According to the Guinness Book of Records, Hasselhoff is the world’s most-watched TV star. According to my friend Adina, Hasselhoff is scary.
I’d been thinking about splitting this weblog into two. The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century would have all my stories and observations about life in general while another blog would be more technically oriented.
One of the names I was considering for the tech blog was “Happiest Geek on Earth”. This turn of phrase is actually Cory Doctorow’s; he came up with it by altering the Disneyland slogan “The Happiest Place on Earth”. He’s used it to describe both himself (in many places, most notably this Industry Standardarticle from October 2000) and me (in a recent bOINGbOING entry about my becoming a go-go dancer). I decided to run a Googlesearch for the phrase to see if someone was already using it as a title for a web page.
The result was a single page of entries, and they were stories about either Cory or me. Of the two about me, one was the bOINGbOING entry. The other was from a German blog called Der Schockwellenreiter (in English, that’s “The Shockwave Rider”). He’d seen the story in bOINGbOING and decided to link to The accidental go-go dancer. Here’s the entry in the original German:
[Der glücklichste Geek der Welt]. So könnte ich mir mein Leben auch vorstellen. Tagsüber ein wenig hacken und bloggen und abends durch die Musikkneipen tingeln, schräge Songs auf dem Akkordeon spielen und dabei immer von hübschen Frauen begleitet werden. Joey ist jedenfalls the happiest geek on earth.
Google’s translation feature offered this interpretation:
[the luckiest Geek of the world]. So I could also imagine my life. During the day a little chop and bloggen and by the music taverns tingeln, diagonal Songs on the accordion in the evening play and by pretty women to be always accompanied. Joey is anyhow the happiest geek on earth .
“Diagonal songs”? As you can see, machine-based translation has a long way to go.
A Google search for the word accordion currently puts me on the fifth page of results.
So for now, my Google claim to fame is that I have the Google search for the word accordion currently puts me on the fifth page of results.
A Google search for the mispelled version, accordian, places me on the first page, seventh item down. This would indicate that while my readership is a little low on the spelling skills, their taste is impeccable.
Here’s I photo I’d never seen until I ran a search for pictures from Burning Man 1999 using the non-word accordian:
Too many people I know are planning to “take it easy” tonight. It could be the cloudy weather, or simply the fact that after last week’s summer-like temperatures, the current chill has dampened everyone’s spirits.
My friend Anne works for Aerial Communications, the PR firm behind the Toronto dates of Jackie Mason’s latest stand-up comedy show, Prune Danish. She always gets tickets to any show promoted by her company and invited me along to see this one.
Mason comes from the great tradition of the comedians of the Borscht Belt, a vacation spot in the Catskills that became a popular destination for Jews starting in the 1950s. The hotels and resorts in the area hired Jewish entertainers to match their clientele, a lot of whom were stand-up comics. From the Belt came the great comic staples of observational humour (think Jerry Seinfeld and even Cory Doctorow) and aren’t-WASPs-funny jokes (think BET) that we take for granted today.
(I was probably the only Asian in the audience. Most of the audience looked as though they came from North York, which means their only encounters with Filipinos are usually with their housekeepers and nannies. I wondered if they thought I had the night off. “Did you press my shirts and get the kids’ lunches made already?”)
Mason put on a good show, starting with his traditional jabs at audience members in the front row and then going straight for the observational humour. While there’s nothing terribly ground-breaking in his material — the standard items from the news and ethnic jokes (there were moments he really sounded like Krusty the Clown, but then again, Krusty’s probably modeled after him, right down to the bit where he quit being a rabbi to go into comedy and making fun of foreign accents) — he still got a laugh out of the audience, who ages ran the gamut from university students to seniors.
I really liked the bit where he said that “only Gentiles think they have to sit in the airplane seat assigned to them”; it’s funny because it’s true.
I haven’t taken a “Which X are you?” online test in some time, but I couldn’t resist this one. I’m sure my friend Ryan Murphy already knows not only what kind of Nokia phone he is, but which Bang and Olufsen product and which BMW model too.
There was a birthday party for my friend Marlo on Saturday. Dinner — which I missed, owing to some prior commitments — was at the anything-goes yuppie hangout Seven Numbers.
I caught up with Marlo and her entourage after dessert, at which point everyone decided that they wanted to go dancing. I suggested the neighbourhood I call “Clubland”, a busy row of bars and clubs just south of where I live. We were going to see if we could get into Fez Batik, and if the line was too long, we had at least a dozen other clubs from which we could choose.
The line for Fez wasn’t moving at all, so we decided to walk south and try our luck at the clubs on Adelaide Street. Luck was with us; while The Living Room had a decent crowd inside, there wasn’t any line.
Always let the ladies try your pimp hat on.
A brunette bartender in pigtails and olive green tank top motioned for me to come over to the bar.
“Can you play that thing?” she asked, pointing at my accordion, which I was wearing like a backpack.
“Yeah, otherwise it would just be a thirty-pound fashion accessory,” I replied.
“I’ll buy you a drink if you play something for me.”
I don’t remember what the DJ was playing at the time, but it was easy to figure out which key it was in. I remember the song having a simple riff and that I had no trouble playing it. The bartender was impressed and she poured two shots of Goldschlager — one for her, one for me.
A bearded man in a grey sharkskin suit walked up to me.
“That was great! By the way, I’m Tony. I run this place. Follow me to the DJ booth.”
I followed him through the crowded dance floor and into the booth.
It was occupied by the DJ and a couple of hangers-on. The DJ was starting an old-school set with Prince’s Kiss. Tony asked the DJ for the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Tony announced, “please welcome the latest addition to The Living Room family…the Accordion Dude!”
I tipped my hat to the crowd. Tony pointed the microphone at the accordion and said “Go on, play.” Luckily, Kiss is a I-IV-V song, heavy on the sevenths, and it took me only two stabs at the keyboard to find the right key – A. I played through to the end of the song and even managed to get in a decent solo.
Tony led me to the bar on the opposite end of the dance floor, where he asked me to play something for the dreadlocked barman. I forget what the DJ was playing at the time, but once again, it was easy to figure out the notes and I played along. The earned me a free drink from this bartender, and Tony gave me a fistful of tickets good for free drinks. He then led me to the lounge near the front of the club to play for the bartender there. Marlo and company were in the lounge, so I gave them the drink tickets.
“When the accordion train comes in, everybody rides!” I said.
I managed to have a couple of vodka-and-cranberries with the birthday party before Tony came back with an idea.
“I’m gonna have you dance right on the main bar. It’ll be just like Coyote Ugly, but with an accordion.”
He put two crisp fifty dollar bills in my hand and led me to the bar with the pigtailed bartender who served me first. They cleared off a section of the bar for me, and I climbed up and played and danced.
The bartender, Jenn, kept feeding me Goldschlager shots. So far, I hadn’t spent a dime on drinks and I was actually making money.
Marlo had my camera and took a couple of pictures:
The guy in the sharkskin suit in the foreground? That’s Tony.
A couple of women reached up and tucked fivers in my pants. Inspired by this, Jenn climbed on the bar after last call and tucked my shared of the bar tips into my pockets while spanking me to the beat. This, of course, is why we boys take up playing instruments in the first place.
We decided to head out for some late-night eats after Jenn closed the bar. As I walked out, Tony asked me to meet with him later in the week to discuss a performance schedule. He wants me there every Friday and Saturday night.
I don’t really want to sacrifice my weekend nights to go-go dancing.
(I just read that last sentence and thought: That’s one of those things I never expected to write.)
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