GAG8 dinner, Bullwhips & Indy talk...

We had the big geocaching roundup dinner at Uncle Louis again this year. Great Pizza! And they had the hockey game on so we could watch Ottawa thump Tampa Bay. Got to meet quite a few new folks and had the chance to place some names with some faces.
Funniest conversations started when the placed cleared out near the end and we all traded bad stories of bad places you go to when you're male, young and stupid.. (grin).

About mid evening I noticed I was sitting beside a guy with an Indiana Jones fedora (it took awhile to notice, they are cool hats and kind of blend for me). He was a freind of Kirok's, who incidentally grew up watching the same cartoons and TV shows as me and gets any references that I occasionally blurt out. As I was talking to the guy with the cool hat, I noticed he was also wearing the kahki shirt from "Temple of Doom".. I Check the pants.. Man, those are Indiana Jones pants.. I'm pretty sure the boots were those ones from Alden in England (also used in the movie) but I never checked, and heck, there was a brown leather "Indy" jacket folded over the chair.
How cool is that! YEARS ago I stumbled acros the motherload of Indy fan sites, INDYGEAR.COM and I had read up on the movie costuming and props there. I own a great prop book on the Lucasarts movies, from Star Wars to Raiders and it's great to get all the gritty detail.

And since I make bullwhips (outdoor whipcracker only folks, none of the kinky bedroom stuff) and used to be a member of the Australian Plaiters guild (Kangaroo is the best thonging leather there is, I still have about 10 hides at home stinking up the closet) of course we talked about the David Morgan 12 strand bull (my how his prices have gone up!). I own a 10 footer he made in 2000 (paid about $500 US for it then). Back in the late 90's I exchanged a ton of emails with Morgan about his whip construction. He was in his late 70's back then, and he's still makin' em!

It reminded me of the time I dressed up in psuedo Indy gear for Hook's Indy-themed Geocache "Indy lost his watch" Man.. I gotta get me one of those hats.. The whole reason I wore a brown Tilley hat for years was because I liked the Indy Fedora, but didn't want something as recognizable(grin).

Can't wait for the 4th Indy movie!!

And the next GAG!

Go and Get em 8!!! (GAG8) - Ottawa geocaching event

Well, it was GAG8 this weekend, and about 137 of us were traipsing around in the woods looking for various forms of tupperware and swag with our GPSr's for this geocaching event. We were in a group of 5 and it made the hunts go a little quicker as you had many sets of eyes looking. We were taken to some great wooded areas and trails I hadn't been too before. At one point in the evening we found a bleached deer skull and we recreated the scene that took place before it got that way.

Deer1 "It's called a road, you cross 'em."
Deer2 "Really? is it safe?"
Deer1 "Sure! You go first!"

We found about 15 or 16 that night and we got kinda punchy as we went along, probably because some of the guys hit the beer-store for some celebratory brews along the way. We saw a pair of porcupines on one cache (how do those things mate anyhow? - UGG.. just checked. Something about the male softening the female's quills with urine before mating.. ) but they both scrambled up a tree before we could take any good pictures.
One great thing about these GAG events is that you run into people in the woods doing what you're doing! (geocaching.. what else? Well, as it turns out, there's plenty else, but we won't go there...). We ran into one couple also geocaching as all five of us came out of the bushes and it was nice to meet a few new faces. One of them said..

"Are you guys doing what we're doing?"
And I said "Satanic cat sacrificing rituals?"
And Gwilliker said "Shhh, nope.. That's Thursday..." and they laughed even though they looked kind of nervous...

Twas a grand night. Thank you US military for using your sats for FREE!"

Ahh, the porcupines.. I was reminded of something my grandfather told me long ago. He said that if I wanted a pet porcupine I should go find one up a tree somewhere, and shake said tree until the porcupine came falling down out of it. The wind velocity of the fall would cause the porcupine's hollow quils to point skyward and it would be quite safe to catch it.

He had a strange sense of humour...

My favorite X-File episode - Home EP02 SE04

I was emailing someone about an X-files geocache and mentioned that my absolute favorite episode has to be "Home" from season 4. Well, the geocacher hadn't seen that one, and in my mind, it was the best episode they ever did!!! We had moved into our house that summer (the same weekend Donovan Baily won gold at the Olympics) and this killer of an X-files episode aired months later on October 11 1996. I had stumbled onto the X-files at the tail-end of Season 1 and we had started to watch it religiously after that, so there I was, Friday night, 8:59pm (Man, I remember when it was on Fridays!) on my couch in the dungeon waiting for my wife to finish getting popcorn, or whatever it was she was doing, and it started.

