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!

The Godfather on Xbox

I'm playing "The Godfather" for Xbox these days. Very cool. You run around New York convincing business that they need protection by breaking their stuff and roughing them up til they agree to pay. You play a periheral character in the story but they include him in all the major scenes of the movie, like when the godfather get's shot, etc. so it replays quite a bit of that great storyline. They do a great job on all the Corleone family members. The streets where everything takes place are right out of real life and you can recognize several scenes from the movie.

The best part has to be the hand to hand combat. They really do a good job with the interface and you can slam people up against things, toss them around, etc.. All in a day's work for a wiseguy.

Check it out!

Robin! To the Pot Cave!

Someone sent me this last week, and I didn't have time to look at it. Got it again today, gave it a look and Woohoo! Ain't it neat! So there's this nice little house in Trousdale county Tennessee and as it turns out, it's sitting over a cave that the owners have turned into a pretty sophisticated underground marijuana growing facility (here's a PDF).

The place had everything! They had spliced into the county power lines and were keeping the 1000 or so plants at a steady 87 degrees. They had living quarters down there, offices, etc. They entered through some secret door in the garage which fronted a huge hydraulic door(it looks like a bank safe for *&$%? sake). This led down a concrete ramp into pot central.. A full-on irrigation system for care and feeding.. A real multi-million dollar operation. This beats the guy with 10 plants out in the bushes any day of the week!

The best part was the escape hatch which featured a tunnel up into the backyard that was covered by another hydraulic hatch with a huge landscaping rock on top of it.

I'd love something like that setup under my house, but I wouldn't use it to grow pot.(grin)

I'd use it to house my bat-mobile.

Ark II and the PDA Gauntlet

Last year I was looking at this crazy thing to make it easier to refer to my PDA while in the field. Usually I need it at night when I'm in the woods with a flashlight in one hand and god knows what in the other. No room for the PDA. Kindy geeky but very functional. I probably wouldn't wear it during the day(grin).

Anyhow, it occurred to me that since I was a kid, I've always thought it pretty cool to have devices attached to your forearm to make them accessible, be they Bounty Hunter armorments, Com links, whatetever.. I was suddenly reminded of this old Sid and Marty Kroft show I used to watch as a kid called Ark II (and bloody hell! it's in Wikipedia!) . And GadZoinks, some site even has a video of the cheesy 70's intro scene!

It had all the strappings of a fine TV show for youngsters, the cute girl, the cool truck thing with the little mini-buggy in the back, and it even had a frickin monkey!

I recall building a replica out of lego in 1976. The doors of the Ark opened up like a private jet's, the lower door turning into the walk way. From what I remember there was a nuclear war, everyone was all radiated and weirdo-looking, and these kids in buck rogers outfits with those cool wrist gauntlet comlinks drove around the outback with a monkey trying to save everybody. The oldest guy was the old 'Jack' from the Y&R (he's dead now).

What a great freakin show! They should release all that old 70's crap on DVD. People like me will buy it.

Added hologram pics..

To my previous post. The flash setting got the colors the best but left a lighting bolt across the middle, which is cool, so I went with that.

I may wear my ice-blue vampire contacst to work on Friday for when the cleaning staff come by.

My creepy picture from the 1800's that freaks out the cleaning staff...

I found out Friday afternoon that the cleaning staff where I work are superstitious and terrified of my office on the 7th floor all because of a weird picture I have on display there. I got it for Christmas (from my mother) and I really like it. It's a sepia picture from the late 1800's featuring a weird-looking gentleman with spectacles that I'll admit is pretty creepy. In fact, the reason I have it at work is because one of my kids is terrified of it and I had to get it out of the house. I tell people it's my great grandfather (grin).

The thing that is special about it is that it's actually a hologram. As you look at it from different angles, the guy with the specs turns into this winged skeleton full of decaying flesh (I really like it! it was the perfect Xmas gift!)

So I was at work late Friday afternoon, re-organizing some new shelving and tossing out some old junk when the cleaning lady came by to empty my trash can. I come in after hours sometimes and often have to sign in and I've spotted the cleaners list at the guard station before. I've noticed most of the cleaner's last names are the same so I figure it is a family operation of some sort. The names look Spanish or Portuguese.

Since she could not get in my office, I reached over and emptied my trash into her bin and that's when I noticed she was staring at the picture of the creepy guy on my wall. I turn around and look at it then I turn back and tell her.
"It's my great grandfather.." She was horrified. Then she said in broken english:

"We..." "Uhh.. "No One...".. "No one no like-ah you picture...!"

