Human Incoming!

Man, long time no post! Been so busy with work, French, home, school, kids and pre-production for the Trailerpark Geocachers meet Bigfoot 2 movie I haven't had the time!!!

Last Sunday I helped my friend brick in his back patio with paving stones. He has a big Siberian husky named Nico. Now I usually use opportunities such as these to get my Dog fix in, 'cause I love them and don't have any. It's a pretty good deal, you show up at someone's house, get their dog all hyped up, leave and you don't have to walk it or pick up any poop! Except he don;t let me play with his dog. Because his dog is friggin nutzo!
It bit someone last year. It wasn't really it's fault. His mother-in law was walking it and some guy walked up! Ohh, nice dog and she says "Please don't touch the dog, he gets nervous with people he doesn't know!" and the guy goes "Nonsense! I'm MR DOG!" and she said "Please sir, he might snap at you if you stick your hand near his mouth!" and he goes "PISHAW!!!!" and proceeds to get bit.. (idiot. Go try and hug a moving car next time). So, I don't get to close to Nico..

On that day, my friend's brother in law comes over with his TWO huskies.. He lives out in the boonies an takes his dogs with him when he comes into town because they are NUTZO too and will rip the house to shreds if he leaves them alone for any amount of time.. So he would rather have that happen to my friend's place instead (hehehehe, naw, if the dogs are with Nico, they are a bit calmer).. So I look at those dogs.. "Hey, can I?????"

NOPE! They are Psycho and they would eat you.. "Ok".. I say.. I look at them through the window(they are sitting there on the other side of the glass wondering how I taste) and I can't help but notice that one of the other dogs has some holes in his head.. I ask..

"$600 vet bill to fix that!! The other dog bites that one in the head sometimes.."

OK.. I'll just listen to everyone and stay outside..

So.. after awhile, I have to use the bathroom and I say to my buddy, "Hey, uhh, I'm just gonna use your bathroom." I figure, I'll just walk past these dogs, they smell fear, I'll just treat them indifferently, alpha male, etc.. I'll be ok... I don't get the chance.. "Wait a minute!!!!!" He says..

He yells inside the house at his girlfriend.. "HUMAN INCOMING!" and after 30 seconds she yells back "OK! I got 'em!" so I go inside an there she is, all three leashed and tied together like some Husky Hydra.. I make it in and out and wonder why anyone would actually get one of these dogs (much less two ) unless they lived in an igloo and needed them to pull a sled..

An hour later I found out what good sled pullers they are when one of them got out the front door as I was digging stone dust into a wheelbarrow. It shot out the front door when someone came in from walking one of the other dogs and it ran past me (I tried to grab it but missed) and down the street.. This dog ran out of the house (it was one of the visiting dogs) like it had been tortured there for six years and was fleeing for it's life! Not, gee they feed me all I can eat here and love me and give me a nice home to stay in! etc.. It was more "RUN!!!!!"..

Stupid dog.. It also ran down the middle of the road like it was a car which caused other cars and trucks to swerve out of the way so it would not get hit. I watched as it became a tiny spot in the distance and thought, if it gets to huntclub, it's gonna be dead. We'll hear a squeal of brakes and that's it. I hope no humans get hurt in the process..

But as luck would have it, another husky owner was driving by, he opened his truck door, the dumb dog jumped in, and he drove him back to us..

I will NEVER get that breed of dog as a pet..

Unless I move into an igloo and need one to pull me.

Alain Caron - NOT!!!

So I'm trying to learn funk bass these days. Mostly because I've always thought it looked pretty cool, and it sounded pretty cool, and heck, it IS COOL! As a guitar player, I always wondered how easy it would be to pick it up, and it's not so bad. The Heavy Wood fingerstyle guitar sure helps with the thumb slaps et al. I have weak girly hands on the bass though, and I have to strengthen them up a tab before I can move into the happy slappy thumpy choppin snapping.
So in order to sponge up as much info on the instrument as possible, I've been downloading these instructional videos, 1980's VHS rips of tapes you just can't get anymore, of Stu Hamm, Larry Graham, Louis Johnson, Frickin Flea of the Chili Peppers (River Pheonix is on that tape, go figure). Well, imagine my suprise when one day, I see this title, "Alain Caron Methode Technique-Basse Slap And Tapping.avi". Whoa. He's the old bass player from UZEB, that Quebec jazz trio. He rocks!!! He's the bee's knees! He's funkalicious! He's the french Bootsy Collins minus the UFO gear!
So I download this thing. It takes days, like 3 or 4.. And it finished tonight. I click on it.. Some funky intro music.. Cool.. Kinda sounds like porn bass, but hey, who am I to argue with the master! So the production credits finish... and I'm treated too...

PORN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Some idiot or idiots renamed a porno flick "Alain Caron Methode Technique-Basse Slap And Tapping.avi" and are passing it around the P2P servers. They should be nailed to their front doors! I'd like to attach them to my car and take them for a drag on the queensway!

