Readers of this blog familiar with the extent of my corpulence, not to mention enemies of upchucking everywhere, will be relieved to hear that the above title refers to the end of my recent “consecutive days with a blog post” streak rather than the termination of any spirited au naturel sprint down the hiways and biways of Juniorvania.
I didn’t manage to get a blog post finished before midnight yesterday, so history will reflect my failure to tell you anything new or funny on this site on March 24th, 2010. Well, you know what? History can go fuck itself, I was busy dammit. I am sorry, history, but you are starting to piss me off. You are always standing behind me. That is just weird. Also, have you noticed, history, that you are always repeating yourself? That is an annoying trait, history. It was vaguely cute at first, but now you’re just that “you can call me Ray….but you doesn’t has to call me Johnson” guy. Oh, and history? You haven’t changed a bit in a long time – not since George W. Bush was President and people were less hung up about “facts” and “accuracy”. Remember how dynamic you were back then, history? You didn’t insist on typecasting Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the President who guided America to a recovery from the Great Depression; instead, he could be a cruel and stupid villain who actually prolonged it. The point is, I liked “fluid history” much better than “static history” – for instance, remember that time that George W. Bush and his peace-loving hippie friends came to power as a result of an undisputed landslide? Yeah, well, douchebag buzzkill static History wants to remind everybody that it didn’t happen. Way to trash the vibe, bro. Like yellow cake uranium and Iraq are any fucking fun.
Anyway, Wednesday evening was spent cobbling together the most recent installment of my “Good News” series for posting over at Maple Leafs Hot Stove. They keep doing things like “including me in discussions about writing things for the site,” so I kind of feel like I need to chip in a few hundred words every now and then so I can justify hanging out in the lunch room and sucking back all the free coffee.
Two funny things I learned today yesterday DAMMIT HISTORY THAT’S ENOUGH OUT OF YOU:
If you go to the Maple Leafs Hot Stove site and type “good news” into the search engine box, the hilariously funny MLHS server (which was obviously wired up by a Habs fan) will tell you, “I’m sorry, what you were looking for cannot be found.” Well, at least that’s what the MLHS server used to tell you, until I asked a new intern in the HiR:tb IT department, a very belligerent fellow by the name of Colton Orr, to look into this problem for me. It has since been corrected. In unrelated news, there is very large pile of twisted metal in the MLHS server room;
There was a report on TSN’s website Sunday night that the National Hockey League Players’ Association is preparing to offer Donald Fehr the top job with the union. Those of you following along at home will recall that the last fellow who was hired to do this job, Paul Kelly, was comically and hilariously quite suddenly fired after less than two years on the job – for no particular reason that anyone could put their finger on. Mr. Fehr, before he became a grumpy retired person, was the Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association from 1986 to 2009, and that just went swimmingly for everybody concerned.
What can we expect if Donald Fehr becomes the next Executive Director of the NHLPA? I fed the relevant data into the Digital Overlord (the Silicon-based lifeform in whose home Spouse and I reside, and at whose direction and behest we perform all functions in meatspace), let its hard drives, LEDs and assorted geegaws whirr away for an hour or two, and then retrieved the following scientifically guaranteed predictions concerning future events in the NHL:
April 1st, 2010 (morning): ESPN reports Donald Fehr officially announced as new Executive Director of the NHLPA. For two hours, National Hockey League President Gary Bettman refuses to believe that this announcement is anything but a cruel April Fool’s joke, just like that time that Sports Illustrated published the story about Sidd Finch. After lunch, Bill Daly arrives and shows Bettman a copy of the story confirming Fehr’s hiring in the New York Times. Realizing the story is true, Bettman pees a little on his fancy President chair, hops down from it and runs into the Executive Washroom. He refuses to come out of the bathroom for six hours. League staff swear that, through the heating vents, they can hear someone sobbing and cursing Eric Lindros’ name.
April 1st, 2010 (afternoon): Fehr gives an interview to Stephen Brunt of the Globe and Mail. Brunt asks Fehr what reason he had for changing his mind about retirement. Fehr says, “I’m only 62 years old; I wasn’t ready to spend my time playing golf in Vegas with a bunch of ninety-year old men.”
April 2nd, 2010: Fehr takes a congratulatory call from recently-elected Atlanta Thrashers Player Representative Chris Chelios, who inquires about getting together for a round after the NHL Awards. For the first time, Fehr wonders if he’s made a horrible mistake.
