Shattered Pride

I'm going to tell you what to do, Toronto, You Stupid Dick 4 Replies

Poor Pride Toronto.

It seems everyone is out to get you.

There’s that whole Middle East problem that somehow has become a sword for any yokel who dislikes a few hundred thousand people getting together to celebrate diversity. Hey JDL and QuAIA – Thanks for bringing your fight to the mix and stop me if I’m wrong, but a festival about sexual freedoms is not a place for airing out your Forever War, even if you tack on the word “Queer” to your cause. Pride is now officially like a high school house party for theatre fags where the chess club shows up and insists on taking the B52s off the stereo and putting on Nana Mouskouri. ZZZ.

Meanwhile, at city hall…I imagine the mayor and his right winged goonsquad are melodramatically twirling their mustaches, thinking up ways to defund you. Like setting public opinion upon you by ramping up buzzwords like “hate speech”, painting you as being dis-organized, therefore not deserving the dollars. Seriously Pride Toronto, watch these guys. They’ve shown in the past they’d be happier if you didn’t exists at all, let alone being forced to give you money.

And at the Sun (snicker) newspaper, some hack awful reporter (who has her nose quite far up the mayor’s ass) is going behind your back telling religious leaders to lean on city council reps to de-fund you due to hateful messages in your parade.

Remember when you had to deal with naked people? Good times…

So what do you do?

I’m going to tell you what to do and you can do what you like:

Cancel Pride.

Hear me out: I’ve always thought the best advice for dealing with children who are throwing fits is to calmly stop, let them run their course, then punch them in the face.

Okay now I’m dead serious about this. Please cancel Pride for one year and let the city wonder where the couple hundred million dollars in tourist money went. Let these petulant whiners wonder how the city came up a few hundred million dollars short in the budget because of all the product placement, transactions and advertisements suddenly stopped flowing from business to business. Let the businesses who lose out without Pride deal with the mayor and the right-winged reporters and religious goons. Money has a funny way of shutting people up.

Friday Link Round Up!

Celebs and Media, Distractions 1 Reply

Someone over at The Guardian got to see and play a preview of Portal 2 and he is impressed. Colour me anxious! I can’t wait for April 21!!


At lunch today I downloaded the mega-pack of Atari’s Greatest Hits for the iPad. I got to zip through a few games including Tempest and a little nerd tear rolled down my 8-bit cheek. However, the Atari 2600 version of Tempest sucked ass. As it did back then. Controls are touchy (ha!) but oh the sweet Tron-like memories that flooded back into my gullet. Here’s a video! (Via BoingBoing)

Robots and Disney News (is there any other?): PeeWee’s Paul Rubens (as the Flight of the Navigatory REX) has been bumped out of the pilot seat on Star Tours 2, replaced by a far more competent Anthony Daniels/C3P0. Expect ‘3P0 give you the possibility odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field (approximately 3,720 to 1).

From the mailbag: Josh sends on this news story of the most successful hand model in history. MESMERIZING! It’s like Medusa’s head without the hissing! I had to watch it a couple times, thinking it was a parody. Nope. Real.

Eric Rubright sends me this video of Autobots getting their Thriller on. Why the Xmas tree?

Still on robots, Topless Robot pops up this video of everyone’s faaavorite Stormtrooper, TK-421, proclaiming the Death Star was his idea.

Coming Into Focus

Tech, You Stupid Dick 4 Replies

Last night I got to sit in on my first focus group, 2-way mirror and all.

I went to an office somewhere downtown where I sat in a room with 5 other guys and talked about cleaning products. Guys plus cleaning products can only mean one thing: this was a research panel about cleaning gadgets. And gadgety they were.

It seems everyone is trying to re-invent the Swiffer, like so many have tried in the last couple years. This company was charged with trying to bring new design/product ideas to the table that would stimulate men to purchase cleaning supplies and we were the guinea pigs. I can safely say that out of the 30 or so product treatments we looked over, 3 only got me interested. The rest were variations on a Swiffer theme. Here’s a glimpse of the cleaning future: know that “UV lighting” plays big.