And this is when the guy that cleans the bathrooms also came by and nodded vigorously(there is a handicapped washroom two offices over from mine).

"Is bad picture." he says "Evil.. El Diablo!"...

And they hurried off, glancing behind a few times

I find this HILARIOUS! You know... There's been different cleaning staff up on the floor lately and I wonder of they are drawing straws or something. Usually it's the same people every day. What makes this especially funny is that they are just freaked out by the picture of the old guy. They haven't seen what he really looks like underneath because of the way I've positioned the frame. I've already notice this with my co-workers who will sometimes come in and stare at the picture. You only see it change of you come in my office and move about 5 feet to either side, so most who see it don't know it's a hologram.

To make things fun now I'm going to adjust the angle of the picture just a little bit over time. About 2 inches a day, for the next week. As you change the angle , just a little bit of the creepy thing starts to show through. Like, right now I moved him two inches and you can just see an outline of bony wings in back of the guy, he still looks pretty normal though. I'll do this a few onches a day and by Friday it will be showing the winged skeleton full of rotting flesh!. I wonder how that's gonna go over!

I'm also going to create a backstory for him to tell the cleaning staff next time they come by, something along the lines that he was my great grandfather who ran a boarding house in 1890 where people disappeared and then they found out he was eating them and serving them as meals to the other guests so the town lynched him but after he was buried people would see him around town at night so they dug up his grave and found nothing but an empty coffin... And that the picture hung in my grandmother's old cottage in a room us kids used to sleep in and in the middle of the night we would be awakened by a cold slap in the face and when we woke up we could see our breath and it was the ghost of my great grandfather!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

P.S. I'll try to post a pic of the picture this week! If you can think of a neat angle for the backstory, leave it as a comment! If you think I'm being mean or cruel.. Well.. I probably am..

Angelina or Jennifer- Revisited

OK, let's do this Jen versus Angie thing right. Vote away!

Scary German Hissy fit.. (Don't touch my monkey!)

I have no idea which online RPG it is, but this kid should stop playing it.. Hook sent this to me.

I've been PK'd by roving bands of 11 year old tots and I never chucked a fit that bad!

Scary..

That reminds me. I have to go finish watching Stalag 17.

Playing with CSS

I'm learning the mysterious inner workings of CSS style sheets! WooHoo! I want to go to a custom 3 column layout optimized for 1024*768 (screw 800x600). Maybe by the weekend. My colors are all screwed up though. You can see the latest test mess here.

Queensway fun, twice in one day.

Got home late today, the Queensway was a mess, thank god for the Ipod or the ride home would have been unbearable, and I must say John Mayer is one hell of a singer/songwriter. Picked up my kids, gawked at the new Puffer fish (I gave it a dirty look. It strongly resembled the Rockfish that stung me in Aruba) , and headed home to make supper when I got the call.

My wife had run out of gas, on the Queensway. Ack! I stopped cooking, bundled the kids up, got the gas can outta the garage (thank god it was full, I can't siphon without getting a mouthful of gas), and away we went. I pulled up behind my dead Truck 10 minutes later but my wife made me move the car in front of it. Ever since that OC Transpo bus plowed into that stalled car a few years back, everyone's kinda careful when parking on the shoulder these days.

I pushed the truck over to the side more so I didn't have to fill the tank standing in the right traffic lane, and we were all soon underway!

The good thing about this gas rescue is that we changed dinner plans to a fast food joint. Woohoo!

I ran out of gas once in 1989. Never again... Respect the "E"....

Jolie or Anison?

I caught the new Clive Owen/Jennifer Anison flick Derailed yesterday. Not a bad movie (a tad predictable). Kinda a "How not to start an affair" movie (like don't do it in the first place or if you do, don't go cheap on the hotel room in a bad part of town!). Which was the subject of our break discussion today. If you were Brad Pitt, which women would you prefer. I'm in the Anison camp. Jolie is beautiful, but a bit too freaky, plus she was married to Billy Bob Thorton and carried his blood in a vial around her neck (at this point The Ciminator said something like "Stop!! building her up like that! I can't take it!"). While Aniton is that cute girl from the Leprechaun movie and Friends..

Eddie the Eagle tried to sum it up. He said:
"Picture either of them in bed, about to have sex with you. Jennifer Anison would be like "Ouch, you're on my hair, your feet are cold, clip your toenails!"

while Angela Jolie would be like..

