February 2002

"This World Wide Web of Theft and Indifference"

by Joey deVilla on February 28, 2002

Michael Greene, NARAS President and CEO

During last night’s Grammy awards, Michael Greene, President and CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) delivered an anti-file sharing speech entitled The Insidious Virus of Illegal Music Downloading. Some excerpts:

No question the most insidious virus in our midst is the illegal downloading of music on the Net. It goes by many names and its apologists offer a myriad of excuses. This illegal file-sharing and ripping of music files is pervasive, out of control and oh so criminal. Many of the nominees here tonight, especially the new, less-established artists, are in immediate danger of being marginalized out of our business. Ripping is stealing their livelihood one digital file at a time, leaving their musical dreams haplessly snared in this World Wide Web of theft and indifference.

…

This problem won’t be solved in short order. It’s going to require education, leadership from Washington and true diligence to help our fans – that would be you – to embrace this life and death issue and support our artistic community by only downloading your music from legal Web sites. That will ensure that our artists reach even higher and, deservedly, get paid for their inspired work.

Life and death issue? I think NARAS should get over themselves.

It’s fandom, not theft

Greene squarely puts the blame for the music industry’s woes — woes most industries would kill for — on the customer. This, in spite of the fact that music sales were up during the peak of Napster. What he doesn’t realize — or more likely, what he realizes but chooses not to say — is that nobody “rips” (that is, converts CD music to MP3 format) music they hate. It’s a waste of time. Rather, they rip the tracks they love, and those are the files they share. No money changes hands in the file sharing process; no one — not even the Napster corporation — made money from the transfer of MP3 files. This isn’t piracy; it’s fandom. And unlike piracy, fandom is free advertising. They don’t like nor understand this, which is why they also consider making mixed tapes and CDs for your friends illegal.

They’re not too keen on the doctrine of fair use. If you have a favourite CD that you want to keep at home, they’d rather you bought another one for your car and another one for work instead of making copies for car and office use, even though that’s considered to be fair use in the eyes of the law. Here’s RIAA president Hillary Rosen and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on MP3 downloading, courtesy of Leflaw.net:

”Can I make a copy of a CD that I buy and put it into a car?” asked Hatch. When Rosen hemmed and hawed, Hatch muttered, ”The answer is yes.”

”Is it fair use to give the copy to my wife for her car?” Hatch continued. ”Is it fair use for me to rip a CD? Is it fair use if (a computer network) decides for efficiency reasons that one copy is sufficient to serve for storage, instead of keeping 200 separate copies, is that fair use?”

”None of these is fair use,” Rosen eventually replied. She argued that musicians’ willingness to ”tolerate” people making copies was an instance of ”no good deed goes unpunished.”

They’re taking intellectual property protection to ridiculous new heights. The music industry would love nothing better than for you to shell out extra ducats in order for you to know what the lyrics and chords to your favourite songs are. That’s why the Harry Fox Agency tried to shut down or neuter OLGA — the On-Line Guitar Archive — and several other sites providing lyrics, tablature and chord charts. Listening to your favourite piece of music over and over again so that you can transcribe its lyrics and chords and then sharing that information isn’t a crime — once again, it’s fandom.

Recently, Pete Abrams, in his great online comic Sluggy Freelance, used the lyrics to James Taylor’s Fire and Rain to underline his storyline. He credited the creator and copyright holder, but still he was told to takes the lyrics out of the comic strip. The songs wasn’t central to the storyline; as Abrams himself puts it, “…the lyrics were just icing on the cake of this story…Actually it’s the little decorative flowers that go on the frosting of the cake.” It was merely a nice detail, and an act of fandom, not theft.

They’ve gone so far as to try and make money off cell phone ring tones that sound like your favourite tunes. Once again, that’s fandom, not theft. How much longer before your keyboard, guitar or accordion is embedded with a device that pays royalties whenever you cover a recording artist’s song, even for family and friends?

In all these cases, we’re not talking about acts of taking someone else’s work and making a profit of it. We’re not even talking about people who are taking credit for someone else’s work. We’re talking about fans who love the work so much that they use it, which in turn further propagates that work. This is advertising that is not only free, it’s done by people who truly love the work, not some disinterested ad exec who’s only promoting the work because s/he’s paid to do so. It’s honest and from the heart. It is not piracy.

The patsies

The patsies who participated in the downloading experiment-cum-publcity stunt. The filename of this picture is “hackers.jpg”.

During the Grammys, the cameras would occasionally cut to a scene where three college-age students, Numair, Stephanie and Ed, were downloading MP3s. It was part of a demonstration of the evils of downloading. Greene announced that they were showing just how many files could be downloaded by only three people in two days. These three patsies — or perhaps they’re doing this as part of some community service in exchange for time in juvie — managed to download almost 6,000 songs.

“That’s three kids, folks,” said Greene “The RIAA estimates that – now listen to this – an astounding 3.6 billion songs are illegally downloaded every month.”

In an attempt to paint computer programmers as part of the problem, the on-line photo of the three patsies is called “hackers.jpg”. The term hacker refers to a obsessively dedicated programmer, and even the correct term — cracker — refers to someone who breaks into computer systems, not someone who is downloading files.

By the way, if any you happen to know Numair, Stephanie or Ed, by all means feel free to give them a good pimp-slapping in my name.

Do you suppose they have any friends left after last night’s Grammy awards?

Forgive the ad hominem cheap shot, but I can’t resist

Mr. Greene, I respectfully suggest that you stop harassing the customers, and while you’re at it, stop harassing your own executives too.

Recommended Reading

The RIAA sucks donkey balls. Here’s proof. Want more proof? Here’s an article on how they’d love to look inside your computer.

George at blogaritaville reports that “the government, two gigantic content distributors, two consumer electronics manufacturers (one of whom owns a substantial MPEG/MP3 patent portfolio), a router company, and a chip company are getting together to debate your rights as a content consumer.” Hmmm. Around the same time as Greene’s speech at the Grammys. Funny, that.

Memo to George: Please use capital letters at the start of your sentences. It makes ‘em easier to read. The e.e. cummings / archy-and-mehithabel thing is pretty old.

Support the good guys in this battle against industries who are deciding what you rights are. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is on the side of the consumer in the current imbroglio over copyright and fair use. They’re the good guys, and really stand-up people whom I know personally and for whom I would take a bullet. (Cory, Fred, Cindy, Brad, and Biella: please don’t put this to the test.)


Update, Friday March 1.

Welcome BoingBoing readers!

George at blogaritaville points out in this posting that “unless the artist had recouped for the record label, the band that made the music on the CD wasn’t going to make any money off their purchase, anyway.” He also points to a Steve Albini (producer for Nirvana’s Bleach and In Utero albums) essay, The Problem With Music. Oftentimes artists end up losing money when they make an album because the record industry middleswine have taken their inordinately large slice of the pie.

