Sex Ed gone bad - 1970 - Men's menstrual cycles.

I was out geocaching last Friday with Tripper and I dunno how we got on the topic, but I ended up regurgitating an embarrassing story from way back when. When I was in grade 6 at EMCS, we were apparently the first bunch of middle school kids to receive co-ed sex education. To some of us 11 year olds, it was a pretty confusing topic. For instance... Our teacher was talking to us about a women's menstrual cycle and she said something like, "It's important to keep clean during it, because it can smell bad.". So I'm sitting there, staring off into space, not really paying attention because as I see it, it doesn't really apply to me when my locker partner "Suf" whispers jokingly into my ear:

"I'll bet Shawn doesn't wash during his period!..".

I laughed - I Guffawed, and hard! and got in trouble..Shawn was this kid in our class that was one year older than everyone and constantly smelled of shit. Like he made a habit of stepping in it every day, or he wasn't a big believer in the value of toilet paper or something like that,. To insinuate that Shawn smelled like this because he had a menstrual cycle was so absurd I found it extra funny! Way to go "Suf!".. hehehehe.. I'll take the detention for that one.. Hehehehee.

Anyhow, a few minutes later he said it again, this time about the 2nd smelliest kid in the class (Yes, we had a ranking of the rank and don't even ask, I was not top 20, not even close,..) and it sounded weird. Like... He was trying to be funny, but not absurd.. like he was missing some great detail in all of this.. The fact that men don't have periods. I started to get at that very moment that he had it in his head that getting your period was something both sexes experienced on a monthly basis..

ACK!

I take it at Suf's house they didn't talk to much about the birds and the bees at home, but this was pretty bad.. I didn't know what to say, so I asked my best friend Geoff, who knew immediately what to do..

Geoff was a nice guy, but he loved a good practical joke, even if it was a hurtful one..I told Geoff, and Geoff did what any sensitive friend would. He sympathized with Suf. In fact, Friday after school, he told Suf that HE Geoff himself, had had his period, it was no big deal, and not to worry, for when Suf was mature enough, he too would have his...

Suf started to ask questions. Geoff didn't blink. What to expect? Well, he laid it all out. Blood leaks out of your belly button. You have to wad up Kleenex in a ball and tape it over there so you don't get blood on everything. You trickle blood for about three days and then it goes away, starts again in a month.

So...Suf goes home for the weekend and on Monday morning at school, what do you know! Whammo! He comes over to Geoff and I and pulls up his shirt, where he has a wad of Kleenex taped over his belly button, with some red marker on it or something...

"Hey!" he whispers.. "I got my period!!!!" he gives us the thumbs up!. We give it back, turn around and collapse on the ground in laughter as he leaves. The trouble was, he wasn't finished. He wasn't content to just tell us. He started telling EVERYBODY! That he was mature, and got his period, and blood comes out your belly button but it's ok, you just put a wad of Kleenex there and tape it, etc...

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Later that day in the principal's office, as I was sitting there listening to the teacher who had over heard Suf telling a group of girls about his menstrual cycle recount this sorry state of affairs to the Principal and debating over what to do with me and Geoff I was hit with a feeling of great injustice! The principal said something like "Well boys, what do you think should be done here!" and I went off on this big tirade.

"Well Suf lied! If he would have just not lied to everyone about getting his period this never would have happened! He should be up here with us for lying about this whole thing!".....

Didn't work.. We had to copy pages 350-page 370 in the dictionary word for word on 8x11 pieces of paper.

And Suf? By Tuesday he said he did it all just to get us in trouble.. ...Suuuuuure..... Must be PMS..

Swimming with the Dolphins (the ocean is their toilet)

In the cafeteria at work on Friday, I ran into a guy I happened to go to Mexico with in 2000. We had no idea beforehand, just saw each other at the airport that day. It reminded me of when I fulfilled fantasy #27 "Swim with dolphins". I was visiting a wildlife preserve in Mexico(the one other than my hotel) and for $50US they will let you swim with dolphins for a half-hour. I was pumped. I had gone scuba-diving the day before so I had my fins, snork and mask and I was all ready to meet Flipper and his buddies and make dolphin noises underwater.
So I get there and they take away my mask, fins and snork, make me put on this ridiculously HUGE life jacket that I can't even turn my head to either side once it's on and the next thing I know I'm bobbing unhappily in the water like a friggin bowling pin.
So me and the 50 other bowling pins are floating there and they bring in the dolphins, about 8 of them, and we each break off into groups. We had a girl dolphin from Cuba. It was educational.. The trainer flipped her over and showed us the difference between girl dolphins and boy dolphins(the dolphin didn't seem to mind, he gave her a fish after). Soon after we're bobbing in the water and the dolphins are swimming through us and you can touch them as they swim by. They feel like a wetsuit made out of orange peels.

