It's a model I found online at The UFO Store. It has flashing lights run by a watch battery and it's held together by a magnet that allows you access to the light switch. I painted it up in a Humbrol metallic gun-metal grey colour and polished it.
It should look real good, much better than the two metal bowls duct taped together. See pic on left. (although I still always liked how that turned out. A two minute solution and very campy!).
I didn't buy that did I?
This is my youngest. We were sitting down to supper and I noticed that after a few bites, she seemed to be chewing an awful lot.. Recalling that she had been given a hubba Bubba Glop bubble gum two hours earlier, I asked the question..
The body has been thawed and it is a costume. Gee. Didn't see that one coming. And guess what! It's the Horrordome costume! When the photo came out and it became immediately obvious that the suit was the same one on their site I dropped the company a few emails. I've bought a thing or two off there before and hell, I decided to buy this same hoaxed suit for the next Bigfoot movie because I like it so much. When I made mine it was about 3 and a half years ago, and this one's only been out for 2 years. Apparently there are only 100 made so I decided to bite the bullet and make the purchase in case people go crazy and start buying them to put in freezers.
I keep hoping that one day this will happen for real, but it ain't happening today (or tomorrow to be exact). In Atlanta Georgia some hunters say they found a dead Bigfoot in the woods and stuffed it in a freezer back at their house. A notorious hoaxer self-appointed Bigfoot expert Tom Biscardi became involved and a photo was released on his site.
The simple fact that he's involved means this this is a total fake. That and the fact that the thing in the photo up there looks like a certain Bigfoot suit available from The Horrordome website. It is a fantastic suit! I'm thinking of buying that one and the Yeti one for future film projects.
Click on the pic on the left for a closer look (here's a set on Flickr). On Sunday my wife went out to play with the kiddies and she came in and told me to come outside and see something. There on the lawn was a baby robin, just sitting there, with a small stick impaled through it's tiny body. It was pretty freaky because it did not seem to mind being impaled at all. He didn't look to be in pain or shock and darn it, the stick looked "old". Like it had been there awhile. What are you supposed to do?
Ya pull it out! Or not! Oddly enough from watching C.O.P.S. on T.V. (ooh I knew that would come in handy one day) I learned that when a human being has been stabbed, you don't pull the knife or whatever it is protruding from the body because it is actually keeping the blood in. You pull it out and the person bleeds out. So I actually contemplated leaving the stick in and just trimming it a bit but HEY! They poor bird has a stick in him, and he wasn't gonan be seeing the birdy vet anytime soon! I figured it must have been through the meat and not any organs or he wouldn't be so chipper and all that so I put on some gloves, nabbed him with a handy butterfly net and proceeded to pull Mr Stick out.
He made a big PEEP when I did it and the darned stick broke and I had to get the rest from the other side (good thing i didn't trim it). But when it was out I compared the two ends and they matched. Some of the stick looked like skin had healed over on it. I wonder how long he has been carrying that thing in his gut and out his back.
I put him in the garden and he hopped away. he actually came out and sat on top of a rock and looked at us. I think the littel bugger is going to be ok. Soon afterward he PEEPED again and a big Robin (with a full tail, must be mommy or daddy) swooped down and fed him a bug. I heard another peep and there's a bird just like him in teh tree behind me. So it must have been "leave the nest" day and the parental units feed them for a few days to get them on their way.
This photo pretty much captures the weather we were treated to at least twice a day on our vacation this year. We went to Sandbanks in July this time hoping for warmer weather than the other times we've gone in August. Instead we got rain. Buckets of it! It was still loads of fun though.
I liked the very strange Star Trek transporter you have to step through now before you go up the elevator. I saw it and groaned to myself "A metal detector? I'm full of Cameras, Ipods, PDA's and GPS units! This is gonna take forever!". Instead I stepped into this thing, it said to wait 10 seconds and then it started blasting me with air starting at my toes and working it's way up. Lots of air pressure too. It was freaky. It beeped and lit green and I asked the guy as I stepped out what it was for.
"Bombs." He said..
We had good weather about half the time, and the dark rainclouds made for some great sunsets when they finally broke. The pic on the side is the same dock in the lead off picture where my friend Jim is getting drenched.
