Author: Joey deVilla

Categories
It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Paging Mr. Godot [Updated]

I’m still awaiting a return message from Russell Smith’s friend. Russell, if you recall, is the Globe and Mail columnist whom I excoriated in this entry.

In a comment not related to the entry for which it was posted (a number

of people are using comments as a means of just dropping me a line —

guys, that’s what email is for), a friend of Russell’s wrote:

Not related to the topic but I’d like

to respond to something you wrote in September (I just found it):

“Here’s the deal. If you see Russ in some bar, go buy a drink. Then

walk up to him and throw it in his face. I’ll reimburse you and take

you out for drinks. Sound cool?”


I’d like to invite you to have a drink with Russell and I.  I

mentioned your blog to him, yesterday and he’d like to meet you. 

We’ll buy you a drink and I promise we won’t throw it in your face.  So. If you’re not a big pussy please respond to [email address]

to arrange this.  (I don’t know if you currently live in Toronto

or not but if you don’t but you’re planning to visit just set the time

for us).

That comment was posted on February 16th, and I replied via email the

next day (I’m not a “big pussy”, after all). A month and a half has

passed, and still no reply. Really, I’d love to meet Russell and hear

his side.


Update:

Russell’s friend got in touch with me, and he’s got a lot of stuff to

do for the next little while, so the meeting of minds will have to

wait. Perhaps later this year, when patio season truly begins!

Another email I sent that has gone unanswered went to one Andrew Babian, whom you might remember from this blog entry. I sent him a very short message:

Would you mind not calling my girlfriend, Wendy Koslow, a slut?

I thought I’d go the polite route, letting the proverb about flies,

honey and vinegar be my guide. I fired off this message yesterday, and

it may be too early to expect any sort of response. An apology to The

Redhead would satisfy me.

Categories
It Happened to Me

What a punkass

Part of my morning ritual is to check The Redhead’s blog

and see what my special lady has written. One of entries today points

to some guy who writes out her full name in his blog and then writes:

i wrote a comment on one of her wishes for men .

she sounded interesting, but now i’m thinking a bit of a slut, and her

personality type seems to explain it–enfj, like aimee.

It’s that comparison at the end that explains everything: what we have here is displaced anger

combined with ungentlemanly behaviour. “Slut” is a guy’s classic “sour

grapes” remark about a girl. As a DJ at a popular campus pub, I heard

that all the time from guys who’d been snubbed and were retreating from

the dance floor to the comfort of their beer.

It’s also Penny Arcade’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory in action:

It’s dirt easy to write something about a stranger online, but another

thing to say it in a face-to-face situation. One of the best examples

of this I can think of was at LinuxWorld Expo NYC 2000, during Jon

Katz’s appearance at the Slashdot booth. Slashdotters had made a hobby

of excoriating Katz online, but in meatspace, everyone was polite and

showed deference. I got to chat with him after his presentation, and he

said that that sort of thing happened all the time: he was treated

rudely online, but nicely in real life.

I think The Redhead’s list of what she wanted in a guy both interested

him (she’s into geeks) and spooked him (she stated out loud what she

wants in a man, and she’s quite frank about her dating experiences in

her blog). Personally, I like the Redhead’s openness — it’s one of the

things I love about her. To borrow a phrase from Maya Angelou, she’s

the kind of person who grabs life by the hand and says “You’re with me,

kid. Let’s go!”

A quick scan of his blog

reveals what seems to be a guy who likes to think about things who had

a little bit of a lapse in etiquette. I think that this was more

tactlessness than malice. We all make a faux pas every now and again;

let’s let him off with a slap on the wrist (this blog entry) and move

on.

I’ll close with this: Dude, don’t you ever call my girlfriend a slut again. Not if you wish to continue converting oxygen into carbon dioxide.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Really, no apology is needed.

I just got this virtual bouquet of flowers…

…from a nice young lady who wanted to apologize for hanging off my accordion last Thursday night.

Really, you needn’t apologize. That’s exactly the reason I walk around with the accordion in the first place!

Categories
It Happened to Me

"Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers"

Alan Graham and Bonnie Burton’s review of the best blogs out there, Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: The Best of Blogs, is out! And among the blogs featured in the book is…The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century!

As one might expect, the book also has an accompanying blog.

I’d like to thank Alan and Bonnie for considering me worthy of

being included in a book that contains the “best of blogs”, and

congratulate them on a job well done!

Boston Bound

I’m flying to Boston on Thursday to catch up with The Redhead, but I’m also squeezing in time to see my Beantown peeps. Wendy’s organizing a gathering in Boston on Friday; see here for more details.

Categories
Uncategorized

Carnival of the Canucks #15

This week’s Canadian blog linkfest is being hosted by the blog with the Atkins-compliant name, The Meatriarchy!

If you’ve missed any installment of the Carnival, you can always check the archives.

Categories
In the News

Fluorescent

[ via The Meatriarchy ] “Fluorescent” is Korean slang used to describe someone who takes a

little bit longer to get the joke. Well, that’s the kind way of putting

it.

(Think about how fluorescent tubes light up when you turn them on and the derivation of the expression will become clear.)

Adam Daifallah seems like a pretty sharp guy, but as we all do from time to time, he had a moment of fluorescence:

Until now I have always defended Ann Coulter against her detractors,

many of them my own (often conservative) friends. I find her writing

style crisp, original, and not to mention hilarious. I especially love

her acerbic barbs at Ted Kennedy.

But I’m afraid in the last two

weeks she’s crossed the boundaries of good fun and good taste to the

land of the indefensible/despicable. What really put me over the edge

was this line from her column last week on The Passion:

Being

nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of

Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along

the lines of “kill everyone who doesn’t smell bad and doesn’t answer to

the name Mohammed”).

I mean, that is just unbelivable. It

is beyond the pale. It crosses the line. She was always pushing the

limits before, but she seems to have kicked it up yet another notch —

and her column this week, also on The Passion and tearing a strip off New York Times columnist William Safire, isn’t much better.

Ah, the old “wogs smell bad” canard. I thought that was a thing of the seventies,

when I was a “New Canadian” and taking weekly lumps from the Sons of

the Family Compact for the crime of having been born elsewhere. And the “all Muslims are jihadis” stuff is a bit much.

Well, Adam, better late to the party than not showing up, I always say.