There was a gay couple from New York in my group and one of them was a real pain. The trainer goes, don't touch them on the head forward of their blow hole or ears, they don't like that, so New York proceeds to stick his finger in the dolphin's blow hole and ear and it gets pissed off and swims away and he goes "Hey, where is he going! Hey! Why is it leeeeeaving?!?!"

"First off he is a she" I said , "and second..." but he wasn't listening. Idiot. So I swam into the middle to put some distance between me and the new york guy who was now trying to poke the dolphin from the other group in the eyes insead and the next thing I knew, I had three dolphins around me.
They seemed to be trained to swim past you, let you touch them and then they look around for a fish, so I pet them, the trainer is on the side chucking fish and I had a feeding frenzy going on. It was great! And then Mr New York came dog paddling over to spoil the fun "They're over here!!! Over here!! Oh Don't swim away!!".. Dolphins are smart. They can tell if you're an asshole right away. They bugged out and one left a big chocolate swirl as it took a crap underwater. Hey! We are swimming in the dolphin's toilet( It's not like TV! Flipper never did that!)

They they lined us up and the dolphins jumped over our heads and stuff for awhile. That was cool. When it was over I was still kinda pissed at the NYC eye poker so I did a fast side stroke to the dock, beat everyone there and was the first one out. As I'm standing there dripping the trainer came over and said something in spanish and I said "Hmm?" and then he said in english

"Do you want more to swim with dolphins?" (or something like that) And I said "Sure!" he goes "OK, is free, stand here." So I'm standing on the side and I'm trying to get my wife's attention. She has been watching from the observation walkway the whole time but she is not looking my way. She is with some good freinds we came down from Ottawa with waiting for me to come back up. The trainer is picking certain people out of the crowd of 50, a spanish guy, a couple from Britain, a guy from Germany (not the couple from New York). Pretty soon he says "OK, follow!" and he takes off around the corner. I still haven't gotten my wife's attention and she is expecting me to come up with this crowd of 45 people but the trainer is gone now, down this little path and I made the decision to GO and face the concequences later(grin).

The trainer takes us to this huge man-mad pond in the back connected to the dolphin paddocks on the other side. He explains that these dolphins are wild and they are integrating them into the swim with dolphins plan. They have just started to get used to people. They are "how you say.. tough" I think he meant rough, but hell, this looks like more fun than the other one we just did. Then I kinda saw how he picked me and the others. He probably figured that these wild dolphins would not be able to kill us as easy(grin). So in we go. These wild dolphins are cool! They ram you, kinda bite you(or mouth you, ) head butt you, roll into you, move you, etc.. They haven't gotten the "Let the stupid human pet you and you get a fish" trick. Some of them are thinking "If I ram into this human full blast I'll surely get a fish! Hey where's my fish? Musn't have been hard enough!" Now I think I know why these life jackets are made this way. It's like dolphin armor.

That was one of the coolest things I had ever done. I think it lasted 45 minutes. I didn't know any of these other 5 people but we were all best freinds after almost being drowned by semi-wild dolphins. There was one dolphin they had to take out because he was too rough. I was curious how the hell they were gonna do that, I mean the trainers are on land and the dolphin is in the water, he's gonna do what he wants. Well, first off they don't throw fish his way, then they get this big pole with a circle on the end and they slide a plastic symbol into the circle and they slap this on the top of the water and shove it underneath when this dolphin swims by. He goes and looks at this symbol, then he swims off towards his dolphin paddock. ?????????? I asked them how that works but they were unable to translate.

Soon it was over and I broke the freestyle swimming record to get back to the other side and face my wife who has spent the last 45 minutes in a foreign country wondering where the hell her husband is.. I found her angry and arguing with the Swim with dolphins tour guide.

"My husband came down here, swam with your dolphins and he did not come back up with the other people! Is he dead at the bottom of your dolphin pool?" The guy actually bent over and checked if I was(grin)..

"Hi honey!" Uh oh....

That was bad.. But worth it!!

Muslim Cartoons

A link to those Muslim Cartoons that people got riled up enough over to burn a pile of Danish and other European embassies and attack a US military base... death toll is at 10 so far. Over some cartoons...

Celebrities who should be neutered

First we had Steve the idiot

Then Jacko the wacko..













And now Brittany Spears(I wonder what her sperm donor husband has to say about that).

At least get a friggin nanny if you're going to act like freakin idiots.. They should be neutered! Well, I think one is, Jacko just buys them on the Internet from what I hear. Scary...

Ottawa Zombie Walk

Sometime this summer, at my brother's post wedding reception, I briefly met this interesting guy who seemed to be into some of the same things I was in. Along these lines, one thing he does is help organize the Ottawa Zombie walk. It occurs a week before Halloween and involves a huge pile of people dressed up as zombies who meet at Beechwood cemetary and lurch downtown towards Parliament hill. Very cool indeed. I smell a new film. Trailerpark geocachers V.S. Zombies. Get your Zombie outfit ready for Oct 23rd 2006!