These shadowy figures in overalls were burying a baby in the mud with a shovel at night in a rainstorm and it was alive and crying! CREEPY!! In the low light you can see that it's a deformed baby and one of the three people burying it is crying too, and they all kinda look deformed as well. They are all decked out in your standard "You got a purty mouth" hillbilly fashion.

At this point I yelled up the stairs to Julie.. "Hurry up!! It looks like a creepy one!!!!"

hehehehehe. And it WAS!!!!!

The mother creeped me out the most..... quote "I'm hungry!!!!".. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I don't want to ruin anything. Go rent it (or be bad and bittorrent it).... And prepare to be disturbed..

And finally, to my good friend Slava, who maintains that Gillian Anderson is not really good looking... Go get some GLASSES!

Oh my god! My chipmarks just sorted!!!!

Just now!!! HAH! I've been using Chipmarks for awhile now, a great free service that stores your bookmark links up on the web so that they are accessible from any computer anywhere (like my work one and home one and laptop one, etc.. ever try to syncronize a favorites list for all three?) but I hated that they only showed up in chronological order in my browser chipmark menu. I emailed them about it ages ago, as I'm sure many other people did and it looks like the new version today fixed that.

I've just become infinitly more organized and I didn't do squat! HAH!

Thank you Chipmark.com... I love this useful free stuff that works!

Google Calendar - more Google world domination

I used to use the Planzo online calendar, but this Google one just blows that outta the water. In fact, it blows Outlook out of the water. As long as you don't mind the Google Gods looking through the bits and bytes of your electronic private life so they can ad-sense you, this is one really cool calendar! Tripper showed it to me today and hell, you can label some items and toggle them on and off (all color coded). You can allow other people access to your event info and even give them permission to change them, etc.

Very cool..

Clustermaps - Who are these people?

I put this Clustermaps link on my blog after seeing it on Wendy's Wanderings (when I was looking for pictures of Murray Wiggle - apparently her favorite guitarist as well :-) and is it ever cool! It takes the IP of the viewer on the page-load and maps it to a general geographical location. Only thing is, who ARE these people? I know some of them, I think.. Gotta love blog surfing I guess.

DV Camera stabilizers

Oooooooh, I gotta make one of these octagonal PVC Fig rigs. You can probably get some pretty interesting shots with it. I've made the $14 poor man's steadycam below here, which works great, I'll have to give this other one a spin.. Any of these rigs gives you a much smoother 'floating' shot, cutting down the 'jarring' hand-held stuff you normally see. Although.. I like that too.. hehehehe. Thanks for the link Alastair!

I wish I would have had these on "Trailerpark geocachers meet bigfoot"

Zartimus versus Murray Wiggle

So I'm sitting on the couch Sunday morning, my wife is out at a scrapbooking thing and the kids are watching the Wiggles(I took my five year old out to see them live when they played the Corel center a few months back). Murray, the guy in the red shirt(who is like 6' 4" by the way, man those wiggles are tall) is "Playing his guitar". Well, not really, he's kind of strumming a "mystery chord" kind of like Avril Lavigne does when she straps on a guitar (love those mystery chords, they always look like that E7#9 chord from Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze) and dancing with a green dinosaur.
My kid goes "Murray is the bestest guitar player!".

At this point I should mention that I'm sitting on the couch with my guitar, practising economy picking patterns ( a combination of alternate picking and sweep-picking on string skips) to a metronome. So I find myself saying..
"Daddy could kick Murray's ASS in a headcutting guitar duel!" But instead I said something more kid freindly like "Daddy is WAY betterer than that Murray guy!"

My daughter doesn't buy it, so I try a different tack.
"See that red off the shelf guitar Murray is playing?" I say.. (this is also the bestest guitar by the way)
"See this guitar Daddy is playing? He built and finished this himself with parts from Warmoth guitars in Oregon.." She is totally not impressed with my whole 'I see you have constructed your own lightsaber, you have now become a Jedi!' guitar-building trip. I continue.
"In fact it's meant to be a replica of one of Eric Johnson's 1956 strats except I hot-rodded it with a stacked humbucker in the treble position and a Khaler tremelo!" This is getting nowhere...

