Month: August 2003

At the Bovine Sex Club. Good fun, cheap booze, great music, friendly crowd.

Chris Baldwin, the author and illustrator of the terribly poignant, often deep and extremely adult Bruno, has created a new comic strip called Little Dee, which replaces Bruno until September 1st. Here’s the start of the Little Dee run.

The only similarity between the two strips is that Dee looks like a little version of Bruno. Aside from that, it’s completely different: Little Dee is about a girl who gets lost in the woods and ends up being cared for by a friendly bear, a vulture and a dog who’s broken free from the domesticated life. Where Bruno is all angst and Weltschmerz (and hey, ain’t nuthin’ wrong with that), Little Dee is light and cute.

And hey, I’m a sucker for friendly cartoon bears.

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail:

Forced by the blackout to move away from the TV, everyone then had a chance to express their disdain for it. This is another common theory tonight. At a dimmed bar called the Village Idiot, a woman named Judith Coombe is listening to a man on an accordion sing an AC/DC song that includes the lyric, And I’ve got the biggest balls of them all. She likes the new darkness. “It’s so amazing. So quiet. It’s nice that people don’t have to watch TV or the Internet. It’s nice to force them to interact.” You also can’t get money, and you can’t spend money much of anywhere, except in a bar.

Thanks to this (unfortunately anonymous — hint, hint, powers that be at Blogware) commenter for pointing it out to me!

I’m going to have a “Best Of…” set of links in one of these sidebars sometime soon, but after having received a couple of email requests over the past few days, I’m going to post a few right now.

In reverse chronological order…

Worst Date Ever

A multi-part story that I haven’t finished telling. The story takes place in 1999; I’m telling it because I promised I would if I were nomianted for a Bloggie.

What’s been told so far:

1. Begin near the end. In which your humble accordion-playing author violates the laws of the space-time continuum and starts the story after the fireworks are pretty much over. Most of them, anyway:

If life were a cartoon — and it often is — there would be two miniature versions of me sitting on my shoulders. One would be dressed in white with wings and a halo saying “Do you think this is such a good idea, Mr. deVilla?” while the other would be dressed in red with horns and a pitchfork, doing pelvic thrusts and saying “British Invasion! FWOOOOOAAAAARRRR!”

2. A little background. How I met The Waitress during the Worst Year Ever, while attempting some sort of detente with the Then-Worst Girlfriend Ever:

Hers was a dysfunctional family, and the fact that my family was close — we are Filipino, after all — she alternately saw as a sign of immaturity, a sick dependency or a threat. As revenge against her parents, she one day (and remember, this is after our breakup), decided to give me power of attorney.

A year earlier, she’s decided to switch to a sort of made-up religion: a muddle-headed mishmash of wicca, crystals, aromatherapy and eye-for-eye karmic point-scoring (from the way she carried herself, she seemed to be exempt from karma accounting). Naturally, anything Christian — the religion of her parents — was by definition bad. She was doing a lot of flying that year, and like any superstition-prone fool with less rational scientific thinking skill than a bed of kelp, she was sure that she was going to die in a fiery plane crash. She told me that she had faith that I would honour her burial wishes because I was nice to her even when she was “being a total bitch.”

All that did was fuel dark power of attorney fantasies. I imagined a funeral theme that could only be described as “Maximum Jesus”. I wrote a script in which I would visit a hospital immediately after an accident. It went something like this:

Doctor: Mr. deVilla, she…she’s…

Me: Tell it to me straight, doc. No sugar coating. I can take it.

Doctor: She’s scraped her knee.

Me: I HAVE POWER OF ATTORNEY! I KNOW HER WISHES! NO HEROIC MEASURES! D.N.R.! PULL THE PLUG! PULL THE PLUG!

I remember saying to my sister: “I don’t even have the luxury of wishing she was dead, because I’d be stuck with all the paperwork.”

3a. Meet The Artiste. I introduce the waitress’ boyfriend, a sculptor who doesn’t sculpt:

I call him The Artiste with the extra “e” not out of any disdain for artists, but he was more a graduate of art school using his artist status for street cred rather than someone who say, actually created any art. He had the image — the perma-stubble, the drab clothing, the Elvis Costello glasses and especially the 16th-century personal hygiene. Although he sometimes talked about his works in progress, we never saw any sketches nor did he tell us where we could see his works. He ran around with the small “shock value for shock value’s sake” clique from Ontario College of Art and Design, a group who counted among their number post-post-post-postmodernist Jubal Brown — the prat who vomited on paintings as a some kind of performance-art/artistic-statement/cry for help sort of thing.

