6/30/2006

Pluse de Beer, mes amis, Plus de Beer!

Hey all,
'Nother one at beer.com right here.

God, I kick ass.

later,
Chuck

6/27/2006

The Gitbox Case, Installment Two.

Hey. More shit on my case.

Thanks to Mr. Scott Stoneman, for bringing to my attention the symbol used on Mandalore armor: the skull of the Mythosaur. While it's kind of a fruity name, it's a cool pic. I can't find a picture of a mythosaur anywhere, except for a city built out of mythosaur bones.

Anyway, this next one was suggested by Rob, but it's all about Joel here. Not done yet; it needs a little cleanup, but it'll be cool, I think.

And then, of course, I had to put on the Boyscout You know, the Last Son of Krypton, the Man of Tomorrow. Big Blue. The Man of Steel, The Metropolis Marvel. This guy. Unfinished, of course. The yellow's going on now.

Later,
Chuck

Just a little bizarre.

So I'm driving home tonight, one-thirtyish, coming home from work. Late relief shift on 76, which means 5pm to 1:14am on Royal York South.I think I mentioned something about the RYS earlier. Anyway, I'm on the way home, listening to Foo Fighters' There Is Nothing Left To Lose.

That is one fucking fantastic record. A couple of solid FM hits and several prominent movie songs make this a fairly comfortable album for non-Foo afficionadoes, but this album is so cohesive and... right. You know when you have a record and you could never, ever hit 'shuffle'? This is one of those. Every song is a perfect apertif for the next and a sublime dessert for the last. This is the third record, and the first where Dave Grohl handed the drumsticks to a scrappy fella named Taylor Hawkins. There were three singles released: Learn to Fly, which everybody knows, Breakout, which was a movie track from Me, Myself and Irene, and Next Year, which is a cool strummy acoustic-esque song with awesome Taylor Hawkins drums. But the real gems here, I feel, are album tracks like Stacked Actors (dirtiest guitar since Big Sugar covered Dear Mr. Fantasy), Generator and MIA. I could listen to this thing all damn day.

So where was I?

Oh yeah. Driving home. I don't know if anybody who reads this lives in a city. Joel kind of did for a while, but after a while in Toronto, you kind of start to navigate not so much by signs, but by the skyline, if you're approaching the city from the outlying areas. I know this sounds dumb, but T.O. has a very distinctive profile (you can imagine why), and you kind of triangulate with it subconsciously to get your location. It works downtown, too. If you can see the tower and anything else (building, intersection, whatever) you know where you are and what direction you're facing.
So as I come home, eastbound on the Gardiner, I don't look at signs, I just make turns until everything's the right distance apart and then I'm at Spadina (the road on which I live; rhymes with certain naughty bits). But tonight was weird.

We've had one of those not-quite-rainy-but-black-thunderheady-humidish kind of days, and for some reason, we have a lot of very low-lying cloud cover over the downtown core. It was patchy, but VERY VERY THICK. So as I was coming into town, i felt a vague unease, and began to think I had missed my exit. I hadn't, of course; I'm not retarded (shut up, Joel, I'm not.). I tried to think why, and then I noticed that the CN Tower did not exist. When it gets like this, you can still generally see the tower but it's blurry and misty, but tonight it was just fucking gone. But First Canadian Place, the second-tallest thing in the city, was lit up and clear as a bell. For that matter, most of the rest of the city was clear and fog-free. There was this localized cloud cover right over the SkyDome (I refuse to call it the Rogers Centre) and the tower; Even up close (and I drive past it at a distance of about 300 yards), I could only see the barest outline of the bottom of the tower, and nothing at all of the upper three quarters.

So, having satisified myself that the Tower hadn't been kidnapped the day after its 30th birthday (true), I turned up the Foos and went home.

Yep.

Chuck.


ps: Rob, that little asshat, fell into backstage passes for 54-40 at the Harb tomorrow night. Bastard. He had to call me up and ask me what songs they did.

6/23/2006

Beer is a Wonderful Thing.

It's given a name to a website that will publish my bullshit.
Publish it here.
Enjoy!
Chuck

6/19/2006

Need A Hand, Folks!

