Wednesday, September 29, 2010

More Funny Avatars #2


Avatar (computing), the graphical representation of a user. So, these weird websites I happen to go to that have weird forums with weird people and most of them have weird avatars. Cool little thumbnail graphics standing in for a picture of themselves. I always snag the funny ones I see, and it's been a few years since last I blogged a set of them. Here goes!












Thursday, September 23, 2010

Paranormal activity in the 6 year old


Last night at 23:30 as I was climbing the stairs to bed (yeah I know, early for me!) I smelled something burning in the kitchen and went to check on it. No worries, my wife had started the auto-clean program on our oven so the house sort of smelled like the gates of hell (well, not that bad, maybe like the doggy door to hell). I put the hood fan timer on and went upstairs to check on the kiddies before retiring. The ten year old was snoozing away upside down in her bed and I threw a glance into the six year old's bedroom as I made my way to ours and saw a dark shape swaying upright in her bed and a strange chanting sound of someone saying something backwards over and over again.

All's well! G'night!! (Uhh no...) So, I did a double-take. Steeling myself for a possible ghostbusters sliming I opened the door and crept in. My kids have lava lamps they use as nightlights (I usually shut them off when they fall asleep) and this one was casting erie bulbous red shapes against the walls and the backwards chanting was very loud. My daughter was kneeling in the middle of her bed half asleep and her CD player, which had started out the night playing the "Fantastic Mr Fox" audiobook, was skipping madly over a scratch in the disc at some dialog which sounded positively satanic. . So, that explains that. I shut it off. Maybe that horrible sound, in addition to the gates of hell smell woke her up and had her semi-consciously wondering what the heck kind of sleep deprivation experiment she was being subjected to. I put her back to bed.



I threw out the disc (It was a CDR copy of her sister's disc). We don't need any more paranormal activity!

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Zombie Roadkill

Man, zombies everywhere! Looks like a new interesting show starting October 4th. The teaser showed a park ranger getting mowed down by some zombie squirrel. How awesome is that!

From the Site:
"Academy-Award nominated actor Thomas Haden Church co-stars as a tough as nails Park Ranger who teams with an unsuspecting teenager, played by David Dorfman, to escape a cursed stretch of highway that resurrects roadkill in the form flesh-eating zombie animals. This new breed of terror is not just playing dead.
Zombie Roadkill centers around a group of college kids as they are driving on an unfamiliar road. Everything seems fit for a road trip to the lake, but when the group accidentally runs over an unsuspecting squirrel, they quickly realize there will be a price to pay. The cursed road brings the zombie squirrel back to life to haunt the kids. After the kids crash and everyone is injured except the younger brother, he is forced to set out on a journey to defeat the ancient curse and save his brother and friends before it is too late. Zombie Roadkill is scheduled to air spring 2010 on FEARnet.com and the FEARnet On Demand VOD network.
The series’ claw-scratching and spine-tingling action unfolds over six, four- to five-minute episodes. David Green will be directing the series penned by Henry Gayden. Aaron Lam of Ghost House Pictures will be producing with FEARnet’s Jim Burns serving as executive producer. Frank Langley and Tom Bacho of Quantum FX (Where the Wild Things Are, Star Trek, Watchmen) have come aboard to bring all the terrifying creatures to life."

Zombie study in Ottawa

A graduate student at the University of Ottawa published a paper featuring a mathematical model of the possibility of a fictional city of 1 million surviving a zombie attack. It doesn't look good people! After 7 to 10 days, everyone was dead or undead.

Am I naive to think that everyone's read  the "Zombie Survival Guide" by Max Brooks? Doesn't everyone know what Solanum does to your brain? Get yourselves a copy before it's too late!

African rabies is no fun!

Thursday, September 16, 2010

The 2nd time "Big Mike" tried to kill me in ECMS grade 7

My wife asked me tonight if I knew her new Director, because he grew up in Blackburn Hamlet, and went to EMCS (Emily Carr Middle School). Alas, I did not, but for some reason I was reminded of the 2nd time "Big Mike" tried to kill me at that school. It was 1981 or so and "Big Mike" was about 6 feet tall back then (he'd probably have been 7 feet tall if he hadn't smoked so much). He was huge, with facial hair and he always wore the same jean-jacket and blue t-shirt, which was a real help because you could see him coming from a mile away and could get the hell outta his way! I suppose he was in the eighth grade again, possibly for the 3rd time, and I was in grade seven.

