adventure/nimrods abound

imma do things chronologically so we don't lose anything in the mix.

when we got hitched, we had to rent an amp. so we went to the only music store in geneseo, ny - buzzo's music. owned by this fine gentleman:

who walks with the help of a jerry-rigged cane (it looks like a bunch of metal rods taped together with packing tape) and speaks in a raspy mumble that's near incomprehensible. buzzo, who's famous catch phrase is: "you kidding me or what?", is a well-preserved relic from the trip the light fantastic, don't drink the kool-aid, shine on you crazy diamond 60s counter culture. he doesn't really do rentals, but he made an exception for us. in return, the dotytron bought this shirt:

when the last of our auxiliary performance thank you cards went out shamefully late, i made sure to get the dotytron to include one for buzzo, with some photos of the amp and the dotytron rocking out with the electric guitar.

on wednesday, i came home and emptied the mail box (note for posterity and future house-chore labour division collateral: THE DOTYTRON NEVER EVER CHECKS THE MAIL) to find this envelope:

i waited for the dotytron to come home and we opened this letter together:

it reads:

dear lagerfeld and dotytron,
so glad it's gone so well!!!
hope this finds you both healthy and happy!!
the pictures will be "on the wall" somehwere (or on the "green giant")
thanks!!
best regards,
al "buzzo" bruno

AMAZING ON SO MANY LEVELS!!! first of all, only buzzo would write BACK. second of all, only buzzo's lsd-derived chicken scratches would take us the better part of half an hour to decipher. third of all, we're going to be immortalized on the wall of a geneseo institution! so the best! we got deep roots there, folks.

last night for dinner we had another legume-based dish. i made that warm baby spinach, lentil, bacon, shallot salad that i do. i usually bread and fry the goat's cheese rounds but we didn't have panko and we already had toasted breadcrumbs leftover from the lima bean dish on tuesday, AND i was feeling chided and remorseful from the weekend of gluttony followed so closely by fat tuesday, that i just smeared the goat's cheese onto toasted slices of my sourdough bread and served it alongside, topping the salad with toasted breadcrumbs for texture. it was good!

so we pile in the captain to do some errands before dball. as we're driving to dball, i start talking about ehm do's show on saturday and the dotytron mentions that he's kind of weirded out by how she was making kind of ribald comments (it was close to valentine's day, after all) and he doesn't really want to see his sister being sexy - that it gives him the willies. and i was talking about how you have to be supportive and then i said, "i'm sure if you were dita von teese's sister, you would go to her show"

the dotytron, driving, looks over at me with narrowed eyes and a puzzled, uncomprehending look and slowly says, "okaaaaaaaay.........i'm not really sure where you're going with this."

and i was like, "you know, if you were dita von teese's sister, or her parents, you would go to her show, even though it's sexy."

a couple of beats passed in puzzled silence. my puzzlement at the dotytron's obtuseness, his puzzlement to be revealed a second later when he burst out laughing, "oh, i get it. i thought you meant that dita von teese's sister would be going to ehm do's show, and i was all like, 'why would dita von tee's sister go to ehm's show?!?'" LOL!!! we laughed our guts out. it was the way he kind of gave me the puzzledeyes and was all like, "okaaaaaaaay..." about it. like he didn't have a clue where i was going but was willing to reluctantly follow along. kind of like a metaphor for our relationship.

so we played against a team that i kind of dislike in dball and lost because they're an amazing team. my team (well, like 2 players) got super rattled and freaked out and started accusing the other team of cheating and then one of the dudes on my team walked out like a poose. it was so poose. this broad on my team said that there's more glory in throwing someone out when you're the last person on the court for your team than a catch. THAT IS SO WRONG i almost smacked her upside the head. catching is the NUMBER 1 SKILL in dodgeball. the NUMBER 1! repeat it after me: CATCHING IS THE NUMBER 1 SKILL IN DODGEBALL. because it's the double whammy - you get someone out AND you bring someone on your team BACK IN. what an idiot.

anyway, on the way home, we got pulled over by the cops because the sticker on our license plate was expired and we hadn't renewed it. the dotytron tensed up like whoa, but i found the whole situation kind of funny. we were literally 1 block from our house. i've never been pulled over before so i put my hands up in the air in the car to show the 5-0 that i wasn't packing. the dotytron was unamused. when the lady cop (it was a lady cop!) was shining the light in the car i suddenly had a hilarious idea. how awesome would it be to be pulled over by the cops, have them come up to the car, shine the light in, only to have you turn around with one of those halogen head-lamps strapped to your head?!??? ahahahahahahaha!!! i can picture it in my head and it would be so funny.

so we're waiting there while they run our vehicle and registration and insurance shiz and then the lady cop comes back and says, "it's your lucky day, guys. we just got called to a knifing" WHAT THE HELL? lucky us, unlucky schlub who got knifed, i guess.

so i've been on twitter for about a year maybe and i finally got into a snippy tweet flame war with the food writer for the toronto star, who wrote this incredibly smug article about how torontians aren't being "cool" about the arrival of guu. read about it here. it got linked in my twitter, so i'm like, ummm...FIRST OF ALL ELECTRO CYBER GEEK, how do YOU get to be an arbiter of taste i toronto? have you met you? btw, you posted THIS as your twitter picture:

what an "asexual snail" in the words of dr. rei. explain how i'm supposed to take any of the pretentious, holier than thou, "oh, i'm going to ask my FRIEND, the chef at kaiseki-sakura [aka native insider authenticity generator alert!]" drivel that comes out of your mouth, seriously? you, who overcooked a ribeye like whoa?

