“The liberals took our dates!”

[ via Relapsed Catholic ] Bernard Chapin blames his dateless status on his being a conservative in the liberal city of Chicago:

For the paraphernalia displaying conservative, unexpected house
guests can make for dangerous situations indeed. I had this hammered
home to me last weekend. Upon our entrance, I wisely spent the first
five minutes frantically cleaning the bathroom for my guest’s approval
but I neglected to realize that the rest of the apartment is heavily
mined with all sorts of visible “buzzkills.” With a heavy aroma of
Clorox perfume I walked into the front room and found my guest pointing
at a portrait of our President smiling from a podium and wearing a
Carhart style coat. It was addressed to me on behalf of the RNC.

“What is this?” she spat.

Now
a man of true principle would have stopped right there and pointed out
George’s merits to his guest but some things are more important than
winning political debates so I opted for the weaselesque, “I have no
idea. I don’t know who that person is. I wonder why he’s hanging on my
wall.” This answer at least produced a smile from the Bush-hater before
me. I considered myself lucky that she missed the framed picture of
Charleton Heston hanging just below George. However, later in the
night, she called me over to the area near the front door and inquired,
“Whose face is this that you wipe your feet on?” This was really bad
news. She had incidentally stumbled across my “Hillary Clinton Doormat”
one the way to the bathroom. In the spirit of Bill’s autobiography I
answered “I have no idea”–although I kicked myself later for not have
said, “I cannot recall.”

Overall, it is wise to adopt
Clintonian standards for discussing politics if you wish to get along
with most Chicagoans and this is particularly true regarding the
shapely and form-fitting women who ornament our city to summer
perfection.

Admittedly, while political leanings can be a factor in romance, I think Chapin was more undone by:

  • Having to perform emergency cleaning on the bathroom.
    There’s really no way to do this discreetly, and disappearing for a few
    minutes when you’ve invited a lady friend over for a nightcap is the
    best way to kill any momentum gained during the date.

    By the bye, learn this mantra, Mr. Chapin: Chicks dig bathrooms that have been cleaned in advance. It says “grown-up”.

  • Going overboard with the political paraphernalia in the house.
    The Bush photo alone wouldn’t have been much of a problem. The Charlton
    Heston photo alone would’ve been no obstacle. The Hillary Clinton
    doormat wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker either; I once had a liberal
    girlfriend who couldn’t stand her.

    However, the combination of the three is a bit much: it screams political junkie,
    and unless you live “inside the beltway”, that’s just damned
    unattractive. It just makes one imagine that you haven’t yet gotten
    over losing the election for student council president (only in D.C.
    could George Will and James Carville be sex symbols).

    That’s the great lie of politics: “History is written by winners”. No,
    history is written by political junkies, the sort of person who doesn’t embody “winner”, but rather, its opposite.

    Pictures of
    politicians who’ve lived within the past 25 years are as much a warning
    sign as a bookshelf full of nothing but Stephen King and Anne Rice novels, possession of too much cat paraphernalia or
    ownership of a LiveJournal.

What do you think?

(The title of this entry is borrowed from a scene from one of my all-time favourite movies, Animal House.)

Categories
Geek

Don’t forget: I write another blog…

…on matters programmer-y and geeky. It’s called The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout,
and it covers all sort sof news of interest to software developers and
other folks interested in that sort of thing. In the Monday, July 5th
edition, the articles are:

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Scenes from a Sci-Fi Convention, Part 1: The Photos


Looks like there’s hope for the goths after all.

I’ve posted my photos from CONvergence, the sci-fi convention to which I was invited to play accoridon pied piper for the Dystopia Party. You can check the slideshow, but be sure to view them in album form, because I’ve written some back story for each of the photos.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Happy Independence Day!

Happy Independence Day to all my American readers! Hope yours was fun.

I spent mine saying some good-byes to my friends at CONvergence/Dystopia, joining Dave Ahrens’
family for a barbecue and then getting dropped off by him at the
airport. Here’s a shot of me from earlier this afternoon, ready to
celebrate the 4th American style: lookin’ stylish with a
stars-and-stripes tie, resplendent in my Elvis sideburns and ready to
rock, and posing beside a ridiculously large automibile.


It doesn’t get more “American Badass” than this.

The tie got raves at the airport. A number of the staff at the
Northwest Airlines counter came to check it out, a young woman at the
security checkpoint winked at me, gave me a thumbs up and said “Great
tie, dude!” and the stewardesses on my flight were all over the tie.

Maybe it’s time to start a “flags of the world” tie collection.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Just Got Back…

…from the CONvergence sci-fi convention held in the Twin Cities, and more specifically, from the Dystopia Party,
where I was treated like a rock star. I also got to indulge some of my
geekier urges, which included checking out some custom Klingon bat’leths. It took a lot of convincing to get Wendy to take this photo of me with them…


No, I didn’t buy them.

