Every Part of Me

I have a long history of sending strange and unsettling e-mails to my sister.  It bothers her.  I enjoy things that bother my sister.  My, how the world is admirably arranged.

My favourite email was this:

From: Rick

To: Stupid Sister

Subject: Hello

Dear Carly,

I like to poop.  It makes my bum feel nice.

I like cookies.

Love,

Rick

It recently occurred to me that I had not sent her any disturbing emails in awhile.  I also happen to have gotten my webcam back on.  So I’ve been sending her close-up pictures of various parts of my body.  I started with an eye:

Then moved onto the tongue:

Ear:

Nose:

I was running out of funny parts of my face and so tried an armpit:

And my big toe (right foot):

At this point I felt kind of bad for filling her inbox with all these crappy pictures.  They’re very low resolution.  So I set the camera for a better resolution and took a much better picture of the inside of my nose, cropping it and getting some lighting in there so you can see all the little hairs:

There’s a lot of hair in there, isn’t there?  Yesterday my wife accidentally burned up all the hair inside her nose (or so she says, I’ve never noticed she had a hairy nose) by accidentally getting too close to a scented candle she was trying to smell.  I’m going to try that.

This is the stuff I do for fun.

The Pope and I

I’m getting pretty sick of Joe… most of you know him as Pope Benedict XVI… sending me emails late at night when he’s drunk.  Look at this crap he sent me this morning:

From: Pope Benedict XVI (hisholiness@vatican.vc)

To: Rick The Great (rickjay71@hotmail.com)

Re: you sukc asshole

 

Hey fuck face you know something else Nikki told me was you smelled HA HA HA I made a poem about you

 

I once knew a guy and his name was Rick

He was stupid and he was a dick

nobody was his friend because he was a jerk

 

the last line doesnt rhyme so sue me jerk wad I had like 10 jagermeisters and now a cardinal is bringin me more wine I party all I want and you can suck it

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI

I’m getting pretty sick of this.  The whole thing between Joe and I about Nikki and that time at the Welly was years and years ago and I’ve put it behind me but he just won’t get over it.  I’ve tried to be nice about this.  When I was at Queen’s and in the Army with Joe, he wasn’t my best friend or anything but we got along okay, except for the part about me making out with his girlfriend.  I admit I was on Nikki like white on rice but give me a break; aside from it being years ago, we were in university.  And piss drunk.  What do you expect?  We were kids.

Anyway, since I started the blog Joe’s been sending me non stop emails and snail mail so I think it’s high time I fired back: Joe/Benedict is a complete asshole.  I know you’re out there thinking I’m referring to his stance on homosexuality, or birth control, or ordination of women, but I don’t care about all that stuff.  I’m telling you he’s a jerk in person.  It’s not just all the drunk emails he sends me.  For instance, have a look at some of the photos I’ve got from our Army days.  Here’s a picture of Joe about to hit a cute little kitten with a hammer:

Actual unretouched photo of Pope attacking kitten with hammer, circa 1992 (Associated Press)

And if that’s not enough, I also found this picture of Joe shooting an lowland gorilla, which I should point out is an endangered species:

Actual unretouched photo of Pope shooting a gorilla (Reuters)

If you need more proof of the Pope’s being a jerk, I’ll post more drawings photos of other horrible things he did back then.  I feel bad airing this dirty laundry about the spiritual leader of a billion people, but he started it.

The Ten Least Popular Service Animals

Everyone’s seen a seeing eye dog (except for, ironically, their owners) and you may have heard of other kinds of service animals, like monkeys that assist quadriplegics.  But what service animals just aren’t in high demand?

10.  Irritable Bowel Syndrome Dog, which starts barking uncontrollably just before you shit yourself

9.  The Passive-Aggressive Parrot (always grudgingly accepted by patients)

8.  The Pit Bull That Mauls Other People’s Kids’ Faces So You Don’t Feel As Bad About How Ugly Your Kids Are

7.  The Anorexia Cow, serves to help the anorexic patient when coverted into hamburgers and prime rib

6.  The Seeing-Eye Skunk

5.  The Deaf-Assist Bag Of Really Pissed Off Hornets

4.  The Quadriplegic Assist Polar Bear, the idea being the bear would help with household tasks, but instead they seem to just enjoy eating their owners

3.  The Teach-You-To-Swim Great White Shark

2.  The Gila Monster With No Discernable Purpose

1.  The Chimpanzee That They Told Me Could Drive A Car but it keeps getting parking tickets so what damned good is it?

Resolved!

