the night, when I was dead, to anyone who would listen. What would I whine on about, my voice being mingled with millions of others, forming the midnight wind of infinite regret?

"Spending six hours listening to goddamn Heinrich," I decided. Then I went to bed.

2002-05-15T15:25:00.000-04:00

I've been trying for about six days straight, and I just can't goddamn feign bemused indifference.

Let's get a few things squared away here, first. When I say "six days straight," I don't mean I've been hanging out in the bathroom in front of the mirror all day squinting and screwing my damn face up. I'm not a weirdo. An hour a day, tops, spread out over like twenty minutes morning, twenty minutes when I get home and twenty minutes before bed. And when I say I can't feign bemused indifference, don't think I can't feign bemused or indifference, 'cause I can do both just fine. It's just the combination of the two always screws me up, and I wind up with scorned pride. Don't ask me how. Scorned pride every time. I've tried the lateral approach, too, a little side-shuffle over from condescending tolerance, but that just leaves me with smug tolerance which is totally, totally wrong.

Heinrich, this guy I went to school with, is the last gravedigger in the country; the last traditional gravedigger. It's all backhoes and augers and pneumatic shit these days, but Heinrich gets out there with a six-foot spade and digs 'till the splinters stick out of his palms like a porcupine handshake. He says people appreciate it, too. Not the living, 'cause they don't notice shit except for chrome and tits, he says, but the dead, they know the value of a hard-dug grave. They crave the sweat and the blood, down there in the hole, and knowing that a man grunted and cursed his way through a root, and pissed in the hole, and buried a little bit of himself down there -- that means something to the dead. That means a lot.

I asked him once if it was a little creepy, working in a graveyard, and Heinrich told me this story about when he was a little kid; being left with his grandmother for the long weekend while his parents were away. His grandmother -- Judith -- was a kind woman, stooped and fat, with sour breath, Heinrich said, always sour like she'd been eating pickes or olives six or seven hours before. Judith had had Heinrich's mother very late in life, so she was old -- into her seventies -- when Heinrich was only five, a fat seventy-something-year-old woman with sour breath, a pleasant demeanour, and a surprisingly vibrant social life. The phone was always ringing at Judith's, and all of the calls were very important to her, from her worldwide network of friends, from her neighbours, from her bridge partners -- all very important, very special, very precious. She could spend hours on the phone, and did, and even had a special headset, this was years before headsets were common, even had a special headset made so she could talk while making beans, or rice, or mounds and mounds of stinking wet steaming sourkraut. And Heinrich's parents were going to leave him with Judith, this nice grandmother that somehow scared the hell out of him, you know how kids are, and all the way there he scratched at the back of the front seat and whimpered "don't make me go, don't make me go," but they did, and she gave him a sour kiss at the door and pulled him inside, and as she shut the door behind him Heinrich had only one thought, only one thought in his five-year-old mind, and that thought was "I am doomed."

I don't want to give you the idea that I feign human expressions because I'm emotionally cold myself. I'm not. My friends and social acquaintances universally agree that I have a vivacious and dynamic personality, that I am a good listener, that I am empathic and compassionate and resonate with true human passion. I just find it...difficult...to make certain human expressions. Expressions that others find common, I can't seem to convey. When I get extremely angry -- apoplectically angry, aneurism angry -- I am told that I look extremely amused, tickled, like somebody has just whispered a joke in my ear, a joke so funny I have turned as red as a red beet. I can't control it. I don't know what it means. It just happens.

So I try to fill in these expression-gaps in the mirror, so that next time I'm at a party and somebody expresses an opinion I find personally distasteful, I can look intellectually aloof. I can summon up the appropriate expression for the moment, and not worry about my face running amok all over the party.

That's why I practice my expressions, thrice daily. I want to master them all, control my face, take advice and give advice and leave advice while arranging my face as that of someone...who knows.

Shortly after Heinrich's parents left, his grandmother dropped dead into a giant pot of sourkraut while talking on the phone. She stopped in mid-sentence, said "urk," and pitched forward, taking with her the only phone receiver into the house. Heinrich, from his seat at the kitchen table, watched her melon-shaped head sink deeper and deeper into the sourkraut until leg muscles gave out and the weight of her body pulled both her and the sourkraut pot down onto the floor. Heinrich didn't know what to do. The cord of the only phone in the house had been ripped from its base by Judith's untimely collapse, and the phone was, with her head, neck-deep in a giant pot of sourkraut. Heinrich screamed until he was hoarse, but the house was isolated; the doors were locked and he was not strong enough to turn the deadbolts, and try as he might, he could not bring himself to break a window, being a very respectful and law abiding five-year-old.

Heinrich stayed with his dead grandmother in that house for the entire long weekend, four days, sleeping curled up next to her cold body on the kitchen floor; feeding, when necessary, on the sourkraut spilling from the pot that her head was in, now congealed such that the waxy dead flesh of the neck seemed to flow seamlessly into the sourkraut itself. His parents eventually arrived, broke the door down, and rescued Heinrich, but not before he had polished off the sourkraut, which due to its warmth and acidity had begun to disintegrate Judith's actual head.

His accidental descent into cannibalism, Heinrich said, at the age of five while spending a long weekend with his fat dead grandmother, meant that not much that went on the graveyard was "creepy."

I agreed, and tried to show him my sympathetic unnervedness. Apparently, however, it came off as incredulous fear. Yet another one to work on, I suppose.

NP: Medeski Martin and Wood, "Tonic"

2002-05-14T17:59:00.000-04:00

THE OFFICIAL TOURNIQUET SITE
So I got the "tourniquet" thing below a little wrong, and for some weird-ass reason blogspot is putting the blogspot addy in front of it, too.

Plus, it takes a bit of finding to get to what I talk about below...you have to enter the site, go to their FAQ, and then click on the first question. Then you get the weirdest-assed Jesus Heals The Bloody Arm animation, well, ever.

2002-05-13T11:51:00.000-04:00

Jesus, Friend of Heavy Metal, be a Friend to Me...

Okay, so I was looking for this cool comic strip I found online and found this instead...Tourniquet, a CHORD-CRUNCHING HEAVY METAL MASSACRE, or so I thought. I was all set to Blog it, but wanted to find a page of bombastic Heavy Metal Talk about how Fucking Kickass Tourniquet Is.

Instead, as the answer to the first question in the FAQ, I am told that...

TOURNIQUET: surgical device for arresting hemorrhage by compression of a blood vessel. Spiritual process by which the living Triune God can begin to stop the senseless flow of going through life without knowing and serving our Creator.

Followed by a cross shedding a beam of light on a heavily-bleeding severed arm, at which point MAGICAL FUCKING BANDAGES APPEAR AND STOP THE BLEEDING, FOLLOWED BY THE TEXT

"He is our Tourniquet."

I think I just found my next tattoo, gang. YOU MUST CHECK THIS OUT. The Christian power of Tourniquet commands you!

NP: Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One

2002-04-29T15:26:00.000-04:00

TERMIUM Plus®

Whoops. Meant to look at the blog, not add to it. What the hell. One of the upshots of the harrowing driving experience yesterday was being stark awake at 3 a.m., unable to sleep and worrying about money, life in general, etc. etc. Mel was also awake wired on moving-stress and end-of-term stress in general, and I told her a story to get her to sleep, the touching tale of a cat named Moofy who leaves home because the little girl there pulls her ears. Moofy tries living in a house with an old woman who wants her to eat mice (but Moofy likes mice), a hunter who wants to hunt Moofy (obviously a bad idea for Moofy), a dwarf with sixty-three other cats (Moofy likes some independence) and finally, a really nice lady who treats Moofy well and pets her and gives her special food. After a while, though, Moofy realizes that although the little girl pulled her tail and tugged her ears and rubbed her fur the wrong way, it was still her little girl and she had to go back home. So Moofy went home.

Either a touching story for kids, or a harrowing approval of domestic abuse. Make of it what you will! It was 3:30 in the bloody morning.

NP: Still Occhipinti.

2002-04-29T15:21:00.000-04:00

TERMIUM Plus®

A nightmarish day yesterday, involving moving all of my girlfriend's belongings from Lennoxville to Sherbrooke during a 90-minute time envelope to rent, load, unload and return a 24-foot cube truck in the midst of a mighty bloody blizzard. In all honesty, 24 hours later it all seems like a strange dream -- two solid hours of adrenaline, fevered anxiety and cars skidding around like Disney on Ice. Quite possibly the worst experience of my entire life -- no, that's hyperbole. But worth commemorating with haiku:

Moving day is here.
An unseasonal blizzard
Stupid fucking truck.

NP: Michael Occhipinti, "Creation Dream"

2002-04-26T11:08:00.000-04:00

MOTREC
"Okay, men. We need to hit the Jerries hard in that bunker -- get all over 'em before they know what's going on. Jenkins, you try to get up top there, toss some grenades through the slit. Jasper, Harries, you guys back him up. Lasker, you cover us. Ready?"
"Yes, Sarge."
"You got it, Sarge."
"Uh..."
"Uh, Jasper?"
"My leg's asleep, Sarge."
"What?"
"I can't run across that field when my leg's asleep. I'll be all stumbly and stuff."
"Jasper, what the HELL --"
"Well, jeez, Sarge, we've been crouched in this trench for almost fifteen minutes. I musta sat on my leg wrong. It's all tingly."
"Walk on it, Jasper."
"I can't walk on it, Harries, you stupid. If I stand up, they'll shoot me. Give me a minute. Rub my leg, would'ya, Sarge?"
"Get bent, Jasper."
"Naw, really. I gotta get the circulation back."
"Okay, okay. Better?"
"Yeah. Think I can run now."
"Okay, men. We're gonna do this fast, before Jerry can get a bead on us. One -- two --"
"Ooh! Ooh!"
"What is it, Lasker?"
"My arm's asleep now."
"WHAT?"
"Well, I was getting all ready to cover you and holding the rifle and everything, but I guess I held it wrong while you guys were messing around with Jasper's leg, there. Now my arm's asleep. I can't cover you if my arm's asleep, I won't be able to aim or nothin'."
"Judas Priest."
"And my foot itches, Sarge. I think it's the water in my boot."
"Look, men, we have to take that bunker out. I don't complain about my bunions, do I?"
"You have bunions, Sarge?"
"That's not the point."
"Sometimes I get the bursitis real bad."
"Oh? My mom used to use raw steak and lemon juice on my dad's shoulder."
"Hey, great idea."
"CAN WE PLEASE ATTACK THE BUNKER?"
"What?"
"The bunker. We need to recapture it from the Germans."
"I thought it was some guy named Jerry."
"That's what we call -- never mind."
"Hey, the Germans are leaving."
"What?"
"Yeah, they're all coming out of the bunker and stretching their legs. I guess it gets all crampy crouching in there all day."
"I don't believe this -- well, shoot 'em!"
"What?"
"Shoot 'em!"
"That doesn't seem very sporting, Sarge."
"What sporting? They're in a concrete bunker with six-inch walls! We're in a hole! Shoot, already!"
"Huh. Good point, Sarge..."
RATTA TATTA TATTA.

War is HELL.

2002-04-22T15:43:00.000-04:00

MOTREC
Sorry 'bout the lack of posts lately, people. Busy as a dog on speed.

From a recent e-mail to The Phil of Skinny Panda:

The truly amazing thing about Webcomics is the sheer number of people
"publishing." Would I be writing a comic strip to self-publish little wee
booklets that I staple together in the basement? Nah. Would 75% of the
amateurs (not using the term in a derogative way) out there have stuck with
it for three or four years (which many have now) if there weren't this
medium? Probably not. All over the world, the presence of the media is
generating more art, and better artists. I think that's rather wild.

np: quiet...