We went to the sand dunes every day, that's what the place is best known for, and they are pretty cool!
We popped out to a few other beaches and happened across a dead racoon at one of them. dead animals are so much easier to photograph than live ones, none of that running away stuff! It was almost like he was power-tanning or something (except he wasn't breathing.. ).
On the last night of our stay we went to dinner at place called JJ's saloon in a nearby small town. Turns our I knew the night's entertainment, "Louise", local guitarist extraordinaire. We attended a Don Ross weekend seminar in Cannington Ontario a few years ago. Small world! (the guitar fingerstyle world that is). So she made me get up and play a set on her nylon string classical guitar (god but I HATE catgut strings!). Not that she didn't have to twist my arm or anything.
I put a new geocache out last month. It was called "The Crate" and it was based on the creepy short movie vignette of the same name in the movie Creepshow about the crazed monkey thing in a crate under the stairs at a university. That's Tripper photo shopped into the bunny pic of a real bunny (if you can beleive it). It was hell dragging the damned thing into the woods but it looked real creepy sitting there like that.
Originally I was going to have a mutant killer bunny spring loaded on a bungee cord which would fire the thing up out of the crate when the lid was opened, but field trials proved too dangerous and I scrapped that. I found a creepy bunny at the Salvation Army and made his mouth all bloody like he was a carnivore and stuffed him in the crate. A nod to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
He seemed to go over well. Some geocachers even dressed up like giant bunnies when they did the cache(which I found very creepy - Anyone here play BioShock? I'm gonna have nightmares!).
My refurb 30GB Ipod Classic got stolen two days ago outta my truck. I had left the window open and it was parked in my driveway. It's the first thing I've had stolen from my property since I've moved there in 1996, a pretty good record I'd say! I think it might be my paper delivery guy who would have had to walk up between my two cars to put my paper in the mailbox. He could have seen the window open and the Ipod sitting there. Then again, who am I to toss around accusations. They did not take the cigarette lighter adapter. So who knows, maybe it was a kid.
So, I bought an ipod touch last night. They are the coolest! Buying stuff with the kids in tow is always a challenge. Near the end I basically gave the girl my credit card and chased after my kids. "Get yourself a little something nice "Tonya"" (her nametag). When I got home from futureshop I spotted a black cat squeezing out from under my garage door. I gotta fix that. It appeared to be a new cat and not the one I scared the shit out of last year with my bullwhip. I haven't seen that one since.
A spyware sell job.. Wonderfull. This will really make me want to buy your crap software. More likely it will make me want to track them down and rip the developer's lungs out.
A Flickr photo set from this past winter popped up randomly on my igoogle page that I forgot to blog. I always build some type of ice luge in my backyard for the kids and every year some animal gets stuck in it and I have to free it and clean up the fecal matter or scrape off the pee they leave while in temporary captivity.
This year it was a small mouse who must have hit the slide at the top, slid all the way down and got trapped. He was doing a pretty good job of ice climbing (as you can see in the close up photos) but he couldn't quite make it all the way over the lip of the slide. My wife rescued him with a shovel and he scampered off into the bushes to do what mice do (poop and whiz over everything from the looks of it).
Check this wicked article out! Try this at home!!!! Lenzspot told me about this awesome site a year ago and it's been awhile since I've paid a visit.
On the hottest day of the year so far (also my birthday!) a bunch of us decided to hike up in the Gatineau Hills after some geocaches. It was a route I hadn't gone before and we went after La p'tite facile (it actually wasn't that easy). The bugs were the worst I have seen in eons. Not many mosquitoes, but lots of big black horseflies (or deer flies. I dunno the difference - they take chunks out of your skin but do not appear to have teeth). After you put your sun block and then bug spray, you sweat it all off in about five minutes and they would be on you again.
Check out this steamy jungle pic. It was like Jurassic park out there! I was just waiting for the Raptors to come and eat Tripper (or anyone else I could throw in front of them to save myself). Kenmore and Tripper found some kind of snake, and they played with that until it oozed it's stinky snake juice and they let it go. I swear animals and reptiles fall out of the sky on those two guys. Which reminds me of the weird conversation Tripper had on the ride over.
