Me and The Redhead. It’s good to be the king.
Tomorrow, I fly out to Boston to visit The Redhead. There’s a gathering tomorrow night at Clery’s for beer and dinner — feel free to drop by!
Gotta love how straightforward Boston food cart signage is. They also have carts marked “COOKED MEAT” and “LIQUID IN CANS AND BOTTLES”.
“Round-eye will pay. Ooooh yes, round-eye will pay.” What this man needs is an accordion.
An Asian dude by the name of Wesley has a site called Stuff That Is Awesome, and on it, he’s publsihed a bitter, funny and at least partly-true essay called The Curse of the Asian Man. It may help explain why Details’ Gay or Asian? puff piece garnered so much ire.
Go give it a look. I love the illustrations he included:
It’s true: in fact, the next items on the “To-Do” list in my iCal are “Avenge death”, followed by “Pick up dry cleaning”.
I stumbled across this entry after seeing this entry in Richard’s Just a Gwai Lo, which took me to this entry in Karl’s La Grange, which in turn took me to the asian asymmetry entry in Joseph’s Goatee, which also points to this entry in Nora’s blog, Au Jus, in which she writes:
Your comments, please…
[ via CarbWire, which I’m surprised Cory didn’t blog until now ] Avril Lavigne, who is famous for having been covered by me on MuchMusic, says that her angry song lyrics were the result of her eating too many carbs.
(And here I thought the songwriting trio known as The Matrix wrote her stuff.)
This isn’t the first time that sugary foods have been blamed for someone’s erratic behaviour; in the late 1970’s, there was the “Twinkie Defense”.
Someday, when Meryle runs for Prime Minister, this picture will come back to haunt her.
It’s time again for Carnival of the Canucks, where each fortnight a
Canadian blog points to highlights in other Canadian blogs in a fit of
Canadian linky love.
This fortnight’s Carnival is being hosted by Nicholas “Ghost of a Flea” Packwood, and the theme is “Fat, Drunk and Canadian”. The theme draws its title to a response to the Toronto Star’s recent column by Antonia Zerbisias, Insult-Happy Web Guns Fall Quiet,
in which she wrote about how the warbloggers aren’t blogging as much as
they used to. A riot of angry posts, right-wing rhetoric and fat jokes
(“laughing at someone else’s expanse”) ensued.
[ via #joiito ] A German couple went to a fertility clinic to find out why they were still childless, and the answer turned out to be ridiculously simple.
How this is possible in the country that created carstuckgirls.com [safe for work, but a little weird] is beyond me. I smell a tall tale. I hope.
This entry and this entry got me thinking about a story I haven’t read in a long time.
Most people with at least a passing interest in literature or science
fiction will have heard of H.G. Wells’ better-known works such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (does anyone remember the prog-rock album inspired by it?). While I enjoyed both, the Wells story that really “got” me was the short story, The Door in the Wall.
(The “Door in the Wall” link leads to the full text of the short story. Go ahead and look — it’s a pretty quick read.)
In The Door in the Wall, Lionel Wallace is an Englishman of high standing — “A Cabinet Minister, the
responsible head of that most vital of all departments”, as he describes himself. Redmond, the narrator, describes Wallace:
In spite of all this, Wallace is not a happy man. He is a haunted man, consumed with regret.
When he was a child, he wandered away from home and got lost in West
Kensington, where he chanced upon a green door set into a white wall.
He felt strangely compelled to pass through the door, which led him to
a magical garden filled with friendly panthers, happy playmates and
wonderful games. After playing for some time, he was appraoched by a
woman who showed him an unusual book:
“It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were
not pictures, you understand, but realities.”
The page immediately after the one that showed him wondering whether
to go through the green door did not show him playing in the garden.
Instead, it transported him back to the grey streets of West Kensington.
He tells Redmond that he has seen the door a number of times
throughout his life, but never went through it again. Each time he had
seen the door, he had some kind of pressing appointment: school, a
lady, an important vote in parliament. Each time, to his eternal
regret, he chose ignore the door. After telling his story to Redmond,
he vowed that the next time he saw the door, he would not ignore it.
He is found dead in a tubeway construction site the day after he saw
Redmond. He had apparently gone through a door set in a wall
surrounding the site and plunged into the excavation to his death.
Was the door and the garden just the product of a bright but stifled
child’s imagination, or did Wallace actually discover some kind of
gateway to another world? I don’t think it matters. Regardless of
whether it was a magical portal or ordinary door, if he had tried the
door at least once after his
first encounter, he wouldn’t have lived a life of hollow victories, of
“if only” and “what could have been”, and he might not have fallen to
his death as a result of desperation.
Do you keep walking past your door in the wall?