Hey. Little help? Here's my sitch. I'll ask you the question at the end of the post.

I recently bought a new guitar case to replace the shitty barely-more-than-cardboard one that's protected my older-than-me guitar clear across the continent for twenty-eight years. I am most pleased by this, but I found myself missing my case's lone adornment: a sticker from the Vancouver Aquarium which I got, oddly enough, at the Vancouver Aquarium. It was located on the narrower bit of the lid of the case, right about where the headstock would be if you were to look inside.

My new case had nothing there. Nothing anywhere else, either, which was something I regretted on the old case as well. I would never, ever, ever put a sticker or any other non-luthieresque adornment on an actual guitar, but I find that decoration on a case lends character to an otherwise bland conveyance, and allows a look into the personality of the player.

So, I decided that I needed to put something on mine. I had to go with something strong, something impervious. This new case, while it's just a regular acoustic guitar case, is fucking titanium compared to the old one; Joe, Joel, Andrew and maybe Meredith can attest to this. So I needed to have something on there that represented the absolute pinnacle of defensive armament. And who's tougher on the D than the shellhead himself. The Invincible Iron Man. And I don't mean the Black Sabbath bullshit Iron Man, I mean Tony Friggin' Stark, billionnaire industrialist and inventor of military technologies. And here I found a problem: The only easily accessible pictures of Iron man were either unsuitable or required subtle blendings of colour of which I am not as yet capable.
But then I found a sketch, a simple toss-off drawing by a dude named George Perez, whose mere name brings gasps of awe and the muffled noises of furious masturbation at comic conventions. This sketch.

Pretty boss, right? Right. So I cleaned it up a bit (paper was a tad yellowed and there were still the rough pencil lines, and a signature) and transferred it to my case, and painted it, with durable and easy-to-work-with acrylic paint I got from Curry's Art Supplies.

Yes, I do rock, thank you. And now my problem was solved: I had a decoration to replace my lost sticker, and it was sufficently boss, AND it represented the coolest suit of armour known to man.

But then... I still had a bunch of paint. So who else is cool? Well, if you've read a comic called Watchmen, by Alan Moore (which most of you haven't but really should (ask me and I'll give it to you on CD; it's only tweve issues)), you'd know that the coolest guy in there (probably) is a guy called Dr. Manhattan, whose powers are so boss I'll have to leave it to Wikipedia to explain. And his little symbol dealy looks like this.

And then, I'm thinking, who's the coolest? I don't mean like in a Fonz, kind of way, or in a Bjork kind of way. I mean in a massive cosmic power kind of way. Which leaves who? The Silver Surfer, possibly, but I had more of a Lantern vibe in mind. A Green Lantern Vibe. But this in itself caused me some consternation. As we all know, the Green Lantern is the protector of Earth's sector of space, and there are 3600 such sectors in the known universe, each patrolled by its own Green Lantern. Now, there have been seven Lanterns on Earth. Fortunately for my dilemma, there have been only two really awesome ones. Alan Scott and John Stewart (the current GL) were cool and everything, but the real boss ones were Kyle Rayner, the most famous Modern Age Lantern, and Hal Jordan, widely and correctly considered to be the one, true Green Lantern. but how could I choose?

But who cares? I have a fairly large guitar case. I decided to go with both, starting off with Hal's logo. It needs another coat or two, but it now looks like this. And then I started off on Kyle's decidedly more modern-looking symbol. Not done yet, of course; I'm still thinking about whether to use a white outline or to make a greenish-black fade on the outside border, or maybe another green-and-black bisected circle. Who knows? As of now, the whole thing looks like this.

But I need more! And here's where I call on you, Constant Reader, to help me.

Tell me any suggestions you may have to de-boring my guitar case! I'm currently mulling over the obvious Superman and Batman symbols, as well as Autobot and Decepticon logos, and possibly a Captain America shield. Definitely the Spidey symbiote suit, or maybe the new Iron Spidey look. And of course Captain Marvel. And I don't mean Marvel's Captain Marvel, I mean DC's Captain Marvel. The one that says 'Shazam.' Maybe Rorshach. Maybe The Sentry... I dunno. Help?

6/15/2006

Two Posts For The Price of One?!?

