Tonight we are off to the Beastie Boys, at Pacific Coliseum. This will be my first trip to an "arena" concert since I went to Tool, way back in 2001. I'll have to remember to bring a lighter, so I can hold the flame high when the house lights go down.

I will feel particularly old at the concert, since I'll be attending with my pregnant wife.

Today I finally finished The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. It was so enjoyable to read that I was actually upset when the book ended. I rank it as the best book about soccer (or football, or calcio or whatever you want to call the beautiful game).

Honorable mentions in that category would include The Football Factory, England Away, Fever Pitch, and Among the Thugs.

It would make a great movie, although I would fear for the author's life.

Since an NHL season looks unlikely, hockey addicts should jump on the Whale bandwagon early. While millionaire fourth-line journeymen squabble over money with other millionaires, you can enjoy the passion and enthusiasm found in a hard-working 13th division. The Whale are off to a good start this year, but feel they have been put in a division too low for their calibre.

It appears that little has changed at my alma mater, a haven for those who believe that in vino veritas, and that the more vino, the more veritas. Oh, how we found the truth....

There is one problem with the pictures, as Kerry pointed out; the windows were left intact. If you are going to burn down a house, you might as well break the windows first.

Admittedly, I am as susceptible to schadenfreude as anyone, but I take particular enjoyment in the demise of the worlds built by pompous liars. The only punishment suitable for Lord Black is the stripping of his title and the repayment of the money, as I don't think anything else means much to him.

It's nice to find Richard Perle's name in there, too.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

July has historically been a month that escapes my memory. Perhaps it's the heat, or my alcohol intake at barbecues, but i can never seem to remember what happened in July, or even that the month has passed. I still start every page in my notebook with "J", before I realize that it is August. I think the real reason is that I tend to do very little in July, or as little as possible.

This July was an exception. I remember almost everything that happened, and there was much: taking a brief vacation to do nothing but having to find a new home in 3 weeks, thus spoiling my plans to do nothing for a week; frantically searching for short term accommodation that will accept pets; frantically searching for long term accommodation that we can afford; spending every night on mls.ca looking for homes and finding nothing but filthy slums for $400,000; securing a temporary home with 1 week before our move-out date (thank you Graeme); travelling to Atlantic City to discover first hand why it is called "Poor Man's Vegas"; finally grinding down the sellers of one property to accept our offer; night after night of packing our belongings; finding a mover that didn't laugh at me over the phone when i asked if they had availability on July 30; moving our belongings into storage; moving the rest of our belongings into our temporary Kits home (thank you David); winning the Mercedes at work (thank you Troy); celebrating our 4th anniversary (thank you Anya!).

Whew. Now I understand why people tell me that I need a vacation.

Spread Thin

Despite my ease at adopting a routine and settling quickly, I do enjoy making an adventure out of some of the stressful changes one has to endure. Life is either an adventure or it is nothing.

Things I will miss about living in Yaletown:
 
Commuting two blocks to get to work
Coming home for lunch
Never using my car except to drive to hockey
Yelling up at Bruce's loft when i need a drink
 
 
 
Things I will not miss:
 
The noise of SUVs circling, looking for a parking spot that doesn't exist
The stench of fish wafting up from Rodney's dumpster to my balcony
The way everyone checks out their reflection in store windows
Waiting 3 minutes for the light at Davie to change
The scene in front of Urban Fare
The Cactus Club
The mix of cigarettes, vomit and urine that greets me when I step onto the street on a Sunday morning
The incredible lack of green space and shaded areas
Boystown
 
So yes, Anya and I (and the little one inside Anya) are moving to an as yet undetermined spot on the East side.  Somewhere in the vast expanses of East Van is a patch of land for us.
 
