Don’t drink the beer – IT’S NITROGLYCERINE!

Ever seen Moonwalker ?  You probably have, but even if you haven’t, you’ve likely seen the extended music video from that movie for Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal”.

Some forward-thinking person out there took that song, and remixed it to a few clips from two old Fred Astair films, The Band Wagon and Daddy Long Legs.  I know, I know; I haven’t seen them either.  But the video is awesome, if you like people dancing to MJ tunes (I surely do), and the Jackson version is strikingly similar, both in dance moves and tone, to the one seen here.

Actually, the entire video (about 6 minutes or so, not including credits) is worth it for the incredibly fucked up little dance/walk that Fred busts out around 3:25.  It’s creepy and super sweet at the same time.

* Courtesy of www.neatorama.com

 

Some Days

Dear Internet;

You know, some days I feel we’re at cross-purposes.  I work hard every day, proven by the big lunches that I take with me to the job.  I come home in the early afternoon to few joys – my girlfriend whom I miss is nowhere close by, my good friends and faithful blog readers are only accessible to me through cold, hard computer screens, and there is usually only lukewarm beer in my fridge (which frankly, between you and I, has not been pulling it’s weight lately.  If you can’t chill a beer, then it’s off to the curb with you).

So I ask little of you.  And some days, honestly, you don’t deliver.  There are days when you’ve nothing to offer me.  I mean, no new politics news, no new celeb gossip, and heck, not even a decent lolcat in the bunch!  And don’t get me started on the rapidly plummeting standards of porn.  I’m not a complicated guy, but really, who do I have to give a reach-around to in order to get just three measeley minutes of a girl being mounted by a guy in a Stephen Harper mask?

But there are other days, Internet, like today, that see you rise to the challenge.  You have given me, already, some excellent blogging, a new Ratatat album (plus downloads of their two latest EP tracks “Shiller” and “Maholo” and now…and now this.

This is for all of you, my very good friends.  It’s a Paul Rudd screen saver, available for download at www.funnyordie.com/promos/screensavers.  I realize that I’m usually slow with the new Internet things, so maybe I’ve missed this?  But here’s a sampling of the ss from funnyordie.com

Paul Rudd Screensaver on FunnyOrDie.com 

OH YM GOD *Updated with vid*

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH YM GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

OH MY GOD

http://www.ratatatmusic.com/

OH MY GOD

*****

And the new vid from the band entitled “Mirando”.  That opening frame look familiar at all?

As if any further proof of how amazing Ratatat is, they’ve created a video with nothing but Predator clips.

 

Ba Da Da Dum Bup, My Dear Dear Friend

My mother has offered, more than once, a Five Point Plan for my future that will ensure that I do not tumble into the merciless black hole of debt and despair, but rather walk a golden, albeit straight and narrow, path towards comfortable adulthood.  For it to work, I need to start now.

I hate it when that happens.

1. Graduate from Kings with my degree, and some internship experience, in tact
2. Live at home for a year, or, if I can manage, maybe even two.  This will assure rent-free living.
3. During this time, work and save at least $20,000.  This seemed a much easier plan before I found how much next year was going to cost, but onward, onward!
4. At that time, following two years at home, I take my savings and buy a small semi-detached with a trusted friend.
5. We rent out the basement as an apartment to pay the mortgage, and begin the saving cycle over.  Exeunt some years later, selling the house for hopefully more than we started with.  My father has been in real estate about as long as I’ve been alive, and for all that I still know precious little about the subtle ballet that is the Canadian housing economy, so I need this explained to me.  It’s a sad state of affairs.

The trouble is, I’m having difficulty coming up with a list of people I could move into a house with.  There are a few, to be sure, whose names will remain concealed here in the interest of modesty, but it’s a tough decision.  Male or female?  Long-time friend, or do I value trustworthiness with financial matters over all?  How long would I conceivably be living with this person?  And where do I buy?

Growing up is terribly confusing.  In my mind, I picture my starter house with a nice, clean kitchen and a ratty backyard, and most likely somewhere in Ontario (although I wouldn’t mind terribly if it weren’t).  If these visions make me seem unambitious, perish the thought – it’s reality baby.  I’ll own a sprawling country home with a porch and a faithful dog soon enough.

