Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Not again..... Sens down 2 games



















WTF!
Two games down? That's the Ottawa I know!


I want them to win but &*%$#@*&^#%#$ that game reminded me of the 1992/93 season. I call it the SKATE!!!!! SHOOT!!!!!! SHIT!!!!!!! season because that's what the crowd used to yell in the first season and it's what I was yelling at the TV tonight. Not gonna win giving the puck to the Duck's defense on every (I'm not gonna say rush)
forward movement into the offensive zone. Can't carry it in, can't dump it, Oh well. 15 shots? Spectacular. It's gonna take 30 to get one, at least the ducks are shooting!!!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

NOT AGAIN!!!!!

Somebody better chew a piece outta someone's ass for that game!

Facebook

When Facebook opened up to the community at large in 2006 I remember hearing about it on some blog somewhere, checking it out and dismissing it as another myspace type thing. A poor man's auto blog chocked full-o ads. Well last month I got some invite through Facebook, I had some sorta pseudo account on there, not validated, half-set up and I finished it to reply to this concert invite I received. That was kinda cool. Facebook had added some smarts and it asked to go through my contacts list to see if any were on face book. "Sure!" I said (compromises my email password, why the HELL not!) and it found 25 people. I clicked on some names and next thing you know all these people are added to some list on the side and you can click on them and see what the heck they've been up to.

It was addictive. It was great to see what the hell people look like after all these years. Almost everyone's got kids, and they're all over the darned country! Most facebook profiles I looked at had funny sayings and stuff written by the people themselves. I thought to myself, "I have a blog, no way am I gonna write the same stuff in two places... No sense boring everyone twice(grin)". But hell, Facebook saw my blog and asked me if I wanted to set up an auto import. So it checks the blog every few hours and automatically imports the entries to facebook with a link back to the blog itself.

Not bad!

The weirdest thing is, once you get on there, and you add someone to your list of friends, their friends get a notification, and some of those people know you, so they add you and so on and so on, like some big friend virus, spun out of control.

Gotta go with market share with stuff like this. It's the biggest online social networking website, getting bigger every day,popular in Canada, (Toronto has the city record if you can believe it, 500,00 people registered)

Check it out if you haven't already. Not at work though, (poor slobs at Enviro canada have it blocked har har har!)


Emails from my cow freinds

Last week we went to 'Granny's' to swim in the pool that is much better than 'Winchester Joe's' and afterwards we went back to the farm and saw that some cows were there. Jade and I went to see the cows. They were new and skittish and didn't want anything to do with us so we went back inside.
Jade was talking to my brother Bruce about her new friends, 'the cows' and he went.

"What? they're your friends? Are they going to email you on facebook now?"

North Korea back-ass country Kim Jong Il rant

I went out and kissed the ground tonight(I think the neighbor saw me, but no worries, I think he's part of the witness protection program and has bigger problems to contend with)

Good old Canada. I'm so glad was born here. Thank you great, great, great granddad, for getting on that boat and coming on over from England, Scotland, wherever...

You see I watched a National Geographic special on North Korea and Kim Jong il, the 'dear leader'. Fuck that guy bugs me. He's running the most isolated country in the world where there is no internet and cell phones are illegal, with the world's 4th largest army (1 million) whose 238km border with South Korea is the most heavily guarded in the world.

WTF is over there? 23 million people, all controlled by one class A pudgy nearsighted dictator freak, with the cult of personality on the turntable 24/7. The people over there are trained from birth to love him. These same people still don't know that a guy walked on the moon way back in 1969!

So this TV crew followed around a Nepalese eye surgeon and the National Geographic lady(of Asian descent) was told that she was the only american in the country at that time (they seem to keep track of this). On the way to the hospital where the eye doctor was going to perform 1000 cataract ops in 2 days they zoomed in on a wonderful 12 lane highway in the main city that was empty(go figure. We have the queensway).