(i pulled this photo from his blog...which is teeth-gnashingly smug). so i posted in response to him...uhhh... what's your FREAKIN' POINT? people line up all the time. sorry if it's not "cool" to line up. people line up for all kinds of things: ramen at momofokus, yakitori in japan, caplansky's, the black hoof, reserving 6 months in advance for alinea (could be construing as lining up) - are all of those equally "not cool"? HOW ARE YOU "COOL"? so effin' elitist and self-aggrandizing.

sigh. i effin' hate the calibre of the food community in toronto if it's made up of corey mintz and toronto life and joanne kates. where's the realness? where's the inclusiveness? where's the JOY? the joy in eating...that giddy excitement, the desire to share, to encompass the world at your table and while away an evening with friends over the table? if these people have it...it doesn't come across. what comes across is how much you want to sock them in the nads. that corey dude even has a twitter hater who's only goal is to start flame wars with him (misterpsm) kind of awesome.

in other news of people being shacker hackjobs, the special library association, of which i am a member is hosting a workshop with a guest speaker on the topic of "information overload." the guest speaker, whose bio reads thus (you can skim it...the main point is...he talks himself up like whoa):

"Karl Dawson is the CEO of phiScape AG, a company specializing in distributed computing and data integration in heterogeneous environments, with particular application to digital media and knowledge management systems. Prior to founding phiScape AG in Zürich, Mr. Dawson was CTO of Deltavista, a data broker based in Switzerland which connects large volumes of data from a myriad of public and private sources through sophisticated record linkage. In this position, Mr. Dawson not only designed the software and data architecture, but contributed to key parts of the implementation. Prior to Deltavista, Mr. Dawson was employed at the Amdahl Research Laboratory in Toronto, where he helped to develop a relational database system with an embedded rule-based engine. Before this, Mr. Dawson worked five years at I.P. Sharp and Associates in Toronto, where he was privileged to help engineer the company’s APL interpreter, implementing new language primitives. Mr. Dawson holds university degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science."

anyway, chachi up there describes his upcoming presentation thusly:

"Arthur Toffler characterized "Revolutionary Wealth" as resting on three pillars: time, space and knowledge. The identification of these particular elements is in no small measure attributable to technology, particularly the internet. "Internet time" is something that we all know about. "The World is Flat" is the standard metaphor for globalization. But, whereas the internet has compressed time and space, knowledge is expanding at an accelerating rate. This is the “information overload” problem that we experience in our daily lives.

Information overload cannot be solved by search engines alone, since even the most precise search requests still leave us with a lot of information to absorb. We live in a post-Gutenberg world of electronic documents, but where are the post-Gutenberg tools to help us process all this information? There has to be something more than just tag clouds."

i got just one simple question for you: WHO THE F**K IS "ARTHUR TOFFLER"???!!!??? i can only assume you mean ALVIN TOFFLER, the actual author (with heidi toffler) of "revolutionary wealth" - unless of course YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT AND MAYBE DIDN'T EVEN READ THE BOOK YOU'RE REFERENCING IN YOUR TALK SUMMARY.

WE ARE INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS. WE SHOULD BE GETTING THIS STUFF RIGHT. this is basic. that's like calling barack obama, bruce obama. or michel foucault, marion foucault. so i posted a comment on the event page. it's infuriating. because, you know, if information professionals actually had A SINGLE THEORETICAL INTEREST outside of hitching a cart to whatever "digital networking/crowd-sourcing/breaking down information silos" bandwagon happens to be jolting by n00b-alley, then stuff like this would be less likely to happen. you gotta crawl before you can walk, kids. GAH!!!

this weekend is gonna be dope.

tonight: dinner with the fam-bam up in markham. we're getting takeout from this sri lankan place, babu. i'm excited to try sri lankan/south indian stuff i've never had before like hoppers, etc.

tomorrow: i don't know where for lunch and then DREAM MENU for dinner for kung kung's birthday. hoping to hit up asc at the basement for old time jungle's sake. haven't danced in FOREVERS.

sunday: dim sum brunch with C et famille and then back downtown for dball.

family and jungle and food and friends - the quartfecta of good times.

fin.

