Friday, January 27, 2012

Eastern Block

I know I've been doing this for nearly a year, but I still feel very new to the blogging universe.  Maybe it's because other than typing and/or editing posts, I'm kind of lost when it comes to navigating and/or making changes to my own site. 

For example, and for those of you that aren't familiar, when you are drafting a post, right above the regular toolbar (all the usual icons to click if you want to italicize, hi-light, go back, etc.) there are two tabs, "Edit HTML" and "Compose".

I guess I accidentally hit Edit HTML a few months ago, because every post between then and two days ago has been a frustrating experience indeed.  Everything I tried to italicize had <'s and >'s everywhere.  And any links I tried to include didn't actually link. I mean, the letters were there, but you couldn't just right click them and get connected to anything*.  And any pictures I tried to attach were an incomprehensible string of letters, numbers and symbols:  

ajgo80rtu2[409pnb[0wgjvparjvare]9jb[
odfvk
WEI=TE
[HJTE]-H9UTPEHJTR'HSOSKR-TY9UPEAFJ;DALKFG59UY

I very vaguely understood that this was HTML (?), but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to turn it off.  As I discovered two days ago, all I needed to do was click on the "Compose" tab.  Live and learn.

The other issue is that given that I made zero effort to promote drinking-for-two, for a long time my only readers were friends of mine and/or Sara's, so I didn't have a lot of incentive to check my stats or anything like that.

However, things change.

While my number of  "followers" has been static since about last May**, my readership has recently increased dramatically.  What's significant to this particular post is that part of this is due to having acquired a healthy number of readers from Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.  In fact, Russia is now 2nd only to Canada in terms of number of page views by country.  How??  Why??  Has there been a sudden increase of interest in Evan Dando's penis in the Eastern Block? 

I managed to figure out that one of the "referring" sites is this:  http://troll-face-ru.blogspot.com/.  I visited the site, naturally, to try and figure out "how?? why??".  As best I have it, it's a collective of Russian cartoonists.  But it hasn't revealed a damn thing.  Given that it's almost all in Russian.  Never mind that it's a whole different language.  It's a whole different ALPHABET.

But it sort of makes me wish that I could read Russian, not only because I would like to understand how visitors to troll-face could possibly be connected to me***, but also because I really like the artwork. 

My Russian literacy is limited to one word.  Het.  Pronounced, nyet.  Meaning, no.

My spoken Russian is not much better.  Da:  yes.  Nyet:  no.  Dasvidanya:  goodbye (literally, until we meet again).  Babushka:  old woman or grandmother.  Borscht:  borscht.  Smiert spionom:  death to spies (which I learned from watching the Bond movie The Living Daylights****).  Fetyuk:  pussy, as in, "don't be such a pussy" (a now obsolete slang word which I learned from reading Gogol's Dead Souls).  The end. (Kahneehetz).  I just learned that one.  Thanks, Google.

Think I might actually get Rosetta Stone for Russian.  It is, after all, the country/language of 1/4 of my ancestors*****.  Given my gift for follow-through, I expect I'll actually get the software sometime in between now and 4 years from now.  And maybe, very much maybe, sometime in between that and the time of my death, I will be able to recite the Cyrillic alphabet and have expanded my vocabulary to 30 or 40 words.

At any rate, to celebrate my new Slavic friends, and more importantly, to celebrate (if I must) the recent impregnation of one of my oldest friends******, I propose that I collect a group to go back to the Russian vodka bar near my apartment for a second go at Absinthe.  And also some vodka.  Maybe even hang out and pretend we like Russian dance music.  Who's with me?  They give you free pickles!


*ie, Don't call me Grank.  Anyone who read that post and didn't actually look up the urbandictionary definitions because the links didn't work should give it another try.  I fixed it*******. 

**I curse all of you who read regularly but have not bothered to officially "follow".  You make me appear very unpopular.

***I expect that the connection is something completely random (rather than the acquisition of an actual fan of my prose stylings), but I'd still like to know.

****Timothy Dalton, without question, is the most under-rated Bond ever.  He was awesome!

*****If anyone was ever curious about the ethnic origins of "Granken".  It's Russian. One of my dad's clearest/dearest memories from his childhood is watching the coldwar American news with his dedushka and having said dedushka shake his head at the translations of the horrible things the Commies were saying, commenting, "you know, that isn't what he said."  Wait.  I guess I can add dedushka to my vocabulary.

******this particular friend decided to tour eastern Europe after university graduation, and spent about a month in Sarajevo waiting for a visa to get into Russia which never materialized.