September 1st, 2010: At the end of his first month in office, Fehr declares himself “up to speed” on the business of hockey and calls a press conference. He publicly denounces the league in general and Commissioner Bettman in particular for wrongfully depriving players of their rightful share of vast sums of money earned by the league from the U.S. Network television deal. “Obviously,” Fehr is quoted as saying, “that pittance that Versus is paying the league can’t be the only national TV revenue coming in from all of America. I mean, come on; Versus isn’t even a real network.” He goes on to point out that NHL games also appear on NBC, and says the players don’t seem to be getting their share of any NBC rights money, saying. “It’s NBC; they’ve gotta be paying the league something, right?” Entire room bursts into laughter; Fehr looks confused and storms out.
September 2, 2010: Previously cozy relationship between the NHLPA and NHL is torn asunder. Bettman is deeply offended by the allegations of deceit and will not return Fehr’s phone calls. As a result, a work stoppage ensues. For six continuous weeks, Fehr’s own staff work daily to convince him that the Versus revenues really are the only U.S. TV money. When he finally comes to the realization that this is true, a further six weeks of work stoppage follow merely because Fehr does not want to apologize to Bettman. “After all,” he confides to an assistant, “if I say I’m sorry, I’m just going to have to sit next to that fucking guy at the All-Star Game.”
October 16th, 2010: Plans to accuse NHL owners of colluding with one another to artificially depress the free agency market are scrapped when Fehr – who has still never even been to a hockey game – learns that in the summer of 2009, the Montreal Canadiens agreed to pay 35 year-old defenceman Jaroslav Spacek $3.8 million dollars a year, for each of the next three years, to not score any points for their team. Fehr, who knows so little about hockey that he calls goalies “backcatchers”, immediately calls Bob Gainey’s number. When Gainey answers, Fehr simply says, “You’re a fucking idiot,” and hangs up. Coincidentally and unbeknownst to Fehr, this is the 215th consecutive day on which Gainey has received such a phone call.
November 1st, 2010: NHLPA Player reps, concerned about previous incidents in which union leadership surreptitiously read their personal correspondence, conduct a secret surprise inspection of Fehr’s office and computer. They are relieved to find that Fehr has not had access to any player email. They are, however, disturbed to learn that he has apparently been spending seven to ten hours a day on Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com and Craigslist. Worse still, they find a partially completed job application in his name that appears to come from the Starbucks across the street.
December 22nd, 2010: Fehr is photographed sitting on the lap of a shopping mall Santa Claus; bystanders swear that he was overheard asking Santa for an important job in a more popular and widely known sport, like maybe the B.A.S.S. Pro Tour, the Pro Bowler’s Association or the National Pinochle Tour.
March 1st, 2011: Concerns that the NHL’s new “head shot” rules would be difficult for officials to enforce prove unfounded when it is announced that the cranial circumference of all NHL players has increased by 50%. Players’ heads become impossible to miss, obscuring many fans’ view of the video scoreboard above centre ice, and all body contact is eliminated from the game entirely. Fehr declares the NHL’s substance abuse policies a success, excuses himself from the press conference and goes to work at his other job: selling popcorn at the Cineplex Odeon.
March 15th, 2011, 11:39 p.m: Fehr is invited to attend a hastily-called meeting in Rome, New York that he is told is intended to celebrate the 1st anniversary of his hiring. He points out to one of the fellows in the room – a guy that he hasn’t seen around the office before, but who looks suspiciously like Eric Lindros – that he hasn’t worked for the PA for a year yet. Other players keep referring to this guy as “Brutus” and laughing. A group of player reps approach him from behind and begin patting him – perhaps a bit too vigorously – on the back. Fehr wakes up in the emergency room with several knives protruding from his back and a crumpled pink slip in his hand. The fellow they kept calling “Brutus” is having a conversation with one of the E.R. doctors and is insisting that since Obamacare got passed, there must be a death panel that could “take care” of the guy he brought in. Doctors refuse to comply with the man’s request, but do insist that Fehr get off the gurney and work his scheduled evening shift emptying bed pans in the geriatric ward.
