Why I Will Not Live To The Age Of Thirty

"The Boys" and myself just went out to Tim Hortons. I got a large Quadruple-Quadruple. Then we went to Seven Eleven. I got a Super Big Gulp of Coke. I am currently working on both.

Why yes, we are playing videogames. How did you know?

Can you believe it ladies? I'm single!

As an Aside

Today at "work" was both harrowing and rewarding, each in great amounts. My great acheivement of the day and perhaps my life was the construction of a 1.5 meter long rope out of elastic bands. It wasn't a half-ass rope either; in most places it was six rubber bands thick. I could have dangled a small child safely out the window using it. I am absolutely certain that at some point in the near future it will be used as a three-man slingshot. I plan to keep working on it until it is long and thick enough to rappell down the side of the building so that I may leave the office like spiderman.

Rubber-band rope-making is thirsty work so I stopped in to Brixton's for a coke and a cheeseburger on my way home. At least, a coke and a cheeseburger is what I ordered. What came was a cheeseburger and a mystery cola. There are many downsides to the amount of coke that I have consumed in my life (sleepless nights, caffeine addiction, tooth decay, premature death) but one of the benefits has been a highly tuned tounge for the detection and analysis of colas.

I am living proof that there are too many humans.

It's not so say that this mystery cola was bad, it was actually very good, but it sure wasn't coke or pepsi. I confronted the barmaid about this when paying my tab, and she was honestly surprised that I noticed. I briefly considered explaining to her that in most weeks I consume more coke than she could in the entire remainder of her life, even if she dedicated her every waking moment to it, but I decided against that. There was no need to frighten her with my tales of a wasted youth. In due process she informed me that they actually use Bravo Cola. As it turns out, the coke and pepsi distributors are (apparently) pretty uncomfortable to work with, while bravo will "bend over backwards" to help you stock their product. For the one gangly kid who notices the difference per year, it sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

As an aside, I have a new spirit-guide for writing, Diablo Cody. She won my respect with the phrase "missiles of gore," and won my heart with her staunch resolve to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition at all costs. When the prepositional ending can't be avoided, she seems genuinely pained, and that is (to me at least) the most adorable thing in the history of the universe. In case you haven't noticed, the blogging has been slowing down and growing crappier as of late, but taking a brief tour over her page reminded me of how fun writing can be, and how much better I wish I was at it. I also hope to use the term "apropos" more in my daily routine.

By the way, Tycho if you're reading this fear not; I will always have you as spirit-guide number two for your uncompromising vision of a future where a thesaurus is required to carry on even the most mundane of conversations. Someday I will find a way to use the word "extrapolation" while buying a soda. I will then point to the sky and say "That one was for you, buddy," even though you are not dead and not my buddy. The clerk selling me my soda will think that I am talking to God, or perhaps Eddie Guerrero.

World War 2.1

The problem with the internet and modern media in general, is that it is far too easy for people without any kind of educated opinion to gain an audience. All that someone has to do is ignore facts and spew out apocalyptic and fanatical crap and there will be people willing to listen to their "expert opinion." Generally, these kind of venomous, horrible people do one of two things: they start blogs with pictures of themselves tossing out geek gang-signs in the top graphic, or they get a job with FOX "News."

Why the hating? I'm hating on FOX because they allow their pundits to say ridiculous shit like calling the crap going down in Lebanon to be "World War Three." This just looks bad on FOX if you have mastered the mystical and secret art of understanding the meaning of words. For this to qualify as being a "World War," you'd have to say that, much like previous World Wars, a majority of the nations of the world are involved in it. Let's count how many countries are fighting in the middle east right now.

In the re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-rematch of the Israelis versus the Palestinians, the Israelis are being represented by, logically, Israel. And in the blue corner, their opponents, representing the Palestinians, Hezbollah! Hezbollah, not Lebanon. Lebanon is like the guy with the nice house who has a deadbeat friend (Hezbollah) move in, annoy the neighbours, and eventually get the cops called for playing their gangsta rap too loud in the middle of the night. Hezbollah isn't a country, just a bunch of guys with AKs. So Lebanon isn't really involved in this, other than they keep getting missiles shot at them for crap that they didn't do. Israel is also shooting missiles at Palestine, which isn't really a country either, they're kind of status non-specific. Between Hezbollah and Palestine, I'll give them about three quarters of a country, or 0.75 of a country. Israel, on the other hand, is actually a country, mostly. Large parts of their territory are under dispute, they have a coalition government which only mostly represents the interests of the population. With this in mind, I'll also give them three quarters of full "country" status. Not to punish them, just to encourage them to try harder.

