Monday, December 31, 2007

Nice Doggy!

Last Saturday night was UFC night, the Ultimate Fighting Championships with George St-Pierre taking on Matt Hughes for the interim title. My neighbor's brother was getting the fight on PPV and we headed over to his place at 9:30pm to watch it. It was my first time at his place, and he had the biggest dog I have ever seen. It was an Akita breed, and looked like it weighed over 130 pounds.

The owner asked me when I came in if I was afraid of dogs 'cause he could put him away if that was the case, but I said "No not at all, I love 'em.."(grin), and this is true. I get my dog fix at other people's houses because I don't have one. I'd like one but you know, I really don't miss the dog hair, the walks and picking up the poop and all that. More importantly, the family is allergic so I live without the dog thing.

So I held my hand out for the dog to sniff but he ignored it and trotted off down the hallway. He got a toy and headed back my way. "My god that is a huge dog!" I thought. He looked like a small bear. I set my drinks and peanut M&M's down on the kitchen counter and started talking to the owner about his dog just as it trotted in with the toy. I kneeled down in front of it to play with him and before my knees touched the ground it had dropped the toy, his muzzle got these little wrinkles on it and with a little snort he shot forward and clamped his teeth on the front of my throat and started biting and shaking me.

I didn't expect that at all so he had a great wide open shot at me. I didn't even have time to put my hands up. His owner freaked and grabbed him and managed to pry his jaws open. I don't remember doing anything to get him off but later at the hospital I noticed my thumb was cut so I must have jammed it in his mouth at some point. I think he was on for about three seconds and then the owner popped him off and stuck him somewhere. The weird thing is that the attack was totally unprovoked. I'm not a loud person. I'm calm, I move slow. It just snapped. Maybe getting down on it's level set it off, maybe direct eye contact, I probably smiled and showed teeth, maybe it was just a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. Who knows. It's the first time I've ever been attacked and I've been rolling around on the floor with big dogs all my life(may have to re-evaluate this policy).

I remember standing up and it didn't hurt just then, it was kinda hot was all, and I touched my throat and looked at my hand. Blood everywhere. Not good. My first thought was the jugular vein or the carotid arteries. I don't know how they work but I know spurting is not a good sign. It's basically your suddenly racing heart helping to pump all the blood out of your body. I was kinda worried just then and asked the guys, "Uhh, what's it look like? Should we be calling 911 or anything?" The faces I got back were concerning me a bit. I think the word is "agast"? It mustn't look good - but I felt ok.. I was in the kitchen and there was a wack of paper towels on a rack so I took a few and pressed them up against my neck and looked at it. Just 5 or 6 big red openings looked like, bleeding pretty good but not gushing or spraying or all that bad stuff. This was not a Clint Malarchuk moment (thank god). The owner was back and pressing a wad of the paper towels in my neck and I asked to see a mirror so he steered me into the bathroom. He wet a big clump of the paper towels and cleaned all the blood away and it looked Ok actually. Just a bunch of 2cm holes in my neck. The dog had missed all the important stuff! I clued in to the fact that I was able to talk ok, and there was no blood in my throat. This was gonna be ok!. Woohoo! I tried to reassure the owner, who probably thought I was gonna bleed out on his kitchen floor at first, grabbed a pile of the paper towels and out the door I went to get driven to the closest hospital, the Montford(cute nurses!), where they stitched me up. I don't think I had been in the guy's house for more than 5 minutes.

The doctor was impressed. He told me it was good that he got me on the front of the throat (I told him I just basically sat there and let him bite me on the neck like a dork) because all the important stuff is on the sides and if I'd have turned to get away and not been fast enough, he could have opened up something important, and then I'd be at the Civic or the (he mentioned another hospital). And then he snickered. I didn't get the joke but I guess it has something to do with vascular surgery or something like that. Or maybe those hospitals have the best morgues (you know how night shift doctors are).

The owner told me he was going to put the dog down and I feel bad about it, but it's the right thing to do I guess. It was one of those vicious attacks. Not a nip, or a bite and let go. It was a go for the throat and hang on kinda thing.

The next day I googled the breed, "Akita" and it seems that they aren't really very nice dogs. They seem to
attack people and other pets a lot! So I must be in a club or something now. I dunno, maybe it's because they are prized for their ability to hunt bears, but I'd think twice about getting one as a family pet.

One website had a quote like:

"Excuse me, but what kind of dog is that? He looks just like a big bear!"

Chances are, the questioner has just met an Akita, a Natural Treasure of Japan.


hope the meeting went better than mine!





Thursday, December 27, 2007

Feeding fairies to the T-rex

Mmmmm crunchy... Clap your hands if you believe in faries! The plastic t-rex is hungry!

Smoking butts suck

I went to work on Monday with one of my kids to do the office xmas thing and as we were leaving she asked me why the ground outside the doors to the Main building were covered in cigarette butts.

Gee, what was I supposed to tell her? "I dunno, smokers have bad aim? They're natural born litter bugs? They like to share their disgusting habit with anyone and everyone?"

Seriously, how hard is it to hit an ashtray with a cigarette butt? I manage to put all my garbage in a can. I don't chuck burning crap outta my window when I'm driving either, or empty my ashtray at a red light(mostly because I don't smoke).