"Get over here and &^%$* the *%&$ out of me! NOW!!"

So.. Take your pick he says..

But what does he know?

North Hollywood Shootout - 1997

I caught a documentary this weekend about this old but highly publicized shootout featuring two AK-47-toting bank robbers in body armor versus LAPD patrolmen (and later, SWAT). I remember reading about it in the paper for days afterwards and seeing the chilling footage on TV. Pretty scary stuff. I recall one story reporting that they used the 1995 film 'Heat' with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as a training film.

It brings up that old 'monkey see monkey do' argument and juts off into letting kids play violent video games.. I got a hunch that if simply watching something makes you wanna go do something illegal, you got bigger problems and if it's not a TV filling your head with ideas, it'll be your imaginary friend or a book or something.

It made me dig Heat outta my pile of DVD's and watch it. Great flick. A young Natalie Portman is in it along with Ashley Judd and Val Kilmer, as well as one of my fav actors, hollywood madame-beating coke-snorting Tom Sizemore (he's a great actor, just not a nice person...)

Back to the shoot-out, there were actually some criticism aimed at Police for not letting medical personal get through to one of the robbers when he 'gave up' after 1) failing to start a truck he hi-jacked and 2) he ran out of ammunition.. Screw that! He gave up his right to medical attention when he started spraying the neighborhood with bullets. Sheesh..

Gawker Stalker

Wow. Stalk your favorite celebrity in Manhatten, complete with Google Maps tie-in. Gotta love technology. Just what dangerous weirdos need to find Madonna or whoever and express their undying wish to be together and to explain to her that if they can't have her then no one will (stab-stab).

Some celebrity is gonna get attacked because of this website. Someone with a Blackberry is going to submit a sighting and then the next Mark David Chapman is gonna put down his copy of The Catcher in the Rye and go and do something stupid. (and I posted the link, Doh, no crazy people read my Blog though...)

Childhood story #15 - Chicken Pox

Recalled this one today at break. I was 5 or 6 and I had a foster sister around the same age. We'll call her 'Telula'(not her real name). Her father had shot someone in front of her so she had suddenly became a ward of the Children's Aid and we were taking care of her. She came with Chicken Pox which I soon got.
So on Saturday morning my friend Gordie(his real name) calls on me. Rings the doorbell. I answer through the screen door but do not open it..
"Can you come out and play?" Gordie sez..
"Nope" I said..
"Why not?" he asks.
"Because I got the Chicken Pox.." I told him. At this time 'Telula' had wandered over to the front screen door.
"What's the chicken Pox?" Gordie asks. Then 'Telula' takes over..
She elbows me out of the way and stands in front of the screen door
"THIS IS THE CHICKEN POX!!!! SEE????" and proceeds to hike her nightie up to her neck because she has a chicken pox scab on her belly. She wasn't wearing any underwear.
Gordie is shocked and goes "AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGG!!!" and runs home.. I think nothing of it and go back to my comic books.

Minutes later we get a phone call. Gordie's mom is on the phone. She is furious and she wants answers!
"What the hell did your son tell my Gordie!" She wants to know.
"I have no idea.." My Mom says. She calls me over "What did you tell Gordie?"
"I told him I couldn't come out and play 'cause I had the Chicken Pox.."
Gordie's Mom does not buy this. But hey, it's true.. I go back to my comic books..
"What's the matter with Gordie exactly?" My Mom asks, trying to figure out what's up..
"He says he never wants to play with your son ever again!"
My Mom is kinda shocked..
"Why not?" she asks..

"Because he's convinced his birdie is going to fall off!!"

Ya see, Gordie didn't have any sisters and he figured everyone had a 'birdie' and if Telula had Chicken Pox and didn't have a birdie then it must have fallen off as a result of the Pox or something.. Kid logic.. Makes perfect sense if you think about it.... hehehehehehehehe. I actually ran into him at a party or something when he we were like, 22. I hadn't seen him for like 12 years, and I told that story.

