The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Posted just in case you needed to know the difference.

It’s the second Monday in October, which means in Canada, it’s Thanksgiving! Unlike the American Thanksgiving, which takes place at the end of November, Canada’s Thanksgiving is based more on the old harvest festivals in Europe. However, like the American tradition, a family gathering with turkey, cranberry sauce/jelly, and pumpkin pie is how we celebrate.

For those of you who celebrate it — and seriously, do it instead of Columbus Day — Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! In its honour, here’s a song with a “thankful” theme: Gratitude by the Beastie Boys:

If you’ve seen Burger King’s ads with their mascot and that creepy “King” mask, you know that they’re no stranger to weirdness. Combine that with Japan — the world’s leading exporter of pure, unadulterated WTF — and true weirdness is the result.

Burger chains with international reach often create local versions of their sandwiches. Burger King’s latest version is the Kuro Ninja burger — kuro is Japanese for black — which features a black bun created by mixing bamboo charcoal with the flour and “black ketchup”, a concoction of regular ketchup, garlic and squid ink. The burger also features a big hunk of bacon.

If the bacon in the promo photo above reminds you of someone sticking out their tongue, that’s intentional. The mascot for the burger is a ninja — the feared shadow warriors of legend and a lot of painfully bad Sho Kosugi movies from the ’80s — sticking out his tongue.

The marketing equation that Burger King seems to be following for the Kuro Ninja is as follows:

If any readers have tried a Kuro Ninja burger, let us know in the comments!

Many engagement photos are overly saccharine, and the better ones require waaaay too much prep, makeup, costuming, and choreography. Perhaps that’s why I rather like the picture below, which I presume is one announcing the engagement of two people who don’t take themselves too seriously:

My congrats to the happy couple.

I’ll miss Tampa — and I’ll miss the girlfriend even more. I’ll see you folks in Toronto soon.

I’ve got a friend in the Toronto area who’s looking to sell his Lenovo X201 tablet-style laptop with the following features:

• Core i7 processor
• 4GB RAM
• 128 GB SSD drive (fast!)
• Touchscreen w/ stylus
• The 64-bit version of Windows 7 Pro

It’s yours if you want it for $450. Contact me at joey@joeydevilla.com and I’ll arrange an email intro.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Sandro Lisi: Friend and sometime-driver of Toronto’s mayor, accused of drug trafficking, has a rap sheet that includes violence against women, lives with his mom. The mayor has referred to him as a “good guy”.

The special police probe into Toronto’s Mayor and his skeevy friends has a name, and it’s a great one: Project Brazen 2! A spin-off of the guns-and-gangs crackdown Project Traveller (just like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Wolverine were spin-offs of the X-Men movies), Project Brazen 2 was launched when Mayor Rob Ford’s friend and sometime-driver — and let’s not forget the details of a rap sheet that included violence against women, and the fact that he still lives with his mom — tried to secure the return of stolen cell phone in exchange for drugs.

The cell phone is believed to belong to Rob Ford. There are reports of the mayor and his staff being concerned when the phone went missing in March, although it’s not clear why. The phone went missing at a rather suspicious time: about a week or two before the Toronto Star learned of the existence of the infamous alleged “crack video” and two months before the Star and Gawker published their reports. The police investigation reports says that Lisi “brokering the return of a cellular phone stolen from an associate of his” in exchange for a “payment of marijuana”. It doesn’t say if he got the phone back or not.

Here’s an interesting fact: Project Brazen 2 is not a sequel to Project Brazen. It’s just that some other branch of the Toronto Police already had a Project Brazen going on at about the same time, nobody checked if the name was already taken, and both groups seemed rather attached to the name “Brazen”. You could consider them unrelated in the same way that the film often known as Hackers 2 has absolutely nothing to do with Hackers, or you could think of it as typically Canadian in the way we used to have two Canadian Football League teams with practically the same homoerotic names (Saskatchewan Roughriders, still active, and the defunct Ottawa Rough Riders).

Still, Project Brazen 2 would make a great name for an action flick: