How To Stick Your Head Up Your Own Ass

Last night, the family got together for dinner at my aunt’s house. For the pre-dinner entertainment, playing on the television set was a Cirque Du Soleil DVD.

I am vaguely familiar with the Cirque Du Froo Froo and the general idea of their show: a bunch of French Canadians bending and jumping and singing and dancing while wearing weird clothes.

At one point, the show was focused on this one woman in the centre, and she was bending; bending in weird ways. At one point it looked as though this woman was going to insert her own head into her ass. Her butt was hovering over her head. All she had to do was sit down and SLEWP, anal penetration.

I’m very glad she never did the head-first ass-ram otherwise I would have certainly lost my appetite and possibly my lunch.

Then it hit me, this was supposed to be a circus. Hey, people! Where’s the pie throwing clowns? Where’s the bear driving around in the little car? Where’s the inbred carny folk?

Oooohhh…

Recommended Listening: Circus by Lenny Kravitz.

Weekend Recap: Juice Gets Beaned

The most important thing that happened this weekend… Okay, the only interesting thing that happened this weekend didn’t even happen to me. I never actually saw it, I was looking some other direction.

On Sunday, Juice and I went to the Stouffville Country Market (a flea market) in search of the usual crap you’d find at a flea market. So for me that meant vinyls (I didn’t find any) and for Juice that meant vinyls (he didn’t find any either) and books.

Juice likes looking at these sorts of places for a certain sort of book. He likes those choose your own adventure style of books. But not the cheesy ones were you, the reader, are some kid stopping smugglers like some lame Hardy Boys book. He reads the ones where you are a samurai or an elf or a robot or some sci-fi mumbo jumbo.

Juice eventually found this one book and it was eight dollars. I remember these things when I was a kid and they weren’t eight dollars when they were new. They were five or six bucks. So Juice takes the book to the old lady running the store.

“This can’t be eight bucks, could it?”

“If its eight bucks, it must be first edition.”

She takes the book from Juice’s hand, opens it to the publishing information page and points to it.

“See first edition!”

She then closes the book and beans Juice in the head with the book.

And he still bought it.

Other than that I had a pretty quiet weekend. Friday night, I went to the Wonder Twins place with Bob and we watched a DVD.

The rest of the weekend I spent playing video games. Yeah, I’m a mature human being who does adult things…

I’ve got this game called The Darkness. When I was a kid, video games didn’t have storylines, it was just Pac-Man eating some dots while evading those little ghosty guys. This game I’m playing now is more movie than game.

If I wanted to watch a movie, I’d buy a movie. And you’d think with that much movie, it would actually make some sense. The movie, err game starts in contemporary New York City and the central character is some young mafioso. After a couple of levels, he’s driven to suicide. But instead of dying, he awakes to find himself in the trenches of World War I.

Oh, and did I mention this guy has a pair of talking tentacles.

I really don’t care much for storylines in video games. The last game I was playing, F.E.A.R. has a storyline but I really didn’t pay much attention to it. All I know is that I shot anything that moved until the game was over. And to win that game, I had to shoot a little girl in the head. I don’t reallly know why, but it seemed to work. Maybe this girl was evil or something. She probably was, when I didn’t shoot her, she’d kill me.

But in this Darkness game, I can’t skip by a lot of movie parts. Don’t these video game makers realize I just wanna shoot things.

Recommended Listening: Epic by Faith No More.

Long Weekend Re-cap

Friday afternoon while I was still at work I noticed a couple of missed calls on my cell, both from Bob. I called him back. This would have been just before 3:30pm.

“So WIGSF, do you still have no plans for the weekend?”

“Yup, still no plans.”

“Wanna play in a baseball tournament at a cottage.”

After some humming and hawing for a couple of minutes, I said yes.

By 5:30pm, I was in Bob’s car heading up Highway 48, trying to find Coboconk.

Bob knows my fondness for baseball, but he also knows I haven’t played since I was 12 or 13 years old. But one of his better players cancelled on him and he needed a fifth guy on short notice.