*******I can't be sure that it has anything to do with my request for help, but in the meantime, there have been a couple of additions to the definition for the adjective, "granky".  And I'll take them:

1.  an emotion, between happy and horny. ie: oh, im so granky right now

and

2.  cool.  ie:  that was pretty damn granky

If anyone out there is responsible for any of this:  THANK YOU.  Regardless, things are still looking up.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

ceramic ashtray

I figure schoolchildren don't typically bring home ceramic ashtrays as father's day gifts anymore. I think, as art projects go, the anti-smoking movement had rendered them extinct even way back when I was a little child. Maybe they still exist, but they're called candy dishes now. Or paper clip holders (anti-sugar movement).

I'd say macaroni art still roams free, but I assume that celiacs have ruined that for everyone, as well.  Silly celiacs.  So afraid of wheat.

However, I am confident that the artistic offerings young children generate at school for their parents still exist in some form or another*.

I'm sure that the first of these childish scrawls are met by their parents with delight. And probably the second and third and so on. And I have no doubt that some of these are tucked away lovingly as cherished souvenirs** of the days when your children were nothing but potential and still loved you. But there must be a point when you shudder when your son or daughter hands over another one of these tokens. Thinking "good god, not more". Wondering how to subtly dispose of it rather than try to find somewhere to put it. Knowing that your child will likely be very upset if you accidentally drop it in a puddle, set it on fire, or are cornered into saying (lying) "your painting is in the recycling bin? Sorry kiddo. I can't imagine how it got there."

My question is, at what point is it no longer insensitive for you to say something like, "that's great... very impressive. how about tomorrow you make a present for... um... someone else?"

Jack and Molly are a long way off from that sort of thing. First things first. (Crawl, first. Abstract expressionism, later.)

I'm getting somewhere with this.

I obviously am not the parent of a kindergarten-aged minion. I have a cat***. And I assure you it's not just human young who bequest unsolicited gifts on their caregivers.

There was a day last winter when Orange woke me from a blissful slumber and would not relax until I followed him downstairs into the hallway. Where he sat down, looked up at me, and started purring maniacally - remnants of a mouse at his side. The rear remnants. The head and front legs were missing. I have a vivid imagination for sound. Whenever I think of it, I still hear (in my mind) the sound of my sweet and docile furry friend crunching through mouse spine and skull. Hearing it right now. Ahem. Moving on...

I know that it's not unusual for pets to bring their kills back and presenting them to their people. I have experienced this before. I lived in a house in Banff with a minor mouse problem****. The Orange One proved himself an adept and ferocious hunter. More than once I leaned down to pick up what I thought to be some lint from the floor by my bed to discover that it had bones. Ick.

Last Tuesday around midnight, I decided to call it a night after spending a relaxing evening lounging in bed, watching episodes of Weeds on my laptop. I wandered downstairs to have a bedtime cigarette on my kitchen porch. Orange, ever the faithful companion, followed me downstairs, and promptly disappeared and started rustling around under a shelf on the floor by my stove, where I keep seldom-used kitchen appliances. I went outside, thinking "what a strange cat." When I came back in a few minutes later, he darted out from under the shelf and sprinted into the livingroom, leaving me to think, again, "what a strange cat."

It took a second to register that I'd seen what looked very much like a tail trailing from one corner of his mouth. I chased him down and found him crouched on the floor, with, indeed, the tail of a mouse dangling from his lips. I stuck a finger in his jaw (on the other side) to try and make him let go. He would have none of it. I danced nervously back into the kitchen (thinking "oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god"), fully expecting to hear the snapping and crunching of skeleton any second. But silence. I gathered some courage, and went back into the livingroom for a second go. I found The Orange One batting it around happily. "Aha," thought I, tossing a different toy across the room to distract him. It worked. He raced after it. Sadly, I hadn't had the foresight to bring anything with me to transport the body, and palming the warm corpse of a recently deceased rodent was not appetizing. I retreated to the kitchen to regroup, emerging seconds later with a dustpan.

I managed to distract the cat again and slid the dustpan under the mouse, like a spatula under a pancake. The cat, astutely, realized that I was messing with his new favourite toy, and pounced back towards me. With less than a second to react, my only course of action was to flip the pancake. The mouse somersaulted in the air several times, landing safely back on my waiting dustpan (skilled short-order cook). Now safely out of reach of my watchful feline.