Everyone makes New Year’s resolutions, so why not me?  I’m going to make some resolutions in public here and you can all hold me accountable at the end of 2010.

2009 was a shitty year, all in all.  There were some awesome moments to be sure; Sylvia joining us, Heather and Casey getting married, and… well, that’s about it.  Time at Casa Jones were stressful for economic reasons and the whole darn world is in the economic pits.  So my first resolution is for 2010 to be better, for us and everyone.  But, you know, little Sylvia’s smiling at me from my second monitor right now, and so my first resolution is to tell you all that, all in all, I’m a lucky guy.  So here goes:

1.  Lose another 30 pounds.  I am presently at approximately 240, so I resolve to be at 210 or lower by December 31, 2010.

2.  Take the Wiggler for Disneyworld.  No excuses, no “well do it next year.”  The Small One must see Mickey Mouse in February 2010, and that’s that.

3.  Do not kill a single elephant.

4.  Spend more time with friends.  This may not sound like much of a resolution, but with me it’s a problem; I have a way of cocooning, and it doesn’t help that my best friend lives in California.  So I resolve I will get in a few more games of Supreme Commander with Scott, and get out regularly with some friends like Casey, Steve, et al.

5.  Resolve this thing with Joe, or as you know him, Pope Benedict XVI.  He’s leaving nasty messages on my cell phone now.  I might need to go to Rome and get him drunk.

6.  Lift weights 3 times a week.  I need to lose weight, yes, but I want to gain more upper body strength.

7.  Get a REALLY good photo of myself taken.  I have no good photos of myself.  My Facebook photo is a self portrait and looks awful.  Sharorn keeps suggesting she take one but now I’m resolved to get it done.

8.  Take the Second City standup comedy course.

9.  Do a better job at work of not putting off paperwork.

10.  Keep loving Sharron and Maddy.  This one’s easy, but I needed one I knew I could do without even trying.

Pimp My iPod

I got a $50 iTunes gift certificate.  So far I’ve bought 15, 16 songs or so.  I know I want more, and yet cannot for the life of me figure out what songs to get.

Anyone else remember LPs? Anyone? Holy shit, I'm old.

See, the thing is there’s like a thousand songs I’d like to add but I can never remember them when I’m actually staring at the iTunes software.  The way it always works is that I’m driving around and the radio’s on and a song comes on and I think, “There!  That song!  I want that song!”  I resolve to add it.  And then later I totally forget what song it was. 

Last week, determined to break the cycle of song-forgetting, I actually wrote down the name of a song I heard when I heard it (“A Penny More,” by the Skydiggers.)  But I heard it on a portable radio in a factory I was doing an audit in, and the only place I had to write it down was in my audit notes.  So I have the song now, but I forgot to erase the song from my notes, so now the audit reviewer’s going to be like, “Okay, here are the notes on purchasing.. what the hell’s this?  Hey, that was a cool song.”

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that my write-the-song-down strategy isn’t going to really work all that well because

1.  I always forget to do it, and

2.  Most of the times I hear a song I want it’s in the car and if I write notes while driving I’ll pile my car into a bridge.

So I am asking you, my loyal readers, to recommend songs.  Just throw them out there.  I like lots of music – classic and modern rock, dance, hip-hop, blues, Motown, pop, electronica, anything but country.  No country.  Don’t think “I should send Rick some obscure shit, he’ll have the common stuff” – no, I might not.  I have big holes in my lineup.  Send the popular OR the obscure stuff.  Name as many songs as you want.   Just comment with some suggestions.

(However, I guarantee I have these bands covered: Tragically Hip, U2, REM, Police, Peter Gabriel.  And for some reason people always suggest “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but I have that.)

Thanks!

Pack It In

Christmas is about the kids.  The Small One is four years old, and her little cousin Sylvia is just six weeks old.  So, as you can imagine, Christmas this year was largely about giving the Small One toys, and cooing and gushing over the Smaller One, who as you can see is so ridiculously cute it boggles the mind:

Come on. How cute is this baby? Damn cute.

