History of the third Reich - (Hitler was quite the bastard)

I got hold of a podcast on Hitler and the history of the third Reich from Slava the other day. Man was it interesting! I thought I knew a bit of the story but man Hitler was a CRAZY bastard. Him and all his stupid frickin National socialist Nazi buddies. The next time I run into one of those moronic Aryan lovin skinheads (I ran into a Heritage Front demonstration downtown years ago when I was in the market - now there's a bunch of raging idiot hate mongers), I'll have some new stuff to talk to them about little Adolf Schicklgruber and explain to them in great detail why they are &*%$#@ morons for holding that guy up as some sort of great leader.

We're all heard of the final solution and the death camps. What I never knew about was the Nazi Racial hygiene programs. In 1939 the Nazi's attempted to "Cleanse the body of the German people". They set up 21 children's departments, to evalueate children with birth defects, any abnormality, mental retardation, etc. To identify these kids they used social agencies (previously set up to help kids like this), hospitals, the church etc. To the Nazi's these kids were "Racially Valueless" and qualified for their "euthanasia" program and were put to death by injection, starvation, or poison gas. They started this up when they came to power and in control of the state mental hospitals and sent form letters to the families of the murdered children. At one point in 1941 some families put two and two together when neighbors received the same letter and started to ask questions. The program was shutdown for a time and then started right back up when the protest blew over. Over 5000 kids were murdered. In the 40's the program was expanded to adults of which 80,000 were killed in the same manner. If you were lucky enough not to be murdered, you got a forced sterilization (about 400,00 of those up to 1945).

The Nazi's are not nice people folks...

I always wondered how much about the Final solution the world knew about. How much did the German population know? None of the camps were in Germany because the Nazi's knew there would be public opposition to them at home (as much as could be mustered of course). I also heard about the Madagascar plan for the first time. After they invaded France, one of the co-conspirators there offered up the Island of Madagascar as a possible haven for European Jews. There was some plan drafted up, which called for the use of the defeated British navy ships to help with the plan, but the English didn't cooperate by not losing. Jewish relocation was already going on in Germany and I'm pretty sure everyone knew that it wasn't going to be taking anyone off on holiday...

I always thought it quite ridiculous that a short little black-haired guy from Austria conjured up images of big, blonde, blue-eyed folks as the perfect (Aryan) German race. Didn't he ever look in the mirror? Apparently he had a division of people charged with rounding up kids who looked like this in Germany and surrounding annexed countries for a massive repopulation experiment.

No more Boy scouts. Now you gotta go to the Hitler Youth. All aspects of social life were controlled. you had a League of German girls, national Socialist groups for attorney's, physicians, woman's league, etc.. Even the Barbers had a National Socialist club.

Hitler never signed any orders during his reign of terror (Hitler dairies? full of crap). Some of those clueless aforementioned people who still think fondly of the guy always point to this as evidence that he had little to do with the holocaust and the other atrocities. I say he was much too chickenS&$t to sign anything lest it go wrong and he become associated with it.

All three of his girlfreinds attempted suicide. What does that tell you about Adolf? One or two succeeded.

Did you know the best time to arrest some0ne in Nazi Germany is at two in the morning? Early on when the Nazis forbade any public criticisms of the party, the Gestapo hauled a lot of people away in the middle of the night. You'd tell a Hitler joke in a bar, some people would laugh. That night at 2:00am, you'd get a knock on your door and then it was bye bye time. Got a hate on for your neighbor? Does his cat piss on your lawn? Call the Gestapo, tell them the cat's owner is a communist. Problem solved. Sometimes, they did an extra nice thing whereby not only would they arrest you, but your wife, your parents, your kids, your friends, your relatives... Lots of us in life are brave enough to stand up for ourselves, and others, but not to the point where it lands your whole frickin family in the gulag. My god what an inhumane way to live. No wonder your typical German citizen looked the other way after awhile. The crazy train had already left the station.... Once the Nazi's got in, they made sure they stayed in, and started rolling out little 'ammendments' in such a trickle that it was like watching corn grow. You don't notice the place has gone to hell until it's too late.