You might want to check my earlier postings on copyright and fair use, Death to Disney, Part One and Death to Disney, Part Two. Read about the influential Disney guy who says that there is no right to fair use, learn about copyright and how it’s been stolen away from recording artists, find out what this fair use thing is and what the RIAA really thinks about it. Then write your government representative!

Nick Mark of Naked Pope: The Movie fame reminded me of this funny Onion piece called Kid Rock Starves to Death: MP3 Piracy Blamed.

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They’re Not “Strippers”, They’re “Naked-Americans”

by Joey deVilla on February 27, 2002

North Beach

Friday, February 15th: North Beach is one of San Franscisco’s most lively neighbourhoods. It’s a strange mix of date-worthy Italian resto-bars and strip clubs, as if New York’s pre-Disneyfied Times Square and Little Italy had merged. The sidewalks are crowded with people eating tiramisu at cafe tables and passers-by taking in the sights. The road is packed with cars looking for places to park and limousines and buses full of partygoers toasting each other and people on the sidewalk with cans of beer.

Paul, Scott Hardy and I were being led to The Lusty Lady by Annalee Newitz, sex-and-tech writer extraordinaire, whom we’d met at CodeCon earlier that day. We were joined by her friend Charles Anders, who wore a smart little skirt uniform (Meter maid? Police? I don’t
recall.) and sensible red flats.

(I have a theory that the “Gay Disneyland” part of San Francisco’s Castro neighbourhood stops where Castro Street turns into a steep hill because it’s impossible to climb it in a pair of pumps).

It was the kind of group you might only see in an ensemble cast movie: cross-dressing Charles, Annalee in indie-rock olive drab, Scott (who looks as though he could’ve been a member of Steppenwolf), Paul the tall guy from the Midwest, and the mop-topped Asian guy with the accordion on his back (“…and together, they fight crime!”).

The Lusty Lady

The Lusty Lady is no ordinary peepshow theatre. It was the setting of a documentary film called Live Nude Girls Unite!, a story about the struggle to form first exotic dancer’s union. In order to supplement her income, comedian Julia Query started dancing at the Lusty Lady and found the work arrangements appallingly bad. Dancers had to pay stage fees — the exotic dancer’s equivalent of the musician’s onerous “pay-to-play” contract, were being asked to “date” the owners’ friends and were being videotaped for porn without their knowledge or being paid. The end result: the Exotic Dancers Union was formed. The Lusty Lady is, as I understand it, the only unionized strip club in North America.

“Do they have a good dental plan?” I asked Annalee. “I’m unemployed, you know. And is it, you know, empowering? I don’t want to be exploitive. I mean, I’m like that guy from the Chris Isaak Show [sorry, the link is only available within the U.S.], the guy who had the line ‘You give me a boner…with respect.’”

When we arrived at the Lusty Lady, we were met by more of Annalee’s and Charles’ friends, making our combined group an almost even mix of men and women. How different this scene was from what it was like ten years ago, when many of my women friends shared Catherine MacKinnon’s and Andrea Dworkin’s views: “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice”.

The Lusty Lady’s front desk is in a room painted a very lurid red with cheesy furniture; it would look right at home in a Russ Meyer film. A little weasel of a man sat at the front desk.

“Are the art films still in the video booths?” asked Annalee.

“Art films”, I thought. Yeah, right.

“Yesmam!” he said in an cartoonish Spanish accent with an even more cartoonish sing-song cadence. He sounded like a less gravelly-voiced version of “Cheech” Marin’s character, Chet Pussy, in From Dusk Till Dawn. “De regular pooooorno feelms are on channels hwone t’ru twenny-seven, wit’ the art feelm on channel twenny-h’eight.” He said pooooorno feelms and art feelm with particular gusto, and cupped hands pantomiming the squeezing of breasts. “An’ don’ forget ’bout de nekkid ladies!”

The back area was painted the same lurid red. It was a hallway with closely spaced doors, each with a number and a light overhead that was lit up if the room was occupied.

“Let’s get the corner booth,” said Annalee. “There’ll be more room there.”

The five of us piled into a triangular shaped room with a bench built into the wall. On one wall was a machine that accepted bills. The wall that the bench faced had a plexiglass window that was covered by a shade on the other side. The booth was stuffy and had a vague, mushroom-like odor.

“I just stepped in something slimy,” Paul said.

That’s when I noticed the paper towel dispenser on the wall.

Someone fished out a five-dollar bill and fed it into the machine. The shade on the other side of the plexiglass rose, giving us a view into a small room lined with animal print faux fur and lit by several chaser bulbs. Five women, some completely nude, others wearing tiny pieces of gauzy lingerie looked inside our booth and seemed a little annoyed that we were “cheapiing out” and cramming inside.

I raised the accordion so that they could see it.

“What’s in the box?” one of them asked. Oops. I was showing them the back. I turned it around and put it on.

“Let me play you a little song,” I said, and started into Wild Thing.

One by one, they gathered around our window. Three of them lay down on their stomachs, their heads propped up in their hands, as if they were kids watching Saturday morning cartoons. The other two did a sexy dance along to the music.

When the number ended, they appluaded and asked for more. I could not possibly turn down five naked women asking for more. All the women, save the cute blonde one with glasses, took turns dancing; she stayed by the window, watching the show. I smiled at her, she smiled back.

“Take your clothes off!” she yelled.

“I will, but first you have to put money in the machine on your side!” I answered.

We kept feeding the machine for another five songs and left the booth afterwards.

“I tell you, that blonde was checking me out!” I told Paul.

“Yeah, right.”

Paul and I tried one of the video booths next. We opened the door and Paul checked the seat for gooey substances before we sat down. I gave Paul a couple of dollar bills to put into the machine. We cycled through the first twenty-seven channels, which were standard run-of-the-mill porno: anal, vaginal, fellatio, threesome and posing.

“Not much variety,” Paul noted.

The twenty-eighth was quite different. It was a reel of student- and “artist”-produced short films. The first was a close-up of a woman’s mouth licking a one hundred dollar bill, which we found hilarious. The next segment showed a naked woman standing in the woods, with two men in soldier’s uniforms running at her from her left and her right. As they approached her, she raised her arms to face each of them, revealing that she was carrying two handguns. She shot them dead before they could reach her. This repeated in a loop for about a minute.

“Pavlov Video Chicken One,” I said. (You’ll have to ask a fan of the old Saturday Night Live about that one, it doesn’t appear in Google.)

Someone knocked at the door. “Joey,” said Jesse on the other side. “Your presence is requested.”

One of Annalee’s friends, a rubenesque woman with a low-cut black shirt was going to strip for the strippers and wanted some accompanying music. She, Annalee and I piled into the corner booth. I played a blues progression in C minor while she pulled up her top, presenting her breasts for the dancers’ viewing pleasure. Such reciprocity!

