Just my fancy way of announcing my monthly updates on the other blogs you should be reading (again, some are on my blacklist, sorry for the non-link):

BrotherDown (brotherdown.blogspot.com) has a difficult time with “YellowStone” Never charade drunk.

“…the experience of nearly a generation of gay men being wiped out from HIV is just as far removed from you as the holocaust.” Lordy AcidReflux’s blog (lifeandtimespoz.blogspot.com/2006/01/got-hard-on-and-no-where-to-go.html) is funny yet not. Yet is. (whispers) Should I be laughing…?

Jim B hasn’t updated his blog since November. It’s understandable. He’s renovating. Maybe some traffic to his site will inspire him to post some pictures of the damage.

Dawn was worried about the floods. Hopefully Arnold will keep her safe.

Salvage made a funny at our American friend’s expense.

Ever realized something from your youth wasn’t what it seemed? Not Well Planned got a wake up call.

Photojunkie links to a sick-making wicked cool picture. Shimmy!

Blamb gives us another self indulgent smarmy cartoon (I am, of course, just kidding). This one made me want to call Airmiles and demand my toaster.

A well hung conversation over at Where the Hell Was I:
Her: What color would you think would work?
Me: Gee, I dunno. Magenta?
Her: Um… well, I think magenta might, ah, clash. With, sort of, everything.
Me: Oh. Okay. How about black, then?
Her: Black? On the walls? All the walls?
Me: Well, black doesn’t clash, right?

That Woman wakes up without a hangover Jan 01. Good for him.

Nothing I type here can prepare you for SloppyJoe’s clip of the month. Just go.
Star Wars Stripper part 1

Star Wars Stripper part 2

Happy Birthday Busdriver! I hope you’re around for another half century!

Not even a month into winter and I nearly wept like a baby when I found this on my hard drive.

Twirl and Dance.

Sunday, 1:20pm, Jan 08, 2006

No Frills, Carlton and Parliament

Sharkboy and I are in line with our meager purchases and in front of us are two exquisitely rotund women purchasing the largest amount of consumer meat I have ever seen. Enough ground beef to reconstitute a cow, 7 packs of half chickens (three and a half chickens?), 6 packs of thick sliced ham, drumsticks to beat the band to submission and various other sundries.

While one loads stuff onto the conveyor belt to be scanned, the other is packing all this meat into bags. The one packing meat, dressed in white sweats, hoody still up, answers a call on her cell, magically produced from one of her folds, with “Why are you calling me?” Pause. Louder. “WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME?” The uber-rubenesque one unloading their groaning shopping cart stops her meat-haulin’ and looks up at Hoodie.

Hoodie continues: “My own child and you’re harassing me with these calls. I told you not to call.” To the Unloader: “Harassment!” Back into the cell: “You’re harassing me. You. Are. Harassing. Me.” The drama continues in this vein. Meat starts to back up on the conveyor belt, sadly wanting to be packed into embarrassingly yellow NO FRILLS bags.

And in the drama, Unloader lady “forgets” to put a single package of bacon up on the belt (I’m still trying to figure out why all this meat and yet one single package of bacon…). She pushes the cart through (note to self: no alarms went off) and instantly starts to put bags of meat into the cart, covering the poor forgotten bacon.

I bet you can see the finger quotes around “forgets”. It was a bit too fast and a bit too obvious.

The bacon was the last thing in the cart making it pretty difficult to missed putting it on the belt. While Hoodie’s harassing drama was loud and distracting (the poor cashier was wincing at Hoodie’s verbal cell phone lashings to her child), Unloader pushed that cart through to the bagging area pretty darned fast.

Sharkboy was on his tippy toes wanting to say something.

The time comes to pay and Unloader hands over five $20 Loblaws gift cards. My oh-so-judgemental mind says “trailer trash!” as they fuss and haul and grunt their fodder into their cart, Hoodie still sputtering about being harassed by her kid.

“Do you think karma will come back onto us for not telling the cashier about that bacon?” asks Sharkboy, in a moment of boyfriend zen.

