Author: Joey deVilla

Well, not really. But scientists do have a “weighty” problem: the standard for the kilogram is getting lighter.

(Yes, I know the kilogram is a measure of mass, not weight. I’m making a funny here.)

Here at The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century, we strive for factual accuracy, and we run our corrections on the front page. Not like other sources of news, who have outright liars on their staff.

And now, the facts (you might want to see the Kickass Karaoke story in this entry first):

• I got my numbers wrong. There were 180 karaoke discs stolen from Kickass Karaoke host Carson T. Foster, not CDN$1800 worth. Their value is closer to CDN$5000. A hefty chunk of change.
• More on Flyerman. Although I didn’t get a picture of him, there are photos of him at a site for a company that makes light-up clothing. Flyerman even has a film about him.
• Getting our Star Trek science right. After Flyerman entered the room and danced to my rendition of Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole, Meryle (who often holds the mic to the accordion during my numbers) said that having me and Flyerman in the same room might open some kind of vortex. Carson then remarked that “all we need now is Jaymz Bee“, not Digeridoo Guy. He mentioned Digeridoo Guy after Michael J and I did the trumpet-and-accordion treatment of Istanbul (Not Constantinople). I still think with all these ridiculous pseudonyms, we could start a second-rate superhero team a la Mystery Men.
• Meryle has more. Surely you’d like to read someone else’s perspective on Kickass Karaoke, and I’ll let her tell you the story of me, her, and Mortimer the Molesting Hand. “Let’s make biscuits! Let’s make biscuits!“

Yup, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon, giving my friend Liz moral support as she waited in the corral of hopefuls auditioning for Canadian Idol, the Canadian version of American Idol, which in turn is an Americanized Pop Idol.

Yes, I brought the accordion, and yes, hilarity ensued.

(You might want to read the previous entry first.)

Truth be told, I’m not some kind of anti-TV snob. I will drop a Simpsons quote or Star Trek reference at the drop of a hat; I am, after all a pop culture aficionado. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered to dress up for The Matrix: Reloaded.

(I draw the line at dressing up for Lord of the Rings or any of the Harry Potter movies. However, I know a supreme Harry Potter nerd who wears a Gryffindor scarf.)

I’d love to catch more episodes of 24 — I believe the first season is available on DVD. I caught up with my Sex and the City viewing — people gave me the first two seasons on DVD for my birthday. I have to get around to catching all those Sopranos episodes I missed. I have two strategies for watching TV that allow me to lead a bloggable, gooftastic existence and still stay reasonable up-to-date on plotlines:

• Doing it at the gym. My gym’s got a very nice room full of tradmills, stairclimbers, stationary bikes and cross-country skiing machines, each equipped with a multi-channel headphone jack that allows you to get the audio feed from several sources: the six TVs in the room, or from a bank of CD players, FM tuners and tape decks. I managed to catch of couple of episodes of 24 this way.
• Time-shifting. I usually catch Enterprise episodes and The Daily Show by programming my VCR to record them and watching them over breakfast. I’d rather this were a little more automatic, but until TiVo service comes to Canada, I have to remember to plop new tapes into the machine.

As for movies, there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that makes it feel less like a passive experience. Maybe it’s because it’s still an outing, or perhaps it’s that there’s still a social aspect to it. I’m trying to see a few more movies, and yes, especially films (film aficionados will tell you that there’s a difference between the two).

Books, in my opinion, are a different beastie entirely. I will always set some time aside for a good book. Maybe the McLuhanesque distinction of books as a “hot” medium may be a little silly or New Age-y sounding, but I think he has a point; you do have to do a little more work when reading, even if it’s extremely light fare such as the Captain Underpants series (which I highly recommend). I also notice that I’ve done more reading since starting the blog; perhaps it’s that reading leads to writing, which in turn leads to more reading.