March 16th, 2011: Fehr attempts to send his letter of official resignation to interim executive director Eric Lindros, but learns that Lindros has himself been deposed by a heretofore unknown faction of Sandanista guerillas within the NHLPA. That faction was replaced an hour later by Fidel Castro, who lasted fifteen minutes until he was himself replaced by a particularly militant Bobby Orr-emblazoned thermos that had been stored in an office closet since 1971.
Met up with a few of the folks from Pension Plan Puppets last night for the very first time in person. Thanks to the organiz-y efforts of @kidkawartha, Spouse and I were able to meet him and @kimjorn for dinner at Mitzi’s Sister on Queen St. W. in Toronto before Them Blades took the stage later that evening. Also joining us – once he managed to make a brief escape from an ongoing slumber party, as I understand it – was @mforbes37.
KidK will be well known to those who read the comments around here. Jorn is lead guitarist for Them Blades. He and another fellow by the name of Godd Till (@zambonicyouth) now reputedly write with @mforbes37 (himself of Bitter Leaf Fan fame) at a site called Zambonic Youth, but I don’t believe it because I am fairly certain that the last new post over there was drafted on a cuneiform tablet by ancient Egyptians.
Spouse and I had a great time meeting these PPP peeps and the others in attendance too. At the very same time that this was going on, there were a lot of other PPP’ers meeting up with one another in the Big City last night; there was a huge crew meeting up at the Loose Moose for a combination spontaneous birthday celebration for Down Goes Brown/pre-game piss-up (PPP overlords Chemmy and SkinnyFish had driven up from the States for Saturday night’s Leafs/Habs tilt).
I thought that I’d post the video below – a quick clip I took of the band playing their third song of the night – so the PPP’ers who couldn’t make it out to Mitzi’s would be able to see a little of Kim Jorn’s band for themselves.
I hope the folk in Them Blades don’t mind that I’ve posted this video clip; I haven’t asked their permission. I think the name of the song is “Rock the Cashbar”. As a point of interest, keep your eyes peeled for the freaky looking dude on the dance floor near the mid-point of the video; he was the drummer from one of the other bands on the bill. Reportedly, he had difficulty keeping hold of his drum sticks, played much of his set clad in his boxers, and fell off the drum throne 3 times.
You may recall (perhaps through the magic of hyperlinkery) that Spouse and I are firmly of the view that Stinky Tim’s never fails to deliver a memorable Horton’s experience. Having both been brought low earlier this week by illness, and being both more generally afflicted with a less virulent but no less consequential sloth, we decided to make Stinky Tim’s our breakfast destination this morning. Stinky Tim did not disappoint.
For a while there, as I sat munching contentedly on my Bagel B.E.L.T., I thought that the organizing narrative around which today’s trip to Horton’s would revolve is the repeated transformation of our breakfast order by one of the counter staff. I won’t use the name on her name tag, but let’s call her “T”. T. is in her late teens, thin as a rail, pale as a ghost and (as I complete an impressive trifecta of tired clichés) quiet as a mouse. She wears a ton of eye make-up – all black – and though she herself never raises her voice above a single decibel, her entire demeanour fairly screams out that she is shy and profoundly uncertain of herself and her place in the Stinky Tim’s universe. T. struggles mightily to recede into non-existence even as she stands at the register receiving a customer’s order. By the time you’ve made it through “large double-double, bottle of orange juice and an apple fritter,” you’ll wonder who the hell you thought you were talking to because T. has somehow managed to dissipate entirely into the ether so completely, you’ll find yourself unsure about who took your money and made change on that twenty. T. may be emo, she may be goth, I don’t know, but whatever T is in her civilian life and among her friends and peers, she is not at all at ease with her role in the ranks of the Horton’s team.