2002-04-12T14:55:00.000-04:00

Gone And Forgotten

I deeply and desperately wish Captain GAF would get off his &?%$ ASS and do another installment of Gone And Forgotten, the only thing on the Web that has ever made me -- no poop -- literally WEEP with laughter. Now, you have have to have the same grounding in Silver Age comic-bookery as me to truly dig the GAF groove, but if you're a comic book kind of person (or even not, probably) between the ages of 22 and 35, you may just pee yourself laffing. God, I wish he'd get back on the stick, because we can all use a few more laughs in these days of Venezuelan turmoil.

2002-04-12T14:49:00.000-04:00

Skinny Panda

I wanted to bring you a perfect bit of sunshine, snapshotted on this ideal spring day, a sprightly piece of wonder embedded deep within my braincells and spirited over to you. But then I got sleepy, and lost it, and now it's buried under some old G.I. Joe cartoons and kind of muddled up with some question about Aristotelean philosophy. So a perfect piece of sun shines on Aristotle in the muddled rotten basement of my brain, but I had been trying to save it for you. But the sun still shines, and there's the chance that I might be able to catch another perfect moment when these trucks stop rolling past...

2002-04-10T13:30:00.000-04:00

Putting the Id back in idiot

Ever get the weird feeling that if you cut off your TV and the Internet and the radio and lost all your books and magazines and...well...completely isolated yourself from all media, and just existed in a small confined area and wrote and wrote and wrote, that you'd consume your own imagination? Thinking and writing in smaller and smaller concentric circles, a diminishing spiral of data, until you got down to your core ideas, or even one core thought, your mantra, upon which all else is built and grows out of.

Me neither, really.

NP: Bjork, Homogenic

2002-04-10T11:10:00.000-04:00

Todd and Penguin--the comic strip now with more Penguinny goodness!

Polar bears.
There's the problem.
Not enough polar bears.

If there were more polar bears, see, they'd eat more fish, and scare more people. And if there were more polar bears, they'd start being forced further and further south by overpopulation, and start evolving to be more, like, capable of living in non-Northern climes. And if the polar bears started to evolve to live further south, well, who knows when they'd stop? They'd probably get smarter, too, and funnier, as part of the whole evolution process, because they'd be competing against smart funny humans with Ski-Doos. And as they evolved smarter and funnier and capable of driving Ski-Doos, they'd become better stunt drivers and better able to act, too, because a good part of stunt driving is acting, right?
So we'd wind up with all these clever, funny polar bears stunt-driving Ski-Doos and putting on community theatre shows of things like Leaving Home and other Canadian theatre classics, and developing a keen sense of pathos and desolation, the two prime requisites for Canadian Drama. With such a sense of pathos and desolation, it would only be a matter of time before a particularly clever polar bear with typing skills would produce the Great Canadian Novel, and be interviewed often on CBC television. Taken in by its wit and charm, all Canadians would want to befriend these charming, witty, community-theatre producing polar bears, and would rapidly all get eaten.

Polar bears.
Let's go.

NP: The Orb, Cydonia

2002-04-08T12:46:00.000-04:00

Neil Gaiman's Journal

Just read some of "The Most-Read Journal On The Internet."

...yeah.

NP:

2002-04-08T11:09:00.000-04:00

Putting the Id back in idiot

See below, and tell me I don't just exude "I just saw a performance of 'Under Milk Wood' last night." I won't believe you if you do.

NP: Mingus Big Band, "Gunslinging Birds"

2002-04-08T11:06:00.000-04:00

Amarillo Bay presents The Book of the Dead by James Strickland

And we slept then, nestled in dustgrey comforter and curled like cats in the unsun of midnight, blinds open to receive the darkness and let it splay over us like a sob. We hugged in our sleep, myself, forty-seven and drunk on salt air, and her, whom I loved so much that I'd burnt her name in my arm with a white-hot poker some fifteen years before, on a bet and a dare and mad with panic and loss. She'd come back to me eight years later, midway through the interim, when the burns on my arms had healed into a shining puckered scrawl and she could barely make out that it had been her, burnt in, and then best only when tracing my cold smooth scars in the pitchblack.

We slept like those who had spent life without waking, born to a half-century slumber on beds of wire and water, slept like alcoholics having their first long drink after fifty years of abstinence, slept like sheep in the darkened folds of the shepherd's cloak, whisper-quiet in the mediterranean night.

NP:

2002-04-07T07:32:00.000-04:00

Wotta mess.

So over breakfast yesterday, I was talking to Her Melness about Alan Moore and his interesting off-the-cuff analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde being a symbol of repressed homesexuality in Victorian England; mainly marvelling that Moore (one of my favourite authors, and one that apparently inspires alliteration) came up with this introspection and tossed in a few supporting facts completely off the top of his head. Mel said that it wasn't all THAT hard with classic English literature, so I decided to re-align Moby Dick as a parable of man's search for God (pretty obvious, considering that God is big, and so are whales).

Three minutes later, things were getting eerily plausible -- not quite 100% on-thesis, but close to. Consider that 'Moby Dick' may be not the story of Man's quest for God, necessarily, but the struggle of Jesus on the cross, and the futility of vengeance against the divine. Ahab is Jesus, see, and he's got a wooden leg -- the cross -- because of Moby "God" Dick (Moby bit his leg off, if you don't know the story). So God has nailed him to his cross, and he is on a mission of hateful rage, spurred on by the demonic 'foreigners' on board the ship, to destroy God. He is aided by pagans and good Christenfolk alike, all of whom fear and loathe God as being inscrutable, almighty, and, well, worth a lot of money if they catch Him (???).

And so on. ANALYZE SOME CLASSIC LITERATURE TODAY, KIDS! It's good for the blood and gets your brain all hotted up.

NP: Nothing. It's quiet (7:30, but 'really' 6:30 because of Daylight Savings) and Mel is still asleep.

2002-04-05T15:03:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Catholic.net
Discovered while translating: Catholic schools are most appropriately referred to as "confessional schools" as a group name.
Why not just call them 'guilt schools' and get it over with?

2002-04-05T14:25:00.000-05:00

nutrition

As an experiment, I decided to spend a month recently eating only liquid foods: yogurt, drinkin' boxes, soups. I decided to include some borderline foods like chili and mashed potatoes. My criteria was pouring. If I could pour the foodstuff in question, it was edible. I wanted to spend a full thirty days consuming pourable foods.
By day three, I had made a quick intuitive leap: most foods are indeed pourable if you want them to be, and if you're willing to invest a little time and ingenuity into making them so. I did not have a wide variety of fancy kitchen tools, but thanks to ongoing renovation projects, had enough hardware to make do.
Steak, for instance, could be rendered drinkable through a fairly simple process:
Start by deboning the steak using a filet knife or a small hacksaw.
Then cut the steak using a reciprocating saw, band saw, or electric mitre saw. A plane can be used to flake well-done steak, but the operation quickly becomes slippery and slightly dangerous.
Once the steak is finely chopped, put it in a blender and set it on 'high' for fifteen minutes. If you do not have a blender, you can use a Makita 7.5 amp cordless drill, an old apple juice tin, and a large spade-headed drill bit used to make one-inch holes in plywood.
It should be mentioned that in the interest of hygiene, it is wise to buy new accessories, bits, blades etc. for your tools, so as not to mix your renovation supplies with your food supplies. This is useful on two fronts; you do not want to consume rust, and you do not want bits of meat in your windowframe as that will attract ants and possibly other vermin.
Using similar techniques and a variety of other common home tools, such as a drill press, lathe, and the turbine of a small-engine aircraft, I was able to liquify most of my favourite foods such that they would be drinkable.
As the experiment wore on, I noticed that my life was changing in surprising ways.
First of all, I was sleeping less. While I had previously required seven to nine hours sleep to wake up feeling alert and refreshed, I now found myself sleeping only five or six. My bedtime remained ten o'clock sharp, but my waking hours shifted from six a.m. to five, and finally settled at 4:30 a.m., no matter how late I stayed up, and I always felt delightful upon opening my eyes. I attributed this change to the excess energy produced by my body that was no longer required to process solid foods -- the lack of strain on my stomach and intestines was having an immediate and noticable effect on the amount of rest I required to refuel each day.
Secondly, I found I was much more productive. After a week on my liquid diet, in a fit of inspiration, I went to a sporting-goods store and purchased what dedicated off-road cyclists call a "camel pack." This is a backpack with two four-litre soft-bodied cannisters attached to it, connected to a long tube. Mine had a harness that I could strap to my head, to keep the tube constantly close to my mouth. When you are on a long bike trek, say across the Carpathian mountains in Eastern Europe, and you want to take a drink, you merely suck on the tube. By having a priest bless your water at the beginning of the excursion, you can even foil vampires either by drinking massive quantities of blessed water, blessing in turn your blood, or by confronting said vampires and sucking and spitting the holy water on them. Unless the presence of water in your body removes the holiness from the water, which doesn't seem likely, but I digress.
I drilled a larger hole in the camel pack and inserted a wider tube than the one included, allowing me to suck larger quantities of fluid out of the pack in thicknesses far greater than that of water. I found that by sucking hard, I could pull even the most thick and viscuous chilis and stews out of the storage pack on my back and into my mouth.
I had also begun to spend a lot more time in the washroom. I was urinating more frequently, and my stool had become loose and rapid -- it was almost like having diarrhea, but with slightly more warning time and better consistency than completely liquid stool. All of this was to be expected, but was, regardless, a little disconcerting.
As a result of the camel pack, I found I could free up more and more of my day by making huge masses of soups, stews and chili -- all with abundant vegetables to avoid scurvy -- in large pots or in my slow cooker, transferring a few litres of food to my camel pack twice a day. Without the need to cook, do dishes, or sleep as much as before, my free time increased abundantly. After two weeks, I timed myself and found that rather than sleep eight hours and spend over two hours per day preparing and eating food, I was sleeping four and spending only twenty minutes a day washing my slow cooker and preparing new food in it. I had liberated over five hours of my day through liquid food.
I finished my novel (now at the printer's) and began to take long walks through the countryside, punctuated only by the constant nagging need to defecate.
Week Three saw more of the same, but with looser stool. Loath to give up the benefits of all the added time in my day, I underwent a simple surgical procedure to have a colostomy tube attached to my colon, storing my waste matter in a container strapped to my right thigh. I began to file and organize a complicated series of bags in my house: two for the camel pack, ingoing, one for the colostomy container, outgoing, and several to be boiled and hung to dry after use. The system worked, but took quite a bit of time to maintain efficiently and accurately. After one late-night accident hooking a camel pack hose up to a colostomy bag, I realized that compatible hose sizes were a mistake and put an adaptor on my colostomy hose so that the camel hose would no longer fit it. Despite the loss of time in the bag-sorting process, including time invested in developing a hook-and-hanging system involving old clothes hangers and a series of dowels loosely connected to the kitchen ceiling, bags being folded and stacked when dry in my now-unused food cupboards, I was still up four hours a day or perhaps slightly more from my solid food days.
In week four, I began to develop a constant nagging tingling in my mouth. A visit to the dentist confirmed that my teeth, after a month of disuse, were beginning to loosen in their gums. The dentist also recommended I visit a doctor after I complained of a peculiar stabbing pain behind my eyes. The doctor diagnosed me with Harbrecht's Syndrome, a rare affliction targeting the internal organs; a general shrivelling effect resulting from weeks of misuse. Apparently, my diet was relieving so much strain on my inner organs, depriving them of so much wear, that they were physically atrophying inside my gut. There was also some concern about enough blood reaching my brain, the lack of solids also resulting in some sort of brain-blood-anemia. Stethescope firmly planted in his ears, the doctor waved a fat finger at me and demanded that I go back on a regular solid-food diet immediately.
How dare he, I seethed internally. How dare this fat doctor tell me, who had never felt better in his life apart from sore teeth and stabbing pains behind my eyes, that I had to abandon this time-saving method, this creative mecca, this whole new life? Before I knew it, I had unstrapped my colostomy bag and was squeezing it, spraying my liquid feces around his office, yelling "solid food is the devil!"
I seemed to swim into consciousness some time later in a cell, I assumed in the local lock-up, and began to reflect that my usual mood swings had become perhaps even more extreme and unpredictable over the past month, and that perhaps whittling my sleeping hours down to fifteen minutes a night was not a balanced life decision. I had vague memories of swearing at the cat, and doing something on my neighbour's lawn, but I began to discover significant and frighteningly large memory holes sporadically scattered throughout the last week. I remembered wearing the chiffon gown, and vaguely recalled dipping it in chocolate sauce and leaving it outside the door of the truck driver that lived in the apartment below mine, but had no idea where I had bought it, or even if I had indeed paid for it. And the full rack of police car lights flashing in my living room, which i had never thought twice about, suddenly became a great source of concern and mystery. Maybe it was time to get back on 'real' food -- starting with steaks and liver, something to get the iron in my blood back up.
The telling blow came when a guard showed up, dragging a skinny teenage boy behind him. The kid was bedraggled and obviously terrified. There were red welts on his face and arms, and he was trying to pull away from the burly guard, but lacked the strength. The guard threw the door to my cell open and shoved the kid in, shouting "if you want to fight in the yard, you can sleep with the blood-drinker! Good luck, Carlson!"
The kid threw himself against the bars, whimpering piteously, as the guard stalked down the hall. It took me a few seconds to catch on that I was the blood-drinker, although I had no idea why. Rubbing my chin, I realized that my camel pack was gone, and there was some sort of dried crust on my face. Picking it off, I looked at it -- dark rust-orange, like a...scab.
Oh. So that was it. I checked myself for bite marks, and found none -- only my colostomy hose, dribbling steadily onto the floor, and a rash on my right leg. Whose blood had I been drinking? Who knew?
Still and all, there was no need for this 'Carlson' to fear, now that I knew I'd be rejoining the solid-food world. I smiled disarmingly as he scuttled, crab-like, into the furthest corner. "Don't worry," I said, "I've decided to start adding real meat to my diet."
I was aquitted of the murder after it was conclusively determined to be a one-hundred-percent natural heart attack, and released back into the community. I began to eat solid food again, starting with small and simple things like peas and beans, and now I am almost all the way back to steak and beef jerky. The dentures fit fine, and the stabbing pains have almost entirely abated.
As an experiment, I am considering spending a month eating only food starting with the letter 'C'. We'll see how it goes.