It was a Friday and my fellow student and arch-nemesis Peter Huckalak and I had gotten a detention again. The way it usually went down was that he'd start something (he'd test how gravity worked by pulling my chair away as I was in the process of sitting down), and I'd retaliate (drawing a naked woman on the cover of his math notebook) and we'd both get a detention. Sounded fair to me although I'll always wonder what the hell the teacher thought I was doing on the ground with my chair in Peter's hand. It's not really my fault I sit next to a sociopath.

When detention was over, we went to our lockers. The school was pretty deserted except for the odd teacher and school custodian. At Emily Carr the lockers are located just as you exit the building slightly below ground level, that is to say, the windows in the locker room are like, 8 feet off the ground and end at the ceiling. Outside, the windows start at ground level and look out onto a grassy hill of sorts. It has a weird effect such that, if you are inside the locker room looking up out the window, and another student is outside, sitting on the hillock leaning against the window, you see their butts, backs and upper torsos. A lot of students sit against these windows and pay almost no attention to the people inside.

So, as we were getting our Adidas(tm) bags out of our lockers Peter taps me on the shoulder and points up at the window near the ceiling. My Lizard brain gave me a start as I caught the distinctive shape and color of Big Mike and his nicotine encrusted jean jacket. He was sitting outside against the window with a girl, making out with her. I noticed that his hand had made considerable mileage up the front of her shirt. I grinned at Peter. It was the thing to do when you're 12. They didn't seem to know we were there (school had been over for almost 45 minutes). Peter was  a lot of things back then. I wouldn't call him my friend because we fought so much (fisticuffs), nemesis was a better word, but he was extremely intelligent and a hell of a funny guy, and I respected that. So it didn't surprise me when Peter made an animated shushing motion, picked up a nearby chair and carried it over to the lockers on tiptoe, directly below where Big Mike and the object of his affections were seated outside on the other side of the window. .

He climbed up on the chair quietly and leaned over so his face was almost touching the window. He looked back at me and stuck his tongue out and pretended to lick the window right behind the young (13 year old?) girl. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! I almost killed myself trying to keep quiet and not break out in gales of laughter. Then he started to make make-out faces on the girl's side, pretending to grab her butt through the glass while giving Big Mike the middle finger with his other hand behind Big Mike's back. I was ready to pee myself! Big Mike and his "date" were so busy doing what they were doing they had no idea they had an audience.

At this point I picked up a chair and quietly set it down beside Peter's and stretched up to the glass to watch this freak show. Man, they have no idea we're here! Crap Mike looks like he's in his 20's. What's this girl see in him? How can she suck on his face like that when he has that frickin Zombie case of acne (yes I was that close). All of a sudden I heard a super-loud "WHAP!" and time slowed down like it does in the movies sometimes.

I turned around and the thing I noticed in the first millisecond was that Peter was no longer perched on his chair beside me. In fact I saw him disappearing around the corner back into the classrooms in a blur of motion. Near the edge of my field of vision I saw something spinning around on the ground like a top. It was a tiny bottle of liquid paper. My Lizard brain roared! Peter had snuck off his chair while my head was turned towards the action and whipped a bottle of liquid paper at the window so it would make a loud noise and he took off so that.... My head snapped back..


Face to face with "Big Mike" and the girl on the other side of the glass. He did not look happy with me at all. In fact, he looked quite cross. I can still recall to this day his purple-faced rage and the slow motion movements of his lips as he formed the words "You're &$%&* DEAD". At this point, the absolute worst time actually, my STUPID sense of humor caught up to the lighting fast situation and I actually cracked a smile at that point and thought
"You know, that was really funny! Peter got me goooooooood!".
I guess that didn't look so good on the other side of the glass because Big Mike appeared to take this badly and shot up in a Beserker rage and ran around to the locker room entrance to make good on his declaration to KILL ME!