Oh, but this wasn’t baseball or softball. This was lobball. Its a lot like softball except that the pitcher lobs the ball way up in the air and the strike zone is actually this mat behind homeplate. If the pitch lands on the mat, strike, otherwise ball. When I played softball and baseball, I was used to seeing pitches come across the plate and into the catcher’s glove. Pitches travelling somewhat parallel with the ground. I don’t know if it was that, or my complete lack of practice over the last half of my life that prevented me from being productive in the plate.

In the field I was fine. Playing a bit of catch for two or three minutes before the first game got my glove worked in just fine.

On Saturday I went antiquing. Not the gay kind, the looking for some cool old vinyls kind. I didn’t find any vinyl. I did find a cool old shellac album though. And when I say ‘album’ I mean ALBUM! This is a hardcover collection of four discs made of shellac, not vinyl and run at 78 rpm. I don’t even own a victrola to play the thing. I don’t care though.

The title of this album is The Heart of the Symphony: containing Movements from Eight Symphonic Works of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakow, Dvorak, Franck.

78 rpm records were the standard before the Second World War but were quickly replaced by the 33 and 45 rpm records that were developed in the late 40s. I bought this thing because I think its cool to have one. I’ve got no intention of ever listening to it.

I also picked up a few out-of-print CDs. Nothing special worth noting. Pretty much bought them because I think Juice might get a kick out of them.

The cottage wasn’t just ‘baseball’ and visiting the nearby towns looking for old junk. There is always lots and lots and I mean lots of drinking. Except I didn’t have a single drink. Just wasn’t in the mood to drink. Pretty much spent most of the night on the couch watching the Giants/Padres game on TV. Barry Bonds finally tied Hank Aaron’s home run record.

When I got home on Sunday night I found the four Blue Jays tickets Juice had won using my hockey picks from the past Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Carmine’s thoughts on a living will and being on life support.

Monday night after dinner, Juice and I went to see The Simpsons Movie. It was Simps-tastic. It was just wonderful.

Recommended Listening: I Talk to the Wind by King Crimson.

Lazy From The Heat

I don’t like the heat of summer. This is nothing new. Ask people who know me and they’ll tell you tales of me collapsing due to heat-stroke. So today, I’ve spent as much time inside as possible. Go to a jobsite, not today folks.

So, I guess because I’m not actually working hard today, (like I ever,) I’m spending more time fooling around at work. Lays potato chips, you really can’t eat just one.

I’ve taken a look at some old posts for my blog that I started to right but never finished and posted. Wowee! So many offensive things I wrote. In a post about going to a buffet, I referred to a fat couple as whales and that they’re raising a child with man bosoms.

In another post, I explained how I hate charitable organizations. That’s pretty low. I starting calling charity groups a bunch fear-mongering, guilt-laying placebo-sellers. That’s really low.

A couple weeks back I wrote some sort of blackmailing post. I can’t believe I actually posted that crap. It was supposed to be an introduction into a bunch of little fictional tales I wrote about some of my readers. Really stupid stuff.

Insulting my blogosphere pals, no I didn’t stop there. I even took a turn at myself. I guess I was feeling really honest one day and I started to list a bunch of embarrassing things about myself. Not fake things, real things, real embarrassing things. Boy am I glad I wised up in time not to post that stuff.

Oh well, I guess not of that stuff will ever see the light of day.

On to some stuff of somewhat interest, its a long weekend this coming weekend in Ontario. I as usual have no plans. I will probably spend the extra day working in my Dad’s yard and doing a little barbecue with the family. Unless somebody calls and which case, BOOM, I’m a dot, I’m outta there. I don’t wanna spend another long weekend with my Father.

I tell you, this guy, he changes the landscaping in the yard so frequently, he never actually has it in a state of completion. Here’s the current project. There is this existing interlocking stone path that leads from the sliding doors to the gazebo. He is currently planting trees on both sides of the path in hopes that they will eventually grow into a wooded archway over the path. Yes, I’m sure that could look great if he actually lets the trees grow. 10 bucks says, he’ll change his mind about that before the end of the summer and we’ll have to move those trees.

If you don’t believe me, I’ll say this about my father and his landscaping ideas. Current home, been there since January ‘99. How many ponds do you think we had to dig in that backyard since 1999 (8 summers). If you’re answer is less than three, you don’t know my Father.

Oh, here’s an idea, Maybe I’ll take a drive out to some other place. A little one day road trip.