"OK." I say.. "Daddy can play 12 notes a second, 6 note triplets at 120 beats per minute!"

Nothin.. Apparently she is convinced Murray can do this too..

You just can't win...Against the Wiggles ;-)

Happy Chocolate Bunny day(late)

Hey, I just realized I neer posted anything about Easter last week. Then I saw this cartoon on another blog. HAW! Happy Chocolate Bunny day!

It was a busy weekend, including a trip to Montreal Saturday to see some guitar virtuosos then off to Granny's farm on Sunday. There was much turkey and chocolate(my kids ran off in the cow dung though. This is why we dress them in white leather shoes, probably made out of cow now that I think of it...)

Hiking up Luskville Falls..

Took the afternoon off to take a hike up Luskville Falls today, always nice to do before the bugs hit. I seem to forget how much I huff and puff on the way up the side of this small mountain every time I visit. It's sure nice to get to the top where it flattens out. We went today in search of the new "Up the Pontiac" geocache.

On the way to Gatineau park I almost got us all killed when I passed by this red light with a countdown timer by the side of the road. It was just this dinkly little light on a pole, at first I thought it was a radar gun thing, showing your speed, but I wasn't going 50 so I ignored it and kept barreling on.. Then, as I rounded the corner I saw all these pylons blocking the other side of the road and it became obvious that they are using the one lane for both directions of traffic and the red light with the timer meant that there was another light somewhere down the road that was green and the countdown was the seconds until it was going to change color and stop traffic from running into us. I quickly threw it in reverse and backed down where I had came just in time to let 3 oncoming cars through. Doh! Dangerous! I'm sure my Ontario plates impressed...

I was probably distracted by the great discussion we were having on the current price of gas ($1.03 in Ontario and $1.13 in Quebec). Tripper and I are watching this old 70's series called "Connections" and the first episode talks about the New York power outage in the 70's and what happens to civilization when we are made prisoners by technology. That is to say, if we run out of oil or electricity and our TV's and cell phones and blackberry's stop working we pretty much have to get out of the city (where we have everything shipped in, we don't really grow food there) somehow, find a farm, convince the owners to let us stay, or kill them all if they won't (it was a pretty heavy show) hope they have a plow and seeds and livestock and start over again..
Man... They better figure out that oil thing. We were all in the big ice storm and later on, the North American summer blackout in Ontario and New York and we came out of that ok. As long as there's food to go around nobody gets too crazy, but once that's gone.. Look out..

So, we hiked up the base of the falls, took a bunch of pics, got to the top, found the cache (coords were 20m off), ended up moving it so no one would accidentally stumble upon it (it had been found by hikers recently and was visible in it's hiding spot 2 feet from the trail, but it's a great area for a cache so hopefully it will last longer here). Tripper broke out a toberlerone bar and a cigar and we celebrated the find by lazing around in the sun up there for about 2 hours.

More weird discussions. One of them centered around the forgotten technical name for that friend of yours that breaks into your house for you in case you meet a tragic death by some accidental means and his one and only job is to remove all of your porn (hehehehehe) so the people that clean out your study after you;re dead aren't embarrassed. This person also gets to keep it. It's from some TV show called "Coupling" or some such thing. I say the term should be "porn ninja" but what do I know..

Tripper also found an old SLR camera with about 20 pics in it. I'm sure he'll have them developed. I wonder what they are? Here's a stiched together Panoramic using the free software package autostitch. You just take a pile of pics, moving the camera around a bit at a time, then this thing pieces them together in a pano. I need more overlap next time!

The Rocket

Thursday at work I scored some free passes to catch a sneak preview of the new movie about Maurice Richard, "The Rocket". I called Lifto up and met him at theatre and took in what has to be one of the best hockey movies I have ever seen. Even my wife would have liked this! It had a love story and everything! It was neat to see some NHL stars in this flick (it was filmed during the lockout last year) like Vincent Lecavalier and Mike Ricci. They take great pains to recreate a lot of scenes from the famous still photos any Habs fan is framiliar with, mostly ones of Richard scoring or standing there shaking hands with some team he has beat with blood streaming down his face. The guy who plays him, Roy Dupuis looks just like the Rocket and also skates just like him.
One of the things they focused on that was kind of news to me was how french players where really treated badly on NHL teams back in the day. They weren't allowed to speak french on the bench, the refs would let other players do whatever they wanted to them and there was always funny things going on with the Rocket and the NHL scoring title. Stuff like other teams having assists given to star players who weren't even on the ice when the goal was scored, etc.. They also explain the cause of the Richard riot...