March Madness - Trapped in a tunnel

Took my 5 year old to the Museum of Science & Technology today. It's March break, the city has been taken over by school kids. Everything is packed and not as much fun due to the sheer volume of kids stuffed into every children's entertainment venue in the city like WW2 soldiers on a 3-day pass. Whenever we go to the S&T museum my kid always wants to go to the NORTEL CONNEXIONS packet routing thing, where they have these big fiber optic tunnels hanging from the ceiling that you can run though pretending to be a network packet (except the packets are really hyperactive kids) .
They have these big plastic corkscrewing tube slides up there on the 2nd story that you can slide down (in complete darkness) to get to the 1st story displays. That's all my kid wants to do, run up the stairs, tear through the tunnels (which are actually pretty cool and would look like the set of Aliens with a little help from a smoke machine) and dive down one of the two corkscrew tube slides. When she does this I follow her because otherwise, you'd lose your kid pretty fast.
On our last trip down this rabbit hole this very hefty lady in front of us was contemplating whether or not she wanted to go down this thing. I estimate that she was about 50 pounds shy of outweighing me by twice my own weight( of 205 pounds). Well, bless her, she gave it a shot! (those tunnels are HUGE!) and my daughter went in after her, I went in after my daughter and some other girl related to the first lady and well on her way to equaling her in size and weight in a few years went after me.
We got stuck... Well, I didn't get stuck.. The lady in front of us got stuck.. It was only for a minute.. In the dark.. With piles of kids slamming into us from topside... Not pretty...

She got herself unstuck... Took another minute to crawl out of the bottom, and she vowed never to go in there again.. Well.. At least she tried.. Next time we're taking another tunnel..

Also. If you are a single man, looking to meet single women.. Grab a niece or nephew and go to the museum of S&T during March break. Almost no fathers taking time off with their kids.. I've never seen so many women, with multiple kids 2 years or less in age apart, at this place. Waiting in line with them, listening to stories about shared custody and deadbeat husbands, uhh.. There ya go..

The Star Wars Kid - revisted

Speaking of the Star Wars kid, who I'm proud to say is Canadian, and may be old news to most, I took the oppertunity to rewatch the video that made me bust a gut 2 or 3 years ago. What really gets me though, is how much I was able to relate. That could be me! I don't own a golf-ball retriever, but I do own 2 light sabers! The kid's enthusiam is infectious. I'm gonna go make a light saber video right now!!
What else is really great about the vid is that some folks have jazzed it up and put out versions with light saber visual and sound effects in there. Like it was meant to be! So the alternate versions are also worth a look (check them out here!). It's too bad the petition to get him into Episode III fell flat. Maybe he'll get a chance in the TV projects Lucas has said he's gonna do!

May the force be with you Ghyslain!

The DNA of Dog Dirt

Apparently in Vienna a local polititian has a novel idea to control the city's rampant dog shit problem. Doggie DNA! The plan is to have each dog DNA sampled when it gets licensed and when a steaming dog turd is found on your lawn, you can call the city's CSI techs to come down to your place, DNA-type the puppy poop and look up the proper owner and fine his lazy ass!!!!

I don't know how much it costs, but it's worth it, they need to get it here in Ottawa for all NCC hiking trails where people let their dogs make all over the place. If they find some turds for which there is no matching DNA record sample it will go into a system whereby, if they ever find the dog, an extra fine is levied for having an un-registered pet.

The picture of the turd on the lawn was one I made myself (it's digital, I didn't really make it myself 'that way', besides there's snow on the ground right now..) using the online Virtual dog shit creator!.

DNA typing wasn't needed for this woman in Korea whom they call gae-ttong-nyue (the dogshit girl). Aparrently her little Pug crapped on a subway train and when she didn't do anything, people started to freak and told her to clean it up, to which she apparently said. "&%$#*&^ OFF!!". So a guy started snapping pictures and the whole country is mad at her so she's as famous as the Star Wars kid over there but for dog shit instead of light sabers.

Hamachi

Hook told me his uncle was using this cool, FREE, internet app to do secure VPN peer to peer stuff. I finally got the name of it today and can't wait to try it out! Hamachi, from what I gather, you set up, make a network name and it turns your Internet connection into a private 16 person LAN for you and your buddies to connect to shares and swap files, play multiplayer games in a LAN mode (no more TOTS!!!!) etc.

I'm gonna give it a go with some buddies sometime and see how it works.

More on this later. Meanwhile, if you're reading this and we've shot each other up in a hail of digital bullets, or cut each other in half with lightsabers, DL it and get it installed!

Let's try Call of Duty 2! And maybe some Battlefield 2 while we're at it!

Woohoo!

My Brother's saltwater fish tank...

He works at one of those fish stores, where every employee is the store's best customer.. He has managed to get himself an amazing saltwater tank and collection of fish and other 'stuff'. The wierdest thing in there is something he calls "The Claw". It's some sort of crabby thing that has just said "To hell with this walking around with a shell on my back thing, I'm just gonna crawl into this little hole in the coral that I can barely fit, and just live in it and wave my one claw around outside the hole for food".