 
 
 

Only a Fool Would Say That

An unusually stressful and gruelling day reminds me of a certain Steely Dan song:

You do his nine to five
and drag yourself home half alive
and there on the screen
a man with a dream

Mea Culpa

According to the unwritten rules of hockey, it is unsportsmanlike conduct and is generally in poor taste to stuff the puck in the net at the end of a game which your team has no chance of losing. This applies especially in cases where the opposing players are merely standing on the ice, watching the time expire.

Violation of this rule subjects the offending player to taunts, threats, insults and intimidation.

Unfortunately, there is no way to get a copy of the unwritten rules of hockey.

Cabbage Town

We're just getting settled after spending the weekend in Toronto, having traveled there for Carrie and George's wedding. It was more like a party than a wedding ceremony, as was fitting for the couple. The reception was held at Steam Whistle brewery, where I was reacquainted with many of my former partners in crime from university. We partied like it was 1992, with much of the same company, but better food and drink,

I was worried that I would be too tired to giv'er that night because we had to wake up at 4:15 am to get our flight, and that I would be going home early. However, the night flew by, and before I knew it, it was 1:30 am, the bar was being closed and we were in a cab on the way to the after party.

Saturday we visited with Scott and Eva, and everyone went out to a Cuban restaurant, where we ate, among many other dishes, ground beef on fried bananas. Sounds vile but tastes divine.

More from Scott: An Open Letter to William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Bush's other NeoConservative Puppet Masters

Why didn't you tell President Bush to invade Western Australia first? I've been playing Risk: The Game of Global Domination since I was eight years old and never, never have I seen someone win the game by massing their forces in the Middle East at the beginning of the game. Too many borders! Impossible to reinforce! Enemies from all directions! Australia, on the other hand, is easily conquered. Start in Western Australia, make a straight-line march through eastern Australia, then on into New Zealand and New Guinea, and finally up to Siam, sealing the entire continent and guaranteeing an extra two armies per turn for the duration of game. (Ask Secretary Rumsfeld if those would come in handy.) Once in Siam, you can leave the remainder of your provinces virtually unguarded and mass your armies of the Far East to eventually move north into Siberia, Irkutsk and Kamchatka, ultimately overtaking the entire Asian continent (seven extra armies per turn), including, finally, the Middle East. Starting in South America is okay, too, if your brat cousin Ronald refuses to play if he doesn't get to go first, and Africa will do in a pinch if you want to change things up, but you better roll some sixes, mutherfuckers, or you'll be knocked out of the game, which means you're available to do stuff like pick up the dog crap in the backyard, or wax your grandfather's back, "since you're just watching." (Thanks, Mom.) I hear that, after watching President Bush's press conference, Mr. Kristol was "depressed." If he was depressed, think about the rest of us, who weren't part of the shadowy extra-governmental cabal that helped install him in the White House in the first place. The history books will write your epitaphs and they won't be pretty:
"Neoconservatives: A late-twentieth-, early-twenty-first-century American political movement that stressed the supremacy of the American empire, but was too stupid to invade Australia first." Think it over, John Warner

Instant Apologist

Instant Apologist

From McSweeney's; how to make an instant Friedman column

Party Like It's 1992

Carrie and George are getting married on May 7th, and I'll be travelling to Toronto to take part in the celebration. It's going to be more like a party than a wedding, I imagine. i lived with Carrie and George on three separate occasions in three very different places. I first shared a house with them in Lennoxville, where we were going to university. Actually, I wasn't really their roomate; my girlfriend was, but I spent most of my time there. When said girlfriend tossed me out, Carrie and George took me into their basement suite in Whistler, which they shared with a Roger Daltrey impersonator. Two years later, through an unexpected turn of events, we were all reunited again in Victoria BC, of all places, although by this time, the Daltrey impersonator had cut his hair.

rogerdaltry Originally uploaded by andrew s.

Posted by andrew s from Flickr.

After only a few days in San Francisco, my spirit is revived. I was sent there at the last minute to attend a speaking course, called Talk So People Will Listen. The course itself was fantastic, revealing to me that, yes, I do look like a stiff when I speak.