I read in the paper once, a small tidbit by a Canadian soldier who stated rather heatedly that there was a difference between the German Army and the Nazi's. The two were just not the same. The Nazi's, the SS, the Gestapo, these were the crazies in charge. The German Army just followed orders and 'made war' (although I'm sure the Russians would disagree; and probably a whole lot of other people), but from what I read, there was a difference. Perhaps it's a lesser of the two evils thing. If it was to be a foregone conclusion, you definitely wanted to get captured by the German Army, than by the 'other' guys.

The one great quote I always remember from that time period is from a German, Martin Niemöller

Here is one of the adapted versions, but you get the meaning:

First they came for the Communists, and I didnÂ?t speak up,

because I wasnÂ?t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didnÂ?t speak up,

because I wasnÂ?t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didnÂ?t speak up,

because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left

to speak up for me.

Hopefully the world can learn from history like this and never repeat it.

P.S.

When I was finishing up the last lecture, I was in the process of picking up my kid from school. I always turn the podcast off and flip over to music my kids like.. Today she was misbehaving and when we got in the car she demanded some song or other and I told her:

"Nope.. I'm not letting you listen to your music. We're listening to Hitler!"

The parent getting out of the car beside me was not impressed.

Beware the Pit!

We headed out to the Quebec side to do Canada's first multi geocache, Beware the Pit. It was a blast! I've never seen so much junk out in the woods! We found some old abandoned snowmobiles, a huge Caterpillar construction tractor, huge flatbed trucks out in the middle of fields, full of frickin junk like you wouldn't believe!

It was a fine day for caching. Once we crossed the border on the ride up I discovered that in Quebec, the horn in pretty much every car in back of you is somehow wirelessly connected to the traffic lights. As soon as the friggin light turns green, the horn in the car behind you goes off to let you know the light has changed. It's very helpful because the speed of light is so fast, it takes a few microseconds to notice that the light is no longer red.. A bit longer than the speed of sound I guess.

We hiked in and saw evidence of some recent bush parties, and this is where we stumbled upon the snowmobile, Tripper hopped on it and tried to drive it outta there, but it just wouldn't turn over for him. In fact, his hopping up and down on it like a demented evil bunny caused something dead-smelling to waft up at us from under the engine. It was RANK! (see the video here)

I don't know what posses someone to leave perfectly good machinery out in the woods like that. At one point, we stumbled upon an entire car engine block, just sitting there in the path, like it fell out of the sky. It was fun to play on the CAT. We couldn't get it started and drive it to the cache, which was to be expected, it looked like it had been sitting there for a few years. The whole way up we were dodging huge horse turds. This area is obviously a huge riding trail.

When we found the cache, we sat down for a bite to eat, and Tripper pulled out his cigar soon after for a celebratory cache-find smoke. Trouble was, his lighter fizzed out on him, he had no way to light it. He asked me if I had a lighter and I got and idea and rummaged through my bag. He didn't think it was funny when I threw him my flint and steel fire starter. In fact, he called me a bad name of some sort! I went about starting a fire the semi-old fashioned way and after a few minutes, I walked over with a burning piece of paper but the *&%$%&%# had gotten his lighter to fire and was already puffing away! It didn't matter. Fire is like CPR. Once you start to do it, you can't stop.

I recorded some stuff with my M-audio Micro recorder. I was going on about Bigfoot and GrizzlyG started to dispute the entire chain of viable Bigfoot evidence, so I thought, "This will be good" and clicked on my recorder with plans to decimate his argument and the %$#@&* recanted everything while the tape rolled and made like he believed in Bigfoot all along! Then he went on to orate how it was weird that an hour before I was having a spirited argument with someone who wasn't there (my imaginary friend) and that maybe I should go get that checked out...

On the way out we stopped for pictures on a little cliff. I caught sight of the horses that were leaving the shit piles all over the place, a line of several on a ride up through the hills. I was on top of a huge rock dressed as Batman so I waved to them! WooHoo!