Which is what it does, whatever it is. While the other crabby things are RV'ing it, this guy's staying put. Funny thing is, he gets more food than the others. Everyone in the house goes out of their way to feed "The Claw" and it's gonna get so fat, it's gonne be stuck in there soon. The first time he showed me it was kinda like "Watch this," and he dropped some shrimp guts down into the crevasse of the coral and man, this mid-sized claw came shooting out of a hole and grabbed it and pulled it in... Freaky... It's going to mutate in there and come out as something else, you watch. Crabs don't seem to like being naked...

He's got a few starfish (that move way faster than I thought they could) that just kinda hang around. When it's feeding time, if one is sucking high up on the glass of the tank, it'll kinda start to drop itself off and head towards the bottom of the tank. Sometimes they do a freefall. I don't even know how they know it's feeding time, but when food enters the tank, the fish rip into it and whatever they miss falls to the bottom and the starfish crawl around it to eat.

He's got a few Clown fish and he has an anemone that the bigger clown fish gets fresh with all the time.. I guess he likes getting stung, or he's building up a resistance to it. He also chases the other fish away from it.

You can sit and stare at this thing like it's the TV....

Green's Creek Toboggan Hill.

Went tobogganing on Saturday at Green's Creek Hill . It was a blast even though I only noticed the big sign that said it was closed because of too much ice until it was almost time to go home. You don't go as fast as you might think. I brought my GPS along and clocked my 50 pound 5 year old and me, 205 pounds for a total of 255 doing a top speed of 31.8KM per hour. I go faster down a steep hill on a bike.

WooHoo!

Most people don't know that there are railway footings from an abandoned train bridge from the 1920's just West of the hill. Hardly anyone goes down there, except teens for the odd bush party. It looks like stonehendge down there. Here are a few pics.. The link for the train bridge links to a local webpage of train stuff in Ottawa. Facinating...

Odd Avatars

I frequent a lot of weird forums and most people in there have pretty weird avatars (avatars are little pictures that people pick to represent themselves in message forums). I'm gonna start listing some of them. Hillarious! Here are a few I like, or that I find disturbing, take your pick..
This last one (kinda rated AA) is the reason my daughter will never have a webcam!

Canadian tourists murdered in Mexico.

I went down to Mexico on the Mayan coast in 2000. Nice place. But getting Mexican Police officials to investigate an international murder is kinda like hiring Michael Jackson as your nanny. So this couple from Ontario goes down to Mexico to attend their daughter's wedding and they are found dead in their hotel room, throats slashed, the day after the rehearsal. Interesting how Mexican authorities fingered two single mothers from Thunder Bay staying at the same resort as the alleged throat slashers. Apparently a trail of blood in the hallway led police in that direction. We'll never know because hotel staff cleaned the whole mess up so as not to alarm the other tourists. In any case these suspected throat flayers were able to leave on time the next day oblivious to the whole affair because on that first day police thought it was an organized crime hit.

It's laughable at how quickly Mexican police determined from the start that the crimes were committed by someone from outside the country, most likely Canada. They don't know shit and they just started contacting the RCMP a few days ago. Yeah we're a nation of throat slashers we are.

A year ago, another Ontario man, Shawn Potts, 23 (a kid really) drowned in Cancun on spring break. Official cause of death from Mexican Authorities after they do an autopsy- Drowning.. Yet, when his body gets back here to Canada, it's missing a ton of blood. Cause of death, blood loss? From what? Hello??

Ridiculous. A colleuge at work had a family member who rented a car in Cancun years ago, only to have it stolen the same day. They called police who told them exactly how much it would cost to have the car delivered back to them(kinda like getting fined for getting your truck stolen). When they got back home a police freind told them that the Mexican cops split this fee with the car thief (most cases affiliated with the actual rental company with a spare key and everything).

I hope tourism takes a hit. Appently Canadians spent $791 million in that country in 2004. If I ever go back to Mexico(not bloody likely), I'm not setting foot off the damned resort, and if i do, it's gonna be on a tourist bus.

Pissant country.. I wonder if the daughter will ever get married? Man....

Fast food ice vs. toilet water - a 12 year old's experiment.

Quote

"My hypothesis was that the fast food restaurants’ ice would contain more bacteria that the fast food restaurants’ toilet water."