Tripper got a phone call and got all excited when he took it. It like one of those phone calls you get when you're dog is having puppies and you're not home. The conversation went like this:
You see, last week he sent me a youtube video with the subject line "Check this out! Gnarly!" and it was a female praying Mantis being mated by the much smaller male, and when the little male Mantis was almost finished, she reached around, grabbed his head and bit if off, calmly eating it while the male's body continued the mating process albeit sans head. Now that says something about the female of the species, and also a little bit about the male(grin). So of course I have to send away for some of the little guys now. Personally I think Tripper wants his own mantis snuff film(grin).
And speaking of snuff films, we strolled upon a deer carcass in A1 condition. Skull picked clean but meat still on the hoof! I find it hard to take pictures of the live ones, but dead deer make excellent photographic subjects, not only because they hold still, but because they look cool!
What a fantastic idea. Why didn't I think of this! There are tons of guitar players on the planet, but only a few who are truely viruoso speed picking demons! Why is this? Why has no one bothered to find this out? Well Troy Grady had an idea to place a high speed mini-cam right down in front of the picking hand, and then ask a pile of the who's who of shred guitar playing to let 'er rip in front of the thing. The results are VERY interesting.
Indy's still got it. At the ripe old age of 65 Harrison Ford still pulls off the Fedora and Leather jacket routine and makes Indy 4 an orgy of scenes to Indy fans everywhere. I was lucky enough to attend a sneak preview on a ticket from a guy who won the hot 89.9 Biggest boulder contest (he built a ten footer from PVC tubing and lots of tarps. How come I don't find out about these things? - probably because I don't listen to that crappy station! ). A fellow Indy connoisseur, Indiana Rob knew the boulder guy and got a ticket for me and he, Kirok and company all took it in last Wednesday at the Silver city.
The film was GREAT! Everyone has probably heard by now that it features space aliens, and it works beautifully! That kid from the Transformers movie does a great job and so did the cute elf from Lord of the rings as a dominatrix soviet agent. The neat thing about the flick is that they had Harrison Ford act his age. It kind of makes you wish he had done a few more films in his 40's and 50's though. The ending was very cool, and there were so many exciting scenes you were forgetting them by the time you got to the end. I'll have to see this one again soon. (and again, and again!)
I attended the Tommy Emmanuel concert Friday because the guy that made my new acoustic guitar, Tony Karol, called me up a few months back and wanted to know if I could bring it down to the show, work his booth and get a free ticket in the front row. I'm there! I was going to buy a ticket anyhow! Woohoo! So I packed it up and headed on over.
What a show Tommy put on! He said next year, he'll have been "spankin' the plank" (Australian for 'playing the guitar') for near 50 years! And it shows! He has an excellent Lenny Breau technique and can alternate pick with a thumb-pick (why can't I do this?) like most guys can with a flatpick. I definitely gotta learn how to do that and reap the benefits of electric guitar shredding I spent most of my early life doing. Crap, he even threw in one sweep picking lick in the middle of something. You hardly EVER see that on an acoustic. I took a pile of photos (click here for my flickr set). I've gone from trying to take a good photo to using the "1000 monkeys in a room with typewriters" method of taking pictures. If you take about 500, statistically speaking, you will get one or two good ones!
The guitars he was using were quite beat up. He seems to prefer an off-the shelf Australian model of some sort and the back top of each behind the bridge is worn down the the wood. Literally. There will be a hole soon. And I soon saw why. He scratches and rubs there to get an amazing array of sounds. He made his guitar sound like a thunderstorm at one point. He has a rubber feedback plug in each sound hole because his stage volume is so loud, he'd be screetching without them. He is literally one of the nicest sounding guys I've ever heard at a show. Australians and Canadians seem to have a lot in common (besides the love of beer).
The guitar booth (corner actually) was really busy and there were lots of people checking out Tony's latest guitar's (here's his website). He had a nice Baritone up, had a spin on it.. Someday! (I want a Harp guitar first and Tony'd probably be the guy to make it!). Personally, I like the guitar, 3rd from the left. It's a beauty! (ok.. it's also mine). It was a bit weird letting complete strangers play my guitar, but as someone there reminded me, "Hey, you're driving up the value of your investment by bringing it out here!