NP: Keith Jarrett, "Whisper Not." Excellent piano-based jazz.

2002-04-04T15:17:00.000-05:00

From a straight 'support whats youse like' perspective, I'm seriously considering Blogger Pro, as I've really been enjoying Blogger for the past month or so. I know I tend to start projects like this and drop them, but the convenience aspect is a real winner for me when I have a few free seconds at work (or even when I don't, but there's a big-ass idea burning up in my brain). $35 US a year...I wonder if they'd accept Canadian Tire money?

Canadian Tire money -- Canada's Secret CurrencyTM. There's an ad campaign in there...

2002-04-04T13:58:00.000-05:00

It's interesting to consider that while most people consider the fourth dimension as 'time,' one might more easily look at time as irrelevant and reconstrue the fourth dimension as 'data.'

Part of this off-the-cuff after-lunch theory stems from Michael Crichton's "Timeline," in which Our Heroes journey to fourteenth-century France (actually an alternate dimension in which exists fourteenth-century France, which doesn't quite explain how things get sent from that past to our present over hundreds of years, and Crichton sort of waffles the point with a bit of fast hand-waving and repeated use of the word "QUANTUM!") through the miracle of quantum physics.

Rather than alternate dimensions, though, consider that there might be only one dimension, this, and an infinite number of datasets comprised of all the quanta in the universe. "Time travel" would merely be the rearrangement of quanta to insert your quanta into that of the dataset of the past...rearranging a large number of air molecules in 1942 Chicago to precisely match my quanta arrangements at this moment in time, for instance. My effects on particles at that point in time would alter all residual datasets both 'before' and 'after' my insertion simultaneously, as data does not travel but merely exists.

Am I making any sense? I think I am...essentially, time is only our perception, and we perceive it based on shifting data. Imagine a large shallow box filled with pieces of black and white sand on an oscillator. The oscillator moves the box, constantly shifting the sand. If you wanted to send one grain of sand "back in time," it would merely be a matter of removing that one grain, arranging the sand in the box to precisely match that of a pervious state, then reinserting your time-travelling grain.

Problems: one, if you remove one grain of sand, you can never precisely duplicate the earlier sand configuration; two, if energy can neither be created or destroyed, just swapping bits around like that might be pretty disastrous.

Solutions: big, big computers. Hey, it worked for Crichton.

NP: monkeyradio.org, which I am very much enjoying these days.

2002-04-03T15:35:00.000-05:00

TERMIUM Plus®

For utterly no reason, I've been scoping out the Dave Sim: Misogynist controversy in my spare (!?) moments at work today. Whoa, Nelly! I was a Cerebus reader back in the 'day, but never thought he'd gotten this whacked out. Not that I have too much time to invest in the "How misogynist IS Dave Sim?" investigation, but...

...actually, I guess there WAS a reason. I was promoting Man-Man by putting up a HYPE announcement on rec.arts.comics.misc (anyone else remember Usenet, or am I showing my age?) and there was a long Cerebus thread I checked out for old times' sake.

To Mr. Sim's credit, I hafta say that very few of the 'wottan evil misoginwhatever' arguments actually specifically refute his Male Light/Female Void argument except to say that it's bad...which tends to lend some ugly credence to his (paraphrased) claims that misogyny is just a word women use to avoid facing the facts. Certainly nobody tacking the issue (and there are a surprising number of websites dedicated to just this) displays his degree of, well, poetry. He paints some powerful, if nasty, images to get his point across. Hate is a creative enabler, kids!

Good Lord, I just said something vaguely positive about Dave Sim. I must be...a MISOGYNIST!

No, no. Only foolin'. I eat meat.

NP: monkeyradio.org. Check it out!

2002-04-02T14:32:00.000-05:00

KeenSpot Forums - View Topic

I live in fear. Do you?
Really? What a coincidence! What gives you that churning dread that persists in your gut all the live-long day?
Wow! Me too! Hey, do you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night just strangled by the fear, choking on your own terror, feeling your sweat-drenched pillow slip underneath you like a baby hippo?
Oh. Must just be me, then.

NP: Ruben Gonzales, 'Introducing Ruben Gonzales'

2002-04-02T10:59:00.000-05:00

TERMIUM Plus®
Passing thought over breakfast with my darling Mel: wouldn't it be neat to have a creature, or race of creatures, which solidify over time? The conversation sprung from me talking about Mel's bus pass, and how she'd have to get a 'real person's' bus pass when she graduated. She objected to me designating students as non-real people, to which I responded that it would be neat if they were only 75% real people, and they would be pretty solid, but you could shove your hand right through 'em if you tried. Sort of like Jell-O.

So that led to the thought that if there was a race of beings that were asexual, they could be born as full-sized intangible wisps, and gradually solidify over time. Death would occur when they eventually became statues after years of slow, slow, calcification.

NP: Modern Jazz Quartet, 'Django'

2002-03-29T22:54:00.000-05:00

Joe Frank r0x

You know that cute story that everybody has, about running away and the parents letting them and realizing on the way out the door that they'd never make it and the parents grudgingly asking the kid to forgive them and come home?

I remember being about five years old and saying 'I'm running away from home' in a fit of immature anger one night. Dad pulling the Koch rifle from out under the kitchen table, sighting down at my head, and saying 'we got too much money tied up in you, bwah. You'se stayin' here.'

It was the nicest thing anybody had EVER said to me. Then and now.

2002-03-28T11:58:00.000-05:00

Joe Frank MP3 Collection

If you do not go to this site now and download and listen to 'Dreamland,' I will personally destroy you. Destroy you.

NP: Joe Frank, "Dreamland"

2002-03-28T10:06:00.000-05:00

Informal Communist Discussion

Goddamn Communists and their goddamn Communist hot rods keep driving up and down all over my Capitalist street, spreading filthy Communist exhaust all over my starched white Capitalist linen. I hate those Communists and their hot rods, souped-up muscle cars with big tires and roll cages, laughing and snorting cocaine and pointing at me and saying "down with the Capitalists, man." Driving arround in their Communist hot rods. They leave pot holes in the roads, these jacked-up funny cars, burnt rubber all over the intersections of the Capitalist streets as the Communists hammer down on the pedal and just go, baby, roaring off into a sunset free of McDonald's burgers and refined sugar injected into baby carrot shoots to make them more appealing to children. Burnt rubber stink and they're gone and all the old people come out of their houses onto Libertarian porches and say "there go the Communists" and sit and rock and look at the Capitalist pavement as the Monarchists walk their bulldogs. But the goddamn Communists are always back the next day in their goddamn Communist hot-rods, waving organic bread and belching fire and squealing up and down my Capitalist streets.

2002-03-27T15:09:00.000-05:00

Don? Is that you?
"Hello?"
"Scott?"
"Who?"
"Don?"
"This is Don."
"Yeah. Is this Scott-Don?"
"I think you have the wrong number."
"Hold on."
"Goodbye."
"Hold on, hold on. She's in the room, right? How is she?"
"She's fine. Who is this?"
"Duane. Duane Mosler. I'm a friend of Don's. Was a friend of Don's. Am a friend of Don's, I guess, sort of."
"Duane Mosler says hello, Mother."
"I talked to Scott-Don yesterday."
"What? What's that? Oh. You go on upstairs, then. I'll be up in a minute with some tea."
"Is she gone?"
"She's gone. What the hell do you want?"
"I talked to Scott yesterday. You're not Scott."
"I'm Yance. What do you want?"
"How's it going?"
"Fine. What do you want?"
"I was just wondering how things were, with Mrs. Marks and all."
"She's fine."
"Really?"
"No, not really."
"Oh."
"..."
"I guess that was a stupid question."
"I guess it was."
"Maybe I should just go."
"Maybe. Good bye."
"Hold on. Hold on, hold on."
"What?"
"Well..."
"Well?"
"I...I just want to...um..."
"I'm hanging up."
"I want to be Don."
"What?"
"I want to be Don."
"Why...why..."
"Look, I know what's going on, and I know it's been a few days. You must be getting spread pretty thin, just giving up whole days to hang around the house and pretend to be Don. I want to help. I want to help Mrs. Marks and help Don, I guess."
"Look, this isn't your problem."
"I know. I know it's not my problem. I just want to be involved. I want to help."
"What was your name again?"
"Duane. Duane Mosler. If I could just do it for a day, just one day, then I'd feel like I was contributing something. Scott -- Scott Baio -- told me that all you had to do was be there and say you were Don if she asked, and I can do that. I know it's just a small thing, just one day, I but I want to help. I want to be involved."
"You do not want to be involved."
"Yes I do. I want to be Don. I can help, just for a day."
"Listen to me. You don't know what she can get like, when she suspects. You really don't know what she can be like when she starts thinking you're not Don. The other day, she got a potato peeler and -- this isn't your problem. You don't want to be Don. Not even for a day."
"But I -- "
"Case closed. Goodbye."
"You want me to tell her?"
"What?"
"You let me be Don or I tell her Don's dead."
"What?"
"..."
"Why would you do that? What's wrong with you?"
"You can't stop me. Letters, telegrams, loudspeakers, e-mail, couriers, kids, slipping notes into the daily paper. I'd tell her. Often."
"You're sick, aren't you?"
"I just want to help. I just want to be Don. Just for one day."
"Look, I've got to talk to the others."
"I'll be there at 6 a.m. tomorrow. You tell the others. I'll be Don tomorrow."
"But -- "
"You tell them."
(click)

2002-03-27T11:02:00.000-05:00

If they can make money selling 'em...