I think they somehow knew we were from Ontario....

A fine day for geocaching!

Flickr badges

I added a Flickr badge on the right hand side of my blog after I saw one on Tripper's site. It's a flash thingie that randomly selcts pics from your Flickr collection and shuffles them around in a clickable little graphic.

Very cool!

Here's how to add one to your site

Skeleton in a garbage truck

I was driving home the other day, shortly after Halloween and spotted this particular garbage truck on the queensway. We were doing about 110km an hour and I had to snap a picture.

hilarious. I'm positive I also see a human head in the jaws of the trash compactor on the right hand side.

And, speaking of Halloween, check out one of our scary pumpkins!

The Dinosaur museum

They're back! After like, a year, the museum of Nature in downtown Ottawa is open again. Only half the exhibit space is available and the upgrades probably won't be completely finished until next year, but the dinosaurs are there and they are WAY COOL! Check out the huge prehistoric turtle!

If you go on Saturday, before noon, admission is free!

Spezza the dead goldfish

A couple of weeks ago, my daughter told me that the three goldfish in her fish bowl "were having a meeting!". Sure enough, two of them were clustered in the bottom entrance to the mermaid cave, deep in fish conversation. Hmm. I've only seen two fish for a few days now. Barring any successful escape attempts, maybe something was rotten in goldfish-land.
I was right. Sure enough, the meeting was about Spezza and probably went something along the lines of how he was stinking up the fishbowl with his dead carcass. He had unceremoniously risen to the interior of the mermaid cave to die in peace and out of sight of my kids. What were we to do?

I waited till she was asleep, donned my head lamp, and armed with a dead-fish scooper, under the cover of darkness recovered the body and flushed him down the toilet.

Two days later, the other two were dead (damn that Spezza). Off to Walmart for more fish soon.

Groundhog Day Hockey with the Ottawa Senators

MY GAWD BUT THEY SUCK!!!!

Rome is burning people. A five game losing streak! Last time they did that was in 1995 or something. 10 YEARS ago for christ's sake!

Ever see that movie groundhog day with Bill Murray? Where he wakes up and the day is slightly different but it ends up the same way at the end of it all. No matter what he does to change it, it just can't be helped, he can't get Andie Mcdowell in the sack...

Well, the last few games I've seen, the Sens pop out to these great big leads, 3-0, the other team pulls the starting goalie (it happened again tonight!) , chucks in the back up and then theSens can't score and they start letting goals in like oxyegen... Gerber.. We're stuck with him. Who will pay $3.5 mil to take him off our hands? I dunno, but the next time the Sens go get the goalie of the future, please make damn sure he has more than ONE good season!!!! I mean, Gerber.. Go practise with some friggin beach balls!

$@#!!!&!*!**@* they better trade someone's ass! Or Fire some upper and lower management! frig, the trainer even!

My freind Charkles had a great idea. Send Redden to Tampa for Vincent Lecavielier. Shake up the friggin room. Fire the coach and GM. DO SOMETHING!!!!!!!!!

Ugg.

I'm a Habs fan, but with a local team like the Sens you can't help but notice and hope they do well. My god. They are embrassing!

Frickin overpaid millionaires, most of them...

Dead Squirrels & Lesbians

A few years back I was planting a geocache on my lunch hour and I came across a dead squirrel in the middle of a path I was taking to get there. It appeared to be pretty fresh(it must have gotten run over by someone on a bicycle or something). I did what any aspiring photographer would do. I took a picture of the dead thing. I've tried taking pictures of animals before ,and it can be pretty challenging. Taking pictures of dead things is a breeze though, they don't move or try to run away! So, satisfied with the picture, I go on my way and plant my geocache on nearby Victoria Island(note the cool totem pole). On the way back, I came across the dead squirrel again, but some birds or something had eaten it's eyeballs(first come first serve).

