Category: It Happened to Me

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It Happened to Me

John and Raja Go to Leonard 313

John (whose blog, Hypothesis.ca is off to a very good start) and Raja are students at Crazy Go Nuts University.

In a comment for the entry in which I advised students moving into

residence (“dorms” for my American readers) to flip their mattresses

over, Raja asked:

what res did you occupy in first year at queens?

I replied

that I lived in Leonard Hall, room 313. It’s where I met some good

people with whom I’m friends to this day, most notably one

mostly-upstanding gentleman by the name of George Tudor Scriban. (Our wacky adventures together stretched beyond school and into what passes for “the real world”: we joined OpenCola, a dot-com co-founded by science fiction author/EFF Crusader/Boing Boing non-fetish article writer Cory Doctorow.)

Since John and Raja seem to be the civic-minded sort (and since it’s

coincidentally a good excuse to check out the freshettes), they set out

to visit the current occupant of Leonard 313 and personally advise him

to flip over the mattress. Being an intrepid blogger, John blogged this

journey into the heart of darkness, complete with photographs!

Raja and John: “Whoo-hoo! We’re goin’ to White Castle! Er, I mean Leonard Hall.”

(John, I notice you’re wearing a shirt with the Alma Mater Society logo that was designed during the first half of my era at Crazy Go Nuts University. I know the real story of how that logo came to be.)

Here’s a shot of the walk leading up to Leonard Hall. And yes, Crazy Go Nuts University has many, many pretty young ladies.

“I…like…Queen’s butts and I cannot lie!”

They found the room:

Wait a minute. What does that sign to the left of the door say? NOOOOOOOOOO!

It turns out that my old room is occupied by a freaking Residence Don,

whose oath of maintaining Law, Order and General Lameness is

diametrically opposed to my Bluto Blutarski approach to

post-secondary academics. I’m sure my roommate, Mark Sedore, would

object too. We’re going to have to visit this Homecoming and perform

some kind of exorcism on the room.

The Don, who goes by the name Darren, wasn’t in, so they left him a note:

My calling card has been left, and I was hundreds of kilometres away! It’s as if I have my own secret army of the night!

John and Raja, I owe you some beers at Clark Hall Pub. Thanks, guys!

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It Happened to Me

A Public Service Announcement to First-Year University Students Moving Into Residence

(To my American student readers: substitute “dorm” for “residence”.)

The first thing you should do when entering your room — after introducing yourself to your roomate, if you have one — is to flip the mattress over.

Trust me on this one.

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It Happened to Me

Named a Canadian "Top Blog" — Thanks!

I finally got the mess with my kode-fu.com email address straightened out. In the backlog, I found out that The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century made the August edition of BlogsCanada’s “Top Blogs” list. Here’s what they had to say:

Jim Elve says, ” I met Accordion Guy Joey deVilla in person recently

and he’s every bit as gracious and talented in real life as he comes

across in his superb blog. I’m not sure how we managed to overlook this

high-energy blogger for so long.”

Wow, thanks, Jim! I’m flattered. Now truth be told, I considered the mention of this blog in the beta version of the Top Blogs listing more than enough, but thanks to the BlogsCanada judges — Briana Doyle, Jay Currie, Vicki Fox Smith and Jim Elve — for adding it to the official list!

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Rue Morgue Party (or: I Got to Meet My Hero, “Sex Machine”!)

A week ago today, I got a call from Darryl Wiggers, whom I met by
chance while picking up some lunch at the Liberty Market, a
deli/grocery near work. Daryl is the programming director for Scream,
the all-horror movie cable channel. He had a couple of tickets to a
party being thrown by Rue Morgue
magazine (Gothica, horror and general Rob Zombie-ism) in conjunction
with last weekend’s science fiction and horror convention. I’d planned
on having a rare quiet Friday night at home, but since the event was
taking place at the Pussycat Club, a mere couple of blocks from my
place, the Law of the Rare compelled me to go.

(The Law of the Rare is a personal philosophy: if I’m having trouble
deciding between two things, always choose the more rare one.)

I met Darryl at the Second Cup at Queen and John Streets and we walked
around the corner to the Pussycat Club. It hasn’t been the Pussycat
Club for very long — last summer, it was a jazz-funk bar owned by a
guy who looked like a very well-dressed Heavy D.

While walking there, Darryl mentioned that Tom Savini would be there.

“Don’t recognize the name,” I replied.

“He was the biker guy in the original Dawn of the Dead.”

“Been a while since I’ve seen Romero’s version,” I said.

“Well, he was also in From Dusk Till Dawn. He was ‘Sex Machine’.”

“OH MY GOD!” I yelled out. “Sex Machine is my hero!”

How can I not be fan of a guy with a machine gun codpiece and a ridiculous name?

More later, but in the meantime, you might want to check out the photos
of me, Darryl, Sex Machine and other horror movie stars who were at the
party. You can see them in photo album or slideshow format.

“Chop Top” from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2



“Dog must hunt! Dog must hunt!”

“Pinhead” from the Hellraiser movies



Actual quote from Hellraiser II: “You’re so ripe, Joey. And it’s harvest time.”

“Sex Machine” from From Dusk Till Dawn



Machine-gun codpieces rule!

Gideon Strauss, in a comment on the photo with me and Doug “Pinhead” Bradley, wrote:

I love people who even KNOW the word “cenobite.”

