Offside

Having just put up Winston Churchill's picture on this blog, I for the first time realized how horrendously sour looking he is. I think he manages to say with that disapproving face exactly how ashamed he is of everything anyone else ever conceives of doing. It's like he's looking at me from the past and waggling his finger in admonition.
Creepy.

Real Duds

I recently realized that I am getting old. At the age of 25, I realize, one should not start to notice how old one is becoming, but I have. It's the onset of male pattern baldness that's done it. I am not yet far enough along to be called "balding" but there will come a day, maybe 2 or 3 years down the road, that someone will stick me with that label, and my life will officially be over.
This grim outlook caused me to become somewhat nostalgic, and something Mel said when we were at a LAN on Saturday with Nick made me remember the good old days. The good old days of yellow pants.
The picture above is not a picture of me, but those are almost the spitting image of my yellow pants. They were outlandish, bright, cheerful, and omnipresent. Once I started wearing them, I didn't stop for what must have seemed to some people to be several lifetimes.
When I really thought about it, though, I started to comprehend that my penchant for odd clothing did not start at the yellow pants. I thought at first that my silk shirt phase was the first time I started wearing strange clothing. Strangely, my mother was very supportive of the silk shirt phase. At the time I thought it perfectly normal for her to happily spend thirty to forty dollars at a time on silk shirts that later would rot in the armpits due to my teenage hormone driven perspiration (for those of you who didn't know that silk did this, you now have a fun fact!). When I think back on those days now, however, I have the nagging suspicion that my mom was making fun of me, and my father was in on the joke.
And it was that thought, the understanding that my mother has secretly watched me ridicule myself with a terrifying glee, that brought back the oldest memory I have of wearing odd clothing.
Home made camouflage pants.
It was her all along.
Since practically the day I was brewed (I refuse to believe I was conceived. My parents don't get along that well) my mother has been quietly mocking me. When I was too young to protest, she did my hair in wings -WINGS! I was a tiny blond jetfighter! Then she dresses me in camouflage pants, which admittedly I thought were truly spectacular at the time. Then she waits several years and when I see my first silk shirt, BAM, she buys it for me and a new phase of mockery begins. Yellow pants, black velcro pants that allow me to drop trou at a moment's notice, trenchcoats that are far too big, winter coats with a waist elastic that when cinched make me look like a busty body building russian mennonite.
So now I wonder if my fashion sense for the rest of my life will be tainted by those early, formative days. Will I be unable to select a nice button up shirt without wondering what it would look like in silk? Will I secretly long for my dress pants to have velcro straps so that in the middle of a meeting I can undo the velcro and reveal my pyjama bottoms? Will all my ties be yellow, in loving memory of their bifurcated sibling?
I anticipate with dread my altzheimer's days. God only knows what sort of things I'll try to wrap around my shrivelled frame. Hamburger meat. Shania Twain. Chain linked undies.
Mmmmmmm.... chain linked undies.

Like Cooking?

As I mentioned in a previous post, the apartment is hot. I used to complain, when winter started, that this was not the case. We were getting snow on the ground and there was still no heat.
Those days are sorely missed.
Apparently our apartment building has two heat settings: OFF and KILL. The OFF setting is actually misnamed, because in that state heat is actually siphoned away from the apartment, so that one can be warm upon entering the apartment and within several minutes become a popsicle. When the heat is in the OFF setting, I turn on the stove just to stay alive.
The KILL setting is more aptly named. On that setting, the walls glow with radiant energy, waves of heat throbbing out of every inch of carpet, every millimetre of wall space, every appliance. Even the air itself is ignited, like a bad dream from the days of nuclear testing. D has been unable to sleep and has taken to fleeing to the couch so that our combined body heat does not cause the apartment to reach critical mass and cause a detonation that would level city blocks. Ostensibly, that's the reason, but we have been eating a lot of garlicky foods, lately. I may not currently make the best bedmate.
Rather than cooking, I hold a frying pan in mid air for approximately 2.2 seconds until whatever is on it has turned into a sizzling meal fit for a king.
One benefit is that every remaining fly in the apartment is now quite thoroughly dead. Of course, this does not bode well for the remaining living beings in the household.
I'm trying to convince D not to have a Christmas party, not because I don't want the company, or can't deal with the cleaning afterwards, but because of the fact that for days before the police arrived to remove the dessicated corpses of ourselves and our guests, the other people in the building would wonder who was having a barbecue.

