The great outdoors

The hotel in which I was staying for the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference was located in the middle of a Santa Clara office park. There was nothing but hi-tech office buildings surrounded by immaculately manicured lawns and a nearby gold course. Only the empty lots nearby — future locations of officeplexes, no doubt — had any kind of growth that didn’t look gardened, genetically engineered or designed. Aside from hanging out on the pool patio for lunch and to catch some end-of-day sun, we were pretty much confined to the hotel, as there was nowhere to walk for at least a mile around.

How do people live and work in such a sterile environment, where the buildings are just bigger cubicles for cubicles? No wonder computers are the way they are.

I’ve just woekn up from making up for the sleep debt inucrred at the conference, and am getting ready to go to some campfire party out in Guelph. My friend Will told me about it; apparently it’s someone’s parents’ two-story cabin with a giant fire pit, and people are bringing musical instruments. Tonight, we share the glow of a fire, not that of an 802.11b wireless Internet connection. Both are great things, in my geeky eyes, but with a fire:

• the girl-guy ratio is better
• you can roast marshmallows

See you on the flipside.

In case you didn’t know, I didn’t come up with the phrase “anal sovereignty” — credit for that goes to Jonathan Rosenberg, the guy behind the online comic Goats and inventor of my another favourite phrase of mine, “ass finger“. The story of how I passed inspection at U.S. Customs did the rounds at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference; since that memorable phrase was used to end that blog entry, it became a popular expression for the week.

Here’s the strip in which “anal sovereignty” appears:

Click the comic to see it at full size.

And for the insatiably curious and butt-joke-fixated, here’s:

• a Google search on the words “anal” and “sovereignty”
• a Google search on the phrase “anal sovereignty” (currently, there’s only one result, and it’s mine.)

Now I think I shall step outside and do something a little more productive (and a little less disturbing).

May two-four

The offical name of the holiday around this long weekend is based is “Victoria Day”. Always celebrated on the Monday before May 25th — the good queen’s birthday — it’s become better known as the May two-four weekend, the “two-four” being a reference to a case of beer rather than the date. My housemate Paul brought back some roman candles and bottle rockets from his trip to the States, and we’ll probably go to the Toronto Islands and light them Monday evening.

In the Queen’s honour, some Victorian links and other goodies:

Lyrics and chords to The Kinks’ Victoria

Riff:

G D G C G D G

Verse 1

D G

Victoria was my queen

Chorus

G D Em Bm D G

Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, ‘toria

Verse 2

I was born, lucky me

Let her sun never set

(play chorus twice)

Bridge

Em D

Victoria, ‘toria

(play solo — use verse chords)

(extended chorus — hold the first two “Victoria”s longer)

Verse 3

Canada to India

Victoria loved them all

(play chorus)

Calamity Claresta

One cannot mention the word “Victorian” without thinking about their rather repressed attitude towards sex. To this day, these attitudes (along with Hugh Grant) still colour the popular perception of Britons in the sack, British men’s magazines, Spice Girls and woman-of-my-dreams Nigella Lawson notwithstanding. One gets the feeling that Brit pillow talks goes along the lines of “erm, ah., oo-er!…Thank you very much, I’m sorry, it’s won’t happen again.”

Here’s a snippet from the first result of a search on Queen Victoria’s advice to young ladies, the phrase “lie still and think of England”:

He pulled her to him and brushed his lips gently across hers. Claresta thought she could not pull away from him should her life depend upon it.

“Do you find it so disgusting, my love, that I wish to be the one to introduce my wife to the proceedings of the marriage bed? Do you?” he whispered against her lips when she did not answer.

“N-no, my lord. ” Her legs had become jelly, and she had to cling to the lapels of his dressing gown for stability.

“Good,” he said. “Should I start your first lesson tonight, love, or would you rather wait until our wedding night.”

“D-Do you not think it always best one is prepared to know what is expected?”

“Precisely. And you will inform me of your expectations as well.”

“My expectations?”

“Did you think only the man gets to have a say in these matters?”