The doc and crew were accompanied at all times by North Korean government minders to make sure they didn't go blabbing about the moon landings or other imaginary things like the Internet or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They were only shown the clean "what we want you to see" stuff about North Korea. They included a clip of a Dutch documentary (zee dutch! isn't zat veird?) and in it a mother and young daughter were skipping to school singing a popular nursery rhyme that went something like
"'the pathetic amercans kneel on the ground, they beg for mercy..."

Gee.. Take that Barney the purple dinosaur.

Then they showed people going about their day, which was pretty wild. Hey, lets go to work and sing songs about our glorious leader! There's an empty town on the North side visible from the south where all the buildings are hollow but look good. It has the world's largest flagpole or something. Pretty much sums it up right there. It doesn't matter how it is, it matters how it looks.

Continuing with the tour, there was a park bench encased in glass. When the tv crew asked what was up, it appears that Kim's ass touched the bench 10 years ago and they honor it in this way, to preserve it for eternity. Like the zillion statues of the guy ain't enough. Christ, Wayne Gretzky scored 800 plus goals and there's only a couple of statues of him. What's this Kim guy done? Getting statues of yourself made up and sticking them all over your country is lame. See Saddam Hussain and Stalin on that one. Their camera guy took a pic of one such statue and lay on the ground to get the angle right and the North Korean babysitter freaked on him! Saying it was somehow disrespectful for a foriegner to do that, and said he was gonna get kicked out of the country for that (didn't happen)

I never knew this but when it comes to the 38 paralell, there's has never been a peace treaty, it's just a 50 some year 'cease fire'. Get that? a CEASE FIRE! There's this joint security area (follow the link, it's a hoot!)somewhere on the border North/South Korean border where a concrete line splits teh two countries. It's where the army guys from both countries they stand toe to toe with each other, well fed Northern officers staring down real tall Southies and US army guys on the other side(you have to be a certain height to work the south side, all real phsycological like). Actually that's not really true. They don't face each other, the brain-washed freaks on the North side stand in a triangle, two guys stand facing each other (so they don't defect) and their boss faces north with his back to them so no citizens defect. Kim must of come up with that one.

North and South are split by a dmz that's 4k wide along a 238k border, a million landmines, high votage wires, pointy things too probably. No way to get across that safely.

This part is real freaky. At the joint security area There is a room that spans the border where both sides have access, but the north never meets in there. When the southies open the door, they use two guys and they hold on to each other so they don't get pulled in the other side. Freaky eh? If they want to set up a meeting they call on some 1960 soviet crank phone but it's useless because the Northies never pick up the phone. Unless Kim says it's ok I guess, and he's probably really busy watching his collection of 20,000 movies and sipping cognac so there's not a lot of conversation. The documentary crew arrived on a good day because the US army guy had to get a message across to the Northies about a dead soldiers body that washed up on their side of the river and they wanted to give him back. So a drill sargent went out with a magaphone and yelled at them to pick up the phone (a translator repetaed the message in korean), then he just read the order out. As he started talking all the North ern soldeirs headed indoors lest the guy polute their minds with his talk.

"DID YOU ASSHOLES KNOW WE GOT A FELLA UP ON THE DAMN MOON! HE PLANTED A FLAG AND EVERYTHING! IT FELL OVER WHEN THE LEM TOOK OFF BUT HEY! IT'S STILL COOL!"

North korean kids are hungry. About 3 million people died i some bad famines in teh 1990's, about 10% of their population. Imagine that happening here in Canada.

A 7 year old North Korean kid is 20cm shorter and 10kilos lighter than a kid in south korea. They are basically the same in genetic makeup. They call it the stunted generation. It's due to malnutrition. They build beutiful 12 line highways and huge Kim Jong statues and maintain a 1 million string army but there's no food for the regular folks a lot of the time. And medical attention is almost non-exstanant. They interviewed a blind lady who wants to see again so she can see the great leader. Not her kids, or the sun, her own hand or birds or whatever, no. The pudgy nearsighted psuedo Don King haired Jong. Crazy!

