Category: It Happened to Me
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Workin’ Away…
Getting a software release to work — especially a web application
under Windows — is such a royal pain in the ass that reading the
comment threads to my LiveJournal Childfree Community entry and the Childfree Community’s response entry is pretty relaxing in comparison.
(I don’t worry too much about arguing on the internet; they often heat up to ridiculous degrees, as this Red vs. Blue movie [21 MB QuickTime] points out.)
Maybe I should go annoy the Furries next.
A couple of the Queen West regulars have told me that Johnny Depp is in town for the Film Festival and has been hanging out at Shanghai Cowgirl. Be careful, Johnny: their sweet potato fries and wasabi mayonnaise may be tasty-licious, but a few plates of those and Sir Mix-A-Lot may be writing raps about you.
Val Kilmer’s presence is also being felt in town, albeit in a different way:
Photo by Cory Doctorow.
Cory Doctorow took the photo above during his last visit to town. He, Possum and I had just come from watching The Village (“A ninety-minute Twilight Zone
episode”, he called it) and were walking along Grange Avenue towards
Spadina when we saw “Val Kilmer” with a peace sign on a side door to one of the Chinese markets.
“You think it’s for his career as a whole, or just a specific role?” I asked. “I liked him best as ‘Nick Rivers’ in Top Secret.”
A couple of weeks later, during her visit to Toronto, Wendy spotted this graffito as we were walking on Phoebe towards Soho (just north of The Black Bull):
Photo by Yours Truly.
The peace sign beside “Val Kilmer” suggests that the tagger probably saw The Doors and had some kind of epiphany. I haven’t seen the movie — was it really that good?
Lesson #3: Chemistry is not my bag, baby
S&R is a discount department store in Kingston, the city in which Crazy Go Nuts University is situated. It was a popular place with students, and for the guys in my house — 103 Clergy Street West — it was the go-to place for cheap hats.
For a little while, hat collecting became a hobby of ours. My housemates Greg Popoff, Mark Bereczky and I were particularly fond of our fake fur hats with furry ear flaps and a high dome; we looked like two members of the Politburo and the North Korean Ambassador in them. I was also partial to a black felt fedora that I’d purchased at S&R and had taken to wearing it fairly often in the beginning of second year.
It was the fall of 1988. Although I was in second year, I was in a first-year chemistry course. I am the opposite of the rest of my family; where they seem to like chemistry and biology, my strengths were in physics and math. I was disinterested in biology, but I absolutely loathed chemistry. “Damned electron shuffling, that’s all chemistry really is,” I used to say.
“You take notes,” said Cathy, my chemistry lab partner, “your handwriting’s neater than mine.”
“Suits me fine,” I said. “I’m in Electrical. As far as I’m concerned, chemistry’s for making batteries and beer.”
Cathy was my partner-in-chemistry in a couple of senses; she was a lab partner and a drinking buddy. She probably heard me complain more about E. (the girl from this story, the one who said that the three kinds of men in this world were “scum, art fags and Joey”) than anyone else. She also helped judge the entries in the “Win a date with Joey deVilla” contest in the paper later that year.
Cathy ignited the bunsen burner as I started writing the introduction to the lab assignment.
“Joey…”
“Hang on, Cathode,” I said, calling her by my nickname for her, “I just have to finish the intro.”
“Joooo-ey…” she said, her voice filled with worry.
“What?” I said, turning my head. As I turned, an orange and yellow burst of colour came into my view. It took me another moment to register what was going on: I was still wearing my fedora, and somehow it had caught on fire. I must’ve been leaning too close to the bunsen burner.
“Oh, shit!” I said, for two reasons: the obvious one as well as the fact that Paul, our lab T.A., was about to enter the lab. Luckily, he was deep in conversation with another T.A., so he hadn’t yet noticed that some idiot had just set himself alight.
Luckily, the lab was on the first floor and our station was right by an open window. I grabbed my fedora by the rear brim and pitched it out the window into a nearby snowbank.
Paul walked towards our station. I didn’t know if he’d seen the incident or not, so I opted to put on my most guile-free expression and act as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
“Hey, Paul,” I said. “What’s up?”
He sniffed the air for a moment and then looked out the window.
“Could you explain what that is?” he asked, pointing to the smoldering hat outside.
“Oh, that. It’s…it’s…well, I’d classify it as some kind of exothermic reaction.”
“Very rapid oxidation,” added Cathy helpfully.
“I can see why you partnered with him,” said Paul to Cathy as he walked away. “He’s an idiot chemist, but a good note-taker.”
See the update at the end of the article.
Wikipedia user “Poccil” saw fit to delete me from the list of accordionists in the “Accordion” entry. What did I do to you, dude?
I will admit that unlike the other fine people listed as accordionists
in the entry, I am merely a hobbyist, but wouldn’t you agree that nobody pushes accordioning as a hobby the way I do?
Update (2004-09-13 12:05 p.m. EDT): Wikipedia user “Suppafly” has reinstated my entry. Thanks, dude!
Why, you might ask, didn’t I simply update the Wikipedia entry
myself? Considering that anybody is allowed to edit Wikipedia, it would
be a very simple matter. However, I think it’s poor form and a
violation of the spirit of Wikipedia to make such an edit oneself.
In case you were curious, here’s the denouement of the Something Positive comic series on the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo books.
In case you missed the comic series, I point it in this entry.
Back in April, I wrote about Avenue Victor Hugo books, which I stumbled into while walking along Boston’s Newbury Street with The Redhead. In that article, I republished The Crepuscule, a document which describes itself as “Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores”.
In Wednesday’s and yesterday’s editions of his webcomic, Something Positive, Randy Mulholland shows the main character “Davan” in a bookstore that bears a striking resemblance to Avenue Victor Hugo…
