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It Happened to Me

One of Our Muscle Men is Missing

My personal trainer found a sponsor for his entry into a bodybuilding competition and hasn’t been seen since. No one — not even his co-workers at the gym — know where he is. Emil (one of the trainers) and I discussed this.

Emil: Hey there. Say, you lost some weight?

Me: I did?

Emil: Since I last saw you. You look thinner, especially about the face.

Me: Well, you’re the second person to notice my getting into shape. You’re not as cute, but thank you.

Emil: Heh. The workouts going well for you?

Me: Yeah, and the meal plan that Mike set up for me helped, too.

Emil: Ah, Mike. We [points to a co-worker] were just talking about him. Nobody knows where he is.

Me: He didn’t even tell the managers he was leaving?

Emil: No, he just…disappeared [makes a gesture with both hands, as if disappearing in a puff of smoke].

Me: Weird.

Emil: And it’s hard to imagine him disappearing. You can’t easily hide that much muscle. When he was training for the competition, he got really huge.

Me: Drinking all that WheyDelicious pays off.

Emil: “Delicious chocolate flavour!”

Me: Every now and again I throw in a scoop of ice cream. It’s not bad.

Emil: It’s pricey. But Mike said he could get it for me cheaper than retail.

Me: You know, he said the same thing to me too. And in a under-the-table kind of way — as if he were a guy dealing pot. He said he could get me Nitro-Tech bars and WheyDelicious at a serious discount.

Emil: Yeah, he always got quiet whenever he talked about the deals on supplements.

Me: You’d think there was a protein mob.

Emil: A creatine mafia.

Me: A cartel that controls all the whey, soy and red meat in the world. Big Protein.

Emil: Maybe he double-crossed ’em.

Me: Mess the with protein mob, pay the price.

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Make My Day

“Hey, I just wanted to say,” the cute girl said, “I was watching you in the Body Attack class in the gym last week. You were looking good.”

I haven’t quite stopped grinning yet. Thanks!

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Operation RATS

A spoof of Operation TIPS and a Babylon 5 parallel.

It’s hard to be a satirist these days when reality keeps beating you to the punch. Still, onepotmeal has come up with a good spoof of the Operation TIPS (the new US spy-on-your-fellow-citizens brigade) called Operation RATS.

Someone on BurningBird’s comments area said that TIPS sounds a helluva lot like the Night Watch in Babylon 5. I suppose there are some parallels between the Current Situation and B5: a president who seized power illegitimately, a rise in xenophobia, and now a clearly-marked brigade of citizens watching other citizens. Like the universe of B5, there are bad aliens out there, but the government isn’t exactly full of good souls either.

My only questions are: Where’s our Captain Sheridan, and will some technomage finally come out and tell me what the fourteen words that will make anyone fall in love with you forever and the seven words to make them go without pain are? Sometimes charm, boyish good looks, wit, scintillating conversation, bizarro luck and an accordion just aren’t enough.

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Pickin’ up BoingBoing’s and Metafilter’s slack

With BoingBoing’s most prolific blogger on vacation and Metafilter down for a server upgrade, I thought I’d take up some of the slack and post some stories that I found interesting and amusing…

US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies (found at New World Disorder)

Hot commie-on-commie action! The lesson to be learned here is not to write Stalin/Kruschev slash fiction. (Also found at New World Disorder)

Karyn needs your help. She’s in serious credit card debt hell has turned to the ‘Net for help, by selling stuff on eBay and asking for donations on her site.

No more speeding in Daddy’s car — there’s now a device similar to the “black box” flight recorder in airliners that record your teen’s driving habits.

Soccer players flogged for moral corruption. It sounds like a headline from The Onion, but it ain’t. (via Yahoo News)

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It Happened to Me

A Chance Meeting in Brooklyn (or: “As a Matter of Fact, I DO Know Everybody.”)

My friend Jay Goldman drove to New York this weekend. He decided to try the legendary Grimaldi’s pizza under the Brooklyn Bridge, which consistently ranks first in the Zagat survey year after year. While waiting in line, he struck up a conversation with a woman who turned out to have the same camera as he did. As the conversation progressed, he found out that she was also originally from Canada, as were her husband and the two friends from out of town that they were showing about. The woman and her hubby, it turned out, went to Queen’s University; the hubby was a manager at the engineering pub where I was the DJ and wrote for the weekly humour paper whose offices were my second home.