I jumped/fell off the chair and ran back to my locker (whose contents where strewn across the floor, Peter wanted to make my escape more interesting by increasing the level of difficulty! (the fucker!). I was all set to leave all that crap on the floor and just disappear - maybe into the ladies room (he's never look there would he?) when I heard Big Mike outside raining fists on the outside doors which lock after the school day is over THANK GOD! I looked at my books and notebooks on the ground and realized that MY NAME was in most of them. Can't have that sitting there for him to find!

It was the fasted locker clean up in ECMS history. Big Mike stopped trying to punch the doors off their hinges and it was quiet all of a sudden. I once saw Big Mike put a roll of pennies in his fist, wrap his fist up with black electrical tape , and punch out a bunch of portable windows one lunch hour. I honestly wondered if he carried stuff like this with him and was gearing up. I grabbed my gym shirt, closed my locker and ran into the inner classrooms to leave by the front of the school where there may be teachers or police or national guardsmen or something. I pulled my glasses off, put the white gym shirt on, tried to frig my hair up and left by the front of the school as nonchalantly as I could. I made for cover and took a round about way home (you never go straight home after a death threat).


Turns out Big Mike didn't recognize me as the idiot behind the glass that day (not that I gave him the chance) and I managed to keep out of his way for the rest of the school year.

What? You don''t remember my staples?

Tonight was "Meet the Teacher" night at school for my kids. This always turns into a High School reunion of sorts because the majority of my old high school classmates live 5 minutes away from where they grew up in Blackburn Hamlet(myself included). I ran into Carrie-Anne whom I sat beside in Law class in the 12 grade and was immediately reminded of the time I got staples in my leg.

It was AGES ago, I was 17 or 18 years old and I was playing Rugby for the first time on a Saturday. I still have no idea how to play but they have a position called "Hooker" in Rugby which is funny ( I told them I'd play as long as I got to be the hooker). There was this guy there wearing cleats. He was wearing these cleats because they were new and he found out that he could not wear them in his Rugby league because they were metal and spiky and illegal, so of course he chose to wear them on the weekends around people like me who don't even know how to spell Rugbee. The object in Rugby seems to be about running and smashing into people and pushing each other a lot, and when you have the ball, and someone gets you down, you have to drop it (that part never made sense to me).

In one of these scrum things I felt something slice across my shin and the next thing I knew I was bleeding like a stuck pig. I had a long, clean slice down the front of my leg and the skin was pulling away from it. I had never been cut open to that extent and up until that point I had never had stitches in my life (that huge bear dog hadn't tried to kill me yet) and frankly, I was a bit chicken. I remember shoving the two sides of the cut together and asking everyone.

"Is that going to need stitches?"

DUH! I was wearing a hospital shirt someone had stolen for me once (I loved hospital shirts, blue or green, no fuss, no muss, no such thing as inside out, they wash great!) and i took it off and wrapped it around the leg and proceeded to bleed all over it. Someone drove me home and I hobbled in the front door to find no one home. ACK! Eventually my friend's Mom drove me to the hospital where they froze it and basically took a cheese grater to it to clean it up, then a med student tried to stitch it closed. For some reason, they kept having trouble. I dunno what was going wrong but after about 10 minutes he left and came back with a medical staple gun. "Kachunk Katchunk" and he closed it right up. I looked like Frankenstein!

COOL!

On Monday I went to school and in Law class Carrie asked me what was up with my leg so I unwrapped it to show her and she got all grossed out. Everybody did. Something about bits of metal stuck in your skin holding your leg together. It must have been bad because she obviously blocked it out of her memory. I went to work at the Cineplex that night and had the Candy Bar girls convinced that I had ripped my leg open minutes before and one of the guys had stapled it shut in the office. ;-)


Two weeks later i went to my GP to get them taken out and the nurse was grossed out! She made me cover it back up. They didn't know how to get them out so they sent me to emergency and someone went over to the baby ward and got the tool to open them up and take them out. It was this stainless steel medical staple remover and it had been made in Germany. That's also when I learned that they threw stuff like that out to stay clean and avoid germs. I was a bit shocked the thing was made of high quality metal and probably cost $20! They gave it to me as a Souvenir.

