people

this one goes out to all the super-couples... party provocateurs and dancefloor agitators; heroes and heroines; mythological contemporaries; social gravity wells orbited by the bawdy and the bleak, the love-bruised and the abashed; the nettleless nexuses; warpless weavers of the cooperative; the divisionless divine; you who have the most to lose, yet still cast us choice trimmings of the goodwill; you deep founts of heady virtue; you fine people, so lucky in love, bigger than you are. though our glory-baskings prove mostly silent, the rest of us are much obliged. recognize yourselves, because this toast's t'youse!

shook Kid Koala's hand yesterday. his hand left mine as Eric's. we both agreed it was cold now. i said 'keep it up' and winced and went outside and lit a cigarette. it felt like he had information in his hand.

swat aym towking bowt

"umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" means 'a person is only a person through their relationship to others' OR 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.' --- (according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu)
It's Big Willy's latest pickup line... but the fucker is right, we're all in silent contract with each other. This is a key to a thought that struck me yesterday: accepting X is inherent to the promotion of X (pretty straight forward). For example, promoting Socialism implies that the promoter believes -to some extent- that we are already enmeshed in a system of social interdependency. Environmental conservationalism implies the tacit acceptance that the environment is endangered. The extension of this is what interests me: if, by whatever manner, acceptance of an idea enters collective conception, promotion of the idea will proliferate, perhaps even autonomously. Too bad there're so many competing Xs on the planet. Or maybe there aren't enough.

Trying to keep it down to one a day, but this video is why exceptions can become the rule

Found this on an old friend's MSN tag. I laughed the mustard stain right off my shirt.

the overherd

from 4 years ago (and in all seriousness): 'I am vaguely more smarter than a monkey'
from last night at cock'n'bull's craft night (an honest to goodness pickup sequence at 2am):
drunk camo girl wearing blueblockers: (speaking of the busboy) That guy is such a row-bot.
victim: huh? yeah...
dcgwbb: so.. are you from Canada?
v: (mumbles something into his glass)
dcgwbb: do you like 18th century english literature?
v: well, yeah.
dcgwbb: i just find it soooo english
we left. but then doubled back because we were howling so hard and had to hear more:
victim: (having found his mojo)... and this is why the produce section at Provigo...
we left for good.

easy rider

-tried to find out the meaning of Easy Rider.. if ever you wondered, check it out here.
-about 10 days ago, i sorted my wallet (a biannual event. whatever biannual REALLY means, it's applicable here) and lo and behold: out pops a post-it with the e-mail address of someone i met in Victoria over a year ago (likely even 2!). the currents of life are strange: it was my friend JoAnne's e-mail, who was roommates with Lucy mid-summer (AND girlfriend/muse/custodian to Chris, fellow Fisherman's Wharf dweller!!!) if you ask me, that's just too uncanny. go on, ask me...
-Heraclitus once said: 'A man's character determines his fate'... if only we could claim that a man also determines his character... (to add temperance: this bandying around of the word 'man' is just a pronomial colloquialism. women ARE fate.)
-somebody please hire me

n-haughty OR n-ice (aywa or la'a?)

Sabah el khan. Ana esmi Tom. Ana moš fī madrasa. Akteb ketāb.
Good morning. My name [is] Tom. I [am] not in school. I write a book.

- - - something that still deeply perplexes me is the concept of 'nice'. what the fuck IS it? receptive to others' personality? allowing space? accepting differences? resilience to violence? but this can be drawn from pure passivity, a 'default' setting. a scared person could be considered nice. obviously, there's much more dialogue behind communication than just verbal exchange. so passivity is only on a sliding scale... being polite is active (even acting) and 'nice', but could be considered deceptive. i've sometimes been accused of being 'nice', and i don't react well to it. for some reason it makes me angry... perhaps i associate a certain amount of supplication or indetermination with the word, because i don't out-and-out dislike the overall concept of 'nice', i just don't understand it. i also find it very alarming when someone i know and care for is not 'nice'. in fact, it pains me, especially when the not-nice is directed towards me. so i propose to exile 'nice' from my vocabulary to avoid the piranhas lurking beneath its surface and use the word 'kind' instead - - -

only six days left for the joke challenge... so far, jordan's won and he didn't even include a punchline! does this not infuriate anyone? (ps. the jokes do not have to be exclusively lewd... personally lame ones impress me the most... eg. Q: What's brown and sticky? A: A stick. OR How does it change many dyslexics to take a lighbulb?)
If anyone was curious as to L's and my joke (v0.3)... it's this (adulterated from original to assist those not from New York) Q: What do you call two dweebs fucking? A: A pairadorks.

