About an hour or so ago, we had our first snowfall here in Accordion City. Here’s a shot taken twenty minutes into the snowfall, taken in the space between my house and my neighbours’:
It’s only fitting: yesterday was Day of the Deadbeat, today is Day of the Dead.
When the Philippines was a Spanish colony, a period that spanned three hundred years from the time of Magellan (whose punk ass we killed — circumnavigate this, colonialist beeyotch!) to 1898, many people from another Spanish colony, Mexico, were also transported there. The Day of the Dead, along with other bits of Mexican culture such as menudo (the dish, not the boy band) and hot chocolate and churros became part of Filipino culture. Unfortunately, while we picked up the visiting-your-dead-relatives’-graves thing, we never adopted the really cool parades of people dressed up as skeletons. For a country that goes all hardcore during Easter with guys actually getting crucified in Passion plays, you think we’d have embraced the skeleton parades.
Besides, I think I could come in handy at one of those parades:
I’m plagued by deadbeats.
First, the former co-worker who still owes me money from last year’s DefCon conference for the hotel and food.
Then, the housemate who failed to pay rent, ran up the largest residential phone bill I’ve ever seen, moved away and asked if he could move back if he landed a job in Toronto.
Then, the company that owes me six weeks’ worth of back pay but still needed me to do a lot of stuff.
Then, [Update October 31, 4:45 p.m. EST — okay, he paid up.]
I am sick and tired of people abusing my goodwill and generosity.
I’m coming after all of you, and I promise that I will make your lives so miserable that you will cry yourselves to sleep and wet the bed from your nightmares until you pay up.
You fuckers have been warned. Pay up.
Accordion City’s venerable BamBoo Club, a long-time fixture on Queen Street West, is closing its doors for the final time tomorrow night. It’s long been the home of live world beat music, great Thai and Caribbean food and for providing weekend-like drum-and-bass nights on Monday and Tuesday evening for those of us who work in the bar/restaurant service industry. The wall mural is already gone, and the rest of the club disappears after tomorrow night.
If you live in Toronto and have enjoyed the BamBoo over the years, be sure to catch it one last time. I’ll probably be there tonight along with some of the Thirsty People of Toronto and tomorrow night with the Sunni Choi Girlz.
I’m less than a week away from being thirty-five. The actual birthdate’s November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day, but the party’s taking place on Saturday November 9th chez moi. So far, 44 people have said “yes” to the eVite (and more than those who respond always show), so it looks as if this may be the record-breaking party for this house.
You don’t have to bring a present if you’re attending the party, but if you must, you can check my Amazon wishlist to see what kind fo stuff I like. If you can help me stock the bar for the party – beer, wine, or liquor — it would be appreciated. If you’re a musician, feel free to bring an instrument!
For my birthday, I’ve decided to adopt some new expressions: “Do an old man a favour” and “Make an old man happy”. As in “Do an old man a favour and get me a beer, please?” or “Make an old man happy and have dinner with me, won’t you?”
I rather like the sound of that.
Lyric time!
It Was a Very Good Year
Music and lyrics by Ervin Drake
When I was seventeen,
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for small
town girls and soft summer nights.
We’d hide from the lights on the village green
When I was seventeen
When I was twenty-one,
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for city
girls who lived up the stairs
With all that perfumed hair and it came undone
When I was twenty-one
When I was thirty-five,
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for blue-blooded
girls of independent means
their chauffeurs would drive
When I was thirty-five
But now the days are short,
I’m in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage
wine from fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
It poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year
For you young whippersnappers who don’t know how this song goes, you can check out this Windows Media file. It’s the Robbie Williams/Frank Sinatra version, taken from Robbie’s album, Swing When You’re Winning.
Some more photos from Saturday night.
About a quarter of Peter’s loft space was used as the dance floor. Music was provided by — of course — a computer playing from a selection fo MP3s while a laptop hooked to a projection TV showed images such as those shown below on the wall closest to the dance floor:
Peter was kind enough to post the entire set of projected images here.
“Obi-Wan” bought the lightsaber from one of those online places that makes replicas that are very faithful to the movies, right down to the glow. Unfortunately, the flash on my camera makes the saber appear white; it actually glows blue.
Early Saturday evening, I met sci-fi/fantasy/animation author and fellow blogger Diane Duane, who was passing through Accordion City, for drinks. She showed me her husband’s new computer, a Sharp Mebius laptop.
Never heard of the Mebius? That’s because it’s not normally available here in North America — the japanese market has determined that we’re not interested in incredibly skinny laptops with DVD-RW drives, built-in 802.11 and Ethernet and cool design (they have determined that we want all the tentacle porn we can eat, however).
Diane picked this up for her hubby at Dynamism, a New York-based company that specializes in bringing the latest and greatest Japanese electronics to North America (I’d love one of their tiny Ericsson cell phones!). Although it’s a Japanese computer, it has a standard QWERTY keyboard that has the Roman alphabet in large characters on its keys, as well as Japanese characters — you’ll feel like a console cowboy punching deck in a William Gibson novel using one of these.
I’ll write a little more about my meeting with Diane in a later entry.
Peter Timofjew, one of the kahunas behind the social group/drinking club/bunch of troublemakers Thirsty People of Toronto, held a Hallowee’n party last Saturday night. He’s the first set of pictures.
I used to go for more elaborate costumes in my younger days, but I’ve given up on that in more recent years. For the past three or four years, I’d simply throw on an apron and chef’s hat as go as “Chef” from South Park. This year, I toyed with going as Angus Young from AC/DC, or perhaps as “Manila Rice”, the Filipino answer to Vanilla Ice. Instead, I went as “Random Hong Kong Movie Gangster”. Rob loaned me his “Tom from the Chemical Brothers” yellow shades. And then I messed up the look with the hat.
Matt “Black Belt” Jones and I agree — your best clubbing outfit is an old tuxedo or equally formal black suit. You can wear it traditionally with a shirt and tie, as I did, or tieless with a black shirt, or go all Man from U.N.C.L.E. and wear a dark turtleneck with it. I went trad and wore a raffish (well, in Asian clubbing circles, the tie is actually understated) gold tie and white shirt. The suit’s a 10-year-old hand-me-down Hugo Boss courtesy of Dad. We should all have such generous fashion plates for fathers — thanks, Dad!
Rob got some coloured hairspray, but it didn’t work quite as advertised. Instead of making his hair platinum blond, it just made him look older. Very distinguished, though.