Oh, How the Fruit Flies?

Okay, since I told an embarrassing story about me, I'm now going to tell one about D. Fair's fair.
During the summer D and I were in the habit of going to the market and picking up a variety of fresh fruits. We used them in everything, from my patent pending Jeremy's Juicy Rouladin Surprise, to lunches, to evening snacks. The fruit was cheap, and it was good.
There was also way too much of it.
One day, D noticed that we had some fruit flies. She looked at the bowl of fruit, and saw that it was a bit infested. So, she found a place to put it.
Now, I sleep in late, so I woke up some three hours later. I made myself some coffee, played on the computer, and started to consider lunch. I remembered that we had some chili or soup in a tupperware container in the fridge that I could warm up.
I go to the fridge, which is suspiciously empty, except for a big jug of juice from D's sister's wedding and the soup I'm seeking. I grab the soup, and run through emergency procedures for starting the microwave.
I run around the house and shut everything off, leaving only the alarm clocks. The reason for this is that the genious who installed the electricity in the apartment put every single outlet on the same fuse, so if ANYTHING is on when the microwave starts we blow that puny little 15 amp fuse. We've gone through nearly a gross since we moved in.
Anyway, emergency procedures complete, I go to the microwave, and open it.
I stagger backward under the assault of what I estimate to be approximately two hundred billion fruit flies. A veritable cloud of the tiny buggers comes flowing out of the microwave, so dense I have to blow my nose to clear it of the things. I spend the next few minutes finding something, anything to kill them with and eventually resort to a bottle of windex, which gets most of them, except for a randy few that proceed to propogate their miniature race so that we have permanent housemates for the next few months.
I look in the microwave. A few lonely, outcast loser fruitflies hang forlornely over, yes, what is in fact a bowl of now quite inedible fruit.
D's solution to the fruit fly problem was to place both they and their primary food source into a tiny, hot, enclosed space, where, with their infintesimal lifespans they could in the three hours between her leaving and my waking happily spend about a quatrillion generations "being fruitful".
Some other options I quickly came up with:
A: throw out the fruit
B: put the fruit in the fridge
C: hire a lawyer to negotiate the separation of the fruit flies from the fruit (believe me, this makes more sense than the actual solution taken)
I have since placed an injunction on D dealing with anything insect related in the household. If we get invaded by insects from space, I better hear about it before she decides that an appropriate measure in dealing with them would be to hand them over our house keys and invite them to stay over, while feeding us to their young.
I await the next incident with dread.

A Tale of Woe

So, there's a story that D thinks I should tell. Because I love her, I'm willing to, but it means that very soon I'll have to find a quiet place to die from embarrassment.
Okay, so we ran out of toilet paper (not the crux of the story). Since I had the day off after this happened, it became my task and I accepted it freely to go to the store and pick up more. A simple enough assignment, but apparently fraught with unexpected risks.
Everything seemed to be going smoothly. I got up, played a bit of WOW, then showered, shaved, and quickly threw on some clothes and I was out the door. I strode leisurely down the street to Sobey's, stopped at the Tim Horton's to partake of the Ichor of the Black God, and then successfully managed to purchase not only toilet paper at Sobey's but also some brand spanking new razor blades, which apparently are made of gold given how much they cost.
I get home. I take off my coat, take off my keys, put my money on the baker's rack. I even strip off my shirt because my apartment against all laws of thermodynamics is boiling hot.
I turn around and see myself in the hall mirror.
Something's hanging off my butt.
To explain, the pants I was wearing that day have back pockets that do up with velcro. Velcro, as we all know, likes to grab and hold fabrics.
I walked to the store with a pair of D's baby blue lacey underwear hanging off my butt. I stopped at Tim Horton's with underwear on my ass. I bought toilet paper not knowing that I was walking around like a flag carrier in a game of CTF, only my flag was blue and practically see through.
I nearly had a heart attack right there, in the kitchen. D would have come home and found me dead in her kitchen, apparently trying to wear her underwear on the outside of my pants.
I'm seriously considering burning the pants.