equinox

quick post. trying to reset clock and catch lighted mornings while they're still around to catch. was so addled i told a lady who was worried that my cup was at the table she sat down at that i was not using the table, and only using the table as a table. i'm not even monolingual. am going to blame Quebec's cultural predilection towards issues pur laine.
saw rollerblading leprecaun today. great guy. sometimes whizzes by on one blade (other outstretched behind him) or does handstands to impress the ladies. he has a new pair of raging headphones. also had an 8am battle of eyelids with skeletor. i don't know if he knew about it. there is an outside chance that he's on to me.
am reading now: the odyssey, the cosmic serpent (slowly), the storytelling coach, viroid life, tom sawyer, and the alexandria quartet (still)... wish one'd stick out, but it's like 'mood' reading. feels a bit diluted. forgot how jive the odyssey was.

tried to release home-made joke (it was collaborative effort with my a&s) into the collective, but preliminary trial-runs induced very tepid results. so, i offer a challenge: post the funniest joke you know/can come up with and i'll run them through a highly judicious and selective screening process with a panel of expert laughers/alcoholix. there's no limit on submissions, and the more base/lewd/tasteless the better. the entrant submitting the tasteleast of the jokes will receive a one-of-a-kind prize in the mail, and i promise it'll be awesomer than a fart in a jar. looking for self-generated ones, but all are welcome. no anecdotes please. deadline: oct 1st 2006. i'm wagering the winner'll be albertan.

PERSPICACITY

Oh yeah, word of the day...
per‧spi‧cac‧i‧ty
–noun
1.
keenness of mental perception and understanding; discernment; penetration.
2.
Archaic. keen vision.

(-adj. = perspicacious)

heard it: while reading 'Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition' (don't ask, I've never read Nietzsche in my life...)
example: '...a political perspicacity that is often lacking in current discourse.'

also came across this: a team of archaeologists desilting the harbour in efforts to reveal the ancient city of Alexandria (photo of "Priest carrying an effigy of Osiris of Canopus found on the Antirhodos Island near the two sphinxes.") Website: Franck Goggio. If only there were more lives to lead...

Now this is hilarious. I don't quite remember from whence it came (G and I had a riotous afternoon over it last winter), but it still has me in stitches: http://objectiveministries.org/creation/sciencefair.html.
If you dare, click around... the 'aquatic monkeys' article is acutely idiotic (you can just hear the derisive snicker under phrases such as 'billions of years ago...' and '...one day, one of them gave birth to a human') and Dr. Troy Franklin, Baptist demon exorcism specialist, presents quite the alternative to Halloween.

Thales' neckache

NASA has done it again. I've no idea how the BBC obtained this picture of Eris (the new planet to fill Pluto's void, named after the Greek goddess of discord), but it sucks. What are they using over there? FunSnaps? This is more likely to be a foreign dignitary's last glimpse of the world as seen through the gap in Condoleeza Rice's front teeth than a planet. Sure, it's waaay past Pluto. Only 70km bigger and has a solar orbit of 560 years, but come ON! Reminds me of the tale Plato recounts of Thales, that one day, while intently looking at stars, he fell down a well. So he must've been among the first to've seen Eris...