Harper gets a haircut..

I just found out that the new Prime Minister and I get our hair cut by the same guy. He got finger-printed yesterday (my friend that cuts hair that is) and he's trimming the Harper's locks today before they move into 21 Sussex tomorrow. He used to cut their hair before and they trusted him and all that but now that he's cutting the PM's hair and not just an opposition leader's it's all fingerprints, RCMP bodyguards, and they close the place so they can get their hair cut in private (Kinda like when Michael Jackson goes shopping - or used too that is).

I wanted to know if Harper was really a robot. You'd figure robot hair wouldn't grow. Maybe I've been wrong all along..

Advances in Pizza technology

We tried out Pizza hut's Cheesy Bites Pizza tonight. This is an excellent innovation whereby the outer crust is formed into dough balls shot full of cheese that you pluck off and eat. I guess they saw that a large group of the population leaves the crust (pizza bones I call them, and I actually eat them) and it is simply looked upon as a cheese containment device, not part of the meal. You need something to hang onto while you stuff the thing in your pie hole I guess. Well, it's a darned good idea! I think I ate half of them!

We usually don't go to 'The Hut' or Pizza Pizza, preferring the small dedicated Pizza joints like Gabrielle's etc.. But it was cool to try it. Last time I was at Pizza Pizza, I had a hard time telling the difference between the bottom of the cardboard box and the pizza crust. It was like cardboard and cheese, hold the bread.

Funerals and people who like them(like me!)

There's a funeral today for a guy I used to work with. He retired about 8 years ago. I never knew how old he was back then but according to the obit, he must have retired at age 71, which is pretty rare where I am. Most here are out between 55-58 years of age(I'm talking retirement, not death). Some people in the office that worked close with him aren't going to it because they don't 'like' funerals.

So does everyone feel this way? Who actually 'likes' funerals anyhow? Well.. Sometime I don't mind them. It sucks when it's close family or some shocking death that should never happen, but when it's some 90 year old french aunt (I call them Ma-tants - not Mutants, but french for 'My Aunt') who is up there and it,S quite a natural thing, it's not so bad.
Plus, they always serve these really cool little triangular sandwiches. When I was a kid I called them dead people sandwiches ( actually, I still call them that). They're ussually egg salad, or chicken or ham salad ones. I was at a wedding years ago and I told my wife "Look, they got dead people sandwiches!" and the wedding organizer did not understand it was a compliment (sigh). You also see folks you haven't seen in years at these things, and everyone says the same thing.. "We should try to get together like this when someone doesn't die..."

My GPS just got better!

And I didn't have to do diddly! The US upgraded some stuff on their GPS sat birds and increaded accuracy 10-15%! I may not agree with everything uncle Sam does, but it sure is nice of them to let me play with their 3 billion dollar network of GPS sats for free!

Thanks to AVdezign for passing that one on..

Survivor Panama EP 1

Survivor 12, Panama. Well, has it been 6 months already? Man, I love this show! Say what you want about how crappy reality TV is, this was one of the first ones to catch on and start the craze. Survivor is like pizza or sex. Even when it's bad it's still pretty good.
It still makes me mad when the weak couch potatoes vote off people who actually aren't afraid of crunchy leaves and bugs and can probably survive outdoors without anyone's help. Happens every time (like it did tonight).
Tonight Heart-attack-waiting-to-happen Cirie managed to get the other two spineless jellyfish in her group to vote off the lumberjack lady. I hope to hell they keep these existing groups together for at least 4 episodes because voting off the strongest person on their team should garentee them all a quick exit (but I don't think that will happen, they'll shove them into two groups soon to compete in the bigger challenges)
Cirie is so overweight they had to have a moving blur matte on at least two parts of her body at all times when she's in a bathing suit, because of all the stuff trying to fall out around the edges. Yeah, I want her on my team. She's really gonna help in those extreme challenges. She'll probably go far in the game too. People like to keep other people around who they can beat! ARG!!!!
I love the team of shrinks who pick the contestants! They got a 3-pack a day smoker on the show! They took away his cigs! He is gonna KILL someone in the next episode(grin).

And don't these losers learn how to make fire or a shelter before they go on the show? Three of the teams got flint and all three proceeded to hold the flint in one hand, over tinder, and then tried to hit the flint(did I mention they were holding it in their hand?) with the machette. The team of young guys couldn't even start a fire! Someone is gonna cut their hand off(grin). I reccomend that they should have all read this...

IDIOTS!

I can't wait for it to rain!