If you're a habs fan, you gotta see this flick!

Lilac Chaser - A very cool Optical Illusion

Stare at the crosshair in the center of the picture and wait to see what happens. Very freaky....

If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see one color, pink. If you stare at the black + in the center, the moving dot turns to green. Now, concentrate on the black + in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see a green dot rotating if you're lucky! It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see.

Slava's tales of torture - Not the plastic monkeys! Nooooooo!

Slava regaled us with tales of his childhood tortures at the hands of his evil brother the other day. Some of the techniques were quite ingenious. Among my favorites is the time his older brother dug out a deep concave funnel in the snowbank in front of his house. It was probably 4 and a half feet deep. Then he took the water hose which had just been used to ice down the backyard skating rink and he proceeded to make the walls and floor of this icy prison slick and un-climbable and then he sought out Slava and deposited him in the hole and went inside the house for the evening. An hour later Slava's father arrived home to hear cries of "Help me...... Help...." and I can only assume he extricated him..
Slava shared a room with his older brother and was often fast asleep when his sibling would arrive home late and get ready for bed. Slava's brother would take this opportunity to remove his sweaty socks and drape them over Slava's face while Slava slumbered (for the next 4 seconds or so). He would awaken abruptly coughing and choking with a sock in his mouth.
Then, my favorite.. The Barrel of Monkeys. We all had barrels of Monkeys when we were kids and Slava was no different. Except his brother would take these pointy little plastic monkeys and arrange them in Slave's bed as he slept so Slava would roll over onto them in his sleep and end up tossing and turning all night, monkeys flying to and fro, in an advanced state of childhood sleep deprivation.. .. In some cases if he was sleeping on his side, the monkeys would be placed standing up, holding Slava up like a lean-to so that if he rolled over he'd be poked mercilessly by their evil plastic monkey hands.

Man.. I'm glad I'm the eldest in my family.

Julian Beever's pavement drawings

This chalk artist from the UK is amazing! When you view his paintings from just the right angle, they look 3-D.

You can see it better in this pic of the globe, where it is actually long and thin, but when viewed straight-on, looks like it is sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. Very cool.

Badger Badger Badger

Just go. You'll see why...

GC.Com has run out of pictures

Gwiliker (fresh back from the land of Scots) emailed me today to tell me that geocaching.com has run out of pictures and that I was up on the banner page. So I clicked over, hit refresh and was presented with something even scarier than my own unhaven mug from last Thursday. What a co-inkydink!

Thanks Gwilliker - I think...

My first Montreal night cache

So, after seeing Eric Johnon and Joe Satriani play, I had this geocaching travel bug to drop off, so I went around Montreal looking for a cache which would hold the thing because all I had seen around the downtown core were these minis. So at around 11:30 I found a regular sized one in Parc Lafontaine and it was off to the races. There was a big old building on one side and plenty of parking so I went all the way down to the end of the lot and parked beside another car. I got my maglite, camera bag, pack and other stuff, was already to go, had stepped out of my car and that's when I noticed that the car I had parked beside was not empty.
It's windows were slightly steamy in fact, but not quite foggy enough to hide the fact that there was a guy on the passenger side with a shirt but no pants (no shirt no pants no service!) doing horizontal hydralics with someone underneath.
Afraid I'd disturb them (as if people who have sex in parking lots actually care) I got back into my car, started it up and went about 60 meters away and parked by another vehicle. This one was a van and when I got out again I saw that IT was rocking too, but at least I couldn't see so I left my car there (maybe they could keep an eye on it!)

Found the cache and dropped the bug. What a neat city! Ottawa is so boring sometimes!

