April 2003

(Just so you know, this posting makes mention of female body parts “below the equator”. Read at your own risk.)

Char came over for dinner last night, and over pork chops and salad, she explained the short story she was working on.

“It’s about this woman who has teeth in her vagina,” she said, with the nonchalance of an airline stewardess pointing out the oxygen masks during the safety demonstration.

“Vagina dentata [link extremely unsafe for work],” I said in acknowledgement.

“Exactly. And she uses these teeth. She dresses up as a novice nun and goes to clubs and bars, where she tricks men into thinking that they’re taking advantage of her. Then she bites their dicks off.”

“Eugh,” said Paul and I, almost simultaneously.

“But you know, she eventually falls in love.”

“Of course,” I replied.

I think she’s been reading too much Chuck Palahniuk.

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Jet Lin (not to be confused with Jet Li) came up with a vile food idea. When a Krispy Kreme store opened in a mall across the hall from a Fatburger restaurant, he was inspired to invent the Fat Kreme: a Fatburger with two Krispy Kreme glazed originals replacing the bun. Here’s what it looks like…

…and there’s a photo essay featuring Jet actually eating the Fat Kreme. My arteries are clogging at the mere sight of the photos, and I’m sure Dr. Atkins is spinning in his low-carb grave.

Luckily, while we do have a couple of Krispy Kreme stores here in Accordion City, I don’t think there’s a Fatburger anywhere outside the United States. But please don’t mention this to my brother-in-law or my friend Jeremy — they may still try this Krispy Kreme trick with burgers from another chain.

[Found via Anil Dash's weblog, which in turn led me to Neonepiphany.]

Recommended reading

Krispy Shots! Fine liquor and a Krispy Kreme donut. Barney Gumbel meets Homer Simpson.

Krispy Kreme wedding cake! I’m having one of these at my wedding. I suppose I should scrounge up a fiancee first.

Believe it or not, you can buy or make low-carb donuts. I have no idea how they taste.

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I have been told that I’m too damned lucky, and this story serves as more evidence for that argument.

On Saturday, March 29th, my entire family — all of whom, save me, are doctors — were going to attend a gala dinner/dance for the Filipino-Canadian Medical Association. I was also going to attend. Although I am not a doctor, I am the family’s smoothest public speaker, and they commissioned me to rock the mic and be the MC for the evening. I even had a couple of Toastmaster’s Club-style jokes ready.

However, in light of the SARS epidemic, it was decided that gathering a large number of Asian medical professionals in the same room might not be such a hot idea. The gala was postponed until a date to be determined later.

This turned out to be a good thing for two reasons:

• A doctor who would have attended the gala came down with SARS. He the night gone on as planned, we’d have all been exposed.
• I ended up taking Matt Jones out on the town with New Girl. In addition to having fun hanging out with Matt, I took the picture of me and New Girl that ended up in the “Ten Cool Things About New Girl” posting that prompted a warning email from a whistleblower. We were seen by a couple of people who in turn mentioned seeing me and New Girl to that same whistleblower.

Had the gala not been cancelled and had New Girl and I not gone out on the town, I might be drastically worse off today.

It’s amazing how such a tiny change of plans can have major consequences.

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When my friend and I wandered through the residential neighbourhood of the Annex, we passed by a house which had a box of books that had been left out for the garbage collectors and passers-by to pick up. It was full of two kinds of books: math texts and must-haves for feminist’s library.

“Care to ratiocinate what sort of person lives here?” I asked my friend. (“Ratiocinate” is a verb I’m trying to popularize.)

Nestled between several calculus texts — which I didn’t really want — and a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale — which I already have — was a hardcover copy of Richard Friedberg’s An Adventurer’s Guide to Number Theory. Cool!

(Maybe not cool. We stopped by Future Bakery and the girl at the counter, upon seeing the book, thought I was some kind of nut.)

Other books on my current reading list include:

• Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk (the guy who wrote Fight Club). Mutilated model goes on a road trip and seeks revenge!
• Professional .NET Network Programming by a zillion authors (it’s a Wrox Press book). Microsoft gets blindsided by Java and seeks revenge!
• Simply Scheme, Second Edition. Programmers of a nice readable Lisp dialect seek revenge!
• The Modern Gentleman. I got this for my birthday. A guide to essential manners, savvy, vice…and revenge!

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We’re on our second sunny day with twenty-degree temperatures outside (that’s 70 for my American friends) here in Accordion City. It’s finally spring, which for me means:

Bring on the Girl Trouble!