I could feel the love in the booth. I just hoped I wasn’t standing in any of it.

After the call-and-response peep show in the booth, we returned to the hallway, where we gathered to talk about what we’d just seen or done. We were interrupted by the guy from the front desk, who spoke over the public address system.

“E’scuuuuse me! I just haf an announcement for all the people jus’ standin’ in de hallway. Eef chu wan’ to talk, please do it outside an’ don’ block de way for de people who are tryin’ to spend their money on de poooooooorno feeelms!” He said poooooooorno with particular gusto and spoke so comically we couldn’t help but laugh. We walked outside.

Hotel Metropolis

We went to a cafe on Columbus street and occupied the sidewalk tables. Jillzilla arrived and joined us.

She and I looked through Charles’ book, The Lazy Crossdresser, a copy of which he’d just received from the printer. It starts with a chapter titled Matter and Panty-matter and continues to be hilarious to the very end. I’m definitely going to purchase a copy and have it on my coffee table to put The Fear into some of my more timid guests.

After some cake and coffee, we all parted ways. Jill and I were still in a partying mood, so we gave Brandon a call and headed towards his hotel. We caught a cablecar, where Jill noticed that someone had altered one of the signs within.

'No smoking' symbol.The sign had four of those red circles with the red diagonal bar cutting across an image within the circle.

Three of them were what’s you’d expect: no smoking, no food or drink, no leaning out of the cablecar. Someone had altered the fourth one so that the pictogram and text said “No IGOR”. Apparently lab assistants aren’t allowed on board.

Photo: Lobby of Hotel Mteropolis, Tenderloin district, San Francisco.

The Hotel Metropolis is on the edge of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district. I was expecting it to be a complete fleabag, but it turned out to be the one of the nicest hotels I’d ever seen. It looked as if it had been decorated by Asian readers of wallpaper* magazine, complete with a glass wall waterfall behind the concierge’s desk and Delirium being played instead of standard Muzak. We went to Brandon’s room, where he, Bram, Jane, Steve and Liza were relaxing. I told them about our evening at the Lusty Lady.

“I refuse to believe it happened!” said Brandon with a smile. “It’s all lies, Joey! Lies!”

“I want to believe,” said Steve.

“I want to sleep,” said Jane.

Somehow Jill and I managed to convince them to go out for a bite to eat at a nearby restaurant. I remember Bram asking why this story on his webpage made people think he was some kind of psychopathic freak.

“Perhaps, it’s because…call me crazy…that kind of thing scares people?” I suggested.

Recommended Reading

Book cover: The Lazy Crossdresser, by Charles Anders.

The Lazy Crossdresser by Charles Anders. Be sure to check out Chris ‘site.

A little cross-dressing humour: Transvestites are cross-dressers who hang from the top of the cave, while transvestmites stand on the cave floor. Ha! I slay me!

Annalee’s card says TECHNOLOGY * POP CULTURE * SEX on the front and Must…East…Brains… on the back. How can you not visit her site now? Be sure to check out some of her articles:

I get mentioned in the latest Techsploitation column, which appears in today’s San Francisco Bay Guardian. This column covers blogs and CodeCon.

Thanks, Annalee! You don’t know how much this means to a skanky accordion ho like me!

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by Joey deVilla on February 26, 2002

Local Woman Translates Peekabooty Article in Der Spiegel to English


This is not the local woman to whom I am referring.

The article on Peekabooty in Der Spiegel that I mentioned a couple of postings ago has been translated into English — for the most part. Those quirky Germans and their quirky writing! Check it out here.

Special thanks to Liz “DenVixen” Phillips for the translation!

And while I’m making references to The Onion…

Check out That Trip to Canada Really Broadened My Horizons and Americans Would Be Outraged If They Understood Enron Collapse.

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Usability’s Dirty Secret

by Joey deVilla on February 25, 2002

Being a user interface programmer, let me say that your worst enemy, after the marketing department, the accounting department, the legal department, middle management, the CEO, the CFO, your compiler vendor, your tool vendors, the people who write the libraries you’re using and your end-users…

…is the user interaction designer.

Often escapees from the career ghettos of art school or desktop publishing, these baskers-in-reflected-high-tech glory somehow managed to create a whole damned usability industry whose alleged purpose is to make computers easier to use but whose real purpose is to save them from a lifelong career of waiting tables. Not smart enough to be programmers, not dumb enough to be safely relegated to tasks like super-sizing your fries, these anal rententives are, as my buddy George puts it, “little dictators — SimCity-sized tyrants — intent on foisting their New Orthodoxy on everyone.”

Oh, relax. I’m just kidding.

But geez, they are annoying, pendantic, self-righteous creatures that absolutely refuse to shut up. May you never be seated next to one on a trans-Pacific flight.

Anyhow, Joel Spolsky, who runs Fog Creek Software, has a great weblog called Joel on Software and a book called User Interface Design for Programmers. Evan Williams (Mr. Blogger) found this quote and put it in his blog. It’s the dirty secret that the usability gurus don’t want you to know, and it’s so worthy of repetition that I am doing the same:

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

I’m making it into a T-shirt and wearing it to an HCI conference someday.

Recommended Reading

Some web pages by some usability gurus:

Of course, this poison posting would not be complete without this little Web page called Our little enemies, the lusers. Enjoy!

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by Joey deVilla on February 25, 2002

Blog This

Henry Jenkins from Technology Review (“An MIT Enterprise”) wrote about weblogs in the current his current Digital Renaissance column, entitled Blog This. This very blog gets mentioned:

Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.

…

Most often, bloggers recount everyday experiences, flag interesting stories from online publications and exchange advice on familiar problems. Their sites go by colorful names like Objectionable Content, the Adventures of the [sic] AccordionGuy in the 21st Century, or Eurotrash, which might leave you thinking that these are simply a bunch of obsessed adolescents with too much time and bandwidth.

It may look like a backhanded compliment, and coming from most journalists, it would be. However, Jenkins is the director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, a place famous for seemingly-frivolous pursuits such as the development of the first video game, SpaceWar, to their legendary model railroad club. Silly and pointless as these endeavours may seem, they “sharpened the saws” of those who are shaped and influenced high tech. It’s this background which allows him to see the potential:

Yet something more important may be afoot. At a time when many dot coms have failed, blogging is on the rise. We’re in a lull between waves of commercialization in digital media, and bloggers are seizing the moment, potentially increasing cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation.

Jenkins notes that there’s a polarization going on in media. At one pole, there’s what Ben Bagdikian’s been warning us about for years: control is held by a small handful of very powerful corporations with great reach. You’ll get your 500 channels, but they’ll all have the same thing. At the other end is the Web, noisier than a thousand Istanbul flea markets, with a billion choices and no simple way to separate the gems from the junk. “Bloggers respond to both extremes,” writes Jenkins, “expanding the range of perspectives and, if they’re clever, creating order from the informational chaos.” In an infomation economy, context is the real currency.