More photos later.

Categories
Uncategorized

A Little More on the Election

“Anonymous” got it right when s/he guessed at the reason for my hope for a Conservative minority as the result of the election on Monday:

Let me guess: a minority government as
holding pattern to keep things
moderate until they get their collective acts slightly more together. A
Tory (that’s “Conservative Party” for my non-Commonwealth readers)
minority would punish Liberal arrogance, and the Tories couldn’t
successfully pass any socially conservative legislation if they had a
bare plurality of seats. A chastened Liberal party would come back and
win a majority in 18 months and would Do Better.

I strongly believe that reasoned compromise and moderation is one of the best ideals of the National Character:
between English and French, between ties to the countries from which we
came and the country we adopted, between free markets and socialism and
yes, between being like and unlike our neighbour to the south. I think
that a Conservative minority allying itself with the Bloc (who would
agree on decentralization and granted more powers to the provinces,
which works given Canada’s vast size) and an opposition alliance of the
Liberals and NDP would’ve been a workable solution and would’ve given
the Liberals the “time out” that they so richly deserve. At the very least, it would result in Paul Martin’s ouster.

I also believe that repairing some of the damage to the US/Canada
relationship is in order, and I think that the Tories are probably
better able to do that than the Grits. We may not necessarily agree
with everything they do (my own stance on the Iraq war is that they’re
invading the wrong country), but as anyone who’s made it even part-way
to adulthood will tell you: friends can disagree and remain friends. I think we make a pretty good Simpsons to their Flanders.

“Anonymous” also says:

But I can’t vote for the Alliance, which is all the current Tories are.

While I find a good chunk of their social agenda repugnant (and I’m
sure that for at least some of them, their Canada does not include
Accordion Guy), I’m of the “I don’t have to like you to work with you”
school of thought — hell, anyone who’s been to any of David Janes’
“poliblogger” get-tyogethers knows that I’m even of the “I don’t have
to agree with you to have a friendly beer with you school of thought”.
They can do their job and keep the government running and the swindling
down, and I can do mine, which is making the Internet go. A minority
position would forve them to curb their retrograde social enthusiasms.
I won’t go to
their barbecues and they don’t have to attend my hot tub parties.

I live in the Trinity-Spadina riding, where the race was between
current MP Tony Ianno and the challeneger Olivia Chow. David Watters,
the Conservative candidate, is a non-entity in this riding,
“non-entity” being defined as “not being able to get more than twice
the votes for the Green Party, around whom I can’t even sustain a straight face, never mind the environment“.
Given that I wanted to give the Liberals a time-out and the fact that
Olivia had the best shot at usurping Ianno and since she was probably
the candidate with whom I could actually buttonhole for a half-hour
over coffee (she once tried to recruit me to play accordion at an event
she was hosting), I held my nose and voted NDP.

(By the bye, Ianno won, but by just about 1000 votes)

It may have been madness, but there was a method.

One wonders what the Colbinator (who wrote a good piece on why one should vote Tory) and Judy Rebick (who co-wrote a predictably finger-wagging piece on why one should NDP) would think.

(Truth be told, I’d gladly have a beer with Colby, who seems like the
sort of fella with whom one could imbibe many fine brews and discuss
just about any topic under the sun. On the other hand, I would probably
avoid ingesting anything — even air — with Judy. It’s not from any
political disagreements I have with her; it’s fear of catching The
Shrill.)

A wag at Tucows noted: “The maritime provinces voted to keep getting
handouts, and Ontario voted to keep giving handouts to them.”

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

I’m Honoured

In the process of prototyping an application for Blogware (the blogging tool used in creating this blog) that made use of its stats package, I noticed some incoming referrals from Wikipedia, of all places. It turns out that I’m listed under the “Accordionists” section of the Accordion entry. I’m listed alongside some serious bright lights: Guy Klucevsek, Weird Al, Lawrence Welk and my accordion role models John Linnell (from They Might Be Giants, for making the accordion cool) and Art van Damme and Dick “Daddy-O” Contino (hipster accordion legends, who made the accordion sexy).

It’s sort of odd that I’m listed among these people: with the glaring
exception of me, they’re all pros; I’m an amateur and a seriously
goofball one at that. I’m deeply honoured.

Wikipedia, being a wiki, is designed to accepting editing and
contributions from anybody. One of the necessities of such a design is
a history for each entry, which allows you to see what changes were
made, when they were made and who made them. Thanks to the history page for the “Accordion” entry, I know that a contributor named Bob Jonkman added me to the list on April 13, 2004. Thanks, Bob!

I’ll have to add some people to the “Accordionists” list: Jason Webley and Domenic the Accordion Beatles Guy both of whom have been doing accordion rock far longer than I, Astor Piazzolla, the undisputed king of accordion tango. And I can’t forget my accordion partner in crime, Karl Mohr, without whom I wouldn’t have become the Accordion Guy.