This made for a much more interesting picture! So out came the camera again. But this time, as I was framing the shot, I noticed two women sitting on a parkbench in the far background. They were kissing. I had a photographer's moment! "Dead squirrel in foreground with Lesbians kissing". Woohoo!

Unfortunately, they didn't see it that way. As I lined up the shot to include the girls with the squirrel they stopped kissing and looked at me. The dirty look that followed made me re-compose my shot and forget about my previous cool idea.... As they got up to leave I thought about shouting, "You can keep kissing, I'm just taking a picture of the dead squirrel"!

But thought better of it... Frig, I just left, didn't even take a pic of Mr "I'm dead and now I just lost my frickin' eyeballs!".

Now that I own a camera that fires at 2.5 frames a second, hopefully I can get shots like that in the future!

By the way, the geocache turned out to be a real hit with tourists. It was in my "try to look like a rusted hunk of metal" camo phase. It's stuffed in an old dock along with other bits of weird junk. It doesn't look like a geocache at all! It's made with Sintra, heated and bent to imitate metal fatigue, and painted with Humbrol paint.

Tripper's Worm Snuff film. "Snake's gotta eat!"

I just caught Tripper's new snuff film. Poor worm, he never saw it coming... (I don't think they have eyeballs). I love the Super Mario music in the background!

A visit to Proulx Farm

We visited Proulx farm on the weekend . They have scary wagon rides (well, not that scary. The outfit in Munster Hamlet puts on a freakier show, with guys running after you with chainsaws and stuff) for the kiddies and corn mazes and slides and stuff. It was s nice little afternoon, the weather was great!

When we were in the corn maze I caught sight of some big bird in the sky, no idea what kind it was, so I snapped a picture.. Running around in the corn brought back memories of when I was a kid, running away from someone I had kind of scared the crap out of, and right into a corn field. Those were the good old days!

One neat thing they have is these faces on the trees, with some kind of rubbery paste. I'll have to do up a geocache like that some time.

GAG9 Gnome's Crossing

I only managed to do one geocache on Saturday, but it was a great little hike. You had to cross this creek/small river. Good thing I brought the Fire fighter booties. Tripper and I found some abandoned mattresses on the way in. I wonder what they've been used for recently(they were comfortable though). I've been in this area before but not as far back as the geocache led us.
There were a ton of lightning struck trees, hit so bad they were hollowed out in some cases. Very cool! I'll have to come back here again..

GAG9 - Night-caching in the sewers with Tripper & GrizzlyG(sorta)

So this Friday and Saturday were GAG9 (stands for Go and Get Em 9, a big geocaching event in Ottawa). I usually do a lot of the caches the night of the Friday with Tripper and Grizz. Grizz was indisposed that night, not having any modern forms of communication, and we were unable to link up with him, but we had fun none the less. One of the funnest ones for me was one out in the west end called Bridlewood Brain Teaser 2 . We heard from another group of cachers that the cache was simply not findable and that piqued our interest. "We can find the dang thing!" We thought. So we got there at about 9:30 or so, it's dark as all heck and we search for 15 minutes.. Nada... Nothing.. Uhh Uhh... I break out the description in my PDA. It says something about going 15 paces North and finding a surprise.. Well, 15 paces North was a big bunch of nothing, but 15 paces WEST was a big storm sewer. An UNLOCKED storm sewer (well, it had some fancy closing mechanism, but if you fiddled around with it, that sucker opened right up!!). I opened the grate up, looked at my GPS and by gum, that GPS arrow was pointing straight down that hole! So we all know what that means. Down the hole we go!!!

Luckily it was not a sewage sewer. It was brand-new storm sewer and very clean and only smelled a little bit. I was able to crawl down the hole into this inner chamber and there was a ladder there. This was 2 meters from the cache people!! I climbed up the ladder expecting to find the cache and!!!!!!

Nothing.... No geocache.. Shucks.. It's been my dream to put a geocache in a sewer drain for years, here I thought I was about to find one and durn it.. NOTHING!!!! But wait.. Perhaps the fun was not over yet.

