Da back in the hospital again. This time for a couple weeks to get the swelling down on his pancreas. By Monday they might be able to add a stent to the inside of the blocked tube that goes from organ to intestine. Until then, he’s on clear liquids and a feeding tube. So I took some pictures!
It’s after 11pm and I’m nightclubbing in Earls Court. In England in the 80s, if it’s after 11pm and you’re still out and not in a chippy, then you’re officially nightclubbing.The music ain’t Top of the Pops but it’s ok. I’m not drunk (too expensive) or high (not interested) but I am enjoying the atmosphere in the cave-like den of this club. Pillars divide the dance floor and there are cubby holes filled with couches.
The four of us, Liam, Jen, Mag and I, are sitting in one of these cubby hole couches and we’re manscoping – the stern scanning for men, gay or straight, replete with comments like “Ooer, I don’t like yours much”. We’re so not trendy, made evident by our frumpy clothes, compared to the group of people who occupy the couch next to us. One neighbour is wearing a tiny kiddies-birthday-party cowboy hat, American style plaid shirt, rolled up 501s and toy gun holster. He’s adorable. And hot. We can’t stop looking at him.
He stands, and announces: “I have to go wee wee.” But he says it with such a mish mash of accents (fey gay, northern Geordie and effected Southern Drawl) that his voice pierces the music and stuns us momentarily.
After we recover from laughing, we make gunslinger fingerpoints to each other on the dance floor.
My brother emailed me from a writer’s conference in Alberta:
Some guy came up to me today and said he was in Annie Get Your Gun with me at BCI (our old high school, in BrockVegas). He refused to tell me his name. I wouldn’t care, but he works here and I’m still here for another week and a half. Who was it?
My response:
Tim Picotte? Sorry, I’ve core dumped my high school memories and only retained top level recall, like when I had to get past mom while peaking on LSD.
I do remember not liking the songs, though. Again … Sorry.
It got me thinking about just how much I remember about high school, which truthfully is very little. I was counting the days before I left Brockville by the time I hit grade 10 and knew my life was destined to become 100% better after escaping that town. I coasted through high school. No real Judd Apatow kind of experiences to write about, no drama to dredge up into a memoir.
But some highlights would be:
• I did back stage stuff (props, stage hand) for a youth theatre group and would drink lots on the weekend. I don’t recall any specific party, just the amount of them.
• In my head, bored while helping a friend move, I demanded that the dead parents of the girl I was dating at the time, show themselves to me. At that precise moment, the girl came out of her bedroom to show me a photo of them.
• I wore two types of “doctor” shirt to school (the old kind, with the buttons up the side and across the shoulder): One was pure white, the other had blood splatters across it. I also would wear a bolero jacket from Le Chateau.
• I improvised 90% of my lines and songs during our 4 shows of The Wizard of Oz in grade 11. I played the Cowardly Lion.
That’s about it. Now… England stories, I got tons of.
Sky Captain did it with a big budget and mega-stars, but Iron Sky does it with humour:
Uh oh… Looks like some people are getting the Ring of Death after some freezing issues on GTA IV. Most likely from hard core gamers overusing their consoles for hours on end, breaking the “cold solder” connections on their motherboard. Not that I’m surprised. On the weekend, I flipped on my XBox 360 after a few hours of Wii and had forgotten how loud the fan/HD operation is in comparison. WHAT? ARE YOU PLAYING HALO 3? I SAID “HALO”, NOT GAYLORD! I mean come on, how much power/heat does the console generate? How much does it need to generate?
Truly a testament to Japanese manufacturing compared to American. Cheaper, smaller, faster, less obtrusive and better designed. Curiously there are no entries for “Wii Technical Problems” on Wikipedia, but there was that whole “toss your Wiimote into your new flatscreen TV” thing. Oh sure, I hear you say “But the Wii is a lower processor/graphics intense game play than the Xbox!” I am sure if you were to make an equally graphic machine like the Xbox in Wii size, it would have a big wind tunnel sized fan on the back and heat sinks larger than the tubes coming out of the Alien’s back.
Regardless, I’m having fun will Bully still. I’m beating up Greaser kids over in Coventry!
I was watching The Porno Channel last Friday night with lots of moans and man-ass and penetration-less, bouncy boob shots. Oh don’t say you haven’t either. It’s called Showcase. Anyway, Showcase broadcasts a bevvy of racy shows that feature women with perfectly augmented breasts, secret German sex clubs and kinky people profiles of persons you might be standing next to, unsuspecting, while travelling on the subway every day. It’s Friday night and things are pumping after 10pm!
Right smack dab in the middle of all this erotic TV is a strategically placed ad featuring Kim Woodburn (I can’t make this up) and her squad of lovely homemakers who try hard to find the most practical solutions to keeping your house and home clean.
Buzz. Kill.
The way they film her is the antithesis of erotic, utterly killing any ideas of amorous advancements. Her head, with her hair pulled back so severely, looks like a spray-tan melon with a bun. Her voice has the perfect school marm tone and she looks out from your TV as if to say “I see what you’re doing to yourself!!”