“Well, Nan told me a little. She never mentioned exactly how the man took part, but she said all a woman needed do was lie still and think of England.”

He chuckled. “Do either, if you think you can, Claresta.”

Does this saucy bodice ripper make your naughty parts feel like Cory Doctorow visiting an orbital Disneyland? You can find more about Calamity Claresta here.

A note to my British friends

I can already see my pommy pals — especially Danny, Matt, Ben and Helen — writing angry e-mails in defense of British sexuality.

Yes, I have dated a charming, if somewhat unbalanced, English Catholic girl, the first I’d ever sernaded with the accordion. Unfortunately, the story — while eventful and funny enough to be an AccordionGuy entry — is largely unbloggable. Let’s just say it involves: screaming, a fistfight in a gay and lesbian bar, several Scorpio innuendoes in a cafe, Barbie and Ken dolls, the park by Avenue Road and Dupont, dinner at an Italian restaurant, the “Epilady” and teddy bears, a long walk by the beach, a heartsick Glaswegian, smoked salmon and her getting mad at me because I was speaking in prose and not verse.

It was a complete disaster (“a lot of fuss for a bit of minge“, as one Brit friend of mine later put it after he heard the whole story), but it was a boob-a-licious one. I’d do it again in a minute.

Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you the story.

(In The Happiest Geek on Earth):

EtherPEG, meet PegBoy.

Read it here.

(In The Happiest Geek on Earth):

More reports from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology con.

Read them here.

Yoda’s kung-fu is very good

A number of us attending the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference couldn’t pass up the opportunity to catch the premiere of Attack of the Clones. We gathered a geek army of the Republic of Blogistan (that’s Cory’s catchphrase for the community of people who maintain weblogs) and descended on the AMC theatre right by the conference hotel.

All twenty screens were showing Attack of the Clones at midnight, and the lineups curled completely around the building. The die-hard fans started the line early in the morning and established camps complete with deck chairs, beach blankets, ghetto blasters and some even brought tents and other portable shelters.

We bought our tickets inline and had already picked them up earlier. We decided that we’d lost any shot at the best seats to the hardcore fans who’d waited in line all day, so we spent the evening partying at Danny’s and Quinn’s place until 11:00 p.m., at which time we drove to the theatre. We spent about 45 minutes waiting in line, during which tiome I played the accordion to a captive audience hungry for entertainment. I wasn’t really hitting them up for money, but made twenty bucks nonetheless — enough to cover my ticket and lots of Junior Mints.

Once inside the theatre, we waited almost an hour for the movie to begin. I got some cheers simply by playing the Star Wars Main Theme and the Imperial March. A handful of people at the back yelled “Play it again, Accordion Guy!” (people who don’t know me have an automatic tendency to call me that). One really bored guy did a jig in front of the screen while I played Louie, Louie. We were being made to wait, but we were making the best of it.

There’s a fair bit oif story to tell in the movie’s allotted time, so it hit the ground running with the threat on Padme’s life and soon afterwards, we were treated to a chase scene through the speeder traffic corridors of Coruscant. This movie marks a return to the feel of the old-school Star Wars films, from the sense of grand adventure and stunning visuals to the bad actor hired to play the apprentice Jedi Knight and the sloppily written love story. It’s kind of odd seeing the Imperial symbol on the good guys’ ship, Obi-Wan playing the part of hard-boiled detective (right down to the bit where he meets up with an old friend and underworld contact at a greasy spoon), the stormtroopers as they guys who save the day and Yoda switching from arthritic old Muppet to a guy who’d have kicked the asses of both Li Mubai (Chow Yun-Fat’s character from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Neo from The Matrix. Jar Jar’s appearances are mercifully short.

This film is almost on par with Empire; Empire still has a slight edge because it didn’t have as much mythos to stand on as this movie. It’s considerably better than Phantom Menace, but that was to be expected: this movie’s strength, as with Empire, is the dark-ish ending, and from Phantom Menace, there wasn’t anywhere to go but up. I’m going to enjoy watching it again next week with my friends in Toronto.