 Of course, the Small One has been in fine form herself:

I mean, come ON.

So the Small One got a lot of toys.  She got toys from Santa at home, and then she went to the paternal place of grandparentage and Santa had left still more presents, and then went to the maternal grandparentage location and Santa, amazingly, had left even more presents.

And you know what else Santa left? Fifty seven thousand fuckloads of fucking wire with which to affix the toys to their packaging.  Ah, I remember the halcyon days on my youth (Note to ed. – I am not sure what halcyon means but it seems to be good when attached to the past.  Will look up later. – R)  when the idea was that you bought a toy and it came in a box and you opened the box and took the toy out.  Now the toy is wired into the packaging with a degree of tightness that could only be improved upon by arc welding.  The guys who put together the Apollo spacecraft weren’t this anal.

One toy, a police helmet with a remote control that looks like a steering wheel (and is pretty cool, to be honest) was wired into in no fewer than nine fucking goddamn cockstacking fuck’s sake places. I hasten to add that the goddamned dicksuck fuckface thing retailed for maybe twenty fucking assfuck dollars. I bet half that money went to the wire company.

This year an added bit of fun was that instead of just wiring it in and twisting the wire together, they’d wire it in with two wires, and then the wires were twisted in pairs, and then the pairs were twisted together in the direction opposite the twist of the pairs, rendering the motherfucking cockblasting shitwheeling fucking things impossible to untwist by any living human unless said human had eight fingers on each hand and the capacity to think in five fucking dimensions, for fuck’s sake.

Do you get the sense I was a bit frustrated?

My wife noted that some stuff’s now being marketed as NOT having this ridiculous level of wired-to-the-fuckin-package packaging, and raised a horrifying thought; that ones brand differentiation is well established, they’re going to start charging more for toys that you can get out of the package in less than twenty minutes without using a goddamned light saber.

All I want is to give my child some toys.

Merry Christmas!

I won’t be posting until after the 25th, so a merry Christmas to all my regular readers.  It’s been a fun year of blogging about exploding elephants, poop, weight loss, baseball, vampires, movies, my beautiful daughter, internet scams and general nuttery.  Check back before the 31st for my end of the year wrap up, lists, and previews of the even-more-batshit-insane crap I plan for 2010.  Also… more reader mail!

Make sure you spend some time with your family.  Nothing’s more important.

More Fun With Elephants

In a past column I wrote about the possible implications of setting elephants on fire with a flamethrower.   The public’s reaction to my idea was, to put it mildly, negative:

Dear Rick,

You dirty bastard.  How dare you talk about hurting elephants.  Elephants are wonderful and cute and better than people.  I would marry an elephant if it was legal.  Did you know elephants mourn their dead?  Blah blah blah blah blah.

A Typical Reader

Clearly, I missed the mark in that column in which I explained, in great detail, how you could become the world’s most hated human by setting zoo elephants on fire with a flame thrower and taking pictures of it.  I should have considered the possibility that it would be much more efficient to shoot them with bazookas.

In order to fully and scientifically explore the ramifications of blasting pachyderms with shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons, I commissioned some highly advanced graphical computer simulations of how this might work.  Here is a simulated picture of me blowing up an elephant with a bazooka:

Using my initial simulation assumptions, the bazooka round would blow off approximately eighteen percent of the elephant’s body (in this case, a standard African elephant) raining bloody, singed elephant chunks in a radius of fifty metres.  The effect on the elephant would be highly negative.

But it occurred to me that this is likely not how things would happen.  Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, bazookas aren’t magical blowy-up devices that cause huge gasoline explosions to anything they hit; bazookas rounds are, in fact, very carefully designed machines that propel hot gases into a concentrated point in order to penetrate armor.  So in fact, the bazooka would be much more likely to shoot THROUGH the elephant, like so:

As you can see, the effect would be equally spectacular but would make it less likely that the shooter would be hit with elephant parts.  Also, based on this highly advanced simulation, Elephant 1 seems to be angry at being blown up, while Elephant 2 looks more surprised.  I also cannot help but notice that the simulation forgot to draw tusks onto Elephant 1.