So, to sum it all up, with everything that's going on, we have approximately 1.5 countries involved in the conflict. That is not exactly a world war. That's barely a war at all. It's something more than a civil war, but not quite a real war. So, keep that in mind when you're watching the news and someone tries to call this World War Three, that there aren't even three countries involved in this. There's a country and a half.

Fire in the Disco!!

I had a lot of free time this weekend. It was too hot to move and everybody else had skipped town to do things way cooler (in either sense of the word) than sit around in hot, humid Ottawa. I don't know if it was the lack of sleep or the heatstroke, but I decided that I could afford to pump some hot air out of my laptop for a few hours and make my appartment even more hellish in order to do some photoshopping. I took a picture of this little copper disk that's embedded in the sidewalk near my home, and decided to fix it up a little to pay homage to a running gag that will likely never die. Behold, the new and improved High Voltage Disk!



For those of you that are confused, I recommend that you watch this music video and then see if you can go one week without screaming at the top of your lungs, "Dontchawannaknowhowwekeepstartingfires?!"

The Big Red S

As a geek of note, people are always asking me my opinion on matters of geek lore. Of course when I say ask, I mean that I force my geeky knowledge upon them when they least expect it, like when they read my blog.

You're stuck now. Now you have to listen to me rant about Superman.

With a fresh new Superman movie on the reels, everyone is talking about The Big Red S himself, the man of steel, and generally talking up the superhero of all superheroes. That's what Superman is, right? He's not just a superman, he is the superman from whenst all other supermen are derived. Too bad he sucks. That's right, Superman sucks.

S for Suck.

Here's my beef. Superman's powers all come down to the fact that he is essentially an indestructible, unstoppable, god among men. Nobody can even come close to harming him, and he is without personal fault; he is an unflinching goody good that has never had an impure thought in his life. Justice is his passion and his porn. Superman is just plain perfect. Where's the fun in that?

What can harm Superman? Nothing.
What can Superman do? Anything.
When will Superman right every wrong in the world? Before lunch.

This is a great character when we need a Superman to fight the ills of the world, but after he single-handedly won World War II and defeated the KKK there was just nothing more for Superman to do. He successfully made the world peaceful, so what now?

Well, it turns out comic book writers are pretty lazy. The answer that they came up with was kryptonite. As the name subtly suggests, it cripples Superman and makes him virtualy catatonic. God one minute, slug the next. This gives us hundreds of story options, so long as they all end with Superman gritting his teeth and fighting off the kryptonite's effects or having someone come along to move the glowing green rock that's causing him so much difficulty. This carried the Superman franchise for another 20 years or so, but eventually they needed to fabricate some nemesis or nemises for Superman.

Here's what we got:
Doomsday - Super evil and hellbent on destroying everything.
Darkseid - Super evil and hellbent on destroying everything.
Imperitex - Super evil and hellbent on destroying everything.
Gog - Super evil but hellbent on destroying only Superman.
Lex Luthor - Evil and hellbent on destroying Superman, and even though Superman could kill him on any day of the week, knows where he lives, is on a first-name basis with him, and knows for a fact that Lex Luthor is trying to kill him, he has let Mr. Luthor try to kill him for almost eighty years.
Brainiac - Likes to shrink cities.

As you can see, we have been given a stunning variety of character depth in Superman's opponents. No, just kidding, they're all pure malevolent evil without a redeeming quality. They also have some extremely poor back-stories. Example: Gog. A bunch of gods get together and say "hey, lets give this psychopath unlimited powers!" This is not the level of foresight that I would hope omnipotent beings posess. The further downside is that since you can only do so many takes on the "I want to kill everything" character before it becomes played out (example: Imperitex), they keep killing and reviving these guys at an alarming rate. Example: Doomsday. Just read his bio. The number of times he has been killed is both confusing and sad.