Anniversary

Yes, it's silly, but today is the 3 yr, 4 mth anniversary of the day that D and I met. I'm still amazed on a daily basis that such a wonderful woman has managed to tolerate me for so long. (really, I don't get it.) Regardless, babe, happy anniversary.
Since I haven't bought you flowers in the longest time, and probably still won't have the chance today, I thought I'd do the next best thing.
And Nyah Nyah, I remembered first.
Not that this is a competition.
*hides his first place anniversary remembering trophy*

Songs for A Day

Can everybody list all the songs they can think of that deal with the subject of a day? Like "Everyday" by Buddy Holly or "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats? My babe's trying to compile a list, and don't worry if you duplicate some, just list song title and artist.
James, this one's really for you.

TV Series: Cable or DVD?

Having made a decision in my own household to cancel the cable services in favour of purchasing television series on DVD, I was wondering what other people's stances were on that same subject? Remember that I work for a cable provider so I'm cancelling cable that's given me at a discount.
With the increasing availability of TV series on DVD, a patient person can watch one favourite show in DVD format while waiting for a season of another show to end so that it can then become available on disc as well. Heck, for the serious collector, one can watch and rewatch favourite episodes from select shows instead of waiting for those particular episodes to come out in reruns. I know that my girl has the entire series of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer on DVD, and there are about 6 episodes that we regularly pop in for a bit of fun (Once More With Feeling, anyone?). We've watched the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, though we rented that, and we're eagerly awaiting the third. Mel, because of how much she's moved around, who hasn't had the opportunity to really subscribe to cable, has pretty much all of her favourite shows (Stargate SG-1... and, ummmm.... Stargate SG-1?) on DVD, and I don't think that she now has any interest in obtaining cable.
So it seems to me that spending $40 to $90 on an entire SEASON of a show is such a better investment than spending the same amount of money in a month on the off chance that a particular channel is going to show the episode or the series in which you're interested. TV is full of so much chaff these days (some gold, as well, but rarely) that it seems insane not to take control and personally customize your entertainment experience. Yes, it means we have to wait for the season to be over to grab it on DVD, but how much of a hardship is that, really? It builds anticipation, and when we finally get our hands on that season we can devour it over a period of days rather than one episode a week.
I also wonder what the future holds for the market for tv shows on DVD. I mean, really, if the companies were smart, they'd release the series 1 DVD at a time, 4 episodes a disc at $15 a pop. I mean, I'd still probably buy it, it would make the company more money, and it might start to make cable television a thing of the past.

Everyone's doing it

Well, everyone else got a blog, so what the heck. I now have one too. Not that I have many important things to say, but maybe if I start blogging often I'll start doing more writing, too.
I'll keep this first entry short.
I have a silly question for your consideration. Consider the conflict between pirates and ninjas, well documented in nerdology. Both groups are technically evil, but fully committed to the eradication of the other. Is this the case with all evil organizations? Is the true enemy of Goldfinger Dr. No? Will the Brotherhood of Mutants ultimately focus its energies on destroying Galactus?
I mean, George Bush Sr. and George W. have ultimately toppled Saddam, giving us a real world example of two evil organizations duking it out. Can we expect Putin to eradicate Kim Jong Il?
Is there a place for heroes when villains take care of each other?
Really, I think Lois Lane had the right idea. This world doesn't need a Superman.
James is gonna kill me for that one.