3b. Meet Crabs. C’mon, you can’t resist a story that has this line near the beginning:

“And it dawns on me, while I’m doing it,” continued Crabs, “I think to myself: ‘This guy has offered to give me a ride home and I’m peeing on his face.'”

4. Date #1: My fault. I accept full responsibility for the way this one fell apart. Mind you, Date #3, which hasn’t yet be chronicled, is totally her fault. This one’s got it all — cheesy foreign accents, adult situations, violence, butterscotch schnapps and ABBA! Besides, how many dating stories have gripping narrative like this:

I pressed my hand on his Adam’s Apple with more force. I wanted him to remember this. I wanted to him to wake up in the middle of the night from Joey-induced night terrors for the next week in a vile puddle of his own sweat and urine.

Bring it on. Why I take crap in stride.

The Girl Who Cried Webmaster (a.k.a. The new Girl Story)

Accordion boy meets New Girl. Accordion boy gushes about New Girl on weblog. Accordion boy gets contacted by Whistleblower, who tells him that the New Girl is not who she claims to be. The strangest story ever posted on this blog, complete with drama, detective work, a child-abandoning drug-abusing mom posing as a webmaster, the kindness of strangers, inspiration by Columbo and Encyclopedia Brown and computational complexity theory. This entry put this blog in the number one spot on Blogdex, Popdex and Daypop, and is now the holder of the record for most — and nicest — comments.

Last Night

Striking out, thwarting a pickpocket, coping with bad poetry, dealing with the Gap ninjas and other minor diappointments. At least when things suck for me, they suck in novel and interesting ways.

Mandatory “Cheese Sandwich” Entries

Part one and part two of a two-part story chronicling one particularly good day.

A very good Wednesday, indeed

Successful job interviews, helping out on the set of a film, chatting with cute girls, and sticking it to a telemarketer. I’m the King of Rock.

Naked News throws a party

…and I got invited!

The best Christmas present ever

A tale of friendship, crab lice and the true meaning of Christmas. Not likely to be turned into a TV Christmas special any time soon.

The big three-five

Happy birthday to me! 120 of my closest friends get together to celebrate.

Not-so-smart mob

Conversations and observations from the 2002 Reclaim the Streets party in Toronto. Their hearts are in the right place, but their heads might need a little work:

Bible-thumper: Please, take one (proffers a pocket Bible).

Man: (looking at Bible and recoiling, as if he were being handed a severed human head) Yiiiii!

Me: It’s not toxic. (To Bible-thumper) I’ll take one, I lost mine (I take it and put it in my pocket).

Really, I can’t find my copy. Some fundie friends of my parents gave them a gold-leaf trimmed copy of the King James version (“the only true version”, they said), which my folks then gave to me. It usually sits on my bookshelf beside the Bhagavad-Gita and for extra-flaky contrast, the Urantia Book. Did I lend it out to someone? I can’t recall.

Man: Not my scene. I’m a Buddhist.

Me: That doesn’t rule out reading the Bible. Buddhists consider the teachings of many other religions valid. They consider Christ to have been enlightened.

Man: No shit?

Me: Ever read Living Buddha, Living Christ?

Man: Um…never even heard of it.

Of course not. I decided to adminsiter the “Are you really a Buddhist, or are you doing the religion-as-fashion-statement thing” test.

Me: You know the Four Noble Truths, right?

Man: Uh…I’m still new at it…life is suffering, um…

Me: There’s the one with desire…

Man: That it! Desire sucks…then the eight paths…

I can see Siddhartha himself saying, “Yo! Desire sucks, dawg!”

Read the story, see the photos and check out the discussion that ensued on BoingBoing.

(Continued from this blog entry.)

I went into my house and switched to the coolest, most breathable clothing I had: a pair of black walking shorts, a t-shirt and a U.S. Postal Service work shirt given to me by an ex-girlfriend.

(This shirt was given to her from the U.S. Postal Worker I’d saved her from. It’s a sort of trophy; I refer to it as the “skin of my defeated foe.”)

My phone rang. It was Boris, who’d arrived from Montreal earlier.

“It was weird. I put money in the parking meter,” said Boris, “and minutes later, the power went out.”