When I got there the first thing I noticed about the other panelists was that all except for one guy had dirty hair. Seriously greasy. One guy was well groomed but he was a bit run-on-the-mouth, negating his cleanliness and making him the know-it-all. One guy kept his sunglasses on until the woman running the show asked him if he had a medical condition. No, they’re just cool. Thanks Corey Hart! One average joe kind of guy (who I would match opinions on things most of the time) had such an angry grimace on the whole time looked like he wanted to murder us all just because. And finally there was Monseraat. Yes. That’s his name.

Monseraat wanted to talk in depth about how awful all the products were. While I gave my opinion honestly and said opinions that came from my consumerist heart, Monseraat just wanted to have his bitch on. I was convinced that he was a bit drunk because he could not follow the simple instructions the group leader was laying down. First, we were instructed to talk about the positives about the product, if any, to which Monseraat would ignore and start into a diatribe of how horrid this new thing was: “Why would I want to have different types of cleaning heads? Can’t I just pick up a sponge if I need a sponge?” Monseraat hated everything they threw at us because it didn’t have steam cleaning power. When one hand held steam cleaning prototype came across the table, he went apeshit with happiness, until I said: “I’m not too comfortable using an electrical, plug in device to clean a bathtub.” Then with daggers shooting from his eyes directed to me, he changed his product score one point lower. It was then I realized I could counter his opinions with logic and I went to town.

“Why would you use something that looks like an oven mitt to clean? It’s awful.”

“Well you use your whole hand, it gives you more coverage and more control over the size of your wipe. More area equals faster cleaning!”

Dirty daggers.

In the end Monseraat was a ball of confusion when it came to choose our top three favorite products at the end of the evening.

Would I do it again? Absolutely! Would I want someone like Monseraat in the group? YES!

Living With The Dead

Distractions, Hobbies, Personal Bits 1 Reply

Okay, more like Living With the Plastic.

On Monday you might have seen my video of my trooper assemblage. A bit of a pre-story as to how I got the mannequins:

I email postbear about where I would start to look for mannequins, knowing that he trolls craigslist and kijiji like the Eye of Sauron. Not that I could have looked myself but wading into these sites makes me nervous. postbear sends off a couple links and I find my guy. Two male mannequins with no dings or dents, all their fingers and going for cheap. I call and make arrangements to pick them up.

Sunday, I enlist Josh and Sean to drive us out to some homestead out in Scarborough. As we pull up, a squat, thick, swarthy Latino fellow is sitting by his truck staring off into the middle distance. He doesn’t look over as I approach. “Raul?” I say, walking up his driveway.

His head snaps towards me, whipping his waist-length braided pigtail like a serpent’s. Like I suddenly appeared.

After that initial awkward moment of personal introductions, Raul takes me to his back yard to a large shed. “Dexter style kill room?” pops into my head. I look back to the car to three faces looking at me possibly for the last time.

In the shed, it’s a riot of shop fixtures. Torsos in glass cases. Arms sticking straight up in the air. Jewelry cases holding garbage bags of… things? My mannequins are deep in the back, inside a rack designed to hold tuxedo rentals.

“This is great! We just got ourselves Stormtrooper uniforms and we need a mannequin to display them so that they’re not stuck …in… a … duffel… ba…” I trail off. He’s not listening. Doesn’t care. I get serious: “All the fingers are intact, right?”

“Si. Yes.” and he hands me a green garbage bag with a torso in it. With breasts.

“Male?” I say, economizing my words for some reason.

“Yes.” And he digs further. We extract two male mannequins from the riot. I notice his arm tattoo: Evita and I decide not to comment, and if I did, then maybe mentioning Madonna would not be appropriate. SharkBoy comes and helps with the back and forth of plastic human parts from shed to car.

At home, we amuse ourselves by dressing up SharkBoy’s mannequin in our Panty Game underwear and finally his old luchadores singlet with a smart belt around the waist. Very 80s. After all that, I made the video. When I’m done we had to find places to put the mannequins: mine in the office, SharkBoy’s in the hall alcove by the bikes, awaiting further accoutrements.

Within the last 48 hours we’ve both managed to scare the shit out of ourselves just by spotting the damn things out of the corner of our eyes. Who would have thought that having a mannequin in your home would make you think that someone was standing there (albeit headless) in some dark corner of your house?

I figure this is the closest I’m going to get to living on the set of Blade Runner.