Bloggers are lenses through which the information of the Web is focused. Some, like Jim from Objectionable Content and George from Blogaritaville, are powerful microscopes focusing on current events; others, such as this one, are closer in spirit to those novelty spyglasses that came in Cracker Jack boxes that distorted your perspective or made the world look funny. Both have perspectives that you won’t find easily (or maybe at all) in mainstream media and both often aggregate news from broadcasters, print and the Web and interpret it in their own way.

Jenkins suggests that the future of media:

…could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and these grass-roots intermediaries. Imagine a world where there are two kinds of media power: one comes through media concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television; the other comes through grass-roots intermediaries, where a message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics. Broadcasting will place issues on the national agenda and define core values; bloggers will reframe those issues for different publics and ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard.

I find this interesting, not only in and of itself, but also because it’s along the lines of the kind of work I’ve been doing for the past two years at the company for which I used to work. We were developing software whose purpose was to find things that were of interest to you, based on the the principle that people for whom you have a high affinity will likely point you to things you find interesting. Blogging acheives roughly the same result; the blogs I like often point me to things I love, whether it be some other Web page or simply something of the blogger’s own creation.

I’ll leave it to Jenkins to close this entry:

As the digital revolution enters a new phase, one based on diminished expectations and dwindling corporate investment, grass-roots intermediaries may have a moment to redefine the public perception of new media and to expand their influence.

So blog this, please.

Duly blogged.

Recommended Reading

The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian. Yes, I’ve already linked to it in the posting above, but it bears repeating. The latest revision covers the reach of traditional media corporations into the Internet.

There’s been a recent spate of writeups on blogging. Check out various articles from:

And while I’m on the topic of writing blogs, here’s a great essay called How To Write a Better Weblog.

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Ein “hipsterdoofushacker” mit accordion? Unglaublich!

by Joey deVilla on February 24, 2002

The German magazine Der Spiegel (“The Mirror”) ran an article on Peekabooty on Wednesday entited Im Zeichen Des Teddies: Vorhang auf für Peek a Booty. In my head, I picture well-dressed Germans in Strellson suits marvelling at our work while flipping through Der Spiegel in a Berlin cafe. Perhaps they’re doing this while enjoying some Mentos (The freshmaker!).

Unfortunately, I know very little German, most of it from hanging out with my friends Liz and Nasreen, a very quick lesson in the language taught to me by my charming date in Prague and from “Nightcrawler“, the German member of the X-Men. I turned to Babelfish for assistance.

Ach! Ist ein long, long way to go

Even when people are doing the translating, the meaning often gets mangled or lost. The title for the Scorsese movie Mean Streets once got translated to Greek as “Bad Roads”. I remember laughing at a magazine advertisement for the German-made CD-burning software called Toast (an excellent piece of Mac software, I might add). The headline read “Not only with bacon do you catch mice.” Later it was explained to me that it was a direct translation of a German colloquialism. What they meant to say was “there’s more than one way to do it”; the closest English equivalent might be “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”.

Computers are much worse, since they pretty much rely on lookup tables and some pre-programmed rules for grammar. However, the results provide for the kind of amusement you can’t get from a human translator.

The headline translates as “In The Character Teddies: Curtain On For Peekabooty”. It’s followed by this paragraph:

That once as “Hackerbrowser” concerned Peek a Booty had its first public appearance. As “Privacy Tool” is to occur to “Booty” censorship in all world. The final phase of the development becomes the balancing act between attention and proscription.

As Babelfish would put it, I become in the state of confusion.

When a human translator runs across a word that doesn’t translate, I imagine s/he tries to express the meaning of the word by using an explanatory phrase. For instance, the German word schadenfreude would have to be expalined as “delight in other people’s misfortunes”. Babelfish doesn’t have this capability and simply leaves the word as it appears in the original document. Combined with its dubious translations, you get gems like this:

No miracle thus that DC stopped being a group of hackers: Cult OF the DEAD Cow understands itself now as a “prominent developer about Internet Sicherheits Tools”. And DC develops naturally no software, which smells after “Hacking”.

I’m guessing from context (something that Babelfish can’t do) that sicherheits means security. And I’ve been in a couple of poorly-ventilated computer rooms that did smell after hacking.

What about my muck?

My favourite line in the translation is this howler:

Those grew on deVillas muck and quite cult-suspiciously

I swear, nothing grows on my muck. I wash it daily.

I think it’s a reference to the bears I drew for the user interface. I think what they really meant to say is that the bears are great mascots and will become popular icons in computer culture. I hope, anyway.

They did their homework

What doesn’t require translation is the research they did in writing the article. Despite the fact that the Peekabooty site doesn’t have any links to Paul’s or my Web sites nor any pictures of the bears (yet), they managed to find some graphics for the story. They got an image of Boodles the bear — his original name, taken from the gin — and added the caption “nice competition for the Linux Tux” . From a photo on Paul’s site, they made a photo of me and Paul with phreaker legend Captain Crunch. They cropped out The Register’s Andrew Orlowski, who appears in the original photo.

I looked around for any mention of my accordion playing, but there wan’t any. Hmmm. You’d think the Germans would be poopin’ their pants with joy over that.

Thanks, Liz!

Luckily, help is on the way. My friend Liz “Bunny” Phillips is going to translate it for me. I can hardly wait to read it in non-mangled English. Thanks, Liz, and I’ll buy you drinks for the favour!

It’s a nice sunny day. I think I’ll go wash my muck and then go outside.

Recommended Reading

If you want to see the article as translated by Babelfish, copy this URL…

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/technologie/0,1518,183280,00.html

…and paste it into the “Web Page” field on the Babelfish site.

Mark Twain’s satirical take on German: The Awful German Language.

In the movie South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut, Cartman manages to say “German scheisse video” without getting electrocuted by his implanted V-chip. Perhaps the V-chip works for English swear words only. I often lie awake at night pondering these things.

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A Conversation in California

by Joey deVilla on February 23, 2002

Thursday, February 14th: Mountain View

The scene:About 1:30 a.m. on Castro Street, Mountain View’s main strip. Jill and I are outside Molly McGee’s.

We’d been drinking and dancing for a while. We left as soon as the DJ started playing the Grease Megamix, a crime that should be punishable by public execution followed by public peeing-on. It’s that bad.

(If you want to experience a fraction of its horror, here’s a RealAudio sample. There’s also a MIDI version.)

I wonder how Jamie Zawinski managed to live here without losing his mind.

A group of drunk partygoers — an even mix of men and women — see the accordion and ask the question that most ninety-nine out of one hundred people ask: “Do you know how to play that thing?” I prove that I can by breaking into a couple of popular tunes.

After a couple of tunes, I stop to talk to the group. One of the women is pressing on the keys repeatedly and getting frustrated.