It's good to see this particular habit becoming less popular. Truth is, I like most smokers because they're so god damned sociable! It's just that they're not gonna be around that long so we should be nice to them while they're still with us I guess.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Jennifer Love Hewitt Turns Down Playboy

My wife was in line at the grocery store and she caught some headline in People that JLH was going to pose in Playboy. Knowing that I (cough, cough) had a thing for JLH in the old days, she told me this and I was kinda of thinking it was a good thing...

A co-worker of mine with the same appreciation told me many years ago that he couldn't wait for JLH's career to start to tank so this would happen. Now I don't want to wish THAT! She deserves an excellent career! She's worked hard! And here we are in 2007/2008 and she has a hit show. What does she need to show off her goodies for?

So it's been officially squashed. She's turned them down. I hope it wasn't for those Hawaii bikini photos that made the tabloids where everyone said she was fat.

Those tabloid people need to be beaten with a dead gopher. She looks great to me, she just isn't as skinny. That kinda happens to most of us as we get older.

Ah well.. I got some other stuff I wanted for Christmas(sigh).

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Fun with Diablo back in the old days

I got a Christmas card from my old buddy Darryl yesterday(his wife even made him sign it!) and I was reminded of the time he was over at my place, circa 1995 or so to watch the hockey game and I made the mistake of showing him the new computer game of the year "Diablo". Diablo was a really cool psuedo mouse button mashing RPG where you picked a little guy and ran around this town and these dungeon tunnels underneath it killing monsters while in search of loot. It was one of the earliest multiplayer games that utilized a bunch of central servers whereby you could hook up and play the game with up to three other players from around the world. In most cases these were your buddies, but in some cases, they were total strangers. And that's where the fun began.
So I showed Darryl how to start, how to choose a character.
"I want to be the cute chick!" he said.
"The Amazon  Rogue? sure, she's a great character! What do you want to call her?"
"How about Betsy Buttmunch?" Darryl said (I've changed the actual name he used at the time because the real one is unprintable)
"Uhh, ok I guess..." I said, not sure if the name would be accepted. It was.

Darryl said "Ok Ok, what do I do!" and we went through the intro, got him a little javelin to poke into baddies and he got himself killed a few minutes later, reappearing in the village again and to our suprise, there was another player there! He had entered the game while we were in the load screen. It was then I realized that I had set up a Battle net game purely out of habit. That meant the game was open to anyone in the world, they could come in and play or just chat. Darryl was slightly confused and tried to kill the guy. Since he was a newbie it didn't work and the person typed at him to "STOP IT!".

"How do I talk to him?!?!" Darryl asked. I told him to hit the enter key, type what you want and press enter again. Darryl typed something mean but very very funny. The guy responded very politely. I felt I had to add..

"Oh yeah.. sometimes I've noticed that when other players see the Amazon Rogue character, they assume it's an actual real-live girl playing. He probably thinks you're a girl.."

"Interesting.." said Darryl..

I'm not sure why some male online players think that. In my experience(before Everquest and World of Warcraft), it was the opposite. In the old days girl players took men character personas so nerdy online men players would not hit on them. I went down to watch the 2nd period of the hockey game and left Darryl upstairs on my computer. What a mistake that turned out to be!

When the hockey game ended I went back upstairs to my computer room and Darryl called out to me from the top of the stairs:
"I got three guys fighting over me here.."
My god he did. There were three fighters standing around chatting with him, text filling the chat line.
"One of them's giving my girl swords and armor and stuff but I don't know what to do with it.. And.. " He turned around and smirked. "I have a date after!"

"What!?" Turns out one of the players lived in Ottawa and during the marathon chat and flirt session Darryl had used his fake computer feminine charms to set up a rendezvous between this guy and his computer game persona Betsy Buttmunch at the 24 hour waffle house in Vanier later that evening.

I reached over and shut the computer off on him at that point. It was funny but getting out of hand. Darryl wanted me to drive him over to the waffle house so he could try and pick the guy out of the crowd and laugh at him but I dropped him back at his place after that.

Ahh, the good old Diablo days..

Friday, December 21, 2007

Vive le Niveau "C"!

Finally! After 8 months of French to get to a "B" and another 8 months to finally get a "C" it's finally finished! I am now licensed to officially butcher the French language in any manner of my choosing!

Muhahahahahahahahaha!

I can now speak my second official language better than the head of the Parti Québécois can speak hers! Muhahahahahaha!

Friday, December 14, 2007

CliffyBeer ads


I on my was Flickr page and noticed one of my contacts, the ever-entertaining Cliffy, had some sets I had not seen. Some old ad-work he did quite a few years back. Some of you might recognise him as an old GHS alumni or local geocacher.

Christ he's funny!

Rated R for "Really?, I don't belive he just posted that on the Internet, but he did!"

Not for kids but really really funny! My favorite has got to be Canadian Camper!

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Ben Lacy - Let's dance, funky slappy poppy guitarist

This guy is FUNKY! As I'm co-incidentally teaching myself slap funk bass, he's a dude doing it on an electric guitar (the instrument I'm coming from- Doh!). The thing that makes this type of song arrangement so cool is all the little pops, slaps, accents, ghost note left hand slaps, etc. that you usually find in bass guitar. Although this song, written by Nile Rogers, one of my favorite clean guitar funk players, featured a bit of that on the original recording, it wasn't taken to this level. Insanely rhythmic. This is one of the coolest arrangements I've seen in awhile.

I'm sure we'll see this guy in an Apple Ipod commercial soon(grin).