The Noive A Dem!!! POW!!!! TO THE MOON!!!

And it wasn't even good porn... (As far as porn goes)

Same thing happend with a video mnarked "Eddie Van Halen - Guitar instructional video".. I love Eddie! But man, he's never made a video.. so gee, guess what.. it's porn..

Here I am complaining about some free shady downloads, but people have to know. Don't mess with a musician in his pursuit of free instructional videos...

Ack! (at least I have Stu and Flean and Louis!).

A texting wrong number.

Just in case anyone didn't know, I'm on full-time french language training for the next 9 months. I go to work, but instead of doing work stuff, I go to a classroom and learn to speak, write and understand francais! Luckily I have a great teacher and the class has some pretty cool people in it so it should go well.

So the guy next to me (we'll call him Maynard today) got a weird text message on his phone this morning before french class from someone we'll call "Out of the Blue"and he showed it to me at the break. It was someone sending text messages to the wrong phone number, but it was freakin hillarious! It went something like this..

Out of the blue types: "OMG!!!!...."
Maynard types: "OMG ??"
Out of the Blue: "So sorry, I'll clean up the huge mess I promise!!!"
Maynard:"mess?"
Out of the Blue:" The big mess I made in your room while I was basically ;-) doing the guy from the band"
Maynard:"LOL!"
Out of the Blue:"I went back to your apartment this morning but it was locked."
Out of the Blue:"Let me know when you get home from work and I'll come by and clean up. I'm SOOOOO bad!!!."
Maynard:"Is this Suzie?"
Out of the Blue:"?????"
Out of the Blue:"OMG!! I msg'ed the wrong number, please disregard the lewd msg!!!!!"
Maynard: "Hello???"

Hillarious! Man, when he showed me that I had to know more..
1. Who was she?
2. Was it a she?
3. What band was the guy from? B level or A? The Black Eyed Peas are in town.. (frickin slimy musicians, can't trust 'em. )
4. Why was she in her freind's room?
5. If her freind wasn't in her own room , where was she/he?
6. What kind of mess? (use your imagination, are we thinking stuff on all 4 walls? broken furniture? Some rare unmentionable sex act gone horribly wrong?)

Inquiring minds want to know!

Hillarious! They probably won't answer back.. If it was my phone I'd Text them back for more details.

Lotto fantasies and how to not start blogging.

Lifto is trying to tell me something. He sent me this.

It's too late!!!! It's just like when I started buying lotto 649 tickets in 1993 when the Montreal Canadiens won the cup! I picked all the jersey numbers of my favorite players! I can't stop now if I tried! It's way too late for that! Even when I forget to play the odd time I still check out the winning numbers just in case I won so I can feel bad 'cause I didn't play that day. I know the odds are ridiculous, if I were to take the 4 bucks a week and invest it in an RRSP, I'd be much better off!

Let's see,
₄₉C₆ = 13,983,816 combinations

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

But if you don't play, you can't have lotto fantasies. So, $4 a week for lotto fantasies is much cheaper than phone sex (so I've heard)

What would you buy? Let's see.. Pay the house off, buy an old Lotus Esprit turbo in good condition and bank the rest for a year wile I figure out what to do with it..

The next book I gotta read

A guy in my french class told me about this interesting book he read titled "1632". It's about a small town in West Virginia that for some reason was displaced in space and time to Europe in the year 1631. You can imagine all the weird stuff that takes place. These semi midieval peasants coming into contact with SUV's etc.. It's a 6 mile chunk of land that gets plopped down there and the town's got a coal plant, so they have electricity, but like, when they run out of lightbulbs, they're screwed because they have no way to make them. It's the good old US of A so everybody and their mother has a gun, but most are exotic with no proper ammunition.

They have a town library so there are books on old languages so they can talk to their new neighbors and converse about exciting new ideas like, uhh, women's rights? I'll be picking up a copy this week. Sounds like my kinda read! Apparently they go all American Revolution on the poor Europeans. It's got a fan website at http://www.1632.org/

Death to Bees!

I can finally declare victory in my war on the bees that had moved in underneath my front step this summer. They are no more. The fancy schmancy "kill flying insects" foam spray from Walmart didn't do the job (although it did thin the ranks). The umpteen litres of water I doused the general area with didn't do anything (Posideon would be proud, I'm glad I didn't flood my basement as a result of the torrents I unleashed). The many shovelfuls of packed earth and crushed stone did little to deter the digging little buggers! No.. It was my good freind, "Quick drying concrete" and their own ingenious choice of nesting spot that did them in..

They must have been like:

"Hey, look at the little hole under this guy's concrete front step! Let's build the nest in there! no one can get at us! They'd have to pull down the foundation to get us out of there!"

Hah hah! They were right. When I first noticed the little striped hueys choppering in an out of there, it was clear they'd been at it a long time. After a few days my kids were afraid to come out of the front door - there were bees everywhere! I got that foam spray 'instant death' stuff and stuffed it in the crack and pressed the button until it came overflowing out the sides but they seemed to weather that attack. All it did was piss off the bees who were out on pollen patrol. They'd come buzzing in, find the hole all full of foaming death and they'd start looking around for the guy holding the spray can(I'd run).