Montreal jaunt to see Eric Johnson & Satch

I got an email a month back from my Eric Johnson mailing list that Eric was gonna be on Satch's tour and would hit Montreal today, the only Canadian date on the tour! EJ? Two hours away? I'm there.. Joe Satriani was just icing on the cake! Plus I had a geocaching Travel Bug that had to get to la belle province, so the planets were aligning or something. I've come to realize that I've never seen Eric Johnson live. When I was about 14 and down in the southern US on vacation with my family, my Dad and I caught a great band outdoors near some themepark and the guitarist played "Cliffs of Dover". He had big hair and when I first saw EJ on the cover of guitar player in 1986 and heard "Cliffs" on the included flexi-disc soundpage I thought, "I've heard this before! I've seen this guy! WooHoo!.. Over the years though I've realized that it was probably some hotshot Texas studio rat who heard Eric's tune, lifted it and played it just for fun.
So to make a long story short, This is one of those things to cross off the "Things to do in my life" list. I've been an EJ fan since 1986. He's probably been to Canada twice before. This almost never happens. Over on his website there used to be a pretty cool mailing list (now defunct, they went to a forum based thing..) and we'd talk about anything and everything. Like how the treble position pickup in Eric's famous guitar "Virginia" was actually a Dimazario humbucker with only one side coil wired. Or how the bridge saddle for the B sting was brass and the others were steel, or how he could "hear" the difference between Duracell and Eveready batteries in his stomp-boxes.... Two years ago, in the summer of 2004 EJ was about to turn 50. A pile of us on the list got together and recorded an audio CD in his honor (actually it was more like 3 CD's about 17 songs on each, hehehehehe) and Val Serrie presented it to Eric. Very cool (you can read about it here, my tune was called "LE")..

I also got my hands on one of his hard to get Fender Elite signature model stratocasters, which are based on "Virginia" his famous 50's recording strat. Mine's the two tone model. It sounds warm and fuzzy!

So, the show... Eric came on right at 8:00, with "Columbia" the tribute to the blown-up shuttle. His tone was awesome, coming out of a Marshall stack on stage right where I had planted myself soon after spying it. His clean sound was coming out of another head and cab which I could not identify. Unfortunately, the mains cut out! Fortunately, from where I was sitting, I could still hear EJ! It continued for a few songs and really hampered the clean passages in "Trademark" but when the mains cut in, you could hear his clean sound as pristine as it sounds in his recording studio. Amazing. It is cool to know that he is using a stock sig model EJ Fender and mine would sound close to that if EJ was playing it (a lot of the sound is just in the fingers of the artist I've found).

It was a great show. I don't know if I'll ever see him up here again, but I was sure glad not to miss it.

Oh yeah, Joe was ok too. Last time I saw him live, he had HAIR! That's how long it's been...

Suicide Bomber Barbie

I was cruising through this month's issue of Heavy Metal and caught an article on Simon Tyszko’s Suicide Barbie. I wonder if we'll ever see this on the market one day... It's not a real toy, just a pop sculpture and general statement on the world these days. I expect we'll also see a Jihad Joe as well...


I was also suprised to learn that a toy company from the middle east has marketed a Barbie clone
named "Fulla", complete with typical female middle-eastern outdoor clothing, Burka, headwrap and all that. Lots of countries in the middle east, even uhh, a swinging place like Saudi Arabia, banned Barbie because of her "revealing clothes and shameful postures." Okaaaaaaay.. (it is a toy right?)

No Ken counterpart as of yet but some website jokingly made reference to plans for an "angry brother". Hehehehe. Also the pic we see at the right revealing the flowery skirt, would only bee seen by other women and Fulla's family. Shameful hussy!

Geocaching crypto Challenge - The one time pad

I haven't been sleeping much these nights. Ever since I saw the new Ottawa crypto geocache One-Time pad night-guy has been up in full force, trying to crack the thing, leaving day-guy red-eyed, slack-jawed and slightly useless. This sucks because once you get a look at these things, it sucks the time outta your life for days and weeks. I once spent over a month and a half cracking one . I said I'd never do that again, but I've done it a few times since.

Well, after several nights up until 1:00am and three visits to various sites (30km away so 60km round trip for a total of 180km) I managed to find the thing this morning bright and early on 5 hours sleep before work. What a way to start the long weekend!

This one was a little sweeter because Mike at work bet me a breakfast and coke that I wouldn't be able to decrypt it in two weeks! It's amazing what one does for a free breakfast!