I am keenly aware that I am far from breaking new ground with my ironically detached superior observation – shock and opprobrium, alert the national media – that a teenager, one working in a fast food establishment no less, has been found to be awkward and uncertain. The only reason I mention T.’s difficulties at all is because her far from uncommon existential struggle seems to have spilled over into her work performance,in such a fashion as to make her almost invariably unable to correctly translate the “variety of donut ordered by me” into the “variety of donut received by me” without exerting some substantial degree of authorial licence. Do you see the irony in this? T. herself acts and speaks in such a manner as to make one doubt her very existence, her very presence being a quiet denial of individuality, yet – at the crucial moment in the customer-service industry transaction where common expectations would include submission, servitude and compliance with externally imposed demands – she instead exerts her own personality and influence with surprising and disconcerting results upon the encounter. I don’t know much about the criteria by which the work performance of Horton’s counter employees are evaluated, but I would have thought that – like foreign language translators – substantial points would be earned by those who manage to remain transparent and essentially invisible in the process, removing themselves from any obvious directing role in the production chain. A skillful interpreter allows the words of Dostoevsky (though written by him in Russian) to enter one’s consciousness conceptually unchanged via the English language without the reader becoming aware of the intermediary through whom they have passed. Likewise, at Horton’s, I would expect that a skillful counter employee would allow the “chocolate toasted coconut donut” ordered to enter my consciousness conceptually unchanged by providing me with a “chocolate toasted coconut donut”, rather than something else. This type of interpretive transparency is not what T. believes in, or at least it is not what she achieves in relation to my breakfast order. At her behest, donuts without jelly have spontaneously acquired it; those with coconut have had it dispatched in favour of sugar or coloured sprinkles; at times, donuts have been entirely and completely transformed into a different foodstuff entirely, and dutchies or fritters have come out the other end of this creative process. This has been happening with regularity and for some time now, and it happened again this morning when the “large steeped tea with one milk” that I ordered was transformed into a “large coffee with one milk” unbeknownst to me at some point during the transaction.
As I munched on my Bagel B.E.L.T., pondering the mechanics of this process, the morning’s real memorable moment unfolded right in front of me. There was quite a line at the counter (evidently, the particular creative process described above is one that requires a slight bit of additional time to undertake, as compared to a more conventional “fill the order that’s given” type of Horton’s). I watched as a lady entered the store pushing a stroller and joined the back of the queue. She had another child with her, one that I took to be her young son, a boy about three years of age. The boy was obviously excited to be going in to Horton’s (he must share my fondness for transformative and creative counter service) and was chattering somewhat loudly and without a sense of being overheard, as young children will do. In front of him and his mother in line, there was a man in his late twenties. The man happened to be a black man. The child chattered about a number of topics in rapid fire serial fashion- what he wanted to order, events that had taken place on the way to Horton’s, the toy he held in his hand – and he seemed to say the things that he said the moment they came into his mind. You might already see what is coming, but I certainly didn’t as I sat there chomping away on my bagel. Just like that, the kid turned to his mother and asked her, gesturing towards the man in front of them, “Why is he black?”
It was one of those moments in which time kind of stops. It would be wrong of me I suppose, as a white guy, to say that I have any real idea how the fellow in line felt about the child’s inquiry, about having to deal with this situation in the middle of a crowded Horton’s. By watching him and his body language though, he seemed initially at least to be a little uncomfortable, wondering how to handle the situation. The child’s mother certainly seemed more than a little uncomfortable too at first, though only for a moment. It was as if both she and the man decided in an instant and without speaking that this encounter was not going to be awkward. She leaned down, gathered the child up in her arms and picked him up, holding him at her own (and the man’s) eye level. The child seemed to study the man’s face for a split second, then turned to look at his mother as she said something to him along the lines of “because that’s the way that he is, just like you” (though I confess I could not hear the exact words that she said. The man answered the child’s question too; I think he said something like “that’s the way God made me” and smiled at the kid. There was neither embarrassment nor discomfort obvious in either his voice or body language, and the young mother too seemed not to be flustered by the situation.
The moment passed just like that. The kid’s question had been answered, and he moved on almost immediately. He certainly seemed to accept the man in line; the child held out the toy in his hand, a little R2D2 figurine, and asked him a question that I couldn’t quite hear. “I don’t think he wants to play robots, dear” said the mother, as the man smiled but declined to take the figurine. “He just wants to get a coffee.”
I didn’t make it through yesterday. Home early, alternately baking and freezing, nose and eyes a wellspring of all manner of unending and disgusting fluids.
Getting sober is nоt еаѕу tаѕk. It соmеѕ with its uрѕ and dоwnѕ аnd a lоt оf hаrd work. Wіth аlmоѕt 60 реrсеnt of sober реорlе еxреrіеnсіng relapse, it’s nо wоndеr thаt people аrе аfrаіd of gеttіng sober. Undеrѕtаndіng your fеаr оf gеttіng ѕоbеr is thе fіrѕt step to соnԛuеrіng іt. Once уоu gеt a hold оn thе fears that are drіvіng уоur hesitation аnd procrastination, уоu саn begin to ѕее сlеаrlу the bеnеfіtѕ оf gеttіng sober. Bеlоw аrе tеn reasons whу people are afraid tо gеt ѕоbеr аnd hоw to overcome them.