So, while some of my geeky brethren may delight in the return and re-coolification of Superman, I'm going to give it a miss. The Spiderman and X-Men franchises are already doing more with the superhero genre than Superman could ever do. While Superman is a virtual God, Spiderman is stuck with only the amount of power that can be reasonably derived from a radioactive spider; there's all sorts of situations that are challenging for Spiderman beyond glowing green rocks. While Clark Kent is one chiseled hunk of man that could be living the American Dream if he wasn't so uptight, Peter Parker is, frankly, a loser. Peter Parker's life sucks and will likely continue to suck. The general public adores Superman and he adopts a secret identity to avoid fan-mail. Spiderman is hated by half the city, so his superhero life is only marginally less crappy than his real one. Superman gets up in the morning, admires his award-winning abs in the mirror, has breakfast donated to him by a grateful philanthropist, puts in a hard day's work just so that he doesn't forget what it's like to be a commoner, saves the world for an afternoon, has martinis in the evening with hot hot Lois Lane, and finally goes to bed thinking about how awesome tomorrow will be providing Doomsday doesn't come back and kill him again. Spiderman gets up, looks around his crappy appartment and remembers he's still a skinny dork, barely has enough cash to buy breakfast, works all day just to make rent, then spends the evening saving people that may or may not hate him because having 50% of the population spit on you is an improvment in the life of Peter Parker. You tell me which of these scenarios has the greater opportunity for dramatic conflict.

I should also mention the X-Men. They don't have the luxury of secret identities, when they do assist the general population they're assisting a population that hates and fears them, and most of the time they're just trying to avoid being rounded up into concentration camps. They can also only do one thing each, and have a whole host of mortal weaknesses. There is a ton of room for story development there. Watch X-Men 3 sometime. They actually manage to put meaningful philosophica questions into a movie that actually contains the line, "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch."

Oh... Canada....

I feel obligated, as your correspondent in Ottawa, to render some kind of information to you all about what Canada Day in our capital is like. Spending the anniversary of Confederation in our nation's capital is one of those ordeals that is too complex to convey in words, especially considering that everyone who has ever lived through it can only remember hazy bits of it during times when the beer was running low. Thankfully, someone came along and summized the experience very well for all of us: the Guy that Pissed On the War Memorial.

Now, it should go without saying that this dude is pretty unpopular in Ottawa right now, but I think that I need to be the voice of reason in this situation. Yes, we're all very upset that he pissed on the tomb of the unknown soldier. Nobody likes to see that, least of all on the cover of the Ottawa Citizen with said jerk "throwing up the horns." He actually did that. I can't make stuff like that up. However, horns notwithstanding, lets be honest about this: when you invite the entire country to come and be drunk on public property, people are going to piss on things. The unfortunate intersection in all this is that Ottawa is literally packed with buildings of importance and great national value, and it would be very difficult to piss anywhere in a ten-block radius of the Peace Tower without hitting a monument, memorial, embassy, consulate, or National Herritage Site. I can say with great confidence that it would be easier to list the prestigious edifices in this fair city that were not pissed on rather than the ones that were.

Parliament? Pissed on. Chateau Laurier? Pissed on. National Gallery? Pissed on. Supreme Court? Pissed on. Museum of Contemporary Photography? Royal Canadian Mint? United States Embassy? Pissed on, pissed on, pissed on.

The youth of Ottawa like to go on drunken random walks downtown on Canada Day, and they piss on things. That is our national holiday in a nutshell. There's also street vendors hawking things that light up, people waving flags that have the maple leaf replaced with a marajuana leaf, and folks that like to shoot roman candles into crowded areas. It's hot, it rains, the bars are crowded, people are especially ridiculous, but more than anything we are just inviting the nation to our most precious public spaces to use their pubic spaces to piss on everything that we take pride in as Canadians.

Except the Museum of Civilization. That's over in Gatineau and I'm relatively certain people don't piss on it.

Pissing and drunken street riots aside, Canada Day in Ottawa is pretty cool, so long as you aren't the kind of person that throws up the horns when someone is taking a picture of you pissing.