Yet another thing about them to dread

What is it about hippie-poos that make them so hard to flush? My friends Jo and Chris went off on quite the inspired diatribe against this schmuck of a sublettor they fell victim to this summer (nobody needs to know his name is Sam.) The whole thing reminded me of this scene in 'PCU' by Jeremy Piven recounting his grating and scarring experiences whilst rooming with David Spade. The coup de grace was what Jo called 'a big hippie-poo, lovingly wrapped in toilet paper, left for someone to find in the toilet bowl' (not a direct quote, but rye was involved, so it's at my liberty, ok?) This sparked my remagination to unleash a devastatingly powerful and moving montage of all the hippie-poos I'd ever witnessed before, only then realizing that I'd senselessly overlooked the association that each of these floaters had been generated by a dirt-bag hippie. HAHA, right? Well, I am at Pi, and was imbued with the 'urge', and went to wait by the bathroom door. A hippie came out, and the toilet water was swirling, and there was a cheeky nug bobbing about. So I flushed again. No go. Now, I have many toilet taboos, as I'm sure is common, and one is the inability to poo into a toilet with poo occupying it already. I'd never done it before, but this little turdpedo was being real stubborn, matched only by the 'urge' (to emerge) and the Pi toilet does not have the LPF capacity to try coating it with TP to help drag it away. So I caved, and using my patented splashback-proofing method (3 easy installments of $9.99 or one month's supply of Goji berries and this ancient technique will be yours) pooped into another man's poo-bowl. Wiped. Flushed. Washed my hands. And then peeped back into the stall, just to make sure... My poo was gone. The hippie's was still there. Reminds me of the Primal Scream's XTRMNTR opener: KILL ALL HIPPIES.

bloviate

where i heard it: Israeli news website (www.ynetnews.com) in regards to recent Israeli leadership methods...

blo·vi·ate (blv-t) intr.v. Slan. blo·vi·at·ed, blo·vi·at·ing, blo·vi·ates
To discourse at length in a pompous or boastful manner: “the rural Babbitt who bloviates about ‘progress’ and ‘growth’” (George Rebeck).

(to provide even more cocktail-party swagger to the daunting 'fanfaronade', Eve...)

Information

silence is the most treacherous shore
now that i've listened to all my moony music, i'm going to turn the headphones around and listen again: it's time for some krojb
sometimes i wish information degraded faster
no wonder the past burns libraries
no more wonder. give me corporeality or give me death (hahaha)

Loudini

So I dangled in front of Mont Royal metro station this morning for my coffee. Nice spot that. Slanting sunjuices and coveys of interesting people scurrying around. A good place to sit and sip. So I did, and while watching what could have been Gina Davis's drunk-double polish off another beer and hurl invective at innocents, I naturally thought about my mother. And to think about my mother these days is to also think about Louis, her dog.

Louis has a checkered past. He is a German Shepherd that the BC Humane Society caught when he wondered off a reservation and into a supermarket parking lot (the SPCA claims it has no authority in reservations, but they'd been 'tracking' him for a while.) He had not been neutered and had cigar burns on his front legs. After seeing his picture Becky forwarded, my mum shot up there and adopted the kid... the name they'd given him was Roger. So she brought him home and tried to make the transition easy on him, as he was rightfully very skittish. Little did she know to the degree.

Rosie (my mum) would plonk him in a cage when she left the house, just so he could get accustomed. His treats were a few toys, comfy blanket and a pig's ear to keep him entertained. On returning, she found the dog at the door looking very glad to see her. Louis'd chewed through the front brackets of the cage. Impressed, my mum asked Devon (more about Devon in later posts, I'm sure) to fortify the door. He made the door nigh near unbreakable: Louis was now the dog in the iron mask...

Next time she returned, Louis was once again by the door. A little guilty looking perhaps, but free nonetheless. This time he'd chewed his way through the side of the cage (which is some feat), and with an added twist had retreived a book called How To Train Your German Shepherd, and dropped it into the cage for my mum to find. So this is how she discovered Louis' fuck-you style. He'd also started gnawing his way through the walls of the house. One particularly impressive place was around a glass pane... She looked for help from an animal trainer called Gary. This guy domesticates bears, so why not a housepet, right? Wrong. No joy. Louis chewed his way through her seatbelts in her car. Climbed through the cracked windows in car-parks. Followed us into movie stores (a bull in a china shop those episodes). And then there's the fight with other dogs.

