Today at my office’s pot luck lunch, someone was giving out luggage tags from one of our suppliers. The weird part was that they had the logo for the movie “FLIGHTPLAN” on them, the movie about losing your daughter right out from under your sleeping arm.

A tag for your luggage for a movie about losing your daughter.

Am I reaching here? I thought it was pretty funny.

So exactly why would a gay person want to be part of this organization? So rife with understanding and compassion.

And they couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate picture.

Saturday night and Sharkboy and I are walking towards the campground’s party tent. We pass a small tree and instantly we’re covered in spider threads.

“I’m covered in websites!” howls Sharkboy. His English fails him in times of panic (he hates spiders).

“I’ve got URLs in my hair!” I respond.

This Saturday I am hanging a few pictures at the Timothy’s Coffee Clutch (or “The Bear Store” if you’re so inclined) at Church and Alexander. A collection of pop art canvases of characters involved with risk management while infringing on copywright laws. Here’s a sneak peek for you. As a tangent thought: remember how the major networks use to generate so much hype about the Fall Saturday Morning Cartoon Season? Brightly coloured full page ads in Archie + Jughead comics. They use to get me so whipped out of shape in anticipation to see these crap cartoons (Hey… I’ve seen this before. Speed Buggy is really Scooby Doo. They’re just hashing out the same characters!!) while munching on my sister’s perfect PB+J sammiches. I have no clue where that random synapse fire came from.

The next pic is a preview illustration for The Black Eagle’s Halloween poster. You get the drift: barrel of toxic zombie monkeys. I did this in seconds, had no scanner so I took a picture of it with my digicam, ran it through photoshop, streamline and then illustrator. Then I saw where my line mistakes were and need to redraw some of it and do the whole process again. But I like the energy of it. Zombie Monkeys!!

I was so busy with freelance and painting that I failed to contact the owner of Timothys in the last two weeks. She had my old number and could not get a hold of me and since we didn’t talk, she gone done given away my spot.

I’m not upset about this at all, suprisingly. I was cramming two finished paintings before the weekend and was worried that the quality of them was suffering. Now I have some breathing room.

Plus I haven’t made all my “SOLD” cards yet.

So hold up, people. I’ll let you know when it’s going to happen.

I ate a bug this morning while walking Sharkboy to work.

It flew into my mouth before I knew what was going on and bypassed my tounge and went right into my throat. I could feel it bounce off the back of my epiglottis and instantly I swallowed out of habit. Wiggle. Cough. Swallow. Gone. Over in seconds.

Yeah. Slow blogging day.

My off-the-boat-from-Italy grandma was always an enigma to me. Due to her broken English and my fear of trying to connect with this strange lady, we never talked much. We would communicate in different ways though: she would smile at my arrival and instantly put food in front of me and laugh with her eyes. Rosemary was our verb, chicken, the nouns and gnocchi was the “How you doin’?”.

One day I remember going over to Grandma’s house to find my sister in a tizzy. She was sitting at the dining room table with notebook paper strewn all about, the sheets covered in a Bic pen chicken scratch. My had sister discovered that Grandma had been taking notes from the other side and was reading over some of her conversations. Grandma had been talking with a little girl through ghost writing for a couple years and had let my sister read over the conversations while she laid down (it took a lot out of her apparently). Grandma would go into a trance-like state and start to mumble while the pen flew over the page, the girl telling stories of living in “her time” and ominously talk of things coming up in Grandma’s life.

The last note was of an impending suffering Grandma would have to struggle through. Very open ended but creepy, none the less. Of course a while later she was in and out of the Doctor’s for glaucoma and various other health problems. And then Grandpa went downhill with his health. All pretty much predictable and not too spooky.

Creepy was that the notes were written in English. The spelling was bad, but the structure was better than her pidgin speak.

The Globe has a story of internet gloom and doom: Canadian children are running amok across broadband internet, downloading anything not passworded down!

The illegal downloading has cost retail music stores more than half a billion dollars in lost sales since 1999, a study by Pollara for the recording industry estimates.

While some observers believe Internet piracy is a widespread phenomenon, most illegal file swapping is done by younger Canadians, the Pollara report sys (sic).

Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading, even though they make up only 21 per cent of the population, it says.

Wired Mag recently claimed that 30% of all internet traffic is BitTorrent movie transfers so this is no big bit of news. But I was curious as to this company Pollara…

According to their website, Pollara conducts market research using up-to-the-minute internet technology like “Rogers@home”.

“Rogers@home”? That hasn’t been around for about 5 years now.

Oh wait a minute. Looking back at Pollara’s homepage, you can see that the copyright branding is stuck at year 2000. Even the “Chairman’s message” is dated June 6th, 2000 (funnily enough, the HTML file is called “chairmess”). He hasn’t said anything more relevant regarding market research or online studies since the dotcom bust? It certainly validates all their hard work in their internet research when their “Web Based Services” section reads like a pre-bust-how-we-gonna-make-money-on-dis-innnernet-thing manifesto, while all the links on their “Remote Viewing via VPN Webcast” page (including the ever-so curious “demonstration”) are dead. In an ironic statement from their site they offer “your producers, designers and marketers (to) attend a session where customers give instant feedback on your site’s design.” Coming from a site that seems like it hasn’t been updated in years, I say “Physician, heal thyself.”

This is obviously a company that knows how to conduct internet research, by golly! Like their study where they find that men are more likely to swear at their computers when frustrated.

Wow. Shocker.

To be fair, I have noticed that Pollara has been called “one of Canada’s best known and most respected polling firms” (Broadcaster Magazine) so maybe they’re good on the ground, but they certainly don’t instill any confidence in me to trust them on the web.

Moniker Online Services, LLC
20 SW 27th Ave.
Suite 201
Pompano Beach, Florida 33069

Re: Invoice #2005-09

October 4, 2005

To Whom It May Concern:

I am providing you with my invoice for advertising on my private, non-commercial site for the month of September 2005. Your company was responsible for content and comment spam I received during that month supplied by clients who use your services, which in turn, required me to pay an additional charge for extra bandwidth required to display your client’s ads. Since I am unable to contact them directly due to their dubious business practices, I feel it is your responsibility to pass this charge onto your clients while covering my costs.

September Bandwidth overages: $78.00CDN

Payment can be made to the address below. If you require 30, 60 or 90 day payment options, we can discuss terms via email below.

Thank you.

Regards,

Ted
Deadrobot.com

Update: I got a response!

Subject: FW: Invoice for Sept/Oct 2005
From: “Monte Cahn” monte@moniker.com
Date: Tue, October 4, 2005 10:47 pm
Cc: legal@moniker.com

You need to send this invoice to the domain owner/Registrant or the hosting
company that is hosting the domain. We are the Registrar not the
registrant.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Monte Cahn
Founder / CEO

I went back to the top three spammer’s URLs and lo and behold the sites are gone. In the ever successful War on Drugs, it was the policy of the US to undermind the suppliers of the drug, right? In that vein, I feel that Monkier should be held accountable for selling these bulk URLs to known spammers. So what should I write back to (snicker) Monte? Suggestions in the comments, please!

At home sick today, kids. Ugrh. I am sooo trendy I went out and got that cold everyone has.

Couple Halo related things for your attention:

Peter Jackson will produce the movie version of the game so you know it won’t suck…!

This Spartan Life has a short video blog update of “bodyguard auditions”. I guess they’re going to hire muscle for their next show so that the guests don’t get shot up.

All this Halo talk makes me want to re-read Larry Niven’s Ringworld first book. Or John Varley’s lesbian inspired Titan series.