I also considered simulating shooting an elephant with a howitzer. 

Rick and friends at the zoo

However, a key part of my elephant hunting plans involve convenient access to the Toronto Zoo and getting artillery in there would be hard.  Man-portable weapons like bazookas are much better choices if you want to be known as the Elephant Murderer.

The Doctor

So the Blue Jays have traded Roy Halladay.

Roy Halladay, five-time All-Star

The Halladay trade has been the subject of speculation and debate since July, so this is hardly a surprise.

It’s become standard in the press to refer to Halladay as “the greatest pitcher in Blue Jays history,” which is I guess a reasonably strong position to take; you could make an equally solid argument for Dave Steib, though, and in fairness the best pitcher to ever play for the Jays was obviously Roger Clemens, but he was only in Toronto for two years (one of them the best year a Jay pitcher has ever had, it must be said.)

On the face of it the trade makes sense.  The Blue Jays would have had Doc for only one more year, upon which he would have walked away a free agent.  The likelihood that he would have made the difference between making the playoffs and not in 2010 is remote, since even with him the team’s not good enough.  So they cashed him in for players who might be helpful past 2010.  It made sense.  As an added bonus, he’s going to the Phillies, my second-favourite team. 

It’s sad, though.

Most people don’t know this but Roy Halladay might actually have had the worst season any pitcher has ever had.  After a reasonably good start to his career, in 2000 he just fell apart; his ERA was 10.64 (in layman’s terms, that means that for every full game he pitched he allowed an average of 10.64 runs even without counting runs that were caused by fielder errors; the normal ERA is abot 4.40, and 6 is considered terrible.)  That is in fact the worst ERA in the entire history of the major leagues for a pitcher who pitched as much as he did.  It probably changed the history of the franchise; had Halladay pitched average baseball, or heck even been just a bit worse than average, the Blue Jays would  likely have finished in first place that year instead of the Yankees.

So the next year Halladay was sent down to the minors.  Way down.  They sent him past AAA, past AA, and all the way to A with the message, “Whatever the hell’s wrong with you, I guess you’d better fix it or else your career is over.”  To his credit, he never complained, never gave up, and substantially changed the way he pitched (he starting throwing the ball from a different arm angle.)

I cannot think of a single player in the entire history of baseball who improved as dramatically, as quickly, purely by changing a technique.  Halladay was back in the majors within just half a season and instantly was one of the greatest pitchers in baseball, and has been an awesome pitcher more or less continuously since then.  A reasonable argument can be made that he was the greatest pitcher in baseball in the 2000s… and that’s after starting the decade with one of the most awful years a pitcher has ever had.

In short, Roy Halladay is not just a phenomenal athlete; he’s one who has earned it by working hard, listening to his coaches, working some more, and working still more.  Pro athletes are very lucky, but if anyone deserves to be really lucky, it’s gotta be the Phillies’ newest pitcher.

A Few Of My Least Favourite Things

Today I’d just like to rant about things that piss me off.

1.  Evony Ads.  For those of you who’ve not seen them, and you must be a very small group, “Evony” is an online game that’s essentially a cheap ripoff of Civilization.  It is VERY heavily marketed with banner ads on various web sites.  Quite some time ago I guess its owners realized their game wasn’t anything special, but hit upon a can’t-miss marketing concept: Big knockers.  Here is an actual Evony banner ad:

I swear this ad is real; I have not edited it in any way.  I must further emphasize that the game has absolutely nothing to do with boobs, hot women, or women in their underwear.  There is nothing about it that necessitates playing it “Secretly.”  It’s a very simple and lame strategy game.

Now, I have nothing against boobs.  In fact, as a heterosexual male, I’m quite fond of well-endowed women.  Indeed, a lot of my personal belief system is invested in the notion that boobs are great.  But these ads exceed even my tolerance for boob-related stupidity.  Which leads me to:

2.  TV commercials for beer.

With few exceptions, TV commercials for beer are atrocious.  I say that based on my observation that 95% of all beer commercials fail to impress upon me what brand of beer was being advertised.