It’ѕ true that gеttіng ѕоbеr requires a lоt оf dіѕсірlіnе аnd wіllроwеr, but thаt’ѕ nо excuse tо nоt gо thrоugh with іt. Whаt most people dоn’t undеrѕtаnd is that gеttіng ѕоbеr іѕn’t аbоut depriving уоurѕеlf оf something or uѕіng уоur willpower tо ѕtееr сlеаr оf drugѕ аnd аlсоhоl, іt’ѕ about сhаngіng thе wау уоu view thе rоlе оf drugs аnd аlсоhоl in your lіfе, since this could create an addiction in your life, but there are centers of Rehab for Drug Addictions which could help in case an addiction problem raise. Whеn уоu think оf gеttіng sober аѕ a ѕuѕtаіnаblе lіfеѕtуlе іnѕtеаd оf a short term ѕоlutіоn, thе fear of not having еnоugh dіѕсірlіnе quickly fаdеѕ away.
Wіth the fасt оf gеttіng ѕоbеr comes the fасt thаt уоu nееdеd tо get ѕоbеr bесаuѕе уоu’rе an аddісt. Non-addicts dоn’t become ѕоbеr, thеrеfоrе most реорlе аrе аfrаіd оf hаvіng thеіr рrоblеmѕ оut іn the open оnсе thеу bесоmе sober. Thіѕ ѕhоuldn’t be a problem іf you оwn uр tо уоur past and communicate openly with уоur frіеndѕ аnd fаmіlу. Trуіng tо hide thе fасt thаt you wеrе аn addict оr уоu’rе nоw ѕоbеr only makes things wоrѕе. Stор саrіng ѕо muсh about what оthеr people thіnk, аnd have the courage tо let реорlе knоw you’re sober аnd you’re рrоud.
My Friday “can’t miss” work thingy has been rescheduled by others because THEY are ill. Spouse is covering for me otherwise (may the Wendel bless her kind soul) and I am remaining at home in a pile of self-pity and blankets, drinking orange juice and crunching on toast.
Nоbоdу ever said getting sober wаѕ еаѕу, but іt dоеѕn’t have tо bе as scary as іt seems. Undеrѕtаndіng уоur fеаrѕ behind getting ѕоbеr can hеlр уоu соnԛuеr thеm and ѕtаrt your jоurnеу tо rесоvеrу.
Remember the bit about “Spouse on the couch…oozing phlegm” from yesterday?
Well, apparently, I’m a quick learner. I too can ooze phlegm. Only problem is, I can’t stay at home. I have a day-long series of meetings set up to prepare for some things at work that are starting Friday, and then those things are starting on Friday and going for the next two weeks.
Bottom line: although I would dearly love to be sitting on the couch under nineteen pounds of blankets, inhaling chicken soup like it was oxygen, and although I may have been babbling about philosophy
Wendel Wouldn't Lay Down for no Cold
to Buddy Hackett last night in a feverish hallucination, I can’t give in to the illness.
Last evening, I had to take a trip in to Cambridge to pick up some suits that I had purchased there a couple of days before. Spouse had been off work for most of Monday and all of Tuesday (she has apparently spontaneously developed a case of the Bubonic Plague). She claimed, despite the occasional hacking cough and her generally mucous filled aspect, to be feeling much improved in the early evening hours last night . She insisted on coming with me for the drive. It was a beautiful sunny spring-like day, and I didn’t see a distinct difference, from a medical treatment point of view, between “Spouse slumped on the couch in front of the TV, oozing phlegm” and “Spouse slumped in the passenger seat, oozing phlegm”, so I agreed.
