Tag: Life/Yeah…girls…geez

“The liberals took our dates!”

[ via Relapsed Catholic ] Bernard Chapin blames his dateless status on his being a conservative in the liberal city of Chicago:

For the paraphernalia displaying conservative, unexpected house
guests can make for dangerous situations indeed. I had this hammered
home to me last weekend. Upon our entrance, I wisely spent the first
five minutes frantically cleaning the bathroom for my guest’s approval
but I neglected to realize that the rest of the apartment is heavily
mined with all sorts of visible “buzzkills.” With a heavy aroma of
Clorox perfume I walked into the front room and found my guest pointing
at a portrait of our President smiling from a podium and wearing a
Carhart style coat. It was addressed to me on behalf of the RNC.

“What is this?” she spat.

Now
a man of true principle would have stopped right there and pointed out
George’s merits to his guest but some things are more important than
winning political debates so I opted for the weaselesque, “I have no
idea. I don’t know who that person is. I wonder why he’s hanging on my
wall.” This answer at least produced a smile from the Bush-hater before
me. I considered myself lucky that she missed the framed picture of
Charleton Heston hanging just below George. However, later in the
night, she called me over to the area near the front door and inquired,
“Whose face is this that you wipe your feet on?” This was really bad
news. She had incidentally stumbled across my “Hillary Clinton Doormat”
one the way to the bathroom. In the spirit of Bill’s autobiography I
answered “I have no idea”–although I kicked myself later for not have
said, “I cannot recall.”

Overall, it is wise to adopt
Clintonian standards for discussing politics if you wish to get along
with most Chicagoans and this is particularly true regarding the
shapely and form-fitting women who ornament our city to summer
perfection.

Admittedly, while political leanings can be a factor in romance, I think Chapin was more undone by:

  • Having to perform emergency cleaning on the bathroom.
    There’s really no way to do this discreetly, and disappearing for a few
    minutes when you’ve invited a lady friend over for a nightcap is the
    best way to kill any momentum gained during the date.

    By the bye, learn this mantra, Mr. Chapin: Chicks dig bathrooms that have been cleaned in advance. It says “grown-up”.

  • Going overboard with the political paraphernalia in the house.
    The Bush photo alone wouldn’t have been much of a problem. The Charlton
    Heston photo alone would’ve been no obstacle. The Hillary Clinton
    doormat wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker either; I once had a liberal
    girlfriend who couldn’t stand her.

    However, the combination of the three is a bit much: it screams political junkie,
    and unless you live “inside the beltway”, that’s just damned
    unattractive. It just makes one imagine that you haven’t yet gotten
    over losing the election for student council president (only in D.C.
    could George Will and James Carville be sex symbols).

    That’s the great lie of politics: “History is written by winners”. No,
    history is written by political junkies, the sort of person who doesn’t embody “winner”, but rather, its opposite.

    Pictures of
    politicians who’ve lived within the past 25 years are as much a warning
    sign as a bookshelf full of nothing but Stephen King and Anne Rice novels, possession of too much cat paraphernalia or
    ownership of a LiveJournal.

What do you think?

(The title of this entry is borrowed from a scene from one of my all-time favourite movies, Animal House.)

Categories
It Happened to Me

A Scene from My Vacation

Here’s The Redhead facing off against me at air hockey at The Great Canadian Midway, located on Clifton Hill, the cheesy tourist street in Niagara Falls.

(Alas, I accidentally erased a great video she shot of me displaying my
strength at one of those “hit-the-thing-with-the-sledgehammer” sort of
amusements. Working out has been paying off.)


The Redhead loves air hockey and pinball.

Categories
It Happened to Me

What I’m Doing on My Summer Vacation

My summer vacation started on Friday with a trip to the Om Festival, which can best be described as the answer to the question “What if the Ewoks from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi decided to hold their own Burning Man festival?” I just got back from the festival, and in an hour from the time I write this, The Redhead’s plane will land here in Accordion City. We both have the week off and will enjoying just hanging out (we might make a short drive to Niagara Falls’ Clifton Hill; Wendy loves cheesy amusements). Since I have two computers and WiFi in the house, both Wendy’s and my blogging should continue at their respective normal paces, but there are no guarantees. We’re pretty good at distracting each other from work…

Categories
It Happened to Me

I guess I should be flattered

You’re going to need a little background for this one.

First, time-warp back to early March 2003: Mandatory Cheese Sandwich Entry Part One and Mandatory Cheese Sandwich Entry Part Two. Note the “Cute Girl”, whom I shall call “Kimberly” (not her real name) for the sake of simplicity.