(I had to take a break in the middle of writing to book, once and for all, my flight out east.  I leave August the 13th at 9:00 a.m.)

That dog would be named Homer, I think.  Or maybe Hank.  I used to have a list as long as my arm for dog names, sweet dog names (not my joke-ey ones from a few weeks ago), and for the life of me I cannot remember them now.  Maybe Reagan?  Oh man, that’s moving to the top of the list.

90.7 fm

Cait took me to the drive-in last night.  Are drive-in theatres not the best invention ever?  Let us make a tally of their advantages:

1. You can drive up to a screen in your car.
2. You listen to the sound through your own personal stereo system.  If you’re the kind of person who has fitted out their vehicle with a sweet deck, this is a major advantage.
3. Blankets, pillows, reclining seats and air conditioning.
4. You don’t have to smuggle in food.  Copious Bulk Barn trips must be made in order to properly enjoy the drive in.  Our snacks included Honey Garlic Miss Vickie’s chips, gummy bears (regular and sour) and chocolate covered peanuts.
5. Drugs, if that’s your bag.
6. Sweet Mighty Mouse cartoons during the intermissions.

I wish I’d had a camera with me, also.  It was one of those really scenic views: the sun was setting, people were lining up their cars waiting for the movie to start, the projector attendant spoke to us over the radio to let us know “FIVE MORE MINUTES, JUST ONCE THE SUN SETS”, and kids were playing on the spiral slide nearby.  Goooooo Kodak Moment.  (I really hope my folks got the oh-so-subtle hints about the camera that I covet as a grad gift.  Graduation is really soon too…shit.)

We saw Iron Man (again) and the first 30 minutes or so of Indiana Jones.  The movies weren’t really worth the price of admission, but we conducted an important scientific experiment to see how much condensation could collect on the windows.  Quite a bit, we found.  And it took a good two minutes of air conditioning to get rid of it all.

This is just a lazy Sunday evening post.  I have work again in the morning, and mid-week we’ll be bumping our work start time up to 5:30 a.m.  So I need all the Z’s I can muster these days.  I hope that all of you had as pleasant a weekend as I did (because mine was super awesome and probably way better than yours – I was just being nice there).

Also, since there is really only one person who reads this whom I see on a regular basis, I want to let all of you know that I miss you and your 31 delicious flavors of witty banter.  I’m doing my best to keep up with your blogging, but the cold, hard glare of the computer screen is hardly enough to keep me warm at night.  All it does is burn my retinas, really – and fuel the occasional anxiety attack about what the radiation from my laptop is doing to my testicles.  Like, seriously, this can’t be good for me.  Don’t these things pump out radiation?  My kids are going to grow up without opposable thumbs.

Fuck Yoga

I spent most of my day today (five hours, give or take) raking tree beds on the course.  Such an activity involves weeding, turning over old mulch, and some minor edging (although really, we did very little edging because we were all feeling lazy and we’ll likely pay for it tomorrow.  Oh well).

Anyway, unlike sand trap raking, which is tedious and incredibly tiring because the sand is often wet and there’s so. damned. much. of. it, raking the mulch was simple and, as luck would have it, strangely hypnotic.  I found myself taking a list of every image and thought that ran through my head, just a long, long stream of thoughts that I didn’t even catch until I looked back over it long afterward.

So, without further ado, here is a Google Image Search sampling of a few things that I thought about while raking today, a kind of flow chart.  The connections between them may even be obvious!  It’s like a game, you know? (If something seems odd, look for a link)

 

 

 

(Ohh look!  A squirrel!)

Blogging the Summer #5

And then there are times when I get back from being without Internet, and there are LOTS OF NEW THINGS! Thanks to all of you for updating while I was gone.

So the cottage was fun. I had, consecutively, the finest evening and finest morning of my summer. I feel confident in assessing them as such, because the rest of my summer will be me working early mornings and bitching about shovelling.