That being said, you might want to re-consider your options if the highlight of your weekend is invariably making Saturday night a Blockbuster night. Maybe silly accordion-powered mayhem isn’t your scene, but life’s too short to always spend in front of some screen whose primary purpose is to convince you to buy more stuff. Go for a walk, a bike ride or a swim. Help your mom bake a cake or clean the garage. Whittle wood, stone or even soap. Join a gym or a sports team. Kick someone’s ass in the first-person shooter of your choice, chess, Trivial Pursit or Jenga. Go dancing. Hit the library. Hang out at a cafe or patio with friends. Explore the streets or the woods. Play darts, shoot a bow or take a BB gun and shoot cans off a fence.

Just do something.

Not me, but Aaron Swartz: in an attempt to get caught up with the cult hit TV shows created by Joss Whedon — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly — Aaron watched all the episodes, managing to do so between February and last week.

Simply put, he’s probably watched about as much television in three months as I’ve watched in three years.

(Aaron can be forgiven: being one of the people behind Creative Commons, a good programmer, a well-linked-to blogger and someone who gets invited to stuff by Lawrence Lessig, he’s probably the most influential teenage guy who is not in a boy band. Yet.)

That’s one of the side-effects of the accordion, blogging and coding — life’s gotten so kooky that my need for TV and movies dropped dramatically. I’ve got to get around to seeing 24 and Alias on TV, I go to Blockbuster more for late-night Diet Coke than for movies and the last time I made any kind of effort to watch MuchMusic was to catch the segment of Much On Demand on which I appeared and played accordion. This was especially so in the first couple of years of the accordion — I managed to miss Titanic and I may be the only person I personally know who’s never seen There’s Something About Mary.

After all, why watch other people live when you can do it yourself?

Last night’s Kickass Karaoke

As I climbed up the stairs to the upper floor of the Rivoli, where the every-other-Sunday edition of Kickass Karaoke is held, one of the cute Sunday night bartenders had good news for me.

“Hey, Accordion Guy! Carson’s got some of his library back!”

A number of weeks ago, Carson’s library of karaoke discs, about CDN$1800 worth, was stolen. He’s been working with a small set of discs for the past little while, and since the “eighty-twenty rule” — the one that says eighty percent of the music used comes from twenty percent of the discs — applies here, the pickings have been pretty thin. However, last night was different: there were replacement discs, many of which contained songs we’d never seen in the library before.

“You’re finally doing Sk8r Boi tonight!” said Erik, as I sat down with accordion in one hand and a pint of Amsterdam Nut Brown in the other. I’d been announcing to anyone who’d listen that I’d been working on adding Avril Lavigne to the accordion repertoire. I want to hate her songs, as I’m too cool for them, but they’re just too damned catchy. Besides, even the lamest songs gain 33% more cool when reinterpreted for rock and roll accordion.

The rest of the night consisted of more songs I’d never done before at karaoke, such as Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole — the first time I’d ever seen it in karaoke form — Avril Lavigne’s other big single, Complicated and Afroman’s Because I Got High (which I’ve done only once).

During Head Like a Hole, Flyerman — another Accordion City local oddball who hands out flyers at concerts while wearing a snakeskin jacket rigged with halogen-bright chaser lights that run up and down the arms and sides and spell FLYERMAN on the back — did his best industrial rock aggro foot stomp on the dance area just in front of the makeshift stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “Trent Reznor’s stunt double!”

“Accordion Guy and Flyerman in the same room,” exclaimed Meryle, “shouldn’t some kind of vortex be opening right about now?”

“We need to get Digeridoo Guy here and it’ll be perfect,” said Carson.

Accordion Guy, Flyerman, Digeridoo Guy. You’d think Toronto was full of second-tier superheroes, just like in Mystery Men.

Carson paused the karaoke activities to show the room the very short Kickass Karaoke promotional DVD he made, featuring highlights from several past karaoke nights, set to the background music of Head Like a Hole. It’s quite well done, features me in the accordion in several shots of one of its rapid-fire montages of stills and captures the anarchic punkish spirit of Kickass Karaoke perfectly.