“So it’s your fault, then.” I remarked.

“Hah. I’m outside the DECONISM gallery right now, and Steve Mann is standing not ten feet away from me. I told him I was meeting up with you, and he was excited that you’re going to be here tonight.”

“Cool! I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

I also gathered some supplies, including:

• Half a bag of IKEA tealights and a butane lighter
• A Cateye MC-200 halogen bike headlight, which I often use as a flashlight and served me so well at Burning Man ’99
• Cateye LD120II tailight, which I clipped onto my accordion straps
• An old AM/FM radio walkman, which I haven’t used in years
• AA alkaline batteries for the light and walkman
• The “street” accordion

On my way out, I ran into my neighbour Trudy and asked her if she had candles, offering her some if she needed any. I went east to to Beverley Street, then north to Dundas.

On the way there, I switched my walkman on and for the first time ever, I set its “band” switch to “AM”. I thumbed the wheel and found a station — hey, MOJO radio, the “men’s radio station”!

They’d pre-empted the usual talk shows for an all-night call-in show. People were phoning in mostly “good news” stories. One woman, who’d run out of gas while stick in traffic on Highway 401 was aided two men who were hauling a load of lawnmowers. They’d managed to siphon out the gas from the lawnmowers to give her a quarter-tank of gas.

Another caller reported that some stores were either letting ice cream and other frozen desserts go at a deep discount or free.

When I arrived at the corner of Dundas and McCaul streets, some people at the Village Idiot Pub across the street yelled at me to come over. The Village Idiot was until very recently a cafe that almost never had anyone in it; it’s since been transformed into a very cozy and charming neighbourhood pub with a very classic feel.

The Idiot’s exterior walls — essentially garage doors that can be rolled up in the summer to let the air in — were rolled up, and the place was packed.

“There’s no music here!” one of them called out. “Play something!”

“Play a polka!” another yelled. There’s always someone who yells that.

“Play Lady of Spain!” yelled someone else. There’s always someone who yells that, too.

“Hey, how about this?” I asked, cutting into You Shook Me All Night Long, a pretty sure crowd-pleaser. I finished, and the entire bar cheered. Someone started passing around an empty pint glass and collecting money. I started into Born to be Wild. By the end of that number, the glass had returned, and I’d made thirty bucks with just two songs.

I noticed that some guy was standing beside me. I nodded at him. “Got a request?”

“Joey, it’s me, Boris!”

“Hey, great to meet you in person at last!” I shook his hand, and he introduced me to his friend Ken.

“Let’s get some beer,” I said, holding up the money that had been collected. “First round’s on me!”

Ontario Premier Ernie Eves has asked everyone in the province to cut back on their electricity use:

“We currently do not have enough [power] generation back on-line to see us through a regular weekday,” Ernie Eves, the Ontario Premier, said in a televised address yesterday.

Mr. Eves, who told reporters there “isn’t anybody on the face of the Earth that can offer a guarantee that there will not be a rolling blackout of some kind,” urged Ontarians to cut their regular power usage by half and asked all levels of government to operate only essential services for the rest of the week.

Here at Tucows, we’ve shut down the air conditioning and turned off all the lights. Non-essential computers have been shut off, including the company-issued Dell running Red Hat 9 on my desk, which I generally use as an IRC machine and second browser (my own personal Powerbook is my preferred tool). The building so far has remained pretty cool and the nine skylights let lots of sun in, but I’m already planning my move away from my desk at 3 p.m. when the sun from the overhead skylight glares down at me like the abducto-ray from all those alien encounter movies.

I’m going to treat the ongoing power crisis as an excuse to fire up the barbecue tonight rather than use our electric range or oven. Might as well turn lemons into lemonade, right?

Like the way it takes a heart attack to convince some people to change their eating and exercise habits, the big blackout has started to convince some people to find ways to conserve electricity. Power conservation has become a virtue and conspicuous consumption of kilowatts has become a vice, to the point that people running air condtioners are getting overly defensive. Take the quote from the guy in this article:

One man said he had a good excuse for running his air conditioner.

“I resent your asking me that,” he said. “I have asthma, and I could die without the air conditioning, so go away.”

He had me with “I have asthma” and lost me with “I resent” and “I could die”. He comes off more as a petulant emo rock teenager who really needs that new piercing than a guy with a respiratory ailment.