Can't hardly wait - part deux

OK, continued from a previous post, where was I? Grade 8, danced with my muse at middle school grad, Beatrix, thought about her all summer, lost games of Risk while nerdily defending Indonesia at all costs because I thought she was from there, carried a pic of her clippped out of the yearbook around in my wallet like a lovesick dork, etc..

So here we get to the part of the movie that mirrored my life somewhat. The main character in the film recounts a series of events whereby fate decreed that he was to meet this cute girl who was new to teh school that day. From them both being late that day, ending up in the same class, sharing the same taste in breakfast pastries, etc, but he didn't make his move and got un-seated by the high school quarterback, who eventually wooed this pretty young thing, played by Jennifer Hewitt(the girl , not the quarterback).

So here I am in grade 9, it must have been around 1983, first day of high school. I'm decked out in my rugger pants (or Rugby pants or whatever they were called) and I manage to find my homeroom. Gloucester High school is as big as an airport terminal and I quickly found out that you never ask seniors for directions to your class because you'll end up in some spooky place with a bunch of pipes with steam coming out of them.
If you're slightly nerdy like I was, there was also a chance you'd end up in the specimen cage which was this set of glass doors set into a glas wall behind the auditorium. When you propped these doors open it formed a glass triangle and seniors used to stuff some hapless grade 9 in there, kick the doorjamb in until it you couldn't get out and leave you there as the bell rang. Some teacher or janitor drawn to your cries would have to get you out.

So I'm in homeroom, kinda sitting near the back, and who walks in but Beatrix(not her real name)! I was floored! She was gonna be in my home room all year! This was amazing.. So the teacher walks in, looks at his class list, then us. He has decided to quit smoking this year and has a funny habit of putting chalk up to his lips like he is going to take a drag. He looks up and says "I'm going to seat you all in alphabetical order and this will be your seat for the whole year". Everyone grumbles except me. And I'm not grumbling because my last name begins with C and Beatrix's last name begins with B. So I'm looking around, seeing who might screw with fate and land between us, and &*%$# there he is, why the &%$* did Charlie-whose-last-name-begins-with-a-C-and-comes-before-mine have to be in my homeroom! So that screws the order up, he is seated between me and her. She is 2 seats in front of me (sigh). Thankfully Charlie is part midget and at least I can stare at her back kinda!

Then the teacher calls us out into the hall for locker assignments. He goes in alphabetical order and this is where I lucked out again. Beatrix is the first locker in the class, like 201 or something like that, and I am 203 with Charlie being 202, but like house addresses, they stagger the numbers back and forth across the hallway. 201(Beatrix) and 203 (me) are beside each other, Chuckie is across the hall! Woohoo! I could get used to this for a whole year.. I thought.

At first things went rather well. She introduced herself, she remembered me from the dance just before the summer, what did I think of the teacher, etc.. I'm sure she caught on that I was dumbstruck, cause after awhile she started calling me her "little buddy". Her girlfreinds would make fun of me, which I thought might be a bad thing, but could also be a good thing, (hard to tell with girls at that age). But throughout it all I DID NOTHING! I couldn't let her know, etc.. Not sure why not, but man was I stupid! The grade 9 girl of your dreams is right there, and I couldn't bring myself to say anything or do anything. So of course, the obvious happened.

At high school I quickly found that that male seniors were too immature and stupid to impress girls their own age, so they looked down a few grades where they could impress a younger girl with A) their age B) their driver's license and C) that's about it... (please see A and B). Female high school seniors dated college guys or something, and so on.. So it wasn't too long before one of the seniors came circling. It was at this point that I learned that all important skill on how to act nonchallant while getting your books at your locker as your fantasy crush girl is playing tonsil hockey with joe-cradle-robber the next locker over(grin).

And so on... She had a few Boyfreinds that year. We'd still talk, I hid everything well, she'd complain about her latest boyfreind and I'd stupidly stick up for them, trying to act like I wasn't jealous and didn't want a piano to fall on his head(grin). IDIOT!

Years later when I could actually talk to girls without having a seizure, we never ended up being single at the same time, so nothing ever happened. About 6 years ago (17 years after this story took place) I was looking up a freind's email address at a Univercity out west where he was teaching and I stumbled across, of all people. Beatrix! Couldn't be too many people in this world with that name so I dropped her an email. She answered back. It was her but she had no idea who the hell I was, and to have a nice day. Later that summer out of the blue, I get an email from her again. She had gone home to her parent's place for a visit and actually cracked open a yearbook to see who I was.

I was an idiot. She said she would have gone out with me in a second.

Fast forward to 3 years ago. Her and her same sex partner moved back to Ottawa from out west. It looks like she simply got fed up of guys, quit and moved on to the other team. Zoinks! Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I certainly didn't see it coming, and maybe being shy back then worked out for the better!

Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight

"Spectators cheered as entire Cambodian Midget Fighting League squared off against African Lion"

Tickets had been sold-out three weeks before the much anticipated fight, which took place in the city of Kâmpóng Chhnãng.