One of the highlights of my evening was during another new-to-me number, They Might Be Giants’ cover of the old novelty tune Istanbul (Not Constantinople). Michael J, a regular who’d just come from an earlier jazz trumpeting gig (still wearing his dark suit and an undone bow tie) joined me, and we gave the audience a klezmeriffic improv solo that would’ve earned us a spot on They Might Be Giants’ touring band. Michael, we’ll have to do that again soon!

King of the World

I dropped by the Queen Street West branch of Your Good Health yesterday to buy a couple of protein bars and to visit my friend Char, who works there.

“Joey, I had the craziest dream about you last night,” she said. “I dreamt you ruled the world.”

“I like this dream already,” I replied. “Was I a benevolent ruler?”

“Ummm…well,” she said in a voice that wasn’t at all reassuring. “Nobody actually saw you, not even your friends. But there were portraits of you everywhere.”

Not good. The level of freedom in a nation seems to be inversely proportional to the number of portraits of its leader you see in public places.

Char continued. “You used your computer skills to control the weather. And somehow, you knew everything everyone was saying.”

“Cool!”

“You used the weather to make sure everyone spoke in a cool way…or else. You made everyone speak some kind of hip hop jive, and when I slipped up and said something that wasn’t quite so funky, you sent this big cloud to rain on me.”

“That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.”

“I know! And in the dream, I was talking about that with Paul, and he said that once, when he accidentally used the word ‘dude’, you sent a tornado after him!”

“Ha!”

“And then, we realized that he’d just said ‘dude’ again, so we started running for cover.”

This was all very amusing. I don’t think anyone’s ever told me of a dream where I was dangerous and menacing.

“I promise, Char,” I reassured her, “I would never send a cloud to rain on you unless you were on fire. Or perhaps declared an impromptu outdoor wet T-shirt contest.”

That’s what friends are for

My friend Meryle (rhymes with “hurl”), the cute poster child for ADD, had one of those moments of romantic disappointment at Kickass Karaoke on Wednesday and looked as though she could use some cheering up. As one might discern from some of her blog entries, Meryle is quite uninhibited, and one might even say “bonkers”; she’s pretty much like the character GIR from Invader Zim. If someone could be cheered up with a perfect and completely tastelessly inappropriate kind word, it is she.

I took her in one arm said said “Meryle baby, if Playboy [not safe for work — duh!] magazine ever puts out a ‘Women of ADD’ issue, I promise you, I will jack off only to your page.”

It worked. She laughed her head off and thanked me profusely.

Later that evening, while we were having post-karaoke pizza at Amato, she checked her messages and told me that she’d just received one from a guy she liked who obviously was entertaining some rather impure never-to-be-painted-by-Norman-Rockwell thoughts about her.

“It may be the month of May,” I said, “but for our Meryle, it’s Cocktoberfest!”

More laughter ensued.

That’s one overlooked fact of friendship: like jazz or rock, sometimes it’s all about playing the most tastelessly inappropriate note at precisely the right time.

[Be sure to check out Meryle’s take on that evening.]

Although my own camera is out of commission (and I haven’t yet had a chance to go camera shopping), Paul’s been busy snapping up photos of our activities.

He took shots of our fun with fireworks on Victoria Day. It started as a simple outing with me, him, Deenster and Chris, but we kept running into friends on the street, who joined us Sesame Street-style (“Hey, where are you going?” “We’re going to the park to light fireworks!” “Cool! Can we come along?” “Sure!” “Yaaaaay!”).

We also saw The Matrix: Reloaded that weekend. Geeks that we are, we stipulated that if you wanted to watch it with us, you had to wear all black clothing, preferably in a style that fits the movie. Seeing as I would be coming to the theatre straight from a job interview, I decided to dress as an agent…