(The good kind, not the sort that I’d experienced recently.)

Carson lends a hand

I attended the Sunday night edition of Kickass Karaoke at the Rivoli. It’s a mellower, laid-back version of the original event, which still takes place at the Bovine Sex Club on the middle Wednesday of each month. I joined the table of die-hards, which included rockmeister Jeff Kahl, Erik (a.k.a. “Mr. Eighties”), Tara “Rogue” Hunt, and Meryle “Cute ADD Poster Child” Cox. Carson T. Foster, ringmaster of Kickass Karaoke for the past four years, ran the event with his usual panache.

As usual, I brought my accordion. I ended up backing up a helluva lot of people that night on a helluva lot of numbers, including Heart’s Magic Man, Young MC’s Bust a Move, AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap and Carole King’s I Feel the Earth Move. You can see Carson’s photos from the night (featuring me wearing the Pants of Power, no less!) here.

On that last number, I backed up a cute girl who flirted with me quite a bit and invited me to opening night for her latest artwork this Saturday (Thank you once again, magic accordion!). After she left for the night, Carson caught up with me at the bar.

Carson: Hey, I read your blog about the New Girl. Sorry to hear about that. You deserve better.

Me: Thanks, Carson, that’s really nice of you to say!

Carson: I’ve been there, man. By the way, that offer in my email still stands. If you need to work out some frustrations, I’ve got that 75-pound punching bag at my place.

Me: Hey, cool. I’m not upset about it any more, but I’ve never worked out with a punching bag before. Sounds like fun.

Carson: It is. You know, I’ve had my share of psycho chicks. You and me, we could start a support group.

Me: It would be a hit.

Carson: By the way — {cute girl who invited me to her show} might be sort of flaky. Just be careful, ‘kay?

Awwwwww. People are looking out for me. That’s so sweet.

“Is your accordion friend single?”

Yesterday, I caught up with my friend Nicole Cheung, whom I haven’t seen in a while and we wnet for coffee. I’d run into her on Sunday afternoon, and we made plans to catch up. Here’s how our conversation went.

Nicole: I think my friend likes you. After we saw you on Sunday, she asked about you.

Me: Which friend?

Nicole: The friend who was beside me when you and your friend ran into us on Sunday.

I was walking about the Annex area of Accordion City with a friend from out of town when we ran into Nicole and company. That conversation went like this:

Nicole: Hey, Joey!

Me: Hey, Nicole!

Nicole’s Friend 1: (to me) Hey! You’ve got an accordion!

Nicole’s Friend 2: Do you play it?

My friend: Compulsively.

We did some introductions, a little catching up and then my friend and I continued on our way. Nicole tells me that the conversation went like this:

Nicole’s friend 1: Hey, is your accordion friend single?

Nicole: I think so. I saw something about a new girl on his blog, but I didn’t read it. It looks like it’s over though.

Nicole’s friend 1: What’s his sign?

Nicole: Better watch out. He’s a Scorpio. You know how they are.

Nicole’s friend 1: Oooooooh. Scorpio. I like.

Nicole: I think he’s into the tying-up thing.

Nicole’s friend 1: I could be into the tying-up thing.

(I dated a dominatrix back in 2000 and now I’m branded for life. Geez.)

As wary as I am of people who use peoples’ astrological signs as some kind of gauge, I told Nicole to give her friend my number. Scorpios are supposed to be dark, mysterious and sexy, and it just so happens that so am I!

We’ll see what happens.

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I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw a flyer the upcoming pro-pot/hemp rally, The Million Marijuana March. At the bottom, it read:

Sponsored by Amato Pizza

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My friend Micheline Lewis is helping to organize an event called The Seed Money Show. It’s a fundraiser for the Toronto Public Space Committee, a group of people whose mission is to “to democratise our public spaces which have become dominated by automobiles, advertising and private interest.” In a time when public space is becoming increasingly corporatized, it’s nice to see that these guys are fighting the good fight.

They’re raising money for a new magazine to be launched in June, and to that end they’re having a night at Sneaky Dee’s tomorrow — Wednesday, April 30th — and Micheline promised “lots of cute girl bands for only five bucks.”

A good cause and cute girl bands? Sign me up!

