I’m skivving off work at the moment. Looking for two-man hammocks (is that homoerotic?) and I find this on the Costco site.

Does the US Army shop there, post-Iraq, end-of-aggressions?

I spent the most part of my day trying to get rid of that blasted msblast.exe virus off the work computer. Oddly enough it was Norton Antivirus that wouldn’t let me delete the file off the computer. Weird. It makes me wonder what kind of stupid fat fuck thinks its cool to make a destructive program and release it into the world. Man’s fate to destroy itself, I guess.

I had a good chat with the owner of North Bound Leather. I was impressed with his attitude and manner. No wonder he has one of the best leather stores in North America. We mostly gossiped about the leather community and how it needs to be more cohesive now that big circuit parties are on the down slide. I so want to work in his office…at the end of the meeting, his secretary came in and said “they” needed the 2001 receipts. She looks at me and makes a face: “We’re being audited.” “Oh,” I said. “Yeah,” she says, “Later we’ll all be like this.” and bends over to show me her ass. Classy leather shop!

Tomorrow I will talk about the secret love I have for a homeless guy…

11:42PM

I forgot…I wanted to add my favorite sexual innuendo lines from Star Wars:

“You came in that thing? You’re braver than I thought!” Princess Lea
“You’re all clear kid, now let’s blow this thing and go home!” Han Solo
“Look at the size of that thing!” Wedge

Says a co-worker I just this moment teased: “I hope a bear comes into your tent!”

Me: (In my best Latrina from Bromwell High voice) “So do I, lady! So do I!”

Have a great weekend!

Me: Did you remember your shoes?

Sharkboy: Yup.

Me: Your towel?

Sharkboy: Yup.

Me: Did you remember your lock?

Sharkboy: Yup!

Me: How about your monkey?

Sharkboy: Oh geeze. Forgot that. But I do have a gorilla.

Me: (sputtering) Are you implying… Are you saying I’m… (pause) Well that makes you Jane Goodall! You have mousey blonde hair! You have mousey blonde hair! You have mousey blonde hair!

Sharkboy: Jane Goodall does chimps. Not gorillas.

Me: (unable to remember Dian Fossey’s name) Uh. Okay. You’re Sigourney Weaver at the tail end of her respectful career! You’re Sigourney Weaver at the tail end of her respectful career! You’re Sigourney Weaver at the tail end of her respectful career!

My 40th is coming up. I will gladly wear this out to dinner.

Of course, the Japanese are waaay ahead of their bulky American counterparts. Have a look at The Land Walker: the world’s first 340cm bipedal exoskeleton. And the efficient bio-suit soon to be dragging helpess humans around by their spines by 2006.

CRUSH!! KILL!! DESTROY!!

I was walking behind a text book atypical family of four (Dad, Mom, Son, Sis) on the way to work this morning and as they approached a city block the Dad pipes up:

“Okay, on this block, we’re going to pick up all the garbage on the sidewalk!”

Slight grumblings from the son and saunters over to a can by a doorway. The daughter took off, excited to get the most crap on/in her tiny mitts. Mom picks up a couple of wrappers and Dad went right into a bus shelter to get a Kleenex. Ew.

Now, I was amazingly proud of this family. They collected for one city block and stuffed stranger’s trash into a bin at the end of the block. They made picking up garbage on the block fun and helped make the city a little bit cleaner. More people should be as considerate.

But my negatory self, perched up on my shoulder with pitchfork and red catsuit, thought: Dad’s pretty cheap if that’s their form of family entertainment.

It took me about three viewings of Bromwell High (Uk site and Canada’s site)to actually ‘get’ it. If you’re not a fan of TV Flash animation, thick British accents or oddly drawn characters, then give this one a pass. Still with me? Good. Watch a couple and you will be treated to lines like:

“It is true that the Headmaster and I have lots in common: an enjoyment of food, gardening, docking…”

Yeah. Docking mentioned on a cartoon on TV. (If your name is Jim and you are from Boston and you don’t know what “docking” is, do a Google search with the safeties off) You can see why I like it.

I think my favorite character is Keisha. She’s Brash. Bullying. Ignorant. The kind of person you’d want at your back in a schoolyard fight. Her choppy Jamaican speech patterns are almost lyrical, shattered when she utters “motha fukka”. Everyone is her target and no one is spared.

Some would find it rather offensive but with such a large cast it enables them to make fun of pretty much every culture imaginable (including Gypsies!) under the “no one is safe” rules of comedy. It’s just a step past the line of “good taste in adult cartoons” that The Oblongs drew a few years back.

Stick with a couple episodes and you’ll get hooked. It’s on at 9:30 and 11:30 Mon-Thurs on Teletoon.

Weird. Like a pop culture singularity.

I have stumbled across three “John Carter of Mars” websites today without use of search engine or actively hunting them down. Once = “Cool!” Twice = “Hum. That’s interesting.” Thrice = “yeeks!”

I read (I think) three of these books as a kid. Swords, loincloths, Martians and honour.

Never really bought the whole “gettin’ tuh Mars sans spacecraft” though.

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.

Hello and welcome! Tonight’s top stories:

Fancy Dress: what not to wear on the treadmill
When to Stop: Owchie!
New Species of Gym Bunny
and
Ohm Pah Pah! Or, Make Mine Mild!

• Sharkboy and I enter the cardio room to find a man wearing semi-dressy chinos and a Hawaiian shirt running on a treadmill like he was being chased by a demon or a cop or a demon cop with bees in it’s mouth. I speculated to Sharkboy that this person found his way into the gym without having his ID checked. Sharkboy speculated that he was an idiot. Thankfully he was wearing sneakers, so the shock on his legs would not have been that bad.

• Speaking of shock, a few moments later a woman painfully lifted herself up onto a neighbouring treadmill and started it up into a quick-shuffle, something above “hungry zombie spying a headcheese loaf”. She was wearing black knee-to-upper-thigh tensor bandages, cyborg knee supports and a marathon t-shirt. Time to quit, I thought. Bah. She migh be going through physio, but the marathon tee didn’t support the argument that running is good for you, long term.

• Enter The Hummingbird. This incredibly small creature (5’7″ I estimate) floats, nay hovers between the machine he’s working on and the water fountain without any evidence of his hips, torso or head deviating from a 1cm sine wave. His speed is incredible for the amount of unsauntering walk he exerts!

• I guess it was Octoberfest in the showers because I interrupted a sausage comparing contest. Two bratwurst-proud contestants were showing their heafty meat entries to each other. Both their parents obviously didn’t skimp on the stuffing! I must be “November” because when I walked in, the party was over.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is this month’s installment of The Gym Report. Stay tuned for More of the Same! with Regis Philbin and Kelly Rippah