As I clung to the ladder peering out the sewer grate I heard people coming by.. They were talking about meters.. These had to be geocachers. Time to have some fun.. I yelled from the sewer.
"Hey!!!! Can anyone hear me!!!!!" They ran over. After all, this man-hole is like, 2 meters from the posted cache co-ordinates.

"Hey! There's somebody in the sewer!" they said (or something deductive like that).

"Hey!" I yelled "Are you geocachers? Can you guys get that open from the other side! I'm stuck in here! I've been traveling the sewers for hours trying to get out!!" And they actually tried for a second, until one said "Hey, who is that!".

Turns out I knew them. We run into this group on the road every year! After they found out it was me, they stopped trying to pry it open(like it made perfect sense to them that I'd be in the sewer).. So I came back up and looked some more with this group with no luck again, then I did what I do when I can't find a geo-cache in this kind of situation. I went tactile and looked with my hands. I felt along the base of the boulder it might have been under and my fingers brushed plastic. The cache was in hand.. I was the first to find it, a FTF they say (second of the night. It's easier when there's like 47 new geocaches planted in the city!). This is very important to some crazed geocachers, who, if you'll excuse the analogy, liken it to defrocking a virgin. For the record, I do not(grin).

As I tell people when I talk to them about geocaching... It leads to you spots you've never been before. I never would have gotten to see the inside of that cool sewer if it hadn't been for that geocache!

GAG9 - More Friday night follies

We saw tons of deer on this night. From far away they look like hyenas eating something dead on the ground when they look at you with their reflective night eyes(I wish I had reflective night eyes). I got this new headlamp spotlight for the event, a new LED one with a powerful spot that can go about 72 meters. It's bright as hell and I was mistakenly blinding people all night with it until I realized that when I look at them to talk to them, I'm actually burning out their retinas. My bad!

Near the end of the evening, when we were coming back from a relatively wet slog in the brush, we spied some backyard lights and we made a beeline to them for a dry walk back to the path to the road where I had parked the car. Now we do this all the time, but I know I prefer to hide in the tree line when I walk back and not freak out the people in their houses watching CSI in Hi-def on their big screen TV's. For some reason Tripper decides to walk right along their backyard fences in full view. Well, not full view, it's dark out, and I'm pretty confident that when the home-owner who spies him walking on the edge of his backyard property carrying a flashlight a big back-pack finishes phoning the police, we have a good chance of getting the hell out of there before the cruiser arrives.

Still, I hiss at him from the bushes "Tripper, don't walk so close to the damn houses!" and he goes "It's ok, they can't see me..."
Just then there's this little click. Not the click of a rifle being loaded or anything, but the click of a motion detector light being tripped and the guy's whole backyard lighting us up like the Sun on steroids.
I plunge deeper in the bushes but this does not phase Tripper. He doesn't speed up but instead confirms his innocence by walking slower.

All I have to say is.. I got the keys!

HAH!

Planting The Body (geocache)

On Wednesday night I dropped my geocache for the upcoming Ottawa geocaching event GAG9. I had a feeling it was going to be a bit tricky to plant it since it was basically a huge duct tape dummy based on my own body proportions, and it was made up to look like a dead body stashed in the woods... So I did what the real wackos and murderers probably do. Waited until midnight to drag this thing in the forest and dispose of it so to speak.

I had the spot all picked out, some little used woods off of the Innes road Eastbound Blackburn bypass.. I loaded the thing in my truck at 11:55pm Wednesday night and off I went! Of course it didn't start off smoothly. I have a new neighbor moving in right across the street and he pulled in late with some U-Haul trailer as I was stuffing the body in my front seat (I waved hello and went right on stuffin' - he pretended not to see me, we'll just keep it that way).

Then on the drive over I did a U-turn to get on the other side of the one-way street and ended up overshooting my entry point! Crap! I continued driving and thought I'd just pull another U-turn up ahead and do it all over again when suddenly the van in front of me jammed on it's brakes - and hit a deer. I stopped. The dead deer really did a job on the van and it's occupants were ok and already dragging bambi to the side of the road, so I went on my way. During that little incident I was reminded that my stupid dome light stays on inside the truck for 30 seconds after I open the door to get out, showing the body in full view to anyone driving by (grrrr)..