Where do these poor brainwashed people get off on this us verses the world stuff? Apparently Kim's pop (kim el sung)came up with a philosophy, ju chea, which means "up yours" to the rest of the world. It supposedly says "We can do everything ourselves(despite the fact they have no economy, no trade, and short hugry little kids ). The philosophy opposes most all things foreign, (like help. The eye surgeon thing getting into the country was amazing in itself). The North Koreans have been abused by so many powers over the past hundreds years, this way of thinking must really do the trick.

Maybe it's the concentration camps like this one, camp #22 (thank you google earth) the size of a small city 50.000 people. The documentary intervewed a guard who said he was taught that the prisoners are not human. They are regularly beaten, and sometimes shot for something as simple as searching for mice to eat. He told a particularly gross story of seeing kids fighing over a undigested kernel of corn in some cow dung, the winner washed it and ate it. Camp 22 is supposedly a family camp. Get this, most of the people here didn't commit crimes, but had a family member who allegedly did (like maybe they successfully defected). If you complain about something to a buddy about the great leader, or the country in general, they rat you out and your famly, kids, and parents could end up going here. Nazi 101. Same if you defect. People don't know why they are there. Keeps people from leaving that's for sure.

And woohoo! If you manage to escape north, you land in China (also on my list of back-ass countries, great firewall of China anyone?)! where they can ship your ass back if you start looking for chinese mice to eat!

So back to the eye surgeon, he removes all the bandages, the government people put up a photo of kim jong so it's the first damned thing they see and who do you think the previously blind but now they can see people thank? Not the Nepalesan surgeon. They thank friggin Kim Jong. They sing the praise Jong song, the ' all becase of our great general' song. One lady told the picture that "I will work harder at the salt mines to make you happy!"

Ack... "For best lucky wash use Kim Jong detergeant!"

Time after time, they all said the same damned thing. Does anyone believe what they are saying or are they scared shitless? Or has it been so long it's just automatic to thank Kim for everything and anything.

And he has Nukes. Wonderful.

I'm going outside to kiss the ground again.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Gopher tunnel set

Since everyone (me included) loved the rodent that attacked GrizzlyG in the last trailerpark geocachers bigfoot film, I wrote in a rodent as a major character this time. A gopher! I picked up a puppet from somewhere in Vancouver and I'm constructing a set to film him on. Gophers dig tunnels here, there, and everywhere, so I can re-use the thing in a ton of scenes. He's gotta be able to run through his tunnel, pop his head out of a tunnel, look up at people walking on the ground above him, dive into his tunnel. Hide stuff he's stolen in his tunnel, etc. So this set is for all the subterranean shots.

I made a cardboard model then a tube outta chicken-wire. Then I covered it in newspaper and then filled the inside with Great Stuff expanding foam. I still have to color it, shave and shape it, then throw glue in there and chuck dirt around the insides.

It has cut out areas for the puppet hand track at the bottom , and a side viewing port to stuff the camera in. If I need to have him do something from another angle for which there is no view-port, I can just flip the film over backwards. I'm happy with the test shots so far. Once it's dressed it will look pretty cool! I took some test still shots of the gopher and the cured foam in it's natural color, like I said, I still have to paint it. The foam stuff lets light filter through it. Once a light dusting of paint goes on I hope it still has a little bit of that affect

Woohoo! My very own gopher tunnel!

Kingsmere

I recall reading somewhere that Mackenzie King was sorta loopy, but I'm in complete agreement with his sense of landscaping. If I could find a huge stone archway like the one on the left, buy it and transport it up to my summer cottage in Gatineau park, I'd do it in a second. Very cool! We went there on a rainy Sunday, paid $7 and change for parking and strolled around the grounds. I had heard there was a cave somewhere and we found it, but it's too small to be considered a cave in my opinion. If a small poodle can't fit inside it, then it's just some kinda hole, a nook, a cranny! Not a cave!

There's a pretty nice waterfall though.

Winchester Joe's swimmin pool part deux.

A few months back I went swimming at a pool near my grandmother's place in the country. It was at this guy's house. He has this frickin huge indoor swimming pool in his place.
At the time I was expecting something a little less extravagant, but that was before I found out that milking cows was so profittable! I took my camera this time around. Check this pool OUT! It's as warm as a bathtub!