The fight was slated when an angry fan contested Yang Sihamoni, President of the CMFL, claiming that one lion could defeat his entire league of 42 fighters.

Sihamoni takes great pride in the league he helped create, as was conveyed in his recent advertising campaign for the CMFL that stated his midgets will "... take on anything; man, beast, or machine." (read the rest of the article here)

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Wow. 42 cambodian midgets versus a Lion! I was disappointed to find out it was fake though(sigh). At first I was like "Go Lion!". Read the explanation here.

Can't hardly Wait

A teen movie I saw for free at a midnight staff screening in 1998 when my brother was working for Cineplex Odeon. I think I saw it with my friend Darryl who was a rabid JLH (Jennifer Love Hewitt) fan at the time (and I quickly became one as well! Although since listening to a few DVD audio commentaries she's done, I'm starting to think that she's as smart as a rock).

Why post about it? Well, I'm playing in this show at work in a few weeks and it turns out the keyboard player I'm in a set with played for a rival band back in the 80's and after a noon practise session we started swapping stories of back in the day. For some reason, I was reminded of this movie again, only because a scene it in kinda happened to me in real life way back in the 8th and 9th grades.

I was 13, it was 1982 and I was walking across the snowy football field of Emily Carr Middle School in my white winter coat (I think my parent's were trying to tell me something, white coat, winter, zero visibility = no safety, etc..) and I caught this vision of a girl, walking far in front of me in the blowing snow.
I could only see her from behind, between gusts of wind and snow, but from that vantage I figured that other angles were probably just as good(grin). She was going in the same direction I was so I kinda ended up following her (it's not stalking if you're both going down the same route). At some point she crossed the street and disappeared into the condominiums dotting the South side of Blackburn Hamlet.
Wow.. That was something. It was a Friday so I kinda kept that image all weekend. It was like a girl-mirage.

On Monday and Tuesday I didn't see her, but on Wednesday - Pay-dirt! And visibility was better. She had blond hair. I was a pretty recluse kid back then. I had just re-discovered the guitar and my best freind had moved to Nova Scotia the summer before. Plus I had these thick glasses and ears that stuck out so I had this kinda Beatles Haircut to go with the zit farm I was growing on my face(grin). So talking to girls was not a developed part of my skillset. Better to admire from afar, I thought, and I followed her on my way home. A few weeks went by, then I actually saw her face! She was one of the cutest girls, I'd ever seen, well worth the wait(it's odd to think about some girl you don't know for weeks and never having seen her face). She was horsing around after school trying to stuff a snowball down this guy's coat I knew. Lucky &%$*&. He could be a bit of a jerk, but when you're 13 that makes you cool or something(grin). I had to stall until she hefted her Adidas bag(we all carried these god-awful things) and walk home about 80 feet behind her. I never crossed the street to she where she lived. That'd just be creepy..

A few months later near the end of the school year a freind caught me staring at her again and actually told me her name. It was Beatrix(name changed to protect the Innocent). It became my favorite name. So the end of the school year was approaching, we had a graduation dance that you get in GR 8 before they throw you to the lions (high school, GR9-GR13), I'm in my bad suit and tie, actually out on the dance floor because some other girl I didn't really like had asked me to slow dance (easy enough concept to grasp, no way was I doing fast dancing stuff though! I'd look like a dork!) and I kept looking for this Beatrix girl. Every time I saw her she was dancing with someone else. A fast song would start and most of us guys would leave the gym floor and go back to holding the walls of the gymnasium up, venturing back out only when a slow song would come on. I think I danced about every slow song with a different girl, with one or two repeats, and by the end of the night I finally bumped into her. She didn't know who the hell I was, but I asked her to dance and she said yes.

And boys and girls.. It was Stairway to Heaven, (forever immortalized in that Bare Naked Ladies song). Eight minutes of slow dancing, even through that weird heavy part at the end after the guitar solo....

What I remember most is that she kinda smelled of sweat (guess she'd been dancing a lot). But she had some kinda perfume on that was great, and here I was actually slow dancing with this creature from the snow mirage several months ago and my freinds are giving me the thumbs up behind her back and all that. Before I knew it, it was over, she said thanks, I croaked something, the lights came on and I got the hell off the floor lest I make a dork of myself (which I probably did by taking off anyhow).

And that was it for the summer. I cut her picture out of the yearbook and carrried it around in my mostly empty wallet like a dork all summer. Someone had told me she was from Indonesia and when I'd play Risk(that game with the map where you occupy different countries) with Darryl I'd lose because I'd throw all my forces at Indonesia! I had to control Indonesia! It was a dutch colony wasn't it? Full of beautiful blond-haired blue eyed girls named Beatrix! (Ha Ha said Darryl, as he crushed me with his vast armies in Australia!).