*grabby hands* x 111110100000

last night's gambol down vinyl memory lane ended up being very fun. we've given up on cataloguing our stuff on discogs for the time being and instead we divvied up the work thus: i would sit on the floor, pull out stacks of my records and file them into "keep" and "iffy/don't remember - requires another listen" and the dotytron would play the iffy/don't remember ones with me barking "forward! back! other side!" directions for the needle. i need surprisingly little time with a track to get a sense if i want to keep it or not.

things i love the most: amens. all kinds. 808s. all kinds. it's a pretty simple formula, really. occassionally i'd pass him something like "tudor rose" or "walk wid your friends" (shouts out to all the massif who know what i'm talking about) and feign like i didn't remember what it sounded like just to hear them again. i haven't touched my records in a dog's age. i'd like to get another turntable and a mixer again. playing records is fun.

stuff on the chopping block was a lot of my indeterminate atmospheric drum'n'bass with the faux jazzy/nature stylings and most of the indeterminate noise/breakcore type stuff. i think all told i'm axing 30-45 tunes from my collection - not too bad. not that significant but it still lightens the load somewhat.

this morning at work i had a run-in with toronto's finest. i was called to the front of the building by security because i could speak cantonese and there was an elderly woman out there who didn't speak any english and they wanted me to translate. i went and the woman was clearly disoriented and confused. she was fairly lucid, but she kept repeating the same story about her apartment. she could give me her name, but not her address or phone number or tell me who she lived with or what she was doing at my building. each time i asked her a question, she would listen carefully and then start repeating the story about her apartment. after 15-20 minutes of this, security told me to go to work and they would call me if they needed me. they called me out again when the toronto police showed up.

there were two lady cops, one kind of burly and pouty and the other one was short and spry and seemed intent on pleasing (i'm not sure who, i think burly cop). burly cop barked out questions to ask the lady, but i got nowhere. then burly cop said, out loud to her partner, "well, we should just dump her at the hospital, she's obviously koo koo." it was off putting to say the least. then she told me, "tell her that we have to take her to the hospital because we can't be babysitting her all day." after about 15 more minutes of me trying to explain to the lady and find out if she remembered the street name of her address or if there was anyone she could call, the woman (who was 71, i managed to get that much out of her) would simply say, matter-of-factly, "i can't remember." she was clearly suffering from some kind of dementia or alzheimers or equivalent. burly copy was clearly impatient (i can't imagine what she had better to do than, oh i don't know...HER JOB). then burly cop started going through the woman's pockets (without asking the woman) all rough and pulled out a cell phone. she dialed the only number on the phone and it turned out to be the front desk of the apartment building and then they escorted the woman out to drop her off at the building. pleaser cop was no better...she was clearly trying to kowtow to burly cop.

as she left, burly turned to me and said, "thanks for your help. you should consider becoming a cop." ummmm...no thank you, lady! that poor old woman - i can't imagine what it must be like to go through what she's going through and to know that you can't even trust law enforcement (which is deemed an "essential service") to make sure you get home safe and sound or that you'll be looked after. they totally didn't give a rat's butt about her and she was a buck to be passed off as quickly as possible. so sickening. i seem to recall in first year politics that we make some kind of trade with government - something to do with "civil society" and some kind of "social contract" - this cop was so NAKED about what a d**k she was. i mean, i guess it's one thing to gripe about this situation when you get home from work, but she was doing it in public! being blatantly patronizing and unsympathetic, rude and callous. it made me want to give her a dressing down, so bad...but i didn't know how to go about it.

it's so sad. when you read the newspaper stories about the racist cops or how they engage in racial profiling or use unnecessary force - it's so easy to believe it. everyone i told the story to today wasn't surprised and more often than not piped up that cops are a**holes. totally disheartening and scary.

not to be a weirdo, but i'm going to change the topic in a big way -

roll call of awesome:

online store: three potato four. whooooosh. that sound, my friends, is the sound of my heart being set afire. click that link only if you are strong-hearted and sturdy of account balance enough to handle the visual assault. it's like instant grabby hands over here, folks. i want most, if not all of the lovely vintage curiosities and novelty items there.

to wit:

united states chalkboard map.

hardware store drawers. these are the perfect size. i actually just went to the trouble yesterday of taking all our burned dvds of movies and shows and whatnot, taking them out of the cd binder, putting them in paper sleeves, and printing up labels with a nice font and labeling the front of each sleeve, with the intention of stacking them in something like this - so that we can flip through them and find the movie we want and it looks nicer than those cd binders and books which i find to be offensively hideous. if i had even the slightest bit of extra coin right now, i would get one for sure.

this old telephone sign. LOOK. AT. THAT. FONT. *faints from typographic happiness*

i'm actually buying this tonight. it would be perfect in the entrance way of lil' ugmo, hung up on the exposed brick wall...add a mini ledge underneath for cell phones and mail and it's a PERFECT landing pad. love it.

wire egg basket - for holding magazines in the living room or bedroom. LUST! PINE! WANT!

whyohwhy must i be so short of money right now? ugh. it grieves me deeply.

fin.