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AltaMira wrote to me about Fetish Cares, an upcoming fundraiser for AIDS in the same vein as Accordion City’s long-standing event Fashion Cares. Like Fashion Cares, all the proceeds from this event go to ACT, the AIDS Committee of Toronto. Unlike Fashion Cares, the fashions shown are decidely more “underground”, being of the fetish variety: leather, neoprene rubber, PVC and the like, often in body-accentuating, sexy cuts. No fashion show is complete without music, and Fetish Cares will feature V.A.S.T., The Birthday Massacre and More Machine Than Man.

Sometimes, during the course of creating events such as this, nasty personal politics rears its ugly head. A few people have claimed that the money from Fetish Cares will be lining someone’s pockets and not going to ACT. This is not so. If it were, ACT — who have rigourous screening and accounting processes for charitable events held in their name — wouldn’t lend their name to the event. Some people seem to be concerned that a for-profit company, Seventh Circle Entertainment, is helping organize the event. Seventh Circle isn’t making any money from this — in fact, they’re taking a loss. They’re doing this for two perfectly good reasons: as a way of promoting themselves and because they believe in the cause. In business circles, this is what we can a “win-win situation”, folks.

For more details, check out the Fetish Cares site, as well as the LiveJournal of maniacaljonny, one of the people behind the show.

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This one’s for the graphic designers and trademark aficionados out there.

My friend Dave Hall from The Gentleman Loser (a very small mailing list for a circle of tech-savvy friends, named by my suggestion after the “console cowboy” bar from William Gibson’s “Sprawl” series; Gibson in turn got the name from the chorus of Steely Dan’s Midnite Cruiser) informs me of the existence of Logotype Free, a russian site containing over 70,000 corporate logos in Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW! formats.

Dave says that Logotype Free “does for logos what IMDB.com did for movies”. I suspect that a number of legal departments of companies whose logos appear there might disagree.

Additional reading

Check out this really cool graph depicting the relationships between major characters in Gibson’s “Sprawl” series.

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It’s a lovely and sunny spring day in Accordion City, so I’m running outside to play. I’ll come back with pictures.

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This pair of photos is a long time coming. Matt “Black Belt” Jones, International Man of User Experience, came to visit Accordion City a few weeks ago, we took him out on Queen Street West. At long last, I’m finally posting the photos as promised.

I gave New Girl the electronic obscurity treatment so when you finally see her being chased and tackled on Cops, you’ll recognize her.

Matt, do you always scowl for the camera?

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Earlier this week, Jonathon “Dishmatique” Delacour sent out an email message to everyone on Shelley “BurningBird” Powers’ blogroll. Shelley’s popular blog, BurningBird, consumes about 12 gigabytes of bandwidth every month — something I’ve only been able to do once, as a result of the New Girl story — and that’s not cheap.

Shelley’s finances have taken a beating this year, and she’s had to think about cutting back on non-essential expenses, which include webhosting. I think losing BurningBird would be terrible: it’s a terrific blog for matters both technical and personal, and she’s been quite an influence on my writing. Her blogger webring — Bloggers with Attitude — was the first one to accept me into its fold, and she’s been nothing but encouraging to me. Finally, without Shelley, we’d lose a rare female voice in the world of technology, a world that really could use a good deal more.

I know what it’s like to have your finances drained through unemployment and deadbeats. I’ve been lucky. Thanks to a little help from the folks, living in Canada (it’s better to be rich in the U.S., but it’s better to be poor in Canada), the “Save Joey’s Christmas” sale and for a short while, the accordion actually covering my groceries, I’ve been able to get by without giving up less essential things like internet hosting.

(A good thing, too, because BLOGS SAVE LIVES!)

Jonathon’s set up a PayPal fund for Shelley. As a way of spreading the grace/karma/good mojo around, I donated the $20 I made from a kind stranger as thanks for playing the Hokey Pokey for a little girl to Shelley. I know Shelley well enough to know that someday, she’s going to pass it along too. If you’re a reader of BurningBird, how ’bout throwing a little extra cash Shelley’s way? Just click on the logo below:

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Yesterday morning, my sister gave birth to this little fella:

Unfortunately, the hospitals are under quarantine because of the SARS situation (which isn’t as bad as everyone outside Accordion City makes it out to be), so I can’t visit Eileen and Nicholas. I’ll have to wait until she goes home, which should be either Sunday or Monday.

Eileen’s given me a special task: I’m to help Aidan get used to the idea of having a younger sibling. You see, I have experience in this area.

I wonder how the little guy’s going to handle it.

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