Category Archives: Hobbies

When my butt isn’t in this chair…

Blind Testing

Hobbies, Personal Bits

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�

Photoplay!

Hobbies, Toronto

Not quite “City As Blog” material but just as fun:

Incredible!

Mr Incredible at Bloor and Sherbourne Firehall. The other truck has Dash

Mule

Mule. I love these stickers from the OZ DVD. Expect more of these.

Vietnamese Littl Richard

Vietnamese Littl’ Richard.

Creepy Camping

Hobbies

I’m back from camping with only 3 bugbites on my right arm (for some odd reason). I have pictures and will try to get them up tonight. We had a great time with the usual crowd and it was great to see the Point guys putting up that great big tent blimp hangar structure for wedding/parties/anything as well as upgrades to the pool. Now to make more showers…

I do have one story to relate: Last year, there was a guy so far gone drunk at the social tent gatherings he was dubbed “Stumbalina” due to his mode of stumbling transport through the crowd. The first party of the weekend in the new Blimp Hangar, Stumbalina was there, doing his thing through the crowd, mumbling drunk disjointed come-on lines.

Sharkboy and I leave to fall asleep in our tent in the quiet wooded section we love to rent (its away from the seasonal party people hence it’s 99% quiet). At about 3am, I’m nudged awake by Sharkboy with “There’s someone outside the tent!”

Outside, about 2 feet away from our tent door, eerily standing right in front of the nearly full moon creating a silloette with a misty halo, is Stumbalina. Swaying slightly.

Immediately the entire Blair Witch movie replays in my mind and I’m awake. I am freaked out. Sharkboy yells “Can you go away, please?”

“Muh lookn fr my tent,” I think he says.

“This ain’t it,” Sharkboy shoots back.

Stumbalina stumbles (duh) away loudly into the night. I’m still sitting bold upright. I’m certainly not going to be able to sleep.

Ten minutes later I can hear him kicking up underbrush near our car/cooler/food area, with no real direction in his movements. I am up out of the warm arms of Sharkboy and with a large, heavy flashlight in hand I am out of the tent and advancing on Stumbalina, who hasn’t drunkenly registered that someone is coming at him. I hit him with the powerful beam from the flashlight.

His reaction to the light was exactly like that scene from the 50’s War of the Worlds when Dr. Clayton Forrester shines his flashlight on the Martian: eEEEeeeeeEEE!!! His hands come up over his face, which is contorted like I sprayed him with ice cold water. “Buddy… where is your tent?” I ask calmly (Sharkboy says I was calm. I wanted to sink the flashlight into his face – years of being a bouncer at the Black Eagle kicks in when dealing with drunks).

“mulglgalgg …Eight!” Meaning he was in lot #8.

“Over there,” I point with the flashlight. He slowly turns and follows the beam.

Stumbalina stumbles into the night.

About 5 minutes later we hear a zipper and a thump.

The next day we see Stumbalina drinking gallons of water. He won’t make eye contact with us.

With Great Page Visits Comes Great Responsibilities

Hobbies

My stats for Feb crested 8000 visits for my little, no-real-direction site. Yay us, funtime happy readers! Thank you! I’d use my hits but unfortunately some dorkass L337 black hat thought it would be cool to create a virus that references a long-erased .jpg from my site which skewers my stats to over a million hits a month (oddly enough the virus was quiet for Jan but last month it resurfaced in Japan sending my hits back up over 3 million).

But this morning I woke to find much of my post’s comments from last year spammed for the first time. Thankfully b2Evolution has a one click banning button that wipes all spam comments/referals or I’d still be logging IPs.

So you see kids, the web is a dirty place. A mean place. A place where thieves roll 20 sided dice and always come up over 15 (with a lock pick modifier of +3).

Buzz Bunny?

Celebs and Media, Hobbies

From yesterday’s Warner Bros Press Release:

BuzzDESCENDANTS OF WARNER BROS.’ LEGENDARY LOONEY TUNES- BUGS BUNNY, DAFFY DUCK, LOLA BUNNY, TASMANIAN DEVIL, ROAD RUNNER AND WILE E. COYOTE – ARE UNLEASHED AS FUTURISTIC HEROES IN BRAND NEW SERIES “LOONATICS”

Produced by Warner Bros. Animation, fast-forwarding seven-hundred years into the future, Loonatics will feature six descendants of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner, Lola Bunny, Tasmanian Devil and Wile E. Coyote. Endowed with individual super-powers and unique abilities these new Looney characters band together to create a formidable team and face-off against the evils of Acmetropolis.

Back in the late 80s, I had the exact same reaction to Spielberg’s announcement that he was creating Tiny Toons: bile rising, eyes scrunching up into what could be seen as anger or illness, arms flopping to the side in resignation to a man with more money than God. But in the end, it spawned a couple great shows like Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain.