So that's just some of the background to what happened next.

To be continued....

Battle of the Planets

Rummaging through the DVD collection (online version is a tad out of date) today, looking for something to amuse the 5 year old on a freezing cold day and I pulled out one of my BOTP (Battle of the Planets) boxed sets. I started picking these up when they first came out to re-live fond memories of my childhood, back in 1978 to be exact. It's been awhile since I put one in, and it's STILL COOL! I didn't realize it at the time (I was like, 9 years old) and I only found out a few years ago when I was cruisin the net, that this guy in the states had bought up all this footage from a Japanese show 1970's anime cartoon called Gatchaman and then hacked it together , sometimes in different sequences, with English voice-overs and small bits of cheap US Animation add-ins, to create this show I ate up as a kid. That explained a few things. I used to draw like crazy back then and I could never figure out why the animation went from 1st-class stuff, to cheap crap from scene to scene (now I know!). I learned how to draw eyeballs from that show (and crotch buldges, it's a long story, but if you see the show, you know what I mean, suffice it to say that I used to daw crotch buldges upside down at first, when trying to re-produce cel frames from the TV show).

I think what really got me was the depiction of futuristic technology, and the whole Japanese Anime tradition of little frickin vehicles that all fit together in one big one, each of the parts contributing to the whole and making it better. They usually go off on this concept with big-ass robots, but in this case it was a space-ship. Another thing I didn't realize at the time were that these were essentially Ninja guys. The Ninja craze of the early 80's had not hit, but this sure set me up for it!
Speaking of the Ninja angle, they really edited the hell out if it in most cases, to remove the violence. Each of the 5 team members had a special weapon, and the leader had this sharpened sonic boomerang thing. Now I'm pretty sure when he let fly with that that thing, it was designed to hit you in the thoat and rip your larnyx out, but they never showed that(grin). And to make matters worse, the R2D2 rip-off robot they had on the show would always chime in with a re-assuring remark that the bad guys were only 'momentarily' rendered unconcious and still had their larnyxes and all that. Bummer!

Also, the cartoon girl, Princess, was hot(grin). They would purposly flash her panties on a regular basis just to play with young male viewer's minds (did I just mention cartoon panties in my Blog? I think I did.. Oh well, I was 9.)
The main characters wore these cool wrist radios too, I used to make them out of paper and cover them with scotch-tape(to form a lamination layer) and wear them to school. I didn't get beat up either(grin), everyone thought it was cool, and pretty soon I had to make them for everyone.

One memory I have is setting up to watch the show everyday after school and having a pencil and paper at the ready. The damned wrist radio on the show would change designs on the face when it did something special (this Transmutation thing). It looked like a real neat design but they'd only flash it for like 2 seconds once or twice an episode. It took me two weeks, but I copied that frickin thing down! It was like my secret. I was the only kid in Canada who knew what that damned thing looked like! (hehehehehehe). Years later when I was a teen and we had our first VCR I recall thinking how handy VCR technology would have been on that one.

This is getting long, I'll have to Blog more about this. Anyone else remember that show? Leave a comment! Or ridicule, I'll take either(grin)

Tail-end of Ketosis

I've got 3-4 days to go on my first foray into Ketosis in about 6 months. Had to get rid of that 10 pounds of Christmas fat! Man it sucks though. I was reading the paper today and a leaflet for Pizza Pizza fell out and it was like free pornography. I kind of stared at the pizza picture for a few minutes, remembering what carbohydrates tasted like... And for supper tonight , my wife orders....Pizza...

I ate some left over fish from yesterday...(sigh)

Snow construction

Weather was perfect yesterday - for building a snowfort! It was +7 so the 10 cm of snow sitting on the crust of the last freezing rain was ripe to be shovelled and placed into your freindy neighborhood rycycling bin for forming big blocks of snow. I only had an hour and a bit (we went snowboarding in the park after) but I made the 'Great Wall of Jade". Next time I'll make some kind of circular igloo thing with no top. It was frozen solid by the time night fell.

Hockey stick snow shovel

We were talking about snowblowers today and my freind Slava commented that he had to shovel all the time when he was a kid. In fact, he told us that his father didn't used to buy snow-shovels, instead he used to make them out of a piece of 1/4 plywood and a broken hockey stick for Slava to clear snow with. I'm trying to imagine how that could work. Apparently it's like having to shovel with a picket sign, or those big platters on a stick they use to put dough in pizza ovens.

I've assembled a reasonable facimile in Photoshop just to grasp this particular invention(except I used a $300 Eason Synergy stick, and it isn't even broken!). Poor Slava. It must have been hard growing up in Mother Russia (I mean montreal)..