It didn't appear to have been punctured. It's musculoskeletal system seemed intact. I poked at it a couple of times, to see if maybe it was just in shock, and I should put food and water dishes, together with an old sock (for a soft warm bed) in a shoebox and barricade it in the bathroom until it recovered. No such luck. Dead as dirt*****. I put the dustpan outside to deal with later. The cat spent the entire night sitting dejectedly on the livingroom floor on top of the last spot the mouse had made contact, occasionally mewing plaintively.

I found my cat in a state of eager agitation when I got home from work tonight. Not immediately thinking "dead rodent", I tried giving him some treats and some loving attention. Neither helped. He wrapped himself around my ankles. Looked up at me, purring insistently. Went into the hallway, sat down. Came back when I didn't follow him. And so on.

I gave in and followed him, of course. I didn't catch anything ususual or of import in the hallway. My gaze drifted forward to my livingroom****** floor, where I saw a splatter-art masterpiece rendered in blood. My gaze drifted down towards my feet, and I saw that what I had taken for a dead leaf carried in on my shoe was actually a mouse, drained of all bodily fluid. Gentle Orange One sitting beside it, looking up at me proudly.

Enough is enough.  It's not that I don't appreciate the gesture - no wait, it's exactly that I don't appreciate the gesture. Please, no more.

I'll of course have to take action against possible mouse problem, if only to avoid any more corpses - the next one might be on my pillow.



*Actually, I know this to be true. Though as far as I can tell, in our efforts to dummy-proof the development of our children, as well as to ensure that none of them are left feeling like anyone might be better than anyone else at anything, artistic expression is now limited to putting stickers of characters from television shows or movies on construction paper. Perhaps interspersed with some ink stamps of characters from television shows or movies. With maybe a smear of glitter-infused glue-stick, for the adventurous. What's so wrong with handing a kid a piece of paper and a crayon and saying, "Go"*******?

**however, given the quality of the artwork of the modern child, how long can a page covered in Dora the Explorer stickers keep you impressed? Years later, will you look at the stickers coming loose from the yellowed page and think fondly of days gone by? Or will you lament that you don't have any mementos of their actual work, which could prompt memories of their developing personalities? Just a thought.

***The Orange One. "Orange", for short. Sometimes pronounced in French, for reasons that are not clear, even to me.

****wildlife everywhere, it being in a national park + poorly maintained dwellings intended to house a transient population = mice

*****which is not dead at all, but teeming with micro-organisms.

******also known as "kill room"

*******I am aware that, especially with the very young, the point of these projects is not to create "art" in a strict sense but to assist in the development of hand-eye co-ordination, so maybe I'm being a bit harsh on the stickers. But previously mentioned crayon and blank page would also lend to the development of hand-eye co-ordination. And maybe, also, the development of independent and creative thinking********.

********On a sort of related note, I've been told that the Ministry of Education is considering dispensing with penmanship as part of the grade school curriculum, on the assumption that everything in the future will be digitized and cursive writing won't be useful in a world where all written communication takes place by bbm. Will they just stop as soon as you learn to print your own name? Will future generations sign their marriage certificates with a finger paint thumb print and their names scribbled in crayon?




Will passports be password protected, and after they scan your barcode at customs they ask you to verify/authenticate your identity by entering your password (the one you've lazily kept since grade 5), and then, just to be sure, re-entering it, all the while asking you the standard questions?

Citizenship?

bieber4Ever


Anything to declare?

bieber4Ever

Friday, January 13, 2012

New Year's/Resolutions

It's a little late, maybe, but better late than never.

I made a number of New Year's resolutions this year, the main one being a non-specific, blanket resolution to start existing in a less chaotic, more responsible (at least more financially responsible) manner. Of course, there are an array of specific ways I plan to implement the lifestyle change. Some of them are already well underway, some of them not so much. And some of them yet to be identified, no doubt.

1. Not to take taxis to work anymore. It only shaves imaginary minutes off of my arrival time and it's a real piss-off to spend $14 to avoid being 5 minutes late for work and then be 5 minutes late anyway. Not doing very well at this one so far. Will start fresh on Monday. I mean tomorrow. No, I probably mean Monday.

2. Stop doing things like buying new socks or pants when I realize I've left home without clothes for the gym or dance class. Not doing so well at this one, either, in light of the fact that I went to the mall and bought some Nike running pants* on my lunch hour yesterday, so that I could go to the gym, on my lunch hour yesterday. I didn't realize they were $80** pants until I went to pay, and then it was too late. I'm not kicking myself too much over this one, though, because I'd been meaning to buy proper running pants (rather than leggings from Ardene) for quite awhile. And they're really nice pants. (May the Indonesian children who were paid 50 cents an hour to stitch them together forgive me. And may the executives who walked away with millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses on the strength of the 79.50 mark-up bite me).