Let’s face it. Bugs and Daffy hit their Acme with Chuck Jones/Mel Blanc dressing them in drag and letting them carelessly play with loaded shotguns meant for rabbit duck season. But look back at the evolution of Bugs and you will find that he went through some healthy character development for years after his creation, but that abruptly stopped since the 60s when WB stopped caring about their animation division. Maybe this show will be the mid-life growth spurt Bugs has been needing?

I hope Loonatics will have deep pop-culture moments like Yakko Animaniac’s curvy eyebrow flick while singing “Dana Delany!” in the opening credits of his show. Or create new characters like Scrappy Squirrel, (loved her ironic kvetching over how cartoons use to be).

But somehow I doubt it.

After sitting on their asses, raking in the profits from the syndication of the Tiny Toons, WB made a decent hack at feature length animation with Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant (that dog’s breakfast of suits-overriding-creativity is a whole other blog entry), yet managed to pork Brad big-time on distribution rights, effectively scaring a master director away into the arms of Pixar. WB then tried too hard too late to parade their outmoded characters into the movies. Hairyfishnuts put it sussinctly when he said: “they’re playing with a corpse, turn him into Poochy for all I care.” (he talks of the whole Jeff/Jim thing but eventually mentions ‘toons). In my opinion, those movies were driven by people who just didn’t “get” the Bugs Bunny culture. Look at every cameo guest star’s face during Back In Action: they wear the expression of having been threatened with contract termination while they barf out those gwadawful lines.

With this new “updating” I am hoping that these characters will get a fresh feng shui-ing and coat of paint they been waiting for. Or they should just remake a whole new set of characters, but that would take years of development and I bet WB doesn’t want to spend that kind of money or resources to do that.

Sort of like how Microsoft creates Windows products.

Bazing!

Katamari Damacy

Distractions, Hobbies

If you own a PS2 I seriously recommend you get this game.

Simple premise: Your dad, the form-fitting, cat suit wearing, bulging codpiece protruding King of Cosmos has accidentally knocked all the stars from the sky (the cut scene looks like he’s soaring through space drunk and his speech pattern suggests he is, regardless of the weird translations) and has charged you, the pee wee Prince, to collect stuff from Earth so he can toss it back up into the sky as replacement for his clumsy flying.

The King of Cosmos gives you a Katamari. I tried to do a search on exactly what a katamari is (its kenji roughly translates to “clump of souls”) but the best I can come up with is it looks like a dim sum dumpling ball with nubs on it, sort of like those shaky motorized balls you use to scare the cat with. Anyway, its super sticky but can only pick things up relative to it’s size. When you start out to pick stuff up, you can only pick up things like thumbtacks or gum wrappers. As your size increases, you are able to roll over and collect more, like staplers and mice… I’ve seen screen grabs of whole buildings and ocean liners, so this game promises to be pretty sweet.

The graphics look primitive but have a certain fun/flat quality that reminds me of when I was at Sheridan College for Graphic Design, working with guache paints to create product illustrations. The game has a dusty, washed out feel, similar to finding kid’s paintings in a snowbank. However, the items to be picked up are blocky and hardly anything taxing for the graphics processor.

The soundtrack is rockin’ too. The first screen’s intro tune is a mumbly scat-like performance from a guy who sounds like he’s first runner up from an all night Karaoke/drinking contest. The in-play music could be packaged as a soundtrack CD of the best of electronica from Tokyo. I’d buy it.

In conclusion: weird game. Addictive (in a “Extreme Elimination Challenge” sort of way). I recommend!

Why I Love Sharkboy, Part the Second

Distractions, Hobbies, Toronto

Just inside the doors at every Rogers Video there is a bin of DVDs that go for $2.99 each. These bins hold such ground breaking direct-to-video classics like “Urkel – The Movie!” or “Sister Trouble 4: Death on the Amazon” or “Kriplah! The Talking Fiat from Belgrave!”

We make a game of covering our eyes and digging into this bin and pulling out a movie each, worst movie wins. Usually we have to debate who’s movie is cheesier. He always wins.

“Mine has Tom Selleck!”

“Ah, but mine was directed by Allan Smithee.”

“Damn.”

New Feature!

Distractions, Hobbies, Personal Bits, Queer stuff

I’m using “Gallery” for my photo content management now. I’ve heard good things about it and decided to give it a try. I may convert the rest of the photos to it at a later date.

Meanwhile, enjoy the photos of Sharkboy, Barbie and I, as we take on Niagara Falls!

(Ed- I’ve long since stopped using Gallery. Check out the Gallery link in the upper right)