I didn't have much time to do anything but attend this course and meet up with Chris and Lu aftewards. Just feeling the sunny spring air on my skin made me feel like putting roots down there. We had dinner at Trattoria Contadina, and then rode the cable car back to my hotel.

The next night we watched Project Grizzly and laughed like hyenas at a man trying to build the perfect bear defense suit.

While leaving my hotel the next day, I spotted an enormous man emerging from the lobby. Dressed like Royal Tennenbaum, he wore a beret on his bald head, and carried a massive walking stick with an onyx sphere on the top.

You Can't Keep a Good Kid Down

From What Is Enlightenment

"One time, a student teacher from a predomninantly black school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn presented my dad with the test paper of a particularly tough fifth-grader. In every box on the mindless rote exam, the boy had carefully penned "Fuck you" in large, clear letters. My dad's eyes lit up as he said to the young teacher, "This kid hasn't been beaten down by the system yet! There somthing here you can work with!"

There must be a German word for it, Part 12:
"Sadness inspired from failing restaurants"

From Middlesex

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I am at the office, and the only books I have are work-related. The closest one is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. I keep it on my desk for reference.

The fifth sentence on page 23 reads:

"To show what happens when strong writing is deprived of its vigor, George Orwell once took a passage from the Bible and drained it of its blood."

Irvine Welsh develops his characters by thinking about the following three things:
Where they stay, who they lay, and what they play. I suppose that is how he would measure and identify a person's character in the world of junkie scammers, con-men and corrupt cops that he creates so well.

I like to look at someone's book and music collection when i first walk into their homes. If i don't see any books but a huge TV, i am likely to make some kind of judgement, no matter how hard i try to avoid it.

What I am reading at the momentL

The English
The Party Blonde
Bombardiers
Middlesex

Part of Middlesex takes place during the 1967 Detroit riots, which effectively drove white people from downtown, initiating an urban rot and decay from which the city has not recovered. You can see the results of the decay on this site.

It's often said that the olfactory senses have the stongest ties to your memory. That is how Adolf Eichmann was captured; by someone recognizing his strong odor. The smell of camphor lip balm remind me of spring skiing and early sunburns, a rite of spring, right up there with a Canadiens-Bruins first round playoff matchup, the Canadiens triumphantly pulling away in the seventh game to take the series, despite being heavily outplayed and outgunned.

Back to spring skiing. Sarah and Nic are on their annual pilgrimage to whistler, and passed through town on their way up the highway. Despite being up for who knows how many hours flying from Johannesburg to London to Vancouver, Nic was able to stay out until 2am on Saturday. We had dinner at Glowbal and then danced till late to the funky house breaks of Ben Watt at Voda.

While waiting for the opening dj to finish his set, Ben sat on a crate in the back with his chin resting on his hand. He looked so bored. But as soon as he took to the decks he came alive, inhaling urgently on the cigarette that dangled from his lips, the heater glowing with each pull.

We hit Whistler Mountain on Monday morning, and it turned into a brilliant spring day. The snow was a bit slushy, but the skies were clear and the air was warm. I realized that Carmex does not have any sun protection factor, and my lips hurt when I ate some wasabe later than night.

Vancouver moment #29

While walking home from Choices, my dog leash in one hand and my rice chocolate chip cookies in the other, I was startled by a screech coming from behind me. I turned back, expecting a kid on a freestyle bike to come racing down the sidewalk. Instead it was a tall thin woman on rollerblades, dragging her heel to navigate around my dog. She carried an iced cappuccino in a plastic cup in her left hand. When she got to Homer street, she turned right and headed down the middle of the road, against the direction of the street. There were film trucks on both sides of the street. She picked up speed and made slalom turns down the middle of the street, right into the headlights of an oncoming car, before her silhouette disappeared between a make-up truck and an RV.