While I was in the hospital I ended up in a triage room with a senior citizen who had tried to beat up a cop...  I got to listen as he explained his story to two different doctors. They gave him a new one after they heard what he had done because they appear to have one or two doctors who make themselves available to go to court to testify if needed, but that's another story!

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Kitten rescue.

Re-posted from http://www.dontevenreply.com/view.php?post=95 . Hilarious. Thanks Gwilliker for this gem of a site. The guy emails unsuspecting people on Kijijji or Craig's List type sites and screws with them (or he makes it all up, in any case, he's funny as hell!). I find this extra funny because I own one of those..
 
 ----------------------------------------------------------
Kitten Rescue
Posted at: 2010-08-12 14:37:56
Warning: The following post contains graphic images. If you are offended by the sight of food-dye, corn syrup, and ground beef, you may not want to read this. 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Original ad:
Humane "hav a heart" traps for kittens needed
There are some kittens in my neighborhood that need to find good homes. I need a trap 4 the cats to help bring them in. Please email me if you have a trap (and a heart)!
From Me to *********@********.org:

Hello,

Are you still looking for a trap for cats?

Mike

From Deb ******* to Me:

Yes I am can you help me?

From Me to Deb *******:

I most certainly can! I believe this trap is for those who want to "have a heart." I used it to catch a stray cat that kept coming into my garage. It is called the KittyHugger. All you have to do is put some cat food on the trigger, and when the cat comes to eat it, the trap gently contracts into a hugging position and comfortably hugs the cat until you come back to deal with the little guy. Please let me know if this will work.

Mike

From Deb ******* to Me:

Mike- I have never heard of a trap like that. I was referring to the "Havahart" traps...you know like the cages for animals?? Do you have any pictures of the trap? I'd like to see how it works before I get it. Thanks.

From Me to Deb *******:

Absolutely. I've attached a picture of it. Sorry if it is a little messy; I haven't cleaned the trap in a while.

Attachment:


From Deb ******* to Me:

YOU'RE SICK!

From Me to Deb *******:

Excuse me?

From Deb ******* to Me:

You killed that poor cat OMG

From Me to Deb *******:

I didn't kill the cat. I told you it was a little messy. The last cat I caught knocked over the bowl of juice I gave him so he wouldn't get thirsty. As you can see, it made quite the mess. I assure you this trap is 100% safe and humane.

From Deb ******* to Me:

IT OBVIOUSLY IS NOT SAFE. IT IS COVERED IN BLOOD

From Me to Deb *******:

You've clearly never seen a juice spill before. You have a twisted imagination if you think that is blood. I guess you don't want the trap.

Before you give up on me, I have one more trap you may be interested in. I actually think it is one of those Have a Heart traps you were talking about, though I've never heard it called that.

Please see the attachments. As you can see from the pictures, the kitty will have plenty of room to be safe and comfortable. It comes with a black tube at the end that is used to pump warm air into the cage to keep him warm while he waits to be released.

I'm sorry I didn't have time to clean the trap. It is still a little messy because the last cat I had in there spilled his bowl of juice and his cat food. It went everywhere!

Mike

Attachment:




From Deb ******* to Me:

Wow can't you read the ad you sick jerk? I DON'T WANT TO KILL THEM

How you managed to turn that trap into a bloody mess is a mystery to me but keep the hell away from me!!!

Monday, September 06, 2010

Testing the Go Pro cam by Hero underwater

My friend Cim bought this cool camera. I'm always looking for things like this so he lent it to me to try out and I'm SOLD! This thing is FREAKIN' FANTASTIC! It has a waterproof housing as well as a water resistant one (better sound in that casing), it's shock-proof, records to a mini-SD card, tons of recording length. It has some 60 frames per second slowmo settings (I haven't played with them yet, but the examples on the website look great!). It comes with all kinds of mounts and harnesses. This thing is perfect for just about anything! The frame is real wide so you can pretty  much capture what you need too (I'm not sure what fixed mm the lens is, but it's wide enough and gives you a great all-around view.

Here are some underwater shots I did with it on the weekend.