“I think karma will rear it’s ugly head when they get anal cancer from all that meat,” I suggest.

As we leave the C’est Ne Frills Pas, Unloader (now switching her name to “Loader”) is bag-by-bag placing their meaty booty to the trunk of their Cadillac sedan because they are unable to get the cart past the iron gates by the door. Hoodie, unhelping of Loader, glares at us as we walk by, exposing the dirtiest interior I have ever seen of such an expensive car.

Go to Apple.com/trailers and just *try* to find this picture of Mel snuck into his new trailer for Apocalypto

(from Laughing Squid, via BoingBoing)

Back when I was hanging out on Zug my first online message board/hang out/drop in centre, members use to trick newbies into clicking on the the web’s most curious picture ever seen (Wiki article – Work safe and you can find the Not Work Safe image somewhere in those links. Good luck). The site is gone now but the picture lives on. Apparently the image’s subject is gone too. No wonder.

Gabbers use to make me laugh every time they posted it because the reaction from seeing this photo was like a punch in the gut. Or bum. Now, Laszlo Toth has been showing the image to his friends and taking their picture at the moment they see it. He encourages you to do the same and shoot them up to a FirstGoatse Flickr stream.

My current fave pic is Ron Jeremey probably thanking his stars he has a good agent.

What would you give to hear what people thought of you, candidly, without them knowing you were listening? Your own private blind focus group.

While at a house party a few weeks back, Sharkboy, three other guests and I, were discussing a painting hanging prominently in the living room of our hosts. As I turned to look at the canvas, I noticed that the artist, James Huctwith, was sitting behind us, his eyes darting from his work, to us, to his shoes. The others in our group either didn’t know he was there or just didn’t know who he was. The painting we were all speculating on was a rich, dark red image of a profile of a man lying on his back. Viewed from mid-stomach up, the man is shirtless, hairy chested, goateed face towards the heavens, and had a puff of smoke or breath coming from his mouth.

“I think it’s his last breath,” says one guest, eerily.

“He’s hot.” Pause. “Sexy hot, not warm,” says another.

“He’s smoking,” suggests Sharkboy, churning up the homoerotic.

“It’s quite well done,” I say, to stoke this barrel of monkeys to provide James with some comment or criticism on it’s execution. Call it a focus group giveaway for his eavesdropping.

“It is,” they conclude. Nothing more. Damn.

I poke again: “I think he’s lying on some velvet in a meat locker waiting for the butcher to come suck his dick,” I say. I look at James. James is smiling at an unseen guest across the room. Sharkboy comments on how smoking is hot but disgusting and the conversation turns. There you go James, I tried.

Flashback to 2003. I am standing in line at Timothy’s Coffee Shop waiting to purchase a tea. In front of me, Dennis O’Connor, head of Church St B.I.A. and owner of O’Connor Gallery is chatting with Kristen, the owner of Timothys.

“What do you think of the art?” Kristen says waving at the canvases of comic book pop art.

Dennis makes a face that resembles someone removing a hangnail from his freshly stubbed toe while sucking on a lemon while listening to Britney Spears give birth to her first sprog.

It was my artwork up at the time. Kristen was trying to illicit a comment candidly the same way I was doing for James. And I appreciated it. I know that you can’t please everyone when you put pixel to monitor, paint to canvas, pen to paper and the negative comment was accepted with a grain of salt. I was thankful for the unfettered input and was actually pleased with Dennis’ reaction.

Flashforward to last night. I am again hanging art at Timothys (I’ll post images later) and I’ve asked an older gentleman to vacate his seat for a few seconds so I could hang my robot-on-top-of-a-car-highway-surfing painting. With my back to this guy I hear him mutter “disgusting” or “ridiculous” not sure which. It certainly wasn’t a mumble of art appreciation.

And like before, I was glad of the honesty. I would rather have someone honestly tell me what they thought of my art or work than to coo coo me into a false sense of security.

I bet that a couple artists who read this blog (Darryl, Evil Panda) have had similar situations where they were privileged to hear comments of their work without the commenter knowing they were listening…