Monday, May 21, 2007

Bazooka Test 1

Today I did a little pre-production testing for the next Bigfoot movie. I have a bazooka in the script and figured I'd be doing all the SPX in post. I used Particle Illusion 3 to make the explosion and smoke trail from the barrel. Next time I'll add a shell (not to mention a projectile prop).

Here's a test clip. I think it's gonna work fine! (hope I don't have to explain the bazooka out there in the woods on film days).

Friday, May 18, 2007

Squirrels!

My mom is still saving the squirrels. This one fell out of a tree somewhere as a baby and she nursed it back to health with some baby food formula in a syringe. In a few weeks when it eats solids you cease all human contact and it goes in the outside cage and a few weeks after that you leave the door open and it takes off into the wild never to be seen again.

Monday, May 07, 2007

John Mayer concert

We went to see John Mayer last month. It was a wicked concert. I wanted to practice my concert photography but they wouldn't let me take my Digi SLR into Scotiabank place(I had even taken off the big scary zoom lens in preparation). So after a short trip back to the truck we settled in to watch the show. Kathleen Edwards opened up and she was great BUT she kept bitching to the audience that they weren't lively enough. In my opinion, if an artist has to do that, maybe they should spend more time concentrating on being more exciting and less time berating the audience. John Mayer didn't have to say a thing and the place exploded when he came on (hehehehehe, ok, not the same market share, I know).
I first saw Mayer on the 2000 or 2001 Grammies when he played and won for his song "Your body is a wonderland". I was impressed with his funky acoustic chops and what he was able to do with his limited vocal range. Then I saw him on ACL and was surprised at his bluesiness! I was even more surprised when friggin Buddy Guy came on and Mayer played right up to his level! Buddy Guy!!!!! Mayer is a blues man at heart...
I love his stage presence and how he moves with his guitar. It's very natural and it's obvious he loves his job. He was even apologetic about the price of concert tix, etc. The only thing that bugs me about him is some of his perhaps pseudo-orgasmic guitar faces he sometimes pulls..

Great songwriter thought. I found out soon after the Grammies that he was going out with Jennifer Love Hewwitt. He's since broken up with her.. (check that! HE broke up with HER). The bastard!
And he has a fantastic collection of vintage strats. If you've never given him a listen, check his music out sometime. His John Mayer trio stuff is great too!

Friday, May 04, 2007

Tripper's 1000th cache

(Ok, actually that's Kenmore in the nightshot on the left). We all went out to see Tripper bag his 1000th geocache on BLAMMO! GrizzlyG's monsterous and hated creation for GAG10, the semi annual geo-fest that takes place in Ottawa. It was a hoot.
At some point in the evening when we were treeing a poor porcupine badly in need of dental hygiene for a Kodak moment (I respect wildlife as long as they cooperate for photos first) he took some massive branch in the face and started bleeding all over the place. Because we are all Canadian we thought that was cool!
Some of the guys were in a very good mood that night (a Molson mood or something) and for some reason we kept yelling out "BLAMMO" for no good reason which usually elicited gales of laughter.
I made a Blammo puppet out of some paper bag one of the guys seemed to have (there's some weird web address on it). I called him Blammo and he proceeded to insult everybody and deflect attention away from the puppeteer (why does that work exactly?)

It was a great geocache! A little bit of everything. And any geocache that features Yoda has got to be a good one. Kenmore and I being east-enders racked up some caches along the way that Tripper and GrizzlyG had already done. I also took the opportunity to do Tripper's Swamp Monster cache, which is in a few feet of water. Being dressed as Batman adds a whole other level of difficulty.

As we were messing around on that one, I caught a Canada Goose shacked up for the night on a big pile of dirt in the middle of the swamp. He just sat there. We didn't seem to be bugging him too much.

Congrats on 1000!

Near the end of the night I came across a huge turd pile, which reminded me of a funny geocaching story I heard that I'll have to blog in another post....