Business idea that I shared with my sweetie this a.m. -- and that I'd like to hang onto for slow or indie business times -- hire yourself and your fast Internet connection out as a plagarism sleuth to university professors. They spend hours and hours poring over Web-hosted essays for plagarism, but most aren't all that Internet-savvy and many don't have the time to really search the way they should. So why not get a university to contract you as a free agent, available to investigate suspicious papers for about $30 per hour? 90 minutes -- $45 -- should be enough to check many obvious sources and run searches and word-string match checks to see if anything pops up, more effectively and thoroughly than a professor or TA could do. And you'd be focused on finding similar essays, not on the pressures of teaching, etc.

Hurm. A danged good idea here.

NP: Joe Frank, "Pilgrim"

2002-03-26T14:47:00.000-05:00

my vote is for 'genius'

"Hello?"
"Is Don there?"
"This is Don."
"..."
"Hello?"
"Uh, I'm looking for Don Marks."
"This is Don Marks."
"No you aren't."
"Yes I am."
"You sound nothing like Don. Your voice is, like, two octaves lower."
"I have a cold."
"Look, can I speak to Don, please?"
"Speaking."
"..."
"Hello?"
"I'm just going to call back later."
"All right."
"Okay, this isn't funny. Let me talk to Don."
"Speaking."
"If you don't put me on with Don, I'm going to..."
"To what?"
"I don't know. Call the cops."
"Because you don't recognize my voice? Because I have a cold?"
"Because YOU'RE NOT DON."
"Yes I am."
"Fine. Fine. If you're Don, what's your favourite brand of beer?"
"What?"
"If you're Don, what's your favourite brand of beer?"
"Hold on a sec."
"What?"
"..."
"Hello? Hey! HEY!"
"Keith's."
"How did you know that?"
"I'm Don. I know what my favourite brand of beer is."
"You looked for empties, didn't you? I bet you looked for empties."
"No. I'm Don. I have a cold."
"Fine. If you're Don, what --"
"-- I don't have to answer these questions. I already did this once. I'm Don."
"Bull. Let me talk to Don."
"I am Don."
"What's going on? What have you done with Don?"
"..."
"Hello? HELLO?"
"Okay, great. She's gone. Sorry about that."
"Sorry about what? Who the fuck are you?"
"I'm not actually Don."
"Christ almighty."
"Are you a friend of Don's?"
"No, I just call him out of sheer indifference."
"Oh."
"Yes, I'm a friend of Don's."
"Oh."
"Oh what?"
"I'm afraid I have some bad news."
"What?"
"I'm not Don. Don's dead."
"WHAT?"
"I'm pretending to be Don because his mother's flipped out. Seriously. She's gone totally batshit."
"Don's dead?"
"He killed himself right in front of her. Blew his brains out."
"I can't believe it."
"Yeah, well, neither could she. She shows up at the hospital screaming. Bits of brain in her hair, right? So we pump her full of roofie and send the cops over, and Don's head is all over the living room ceiling. She fell back when he did it, cops saw blood on the edge of a glass coffee table and matched it up to a cut on her arm. Must have been looking right at him."
"Oh my God. Oh my God."
"So a few of us, family friends, take her home the next day, right? She starts wandering around the house like an Alzheimer's victim, looking for Don. She can't find him and starts getting really upset, starts pulling at her hair and moaning, and Jerry just steps forward and says 'yeah, Mom?' and suddenly he's Don. To her, at least."
"Who are you?"
"We've been taking turns. We've been switching off every day for the past six days. As long as there's someone in the house that answers to 'Don,' she doesn't start mutilating herself. But we have to be consistent. There was a three-hour gap the other day when Marty had to pick up his son at daycare and had a flat, and when Yance got here she had gouged holes all over her forearms with her fingernails. He found her huddled in a ball in front of the oven."
"But who are you?"
"I'm a family friend."
"What's your name?"
"..."
"What, is she in the room?"
"No, she's not in the room."
"So what's your name?"
"...you won't believe me."
"Look, if you don't tell me your name right now, I will call the cops. I will. And when they show up at the door demanding to see Don, because I've told them, I've told them, I don't know, I've told them that he called me last night drunk on heroin and told me he's a child pornographer, when they show up at the doorstep and demand to see him, what --"
"-- Scott Baio."
"What?"
"..."
"Did you say Scott Baio?"
"Yeah."
"Like, 'Joanie Loves Chachi' Scott Baio?"
"Yes. Joanie Loves Chachi Scott Baio."
"Like, 'Charles in Charge' Scott Baio?"
"YES."
"But --"
"Mr. Marks and my dad went to Princeton together. My mom and Mrs. Marks stayed close after Peter died, and she was about to drop in on Patricia when Don killed himself."
"You're Scott Baio?"
"I'm Don."
"What, is she back in the room?"
"Yes, that would be great. Stop by any time."
"So what happened to you, man? I watched 'Charles in Charge,' but then you just vanished."
"Look, I have to go help Mom."
"This is fucked up."
"No kidding. Gotta go. Gotta go."
"Sorry about, uh, Don."
"Not as sorry as I am. Believe me."
"You got any movies coming out or anything?"
"What? I don't act."
"Oh yeah. Right. See you later, Don."
"See you."
(click)

2002-03-25T12:52:00.000-05:00

Another comic worth worshiping, but HIGHLY OFFENSIVE TO SOME.

In case you're not up on what's happening with me, I should let you know that I'm writing these things from the road. I can't tell you where I am right now, you know why, but I'm going to be updating this every two days or so as I move from city to city.

I don't think they're tracking me, or at least not very well. I've been subtly changing my appearance on buses and trains, and when I have the cash I'll buy two train tickets for two different towns (cars are usually destination-specific) under two different names, get on one, exit, get on the other with my face covered or obscured, exit, and get back on the first. A subtle change or two and then I shift back to the second seat in the other car with my new moustache, wig, scar, what-have-you. I think it's thrown them off the trail a few times now, and I shouldn't even really be writing this, but I don't think they'll ever hack through the passwords surrounding the site. The three of you that know how to get in here, I trust not to reveal the passwords ever.

People have been asking me for directions a lot, though, and I'm pretty sure that's just because I'm so good at blending in and walking with purpose. I look like I belong. I always give very vague but authoritative directions when asked for them, because I want to seem like I belong where I am. There are King, Queen, Dufferin and Mount streets in every major city in North America, which is useful. Sometimes I worry that they're giving me names of places that they know don't exist, smoking me out, so I usually throw in a "I think that's the new name of..." or "didn't that place close a couple years ago?" to make it all more authentic and throw them off the scent.

I swear I've seen the same thin little guy with one of those punk can't-grow-a-moustache-yet moustaches two or three times, but I can't get paranoid. Every town has like six hundred of these little weasels, and they all hang around bus stations.

Plus, I'm pretty sure that they don't know about the tooth, which is something else I can surprise them with if they do catch up.

I'm gonna get moving now. I can't tell you where I am, but I hear there's a great pierogi place in this town, so I'm gonna get some good food and figure out where's next. I don't know how this thing's gonna wind up, but I'll keep you posted. If you ever don't see a post for a four-day stretch, assume they caught up and go quiet.

Later.

2002-03-25T11:27:00.000-05:00

The best cartoon on the internet today.

Really. Boxjam's not only a swell guy, he's mastered the art of minimal graphic humour...and makes me crack up more than any other comic (except maybe Superosity).
He also has the greatest T-shirts of any online comic out there. I wear mine sometimes and small children point an laugh at me.

The big news of yesterday: one, I spent all day yesterday helping two Bishop's University students by acting in their short film "Red Sky Morning." I play a marketing executive who rapidly collapses into complete insanity. Not much of a stretch there. Secondly, I found out my old Scoutmaster recently killed himself and his mother in an apparent murder-suicide. When telling a friend how weirded out I was about that, he told me that HIS Cub leader escaped from a mental institute and killed himself by grabbing a cop's gun. While he was a "current" Cub leader.

Avoid the scouting movement, ye depressed and ye unbalanced.

Actually, I find that while some Scouting leaders have been the nicest people I've ever met (Skip, my old Scoutmaster, being one of the good eggs despite what happened fifteen years down the road), a few really strike me as people who are trying to fix their secret broken selves by 'helping' kids, and usually wind up not doing much good. I dated a monumentally screwed-up youth centre coordinator for a while, which is how the whole idea came up years and years and years ago...

2002-03-22T13:16:00.000-05:00

Read the comic!
You know, when you seriously start worrying about the proper style for toll-free numbers, you've been working too hard. But still...

1-800-555-5555
or
1 800 555-5555?

Which is correct? (800) 555-5555 just looks stupid. The Canadian Style and MLA style guides are no help. I don't have a Chicago SG at work. It makes my head hurt thinking about it too much.

In other news, I resurrected an old mix CD I made last December for listening here at the office. It's great! Check this out, amigos:

Tom Waits -- Jesus Gonna Be Here
Velvet Underground -- Heroin
Alabama 3 -- Ain't Goin' to Goa
Mick Harris & Neil Harvey -- Not Found
Manitoba -- People Eating Fruits
Moved -- Cacao Facil
Air (French Band) -- Jeanne
Beck -- Nobody's Fault But My Own
Masada -- Gevurah
Gavin Bryars -- A Man In A Room, Gambling (4)
Charlie Haden -- Taney County
Herbaliser Band -- Who's The Realest?
Blind Boys of Alabama -- Jesus Gonna Be Here
Severed Heads -- Alaskan Polar Bear Heater

Now you can't beat that. No, really. Try it.

2002-03-21T15:25:00.000-05:00

Are you the keymaster?

I've been changing all the locks in my house. One on every door. The thing is, I don't want my guests to feel secure. Private, sure. A little hook-and-eye on the bathroom, on the bedroom door, keep kids from wandering in or the cat catching you doing something embarrasing. I'm hip.

But I don't want my guests feeling inaccessible, you know? They can't be sitting around in my house feeling like I can't get in. They can't shut me out. They have to look at the lock and know it's a courtesy lock, that it's there as a nod to their privacy and because I'm a good damn host. But they have to understand that one good kick and I'm in the room. Not even a good kick. One half-assed shove and that lock pops like tinfoil and I'm right there in the room with them.

Because I shouldn't be shut out in my own house. It's just wrong, right? They can't lock me out of my own rooms and laugh and laugh. They can't. I won't let them.

I'm changing the locks. There are fourteen.

It's a courtesy thing.

2002-03-20T15:55:00.000-05:00

good advice
Just taking a sec to check out the James Hudnall site, and his comics-writing advice is as good as gold. It's funny that he uses a few clichés in his "clichés must die!" section (including ...must die!) but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt...

2002-03-20T14:18:00.000-05:00

The nice thing about having a six-digit user code and password is that you can sing that "You don't make friends with sa-lad!" thing from the Simpsons. And yes, I know that's not where that tune originally comes from. You have so sort of slur "Ydon' " at the beginning, though.

