Tag: query

what are you going to do?

What are people doing to celebrate New Year’s Eve this year? My soul has this dream where I find something spectacular and beautiful yet affordable, even though I know it will never happen. My version of affordable is a small, slight creature that easily falls over in wind. I just spent my last five dollars on fifty cent cup-a-noodle soup so I wouldn’t starve too severely at work.

At best, I think I might get to escape away to Seattle, to watch their tower explode in fireworks, though I have no idea what else I might do. At worst I stay home and friends from all over the world try to call me at midnight to tell me what a fantastic time they are having, only to find that the lines are too busy and they can’t get through.

looking for an upgrade from houseparty

What’s your Hallowe’en plans this year?

A lot of people here are talking about hitting up SinCity and Sanctuary, but when it comes to those two nights, I’m just done. Isn’t there anything else going on? I want dancing and fire breathing and circus acts and acrobats and fun, you know? Not mostly naked people in scanty costumes molesting each other in a drowning sea of goth. It’s okay sometimes, but not every year.

David and I are thinking we might pop down to Seattle to go to Angel’s party, (which I’d really like to attend), but it’s only one night, so unless we find something else too, we’d be stranded for the rest of the weekend. (Everyone else I know down there is going to Freaknight, the Crystal Method/Moby/Paul Van Dyk all nighter). Plus, of course, with David unemployed, we’re especially, painfully broke. We’ve got fifty dollars to live on until my next pay-cheque, and since I’m covering next month’s rent solo, it’s lucky we like lentils.

wanted: people to move boxes

Can you help? Silva‘s departure date is right around the corner. An essential part of moving, however, involves loading a truck and her and her wife, though they are fierce, brightly shining people, are still two little older ladies, and they can’t do it alone.

“We’re loading a truck with heavy boxes and a very few pieces of furniture on Thursday morning at 10 am. If this kind of activity appeals to you, and if you want to help, and if you *can* help FOR SURE,and can be here from 9:30ish until noon please let me know. I have to run off to a dentist appointment at 12:30 so it HAS TO be finished by then. There will be non-alcoholic cold beverages and cookies and much gratitude.”

I’m going to try and take the morning off to help, but I might not be able to and it’s very important that people show up.

not going to forget this year, you people won’t let me

“It’s been believed in the past that the camera steals souls. I once thought this preposterous. Now I think it’s self-evident.

This is why we photograph. The fear of oblivion, ours and our worlds. We will inevitably die, but our photographs, if they’re honest, if they show our lives with clarity, unafraid, our photographs will preserve us. Our souls at least. Who we were inside, and the things we saw. Our images? Particles of light that have been traveling forever bounced off our subjects, were focused through our lens into the tender tissue of our eye, and our brain, and our film. Now, those very same shapes, made by those very same particles, the same ones we saw, others can see. Forever, they can see that fraction of a second we saw.

That’s immortality.” -Clayton Cubitt, 2005

Scientists discover exotic quantum state of matter.

May is quickly waltzing into being, every day one delicate step closer, bringing with it spring and, with that, my birthday. Fragile, the social ties holding me to it. Already people have started asking about a party, as I worked through my birthday last year. So once again, and this year I mean it, does anyone know of an appropriate venue for my birthday party at the end of May? My apartment is far too small to hold the 100+ people who will wander through during the course of the day and outdoors, really, is never an option I care for. It’s impossible to foster the security of the microcosm we call a kitchen party in a park.

What I’m hoping for is the kind loan of a house with a yard for a BBQ that won’t mind if we go over-night, preferably with crash space, that won’t mind if we cook breakfast in the morning. Last time our resident Stephen was kind enough to lend us his place, but it has since been partitioned and rented out to people. (I think Frankie‘s girlfriend’s sister or something now lives in the basement, like, just to go to show how small this city really can be.) It was perfect, big, two yards, just off the Drive.

It came out unscathed, too, minus a large pile of dishes in the kitchen we cleaned up the next day, two snapped guitar strings, and, I think, one broken glass. The people I know tend to be remarkably tidy when it comes to parties, we’re not hard-drinking bar-stars with anything to prove, more the sort of argue films and physics over spanish guitar on the porch. Profit: fifteen dollars in returnable bottles, a set of car and house keys no one ever claimed, (I still have them, people, identify them and they’re yours), and some wonderfully embarrassing arm-wrestling photos.

