Saturday, part one

Earlier that evening: Drinks with Diane Duane

Early Saturday evening, I met sci-fi/fantasy/animation author and fellow blogger Diane Duane, who was passing through Accordion City, for drinks. She showed me her husband’s new computer, a Sharp Mebius laptop.

Never heard of the Mebius? That’s because it’s not normally available here in North America — the japanese market has determined that we’re not interested in incredibly skinny laptops with DVD-RW drives, built-in 802.11 and Ethernet and cool design (they have determined that we want all the tentacle porn we can eat, however).

Diane picked this up for her hubby at Dynamism, a New York-based company that specializes in bringing the latest and greatest Japanese electronics to North America (I’d love one of their tiny Ericsson cell phones!). Although it’s a Japanese computer, it has a standard QWERTY keyboard that has the Roman alphabet in large characters on its keys, as well as Japanese characters — you’ll feel like a console cowboy punching deck in a William Gibson novel using one of these.

I’ll write a little more about my meeting with Diane in a later entry.

Party at Peter’s place

Peter Timofjew, one of the kahunas behind the social group/drinking club/bunch of troublemakers Thirsty People of Toronto, held a Hallowee’n party last Saturday night. He’s the first set of pictures.

I used to go for more elaborate costumes in my younger days, but I’ve given up on that in more recent years. For the past three or four years, I’d simply throw on an apron and chef’s hat as go as “Chef” from South Park. This year, I toyed with going as Angus Young from AC/DC, or perhaps as “Manila Rice”, the Filipino answer to Vanilla Ice. Instead, I went as “Random Hong Kong Movie Gangster”. Rob loaned me his “Tom from the Chemical Brothers” yellow shades. And then I messed up the look with the hat.

Matt “Black Belt” Jones and I agree — your best clubbing outfit is an old tuxedo or equally formal black suit. You can wear it traditionally with a shirt and tie, as I did, or tieless with a black shirt, or go all Man from U.N.C.L.E. and wear a dark turtleneck with it. I went trad and wore a raffish (well, in Asian clubbing circles, the tie is actually understated) gold tie and white shirt. The suit’s a 10-year-old hand-me-down Hugo Boss courtesy of Dad. We should all have such generous fashion plates for fathers — thanks, Dad!

Rob got some coloured hairspray, but it didn’t work quite as advertised. Instead of making his hair platinum blond, it just made him look older. Very distinguished, though.