Steve Buzcek’s Onyx Ball was, as usual, a bearful place to be for hirsuit and the affectionate who love them. While there was your slightly less than average twink population, the crowd was still diverse and the music wasn’t offensive (MLT contest was still better). A good mix of leather and denim, shirtless and thankfully clothed. The staff at the Opera House genuinely seemed to be happy to be serving you, not like the Government where the droids you hand your money over to don’t thank you for your tip or crack their perfect faces with a smile.

It was your usual decor of balloons and dollar store streamers. The drag show rumoured to start at 1am never happened by the time we left closer to 2am. Will I get a discount on the next ball?

In all, I’d give it a 3 out of 5. Not super, not bad, just familiar. It was satisfying but not a “Ball” in any sense of the word.

After a long weekend of reverie, I am warmed to see pigeons eating the corn from puke left on the sidewalks from parties the night before.

Bless these winged sanitation volunteers!

I get a MSN moments ago with an interesting link:

Rogers Kills Bittorrent

Silently in the last month or so, Rogers has been capping and data throttling High Speed Ultra users (yes the ones who’ve paid for unlimited data transfer) who seem to be using Bittorrent.

It’s ok. You Ultra subscribers said that this was ok in your End User Agreements.

Hello, Sympatico?

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.

While I’m on the rant of legal justice and moral forgiveness, I noticed today that the Black Eagle is taking a Liquor Board of Ontario Induced Time Out for “overcrowding” during Pride last year.

Here’s the inside poop for you people: the Eagle wasnt overcrowded. Ask any of the people in the line up, waiting over 45 minutes to get up onto the patio. The bar was fully staffed and was doing their job properly. Meanwhile, the prosecutor for the Liquor Board had no proof because the investigators didnt file a complete report, yet still pushed to have the bar closed for 45 days, which would have effectively killed the bar. In front of the judge, it came down to the Eagle’s word against the Liquor Board. Now, to be fair, The Eagle got similar infractions in the past but the bar placed doormen at the top and bottom (tee hee!) of the stairs which is a considerable cost in wages and training. The bar complied and even surpassed their requests with physical upgrades to the bar.

Dispite all the time and money the Black Eagle put into renovations and new hires, dispite the lack of evidence from the investigators, the judge ruled that the bar should be closed for 11 days. To appeal this decision, it would have cost twice the amount as being closed for 11 days so the bar shut it’s mouth.

Now, I’m no lawyer (but my brother plays one on TV!!) but I don’t see the justice here.

I should be making how much?! Scroll down to third from the bottom, Graphics Designer. And that’s USD$. I am no where near the mean. And that makes me mean.

Not that I’m greedy or anything. I just want to be able to buy my dad’s crap car.

Update: I just checked with Salary.com and got this tidbit for our Canadian readers:

A typical Web Designer working in Toronto, ON earns a median base salary of $55,724, according to our analysis of data reported by corporate HR departments. Half of the people in this job earn between $49,245 and $64,919.

So I am running about $20K less than the median! Holy slave-driving crap!