She was right.

Jasmine Roberts (great name!!), a 7th grade student at Benito Middle School in Tampa, Florida, examined the amount of bacteria in ice served at fast food restaurants as part of her science fair project. She compared the amount of bacteria in the ice with the amount of bacteria in the toilet water of the same restaurant. These are places like Micky' D's, Burger King, etc.. She found that 4 out of 5 fast food joints have higher bacteria levels in their ice dispenser's water than the levels found in their toilets. At the drive through it was 3/5 (thank god I'm a drive through guy).

WooHoo!

P.S. I have no idea what the guy in the picture is doing. A taste test?

Childhood Story #69 The Amateur Garage Axe Murderer Scare

Ahh, I stumbled upon some old emails I sent my buddy Geoff like, 10 years ago when I found him on the net. More childhood stories.. This is one of my favourites!

In the start of the summer of 85 Mike D moved a little ways away to a new house on Keystone in back of Blackburn Public. For awhile his parents had two houses, the one in front of my parent's house, and the new one on Keystone. When they first took possession, his parents let us kids sleep over there on our own recognisance in the living room with sleeping bags, a TV, and a VCR. We watched Friday the 13th part 3D that Wednesday summer night. Among the crowd was Alan(What do you mean Jason's not real?)Ewing, and Mike's lovely older sister who we were all probably in love with at one time or another. We were 15 and had beer hidden in the toilet tanks for after Mike's sister left. After the movie Al was scared shitless and opted not to stay the night and offered to walk Mike's sister home(he had his bicycle). We had told him before the movie that a lunatic had escaped from the regional Detention center on Innes road and he liked to wear hockey masks and cut up people with chainsaws (damn but it was handy having a real-live almost-jail type thing up the road!). When they had been gone for about five minutes I got a wicked idea. When Alan usually went home, he had this habit of hiking open his garage door at the top of his driveway and firing his bike inside the pitch black darkness before slamming it and going into his house. Wouldn't it be funny as hell after his having seen Friday the 13th for me to sneak into his garage and scare the living shit out of him when he yanked the door open(just as long as I got out of the way of the incoming bike)? Everyone agreed it was, It was 11:00pm and if I ran, I'd beat him to his house and have time to hide in the garage while he walked Mike's sister to her parents house.
Five minutes later I was over his backyard fence and in the pitch dark of his unlocked garage. Giggling my ass off at the heart attack he was going to have, I got down on my stomach and lifted the garage door an inch off the concrete so would be able to see his bike riding up the driveway. This was going to be good. Five minutes later I got up off the concrete. He was a bit late, probably talking it up with Mike's sister, amazed at the prospect of being alone with a girl that he wasn't related to. The eyeballs were getting a bit better in the dark after being in there for awhile and I could make out an axe leaning against the garage wall. A prop! Excellent! I'll probably get an earth-curdling scream out of him now. Ten more minutes went by. Alan wasn't being punctual tonight. Maybe a real axe murderer got him(I was just an amateur). The night vision was back and I could see that the garage was packed full of great things you could scare a guy with. I was busy trying to decide between hedge clippers and the axe when I heard a car coming up the driveway.

I hadn't noticed that Al's parents car wasn't in the driveway before. It's missed details like that that make the best of plans fail. Al's dad was coming up the driveway in his big car probably with every intention of putting it in his garage. I'll bet though, that he wasn't expecting to find an amateur axe murderer in there! What the crap was I gonna do? Then he did something weird. He left the car running and got out of it. On the other side of teh garage door I could hear him fiddling with a briefcase or something on the hood of his car, then he started to hike the garage door open. Giving Alan a heart attack would have been funny, he was young and would probably recover. Explaining to his dad why I was hiding in his garage with an axe, was a different story. That inch crack that I left at the bottom between the garage door and the concrete was letting mucho headlight in and I could see really good now. I had already ditched the axe on the floor and moonwalked to the rear of the garage when I first heard his dad get out of the still running car. In Al's garage there was a door to go in the house on the right, and a door to outside freedom on the left, and I could see a couple of garbage cans at the back. Big smelly green plastic garbage cans with lids that I could probably fit inside (if it came to that).
The reason they were smelly turned out to be because they were full, so I ducked behind them and put my blue Kayway hood up and on(this has saved many a young offender in the 80's). Might as well hide the most recognizable part of the anatomy in case I had to flee. The garage door was open all the way now and I was crouched behind these smelly chocked full 'o chicken guts garbage cans with bright headlights cutting around them thinking to myself that I was going to dodge this bullet. Nobody would have to know about this, nosiree bob.. And how lucky I was to have these great green garbage cans to hide behind in Al's garage on this fine summery Wednesday night. The word garbage and garage even sound alike. And when Al's dad opened the garage door all the way is just about the time that I realized that it was garbage day tomorrow(Thursday), and Al's dad was just about to take out the garbage. He was going to march over to where I was hiding and lift up one of these here garbage cans and take them to the curb!