The fights came fast, and had everything to being on the end of a leash. If he was off, he'd cajole the other dog into making a break for it to go hunt deer or wrestle with a rope. If on. He'd go for the murder (he sounds vicious, but he's a big softy with seperation anxiety issues. When I lived with him, he and I were actually inseparable, and asides from Ben, my only friend in Cowichan Bay. We'd go rockclimbing together, I'd take him to work with me, he'd try and flush out deer in the woods for me to catch, and look really crestfallen when I didn't leap to it, instead I just stroked the deer as it bounced by.)

So my mum went back to Gary. And Gary says that we've been too soft on him and that, this time, 'NO MERCY. Show Louis who's alpha.' And taught my mother how to wrestle dogs so they defer. So now, whenever she walks the pooch, and he gets into a cocky swagger in front of another dog, she launch herself at him and body-slams him to the ground. This is too much for the tender sensibilities of Vancouver Island people, so she gets scowls and tuts from all the losers that caused the problem in the first place.

I have no idea why a shit-faced Gina Davis made me think of my mother beating the crap out of her own dog.

piece it together...

detail
1603, from Fr. détail, from O.Fr. detail "small piece or quantity," from detaillier "cut in pieces," from de- "entirely" + taillier "to cut in pieces." Modern sense is from Fr. en détail "piece by piece, item by item" (as opposed to en gros), a commercial term used where we would today use retail. Military sense is 1708, from notion of "distribution in detail of the daily orders first given in general," including assignment of specific duties. The verb is from 1637.

Dead Bill: Hey Ted? Wanna play 20 questions?
Dead Ted: Okay! I got one!
Dead Bill: Is it a mineral?
Dead Ted: Yeah!
Dead Bill: Are you a tank?
Dead Ted: Whoa! Yeah!

9 year-olds approximating love (spring story)

Corrine Hill

Mister McNamara told us what his name meant in Gaelic during the second week of classes. We’d already noted his stormy tendency to huff air through his fiery moustache whenever his authority was trespassed, but it was that name that cemented our collective 9-year-old awe in place. ‘Son-of-a-Sea-Dog…’ we’d whisper reverently to the kids from other classes, ‘how’s life with Ms. Gaye?’ His name and humourous teaching methods galvanized our class-identity to near-mythical proportions. Though we were as much a muddle of misfits as the next class, we somehow had the playtime edge: we appointed ourselves administrators and acting-judiciaries of ‘It’, ombudsmen to any of the larger trades made in those spontaneous playground-bazaars, and all-round McNamara deputies.

Two things about our class had immediately caught my attention. The first was that there was a new girl, Corrine Hill. The second was that I actually found this interesting. I’d peek across the room to where she sat radiating, and I’d swear she made everyone else see-through: hair of muted flax; adoring sky-eyes, as big and wide and blue; and a triumphant overbite that gave the impression her body had yet to grow around her teeth. She struck me as the Platonic Ideal must’ve struck Wagner, and I made sure to send a sigh over to her every time she evoked it.

Our North London school had a fine policy of sweetening Friday afternoons: after lunch, we’d assemble in our respective homerooms, and, jumpers smelling vaguely of rancid milk, pair up and file off towards Regents Park. We’d leave the old convent that was our main school building, and trundle through heavy traffic until reaching the flaky iron gates of the park. Once there, the teachers hastily pointed out the boundaries before retreating to their smoke-bench. We’d go ape-shit: horsey girls would gallop off in one direction, while the lads would throw down goalposts in another. McNamara’s class would either congeal into open-field warfare ‘It’, or break into expedition groups and map the park.

One Friday in late September, McN4 started queuing up to march on the park. Being nine exempted us from the mandatory hand-holding that the grade 3s suffered, sulkily trailing snotty fingers of their free hands through the passing hedgerows. For us, this meant that boy-girl couples were gloweringly acceptable. During the customary jostle to find the favoured partner, I slipped out from under Tetsu’s questing eyes and instead went to quiver next to Corrine. Because pointedly standing next to a girl suggested that I might’ve gone mad, I offered only what I construed to be a smile. Corrine acquiesced toothily, if not with pink cheeks. Then the pied-piper lurched forward into the dark halls, she and I a pair in its midst.