The Psychic hotline

Someone related to me called a psychic hotline, two times for like 25 minute each. What the psychic should have told them was that "Your Dad is gonna absolutely flip when he gets this $100 phone bill one month from now."

Ya see, that's how I can tell they're not real...

Where the hell is Jojo these days any way? Miss Cleo? We hardly ever see her on tv at 2:00am any more..

Night caching & a movie - Sleepy Hollow & Lucky number Slevin

After the parking incident, I headed out to the West end for some night caching with Trip and Grizz. We did "Sleepy Hollow" which turned out to be a hoot. It was one of those refletive lights on tree's type of multi-caches that makes nightime the right time to do 'em. We were lucky once again not to run into any mafia-type guys coming out of the woods with shovels (that will be a bad day indeed).

We think we saw a UFO a well(or it was a Sea King painted black and outfitted with a quiet ceiling fan). Something bathed Trip in some light, turned him green for a sec, and went away. Afterwards he was quiet amazed by the size of his shadow, so much so he proclaimed when trying to take a picture of it..
"It's too big to fit in my viewfinder!"

Show off..

Afterwards we went and saw Lucky Number Slevin , a great new flick with an all-star cast! Lucy Liu was especially cute in this one.

Protect the pavement! Tow the innocent!

Friday... My wife had a luncheon to celebrate something at work, so I got a call in the afternoon that the truck she drove there was staying put and that I was picking her up(grin). It was the responsible thing to do, so I headed out there, drove up to the bar-type place and a bouncer was outside directing traffic.. "Parking lot's full, sorry..." No place to park. So after a five minute 23 point turn to get out of there I headed out to the other parking lot in the mall, that belonging to a Chinese food place. The Chinese food place was certainly not doing as good business as the bar was but for some reason it has a parking lot 4 times the size (I really think they should work a deal). So I parked in the totally empty lot, there was just one other car there, some kind of security guard guy (maybe he'll keep an eye on my car! Cool! I can feel safe leaving it here all night while I drive the other one home..) and started to walk to the bar.
The security car followed me. We all know what this means, this guy has been hired to guard the empty parking lot from people like me who park there so they can drive their drunk spouses home. Bastard! I tried to make it look like I was going for Chinese food but he made me.. He was a splitting image of Peewee from the Porkys movies.

He pulled up beside me and rolled down his window.
"Are you headed to Grace O'malley's sir?"
"Yes"
"You can't park your vehicle there, I'll have to have it towed".
"Out of that empty parking lot?"
"Yes sir"
"How long do you think it will take you to get a tow truck here?" I asked.
"Five minutes" And he looked dead serious.. I'm pretty sure unless there was a 10 car pile up on the Queeensway, and the tow truck drivers weren't busy backing up over the bodies of the injured thrown from their cars trying to get the tow, they would indeed be up for a little parking enforcement.
I asked for his card. It's cleverly designed to look like the City of Ottawa Bylaw dudes. I started to rant. I was there being a good Samaritan. bla bla bla I don't drink beer. I have to take my other vehicle home and leave this one overnight. Would you rather someone drink and drive instead? Bla Bla bla....

Nothin...

"Tow it. I'll race ya!" I started towards the bar.. He got on his radio. I went into the bar to find my wife but I couldn't FIND HER! So I came out looking sheepish and I MOVED MY CAR! I found a chip truck across the street and the owner goes to Florida for the winter so I figured that was ok. I also know he's way too cheap to pay Murray and Murray parking control services
to patrol his empty gravel parking lot. As I parked I could see them in their security car, behind their plastic badges, smiling and probably doubting that I was even married, etc..

After this final parking choice I ran across the road, and knocked on his window.
"Does your jurisdiction extend to the chip truck lot across the street?"
"No sir"
"Good"
"Sir, can I just say something?"
"Shoot"
"You seem to be having a bad day bla bla ,, bla bla bla bla bla bla and I probably would have let you go if it had been you coming out of the bar bla bla bla bla bla bla but bla bla..."

And then I realized that he, in his own way, might have been trying to do me a slight favor, by actually warning me he was towing my car.. So.. I apologized for being short with him. And he said..

"I been doing this job for 14 years, and if I know one thing bla bla bla bla..."

And all I was thinking was that guarding pavement for 14 years is about 13 years too long.. But hey, he has the same last name as the company, so it may be his, or his Dad's , or a sibling's.