Oh, here’s something I gotta do. I still gotta see The Simpsons Movie. Wow, exciting way to spend a weekend.

Happy Civic Holiday everybody. Yes folks who don’t know. That’s the holiday. Its called Civic Holiday. It is just an excuse to have a long weekend in August. There is no significance to the holiday what-so-ever. Its just a government mandated day-off.

Recommended Listening: Just a Gigolo/Ain’t Go Nobody by David Lee Roth, hummilly-boomilly-zimmilly-boomilly-BOP!

My Ignorance

Last week, a co-worker’s mother past away. On Tuesday, the family had a service at a funeral home. Everybody in the company attended the service, me included.

I haven’t been to that many funeral services in my life and those that I have been to have all been for Roman Catholic Italians. A Catholic priest would preside over the service, prayer cards would be given out with lots of Christian imagery, stuff like that.

This service I went to on Tuesday was for a Asian* woman. It was a very different ceremony than I was used to. Her children were dressed in some sort of burlap clothing and chanting. They all wore headbands and headdresses in a similar style. Upon approaching the casket, I was handed a burning stick (incense or something like it) and I was told to place it in this pot of sand in front of the casket. Next to the pot was some raw food (it looked like duck). The food offering looked much like those tiny altars you see in Chinese food restaurants with the bowl of fruit.

It was a very humbling experience for me. I am completely ignorant to the culture. I wanted to be respectful towards the woman, my co-worker and the ceremony itself. I just didn’t know how. Another co-worker of mine helped me out with what to do and what-not.

My co-worker and his wife seemed appreciative to see me there.

I guess when you don’t know what to do, just do very little. I’ve known my co-worker for years now (even before we worked together) and I’m pretty sure he knows that I’m ignorant to his culture.

Again, I just wanted to be respectful and not offend anyone. I hope he knows that and I hope his mother knows that too.

* I was told that she was originally from China, relocated to Vietnam before coming to Canada.

The Orangest Couch in the World

The picture I stole from the Ikea website does not do the orange justice. The actual orange in real life is much more powerful.

Let me back track a little bit. Yesterday, I was asked to help assemble some Ikea furniture. I agreed. I had nothing better to do and this way I could be helpful to another human being.

The couch itself is modular. So it was three similar pieces, all quite easy to assemble. The couch is basically just white, but you can get different colour covers. The colour chosen by the owner of the couch, orange. Not just any sort of orange, but vibrant, exuberant, blindingly-powerful orange. There’s more orange on that couch that there is in an ING Direct commercial.

The couch is half-way between comfy and lumpy, but what could you expect from Ikea, right? For a cheap couch, you can’t go wrong. Besides, it fits perfectly in the room for which it was purchased for. But its just so damn orange. I tried taking a photo of the thing but it melted the lens on my camera.

Okay, that last line was a joke, I never tried to photograph the thing. I was afraid my camera would be incapable of registering that colour. Its too orange.

Just looking at the damn thing provides the daily recommended intake of vitamin C.

Its the kind of orange that I think will simply absorb sunlight and grow stronger and never dull or fade.

Recommended Listening: Tangerine by Moist.

Odd Bits

Got to work this morning and I had a voicemail. It was a drunken gaggle of people singing Happy Birthday. Being not my birthday and the fact that I couldn’t make out any voices that clearly and that none of my idiot friends would call me at work after hours to wish me a happy birthday several months before my birthday especially when only one of my friends even has my work number; I’m guessing it was a wrong number.

I haven’t slept well in the past couple of nights. Its weird. I’m wide awake at 4AM lying in bed staring at the ceiling but I can barely keep my eyes open at 6AM.

Does anybody remember El Kabong? I just love the concept of someone swinging or flying or running into a crowd of people and smashing one person over the head with a guitar. I don’t know why I was thinking about El Kabong this morning. Its weird the way the brain works. I’m just sitting down, trying not to think and kabong, all I can think about is a cartoon horse smashing a guitar over somebody’s head.

Look at that picture. Talk about saving on animation. A guitar with four tuning keys and only three strings. Well, its not like its going to get much use as a musical instrument. Its basically just a funny-sounding blunt object. Kabong!

Recommended Listening: Today, folks, I recommended nothing. Why don’t you recommend something to me.