So I continued on my merry way, did my U-turn, then did another and was soon parked by the road right at the spot I had marked with my GPS earlier in the week. All I had to do now was wait for a break in traffic so I could open my passenger door, drag the body out and stuff it in the woods.. Traffic was particularly busy at midnight... It seemed like 10 minutes before I saw a break in both directions, but there it was and boom, that fake body was out of the truck and in the treeline in 2 seconds flat! I locked my truck with the remote and started tromping off into the woods with the body on my shoulder and a flashlight in my free hand when flashing red lights caught my eye

A police car with it's cherries on was parked in back of my truck. Now I figured there was NO WAY he could have seen me run into the woods with my body.. He had to be just checking out a truck stopped for no reason by the side of the road.. I was about 20 feet into the treeline and I threw the body to the ground (it was wearing a dark blue coverall, so it was ok, but I was pretty sure my MEC jacket had all kinds of reflective shit on it, so I turned mty light off, got down behind a tree and peeked around. The cop was out of his car, walking over to my truck and playing his flashlight around in the woods where I had just gone in. CRAP! I was thinking that if he came in the woods, I'd give a quick "Hi!" and come out from where I was holding the geocache container and try and leave the fake dead body out of it completely. Just explain to him that I was all alone, planting a plain old geocache, that's all, not trying to hide a body or anything, nope..

Well, he didn't come in the woods, he got right back in his police car and drove off. And then it occurred to me that he may have been responding to the van that hit the deer, thought my truck was the one involved, and maybe the deer had come back to life and ran into the woods to die (they do that sometimes I hear). Man.. I was lucky.. Very lucky.. If he would have come up on my sitting there with that thing in the passenger seat....

So I tramped another 150m into the woods, changed the spot I was gonna put him in after finding a cooler spot, and took a pile of pictures.. I even found a dear skull on the ground nearby and placed it in his lap.. He looked great out there! Hopefully it will creep people out a bit when they find it this Friday... Man, if I'd have gotten my act together I could have hired some teenager to just sit in the coveralls and jump when people came near (maybe next year). How'd you like to take a hike in the woods at night and come across this thing?

Desperate Housewives - The Game

I'm a fan of the show. Heck, someone went and made a PC game of it.. It's kinda like the Sims (and we all know how I like to play that particular game!). It got a bad rating on the one site I found that reviewed it, but the story was written by one of the scriptwriters and it has the voice-over suicide lady that does all the V.O.'s for the show.
First thing that happened after I installed and made my character was Edie barged in to show me my new house and made fun of my 23 inch television, then Bree came over and invited me for coffee. I didn't even have time to see if there was anyone tied up in my basement (actually I don't seem to have a basement - they missed the boat there - where will I put my sex-dungeon!) or buried under my in-ground pool!

I did find some pills in my mailbox (I pocketed them) and I met the women of Wysteria lane and found out at the gossip session that I'm a 40 something amnesiac that doesn't remember her past (did I mention I'm a woman?) and I rely on what my husband told me happened after we were 'married'.

It's all pretty hazy...

These twin brother neighbors came over and I let one of them install my computer while the other one told me what a wierd street it was. I can actually surf the web on my pretend Desperate Housewives computer (go figure). After that I was able to have sex with the mail man (some pretty funny dialog led up to that one). I hope the strange old lady across the street didn't see me do that with her binoculars...

Now it's off to the mall to see my shrink! Cute little game..

Zart goes Hi-DEAF!!!!!!!

So there I was, 18 feet up the tree in my front yard, pulling up a saw I'd attached to a rope around my torso so I wouldn't have to climb the tree with it in my teeth - and that's when I got busted... My daughter was in her room (which I was kind of looking down on, being up in the tree and all) and she exclaimed loudly

"Daddy! Why are you cutting down the tree!?!?"

