As some of you know, I produce promotional material for Toronto’s premiere Leather/Denim/Cruising bar, The Black Eagle.

The GM from the bar just sent me a request for a print ad:

I wanted to add “Comes with dedicated web/graphic designer, cheap”

I doubt he’s going to get that price. Although, it’s down from the rumoured $1M everyone was saying he was asking.

And to my Graphic Design readers, yes I moved the price line up into the body of the ad in the final copy. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was on Dayquils.

The first issue of Aeon Flux is out and it’s 9.5 out of 10 in my opinion. The artwork has nods to Peter Chung’s original character/layout design and the writing manages to pull quotes from the original cartoons while tying in the movie look and feel nicely. MTV has some panels for your parusal, but you have to sit through some ads (pop up link, near the bottom).

I have a feeling that the movie will not be as true-to-the-comic (cartoon?) as Sin City but time will tell.

I’m so excited that I nearly dropped the comic book in the toilet of my office loo.

This morning, I did something I haven’t done since the mid-80s:

I put shampoo in my hair.

I actually woke up with bed head and had to laugh. It wasn’t much but I did have a small wing of hair sticking out perpendicular to my scalp. No I did not repeat.

Cut me some slack. I was busy last week and my “new” clippers snag on my hair when it gets longer than 2mm.

Blamblog made me laugh…

I’ve spent a total of 27++ hours in a car this weekend in a return trip to Sharkboy’s sister’s house in Vermont (via a quick pick up/drop off of his parents and aunt just south of Montreal). I still can’t believe I only took one picture. One picture!

The trip was good. It was nice to get out of the city and see his family again but I was on the tail end of a cold and all I was in the mood for was soup, a blanket and brainless TV. When we got there, we dumped our luggage, grabbed Sharkboy’s nefew, Shawn and spent two hours in Best Buy rummaging around the DVDs and doo dahs. I picked up the Oblong Complete Series DVD, which I think isn’t available in Canada yet. Also a cable to start burining all my 1980’s English import records to CD and a set of reflective headphones for my iPod. We then wandered a grocery store and lectured Shawn on how lame Canadian food shopping is. But in retrospect I like Canadian grocery stores because it’s not in-your-face, olestra-is-good, or completely desperately capitalistic, like American food shopping is. It’s almost like Canada is eating to survive and Americans are (toot ta ta tooot!) EATING! I can’t really put my finger on it. Maybe its because Ontario doesn’t sell liquor beside Gatorade.

I think we also spent a great amount of time in front of TV screens that were the size of one of The Bluenose’s sails (how’s that for Canadian content?). Sharkboy’s brother-in-law has a video rental distribution business and therefore has two large TVs to sample his product. In one of his storage closets in his basement, he has many, many 60L rubbermaids full of movies. At random I pulled out a DVD called VOLCANO DISASTER which had “Disaster” in such small letters it was obvious that bored, drunk or blind Vermontians looking for a disaster film would have picked it up thinking it was Tommy Lee Jones’ Volcano. It was like DVD store phishing!

Coming home was rough. We stopped in Montreal on Monday morning to grab some petit dejeuner and we were treated to seeing all the Black and Blue sketchies walking down Sainte-Catherine, shivering heavily in their skintight wet tees in the 13C morning air. Ha! After that we hit the highway and for some reason, all weekend, I had bad car-narcolepsy. If I wasn’t driving, I was nodding off, no matter how loud the stereo was. I think it was a combo of the cold medicine and accumulated lack of sleep the week before. Poor Sharkboy. So on the last leg (Montreal to Toronto) I drove. Now, I know that the 401 is a major highway but I have never experienced stop-n-go traffic from Kingston to Toronto. Seriously. It wasnt even raining all that hard to make the traffic to slow so much. It was pure volume. Spooky how much traffic there was.

We came home and dumped the luggage and went out to Big Momma’s Boy on Parliament. I think I was a bit short to the owner because she was proudly announcing how gluten free and organic everything on the menu was and I said “We just spent 10 hours in a car from Montreal” and she aburptly stopped her sales pitch. The food was delish and I would go back in a second but I was so tired that I don’t think I completely enjoyed the actual taste of it.

At home, we got into bed by 9pm and I swear, I could still feel the vibration of the car on my backside.

That was my weekend. How was yours?

The only interesting thing I’ve experienced this week has been an increase of cardio from 30 min per workout to 45 mins. You can tell that THE CRUISE is coming up soon (28 Days!).