1. Cait and I arrived early on Friday (everyone else got there Saturday afternoon) to an empty, warm cottage.  Immediately the fireplace was a-burnin’ and we’d checked out the dock to make sure that nothing important had floated away.  We found that the satt dish wasn’t working, so we made a delicious pizza and ate the whole thing to ourselves with a bottle of wine and talked for a few hours and went to sleep at 10:30.
2. This is what a cosmic joke my life has become.  I wake every morning around 5:00 or 5:30 to go to work.  I’ve just worked twelve days in a row prior to leaving, so I’m looking forward to sleeping in every day until three in the motherloving afternoon.  I wake up my first morning at the cottage, fully rested, at GODDAMNED 6:45 A.M.  That was a kick in the ass.  But of course, the sun was shining so I had little concept at the time of how I’d been cheated, and I promptly started smiling with a goof while Cait kept sleeping like a champ.  We rolled out of bed around eleven to clean up from the night before, and THEN sat around in our pj’s in front of another fire, eating cookies and coffee for breakfast and watching Almost Famous while sitting on the floor.  It was awesome.

The rest of the gang arrived later that day, and the weekend was spent in all manner of jokes and drinking and eating far, FAR too much.  Our meal last night (for seven people):

• 10 quarter-pound hamburgers
• 10 quarter-pound hot dogs
• 5 racks of ribs
• 2 twenty-five ounce steaks
• 9 cobs of corn
• 10 potatoes worth of oven-cooked fries
• 1/2 a pan of marshmallow brownies

Add about 8 beers, a late bacon-and-egg breakfast, and copious snacking all day to that and you had one extremely uncomfortable boy who spent a long time in the bathroom.

So now it’s back to another week of work, likely in the rain.  I have to get my course selection sorted out for June 1st as well.  I’m feeling stressed already and I’ve been home about 2 hours.

And, just to show you all that I didn’t forget, I realize that production day is going on without me right now and I am SUPER bummed about that.  But I hope it goes well for all of you and your endeavours, and blogs, will remain in my heart.

p.s. Marc, “ugh Joe Walsh” ?  Really?  Fuck you man.  Joe Walsh is a talented man, and has done so many drugs he could probably mainline Dran-O and still run a marathon.

3rd Time’s The Charm

I know, I know, it’s my third post in a day.  I was going to save this until tomorrow but I have approximately zero percent will power.  This is Joe Walsh performing “Rocky Mountain Way” in Houston, 1977.

 

Check out 3:19 in.  The motherfucking talkbox comes out.  I love the talkbox.  That shit is off the hook.

Blogging the Summer #4

Beware, this post is about golf and working at a golf course.

What I Do All Day, or, Where I Think About Blog Posts For The Evening-Time

For the past five or six years of summer employment, I’ve been at golf courses.  The brunt of that time was spent at one golf course in particular, Cardinal Golf Club, which is a public course and a fine establishment and soon to be the largest public course in Ontario, if not Canada.  There, I worked mainly at the driving range and mini putt, taking money from customers, giving free rounds to anybody I knew in even the slightest way, and riding the tractor while customers tried (and usually failed, because I’m like a ninja) to hit me with their shots.

I also spent some time as a camp counsellor, dreading the weeks when we would have too many red-haired children in the camp because they’re all the spawn of Satan.

Anyway, I left Cardinal for good last year after trying to leave for good EVERY year for the past two or three years.  I left for good thinking, silly me, that I would have to get a real job after my degree was conferred upon me.  Luckily, Halifax has stepped in as a contingency plan for next year, and I was left earlier this spring looking vainly for ANYTHING that would pay the bills.  I ended up as a member of turf maintenance for Emerald Hills Golf Club, which is a private club that can only be accessed with a $50,000 membership fee, or as a guest of said member (more on that later).

I start my day at 5:30 each morning to arrive at work by 6:15 – I will soon be starting at 6:00, and then a little earlier later on in the season.  And, I usually come into contact with one of two things by 6:30 every day, when most of you are still in bed (dicks…):

1. Dirt
2. A shovel
3. Both

For example, I spent my 8.5 hour shift today digging holes for irrigation fittings.  This is my fourth time doing so in just two and a half weeks, so somebody up there must have a cosmic sense of humour and has given me a knack for ditch-digging but not so much for finding a job where my English degree is actually fucking useful.  Either way, it’s a pretty good job.  The past two days, for example, have seen me weilding a pickaxe and a metal cutter – two activities at which every man should be proficient.  I’ve also become more familiar with driving stick (heh heh heh) and spreading seed (this is too easy).

