The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Well, that’s how you say the traditional Cantonese greeting (Kung Hey Fat Choy, which translates as “Wishing you prosperity”) with a “street” twist.

I’d like to thank everyone who came to the party on Saturday, which was a goat-tastic do. At peak, we probably had three dozen people in the house. Special mention goes to the following folks:

• Diana brought me a beatiful bottle of her homemade prickly pear liqueur. Tasty!
• Eldon left behind some Chinese New Year’s greeting paraphernalia and also provided the Osama bin Laden toy (the jeep with Osama being hauled away by two U.S. soldiers), which made quite a conversation piece.
• Ryan Murphy brought me a kick-ass mixed disk custom-made for the bash.
• Liz Phillips gave me an “Ubergeek” T-shirt! Thanks, Liz!
• Shayan Mashatiyan, a fellow GTABlogger, brought an amazing Persian dessert made by his mom and brought back from his last trip to Iran.
• Henry Dziarmaga, my friend from high school and university, whom I’ve haven’t seen in over ten years, dropped by!
• Local rock star Kat Goldman brought cake!
• Mira, whom you might remember from this blog entry dropped by and also brought some cute friends too (thanks, Mira!)
• And last, but certainly not the least, mad props to Robertson “Pimpmastah Strick” Strickler, who helped me fetch stuff for the party, provided the inflatable sheep and brought at least a half-dozen women to the party. He went above and beyond the call of dudehood.

We registered one red wine spill on one of the white couches (fixed with white wine and club soda — they’re ScotchGuarded, natch) and minor candle-related damage to the bar which I will someday have to explain to the landlord. Odd, considering it was one of the mellower parties we’ve had here at Big Trouble in Little China.

Work is now kicking into overdrive (thankfully!), so that’s all I can post for now. I’ll post some photos and stories from the party in the next blog entry.

Some of you have already noticed that I’m a little behind on getting that “Worst Date Ever” story out. I’ll crank that out soon, but work and general rent-money-making’s got to take priority.

Recommended free “Year of the Goat” stuff

Goateestyle.com has “Year of the Goat” desktop wallpaper.

(Today’s title borrows from the very funny blog Girls Are Pretty, which comes up with a new theme for every day.)

You too can feel that much closer to a rock star

The mysterious vinyl_demon informs me that an eBay auction selling “Rocks from Avril Lavigne’s home town Napanee” has just closed. The final price was US$1.50, which will probably be less than the cost of shipping.

My friends from Queen’s University, my alma mater, will recognize Napanee as “the sleepy little industrial town just west of Kingston, with the really large McDonald’s roadside stop.”

Because I’m all about pleasing my readers

A reader who wished to remain anonymous writes:

okay, accordion person, you’ve already run that photo of the japanese women with the breast scarves 3 times. i’m sure it’s all fine and dandy for the boys with the asian girl fetish, but what about the rest of us? can you balance the scales? can you? punk?

Why yes. Yes I can.

Okay, Playboy, want to buy this photo? Asian boy fetishists, enjoy! (Taken at the Hustler store in Los Angeles in January 2001.)

She’s doing security at my party on Saturday

The blog Inluminent, which covers matters of “small business, marketing, the Macintosh and other web based developments”, until recently used photos of scantily clad supermodels as a kind of way of increasing its readership (I have a friend to claim to read it “only for the articles”.) In response to some reader mail, the blog’s author has changed it so that the pictures can be turned on or off — the default is “off”.

I’ll admit to having used photos of cute people to spice up the ol’ weblog, but the big difference between the people in Inluminent and The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century is that I know the people in the photos. That, and the photos are unretouched. Every single last one of my friends, boy or girl, is naturally a hottie.

My friend Mira, whom I haven’t seen in a while, RSVP’d for my upcoming party and sent me some photos of her at an open air shooting range, thinking that I’d be amused. I was, and asked her if I could post them on the blog. She said “Yes! But use only the good ones!”

Mira, they’re all good! I very much dig very cute girls with very big guns (and don’t we all?).

Doesn’t it look like she’s defending a huge crop of weed?

“It’s comin’ straight for us!”

Mira certainly knows how to take the boredom out of fishing.

This looks like a still from an ’80’s action flick, doesn’t it?

I would answer a LavaLife personal with this photo. In a second.

Thanks, Mira! See you Saturday!

It was bound to happen: bootleg DVDs of The Two Towers made in Asia are hitting black markets everywhere.

The first interesting thing about these bootlegs is that they’re not “screeners”, or in other words, they weren’t made using a videocamera brought into a theatre. These are high-quality direct digital copies made for distribution by the filmmakers to members of the Motion Picture Association of America in the hope of winning Oscar votes.

The second interesting thing is that they’ve been subtitled very horribly, which has produced some hilarious results:

• During the battle of Helm’s Deep, Gimli asks Aragorn to toss him, but the subtitles read “toast me…I say you got to toast me!“
• The character names are often misspelled: “Fodo“, “I am Aragon son of Alfred“, “my name Smeedle“, “Gibley low you axe“, “Gandolf foogray that was my name“, “Shadol fax is the lord of all horses“…and on it goes.
• They can’t quite agree on how to misspell hobbits: “did you see two hoberts with them“, “we are not oaks we are hobiks“
• Instant-messaging speak rears its ugly head: “u r my heart“
• And there’s one subtitle that I can’t figure out [warning: not safe for work] — however did they arrive at that translation?

