My summer vacation started on Friday with a trip to the Om Festival, which can best be described as the answer to the question “What if the Ewoks from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi decided to hold their own Burning Man festival?” I just got back from the festival, and in an hour from the time I write this, The Redhead’s plane will land here in Accordion City. We both have the week off and will enjoying just hanging out (we might make a short drive to Niagara Falls’ Clifton Hill; Wendy loves cheesy amusements). Since I have two computers and WiFi in the house, both Wendy’s and my blogging should continue at their respective normal paces, but there are no guarantees. We’re pretty good at distracting each other from work…
Category: It Happened to Me
Categories
I guess I should be flattered
You’re going to need a little background for this one.
First, time-warp back to early March 2003: Mandatory Cheese Sandwich Entry Part One and Mandatory Cheese Sandwich Entry Part Two. Note the “Cute Girl”, whom I shall call “Kimberly” (not her real name) for the sake of simplicity.
The next relevant bit of back story is in the entry titled Last Night, a little later that month, which features Kimberly again:
9:00 p.m. – A Chinese restaurant
The fortune cookies are on my side tonight.
My cookie: You will soon be rewarded handsomely for your effort and talent.
Her cookie: A man is a volume if you learn to read him.
Ohhhhh, yeah.
9:20 p.m. – Corner of Bay and College Streets
The cookies lied!
“A” for effort, “D minus” for outcome. Sometimes looks, brains,
charm, incredible luck and accordion power just aren’t enough. These
things happen.
But dammit, I thought the cookies were going to push me over the top.
That one hurt quite a bit, and that’s probably why my “people
radar” wasn’t working properly the following weekend, when I hooked up
with this sort-of-goth girl, which ended up being an even bigger fiasco.
Ever since then, I’ve had to fight down a sense of annoyance whenever
Kimberly’s around. I know it’s not her fault, but I can’t help
feeling annoyed just the same.
(A little aside: The entry prior to Last Night is Doc Searls Comes to Accordion City. If I’d never gone to that little get-together, I’d never have met Boss Ross and would never have been offered the current job. It was a life-changing couple of weeks.)
Last night at Kickass Karaoke, I walked in to find Kinberly there. This is unusual — I’ve never seen her at Kickass Karaoke.
That’s when I noticed the second unusual thing: the new guy she had in
tow. He was about 5’11”, Asian, with a goatee and long sideburns. You’d
never mistake us for twins, but wow, did we come from the same style archetype.
Eldon walked up to me and said “He’s wearing the same colour
shirt you are, too.” I looked down, looked at my “clone” and had to
agree.
“This gives the term ‘cheap Asian knockoff’ a whole new meaning,” I said. “It’s like passing over a Lexus for a Hyundai.”
“Ah, don’t you worry,” he said consolingly, “he’s all Asian and no accordion.”
I guess I should be flattered.
As soon as Carson (the host) saw me walk into last night’s Kickass Karaoke, he attached something to the mic stand. It was an instrument boom. He’d bought it just to make it easier to set up a second mic for the accordion.
Holy crap.
Thanks, Carson! You’re the best!
Categories
Attack of the Clones
Kim says that I have a perfect double in Montana, which is kind of funny, because she has a clone whom I’ve seen at Sneaky Dee’s a couple of times.
While I’m on the topic of interesting things that you can see while walking down Queen Street West (just two blocks south of my house), I saw this scene outside Pages Bookstore on Saturday afternoon:
The woman in the photo was reading Fahrenheit 451. After finishing both sides of a page, she would rip it out and hand it to the man who set it alight in a makeshift brazier:
Ah, performance art.
On Saturday night, I was heading to Smokeless Joe to catch up with my friends Liz and Keith when I saw the coolest upright bass ever. It belonged to the bassist of The Matadors, who performed at The Black Bull later that evening. I aksed if I could photograph his bass, and not only did he oblige, he even posed.
Alas, I’d already made arrangements to catch White Cowbell Oklahoma with Meryle at the same time The Matadors were playing, but I’ll have to catch these guys at some point.
Duuuuuuuude.
Sebastien “Seb’s Open Research” Paquet, one of Canada’s bright lights on the social software and blogging front, made his first visit to Accordion City (he even called it “Accordion City” in his email!) on Sunday, and invited a few local bloggers to come out for lunch on Monday. The attendees were:
- Sebastien (of course)
- Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, whose blog, Editor: Myself appears in both English and Persian flavours
- Michael “Puzzlepieces / Fagan Finder” Fagan, the go-to guy for all things search engine-y
- Kaveh “Not Exactly” Khodjasteh, who can blog about theoretical physics and Jim Jarmusch films with ease
- Melanie “Chandrasutra” McBride, who’s done a quite a bit in the short span of time she’s been blogging
- …and yours truly.
We met for lunch at Cafe Diplomatico, in the heart of the Little Italy that occupies College Street West (we have a couple of Little Italies). Discussed in addition to blogging (which was to be expected) were the supposed rigor of academics, the upcoming election, censorship, Iran, search engines, the University of Waterloo and the glassy-eyed expressions of most of the other folks in the restaurant as they watched Italy playing the World Cup.
It was also the first time I’d met this group of bloggers, and I had great fun. Thanks for organizing this get-togerher, Seb! As for you locals — Hoder, Michael, Kaveh, Melanie — I’ll be sure to let you guys know about any upcoming GTABlogger gatherings.