Her: It’s not making any sound!

Me: Of course not.

Her (annoyed, as if I’m playing some kind of joke on her): Why not?

Me: Because I’m not squeezing the bellows right now.

Her: What?

Me: The accordion is just a big harmonica with buttons and an air bag. Sound doesn’t come our of a harmonica by itself; you have to blow air into it to make noise. Same here, except you squeeze the bellows to move air over the reeds.

Her (impressed by my extremely basic science): Wow.

One of the guys: Dude, you’re not from around here, are you? What brings you down here?

Me: I’m visiting my friend Jill [I point to Jill] and am attending a conference in San Francisco tomorrow.

Guy: We’re all from around here. Most of us work at Lockheed.

Her: I’m a mechanical engineer there.

Me (thinking): I am never ever boarding a Lockheed plane again.

Recommended Reading

The social situation in Silicon Valley, circa 1999. One of the reasons that I have avoided living in the Valley.

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San Francisco and I are on Speaking Terms Again

by Joey deVilla on February 22, 2002

A Bone to Pick

I had a bone to pick with San Francisco. The entire damned seven-by-seven miles of the city from the yuppie ghetto of the Marina to the no-man’s land known as South San Francisco. (Don’t get me started on the Valley — especially San Jose.)

It’s not any one thing that brought about the rift between me and what I like to call “The Richest city in the Third World”, but a combination of its many annoyances:

And let me tell you, even the lowest of the low in the shantytowns surrounding Manila do not take a dump in the middle of the sidewalk the way San Francisco homeless do.

It’s all that, along with what happened to me during my abruptly terminated stay in the city.

Westward ho!

Like most of my stories, it starts with an accordion. One of its many powers is to attract job offers, and in 2000, it got me promoted from programmer to programmer-and-developer-relations-guy. In a fit of needing to be where the action is, the company decided to open a San Francisco office and send its best or loudest spokespeople — namely Cory, me and our white-guy-who-drops-a-lot-of-black-urban-lingo-for-street-cred Chief Strategist — down there to shill our not-yet-existent and often-changing product. There was a short period, maybe a day or two, where I was leaning towards turning down the transfer when my then-girlfriend sagely pointed out this important fact: if I didn’t at least give it a try, I would regret it later.

I moved to San Francisco on December 28th, 2000. I was put in charge of taking care of the corporate apartment, a two-bedroom townhouse in a complex right by Alamo Square Park, whose Victorian houses you’ve probably seen in San Francisco pictures and postcards, as well as the opening shot for the intro to the TV series Full House (brr). The company was constantly sending people from Toronto to San Francisco, and the bean-counters figured that it would be cheaper to maintain a corporate apartment than to book them into hotels. My caretaker role meant that I lived rent-free in a new place equidistant from Soma, the Haight, the Marina and downtown. It was an arrangement not unlike the way Higgins looked after Robin Masters’ estate in Magnum, P.I., the differences being that I was not a stuffy Englishman and my Hawaiian shirt collection puts me in the Magnum fashion camp. (I suppose that Cory was my Robin Masters.)

By February, we had moved to the best damned office I’d ever worked in, made a big splash at a major conference and were being courted by the Beast of Redmond. It was all going accordion to plan.

The E! True Hollywood Story Turning Point, or: It All Goes Wrong

My girlfriend at the time and I were maintaining a long-distance relationship and had decided to shorten that distance considerably. She moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco in early March. About a week and a half later, horrified at everything about the city that makes Cory refer to it as “San Fran-scarcity”, she told me how much she hated the place and that she suddenly had some very serious doubts about the relationship. I asked her to think it over. After all, she hadn’t been there two weeks and it may just be a case of homesickness. I tried to tell her that although it’s not New York — no city is — it wasn’t as if she were suddenly moving to a cardboard box in downtown Calcutta. However, after a couple of hours of talking it over with her, it seemed that she was determined to flake out and I was resigned to the fact that she was going to move back. She booked a flight home for the following Monday.

That weekend could’ve been a miserable one, but it wasn’t. I “officially” broke up with her on Thursday, thereby demoting my status back to “um friend“, a role that made her considerably more comfortable. We spent a very debauched St. Patrick’s Day weekend weekend painting the town red. The bars were serving Irish whiskey, Guinness and green beer, the street parties were great raucous affairs, and playing The Wild Rover on the accordion got us a lot of free drinks. It was one of my better turn-lemons-into-lemonade moments.

Monday was difficult, to say the least. I took her to the airport, said goodbye to her and watched her plane disappear, A few hours shy of two weeks after she’d arrived in San Francisco, she was gone. It was the lowest I’d felt in a very long time.

I didn’t even get the chance to take a couple of days off to cry in my beer; the company had scheduled a series of very important meetings with to-die-for clients: an on-line auction company of some repute and a portal whose name is an expression of glee. I’d written some user interface prototypes that I would be demonstrating at these meetings, as well as talking tech with their developers. I spent the rest of the week putting on my happy face and burying my woes with demos and work.

At the end of that week, it was decided that I should fly back to Toronto for a couple of weeks to meet with the rest of the team that would be developing the 1.0 version of our software. About a week into my visit to Toronto, the company laid off a dozen people in Toronto, cancelled the lease on our San Francisco office, and downsized the San Francsico team to just me and Cory, who would work out of an office at our VC’s headquarters in Palo Alto.

I saw which way the wind was blowing and decided it would be better for me (and even earn me some points with management) if I volunteered to move back to Toronto. They thought it was a good idea, but said that they couldn’t spare me for enough time for me to fly back and pack my stuff. They dispatched our office manager Amy to pack up the office and my apartment and ship it back. About five weeks after I had come to Toronto for a visit, an moving truck packed with all the evidence that I’d ever lived in San Francisco brought my stuff to Toronto. Within the span of four months, I had moved from Toronto to San Francisco and back again.

I spent a week in an “I’m not supposed to be here!” daze. Having lost a girlfriend and then being involuntarily displaced, I felt as if I’d been harshly dumped by San Francisco too. The bitch!

From that point on, I associated San Francisco with unpleasant memories and heartbreak, as if I’d been through some kind of neo-Pavlovian negative reinforcement experiment in which the city was the gerbil cage (whose liner needs changing very badly).

The Return

Just over a week ago, I made my first trip to San Francisco since my abrupt move back to Toronto. I was there to present Peekabooty at CodeCon, do some developer relations with the various hackers who would be attending, and maybe even make my peace with the city.

(Yes, I realize I’m anthropomorphizing a seven-by-seven mile clump of hilly land, its people and its human urine- and feces-stained sidewalks. Don’t tell me you haven’t done something similar.)

Cory gave me the keys to his apartment, where I dropped off all my stuff save the accordion. I had plenty of time to kill before meeting Jillzilla for dinner, so I decided to spent the afternoon walking about the city that was supposed to be my home.