Bravo, Showcase, for making sure we’re not taking your programming too seriously.
Quark: Buck Henry wrote this long before Spaceballs came out. Highly superior (which isn’t saying much, but hey, I was a geeky kid at home on a Friday night).
Project UFO: Again, at home on the weekend glued to the TV watching this crap. But looking at the episode synopsis, I think X Files borrowed heavily from this show.
Fantastic Voyage: Back when Filmation was making buckets of cash for one of the original Archies series, they made a few episodes of this bastardized movie.
Logans Run (TV): Pew pew pew! Pew pew pew!! Remember, no other element makes a 70s sci fi series converted from a movie more cheesier than an emotionless robot played by an actor at the end of his career.
Articles that made me laugh this week:
• The reason why SharkBoy got me the iPhone. 85% less sedatives? This is probably why I haven’t quit my job lately. (via Gizmodo)
• “The Cow Says Copyright Infringment!” (via Engadget)
• Is this the Second Coming of the Jesus Phone? The back looks like the template leak, but I don’t see a user-side camera… I would say mmmmmaybe. (again from Engadget)
• Erica Sundin, the iPhone goddess, confesses to not using her phone part of her iPhone. GASP! (via TUAW)
• Do you think Rogers will do this when they come to Canada? SNORT! Not on your life. (via ComputerWorld)
• No buttons, No Reception, All Ego. A parody ad easter egg in GTA IV (Via TUAW)
• Still one of my favorite groups on Flickr: iPhone Effects. Raw images out of the camera.
• And finally, R2D2 as video projector, yours for $3K (nothing to do with the iPhone, I know. But it’s FRAKKING COOL!)
I saw this on The Register today: the Office of Government Commerce gets a new logo!
According to an inside source, the graphic had allegedly already been inscribed onto mousemats and pens in anticipation of its imminent deployment, but it took OGC foot soldiers around 20 seconds to realise (sic) why this particular bit of joss-stick-driven madness was going to end in tears (of laughter):
Here’s the new logo:
Before I turn it sideways, have a read at 25 reasons you Might Be a Hard Core Designer (I got 22 out of 25!):
1. You’ve had a client that thought they knew more about design than you.
2. Your clients pay you for your professional expertise and skill, yet you’ve run into one of ‘those’ clients, that refuses to take the advice from the very person he/she is paying for advice (you).
3. You’ve had a client that insisted on using the font “Papyrus,” and you had to hold in your barf as you prepped it [the design] for printing.
4. You’ve requested a vector logo from a client, and instead, they email you a 72 dpi image they grabbed from a website.
5. You’ve used typography as a texture.
6. You don’t have a favorite font because you love “Typography.” Not Fonts. Choosing a favorite font would be like choosing a favorite child, it’s just wrong.
7. You collect as many free stuffs from the interwebs as you can on your hard drive, hoping that one day, that cool project will come along that you can actually use some cool shit on.
8. You’d rather have a free font than a free gallon of gas.
9. It’s hard to talk about frustrations at your job with a group of friends because they have no idea what “Vector” or “DPI” is, just to name a couple.
10. You’ve had a client ask you to “Make the logo bigger.”
11.You’ve had a client that insists on “filling up the space.”
12. You’ve learned to over-price web design projects because most clients are more picky about their websites than a high school girl picking out a prom dress.
13. You feel like you’re “On Call” half of the time because clients procrastinate so much.
14. You know keyboard shortcuts that require 4 fingers.
15. You’ve lost hours of work because an application crashed, and you had to start over from scratch because you were in the “zone” and forgot to save. Basically, you were having so much fun being creative that saving was the last thing on your mind at the time.
16. You’ve “Live-Traced” something.
17. You spend more hours per week looking at CSS showcase sites than you do at the gym.
18. The only thing that would make you happier than the demise of IE6 is world peace.
19. You’ve done everything but give up a body part to talk a client out of a “Flash Intro.” Yeah. I said it. Flash Intro. Sad, so so sad. (goes along with #2)
20. You have enough fonts on your hard drive to last you for: 1 font per day for about a decade, give or take a year or two.
21. You know, explicitly, what a “Flourish” is.
22. You worry about negative space as much as the content area.
23. You get phone calls from friends and family members on a regular, sometimes annoyingly-frequent basis, wanting your services for free or extremely cheap. (and the “portfolio” line makes you want to throw something across the room)
24. You’ve had a client that wants a website they can “update” on their own, but doesn’t know shit about websites.
25. You’re never more than 99% happy with your final product because you believe that EVERYTHING can be improved upon. (especially with those tight-deadline projects)
And the logo sideways (clear your mind and think There’s Something About Mary). It’s easy to see how turning a mousepad would reveal this cock up:
Yonge and Wellesley, 4pm. Just outside the doors of Seduction, a rather large sex shop. A family (mom, pop, kid and larvae in a stroller) are standing at the threshold…
Kid: This place is AWESOME!
Dad: It has three floors!
Mom: I don’t know…
Dad: Come on. Just a quick look.