I'm writing text for a "CRM Solutions Provider" at work today, and after an amazing amount of research, I've discoverd that CRM is a business-sourced term for Customer Relations Management -- and that nobody ACTUALLY KNOWS WHAT IT MEANS. It's the perfect buzzword, because it has no definition...there's a lot of "CRM Software" out there, but it can be anything from an e-mail manager to a specialized Excel spreadsheet. It's like all that business-world BS-speak has blossomed into perfect nonsense, and they all keep jabbering the blather because they don't want anyone else to think they don't know what's going on.

If you're thinking of becoming a business student, let me save you about $30,000:

Buy low. Sell high.

THAT'S ALL THERE GODDAMN IS TO IT, FOLKS!

--
np: nothin'. Gotta rectify that.

2002-03-17T19:23:00.000-05:00

Looking for cheap components...
I've been busy working away at building a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) lately, gathering info on what kind of system works best and where to get all the fiddly bits from. Living in Sherbrooke, it's hard to get a reliable computer-parts store within driving distance.

The beginning, anyway, of a monologue for the Big Mysterious Radio Project:

It was then, when I was staring up at that sixteen-foot phallus made of cardboard and rubber bands, that I knew it was my destiny to be an artist.

I left the museum talking -- no, ranting, really. Ranting on the street, striding along, jabbing my finger in the air and babbling out loud, "I know I can do it I know I can make a difference I can BEAT that I can BEAT it I know I can do it I AM AN ARTIST." And I felt the eyes of the crowd upon me as I strode past, felt them watching me and hearing my words fall on them like warm rain and felt their appraisal and approval and I knew they believed that I was. An artist.

I was an artist.

I went home and grabbed the phone from the roommate, hung up, and when he started to complain, I punched him in the mouth. "I'm an artist," I screamed at him, and I could feel all the veins in my neck sticking out a clear quarter-inch, my eyes bulging, my throat hoarse from the streetlong raving for my growing swell of admirers. He staggered back clutching his nose, blood starting to flood from between his startled fingers, his eyes glazed with fear and hatred. "I'm an ARTIST!" I insisted, and the pure light of my art drove him from the room, saying "You asshole, you can't even draw a circle" through his hand and a mouth full of blood.

I started making calls, because he was right, I couldn't draw. Not one bit. Couldn't paint, either, and had not talent for sculpting. If I'd ever had a proclivity for manual artistic talent, I never knew it, and it had been lost along with my hand in the thresher that summer on the McCaul farm. But I was an artist. The phallus had convinced me.

If a man could get twenty-four thousand dollars to make a sixteen-foot phallus out of old cardboard boxes and rubber bands, then by Jesus and Joseph and Old Joe Stalin I was an artist, or I would be one, or I would be the man behind the curtain that the artist stands in front of, lights burning her face, vaseline on her eyelids to keep the Frenells from arcing through and searing her retinas, making her blind and stumbling in a world of brilliant media.

And that was how I became an art consultant.

The calls came in slowly, at first. My first big break was a young up-and-comer in high school, one who'd seen my newspaper ad and was wondering about my services. I let him off cheap. He wanted to draw ducks, you see. He had a strange obsession with ducks. He couldn't draw anything else. He thought about ducks, dreamed about ducks, masturbated to vivid fantasies of mallards flapping on his groin. Flapping.

The thing was, he couldn't sell his ducks, and nobody wanted to watch his ducks, nobody wanted his ducks on their walls. There were better ducks. He hated Robert Bateman, the famous wildlife painter, and would go on bitter rants with the hurt pride that only sixteen-year-old geniuses can muster about Bateman and how he'd cornered the goddamn market on goddamn ducks and you couldn't say "mallard" without somebody saying goddamn "Bateman." He hated Bateman.

So I told him, I told him that I was an art consultant, and what I did was that I helped artists, those with technical skill but perhaps not the marketing savvy to capture the modern art idiom, I helped them to seize that market, that high-priced glittering world of vaseline eyelids and sixteen-foot phalluses, I helped them grab that and squeeze it like a baby chipmunk. Squeeze it 'till it squealed, or quacked, in his case.

He liked that, the sixteen-year-old duck artist, and I swore full confidentiality and told him that if he couldn't sell straight duck paintings, he had to think of the other powers and attributes of the duck population and reassign those to unusual milieus to create modern art that might generate what we, in the industry, called a "buzz."

He thought about it for a minute, making a small coughing noise in the back of his throat, rasping a little. He told me that ducks had wings. "Too general," I said. He told me that ducks could swim. "Try harder," I said. He told me that ducks ate bread in parks sometimes. "Interesting, but we're not there yet," I said, He said that ducks, usually, flew in a "V" formation.

I said "Bingo."

Six weeks later, he was finished an art sequence called "V", taking famous art works and photographs from history with a prominent V motif in them, or a character with a V in his name, and replacing the Vs with a V of distant migrating ducks. Winston Churchill flashed a hand full of tiny flying ducks; and so on. He was hailed, within weeks, as a young genius. His next painting was a series of stills from pornographic films, blown up to eight-by-eight panels, with ducks flying out of women's mouths and privates. The series sold to a reclusive Texan millionaire for forty-seven thousand dollars.

He was on his way, he and his ducks. Flying south to fame and fortune and acclaim. And I knew I was on my way too. They came slowly at first, but the calls came, first a trickle and then a stream, other artists whom were in the confidence of the sixteen-year-old duck genius, other people with technical skills but no perhaps the abstract-art-flair that it took to make them famous. As in, with fame.

I would sit there in my apartment, my door locked, and answer the phone. I kept the door locked because my roommate had never forgiven me for punching him in the mouth, and was thirsty and hungry and hung over for revenge. He would try to ruin my new career by startling me while I was on the phone, to make me scream or yell or cry out and make the people at the other end of the fuzzy connection, fuzzy because my only phone was an old manual dial from the forties, make them think I was insane. Once he went as far as to rent an ape suit and buy bloody fresh steaks and stuff them in the mask of the ape suit, and smear blood all over the gloves of the ape suit, and waited until I was on the phone, pitching an artist, my voice rising as I reached a frenzied pitch of artistic contemplation and creative thought, and burst into the room kicking the door open, spraying blood everywhere as he waved his arms and yelling booga booga. I almost had a heart attack. And I lost the client. I started locking my door after that.

At any rate, I would sit there with my clients on the phone, with my lap robe on. The first thing I bought, with the first flush of success, was a lap robe. They're hard to find, and a little old fashioned, but I like them because I tend to get a chill and a lap robe seems to be what keeps me from getting cold without making me too warm. Long underwear makes me too warm, and I can't lie in bed, can't lie horizontally without falling asleep.

And I was successful, and my clients were successful, and everything was a big success. There was champagne and delicate fruits and tasty chocolates from countries I've never heard of and couldn't begin to pronounce the names of. I was responsible for some of the most famous works in modern art, some of the most audacious concepts in installation work came from my mind while I sat in that crowded apartment, sipping warm brandy with a lap robe keeping my six-inch phallus, delightfully bereft of both cardboard and rubber bands, nice and toasty.

---

It's about half done. Should run about 25 minutes, read, once it's finished. It eyeballs at around 15. Needless to say, my career as an art consultant will end badly.

2002-03-17T19:20:00.000-05:00

the comic continues

2002-03-07T12:10:00.000-05:00

the debate rages on...

I innocently started a thread on this message board over a week ago, fully expecting a couple of answers and a die-down. Instead, I seem to have touched a nerve and sparked some lively debate over writers v. artists, and the fact that artists seem (to put it crudely) grip writers by the balls and demand cash for services up front. Many do, anyway.

Anyway, it's quite the snappin' little debate. I'm a touch embarrased by the whole thing. I just thought it was a nifty idea, is all...

NP: Bob Belden, "Black Dalhia"

2002-03-06T15:46:00.000-05:00

type in twelve

I'd like to, if I may, tell you a little bit about my job.

It's confidential, but I know I can trust you. You're my friend.

There aren't a lot of people I feel like I can talk to, you know? Ha. I knew you'd agree. That's why we're friends.

I've been working at this same job for about twelve years. I've taken seventeen sick days over the twelve years. I was sick for fifteen of them. Two of them I just called in sick, because I --

I don't have to explain myself to you.

Every morning, I get up and drink three big cups of coffee with brown sugar. I eat a sugar-free cereal with two per cent milk. Immediately after breakfast, I wash the dishes I have used and clean the coffee maker.

I have the coffee maker set to make coffee before I wake up in the morning. Did I mention that? I set it up at night so that when my alarm goes off, I can drink my coffee.

They pick me up around 6:45 a.m., sometimes a little earlier. They just pull into the driveway and shut the motor off. I've told them that they don't have to shut the motor off, because it takes me, like, eight seconds to get from the door to the car when they pull in, but they shut the motor off. Every time.

We don't talk a lot on the ride in to work. It takes a lot of concentration, the job, so you spend a lot of time, you know, focusing. Getting in the zone. The other guys do, anyway. I never really need to spend a lot of time focusing. Sometimes I think I got in the zone twelve years ago, and never got out. That I'm living my whole life in the zone, always in the zone, drinking coffee in the zone, sleeping in the zone, eating and farting and masturbating and belching and feeling alone and lost and afraid, all in the zone.

We don't talk a lot on the way in. Did I say that already?

The first row of TVs is about two feet up off the floor. All twelve are recessed into the wall, with sort of a lip over them so it looks like it's just a screen in the masonite. They're stacked four wide, three high, and the screens are all sort of wide so it makes a big square. Early on, in my first year, it took some time to get the trick of getting them all in your field of vision at once, because you sort of have to sit near the back of the room and angle your head a little higher than you might hold it normally.

The trick is to not focus in on one screen, to not get involved with one character or action. You have to let your eyes just open up to the whole wall while you watch, and keep recording your general feelings -- are you happy, sad, upset, frustrated, etc. It's harder than it sounds. Every time I fill a sheet of notepaper, I just toss it over my shoulder and keep going, writing and writing.

Near the start, I used to think about what I was writing. Now I just write. I put a pen in my hand and my hand on the pad and it moves like the images move in front of me. Sometimes, I feel someone else in the room, staying low to the floor, collecting the pieces of paper I've tossed over my shoulder. I don't take my eyes off the screen, though. They break that habit out of you pretty early on.

I'm the only one left of my original car pool. Did I mention that? Everyone else in the car pool has changed three times at least. Most guys last three years, maybe four. When I started, one of the guys vanished after two weeks. He just stopped showing up at the car pool. He had weird eyes.

It doesn't bother me, how often the guys in the car pool change. We don't talk a lot on the way in.

I watch all twelve TV screens at once, and write and write. I don't know what I write. I don't know what happens to those pieces of paper. I don't know what they do with them. I write and I write and I don't watch any one screen, and they pay me a lot of money. Afterwards, I go home and sleep. I think.

This one time, I woke up in the park with a lot of blood on my shirt. My hands, too. There was something stuck under my fingernails. I went home and cleaned myself off and looked for the cut, but couldn't find it. I didn't tell anybody, not even the guys in my car pool.

There aren't a lot of people I feel I can talk to, you know?

I'm not supposed to tell you this. I'm not supposed to tell anyone this.

But I can trust you. You're my friend.

2002-03-05T20:54:00.000-05:00

...um, whoops. Please ignore the double-post below. I thought Blogger had shystered me, but it was just being slow.