I stopped by Brain Wash, and old hangout of mine located across the street from the old office. Its back half is a laundromat and its front half is a cafe. I’ve eaten just about everything on their menu, spent many afternoons writing prototype software at their tables and even did a couple of accordion-assisted stand-up routines at their regular amateur comedy nights. (For the brave or the shameless, performing in front of an audience is a great way to meet people if you’re new in town.)

The place was silent. Normally, the sounds of the kitchen, stereo and washing machines fill the place. Something wrong happened with the power grid, leaving the entire block without electricity.

Amy, one of the cute punkish staff, was talking to a co-worker. I used to fantasize about her, wearing nothing but Doc Martens, softly kicking me in the head. But I digress.

“It’s too quiet here. If I don’t hear some music soon, I’m going to go crazy,” she complained as I walked in the door.

That was my cue. I switched the accordion from backpack mode to ready-to-rock mode, unstrapped the bellows and said “Did someone say music?”

“You! Free cookies and drinks if you play!”

That’s when I knew that San Francisco was about to make it up to me in many weird and wonderful ways.

San Francisco, you are forgiven. (Now, if you can do something about your personal hygiene…)

Next: The bustling metropolis known as downtown Mountain View, CodeCon, children trust me, matter and panty-matter and entertaining a room full of naked women.

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by Joey deVilla on February 20, 2002

Praise from an A-List Blogger!

Jason Kottke, one of the pantheon of A-List webloggers, has posted an excerpt from and link to the Stagette story. Thanks!

In anticipation of the number of people who would click on the link, I made this graphic.

After all, they deserve to be warned.

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Stagette

by Joey deVilla on February 20, 2002

Setting the scene

The second day of CodeCon was followed by a dinner at Don Ramon’s, a Mexican restaurant two blocks from the DNA Lounge.

After dinner, those of us who hung out on the #infoanarchy IRC channel decided to have our own little gathering.

Lisa did the legwork and found a place: Butter, which is across the street from the DNA Lounge. Butter is a cute little space with a “white trash” theme. It’s decorated with trailer park amusements, and the bar snacks are tater tots, TV dinners and marshmallows that you can roast yourself over canned heat.

That night, they projected the H.R. Pufnstuf movie, a couple of Land of the Lost episodes and National Lampoon’s Vacation onto the walls.

We went to Butter straight after dinner, so by the time 10:30 had rolled around, we’d already been there for three hours. Our party was winding down and people were making various plans to go elsewhere.

I didn’t know my evening had only just begun.

Note: The names of people who weren’t at CodeCon — namely the names of the stagette girls and the fratboys — have been changed.

“Can you play that thing?”

Luke retrieved his laptop case from behind my accordion and went back to his hotel. I started to move my accordion to a less crowded spot when a blonde woman approached. She wore a shimmering party dress, white feather boa and penis-shaped antennae holding a flashing dildo approached me.

Even for me, this was kind of unusual.


The bride-to-be and her penis-shaped antennae.

“Can you play that thing?” she asked.

“Sure,” I replied. Oh mighty accordion, I thank you for sending me yet another victim. And so cute, too!

“Is it your birthday?” It was a reasonable guess. ” Can I play Happy Birthday for you?”

“No,” she replied. “It’s my stagette!”

Duuuuuh. I should’ve guessed that, judging from the outfit.

I played the first verse of Billy Idol’s White Wedding in response. She sang along, waving the dildo as if it were a conductor’s baton.

“You have to meet my friends!” she exclaimed, pulling me towards the other side of the room, where eight attractive and tipsy women were greedily downing blue Jello shots from a tray. They took turns posing with me for pictures and a couple even tried the accordion on.

Brandon walked up to me and said “My God, Joey, you weren’t lying about the accordion.”

“It has powers that science cannot yet explain,” I replied.

Invited

The bride-to-be took me by the arm and said “Hey, Accordion Guy, we’ve got a limo coming to pick us up and take us to a few more bars. There’s lots of free booze and I have cute friends as you can see. Wanna come along?”

Lisa overheard this and whispered in my ear: “I think you should go.”

Duh.

The stagette’s timing was perfect. Our #infoanarchy party was winding down, with many people deciding to go home. Most of us were already standing outside Butter’s front door when the limo pulled up. I waved a triumphant goodbye to my friends and climbed into the limo.

All aboard!

Eight or nine girls, along with three other guys they’d picked up at Butter climbed aboard. Both girls and guys were cast from the same mold — the girls were skinny blondes and brunettes in party dresses and the guys were fratboys with brush cuts wearing Gap clothes. They could’ve easily been extras from the American Pie movies.

One of the girls had the last name Stiffler, which she was never referred to as until that movie had come out. I couldn’t resist the obvious joke: “This one time? At band camp? I took my accordion…”


It’s just like one of those old Tom Vu commercials!

The limo had a bar stocked with some terribly sour sparkling wine that the girls didn’t seem to mind. After a glass of that rotgut, I switched to the only other option: ice-cold cans of Bud, which was what the Frat Boys — my mental name for them — had also chosen.

“Dude,” asked Fratboy One, the tallest of them, “where’d you learn to play accordion like that?”

“I learned by playing for beer money and fun on the street.”

“Dude. That’s so sweet. I can tell it’s a real chick magnet. Dude, I gotta get me an accordion! That would so rule! The ladies love musicians. Look at fuckin’ Durst from Limp Bizkit; he’s like dating porno actresses an’ strippers an’ shit!”

“I’m soooo there, bro,” I answered, as I did a little conversational impedance-matching.

As the limo zigzagged through SoMa, we took turns sticking our heads out the sunroof in pairs and yelling incoherently. Some of the girls were drinking the low-grade champagne out of the fittest guy’s navel.

I should hit the gym more often, I thought.


Oh. My. God.

After my turn at the sunroof, I found a seat and seconds later, Lisa, the bride to be, sat in my lap, put an arm around me and asked what I was doing at Butter and where I got into accordion playing.

“I’m down here from Toronto to speak at a hacker conference,” I replied. I chose the phrase “hacker conference” deliberately; it has that certain bad-boy cachet that “programming conference” lacks.

“Whoo!” she exclaimed as she both arms around me and looked me straight in the eye. “You’re not dangerous or anything, are you?”

Suddenly the popular myth that all hackers are criminals didn’t seem like such a bad thing.

The bride-to-be bows out

The limo pulled up to the south side of the Metreon building and came to a halt. We left the limo and entered a bar with a packed dance floor playing Top 40 dance hits. We didn’t stay longer than half an hour, after which we piled into the limo and went to Asia SF, where we toasted Lisa with Jagermeister shots.

Forty-five minutes after that, we boarded the limo for the last time and ended up a a place whose name I believe was Cloud Eight. Lisa was looking a little rough.