En route silence was strictly enforced. This was a good thing, as I had dinosaurs in my belly and felt I’d squawk if I opened my mouth. But every sidelong glance I stole revealed a new expression: a bitten bottom-lip, flicked hair, a purposeful gaze on the distance. It was a long walk and Corrine was MSG to my senses; black splodges of paved gum; bright bird chirps; the susurrus of bike couriers… all scrubbed fresh in the apple-juice light of a balmy afternoon. Our steps were synchronized by the time we approached the final zebra-crossing. There our hands clasped. I don’t know if we let go until we got back to school.

The following few months were awash with euphoria. The weather was mild and felt buoyed by my elation alone. Corrine and I spent most playtimes together, she was even more smiley than I first reckoned, but had a hard, mature edge to her keeping us a little more formal than I would’ve liked. This showed itself in my vain attempts to impress her (like running past her really fast or doing a skit about eating a caterpillar in the school assembly). The best I ever got for these stunts was a rather benign smile, not the typical stunners I so craved. I soon tried other acts of desperation, and tried ignoring her. Once, while reviewing the answers to a particularly hard maths question, Mister McNamara asked the two people who’d solved the correct answer to put up their hands. To my astonishment, one of them was me. The other was Corrine. Seeing her prim hand swaying in front of me, I balked and made a show of looking around the class for the other hand. McNamara, however, was looking directly at me, a slightly bemused look on his face.

The production of this juvenile romance was really the work of our mums. They took turns arranging weekend activities for us: pantomimes and trips to museums and parks. They quickly dropped the idea of inviting our other friends, who’d wander amongst the family like a bruised stepchild. Because of this, our dates seemed to get more and more exclusive, and with that, more quarrelsome. Once we went with her family to ogle Guy Fawkes Night fireworks on one of the Thames’ many bridges. On tiptoes, we put our chins on the guardrails and watched the willowing rocket-dust trace the sky. ‘They’re so beautiful’ I murmured, only slightly disingenuously. ‘Tom,’ she said, fixing me with twinkling eyes, ‘am I as beautiful as those fireworks?’ The complex array of psycho-semantics that interlaces all inter-gender communions had yet to occur to me, so I went for the obvious. ‘No’. But caught her mid-harrumph with some blustery cover-up about women being beautiful and girls pretty, and that I was quite sure she’d grow up to be absolutely stunning. Next week at school, she told me I’d changed.


Though still together, she and I stopped partnering-up to go to the park and rejoined the greater game of playtime. I started to see her affections come out for Michael Haywood, the class ne’er-do-well and all-round bad-boy. He was the fastest runner in the grade. Horrified, I hounded her until I unwittingly secured our breakup by extorting a confession: she had a crush on him. I replied she couldn’t have both of us, she’d had me and now she could have him. And strutted off to the trailer-classes, where all the kids went to cry. The next day I came to school and announced to everyone I had a crush on Lucy Porter. I said it was because she had nice teeth.

Louis, Monkey-Dog

ChewBecca at the Pub

A Path on Beacon Hill

Old Roommate Justine. She Enjoys a Good Laugh

Old Roommate Amy Smeared with Fear

Photo Taken Through Binoculars

JordaNicole in Cowichan Bay

Bex and Dave Outside of 'Prism'

"EXCELLENT!!"