NP: Joe Frank, "Hawaii"

2002-03-05T20:49:00.000-05:00

Putting the Id back in idiot
Ha! HA! Blogger tried to screw me again, but I WAS USING NOTEPAD! HA!
Okay, there really IS a sewing.com!
I just hemmed my first pair of pants. HAW!
Hem and haw. Get it?
Yeesh.
Mom did the first leg for me last night, and I tackled leg #2 this evening. Over an hour to hem one friggin' leg! I suck at hemming! But the end result turned out OK, and actually is even with the other leg and everything. Who the hell looks at the BOTTOM of people's pants, anyway?
I actually got in an argument with somebody once, because he'd bought a $40 pair of dress socks...plain black..."But they were Armani!" Listen up, buttercup: you can buy 'em for a buck at the dollar store, and WEAR SOME FRIGGIN' SHOES. Who's ever going to see your socks? Pants over the tops...shoes over the bottoms...about an inch of exposure, if that. On the old "Little House on the Prairie" TV show, Albert used shoeshine on his ankles because they were too poor for dress socks.

Man, it's amazing what occupies those brain cells. Can't figure out how to stitch a hem, but I recall incidents from "Little House on the Prairie." Go Laura! Go Laura! Go-go-go Laura!

Sleepy, and I still have to write Man-Man scripts. My life is a scintillating funball!

NP: CBC Radio. Too lazy to put something else on...

2002-03-05T20:31:00.000-05:00

Okay, there really IS a sewing.com!
I just hemmed my first pair of pants. HAW!
Hem and haw. Get it?
Yeesh.
Mom did the first leg for me last night, and I tackled leg #2 this evening. Over an hour to hem one friggin' leg! I suck at hemming! But the end result turned out OK, and actually is even with the other leg and everything. Who the hell looks at the BOTTOM of people's pants, anyway?
I actually got in an argument with somebody once, because he'd bought a $40 pair of dress socks...plain black..."But they were Armani!" Listen up, buttercup: you can buy 'em for a buck at the dollar store, and WEAR SOME FRIGGIN' SHOES. Who's ever going to see your socks? Pants over the tops...shoes over the bottoms...about an inch of exposure, if that. On the old "Little House on the Prairie" TV show, Albert used shoeshine on his ankles because they were too poor for dress socks.

Man, it's amazing what occupies those brain cells. Can't figure out how to stitch a hem, but I recall incidents from "Little House on the Prairie." Go Laura! Go Laura! Go-go-go Laura!

Sleepy, and I still have to write Man-Man scripts. My life is a scintillating funball!

NP: CBC Radio. Too lazy to put something else on...

2002-03-05T11:41:00.000-05:00

Type in enthusiasm.com, this is whatcha get. I hate web refers.
I know I'm running off at the mouth today, but what can you do. I just saw an old note on my desk, residue from an edit job of last week in which I was taking notes on the theoretical future "tone" of the doc I was rewriting.
It's a little piece of note paper, about two and a half by four inches, white. Scrawled across it in my messy hand:

"MUSTER ENTHUSIASM."

Sometimes the best things are on little bits of paper you find lying around. I think I'm gonna make a "MUSTER ENTHUSIASM" poster and stick it on my wall. It's the best backhanded motivational statement I think I've ever heard.

2002-03-05T11:13:00.000-05:00

Todd and Penguin--the comic strip now with more Penguinny goodness!

A brief e-mail to the Todd and Penguin auteur, Dave Wright, in response to a "like your blog" comment:

I've found that blogging is the single most important creative tool I've discovered in years. I've tried lots of things, like carrying a notebook and a pen around, and a mini-tape recorder, but all of them take too much transfer from the idea to the execution. Digging around for the notebook or the recorder, jotting/saying the thoughts, and THEN having to deal with them again later.

I spend most of my working day at a computer, and connected to the 'Net through a cable modem, so blogging really is instantaneous. Being a child of the age, I type literally six times faster than I can write, too, so it makes the most sense for me to try to record things spontaneously at a keyboard rather than a piece of paper.

What I really SHOULD do is keep a hard copy of the blog. I'm getting quite proud of it, and don't want these ideas to perish when blogger shuts down (as all these cool free services seem to, eventually...)

The nice thing about blogger is that I can transfer stuff like this to it, too. I'm gonna do that right now, in fact.

NP: still Erik Truffaz

2002-03-05T11:06:00.000-05:00

Moderntheatre.com is apparently for sale.

Open with a fairly traditional stage, a woman...I dunno...reading a book or something. A man enters stage L. They talk for a bit, the tone of the conversation rising to anger. As it reaches a crescendo, the man clutches his chest. He's having a heart attack! He pitches over onto his back. The woman screams and begins to perform CPR, pleading with the audience for help. The audience just sits there.
Eventually, an elderly man gets up, a doctor, and timidly inquires as to whether this is part of the play. The woman shrieks that it is not, and the man hurries up to the stage. While climbing up onto the stage, he suffers some sort of stroke, and falls back into the front row, blood tricking from his mouth. The doctor's wife rushes down to him. She begins to scream as well, her screams mingling with the actress' pleas for help.
A short while later, a young woman in a jean jacket stands up and asks if this is really all some modern theatre thing. The woman and the doctor's wife scream that it isn't. She begins to run out to the lobby to call 911, but trips on a stair and falls, cracking her head on the floor. She passes out.
Another man gets up, this one rather overweight and quite drunk. He pulls out a cell phone and apologizes loudly and profusely for interrupting the goddamn play, and that he doesn't understand this modern theatre shit, and he's gonna call an ambulance and he's not paying any goddamn fine if this is all some sort of fancy-ass "performance art" shit. As he dials, he suffers an epileptic seizure. His friend, similarly dressed in a plaid shirt and baseball cap, begins to demand the audience members around him for a safety pin to pin the drunk man's tongue to his lip to keep him from choking.
Three seats down, an audience member reluctantly gets up, stating that she does not want to interrupt the performance of what is obviously a clearly affecting and gut-wrenching piece of theatre, but audience participation is part of the piece. As she looks through her purse for a safety pin, she sees her insulin kit and realizes that in all the excitement, she is over two hours late for her insulin injection. She lapses into a coma. Her husband begins to yell at her, berating her for ruining the performance.
The piece continues to expand through disaster to disaster, incorporating the audience members as performers, or the performers as audience members, unfolding like a dark and beautiful flower.
After an hour, the auditorium is full of dead, dying, unconscious or incoherently distraught people. Nobody can tell who the actors were, and who the audience was. There is nobody left to observe.

NP: Eric Truffaz, "Mantis"

2002-03-04T16:00:00.000-05:00

I'm warming up to "Your Radio Nightlight," but in that "this isn't bad, but I could do this, and probably a little bit better, even" sort of way.

Ah! One of the choice phrases from my conversation with Aaron (blogged a coupl'a days ago) just resurfaced...
"The problem I have is I think of the people I admire and think that I couldn't be that good...but then I realize that for these people to exist, SOMEBODY has to be that good...so why SHOULDN'T it be me?"

Oops. Gotta go!

2002-03-04T14:03:00.000-05:00

Benjamen Walker's *Your Radio Nightlight*

Hola! Translating the index for this year's Eastern Townships Tourism Guide, and multi-tasking by checking out Benjamen Walker's "Your Radio Nightlight" at the same time. Long-time friends and associates know that I'm a monster Joe Frank fanatic, and B.W. is sort of J.F. format ripoff (he blatantly admits it, and is somewhat proud of it), so I figured I'd take a listen. It's in my own best interest, if I'm going to try to ape Mr. Frank myself with the upcoming Canada Obscura.

Not bad. I'm listening to "Underworld," which seems to be a long monlogue by Mr. Walker, laden with symbolism and a little too reminiscent of Grade 13 creative-writing classes. Definitely lacks the deft surgical satire of Joe Frank, thus far, anyway. To be fair, it's partially the voice -- Benjamen has the standard College Radio Nerd voice, instead of Frank's gravelly, oily throat, which makes him a little harder to take seriously. We'll see how it goes, though. I AM enjoying the listen, just being very critical...after all, this is something I want to do, so best to figure out what I don't like early on...

2002-03-04T07:21:00.000-05:00

I got worms.

Many people don't know that I vermicompost -- that is to say, I have a big Rubbermaid container in my kitchen with a few hundred redworms in it, and I put all my vegetable waste in there for the worms to eat and, over time, turn into delicious compost for the plants.

Unfortunately, I'm fairly new at it, and have several questions, esp. regarding why the worms are climbing the sides of the bins and these little white buggy things crawling around the sides of the bin.

I hope they get answered soon. I like my worms.

2002-03-03T22:26:00.000-05:00

Jones on Bookbinding

Well, the folks are here, dinner has been had, all is well with the world.

An interesting bit of conversation with Dad this evening -- sidelong winding its way around to our varying ideas of what "Conservative" means. I associate it with a very fiscal concept -- what is good for Big Business is good for everyone, and money rules all. His view is that conservatism is more about small government, independence etc. Neither of us are particularly conservative, in case you were wondering.

The interesting bit was trying to figure out where the difference springs from, and I suspect that for people of my age, having spent much of our youth in the '80s, it might all be Reagan and Thatcher, and "Reaganomics" defining what I think of as Republicanism/Conservatism. Somewhere in the last few decades, conservatism seems to have imprinted itself on me (and, I suspect, most people of my generation) as something that advocates fiscal "responsibility" above and beyond all else. Smaller government and etc. does get lip service, but usually just as something that is "wasteful," not something that is ideologically unsound.

Somehow, this seemed more riveting when we were discussing it, but I think the central point is a good question. Has conservatism changed, or is it just my perception that it has? And how much did the '80s, '90s and "Big Money" conservatism (see Mike Harris, Ralph Klein, etc.) have to do with this ideological shift, either real or perceived?

Off to bed, to dream of Thatcher. Ugh.

2002-03-03T16:37:00.000-05:00

Fight the real enemy

One side effect of spending all day cleaning the house is that it gives me lots of time to think of weird crap.

Scenario for a film:
A young photo buff one day decides to take apart his camera, and despite knowing a heck of a lot about the things, finds a little hoojamadigger that he can't figure out. Being the adventurous sort, he removes it.
Later that same evening, he sees Bigfoot! What a coincidence!
He takes a few snaps, and upon printing them, is startled to discover that they all came out perfectly clearly! Wonderful National Geographic-type shots.
For some inexplicable reason, he decides to hold off on publishing his Bigfoot photos until he has a chance to figure out why his Bigfoot photos turned out, while his previous photos of UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Elvis and Casey Kasem all turned out foggy, unintelligible messes.
A relatively bright young feller (hmm. Or perhaps an old codger, like say a Weekly World News photographer from the good ol' days), he quickly discovers that since the days of the Brownie, all photo equipment manufacturers have been conspiring with the world government and that obsequious global shadow government to install a Weird Filter on cameras, a filter that will automatically take anything outside the realm of normal human experience and transform it into garbage.
He sets out to reveal this secret to the world, but is promptly murdered by Maury Povitch, who is still bitter about the cancellation of A Current Affair.
I insist on Tom Waits being cast as the reclusive engineer behind the current Weird Filter, Mark XVII. Other than that, I'm open on all casting. Maybe Gilbert Gottfried as the lead, as the fact that HE can be photographed is still a mystery to millions.

NP: Tom Waits, Mule Variations

2002-03-03T09:55:00.000-05:00

Guess who's not cleaning the house?

I'M not cleaning the house!

Guess whose parents arrive in eight hours for a three-day visit?

MY parents arrive in eight hours for a three-day visit!

Guess who's dangerously close to panic?

Stockwell Day. The race for the Alliance leadership is NOT going well for the ole bastard. I almost feel bad for him.

Hurm. That took a turn for the political, neh?