Which one was it going to be? SCREW IT!! TIME TO FLEE!!!! I let out a big yelp, and crashed all the garbage cans over, and took off out the left hand side doorway to the outside before I even heard his dad say "What are doing in...! Get out of there!". And I was over the gate and in the backyard before I heard the car tires squeal and peel out of the driveway. He was going to try a pursuit! he was probably going to try to get me crossing Innes road or something. I fell over his back fence, ran across Innes, got a soaker in the ditch and crashed through somebody's cedar hedge, bumped into a garden shack, slipped through somebody's Petunia garden or whatever, narrowly missed falling in an in-ground pool, and headed into the best place to lose anybody chasing you - the Kemp road corn field.... I got back to Mike's house, bruised, battered, wet and bleeding. My temples were cut from the corn leaves nicking me as I plowed through the furrows, and the first thing I saw when I came in the back door was Alan hoisting a beer to his lips! He had just walked Mike's sister home because she was beautiful, and had every intention of coming back afterwards. When he arrived ten minutes after I left they said, "Did Dave get you?" and when he didn't know what they were talking about, they filled him in. That was funnier than the first plan.

I saw his father the next day and he still to this day doesn't know it was me. He told all the neighbours about the prowler that night and advised them to lock their doors at night...

I got Al back though... The next day....

--------Epilogue--------------
Al's dad died a number of years ago. Still didn't know it was me.

Earthquake!

Where were you when the little 4.5 earthquake hit Ottawa Friday? I was in the auditorium of my old GHS High School watching a moderatly crummy talent show my brother was in (he was great!). The floor started to shake a bit and I just figured it was the teenagers stampeding up and down the aisles at intermission. But nope, found out soon after it was a real earthquake and everything.

My favorite earthquake was sometime in the late 80's. I was watching something on TV and all of a sudden the couch started going up and down, I turned to see my brother, who had just walked in, standing there looking dazed and I thought he was lifting the couch up and down so I started to yell at him. Turns out the whole house was shaking so we ran outside and my Dad'S truck is sitting there in the driveway, bouncing on it's shocks. The lady from France next door came out of her house screaming. She was waiting for cracks to open up in the ground and start swallowing us up, but that didn't happen(she went back to France the next year). Funiest part was that my Dad was in the tub and he hightailed it out when teh water started to slosh over the sides.

hehehehehe.

I like earthquakes. Little ones at least.. My Palestinian freind Tarek from college told me ages ago (haven't seen him in like 15 years) that earthquakes occur everytime men get together and have sex with each other (Which might explain why San Fransico is on a fault-line). Watch Brokeback mountain win the Oscar this year!

Bad Husband Material - Contract of wifely expectations

This guy from Iowa named Travis Frey came up with this 4 page contract of 'wifely expectations' for his spouse to sign. This was before he was charged with her kidnapping and some unrelated child pornography charges. My question is... Did he just go weird one day or was he always like this? How did he manage to drag her to the alter? Maybe this has something to do with those kidnapping charges after all....

These are pretty bad..

Difference between Canadian Women and Men's Olympic hockey.

Canada's 2006 Olympic medal hopes...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaa!

Misunderstanding of the day. Evil 6-armed cyborg monkeys

JD walked into my office today and I thought I heard him ask me "Where do you think mass production will be in 10 years?"

So I thought about it for 1 second and figured that we'd probably do away with regular robots and machines and stuff and just DNA special order tons of 6 armed little cyborgian monkey-like creatures (like maybe something in a lemur) who will sit on assembly lines and put stuff together. We can feed them banana sludge through little IV's so they don't have to get up to get something to eat and they can just let nature take it's course through a huge grate on the assembly line floor. Of course in 20 more years, they'll get tired of that, rebel, take over the world and it will be like The planet of the apes, except with little IV dripping evil cyborg monkeys who will round us up and make us mass produce IV tubes and banana sludge for them.