“Water,” she croaked, while a friend supported her. She and two of her friends went towards the washrooms at the back of the club.

With the bride-to-be about to throw up and the limo’s contract over, it looked as though the party was going to break up even though it was only one o’clock.

“Dude,” Fratboy One said. “Lisa’s ’bout to call it a night, but some of these girls are still ready to go. I think Sara really likes you, dude. I’d be entering the dragon if I were you, bro.”

Thanks for the props for my mackin’ Asian style, dude.

After going to the back to check up on Lisa and hearing violent retching coming from behind the women’s washroom door, we decided to gather those who still wanted to party and go elsewhere. It was down to me, the three fratboys and three of the women — Stiffler, Cheryl and Max. The girls and one of the fratboys got into one cab, while I got into another with Fratboy One and Fratboy Three.

“Dude!” said Fratboy Three. “This rocks! A limo full of chicks!”

“Fuck yeah!” said Fratboy One, “And we got the Accordion Guy rockin’ the box! You made the evening, dude!”

“Sweeeeeeeeet.” I replied.

Fratboy One’s cell phone rang. It was the fratboy in the other car.

“Dude! Dude? No, dude. Aw dude, that’s like out of town. Aw, dude. Talk to them.”

He turned to the cabbie. “One-oh-one, dude! One-oh-one!”

“Where you want me to go?” asked the cabbie.

“Just one-oh-one! We’ll tell you. Just get us to one-oh-one!” Fratboy One turned his attention back to the phone. “Dude. Put her on. Dude. Just put her on. Hello? Who is this? Cheryl? Hey, forget there. Let’s just go back to my place. It’s in Nob Hill, we got a lot of booze, we can turn the music real loud. It’ll be great.”

Fratboy One tuned to the cabbie. “Dude! Change of plans. Washington and Leavenworth!”

Those round-eyes, they’re crazy

As we approached Nob Hill, Fratboy One told the cab driver to pull over at an all-night grocery.

He and Fratboy Three ran out of the cab to buy some beer.

The cabbie turned around to talk to me.

“Those boys crazy. You seem like nice Asian boy, not like them. You are Filipino?”

“Yes.”

“I have many Filipino friends,” said the cabbie, who was Chinese. “They all musicians, like you. But that not your real job?”

“No, I’m a computer programmer.”

“That nice job, even in hard time like now,” he said, nodding. “You friend with these crazy gwei lo?”

“No, I met them tonight.”

“Duuuuuuude!” Fratboy One yelled, coming from the store holding a 24-pack of Sam Adams over his head. “Let’s roll!”

“And gwei lo say we can’t hold liquor,” muttered the cabbie.

Nerds 1, Jocks 0

Fratboy One’s apartment was exactly the way I had envisioned it. Nice Nob Hill building with hardwood floors, hand-me-down furniture from the parental units, framed posters of beer and that cliched black-and-white poster of Grand Central Station, the one with light streaming through the cathedral windows. The entertainment altar was in the centre of the room and was probably the most expensive piece of furniture. The only reading material that could be seen anywhere was ESPN magazine and Maxim.

Fratboy Two made a beeline for the stereo and started flipping through the collection.

“Put on the Oakenfold, dude!” said Fratboy One, who motioned for the rest of us to join him in the kitchen. He started pouring tequila into wine glasses. “I’m all out of shot glasses, dude.”

Max and fratboy three danced to Oakenfold for a while and then disappeared into his room. The rest of us moved over to Fratboy Two’s room, which had a computer stuffed with MP3′s and a nice sound system.

The only other furniture was a snowboard and a bed.

Stiffler and Fratboy Two snuggled up on his computer chair, with her on his lap facing him, her leather-pantsed legs wrapped around him. That left Cheryl, me and Fratboy One, which meant that the math wasn’t going to work out for one of us.

“My feet are killing me,” said Cheryl, as she leaned back on the bed.

“That’s too bad,” said Fratboy One.

Fratboy One was a good-looking guy with your standard all-American features; he probably wasn’t used to having to put in some effort towards getting the ladies’ attention. My own geekdom was about to pay off.

“Hey,” I said, unzipping Cheryl’s boots. I can fix that. “One foot massage, coming up.”

“Sorry if my feet stink. I’ve been dancing all night.”

“Awww, feet. Keep them away from me,” Fratboy One said. Strike two.

“That feels nice,” she said, as I kneaded her feet. They didn’t stink at all.

“So tell me, how’d you get into playing the accordion?”

I told her, during which time Fratboy One grumbled and wandered off into his room.

Nerds 1, Jocks 0.

“Thank you, Accordion Boy”

Stiffler and Fratboy Two were teasing each other in the chair while Cheryl and I lay back and I told her about how the accordion had saved me from a mugging in Prague and she told me about how she and her friends were ripped off by scam artists in Rome. We snuggled for a while until she started to fade.

Stiffler and Fratboy two looked like they were about to use the bed, so I carried her out to the couch, tucked her in and kissed her good night.

“Thank you…Accordion Boy,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Drunk Girl.”

Farewell

The door to Fratboy Two’s room was still open and the couple were still (mostly) decent. I gave Fratboy Two a high-five goodbye and leaned down to whisper in Stiffler’s ear.

“Give him one for me,” I said.

“I will,” she answered, smiling.

I walked out into the streets of Nob Hill and began looking for a cab.

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Back in Business!

by Joey deVilla on February 19, 2002

I’ve been so busy putting the finishing touches on my part of Peekabooty (a small contribution compared to Paul’s efforts — let’s give him a really big wet smoochie) and with preparations for CodeCon that I haven’t had a chance to make a blog entry, nor even to renew the kode-fu.com domain! That’s why the site’s been silent and unreachable for the past week. However, The Adventures of AccordionGuy In The 21st Century is back in business. Better yet, I have some high-larious stories from San Francisco coming up!

In the meantime, I have to do some horn-tooting about Peekabooty. I’m feeling great about the project and very thankful for the opportunity to work on it. It’s also great getting back to travelling and doing developer relations work; it feels like the salad days back when I worked for the company. Even better, it’s so much easier to do developer relations when you have working code!

Bootylicious links

The Register has two stories about us: Censor-buster Peek-A-Booty goes public and Peek-A-Booty – The First Screenshots. We’d like to thank Reg reporter Andrew Orlowski for interviewing us and being very kind (after all, you read The Register for their charmingly nasty put-downs, don’t you?).

c|net’s news.com also has two stories. The first, Human rights application not finished, is about Peekabooty. The second, Dot-com dropouts share open-source love is more about the fact that most of the applications shown at CodeCon were made by unemployed geeks such as myself.

I was picked up by a limo full of women the night before (story to be told in an upcoming posting), so I was on a natural high when during our presentation. Wesley Felter caught the audio stream of the show and noted what I said in this entry of his blog, Hack The Planet. Thanks, Wes!