A few bon mots from a coffee klatch last night with Aaron Patella, Esq.:

"The voice in peoples' heads that they listen to tends to be the smallest one."

"The thing keeping me from really believing in myself is that most really self-confident people I know also tend to be arrogant assholes."

I'm sure there was more, but I was all hopped-up on caffeine and now I don't remember the entire conversation. Damn, I'd best get to cleanin'.

NP: CBC radio. Borrrrring...

2002-03-03T06:58:00.000-05:00

Netscape.com
Yearrgh. I'm only in Netscape because I set it as the default page for Internet Explorer (Captain Irony!) and I only use IE when Netscape crashes -- which is becoming distressingly frequent. The program doesn't die, it just...stops. Pages stop loading, and no matter what I type in the address bar, it just sits there. The weirdest thing is that even 5-10 minutes after I close everything, if I ctrl-alt-del, "Netscape" still appears as a shut-downable option.

Anyway.

I'm just blogging in to jot down a story idea: man who respects objects. Starts with his girlfriend and her stuffed animal Choomy, which he has to apologize to when he knocks it around or off the bed. Soon, he starts doing it when she isn't even home. Next thing, he's apologizing to the fridge, to the table, to various things when he bumps or scuffs them. Quick descent into a weird form of totem magic wherein he spends all his time talking/apologizing/dealing with various...things.

---

NP: nothing, actually. I'm only up 'cause the damn cat jumped on me.

2002-03-02T17:45:00.000-05:00

Oswald liked products.

He really did. Not any products in particular, just products. He liked to go to grocery stores especially. To look at all the products. No meat, no poultry, no produce. No special cheese. Just the canned, the boxed, the packaged. The products.

He told me once, while drunk on highballs, that he loved the names most of all. Jos Louis, Tang, Froot Loops, Precious Moments, Wizard, Dunkeroos, Catapult, Wagon Wheels; all those logos, all those designs and colours and special distinctive little hooks.

Once he broke into a graveyard with a chisel and began to give all the inhabitants of the graveyard product qualifications. Henry Musty, 1945-1992, was Bigger Than Ever. Kathleen Hargrove, 1845-1921, was Low On Fat. He even carved out his father's tombstone. Oswald Sr. was Tough On Grease.

Oswald told me that he aspires to be Tough On Grease some day. But he was drunk at the time, so I won't hold him to it.

2002-02-28T12:44:00.000-05:00

Think your DJ is local? Think again

MIGHTY CRAP! I just wrote this 750-word rant on community radio and its value in a rapidly-homogenizing radio world...and goddamn blogger DESTROYED IT!!!

ARRRGH!

MUST WRITE THESE THINGS IN NOTEPAD FIRST!

ARRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hulklike rage...subsiding...anyway. Thanks to Boxjam for the initial link above, which got me thinkin'. I'll continue this when I feel like rewriting the ENTIRE GODDAMN ESSAY.

Stupid free and highly utilitarian service that provides me with undreamt-of convenience in posting my thoughts with relatively little hassle!

Okay. So. My original point is that while a lot of people see Small Radio as a dying breed, I actually have a lot of faith in it as a medium. Radio's all about personality, see, and as people lose "their" personalities on commercial stations, there's a local void to be filled by the smaller fish. Granted, programming on volunteer-based stations is often a little more hectic, but when it gets down (as I think it will) to listening to one of four National Radio Chains or listening to your cousin's boyfriend on the local c/c station, the latter stands a pretty good chance.

The problems? One, c/c stations depend on volunteers to donate time (and sometimes money) to support them. Two, if you don't have a good leader -- a REALLY good leader -- it just doesn't work. The volunteers need to be managed and rallied, but most of all, they need focus.

This has been the problem with the radio station I used to manage, CJMQ, since, well, since I stopped managing it. I know that sounds egotistical, but I believe it to be true. We've had some pretty good managers in there, but nobody who's made it a balls-to-the-wall number one priority. Nobody who's truly believed that this might be the most important thing that the volunteers ever do with their lives. I believed that, and it caused me a lot of grief and frustration, but it also moved things forward like nobody's business. In two years managing the station, I spent a total of twelve days not being AT the station...even if just for ten minutes on a Sunday. And that's what it took to really make CJMQ rock.

Once a couple of people who come through who lack the motivation, or the initiative, or just the sympatico, however...a vicious circle is a hard thing to reverse, especially with a small and underfunded volunteer organization.

I believe that community radio can be the most dynamic media on the continent in the next ten years. But it takes volunteers, and faith, and enthusiasm.

If you're reading this and you're NOT involved in community radio -- think about it! The number one reason people don't support their real bona fide local independent radio station is they don't like all the music -- but they're bound to have some music you like, and if the music you love isn't getting played anywhere...maybe you should be ON community radio playing it!

It's the future. At the very least, it's your only alternative to a bland, homogeneous national radio scene that will drain every ounce of creativity out of North American music.

---

NP: Spookey Ruben, "Breakfast"

2002-02-28T10:50:00.000-05:00

Jesus with heat vision.

It was just a wandering thought as I was shoveling out the driveway this morning. Superman is Jesus with heat vision. I'm sure other people have made the Kal-El-Christ comparison before, but has anybody ever taken it to the comic-book point where people worship Kal as the Second Coming? When you think about it, he'd make a hell of a "first I came as the lamb, but I shall return as the lion" kind of guy.

It's also kinda funny to think about Jesus with heat vision. "Pedlars in the temple, BEGONE!" ZOW! FOOM! ZAWASHIE! "Get ye behind me, Satan!" ZAM! BZZAP! KACHOW!

---

np: MMW, "The Dropper"

2002-02-27T12:35:00.000-05:00

Man, weren't the Cure GREAT when they were just wee lads? I've been listening to Seventeen Seconds and Three Imaginary Boys lately, to say nothing of Boys Don't Cry, and I'm re-blown away by Young Snotty Robert Smith (as opposed to Old Fat Complacent Robert Smith).
They were recording back in 1979. That means they have at least one album that is 100% categorizable CLASSIC ROCK.
Weep, ye Goths and Gothlings. Weep, for the Cure are Classic Rock.

2002-02-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

Mr. Dolphin watches sports because he likes watching people grow old, weaken, and fail.
He loves it, in fact. Sits there on one of those creaking metal chairs in the group home, usually alone or near-alone in the rec room, looking up at that fizzing black-and-white hanging down from the ceiling on bolted black arms. The flourescents interfere with the picture sometimes, and the medication he's on makes his vision blur, but he doesn't mind that so much any more.
The reason he watches alone is because nobody can bear to be in there with him. "See there?" he'll crow, pointing at a red blur that stumbles. "He was top of the league, few years back. They'll be putting him out to pasture soon." His yellowed tongue moistens his lips when he thinks about these things. "He's lost it. And he knows." Rubbing hands, stomping feet like a freezing man. "Brother, he knows."
So we leave Mr. Dolphin alone now, to watch and chortle as the heroes of millions grow old, and wither, and disappear. Most of them without fanfare or news. One year, they just aren't there any more.
The funny thing about Mr. Dolphin: I've worked here for fifteen years, and every single day he's been in there watching, and damned if the bastard seems a day older now than when I started.

---

NP: Dead Can Dance, "The Serpent's Egg"

2002-02-26T15:21:00.000-05:00

ATV Accessories and Equipment for Logging and Forestry Operations

Anyone out there know what a "poulie déviation" is in English? Anyone?

---
NP: Ursula 1000, S/T

2002-02-26T13:13:00.000-05:00

Oh, for Christ's sake.

I was idly thinking about the name for the upcoming Mysterious Radio Project while working -- oddly enough, translating promotional documents for an ATV-trailer company doesn't command my full and enthusiastic attention -- and "Master of Nothing" was one prospect. I typed in masterofnothing.com just to see what happened, and the link above popped up.

Normally, I'd be disappointed that I couldn't dot-com my show name. But in this case, I'm thinking about ditching the show name entirely, if it means me and this yutz are thinking along the same lines. Oy.

---

NP: "Seventeen Seconds," The Cure

2002-02-26T12:21:00.000-05:00

download these and listen to them or I will destroy you

Step one: buy a monkey.
Step two: over years of labourious and time-consuming effort, teach it to only go to the bathroom in full bowls of cereal.
Step three: stock up on penicillin. Boatloads of it.
Step four: get some anti-malarial drugs, too. Can't be too careful.
Step five: dose yourself up, get yourself good and liquoured, and invite a friend over with a very good high-resolution camera.
Step six: unleash the monkey. Have it crap in a giant bowl of cereal as your friend photographs it.
Step seven: eat the cereal as your friend photographs you.
Step eight: spend several days in bed, blasted through with penicillin and other medications.
Step nine: have the photos developed, with about three dozen copies made. Keep the copies in a binder with you at all times.
Step ten: next time some twit responds to a negative comment with some stupid saying like "hey, who peed in your corn flakes this morning?" give them a blank stare and whip out the binder. Reply simply "Nobody. But this monkey keeps crapping in my cereal." Show him the photos. Give him his own set. Send him on his way.

Seems like a lot of trouble, but it'll be worth it. Trust me.

NP: still the Lain soundtrack.

2002-02-26T12:06:00.000-05:00

Oh. NP: Nakado Chaibo Reiki, "Serial Experiments: Lain" soundtrack.

2002-02-26T12:05:00.000-05:00

The scary thing about the internet is that people can choose how to present themselves, except maybe in live chat rooms. They can edit their posts on message boards, alter their photos, and basically eliminate all those weaknesses and misrepresentations that creep into human conversation. There's no body language. There's no stumbles, no slips. You can't see somebody's eyes roll or dart around the room. You can't seem them wet their lips or rub their hands.

Personalities are reduced to refined and shining concepts, as flawless as time and research allows.

How's that scary?

It's scary when you realize that and look at how people still choose to represent themselves. They can strive for perfection; great ideas presented well, the most shining aspects of their selves shared with the world to the greater glory of them.

And, d00dz, most of them don't even bother to spell.

2002-02-26T11:21:00.000-05:00

np: Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited, "The Space Sound Effect."

Man, finding an artist for a comics project is gonna be harder than I thought. I met the inestimable Salgood Sam last weekend through some friends in Montréal, and he was kind enough to put me on to some comics-community message boards. Lots of writers looking for artists...very few artists looking for writers.

The main problem is that most of these writers, well, suck. Horrific ideas floating around out there. If I were a decent and serious artist, I sure as hell wouldn't be poking around on these boards trying to find something decent amidst the muck of "Cyberdemonz fighting this, like, evil corporation!"

Back to plan A -- keep doing good work on Man-Man and hope that I can connect with someone good through the webcomics community...

2002-02-25T15:43:00.000-05:00

Oh yeah...

---

np: Various artists, "Covert Operations" (18th St. Lounge)

2002-02-25T15:38:00.000-05:00

CLICK ME YOU GORGEOUS BASTARD

Another passing note about the trip to Montreal -- at no point was I consumed with the urge to buy music! WHAT'S HAPPENING TO MEEEE? I spent a bundle on a MD recorder (far TOO much, according to the Internet, but I've sworn off mail-ordering large-ticket items for a variety of reasons, so what's another $130 for the satisfaction of dealing with a store and...aw, fuck, I got ripped) but I didn't have any desire to go into an HMV or even the super-amazing record store on St. Catherines (Esoterik) even before I spent my life savings.
Mel even asked me, on several occasions, if I wanted to go CD or record shopping. My response? "Nah. I have too much music I haven't even really listened to yet."

I HAVE CLEARLY GONE MAD.