Stop one on the way to “oore’s” (the “M” had blown down during Sunday’s windstorm) in Cambridge was our local Tim Horton’s. Those of you who follow me on Twitter (where my user name is warwalker) may have some familiarity with this particular location, as it seems to be a recurring theme in my “tweets.” We call it “Stinky Tim’s” because the neighbour’s property seems to have some sort of a problem with their septic tank, with the predictably odiferous consequences; the stench is greater or lesser, depending upon the prevailing meteorological conditions, but it is usually only problematic when one is sitting in the drive-thru lane, which borders directly on the property in question. Despite its olfactory woes, we quite like Stinky Tim’s, and will regularly bypass other Horton’s locations en route to our home to go to that specific location; I can’t explain it other than to say that it’s in the neighbourhood, feels like it’s the meeting place for all our neighbours, and it seems to otherwise provide us with endless entertainment. One night, for example, on the way home from some work related function, Spouse and I stopped in much later than we ordinarily would. Things were different right from the start: it took an unusually long time for the attendant to greet us and inquire as to our order; it took an inordinately long amount of time to explain, re-explain and further re-explain my order of “two steeped teas with one milk in each and a medium-sized box of Timbits”, which the said attendant had somehow garbled (twice) to relate to two medium coffees and a Boston Cream donut. When I had completed walking the attendant, step-by-step, through the list of items desired for the third time and was invited to “drive up”, Spouse and I looked at each other doubtfully. In the time between leaving the place where we placed our order (peeps with knowledge of drive thru terminology – is there a name for that place?) and arriving at the pickup window, Spouse and I concluded that our server was likely intoxicated. A quick conversation at the pickup window – during which it was revealed that there was still some profound uncertainty on our server’s part as to the items desired – did little to revise our opinion. Very shortly thereafter, he delivered to us the aforementioned two steeped teas and a medium-sized box of Timbits that was absolutely stuffed with Timbits. I’m not kidding, this box – which customarily would contain something on the order of 40 tasty little doughnut holes – had been packed, stuffed and jammed beyond belief, to the point that there were really no longer individual Timbits inside, but instead a multi-flavoured doughy brick weighing some four to five pounds. It was ridiculous. I tweeted to my followers that the pickup window at my local Tim’s was “paying off like a loose Vegas slot machine”, urging those interested to depart post-haste for the location in question.
Anyway, to get back to the point of my pointless story, we stopped in to Stinky Tim’s last evening to pick up a couple of cups of tea for the drive to Cambridge. Those of you in Canada will already know that Horton’s is currently running their annual “Roll Up the Rim to Win” promotion (specially printed paper cups sold with coffee and tea purchases each include a chance for the purchaser to win prizes, with the result being revealed by unrolling the upper rim of the cup – prizes range from free product at Horton’s locations, to computers and vehicles). Those of you who aren’t Canadian may have difficulty understanding this, but Roll up the Rim to Win is a very big deal up here; most Canadians know at least as much, if not more, about when this promotion starts and ends as they do about the NCAA March Madness Tournament schedule. Most of us also keep a pretty careful watch on our personal win/loss record at Roll Up the Rim. This year, Spouse and I have been on a relative hot streak vis-a-vis this promotion; at one point, I had collected 3 winners in my first 7 purchases (for some folks, this would just be another line on the resumé, but I like to think that I am an ambassador of sorts for the competition) – all of which were for a free beverage. As we were going through the drive through this time (word to the wise Timbit shopper: all staff appeared to be sober on this occasion), Spouse opined that she wanted to “win something different.” In particular, she said as she received her steaming hot cup of tea, she wanted to win “a donut”.
I could not let this pass, despite her illness. I took her to task for addressing the fates and identifying, among all the possible prizes that might be delivered, a donut worth approximately forty cents (retail) as her desired windfall. “Attention, Gods in Charge of Dead Hockey Player Donut Store Promotions,” she had said, “I would vastly prefer to win a forty cent donut over a thirty thousand dollar car.”
I’ll give you three guesses what the Donut Gods delivered. I’ll give you a hint: I’m thinking about making another late-night run to the Drive Thru and collecting that Boston Cream this time around.
Spouse advises that she had a most interesting dream last night: she skated for the Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League.
In real life, she has never before played a game of hockey. (This last fact, I have only just learned, and am determined to remedy somehow.) In the land of Nod, however, she pulled a Blue and White, Maple Leaf-emblazoned jersey over her head and set off to do battle against the (unidentified, so far as I know) opposition on the frozen pond. I can hear the wags now; the Leafs might be better off with her over, say Rickard Wallin. Oh damn that’s funny. So funny, I feel like I want to stab someone.