Much love to Cory Doctorow for providing us with a place to stay and being the best damned agent I ever had. He’s been saying very nice things about us over at Boing Boing. Thanks, bro!

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by Joey deVilla on February 13, 2002

Peekabooty

The Peekabooty icon. Ain't he cute?  After a couple of late nights, a series of debugging sessions and some very hurried cartooning and scanning, Peekabooty is good to go for a demonstration this Sunday at the CodeCon conference in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, it means that I haven’t had much of a chance to add to the blog. I’m going to try to do so tonight, otherwise, I’ll work on it tomorrow during my long CalTrain ride to Mountain View where I’m meeting my friend Jillzilla for dinner.

In the meantime, enjoy this “Stop Internet Censorship” cartoon below. It’s the background image for the Peekabooty installer, featuring Joey-drawn Peekabears. (By the way, the smiley bear face at the start of this posting is the icon for the Peekabooty app).

No uncensored web for you!

Awww….wook at the sad wittle bear who’s not allowed to freely surf…

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by Joey deVilla on February 11, 2002

Hard at work…

…so I can’t post anything substantial until later today. In the meantime, please enjoy this self-portrait (actually a graphic for the Peekabooty Project that I drew) of me hard at work.

I wish I had an LCD monitor like this bear's!

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by Joey deVilla on February 11, 2002

Oh, Camel Poo

None of us in our happy little alliance — this blog, Nick Mark’s Naked Pope: The Movie and Steve Jenson’s Salad With Steve — won an Anti-Bloggie.

However, congratulations are in order. A fellow Torontonian weblogger and member of the gtabloggers, Kelly of Marmalade Maermaid won “Most Obsessed with ‘Which X Are You?’ Tests (the blog also has a very cute photo). Congrats, Kelly, and when I finish coding my “Which Three’s Company Landlord Are You?” test, you’ll be the first person I notify.

(Credit goes to gigglechick for coming up with that test.)

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by Joey deVilla on February 10, 2002

Snow Job, Part 4

If you haven’t read them yet, you might want to check out part one, part two and part three first.

The Promotion

One morning about two or three weeks into the job, Barry called me into his office. He told me that Sam was going on a cross-country trip with her boyfriend and would be leaving Hawaiian Snow. Even though I was the youngest guy on the team, my sales figures were good and I had a driver’s license with a clean record. After today, I would take Sam’s place as driver, and be assigned her truck (which I could use to get to and from work) and someone to be my runner.

Sam congratulated me with a hug when I left the office. “Nice going, kid. I’m going to miss our singalongs.”

Singalongs were a ritual that Sam and I had. When we were driving in the truck, we’d roll down the windows (no air conditioning), turn the AM radio to full volume and sing along with 1050 CHUM, which was a top 40 radio station back in 1985. We had the narration from Paul Hardcastle’s 19 down cold. We massacred the falsetto parts from A-Ha’s Take On Me and did a decent two part harmony on Honeymoon Suite’s Wave Babies (for you Canadian readers, we also sang along with another CanCon hit of the time, Gowan’s Criminal Mind). We made up dirty lyrics for Tears for Fears’ Shout and Bryan Adams’ Summer of 69. We’d sing Walking On Sunshine to people on the sidewalk while we sat in traffic. And we just bopped along to the two big instrumentals of the time, Harold Faltermeyer’s Axel F and Jan Hammer’s theme to Miami Vice (click those last two links for wonderful MIDI goodness).

She tossed me the keys to the truck. “I want to take it easy on my last day. You drive.”

The Biker and the Missionary

Zach, our born-again Christian friend came by our stand late in the afternoon. Business was pretty good, but there was always a lull just before 6:00 p.m., when people were thinking of dinner and not shaved ice. The “Chessus loves chu, chu stupid bitch” incident hadn’t deterred him from trying to save souls. While he seemed rather naive, I had to respect his tenacity.

“I’m going to witness to that guy over there,” he said, pointing at someone down the street.

“Not the biker?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, him.”

“Uh, Zach, have you seen the patch that says ‘Satan’s Choice’ on the back of his jacket? They’re like the Quebecois Hell’s Angels. You don’t even want to look at them the wrong way.”

“Look at the size of him. Maybe you should try to convert someone a little less…huge,” I added.

“Relax, guys,” Zach said, “it won’t be so bad. First, there are a lot of born-again bikers out there already. They were bikers before they found Christ, which means someone had to convert them. Someone like me, who had faith. Like Daniel in the lion’s den.”

“Well, try and convert him close by so we can get help.,” said Sam.

“Thanks, but it won’t be necessary.” Zach walked towards the biker.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of darkness, I shall fear no evil, for I do not fully comprehend the situation.

Sam suggested that I make a shaved ice and keep it handy.

The biker looked unimpressed as Zach approached him. Zach was wearing one of his “Jesus Is Lord” shirts, so the biker must’ve known what he was in for. “I don’t want to ‘ear your religious shit,” he said with a stong Quebecois accent.

“It’s not shit. It’s the truth.”

“Tell it to somebody else. I’m jus’ trying to eat my ‘ot dog and mind my own business. You should do da same.”

“Have you given any thought about where your life is going? Ever wondered if it had any meaning?”

“Why don’ you jus’ fuck off before I beat da shit out of you?”

Sam turned to me and said “I’m amazed these Bible thumpers manage to convert anyone at all. They’re just not convincing.”

“Look,” continued Zach, “I’m just trying to save your soul.”

“Someone’s going to have to save you if you don’ fuck off.”

“Jesus loves you.”

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Apparently, if you’re annoying somebody, the thing that will push your target over the edge is to say “Jesus Loves You.” The biker grabbed Zach by the shirt, made a fist with his free hand and prepared to slug Zach. Sam and I, along with some other nearby people slowly and carefully moved towards Zach and the biker. The biker didn’t seem to care. He just stared Zach down.

“If God wanted to,” choked Zach, “he could make a force field in front of me that would stop your fist.”

The biker pull his fist back and got ready to test Zach ‘force field’ theory.

“…but He doesn’t work that way!” he blurted.

He most certainly not work that way that day. Zach took a right cross to the face and dropped to the ground.

Sam cautiously approached the biker with a shaved ice. “We don’t want any trouble. Here, have one on the house,” she sadi as she offered it to him. He took it and nodded, then turned to Zach who was still on the ground, his hand rubbing the spot on his jaw where the biker had connected.

“Next time you give me your Jesus shit, I’ll really fuck you up,” he warned as he finished his shaved ice. He hopped on his bike and turned onto Yonge Street.

I shaved some ice to make a snowball and handed it to Zach, who was being helped up by Sam and a few nearby street vendors.

“Isn’t there a prayer,” said Sam as she helped Zach into a folding lawn chair, “asking for the wisdom to know the difference between the things you can change and the things you can’t?”

“Yeah,” said Zach, “but I never really understood it until now.”

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