The next relevant bit of back story is in the entry titled Last Night, a little later that month, which features Kimberly again:

9:00 p.m. – A Chinese restaurant

The fortune cookies are on my side tonight.

My cookie: You will soon be rewarded handsomely for your effort and talent.

Her cookie: A man is a volume if you learn to read him.

Ohhhhh, yeah.

9:20 p.m. – Corner of Bay and College Streets

The cookies lied!

“A” for effort, “D minus” for outcome. Sometimes looks, brains,
charm, incredible luck and accordion power just aren’t enough. These
things happen.

But dammit, I thought the cookies were going to push me over the top.

That one hurt quite a bit, and that’s probably why my “people
radar” wasn’t working properly the following weekend, when I hooked up
with this sort-of-goth girl, which ended up being an even bigger fiasco.
Ever since then, I’ve had to fight down a sense of annoyance whenever
Kimberly’s around. I know it’s not her fault, but I can’t help
feeling annoyed just the same.

(A little aside: The entry prior to Last Night is Doc Searls Comes to Accordion City. If I’d never gone to that little get-together, I’d never have met Boss Ross and would never have been offered the current job. It was a life-changing couple of weeks.)

Last night at Kickass Karaoke, I walked in to find Kinberly there. This is unusual — I’ve never seen her at Kickass Karaoke.

That’s when I noticed the second unusual thing: the new guy she had in
tow. He was about 5’11”, Asian, with a goatee and long sideburns. You’d
never mistake us for twins, but wow, did we come from the same style archetype.
 

Eldon walked up to me and said “He’s wearing the same colour
shirt you are, too.” I looked down, looked at my “clone” and had to
agree.

“This gives the term ‘cheap Asian knockoff’ a whole new meaning,” I said. “It’s like passing over a Lexus for a Hyundai.”

“Ah, don’t you worry,” he said consolingly, “he’s all Asian and no accordion.”

I guess I should be flattered.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods

“Picking Up Girls Made Easy,” Chapter 7: “The Walking the Dog Pick Up”

“Nothing succeeds in this world like imagination,” says Eric Weber, narrator of the audiobook Picking Up Girls Made Easy.
“Think about it! Einstein had imagination. Casanova had imagination.
And Romeo had a great imagination. Didn’t he score Juliet, one of the
greatest pick-ups of all time?”

(A couple of notes: 1. For my British friends: what we call “picking
up”, you’d call “pulling”.  2. I’d hardly view a pick-up that lead
directly to my death as “great”.)

That’s how the audiobook chapter The Walking the Dog Pick Up
[4 MB MP3] begins. The narrator’s dated slang and “Eddie Haskell’s all
grown up” voice, the cheesy voice acting and the advice that sounds as
if it’s coming from Larry Dallas (Jack Tripper’s swinging single friend from
Three’s Company) make this an unintentionally hilarious gem.

“There’s no doubt about it: you’ve got to use your imagination,” says
the narrator at the close. “If you’ve haven’t got a dog, try an antique
car.  If you can’t afford that, try an antique bicycle. And if
that’s too fancy, try antique roller skates. Remember, it’s not what
gimmick you use, but how you use it, and how you use your imagination.
Good luck!”

He probably would’ve approved of the accordion.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods Music Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Kickass Karaoke Triple Threat!

If you’re in Accordion City this coming week, be advised that there are
not one, not two, but three Kickass Karaokes taking place!

The dates and locations are:

  • Wednesday, June 16th: It’s the monthly mayhem at the Bovine Sex Club (542 Queen Street West,
    just east of Bathurst). Thanks to the newly-enacted “no smoking in bars
    law”, this cozy venue just got a little bit nicer. I’ll be attending
    this one.

  • Friday, June 18th: A special edition of Kickass Karaoke at the new hipster hangout, the Drake Hotel (1150 Queen Street West, 3 blocks east of Dufferin). I can’t make this one, as I will be attending the Om Festival as part of my annual camping ritual.
  • Sunday, June 20th: The biweekly bacchanal at the Rivoli (334 Queen Street West, just east of Spadina). I will be there, as will my special guest all the way from Boston, Wendy the Redhead (she’ll be here for the week of the 20th).
Categories
In the News

Never mind “solving dating”. We need to solve the people who are trying to solve dating.