2. Finish properly furnishing my apartment. Meaning, get a kitchen table so that my meals are not consumed sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor. And get an actual bed, so that I'm not sleeping on a mattress on the floor like I did in first year. And second year. And third year. And fourth year***. Anyway, done and done.

3. Finish unpacking. It's 13 months since I moved into my apartment, after all. 13 months to finish unpacking is excessive. Until yesterday, I had a whole room referred to only as "hobo room", because I used it exclusively to pile odds and ends of possessions that 13 months later I hadn't decided where to put yet - boxes of random notebooks and papers stacked on top of each other, heaps of laundry that were occasionally washed but never put away, ever. A wheeled cart full of empties that I hid in there because having it out in the open was both unsightly and unflattering****. Etc.

Those of you familiar with hobo room may wonder why I specify that it only existed until yesterday. Wait for it... I cleaned and finished unpacking hobo room. Sort of. I unearthed many long-forgotten treasures in the process, including my nose flute, my punching rabbi hand puppet, some poetry that my friend Bill wrote for me in high school, and the empty coconut shells that I used to click together as Bill and I galloped down the hallways of good ol' Ursuline College "The Pines"*****.

After that, I was understandably distracted. Playing.

But I had motivation to clear up the room sort of forced upon me, which is related to the next part of my resolution,

4. Stop using a remote access wireless internet stick for at-home use and get a normal account like a normal person. Stick was very costly, especially considering how much time I spend watching 80's music videos on YouTube. Also the annoying interruptions in service I contended with when I forgot to pay the bill.

I would like to say with pride that I rectified the situation on the strength of my own resolve. I did not. The stick stopped working on me on January 2nd or 3rd - this is also why nearly two weeks have passed since my last post. I took it to the Bell store to see what could be done about the situation and walked out with an appointment to have a tech come to my apartment to install proper service. 100 GB for what I'm told is the bargain price of $32 per month, including tax. I have no idea what a GB'll get you, but I'm assured it's "lots". I can buy up an additional 40 GB for 5 bucks, too. Though, again, I don't know what that actually gets you.

At any rate, I had to clean up the room to uncover the required phone jack. And to avoid the embarrassment of having a stranger see how I live.

5. Stop doing things like handing over a 750 mL water bottle to Sara & co. and ask that they fill it up with liquor of their own choosing. For me to drink. Like I did on New Year's Eve, when I opted to double down on New Year's events, so that I could both go to a party with my friends, and make it out to the 'burbs in time to celebrate midnight with - a companion of mine. After a couple of games of beer pong, I balked at the prospect of sobering up on a commuter train. I've misplaced the e-mail itemizing everything that went into the bottle, but I remember that 6 or 7 shots of liquor were involved, including a quantity of cherry flavoured rum. Maybe I won't quit this altogether as a past-time, but in future, I will not follow through on any promises to drink it all while in transit. I faithfully drank it all over the course of my 35 minute ride (except for what I slopped on myself on road bumps). On arrival at second event, I was disappointed (and frankly, disgusted) to find that my companion's house guests were watching Underworld or something, with no intent on shutting it off. Midnight came and went with me listening to Outkast (Sorry Miz Jackson) on my iPod. I kind of blacked out after that, but apparently I punched my companion really hard on the sternum (for not being drunk enough), took off my pants, and went to sleep at about 12:30. When said companion attempted to molest me at about 12:45, I was star-fishing his bed, snoring slightly, and basically non-responsive.


*Did you know that proper running pants are put together with a specific patch of fabric to aerate the vagina? I do now.

**one of the bonuses to working in the private sector is the Christmas bonus, which hasn't quite run out yet.

***This has created a new problem. My sleeping arrangements are now almost too comfortable. I sleep so soundly that I have become immune (more immune) to the sound of my alarm clock. I dreamt straight through it for about 20 minutes yesterday morning, pleading with my cat to go shut it off, and being annoyed when he wouldn't. In the dream, I mean.

****I decided months ago that the effort of storing empty bottles and lugging them to the Beer Store to return was not worth the $5.60 it yielded and have just been recycling them. But still.

*****Coconut shells inspired by Monty Python's "Search for the Holy Grail" (of course) and the similarity in sound they have to the clopping of horses' hooves. I had really long hair in those days, and Bill would grab onto it pretending he was holding the reins and away we'd go to math class.