You can bet Microsoft will have something to do with it

Then JD said.. "What? Robot Monkeys? I said petroleum production. How much do you think gas will be in 10 years?"..

Oh...

The New Lara Croft

Not that there was anything wrong with the 'old' Lara Croft, but now there's a new one. 20 year old Karima Adebibe from London.. As my good freind Tripper said
"There ain't nuthin wrong with this one either! The world should be full of Lara Crofts!"

Uhh..

What he said....

Feb 14th show.

Recovered from the crazy-glued fingers and did my two sets today. It went well, except that I led off with Tochigi and played it a zillion times faster than it should be played (or than I am able to play it). Slowed down after a few bars and got it right. Years of performing and I still get the jitters starting off.

I don't know why I don't take my own advice and just start off with a tune I can play in my sleep that has a groove that I can get into off the top, like Drac and freinds part II or something. . But naw.. I have to play the hardest one off the top.

I'll learn..


Some of the other acts were great! Still others were.. interesting.... I guess I kinda get how Kareoke people or guys who play to sequenced keyboards and drums and then stand there after pressing the button doing nothing except singing go over well with the audience. I know they had to program that stuff, but I still find it kind of lame.. But people like it so I guess that's fine.. The new trend is to put your backing tracks on a CD and get the sound guy to play it. At the start of each song the performer says "Track 3 please"... AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Way to press that button!!!!

hehehehehehehehehe...

P.S. My other pet peeve is people who use music sheets live when it's an origional song they've composed themselves.. I got no probs using a chart if I'm accompanying someone last minute, or if a cover band has to learn 10 songs in one night to play the next day. I've done it and I'll do it it again, but your own song? C'mon!

If it's not worth remembering, it's probably not worth playing

Fun with Crazy Glue(not).

I have a show tomorrow at work. It's annual Employee appreciation day and they do all sorts of crazy things in support of it. Everything from belly dancing to bands and stuff (hey, any excuse to play!). I've also been suckered into filming it so tonight I was rehearsing my parts, I have 9 songs to run though and I took a break to fix my busted camcorder tripod. It sort of bit the dust in the Bigfoot movie from this fall.
So I get out the crazy glue to take care of a loose cuff thread and the damned stuff won't come out! There's some in there, I can hear it when I give the tube a shake, it's just that the end is all dried shut, so I take a pin to it and clear the end out. I get the thread cuff ready, position the crazy-glue nozzel, tip it over!....
Nothin! I give it a squeeze.
That was a mistake.
Next time I wear gloves. When will I learn! Crazy glue is EVIL!

Only glued two fingers together this time. I got them apart with olive oil, but now they have a crackly white finish all over them.

Dreaming #78 Sting tries to kill me - Again...

Had a dream last night. Dreamt I was being driven along the east coast of Cape Breton by Sting in an SUV. He had his daughter in the truck and I was in the passenger seat. He kept driving on the wrong side of the road and I kept yelling at him
"We're not in England!!! We're not in England!" and he'd go.. "Sorry mate!" and pull to the right hand side. The whole time this is going on his daughter was alseep in the back seat and suddenly he says "Watch this!" (which is what people in the southern United States usually say just before they die.). He pulls a left off the road onto a big grassy field (easy to do since he was on the wrong side again) and guns the engine and steers the SUV towards a beautiful ocean horizon which is actually this 100 foot high cliff with huge crashing waves at the bottom. Apparently I am ok with this because I say nothing. As we near the edge he whips the wheel around and slams on the brakes sending the SUV into a sidelong skid and I suddenly get what he is trying to do.
He wants to slide skid the drivers side of the SUV up to the very edge of the cliff drop-off and then wake his daughter up and tell her to look out the window (Sting can be an asshole sometimes!). It's not very nice, but it's kind of funny so I'm still ok with it... But!! He screws up his timing and we go sliding right off the edge of the cliff and slowly start to plummet to the water below. We fall for what seems like 5 minutes and I'm thinking to myself, when we hit the water, off comes the seat belt, roll down the window and get out. I tell everyone this on the way down.. A few times actually because we had 5 minutes. Sting is laughing maniacly and saying "Chitty Chitty BANG BANG!" over and over again and his daughter is still asleep. As we fall her hands are drifting upwards in this zero G gravity kinda thing(like when shuttle astronauts sleep).

We hit the water. There are no rocks at the bottom, just cold water and it starts to seep in. It takes me a few tries to take my seatbelt off, and I then wake up..

Never go for a ride in the countryside with Sting in an SUV...