While nothing exciting is going on in my life, these are a couple things I am tracking on the web:

Virtual virus wipes out many Elves. It’s like a million geek voices cried out at once! (via Cnet News)

Mashiro Fukuyama makes suits based on mythology and anime video game culture. (from we-make-money-not-art.com)

Cruising for Sex is not a chairty (worksafe, via Wired Blogs)

A List Apart somehow is able to view into the boardroom of where I work!

I knew Firefox could jump you right to IMDB when you type “IMDB The Black Hole” but I didn’t know you can create the same quick search within your bookmarks for any site that has search capabilities! Keen! (via Addicted To New)

Remember when I said Jack Osborne was L.A. hot? Now he’s Martin Scorsese Taxi Driver Hot (via Hollywood Rag)

Okay that’s enough regurgitation. Maybe something interesting will happen to me this evening…

At 5:45am this morning I had a revelation:

I have never, ever, seen Veronica Lodge’s mother in print.

And there she was, while I sat on the toilet doing my morning purge, in all her white haired glory, looking like a matronly Sharon Stone, smiling like Veronica could do no damage to the world. I thought how weird that I have never seen her before in all my 40 years on the planet. It was a big deal.

And then 20 pages later, there she was again. But this time, typical to the style of Archie comics, Veronica’s mom looked like a fat European opera singer.

I started to wonder about the rest of the missing parents in Archie’s world: Betty’s dad – vapor; Dilton’s parents – glasss; Reggie’s mom ‘n pop – ghosts. But the most worrysome missing parental guidance of all that I never recalled seeing was Jughead’s. Here’s a kid who hates girls, eats waaay too much and seemingly has difficulty dressing himself, wandering in and out of the pages of Archie comics without a hint of Children’s Aid on his tail. I always identified with him because he was such an oddball yet accepted. When I started to wear freaky stuff in high school just like Juggie, I was immediately classified as Art Fag or Theatre fag.

I’m putting too much into this, I am sure.

The Guardian is reporting that Siemens has developed a paper thin TV screen for cheap (about $50/metre). The screen is powered by paper thin batteries and can receive a charge remotely but currently the screens aren’t expected to last much longer than a few days.

Scan ahead a few decades with me and indulge my imagination: You’re lost in the city. You extend your arm and your sleeve accesses the nearby access station wirelessly. You touch your appointments icon and an arrow appears across your forearm directing you to where you want to go. With an abundance of cheap video I suspect that written language will die or at least be pared down to a base level and we will rely on sound and symbol more, cutting out the need to s-p-e-l-l everything out. Visual communication will be reverted to a curious mix of Nintendo icons resembling Celtic runes/Egyptian hieroglyphics, created for fast download and maximum impact. I can imagine English being morphed into a video-Esperanto.

Think of it… Graphic Design will superceed English language lessons in school. Crazy! It’s a future I could live with.

With my hand-me-down amp (thanks OldAudioDude!) and garage sale turntable, I am about to embark on the greatest computer adventure ever… burning my old LPs to CD. When I lived in England I loved music, as opposed to these days where music and I nervously say “hi” while passing in the laundry room. Back then I would scour stores and boot-sales for the best of mid-80s extended remixes like ohh… (randomly grabs a record out of his old milk crate that could actually hold an album) this one: Zang Tumb Tuum’s release of Propaganda’s 12 inch “beta” version (they were so advanced! Using “beta” in the 80s!) P-Machinery or … this one… Vicious Pink’s C-C-Can’t You See

If you want a sampling of the music I’m burning, check out Club 80s with DJ Lex. Or if you have iTunes: Radio >> 70s/80s Pop >> Club 80s with DJ Lex. It’s no Dayglo radio (rest it’s soul) but it’s fun, nonetheless.

An amazing translation for a fuzzy household item:

Front:

SUPER – Family are essential
New product of 21th century

TEN THOUSAND USE
THE DISH CLOTH
• The softness absorbs
• water wring dry
• easily do not drop the floss

Back:

Characteristics: jie card dish cloth, the adoption imports the high class absorbs water the natural plant in sex fiber,combining to was processed by international advanced techique to make into,is material that excellent product to match the enviromental protection,it is soft,absorbing water the dint strong,wring dry easily,after using only through use the cleaning of water can immediately wash away cloth top dirty mark dust,convenience fleetness.
Use: be applicable to put on the clean living room,kitchen and bath indoor and every kind of surface,include furniture,container,electris appliances,piano,car, dining table,ceramic tile,window slot,bathtub and superficial and dirty xO, dust in,etc.in faucets and waters order.fuck to put on the wet putting on all can.

Fuck to put on the wet, indeed!