It’s fun.  I get to be home by 3:00 every day and it looks as though the work will replace my going to the gym like I had planned.  I sleep like a baby most nights, and my only complaint is that 5:30 am comes way to goddamned early.

Here’s the thing that you may not know about working at golf courses, something that I sincerely hope you never find out first-hand.  Golf courses get away with paying you shit money for what is just a step down from contruction work (those guys make like 18 bucks an hour) because they give you free golf.  Cardinal did it, and Emerald Hills does it.  The difference between the two courses is this: Emerald Hills is a private establishment, very expensive, and is a member of ClubLink.

ClubLink is a collective of Ontario golf courses which are all pretty high-end.  They’re run more or less independantly, but all abide by certain codes and restrictions as members of ClubLink, with the same insurance policies, advertising funds, etc etc.  Some courses are ranked higher in the ClubLink family than others – Emerald Hills is a “Platinum” club and therefore one of the jewels in the ClubLink crown.  As an employee there, I get the opportunity to play at any ClubLink course that I want for free.  But first, I have to pass a test, which I took today.

Basically, I have to prove to the power that be that I am a good golfer.  They want to know that I know how to behave, that I know how to strike the ball clean, and that I know how to dress apprpriately and not get completely bombed on the course.  Were I to fail to do any of these things whilst playing a course other than my own, my bosses would hear of it.  It’s kind of an elitist system, but such is life when you’re a white kid in the middle of well-do-to Aurora, Ontario.

So I took my test today, and the very first shot I take in front of the club’s Pro is accompanied by a divot (scar in the ground from your club) the size of your palm, and the ball goes dribbling about five feet in front of me.  I begged off and hit two more good shots, at which point the Pro deemed me fit to continue.  It was incredibly nerve-wracking because I am NOT a very good golfer.  My average round, if I were to keep an honest score, would be somewhere in the 100s.  And even when I don’t keep an entirely honest score, it’s STILL somewhere in the 100s.

Either way, I can now play fancy courses without paying.  All it takes it eight hours a day with a pickaxe in my hands and a paper-bagged lunch.  Figure out for me how that makes sense, and I’ll give you a shiny new nickle.

**Now that I’ve given you all a basic rundown of my job, I’ll be posting with more regularity about my days, if and when anything exciting actually happens.  If you’re still unclear as to what the “turf maintenance” crew does, we basically cut grass on the course, spread new grass seed where it needs to go, rake sand traps, and do other miscellaneous stuff that keeps the place running.**

A Little Self-Indulgence

Ha, as if this blog is ever anything else.

I’m in love with Frank Sinatra.  I grew up with a lot of his shittier albums, the Greatest Hits and Duets I & II and so forth, but I’ve always been a big fan thanks mostly to my Grandpa and my dad (the other side of the family leant more towards Dean Martin and Tony Bennet – guess which side THAT is).

I think he’s great, always have, and as I write this I’ve just put down a copy of Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade, which is a collection of Steyn’s best obituary writings.  I’ve mentioned Steyn here before so I won’t hash on him for too long, but he’s a funny, smart writer, and when he wants he can lend gravity to just about any subject you put him to.  By way of closing his book (and sorry to spoil the end for you) he selected his obituary for a guy named Bill Miller. 

Bill Miller was Sinatra’s accompanist (not accompanyist, which is how I would have pronounced it without knowing any better and Caitlin probably would have smacked me for it), and held that position for the better part of Sinatra’s career.  And there was one song that Sinatra never, ever, performed without him, live or elsewhere, even during their decade-long breakup in the late 70s.  That song was “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”. 

If you click the photo of Sinatra and Miller above, it’ll lead you to a 1971 performance of that song.  Sinatra is wearing a terrible hairpiece, he seems tired, and his little “drunk” impression can get a bit hammy at times.  But otherwise, it’s just fantastic.  “Baby” isn’t really my favourite Sinatra song – that place goes to either “Under My Skin” or “In Other Words (Fly Me To The Moon)” – but it’s a great performance and I’m betting my very bottom dollar that you’ll like it too.  Look at the way Sinatra “picks” the tobacco from his tongue as he does the opening sung-monologue; he was big enough to not be buying cheap cigarettes, the kind that would flake on you, but the character that he’s playing WOULD be buying the cheap ones, and I think that’s important to note.