When that didn't work I just got a shovel and filled the crack with packed earth from the garden. That worked for about an hour. Those fuzzy little buggers are like big ants when they're not busy flying around helping flowers have sex. They dug a tunnel in no time flat. I filled that in and they just switched over to their second tunnel "Harry". It was like an episode of Hogan's Heroes.

Then I dug down a few feet and filled in the hole with crushed stone, which only takes a 'bit' longer to tunnel through, and it goes fast when the pollen patrol comes home and starts digging out from the other side. Sure, I sat there with my battery powered electric flyswatter (sparks fly when you connect with that thing) and killed all the ones milling about the filled in entrance, but soon it was back in business. The one thing I did notice was that the bees where getting smaller. I guess after I killed all the bigs ones, they had to recruit the younger bee folks in this time of great need.

Then came the water, oodles of it.. Water water water. I watered the area of the hole was down until I was worried my house was going to float away. Still no luck. As soon as the water seeped away, they were all buzzin and diggin and flying again.

So.. Out came the cement. You guys like it in there? You can stay.. They buzzed like mad in there for a few days, then nothing...

Death to bees!

And I didn't get stung once! They better not find a way inside my house.. Buzz buzz buzz..

Why do people take naked photos of themselves?

...and post them on Flickr? It's not that I don't mind and most of them are incredibly tasteful (check out exhibit B to the left), it's just that I don't really 'get it'.. And it's usually girl's that do it.

When you go on flickr to organize your own photos, it shows you the last 4 you uploaded, the last 4 any of your contacts uploaded, and then the last 4 uploaded to the site in general(and these photos are from everybody and anybody). These are where I sometimes run into the interesting ones, although some get forwarded to my attention from time to time. Now I know how huge the pornography industry is, I keep saying at work we should survey it properly as a business because it's "huge!" from what I hear, but Flickr is about sharing your photos with the world all free and everything (although there might be some adsense goin' on).

The thing that I think first is, "Your whole office is gonna know what your butt looks like naked!" , or your wife's butt, or whoever you manage to talk into a semi nudie shot.

Weird.. Nobody's forcing me to watch, but I click on them anyway. Kinda like when you pass a car-wreck, you just gotta look. My friend Darryl used to say "I'd roll down my window and ask the cop if he could pull the body over closer to my side of the road so I could see it better.. "..

Ah well. Flickr.com. Check it out sometime, you could spend all day there.. The photo above is from someone who calls themselves Tetheredtothesun (a pretty good photog if you ask me).

Cucumbers are pickles?

I'm not sure why I didn't know this before now, but my 6 daughter told me that pickles are cucumbers. She saw it on "The Magic Schoolbus". So pickles are just cucumbers canned in vinager for like, months.. For some reason I thought they were some vegetable all unto their own. Duh....
SMRT, Smart! That's me..

I guess I don't like them so, I didn't know how they were 'arrived at'.,

(Next thing they'll be telling me that raisins are made from grapes).

Monster House

I caught this little PG computer animated flick the other day. My daughter lasted about 2 minutes. It was GREAT! It conjured up all sorts of childhood memories, you know, of that creepy house on the corner in disrepair where kids who knock on the door are never heard from again. It becomes a neighborhood ritual to nicky nicky nine door the place (that's ringing the doorbell and running away for all of you not familiar with the regional dialect - I'm not even sure where that's from) and once and awhile, the crochety senior who lives there comes out and screams at you and keeps your ball, kite, plane or whatever other projectile you've managed to crash in the no-man's-land that is their lawn.

It's not often you can identify with the characters in a movie like that, especially an animated one, but the story is so imaginative and familiar you just can't help but be drawn in. The character of the old man that lives in the house was done especially well and creeped me right out. The animation was excellent! The cinematography.. well, man.. Sooner or later one of these computer animated jobbies is gonna take the damned oscar for that. They're gonna have to invent a different category. With a 3D-engine you can do whatever you can imagine, and these animators imagined quite a bit. Spielberg had something to do with this, you can totally tell.

Did I mention the dialog? There's a scene where the kids are up all night watching this house eat poodles through a telescope and the babysitter comes in to ask what the heck they're doing.
"We've been up all night watching the spooky house, we haven't left this room once, not even to go to the bathroom! " The room is a mess and the babysitter picks up a plastic coke bottle with an unknown liquid inside "Don't drink that!" the kid says..

Then she says "Whatever disease you guys have I'm sure there's letters for it and they make pills you can take..." etc..

I'm not sure when this thing is out on video, but it' worth checking out!

Steve Irwin dies

"Crikey!"
I always thought a Croc would get him, but it turned out to be a stingray... He was always very entertaining and an environmentalist at heart. He'll be missed (croc feeding with baby incident aside).