Okay, I got two today.
First off, I've spent the last six weeks spending Monday to Thursday, from about two until about ten, driving a bus on TTC's Symington 168 route, which goes from Dundas West Station through a rather circuitous route up to Rogers and Weston Roads. The route doesn't matter; the main thing is that I go through several rather dense residential neighbourhoods that aren't on major transit lines. Which means that the roads are positively covered with the foulest slime ever to haul itself from a Teamster's armpit. The kind of person you'd like to trick into drinking cow urine.

You know.

Cyclists.

Now, I don't mean all people who ride bicycles; some of those people are okay. They go off in the bush and ride over bumpy things, or they use bike paths. No, my focus today is on people who ride bikes in places where I want to drive. I don't care about any cyclist in the world right now. Because I'm not driving right now. So when I say 'cyclist' I mean a person who is using a bicycle to fuck up my day.

So, with the definitions out of the way, I'd like to say that all cyclist can rectally insert one of these. And they can give it a wiggle for me. I hate all cyclists, for the following reasons:

1. They demand all the rights that a vehicle has on the road, and then refuse to act like one. They don't signal, they don't yield right of way when they're supposed to, they generally don't wear the legally required helmet, and they blow right the fuck through stop signs and red lights. And now they expect me to treat them like they have as much right to the road as me? That's like Bill O'Reilly going to a MENSA meeting and claiming to be a genius by virtue of just being in the room. He's not. Never will be. Far from it, in fact. And a bicycle is not a vehicle. If it were a vehicle, it would have a license plate. And it would require a license to drive it, for that matter. It would have real live mandatory safety equipment, and you would never ever be allowed to drive it on the sidewalk. It would be able to sustain travel at the speed limit and not obstruct traffic. It would have signals of some kind, and perhaps a headlight. Oh, wait! That sounds familiar! Hey, isn't that pretty much a description of a motorcycle? Wow! They already have these things! And they're not a pain in the ass! So, bicycles, then, are for children to practice on until they are old enough for a motorcycle. Well, that was easy.

2. Why do you have to dress like a speed skater in order to ride a bicycle? There are two kinds of cyclists: Normal-looking people, who are generally either bearded hippi-esque student types or forty-year old dudes that obviously got their license pulled for one too may DUI's, and there are the bike psychos. And there are way, way more bike psychos. These douchebags always have the racer sportif look, with the wraparound sunglasses and the aerodynamic helmet. They wear those shoes that you clip in to the pedals (as if that really makes a difference on Rogers Road) and wear pants so tight I can see what they had for lunch yesterday. Fuck off. I don't want to look at your ass, magnificently displayed though it may be. You don't need the little belt pack with four little Nalgene water bottles. You don't need the little shoes. You don't need the special bike shirt or the special bike gloves or any of that shit. You've spent six hundred dollars to look like a retard while cycling for exercise. Are you a competitive bicycle racer? Then how come I've never heard of you, and you're fifty? This is not the Tour de France, this is what you do for an hour after work to get away from your asshole wife and kids. I don't dispute that you can probably push the pedals aaround in a circle longer than me, but can you do it better than me? Really? Is there that much to it, apart from an overall circular motion? Does the shirt help? It can't be a wind resistance thing; you're only going thirty. Fuck off.

I may have said this earlier, but I hate cyclists. I hate their bikes. I hate the narrow patch of road that they ride on. I hate their clothing. I hate their children. I hate myself, for breathing the same air as them. If all cyclists were herded into a rocket ship (you could prpbably just tell them all there was the world's smallest pair of pants in there) and shot them into the sun, I would fraudulently remortgage my parents' house to throw a massive party.

And the other thing is, I finally sprung for a receiver for my record player, and have switched to vinyl. Andrew knows about this one firsthand, having switched a couple of years ago. I snagged a mint copy of Van Halen I for a whole four dollars at this place called Disocvery Records, in Scarberia. Cool place. And at Sonic Boom, I found all of the Beatles' albums, brand new. Current reissues. Shrink-wrapped, even. Haven't bought them yet ($27 each) but I will. I've even got two Rush records (Hemispheres and Permanent Waves). Long live vinyl.

See you around, and fuck cyclists.