Jay thought that there were too many coincidences not to ask “You wouldn’t happen to know Joey deVilla, would you?”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” she exclaimed. “Does he know everybody?”

The woman in line was my friend Alicia (a.k.a. “Leesh”), the hubby my old buddy George (they’re the people who are neither me nor Iron Chef Japanese in this picture), and the two out-of-towners with them were my pals Chris and Rob, who’d gone down to Manhattan for the H2K2 conference.

The fact that I can exasperate Leesh even from a great distance amuses me to no end.

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Two skinhead stories

The first one is about racist skins killing a Jewish man early Sunday morning, at almost the same time, two others danced and sang with me at the Legends of Ska concert. Also, some facts about the real Toronto and real skinheads.

Early Sunday morning, two shaven-headed youths — one of whom was reported to be carrying a long knife — entered a pizzeria in North York (the north-central part of Toronto, home to a large Jewish community) and start harassing the proprietors and customers. Outside the pizzeria, a yarmulke-wearing man named David Rosenzweig was helping his son, whose car had broken down. As the youths left the pizzeria, they fatally stabbed Rosenzweig in the back. Rosenzweig was the father of six children, and he would’ve been celebrating his 49th birthday later that day.

Toronto’s chief of police, Julian Fantino, said that “[Rosenzweig] just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, an innocent victim.”

Yes, he was an innocent victim, but in my opinion, he wasn’t at the wrong place at the wrong time. He was answering his son’s call for help; he was being a good Dad. In my books, that puts him as being at the right place at the right time.

It’s his murderers who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Trash collection may have resumed in the city, but there are still two pieces of human trash that need to be collected — and soon. My condolences go out to Mr. Rosenzweig’s friends and family.

News reports:


Only an hour earlier at the other end of town, there were a number of shaven-headed youths among the crowd at the Palais Royale. Legends of Ska, a concert featuring some of the Jamaican Ska greats of the 60’s, was taking place there. I met two skinheads during the intermission; we shook hands after being introduced and then they sang along, laughed and clapped while I played A Message To You Rudy (a song made famous by The Specials) on the accordion. These skinheads were cut from a different cloth entirely, dancing to the syncopated rhythms of the Skatalites with all kinds of people: Jamaican dudes in leather hats and funky dreads, whey-faced well-scrubbed Beat boys and girls wearing Vespa and Lambretta scooter t-shirts, Asian kids wearing Fred Perry golf shirts, older gentlemen looking snappy in either dashikis or suits and porkpie hats, black girls in Kinte cloth summer dresses, white rastas, punkers with mohawks, all ranging in age from teenagers to folks in their seventies. The climax of the evening was when the night’s featured artists all came on stage to do a rousing version of the ska classic Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think) and everyone danced.

This coming together of all kinds of people is what Toronto’s about, and the two guys I’d met are what true skinheads are all about.

For your information:

The original or “traditional” skinhead movement is actually abaout racial harmony, not hatred. The look was later co-opted by Neo-Nazis in the seventies. Here are some pages with quick summaries:

Some quick facts about Toronto and diversity( courtesy of the City of Toronto’s Key Facts):

  • Toronto is heralded as one of the most multicultural cities in the world.
  • Toronto ranked as the safest large metropolitan area in North America by Places Rated Almanac (We still have a way to go, though — Joey)
  • Toronto received 80,000 immigrants in 1997 from 169 countries.
  • Over 100 languages are spoken in Toronto, and one third of Toronto residents speak at home a language other than English.
  • 48 per cent of Toronto’s population are immigrants.
  • Foreign-born residents comprise more than 50 per cent of population (including me — Joey).

Utne Reader gave Toronto a special mention in its list of America’s 10 most enlightened cities. Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (the New York Times review is here) moved here after writing that book.

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In the other blog: Hell buys Zamboni

It’s an entry in which I exchange correspondence with John C. Dvorak. Yes, that John C. Dvorak. Go take a look.