catamighty

where heard: likely first in my pre-socratics class, or maybe before... recently, in Durrell's Justine and in the movie Mysterious Skin...
what it means: well now...
catamite
1593, from L. Catamitus, corruption of Ganymedes, the beloved cup-bearer of Jupiter.
punk (2)
"worthless person" (especially a young hoodlum), 1917, probably from punk kid "criminal's apprentice," underworld slang first attested 1904 (with overtones of "catamite"). Ultimately from punk "prostitute, harlot, strumpet," first recorded 1596, of unknown origin. For sense shift from "harlot" to "homosexual," cf. gay. By 1923 used generally for "young boy, inexperienced person" (originally in show business, e.g. punk day, circus slang from 1930, "day when children are admitted free"). The verb meaning "to back out of" is from 1920. The "young criminal" sense is no doubt the inspiration in punk rock first attested 1971 (in a Dave Marsh article in "Creem"), popularized 1976.
gunsel
1914, Amer. Eng., from hobo slang, "a catamite;" specifically "a young male kept as a sexual companion, esp. by an older tramp," from Yiddish genzel, from Ger. Gänslein "gosling, young goose." The secondary, non-sexual meaning "young hoodlum" seems to be entirely traceable to Dashiell Hammett, who snuck it into "The Maltese Falcon" (1939) while warring with his editor over the book's racy language.
" 'Another thing,' Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: 'Keep that gunsel away from me while you're making up your mind. I'll kill him.' " The context implies some connection with gun and a sense of "gunman," and evidently the editor bought it. The word was retained in the script of the 1941 movie made from the book, so evidently the Motion Picture Production Code censors didn't know it either.
"The relationship between Kasper Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet) and his young hit-man companion, Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook, Jr.), is made fairly clear in the movie, but the overt mention of sexual perversion would have been deleted if the censors hadn't made the same mistaken assumption as Hammett's editor." [Hugh Rawson, "Wicked Words," 1989, p.184]

Man of the Year Awards 2005 (courtesy of an old email of a friend)

immolation and determination

this season seems rife with people.. people who can talk fluidly about their plans for the future, their passed pasts, their stories. determination is in the air... people are hoarding ideas, nodding farewell to the what-me-worry of summer and reaffirming their designs for the upcoming year. some of our choice favourites of these people just whipped through town. my very good friends. it was glorious and exciting and turbocharged fun, where we 'natives' (my travel itinerary seems to be 'stay in one place and let the world come by and tell you about itself') were called upon to help access our shared Montreal. to unveil the change and recapture. these visits always affect me greatly, sometimes clamming me up with nostalgia or a heaviness of respect for the people i've loved or a roughening-up of my self-esteem (these are some dynamos). ok, i'm jibberjabbering. really just wanted to say: pleased to meet you. you all looked so well. and i miss you.

immolate
where i heard it: Carolyn's balcony as posed by Graham. Only conspicuous root: 'mole'
what it means:
1548, "to sacrifice, kill as a victim," originally an adj. (1534), from L. immolatus, pp. of immolare "to sacrifice," originally "to sprinkle with sacrificial meal," from in- "upon" + mola (salsa) "(sacrificial) meal," related to molere "to grind."

so, really, one salsa-fies when immolating. jeepers.

Artificial Intelligence

This program is one big Turing Test. Might be a little slow, as 'George' has multiple conversations at once: Artificial Intelligence conversation. He can be a little rude.

lots of these: 'word'

Harrowing
where I heard it: last night, while Graham was recounting on a place called Fairyland in Newfoundland, he used the description 'harrowing' (or he was describing someone else's tale, I've forgotten already)
what it means: this one is interesting. as a 'harrow' is a farm implement, it's like an after-plough, and used to break the clods kicked up by the first ploughing. there is also an expression called the Harrowing of Hell, which is from the Apostle's Creed and didn't make it into the Nicene and is about Jesus' trip to Hell ('Sheol' in Hebrew) to get his Gameboy back from the Devil. and then the official line follows:
harrow (v.)
especially in harrowing of Hell in Christian theology, from hergian (see harry). In fig. sense of "to wound the feelings, distress greatly" it is first attested 1602 in Shakespeare. Harrowing (adj.) "extremely distressing, painful" first recorded 1810.
www.etymonline.com missed the ball with that one if you ask me, mostly because they forgot to include the etymology. the 'harry' bit offers a glimpse, but, to put into a working example, i don't think that 'the Vikings wounded the peasants' feelings' at all captures the raw nature of a classic, hearty pillaging. the synonym i think of is 'scarifying', but it doesn't quite deliver the gothic tension the way 'harrow' does.

i also intend to use the word 'plough' more, especially this weekend. 'Gameboy' is really funny too, if taken back into context.