Live365 Internet Radio

I remember a co-worker telling me about Internet radio 5-6 years ago. And I checked it out. And it was uhh, like uhh, boring radio stations, just like the ones we have in town, except on the Internet. Well, today someone told me about www.live365.com. A collection of Internet radio feeds. I went there, typed in "guitar" and was lambasted with a ton of Internet feeds that feature nothing but slashing, crashing shredding electric guitar music! AMAZING! Where has this been all my life! It's a small pain to set up at first. My collegue was able to listen through his browser (very simple) but that option seems to have disappeared for new users. I had Itunes on my PC so after I made a free account on live365.com I went into "My Account" into my listening options tab and set the feed to MP3 player (I use Itunes), then when I searched and clicked on a station, a .pls (playlist) popped up to download. I chose to open it with Itunes, and the tunes came streamin' down!

This is the greatest thing since sliced bread! Guitar Central is my fav channel so far! I'm gonna hook this up to my stereo at home! AMAZING!!!!

Even though I try to 'keep up with they times' I sometime miss the tech boat once and awhile. I'm glad I heard of this place though. Freakin Incredible! Vai, Satch, Johnson, Dream Theatre, Ynwie! Where does it stop!!

Snowfall = no TV!

It snowed today. Like.. a lot! Got up and half the TV channels weren't working so the day started with a trip up the ladder onto the snowy roof to clear the Sat dish. This is a pic from the top of my garage. My old 1993 Civic looks great covered with snow 'cause you can't see the rust! Most of my neighbors had cleared their driveways and I thought it was funny that anyone walking by would see a trail from the front door, to a ladder up the garage, footprints to the roof and a clean sat dish. They'll know my priorities for sure!!

One good thing about waiting so long to clean the driveway.. The neighbor snowblowed it for me! (I was watching TV)..

Cookie Dough - Double Fudge Blizzards

I was going through some pics in my camera and came across this shot on the left. I'm addicted to these Double Fudge Cookie Dough Blizzards at Dairy Queen and decided that I would try and replicate one of the damn things at my house and save myself from having to drive halfway across Orleans a half-hour before Lost starts at 9:00pm on a TV night. So.. I got some cookie dough mix. Made it up with no intention of making cookies.. and went to the freezer.. No ice cream..

So what ya gonna do? I froze it for a few days, stuck a spoon in it soon afterwards and ATE IT ALL! It was scrumcious! I used to do this when I was a teenager(a skinny teen-ager- I wouldn't reccomend it nowadays though...)I still haven't calculated the caloric hit on this bowl of cookie dough, but a large double fudge choc Blizzard is 1320 cals(almost half of your daily intake should you go on a diet of Blizzards) according to DQ's nutrition chart.

I'm stil gonna try that home-made Blizzard test though. I'll need to pick up a special blender though, I took notes on the hardware they use Dairy Queen... (Mmmmmmm Cookie Dough)..

Pre-Ketosis Dave

Hey, an old neighbor of mine posted a link to a picture he had of me before I embarked upon Project Ketosis years ago! I'm the one in the middle! (thanks Mr. Lifto, ahh memories..)

Let's go fishin' in Brazil!

I don't know what you gotta do to make hundred's of fish to rocket out of the water like they've been shot out of a cannon and land in your boat (apparently you need to thump your hand on the gunwhale and shine a big light on the water at night), but it's pretty amazing.. It's a Brazilian fishing show called Pesca Rodonia.

25 to life for Xbox

According to CNN (who know about these things right?), here's the latest controversial video game encouraging criminality among impressionable youth. You can play as a bad-ass gangsta or as a bad-ass police officer. I haven't played it yet (and I will) but I for one am looking forward to busting up that prison riot after watching so many episodes of OZ! (I hope I can play as adebizi! - he has a cool hat)

Here's a funny but bad review of the game from IGN. It rates a 3/10 from them.. Apparently the reviewer was disappointed that in the game world, one gang-banger can go out and shoot about 300 police officers and not one of them call for backup.

The tazer gun (see image at right) looks like fun!

Annie Brocoli

Both my kids, 5 and 1.5 are hooked on this crazy lady from Quebec. We now have 3 of her DVD's. Today I put one on while I collected the garbage and my 1.5 year old sat glued in her seat for about 20 minutes. This is unheard of. She is usually trying to blow the speakers on the surround sound, drink water out of the dishwasher or see how much Kleenex she can eat in one sitting when I'm not paying attention. As much as I hate using the visual teat (hey that's TV backwards!) it's nice to keep them entertained for 1/3rd of an hour while you do something fun like waste management.
You'd think songs about Germaine (not Michael's brother) the Vegetarian Frog would be kinda weird but in french it all seems to make perfect sense.. On the plus side, Annie is pretty cute, so.. uhh.. I don't mind watching it either.. For my kids that is...

Also, the visual effects used in her films, CGI, green screen, practicals, are very well done, all stuff I'm interested in, and are attainable on the home computer these days.
Did I mention she was cute?

