Author: Joey deVilla

News item:

GERMAN TWP., Ohio — A petite 17-year-old, irate after seeing three men running from her home in the wee morning hours Tuesday, sprinted outdoors barefoot, clad in pajamas, outran one of the trespassers, tackled and straddled him, then hog-tied him with a rope until police arrived minutes later.

The story also says that she gets lots of exercise being on the track and field team, the softball team and handling the family’s horses, but athleticism doesn’t always mean “ready for action”. I’ve been in scraps where out-of-shape ol’ me was playing hero while the jar-headed football-playin’ weight-liftin’ lugs who could’ve helped stood there dumbfounded.

Personally, I agree with Brian May’s assessment: I think the girl watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Give a Little” takes place tonight at the Cadillac Lounge (1296 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin). This night of funk, deep house and dub jazz is a fund-raiser for the Womens Habitat shelter and the Toronto Food Bank. DJ Slowhand will spin the deep house, Dr. J. Booty will stun us with his mad turntablism and the improv dub jazz outfit Chameleon Project will perform live. The cover is $7, but it drops to a mere $5 if you bring a non-perishable food item. You’ll have fun, and some truly deserving causes will also benefit.

Joe and Bridget came to town over the weekend and I took them around on Saturday night. Here’s a photo of them enjoying the dark gothic sounds on the dancefloor at Savage Garden.

Jish was in town on Monday and held a little gathering at Pauper’s Pub with the GTABloggers. I was too busy conversing to take many pictures — in fact, I got only this one shot. Good thing it’s a good one:

I’ve been spending my days chasing down work for the new year and sharpening my MAD PROGAMMING SKILLZ. Here’s what my work environment looks like.

One of the cool things about Toronto is the fact that the city sets up bike racks all over the place. You can even send requests to city planning fi you feel that a certain block doesn’t have enough.

The downside of bike racks is that they can scratch your bike’s paint job. Fortunately for those people who have to park their bikes on the north side of Queen Street West just west of Soho (in front of the Lush store), someone’s knitted wool cosys for three of the racks.

Here’s the Christmas song that Spinal Tap should’ve written: Mistress for Christmas, by AC/DC, from their 1990 album, The Razor’s Edge (you know, the one with the hit single Thunderstruck):

Mistress For Christmas

Jingle bells, jingle bells

Jingle all the day

I just can’t wait till Christmas time

When I can grope you in the hay

Easy come, easy go

Have a good time with lots of dough

Slippin’ up high, slippin’ down low

Love’m and leave’m on with the show

Listen, I like female form in minimal dress

Money to spend with a capital ‘S’

Get a date with the woman in red

Wanna be in heaven with three in a bed

He got it, I want it

They got it, I can’t have it

But I want it, it don’t matter

She got it, but I can’t get it

I want a mistress for Christmas

Easy come, easy go

Slippin’ high, slippin’ low

He got it, I want it

They got it, I can’t have it

I want it, don’t matter

She got it, and I can’t get a –

Mistress for Christmas

You know what I’m talkin’ about

I want the woman in red with bow in my bed

I can hear you coming down my smoke stack

I wanna ride on your raindeer honey and ring the bells

While I do believe that some traditions should be put to rest, I also believe that a lot of tradition-bashers are poor-impulse-control cases with no actual tradition or culture of their own, save for a couple of Utne Reader platitudes, a mild revulsion for anything even vaguely Christian even if it aligns with their beliefs, a pro-pot slant and a half-formed belief in karmic payback. Standing for almost nothing, they tend to fall for just about anything.

(Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’m a liberal, isn’t it?)

Chris Baldwin’s summed it up pretty handily — and perhaps unintentionally — in today’s Bruno:

To borrow the line about Klansmen and Martin Luther King Day: C’mon, Bruno, how hardcore a secularist must you be to not want a day off?

Of course, those of us who celebrate Christmas would argue the exact opposite: here we took a beautiful Christian holdiay and destroyed it in usual corporate-like/well-intentioned-white-liberal fashion.

(There’s a Randroid who would take another tack and say “here we took a beautiful commerical holiday and destroyed it in usual religious fashion.” Haven’t we developed some kind of Ayn Rand repellent yet?)

In the end, I believe that intent counts. I’m certain there is no malice, no implicit “convert or die” message and no forcing of one’s beliefs on others when someone wishes someone else a happy Chanukah, Ramadan, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Tet or even Festivus, the actions of certain vicious zealots notwithstanding. Balanced minds do not see any implied Hitler overtones at Oktoberfest, nor Hirohito/Tojo insinuations at the sushi house, and neither do they see the Crusades in Christmas. When people say “Merry Christmas”, most of them are really saying “Happy Holidays, and I’m celebrating them Christmas-style. You do your thing, and I’ll do mine. Come by for drinks.”

Merry Christmas, everyone.

I’ve pointed you to Moscow’s hilariously biting alternative newspaper, the eXile before — once for their delightfully scornful reviews of Moscow clubs, and another time for the basty-but-true article about what Europeans think of each other. Written by expat Americans now living in the Socialist Workers Paradise™, it reads like a bitter NOW magazine (people not in Accordion City should imagine their local alternative weekly paper, or the Village Voice if there isn’t one in your burg) written by people who loathe Moscow only slightly less than they loathe the monotony back home amd who might drink more than my online buddy Stavros the Wonder Chicken.

Now let me point you to Buffalo. Back in the 1950’s when Toronto was the Protestant-gripped city known as Toronto the Good — a bastion of stultifying WASPish goody-two-shoesness with no movies, newspapers or even playing football in the park on Sunday, anglophilia was the order of the day, and all food had mayonnaise on it (perhaps a little parprika on special occasions, but only for colour). One of the factors that turned Accordion City around was the influx of immigrants, who brought with them a labour force that built up the city, the sea of multicoloured faces that you see on our streets every day (my handsome mug included), and even more importantly, some dceent recipes. Buffalo, Albany and other cities in upstate New York suffered the exact reverse — a mass exodus from their cities that started in the late seventies as both slid into American mid-sized city urban blight. American TV channels here are fed to us by Buffalo-based affiliates, and from watching their local news, one would think that that happened in Buffalo were fires, liquor store robberies, and snowstorms. The image of Buffalo in the popular imagination — I’m going by conversatiosn with friends as well as a helluva lot of stand-up comics’ jokes — is that it’s cold and permanently covered in snow, bleak and overridden with crime, dull with nothing to do for kicks.

Kind of like Moscow, eh?

This brings me to The Beast, a new alternative paper in Buffalo. Currently on their fourteenth issue, The Beast is run by former eXile editors. While they’re not sure what their mission is, they seem to be quite sure that there are a lot of reasons to complain about Buffalo. In the current issue, there’s a story about “Peegate”, in which Buffalo transit bus drivers have erm, no place to go and another about how the Buffalo police have dossiers on people who have appeared at protests. They’ve also got a very eXile-like piece titled The Beast 50: The Most Loathsome People in America 2002 and some pretty odd “person on the street” interviews.

I’m not sure what it’ll do for the city’s image, but it should be an interesting read from time to time.

If you have Windows Media Player, point it here to see a movie of Joe Eigo doing some pretty wild flips, kicks and other acrobatics during his visit to Toronto this summer.

(Thanks to P. for the link!)