The traditional definition of “cenobite” is “someone who belongs to a
religious order. Priests, monks, nuns, rabbis and druids are cenobites.
However, in the case of the Hellraiser
movies, the captial-C Cenobites are Clive Barker’s creations: evil
beings from another dimension delivering pleasure that soon turns into
gory pain. Doug Bradley played the most famous Cenobite: Pinhead, the
Cenobite leader. In Kingston in the summer of 1992, I spent a couple of
creeped-out evenings in Rik “DJ Stinky Poo-Poo” Young’s liviing room
watching the entire Hellraiser series.

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Things I Have Received in Exchange For Accordion Performances Over the Summer

In no particular order:

  • Lovin’ from Wendy

  • Smoothies for me and Scott from the Lettieri Cafe at Queen and Spadina
  • Beer from the bartender who looks like Heather Locklear’s younger sister at the 606 rooftop bar
  • Beer from the wandering magician at the 606 rooftop bar
  • “Best performer of the night” award from Kick Ass Karaoke
  • The gratitude of the CEO’s kids at the company picnic
  • A card with a picture of “Legolas” from the Lord of the Rings movies
  • Jagermeister shots from the 606 manager
  • Beer from a guy at the Drake Hotel who wanted Happy Birthday played for his girlfriend
  • Beer and chicken roti at the “Give Me Liberty” street festival
  • Kit Kat bar from the vendor at LaGuardia airport
  • Beer from the girl having a stagette at Smokeless Joe’s
  • Anarchist zine from a hippy chick at Kensington market
  • Beer from the table of girls at the Drake Hotel who didn’t think you could play pop songs on accordion
  • The opportunity to jump the line at a couple of clubs
  • Free cover for me and Wendy at FunHaus (the club formerly known as the Zen Lounge)
  • Beer from the guys at John’s Italian Deli on Baldwin Street
  • Beer from the waitress at Shoeless Joe’s
  • Pizza slices at Amato’s on Queen Street
  • Pop from the hot dog vendor at the Parkdale/Liberty market
  • The
    opportunity to demonstrate squats in front of my all-female BodyPump
    class. I got applause. “How do you know when an accordion’s ass is bad?
    When it looks like THIS!” I will never tire of that line.

  • Free cover at the El Mocambo for the White Cowbell Oklahoma show. Meryle
    asked the bouncer at the door if he’d seen an “Asian guy with a flaming
    cowboy hat and an accordion”, and he just laughed. I showed up 15
    minutes later and he started laughing so hard that he lost his balance.
    “I thought she was asking me some kind of trick question,” he said.
    “You go in free for giving me the biggest laugh of the night.”

  • A hearty handshake and slap on the back from an nice old man
    with an Eastern European accent who saw me on my bike with the
    accordion on my back. He pulled over his van, nearly cutting me off and motioned to me, asking
    me if I really played that and could I please play it for him.

  • A look of approval from actor/makeup artist Tom Savini, who played my favourite character in From Dusk Till Dawn: Sex Machine.
  • The
    biggest value: Plane tickets, hotel accommodations, admission,
    coveralls and booze by the organizers of the Dystopia party at the
    CONvergence SF conference in Minneapolis. Thanks, Dystopians! You made
    me feel like a rock star, and for that, you rock!
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It Happened to Me

From my CD-ROM archives I: Virtual Bubble Wrap, Standalone Edition

This is the first in a series of goodies that I found on a stash of
CD-ROM archives that’d completely forgotten about until I was cleaning
up some old junk this weekend.

One application that had received considerable buzz in the Mac world
back in 1994 was something called the Mackerel Stack. It was an
interactive multimedia piece that showcased the company’s work. Written
in the Hypercard-like Supercard, it was an amazing piece of software
and it fit on a single 1.2 MB floppy disk!

It was packed with “easter eggs”, the most popular of which was a
little zen game called Virtual Bubble Wrap. Designed by Creative
Director Dave Groff with the input of the other Creative Director Kevin
Steele and programmed with the help of all-round-idea-guy Karl Borst,
VBW was a little interactive gem. I joined Mackerel in 1995
and near the end of that year, after waking up on Mike Korditsch’s
couch with an awesome Tequila-induced hangover after celebrating my
birthday, I went home and coded what would eventually become the
Shockwave version of VBW.

It would go on to be featured in InterActivity
magazine (In the article, Macromedia engineers talked about how they
used VBW as part of their Shockwave demos) and a number of then-new
television shows that covered the then-relatively-new World Wide Web.

I found a standalone version of Virtual Bubble Wrap for Windows that
I’d put together back in the days of Windows 98. It still works under
Windows XP, and I’ve attached a ZIPped version with this entry if you
ever feel you need to zen out for a couple of minutes.

I have the source, so it’s possible for me to compile a Mac version;
the problem is that all my editions of Director (the software I used to
write it) are pre-Mac OS X; it will run only on pre-OS X machines
(which I no longer have) and will only produce programs that run on
pre-OS X machines.

Dave Groff and Kevin Steele have a fine essay about “the good ol’ days”  titled When Multimedia Was Black and White.

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It Happened to Me

Now all I have to do is get onto the Accordionist deck of cards and my work here will be done

Somebody made me a square on HacksRUs’ “Haxor Bingo” page. Thanks to a
nickname and the magic of alphabetical order, I’m the first square.

By the bye, it’s spelled accordion.