So, please, if this sounds remotely feasible, drop me a line if you’ve got a place or know of one. Let’s see if we can’t work something out.

edit: so far we’ve got the foxy house. anyone else?

bloody coding bloody well bugger it all

Dear lazyweb, I am in need of some internet/codemonkey skills.

I am in the midst of designing something I do not know enough to build. Would anyone like to help out in exchange for some writing or photography?

I’m toying with a shop, a mapped gallery, and some other things which would be easy for someone who knows how but night impossible to for me figure out without wasteful hours of limping code.

against odds, it continues to gain pertinance as time continues

what barry says

My speakers finally gave up the ghost around 6 this morning. I’ve been making do with the public joke that is the radio, which is far worse than I remember, but I’m not sure how long I’m going to last. I’m sincerely not accustomed to advertising. The surface of my brain is already beginning to feel scraped raw.

In the interest of preventing an international incident, does anyone have computer speakers they wouldn’t mind being rid of?

edit: the radio has just spewed out a hip-hop cover/sample/abomination of Supertramp. These are not the actual words, (click at your own peril), but an approximation of the effect they carry: “Take a look at my girlfriend, she’s the only one I’ve got, dah dah dah MY BITCHES SHE GOT MAH BLING”

RESCUE! RESCUE!

I’m beginning to consider dancing for money

Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. -Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)

I’ve submitted a story to Life For Change, an on-line writing contest. It’s $100 for the author of the story with the most votes. It’s a newer site, only active since January, but there’s been two winners so far, and I hope to at least be short-listed for the next draw. Course, I need people to vote for me, that’s how all these work. This means you.

Thank you to Adam, Andrew, Angus, Avi, Brian, Bruce, Christopher, Chris, Christaline, David, Dominique, Duncan, Ed, Erin, Gary, Eva, Gord, Heath, Jacques, Jer, Jordan, Keith, Kyle, Liam, Lung, Lee, Luciano, Navi, Nick, Patti, Paula, Michael, Mike, Mike, Sam, Sara, Sarah, Stephen, Steven, Simon, Travis, Robin, Ray, Reine, Ross, Ryan, Roger, Wayne, Vicki, and the other five to ten people who’s names have momentarily escaped me.

Next time you’re all signing a damned guest book.

I’ve made a Flickr Pool for party pictures, fashionably late birthday. Pass it on.

Roger, Jacques brother, was talking with someone about a car for sale. If this is you or you know who it is, could you get in touch with me? Roger was an older fellow with the short sandy hair who came later, the one with the amazingly inconvenient talent of avoiding being in any of the photos I currently have at my disposal.

And again, whoever forgot their keys, if they’d like them back, they should get in touch with me. (Otherwise, I’m just going to start using their nifty light-up key-chain). My Outlook thrashed itself this past weekend, I can’t get at my invitation list to ask around properly, so I’m relying purely on word-of-mouth. The more of you send out feelers and harassment, the less likely someone will be panicking sometime this week.

Andrew, Sarah, Ethan, and Alicia, you still have books here that you put dibs on.

July 10th was Nikola Tesla‘s 150th anniversary. Tesla, the archetypical mad scientist, invented radio and alternating current, set the world record for man-made lightning, and was nemesis to none other than Edison himself, who was entirely a prick to him his entire career. After an intensely accomplished life, he died destitute and alone in a pigeon filled suite in New Yorker Hotel.

Part of the various celebrations, (2006 has been declared The Year of Nikola Tesla by Croatia, Serbia, and UNESCO. Croatia already has him on their money), is going to be a Christopher Nolan film based on The Prestige, a captivating novel by Christopher Priest, starring David Bowie as Tesla. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslavian film named Tajna Nikole Tesle, (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla’s patron, J.P. Morgan, but I don’t think it’s going to match up to this. I had such a fierce secret crush on Tesla when I was growing up that it was silly, so this looks like it’s going to be entirely too sexy for words. Seriously, casting David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, you can’t actually craft a hotter idea than that. Not unless you somehow throw Phillip K. Dick in there as played by another David Bowie. Here’s a link to the trailor.