I was late, I left, found my wife, met her co-workers including the one who had married a girl from Russia recently (some web mail-order thing I think. I've seen movies about this. Maybe she looks like Nicole Kidman). As I left I drove past the security car, in my truck, with my wife and waved.

I don't think I could ever do a job like that. It's like being a Green Hornet. Why would you want to be hated by people every day? I think it takes a special kind of person to do that kind of job.

Protect the pavement!!!!!!

Hey, feel free to grow pot in your office if you feel like it.

Ivy my ass Ubie! We all know how impossible it is to get fired around here though. I'd post details but I'm afraid they'll fire me.

Heatley - 46 goals!

Watching the Sens and Habs tonight and at 20:39 Dany Heatley just popped one and grabbed the Sens single season goal scoring record with his 46th (previously held by the guy he was traded for, Marian Hossa) making it 2 -1 Sens.

Way to go!

Of course, the Habs scored 11 seconds later on a bad giveaway, but I'm a Habs fan too so it's ALL good! (I love when these two teams play, it's a win/win for me). I'm especially grateful the Habs traded away their sieve of a goalie this season and are making good with Huit in goal. I remember someone on tv saying Theodore would suck this season with the equiptment shrinkage and it appears they were right!!

It used to be coffee...

We don't call coffee coffee anymore at work. I instituted a name change (I don't even drink the stuff). Instead of "Going for coffee" in the morning, now we "Go for Cof.."

Say it kinda fast and slur the word's a bit..



"Hey Mikey.. Go for cof!"

Bigfoot, God, and female genital mutilation

There are some things you just can't talk about at morning coffee, but I'll never learn.. I stumbled across an interesting website the other day. It was called The Official God FAQ. Like an idiot I brought it up this morning , because I'm agnostic and I'd say 30% of the people I know believe in a higher power and I'm always curious as to why, so... (did I mention I'm an idiot sometimes?) It appears I can't yet seem to discuss religion without trampling over somebody else's idea of it and that just ain't right. If I'm supposed to be a live and let live guy, it should not concern me that lots and lots of people believe in an imaginary guy in the clouds, and that when we die everything suddenly gets so much better (as long as you believe in the cloud guy that is, to say nothing of the many other 'different' cloud guys, none of whom have ever been seen or documented or scientifically been proven to exist, etc.. Oops there I go again.. see?).
When I was a kid and went to church the odd time for funerals, weddings and christenings I was curious about the whole communion thing. What was this drinking and eating stuff? Then someone explained to me that it's to signify the blood and body of the guy in the clouds and I though - That's not good.. Cannibalism! I don't want to join this club..

There's a slide of Bigfoot from the famous Roger Patterson film (Patterson/Gimlin film to be specific, but all Bob was doing was holding the shotgun) at the top of this entry. People find it funny that I beleive in the existence of a North American Ape (and life on other planets too!) but not a deity. At least there's some physical evidence of the big hairy guy! By the way, this film has never been seriously de-bunked and I have footprints cast from the film site in my basement. They are really cool!

The break concluded on the topic of female genital mutilations. I say it's barbaric, sexist and back-assed. It's not akin to a male circumcision, I'm talking the type 2 and 3 FGM where they cut stuff away to make orgasm impossible to achieve. I say they take the witch doctor who wants to perform that on a woman and hack his nuts off and see how he likes it. If it's good for the goose, then step up to the plate buddy!

In closing let's go over a paradox brought to my attention by Mr Lifto. If God can do anything, can he not create a huge rock the size of Canada that is so heavy he can't lift it? If he can create this super-rock, then he can certainly do anything he wants, but then again, if he can't lift it, that means he can't do everything... (see FAQ entry #1)

Bowman - pixelated impaling can be fun!

I stumbled across a ridiculous flash game where you propel arrows at little stick men, trying to bleed them dry so you win the game. It's all about the physics people!

Trailerpark Boys Season 6

Being a big TPB fan, Season 6 is right around the corner, not to mention the upcoming movie! (apparently it's "Inbelievable, Extrodinnery and More Awsomer" than the TV show). Check out the trailer too!

A freind of mine (PDub AKA Bigfoot AKA Jason) just told me the first two Season 6 episodes are out on the net (I promise I'll watch them on TV too) if anyone wants a sneak peek. Ahh, Bittorrents... The Internet is my VCR!