2002-02-25T13:54:00.000-05:00

In passing -- I was at a Chinese buffet yesterday, which was about as Chinese and going to China and finding a "Canadian" buffet of deep-fried steak and chocolate-covered bacon, when I thought that it would be really cool to pick somebody at random and just follow them around the buffet, having exactly what they had, in as equal a portion as you could manage. Smile and nod encouragingly every time they look at you, then take whatever they just took. See how long it would take before they got really freaked out. Arrr har har har.

2002-02-25T13:41:00.000-05:00

This is a re-posting, hopefully correct, of the post that should have appeared below, which was a re-creation of an earlier post that got destroyed by blogger. Holy crap.

Okay, this is me recreating an earlier blog in response to an e-mail from Dave Wright of Todd and Penguin (http://toddandpenguin.keenspace.com), a really cool comic strip. I have to start copying these things to Notepad so they survive when Blogger screws up.

Anyway, Canada apparently won the Olympic Gold Medal in hockey yesterday, which I found out this morning. To be honest, I'd forgotten they were even playing last night; I was on my way back from MTL with my sweetie Mel after a wonderful (but very expensive) weekend in Canada's Linguistic Confusion Capital.

I just can't get worked up about it. Maybe I'm a lousy Canadian, but most of my pride in This Great Nation stems from our comprehensive and socialist-leaning approaches to accessible health care and decent universal education, rather than the ability of a dozen or so people to run around on ice with blades on their feet whacking away at a piece of hardened rubber with a stick.

This is a bone of contention (minor) between The Mel and I (wasn't that a movie?)...I say I'd just as soon scrap Olympic funding and put the whole thing into health care, poverty relief, public housing, and etc. My take on the situation is that if you're waiting for a heart transplant, knowing that we have our country has paid a bajoolian dollars to support some people who can run real fast isn't much solace. Unless they're running to the hospital with your &^%$ new heart.

Mel, on the other hand, says that Olympic-level sport raises people's general awareness of fitness and athleticism and inspires average joes to try to be more fit; that sort of thing, especially with children, is a good idea. Hard to argue with that.

Unless...how about we scrap Olympic funding and re-start the "Participaction" program? Anybody else remember that?

Oh...my favourite line from press coverage of the win:

'"You don't know what it's like to have a piano on your back," said Canadian player Al MacInnis.'

What the hell has been going on in their training camp, anyway?

---
np -- Radiohead, "Kid A"

2002-02-25T13:05:00.000-05:00

Putting the Id back in idiot

Okay, this is me recreating an earlier blog in response to an e-mail from Dave Wright of
Oh...my favourite line from press coverage of the win:

'"You don't know what it's like to have a piano on your back," said Canadian player Al MacInnis.'

What the hairy hell has been going on in their training camp, anyway?
---
np -- Radiohead, "Kid A"

2002-02-22T14:18:00.000-05:00

I was just reminded of old SPIDEY SUPER-STORIES comics, which came out in the late '70s by grace of that old CTW show The Electric Company. Each one had a picture of Morgan "Easy Reader" Freeman at the top saying "THIS COMIC IS EASY TO READ!"

The funny thing about SSS is that I have a distinct memory of reading one of these in, like, grade one and realizing (in a bolt of knowledge that near rent my young brain) that EACH word balloon had an EMPHASIZED word that was BOLDED AND ITALICIZED.

Every single one. It was amazing, and didn't really make any sense. It was like the words were being italicized as part of some Warholesque experiment in comic-book pacing. Spider-Man would grab the Kingpin's stickpin, for instance...

"Give me my CANE, Spider-Man!"
"No WAY, Kingpin! You'll JUST try to hit me with it!"
"You MEDDLING fool!"

Later...

"Look out for that ROCK!"
"It's going TO crush US!"

...and so on. Weirdass stuff. Gotta check Ebay to see if there's any of these old goodies out there and available...

2002-02-21T14:55:00.000-05:00

KeenSpace Forums - View Topic
I posted this to the above Todd and Penguin message board a while ago, and realized it might make sense to copy it here for general informational purposes.

Really, I should blog my m-board posts. Sadly, it's where most of my funniest writing gets done. This, however, is a true story...

Two months before I moved, I started making it a point to switch long-distance plans when ANYBODY called. It made for short conversations.

"This is Doug calling from Sprint Canada..."
"Sign me up, Doug!"
"Come again?"
"Thanks for your call! I'm switching to Sprint! Right now!"
"Oh...okay..."

"Hello?"
"Mr. Shepherd? My name is Julie, and I'm calling from Bell Canada. We noticed that you've switched long-distance providers..."
"Julie, I've been a damned fool. Switch me back to Bell."
"...really?"
"Sure!"

"Mr. Shepherd, my name is Roger, from AT&T long distance..."

and etc. I kept track on a notepad near the door. By the time they stopped calling (I wound up back with Bell) I had switched long-distance companies twenty-two times. Once I switched long-distance providers three times in one night. I got phone bills from seven different companies, most of them for nothing, in one month.

Then I disconnected my line and moved.

AH HA HA HA!

It still warms the cockles of my heart.

2002-02-21T13:14:00.000-05:00

Putting the Id back in idiot

Rereading entries from the past three days, I suddenly notice that I dwell on zombies and cannibalism. A lot.

For a moment, I wonder if something might be horribly wrong with me. Then I remember that zombies + cannibals = funny!

If more people would talk about zombies and cannibals, the world would be a merrier place.

2002-02-21T13:12:00.000-05:00

Upon editing stuff for tourism guides, it strikes me how often historical sites think it might be clever to have a "figure from the past" as a tour guide or site host.
Maybe it is. Maybe it's quaint and the tourstas just love it. But when you're running through dozens and dozens of entries that read things like "Lula Belle, born in 1834, will be your guide to the many mysteries of Hill House!" you begin to wonder who the hell all these undead people are, and why they're roaming around our national historic sites.
"My, what a wonderful old house!"
"Braiiiins...braiiinsss..."
"Yes, we saw the trains -- ARRGH!"
That's no way to get repeat business. Then again, it's a swell way to keep the supply of Government Cheese fresh, isn't it? I've called for tax information. I know who -- or WHAT -- is manning the phones in there.
Or "zombieing" the phones, maybe. Semantics are confusing.

2002-02-20T11:45:00.000-05:00

They keep doing news stories on the logging industry, but never mention the salient fact that 99% of logging industry workers get involved because of all the fun, cheap innuendo they can spout.

2002-02-20T11:17:00.000-05:00

Who the hell LISTENS to R&B? It's seeping through the ceiling once again, like somebody forgot to put the lid on the crap-o-matic and it's overflowed and saturated the floorboards. Saccharine R&B is dripping from above. I think it's giving me a rash.

I like some rap; even the rap I don't like, I can sort of understand why some people might like it. I don't really like punk, but I can sort of understand why some people might like it. I don't like new country, but I can semi-sort-of-conceivably-in-a-pinch-with-a-few-beers-in-me kind of mildly wrap my head around the concept of somebody perhaps liking it.

But R&B is a mystery. It's like somebody took music and squeezed all the interesting out of it. It's more formulaic than classic rock, duller than Britney, and about as mentally engaging as a warm sponge.

ARRRGH.

2002-02-18T13:37:00.000-05:00

Say, you know what the obituary columns are called in Sherbrooke's French-language daily La Tribune?
"NÉCROLOGIE."
It's a legit translation of the English word "obituary," but it does rather make the casual English observer wonder what's up with the French and their dead.
Like, if a loved one dies, you can have him listed in the obituaries...or in the Nécrologie pages, with a 50/50 shot that he might come back, and a subsequent 50/50 shot that he might be coherent and not a brain-munching hell thing.

"Where's daddy?"
"He fell into the wine press, sweetheart. But he might be back soon...through the miracle of NÉCROLOGIE!"
"Unnngh! Unnnngh!"
"DADDY!"
"Hooray! Hooray for Nécrologie! Welcome home, dear!"
"GnnnarrrgghhhBRAINS!"
(munch munch munch)

Obituary, while not a humdinger of a word, doesn't conjure up images of men in black cloaks trying to find out where you hid the good silver six months after you've passed on, at least.

2002-02-18T13:16:00.000-05:00

Mmm. Music's back. I guess we're freakin' clean now.

I'd better get back to the grind, here. I should also make it clear for wanderin' eyes that there's a lot of music by black artists that I like -- a lot -- from Stevie Wonder to Public Enemy, from Outkast to Angie Stone. What I'm subjected to daily, though, is R&B hell. Phil Collins and Steve Winwood never died...they just got pigmented, and instead of producing insipid, trite, predictable crap to torture white people with, they now produce inispid, trite predictible crap to torture black people with.

Lord save me.

2002-02-18T13:07:00.000-05:00

The only thing I don't like about my job? The fact that I work in a duplex, directly underneath the stereo of a very loud, very tastless Bishop's University student that gets up around noon and proceeds to play God-awful R&B for a few hours. Jazz on the computer speakers does a bit, but to actually drown out the bass requires a volume that makes conversation near-impossible.

The upstairs neighbour is black, which is relevant only in that his musical tastes are terrifyingly stereotypical. It's like he buys all his music solely by looking at the ads in VIBE magazine and buying anything with an ad that features the word "smooth."

Essentially, there are three songs:

1. I's gonna freak you girl. Cuz I care so much about you an I's gonna freak you girl. Freak you freak you. Cuz you my baby an I's gonna freak you all nite. Freak you up an down. I's gonna freak you.

2. I got really high. I's really high. I's smoked so much dope. I's really high. I's smoked a lot of weed. I gonna get really high. I got high and now I gonna get high. I's high. High.

3. I's so lonely. Where's my baby? Baby not here. I's not high. No dope fo' me. Nobody to freak. I's so sad. Where my baby? Who I gonna freak? I's so low. No baby no weed so low. I's low.

It's like Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac were in a head-on collision, and had to have two brain cells each transferred into the body of Smoove Daddy P-Lo Diddy Wah Groove. Short sentences, but somehow a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Treating it like a dadaist cut-up experiment is one survival strategy, but even Burroughs ripped on skag and rambling on ad nauseum about the glowing homosexual insect boys of Neptune is more engaging than this.

Whoa! Music's stopped. Water's running. The non-stop freakin' smokin' self-pity party may be winding down for some cleanin'.

Because the ladies won't freak ya if your dope is all dirty, yo.

2002-02-18T12:13:00.000-05:00

Man-Man
So I had a dream last night about cannibalism, which featured old friend Heather McCall in sort of a minor role. I don't think she's ever been a vegetarian, but in the dream I had been kidnapped by a mutual acquaintance who was planning to eat me. Cooked, of course. And then, in a pulp-novel revelation, it was unveiled that (gasp) HEATHER MCCALL was going to join in!
"But she's a vegetarian!" crieth dream-I.
Dream-Heather patiently explains that she realized that she should eat meat for health reasons, and after some reflection realized that humans are really the most environmentally-sound meat out there.
Couldn't argue with that. Even in a dream.
I wish I were this sensible awake.

2002-02-18T10:42:00.000-05:00

Do you know what death is in corporate medi-speak? "Serious Adverse Event." If you suffer from multiple coronaries and your eyeballs explode as your brain grows exponentially a la Tetsuo in the last reel (or final six books) of Akira, you have experienced a "Serious Adverse Event."

Jargon reaches the point where it can't even be mocked any more, just whistled at in low tones, as one does when watching a particularly severe car wreck or natural disaster on the evening news.

2002-02-06T14:01:00.000-05:00

Okay, so this is my blogger thingymadoo. I really have an exquisite lack of knowledge about exactly what the poop I'm a-doing here. So I'm typing, and then I will click "post" above, and then it will go up. And then I will be a blogger.

Soon I will be a blogger.