My wife hears this..... She comes into my daughter's room holding the telephone(which is for me by the way).

"No way!" She tells me through the open window. Crap!

"Your friend Jim is on the phone, he is going to that big park off Trim road.. And you are NOT about to cut down half the tree so you can watch TV!"..

I got an HD satellite receiver on the weekend, finally ready to join the HD revolution. I first put a sat dish up about 4 years ago, but it was pretty easy.. A single LNB, I even left it to the default Azimuth, 90, hit the sat bird in the sky no probs, Bob's yer uncle.. But TODAY! No luck.. A High Def install needs a second LNB, you need to hit sats 89 and 91, and you need to tilt the dish to 100, Heading 208, elevation 38.4. You run a whole mess of wires into a switchbox, an SW-44 in this case, you power channel 1 on it and that's all there is too it..

Needless to say it was dead in the water.. All I had was 55% on transponder 11. Not enough for a lock. And on a clear day at that. Add a little bit of snow or rain and you can kiss the reception goodbye! So I took a good look at the tree, and how much it had grown in the last 4 years, and figured I had a line of sight problem after I tilted it ever so slightly.. That had to be it. Hence the trip up the tree for a surgical sawing of a major branch which would give me a clear path to my TV programs. As we discussed the matter, I started to get tired of holding onto the tree with one arm and one leg and suggested to my wife that we discuss it further with me out of the tree. Poor Jim on the phone had no idea what he had just stepped into(grin). I took a break and went to the park.
After I got back I decided that my wife was right, I let the tree off the hook and played with the dish pointing some more, with no luck. It was then, after about 4 hours that I gave in, and called frickin BELL. I'm too stupid to install this, please send someone and charge me money!!! They were happy to oblige. As it turns out, my stupid dish was pointed right all along. I had a bad cable coming down from the roof into the switch, which threw that all off (because it is powered) and after the Bell guy changed the ends, it all started to work..

Crap.... I bought a new coax stripper from Home Depot that day.. I won't be making any more cables with my knife anymore. $100 later. Easiest call the guy had that month I'm sure..

BUT HI DEF TV IS COOL!!!!!! You can see wrinkes and zits and stuff on the actor's and actresses faces. The Desperate housewives all look like they are in their mid-40's(like they are in real life).. Hockey is a blast as well..

Me Likey Hi Def!

Car trouble in the Twilight Zone

This thanksgiving dinner I overheard my brother and my cousin talking about swapping cars. When this happens it's because something is broken or about to break on my brother's car and he gets my cousin in Winchester Springs to fix it because he's a car whiz. I asked him what was wrong with his car.. he said..

"I had a Gremlin on the side of it the other day, he was ripping wires out and stuff. Damn Gremlins!"

Gremlins.. (grin) I have to use that sometime.. That was one of my fav Twilight Zone episodes. If you've ever seen the original one with Capt. Kirk. It's a classic. I hated the Gremlin though. It looked like a frickin little green leprechaun bigfoot. The one in the 1980's John Lithgow movie remake is better. And the Simpsons.. When it tried to scratch Ned's eyes out and he thought it was cute.. Classic!

Farador!!!! D&D - 44 points for stabbing a mostly dead guy.

This is a hillarious short about some french D&D players. I found it while looking for something to do for my french class. I'm going to air an "edited" version of it (minus the Deliverance scene - Ohh, I betcha you're all gonna watch it now eh?) next project I have to do. Pointing out the new french words I learned from it.. etc.. hehehehe

The guy has a blog . I hope he makes more shorts like this one!

Human Incoming!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alain Caron - NOT!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A texting wrong number.

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

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

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

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

Inquiring minds want to know!

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

Lotto fantasies and how to not start blogging.

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

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

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

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

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

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

The next book I gotta read

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

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

Death to Bees!

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

They must have been like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death to bees!

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

Why do people take naked photos of themselves?

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

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

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

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

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

Cucumbers are pickles?

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

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

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

Monster House

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Irwin dies

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