Anyway, Spouse tells me that she doesn’t know who the opposition was, or who skated on her wings, but she does recall that she spent her time on the ice making “sweary jokes”. I have been able to learn little else about the specific details of what constitutes a “sweary joke”, despite persistent and thorough interrogation on my part, except to confirm that the jests in question do indeed (as you might expect) involve profanity of some sort. Spouse was able to advise that the Angry Irish Overlord himself made an appearance in this dream; he was evidently not impressed by Dream Spouse’s chosen form of expression and voiced his displeasure. Now this is where the dream gets weird…erm, “weirdER.” Fictional Burke indicated his disapproval by personally attending to the “puck drop thingy” (face off), prompting Dream Spouse to say – in a sarcastic and “funny” voice, I am told – “Sooorrrry, Misssster Burrrrrke!”, earning her an immediate and permanent benching at the direction of Unreal Burkie.
I swear to you that Spouse was not drinking before retiring for the evening last night. All I can tell you is that we went for Indian food at dinner; the only thing I can surmise is that apparently the Tandoori chicken recipe made liberal use of some sort of arcane insanity peppers. Those of you in the area of the Bombay restaurant on King George Road in Brantford, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Two quick notes to add in the “Technical Shit That’s Happening Around These Here Virtual Parts” Department (and no, I have no idea why I’d suddenly be speaking like an ironic cowboy).
First, the last two posts to this blog have included a bit of HD video captured to my new MacBook via a piece of hardware I already owned and a terrific little software package that I found courtesy of teh Intarwebs. The video was captured from my BellTV PVR via a Haupaugge! HD PVR unit, connected via USB 2.0 cable to my MacBook. I captured the video on my MacBook by way of Steven Toth’s excellent Mac application “HDPVR Capture”. That setup may have some redundancy built into it – there’s really no reason to have a set top box PVR connected to another device that itself turns a computer into a PVR, really – but I tend to carry my MacBook around with me a lot and it’s not likely to be sitting next to the TV ready to capture whatever television programs I might want to record, so (in my case) it does actually make a little sense from a hardware standpoint. The hardware configuration is really unimportant, though: the more interesting bit about this is the software package I used to capture the (HD) video to computer. The Haupagge unit ships (or at least it did when I bought it) with software for Windows-based PCs, but no applications are provided for Mac users. I don’t believe you’ll ever consider selling MacBook. The Windows-based notebook that I had previously been using to capture video barely fit the minimum specs and it frequently choked on the video capture tasks set for out. Worse still, the capture process was producing an “m2ts” file on the computer, a file set out in a format (as I understand it) designed to be understood by PVRs, but supported by precious little editing/playback software out there. The end result was that I found myself struggling to make reliable copies of programs I had recorded, and generally unable to thereafter edit or trim the files (even to do something simple like take out commercials), and unable to archive the files on optical media by burning them to DVDs.
Enter Steven Toth. Let me say that I don’t know the man and I’m not receiving any compensation from him whatsoever; I am just a very satisifed user of the application he has developed, “HDPVR Capture”. As I understand it, Mr. Toth knows quite a bit about the Haupaugge device because he’s worked on the inside there; he knew that the manufacturer was choosing not to support Mac Users, so he filled the void himself and wrote such an application.
My review of this software: It Kicks Ass. Simply stated, it works. Easy to install, easy to use, I had it up and running in a matter of moments after my licence key was received via email (there is a demo version available for free download with certain features locked out or restricted, paid licence allows the user to access all features, but the licence is restricted to use with one Haupaugge unit only).
The videos I’ve captured convert easily into .mp4 files, which then import easily into iMovie and may be edited exported like any other captured video, no problem whatsoever.
Second: I have installed a plugin on the site called WPtouch. The plugin automatically creates a version of the site for iPhones and various other smartphones. If you have WordPress 2.7 or higher installed, you can install this plugin directly from your admin panel by clicking on the Plugins/Add New link, then typing “WPtouch” in the search box, clicking on the appropriate link when it comes up and following the on-screen instructions that follow thereafter. The whole installation process took me about three minutes from stem to stern, and – again – it worked like a charm, at least I think.
Would anybody who’s accessing the site from smartphone let me know how the site is functioning for you. Any thoughts, suggestions as to whether the smartphone specific theme works for you?