Annalee Newitz, whom I met at CodeCon in 2002 (see the entry They’re Not “Strippers”, They’re “Naked-Americans”), has written an article for Wired titled Cracking the Code to Romance.
The article profiles four hackers who are using technology to
“optimize” (in computer programming parlance, this means “make faster”
or “make more efficient”) dating.

I’m hardly what you’d call a Luddite nor could I honestly laugh at the
use of assistive technology to land a date. I do, after all, carry an
accordion to social events (even though these days, I’m spoken for — I
use its power to assist my only my friends now). To one degree or
another, we all use some kind of “dating optimization” to improve our
odds of finding a mate, or at least some with whom to mate
tonight:

  • Getting into shape at the gym
  • Dressing nicely (“nicely” varying with the sort of person you’re trying to attract)
  • Wearing cologne/perfume/eau de toilette/patchouli (you dirty hippie)
  • Going
    to places where disproprotionately large numbers of single people
    gather and drink fluids that are conducive to loosened
    inhibitions/clouded judgement
  • Asking
    to be introduced to someone (by a friend/a dating service/speed
    dating/online dating/asking the guy with the accordion to play a song
    for that cute girl on your behalf)

That being said, this article is going to make geeks look twice as
creepy as the stereotype. Not just “dishevelled guy who’s staring at
you from the back of the bus” creepy and not even “costumed guy trying
to invite you back to ‘yiffapalooza’ back at his suite and ‘see what furries are really like'” creepy but 
“if we put it to a vote, I’ll bet we could have these guys rounded up,
chemically castrated and drugged so much they could be used as
paperweights so women will feel safe” creepy.


The Googler:

(All theory and no practice. This guy is the dating world equivalent of an economist.)

Chau Vuong, a 33-year-old former equity analyst who specialized in
pharmaceutical companies at the investment bank Robertson Stephens,
admits he’s never kissed a girl. He hopes that one day he’ll get
married and lose his virginity. “I don’t actually date,” he explains.
“I just research it.” With a doctorate in pharmacy and a background in
computer science, the self-described “extreme type-A personality” works
full time on a desperately personal project: “to solve dating by
turning Google into a global dating service.”

The Blogger:

(This profile isn’t creepy as it is Beavis-and-Butthead-y.)

When I arrive at the Condomania offices to meet Filkins, he’s finishing
up some business on the phone. I wander around his workspace while he
talks, peering with mild trepidation into giant candy jars full of
tricolor condoms and shiny plastic packets of lube. In one room, I
discover a “condomenorah.” Condoms of various hues and sizes are
attached to nine PVC pipes arranged to resemble Hanukkah lights.
Filkins joins me and grins as his colleague flips a switch, sending air
through the pipes and allowing me to inspect the wares in their fully
operational state.

The Sniffer:

(Oh, dude. Dude. Dude. STOP IT!

To borrow a quote from Ray, the cat from the webcomic Achewood, “Maybe
I got to put spackle all over my monitor to keep you [people] out
of my face all the time. JESUS the internet was not supposed to be this
way”.

Perhaps you shouldn’t have used your real name, buddy.)

Between marathon Java-thrashing sessions, he often finds he wants to
introduce himself to “a cute girl with a laptop” but is too shy to make
an approach. That’s where the Sniffer comes in handy. If a hottie fires
up her AOL Instant Messenger client, Burton sees her login name and can
send her an IM. “I’ve gotten several first dates that way,” he says.
“Women think it’s cute when I can make a message pop on their machine
as if by magic. Now that so many women are online, it’s our chance as
geeks to start getting more dates.”

…

Burton says he’s written dozens of hacks, including a bot that combs
Craigslist personals and IMs him when it finds a candidate that meets
his specs. But his favorite is a browser plug-in for the dating site
Hot or Not. “The problem with Hot or Not is it keeps presenting the
same pictures over and over because it’s random,” he explains. “My
plug-in remembers which ones I’ve seen and will skip them. That way I
can get through the whole site. When I did that, I had about 50 hot
women spamming me the next day.”

The Stalker:

(These guys are doing security
research rather than trying to optimize dating. I wonder why Annalee
inlcuded them in the set of profiles and why she gave these guys — the
seeming best-adjusted of the bunch — the creepiest name.)

These guys churn out hacks that thin the membrane between dating and
stalking. They spend their afternoons chronicling and exploiting the
vulnerabilities in dating sites and social networks. But the strange
thing is, they’re not doing it to meet women. They don’t care about
getting lucky. Moore, in fact, is married and has a baby daughter.