Tabbin' Tochigi

Tochigi is somewhere in Japan, home to a Mazda collision test center, and the name of my favorite tune off of Don Ross's new CD, 'Music for Vacuuming'. It's in DAEF#AE tuning, kinda odd, but beautiful. I have some video of him playing it unfinished in Canngington when I was down for his guitar weekend with Tony Mcmanus so I slowed that down to check the finger/fret postions. A pitch-corrected audio slow-down of the MP3 version of the song also helped(I used transcribe for this). Here is a link to a PDF of an early draft of the tab, check it out. It's just tabulature, no accompanying notation, I'm no Frankentab and I tend to agonize over that stuff so you're best off listening to the track for the timing (it's in 3/4). I still have to put in things like strum direction, add or move some of the augentation indicators around, fix some spacing, and PART F in the tab was rushed, so I'll have to test that and make sure it's ok. It's not perfect, he does so many little things different each time, but the tab allows me to play a reasonable facsimile of what Don does, and 'cause of the video, I know the fret positions, strums and fingering are right. It's funny, what he plays on my home vid is all of the parts of Tochigi, but improvised in totally different orders.

Send suggestions/fixes/corrections/insults/laughter to carrdav@gmail.com

For all you Gobyfishers!

Cheers!

Peter Jackson's King Kong

It was great to see it for a second time (with my wife this time around) and take in stuff I missed before. For a 3 hour plus film, it's amazing how the early scenes fly by to set the picture up. I can't wait for the 4 hour special edition DVD that is invariably going to come from this. The director left a lot of loose ends in there that he did not tie up that must involve story lines that hit the cutting room floor (what's up with feral cabin boy Jimmy anyhow?). One thing that was missing from the 1930's and 1970's Kong films was when Kong tries to disrobe the damsel in distress. I heard Jackson took it out to emphasis the uhh, freindship between woman and beast.. Ok.. I was thinking it was a Hungry Gorilla and food type relationship, but he's got the Oscar, not me! Great flick!!

I saw this flick a few weeks before with Tripper and some other folks over the Xmas holidays. I remember at that showing, it was a snow day, the buses were not running, and the theatre was crammed with disgruntled youth. We were sitting in front of a pile of obnoxious kiddies that I quietly went Tony Soprano on before the movie started. It was funny because I made a point of stepping over the back of my big comfy cinema seat instead of walking 3o feet down the aisle. They can chuck popcorn and yell at the screen all they want while the trailers roll, but when the flick starts they have to shut up. I think I ruined their movie experience because they didn't even laugh at the funny bits in the movie after out little meetin'.

I used to work at a theatre. Sometimes I forget that I don't work there anymore.

Well, this is a pretty cool Firefox extension. This site stores your bookmarks online so you can get at them from all of your PC's. Home, work, notebook, etc.. Very cool! They have a Firefox extension that lets you integrate it into the browser.

The Garbage Pile

My friend Slava has been telling me stories about his bad neighbor for years now. Well, it seems those stories will be no more because the neighbor has moved (or the bank has foreclosed, no one is quite sure). In any event, the kind-hearted boyfriends of the owner's teenaged daughters were nice enough to come by after moving day and collect the garbage festering inside the domicile and skillfully pile it at the foot of the driveway for the city sanitation workers to collect. You know... that thing we do the night before garbage day? Collect the waste we've been saving up all week and bag it individually into acceptable garbage containment devices (like bags, trashcans) so the nice men that work the garbage trucks can hoist it effortlessly into the compactor?

This was their take on how that's supposed to work.

After that there were a few days of freezing rain, so I'm told it had this really nice layer of ice all around it for awhile. Someone phoned the city and they sent a bylaw officer by to see if it merited the $1500 fine you can get (apparently it did) but they're having trouble locating the previous owner. It looks like eventualy the city came by with a front-end loader and a garbage truck and they carted it all away.

Nice!!

Garmin GPSMAP 60CX

Well. The march towards the perfect Garmin GPS marches on. The 60 CX. External memory cards.. Kewl.. I feel like Mr. Smithers when Malibu Stacy comes out with a new hat.

Trailerpark Geocachers Meet Bigfoot

For a few days last July and October some freinds and I got together at a local trailer park and later in the woods to drive go-carts, get chased by Bigfoot, attacked by small rodents and space aliens, all in order to make a film.

(Right click and save target as for the movie links)

The Movie Trailer was released in November 2005. The movie itself was finished it up a few weeks ago, you can download it here (200MB vid file playable in Microsoft Media player). It's a flick about geocaching, a favorite hobby of mine, for more info go check out http://www.geocaching.com/

They say every director has about 10 bad films in them. Well here's 2 down 8 to go!

Cheers! Here's a Youtube embedded version of the Trailer