More hilarity can be found at the Engrish TTT Captions page.

[Link courtesy of MetaFilter.com]

Liz is competing in Blogwhore II, which is some kind of competition. Apparently the more blogs you get to link to your name and the contest page, the better. Here ya go!

I think it’s time to throw another party, and this weekend provides a nice theme: it’s Groundhog Day (given the unusual cold, I can’t imagine the Groundhog predicting an early spring) and Chinese New Year for the year 4700. Better still, it’s my Chinese New Year — the Year of the Ram/Goat/Sheep, depending on whose translation you use. I prefer to use “ram” as the other two have different (and unfortunate, in my opinion) connotations in the West. “Ram”, on the other hand, is a great double-entendre, just like Shaft. Daaaaamn right.

(Of course, not all sheep are uncool: there’s the Black Sheep, and some Chinese guides will also refer to this coming year as the year of the black sheep. Sepaking as the closest thing that my immediate family has to a black sheep, it’s all too fitting.)

The party will take place this Saturday, starting at 9 p.m. at my place (as seen on TV!) and run into the wee hours as usual. Invitiations will be sent out later today. Depending on the response, we’ll fill one or both tubs with ice. In keeping with the theme of the party, I am asking attendees to wear wool sweaters. Given that it’s still 18 degrees below zero out there, it shouldn’t be to hard to comply.

Anyone interested in what my parties are like should consult these pictures.

And now, in honour of the upcoming year, the first of a few Ram/Sheep/Goat lyrics…

The Choice is Yours

by Black Sheep

Who’s the black sheep, what’s the black sheep

Not knowin’ who I am it’s DLB rippin deep

I wasn’t in your realm but I’m in your sphere

You still don’t know the click so just listen here

Trik Turner on the one’s DBX on the two’s

3’s for them off beat crews like you’s

back middle to the front don’t front

you want a good time were gonna give you what

you want, can I get a hey, can I get a what

can I get a buck buck you know that’s what I want

the styling is creative, Trik Turner is the natives

we can be violated or ever duplicated I got

nuhs from catch wreck and cousins of the

wize you know its no surprise that this shit

flies hi, yes which way, what, when, how, Mr.

Otto D. flip the track right now, I know you’ve

Heard the others wanna be dust covered but

Then again the choice is yours.

Where’s the trick at here’s the trik

And even if you wanted to you can’t sound as sick

Watch us swing like this why should we

Swing it like that because in fact what yours

Might hold us back – therefore, I ignore

I do as I feel as I trust in “D” He’s got my

Back tonight you know what I’m sayin’ yo’

Trik I ain’t play’n it’s easy to roll

With this than to roll with that

With no delay and see an actuality to one

It can not be, I made it look easy because

It is to me, anytime capacity was filled, tried

To rock it, anytime a honey gave us play, tried

To knock it, never was a fool so I finished

School never seen us sweat, and you never

Seen us schooled, out to rock the world

Right here from my block, don’t punch girls

And we don’t punch a clock, gotta go gotta

Go see you later by the cat and you can’t

Beat that with a bat

[Hook]

You can get with this or you can get with that

You can get with this or you can get with that

You should get with this cause this is where its at-

Engine engine number nine

On the New York transit line

If my train goes off the track

Pick it up pick it up pick it up — whack!

Back on the scene, crispy and clean

You can try but don’t lie because you can’t get with me

We be the outcast, can outlast, and outblast

Let this shit rip and feel the rush, crushed

Open your doors you best believe we’re sliding thru

Quickly, niftily we can make it hip to be

Down with this mess with two MC’s

Fuck what you heard we on some T.O.P.

I’m still DLB

So now I turn triks cause I’m the true player

Hold your coat cause I got the container

Pass the plate across the fader

Trik Turner gets played like a Sony innovator

Never the traitor party inflator

And you can get a scoop later

I just got email from Playboy, and no, it wasn’t “Dear Mr. deVilla, please pay up or we won’t renew your subscription.” Here’s the important part:

I am a photo researcher at Playboy Magazine in Chicago. We were on your website and saw the following photo:

We would like to purchase rights to use this photo in the magazine. We will pay $250 american dollars for one time english language use and we will give photo credit in the magazine.

Huh? “We were on your website?”

The optimistic side of me is thinking “Well, if I’m being read by both awe-inspiringly deep Calvinist theologians and Playboy writers, I must be doing something right.” The more realistic side is thinking that thanks to a lot of linking (especially from A-listers like The Reverse Cowgirl), a little Googling will show that I am responsible for this particular meme.

(This is the second major meme for which I am responsible. The first is “Drug Dealers vs. Software Developers”, which started with an email I wrote back in ’95 for a newsletter for the alumni of my engineering class.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t take the picture in question. My friend Karin was sent these photos, and she emailed them to me. I just posted ’em here for your amusement. I’ll email Karin and see if I can’t backtrack and find the photographer.

Now I hope that the people at Playboy magazine realize that they’ve a got a golden opportunity to hire a clever, handsome, worldly-wise bachelor who understands their readers very, very well. Or perhaps Hef might be thinking “you know, I’ve never had an accordion player at the mansion. It might be nice.”

I like my cosmos with just enough cranberry for colour and no more, Hef.