An amazing number of beer commercials now centre on the promotion of beer based on the claim that purchasers of the beer can win a trip to a party.  The party is always portrayed as being four douchebags acting like cut-ups in a resort setting at what is shown to be the greatest keg party ever thrown in the history of the world, and at the end of the commercial the douchebags are always being approached by what appear to be beer-company-hired whores.   (The actual prize is likely a weekend in a skeezy dump and food and drink aren’t included. much less whores.)  I’ve seen all kinds of these commercials and can never remember which beer advertised which party.

3.  24/7 Tiger Woods Coverage.   Holy flying fuck, give it a rest.

4.  Disney keeping movies “in the vault.”  The Small One has recently fallen in love with “Beauty and the Beast,” but we can’t buy a legitimate copy, because it’s IN THE VAULT, unless we shell out $60-$100 for a DVD off Amazon.  Gosh, I wonder why people keep pirating movies.  The thing is that if they just sold the goddamn thing on DVD – even at an unusually high price, like $25 – I’d buy rather than pirate.  But I cannot buy the product.  But come on; I’m not paying $60 and I’m not waiting for The Small One to be 17 years old.  So I’m… uhhh, I’m not saying what I’m going to do.

5.  “Psychic Kids.”  We just say this show on A&E and it was unquestionably the most disgusting, offensive, ridiculous, dishonest and exploitative crap I have ever seen.  A couple of allegedly psychic shysters paraded two teenagers – both obviously pretty low on the social acceptance scale and so easy to exploit by giving them attention – through the home of a family whose son had gone missing and had them hold items and make silly, generic guesses as to his location, all of which would have been in the police report.  It was horrible.

Look, there is no such thing as ESP.  It’s ridiculous.  Nobody has it, not an inkling of it.  If you think you do, then go collect your million bucks.

Rick’s Favourite Movies, Part 7: “Christmas Vacation”

Part 7 in our ongoing list of my 50 Favourite Movies is “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” starring Chevy Chase as the long-suffering patriarch of the Griswold clan.

"Shitter's full!"

There ar four Vacation films, all of which follow the same basic premise; Clark Griswold tries to give his family a perfect vacation, going way too far in his attempt at perfection, and everything that could go wrong does, causing him to, at some point, completely go apeshit.

“Christmas Vacation” was the third of the series and it looks and sounds like a movie that was made on a budget of about eight hundred dollars.  It doesn’t even really have a story; it’s just something horrible happening to Clark every day leading up to Christmas (the filmmakers openly embrace that concept by having someone open a day on an Advent calendar before each misadventure.)  In fact, a lot of the stories are culled directly from National Lampoon Magazine, most notably the short story “Christmas ‘59″ (written by the late John Hughes, in fact, who adapted it for the script) and they don’t really connect in any logical fashion.  As usual, they didn’t bother even trying to cast kids who looked or acted like the kids in the previous films.

The movie is, nonetheless, absolutely hilarious.  Clark Griswold is the reason the Vacation movies work, because even though the movies are all ridiculous, Clark is one of film’s most realistic and sympathetic characters.  He is the absolutely perfectly portrayed suburban Dad; a devoted husband and father who really, truly loves his family and wants to give them the best in life, but who’s always trying to suppress his inherently angry, horny, and stupid man-like nature, and it always gets the best of him in the end.  You have to sympathize with the guy; he wants to do his best but nothing ever goes right.

That’s why Christmas Vacation works.  Critically speaking it’s a muddled mess; it’s cheaply, simply done, and the script is just a parade of sight gags. (Of course, Chevy Chase is amazing – it’s the role he was born to play.)  But heres’s the genius: every family recognizes themselves in it.   Everyone can immediately sympathize with at least some parts of it; the boorish brother-in-law, or the overbearing in-laws, or the screwed-up Christmas dinner, or the cheap boss, or the headache putting up the goddamned lights, or the goddamned tree, and on and on.  The movie just piles it on, and you find yourself laughing your ass off at the misfortunes of the hapless Griswolds, because we’ve all been there.

“Hallelujah, holy shit!  Where’s the Tylenol?”

I Barely Even Knew Her!

I like playing online poker.  I got into it a few years ago, broke even, got my money back, and recently put some more money into it and I’m breaking even again.  So apparently I’m not an idiot, but I’m not especially good.

I like poker because it’s a game of skill.  Yes, the cards are dealt by chance, but the game is so simple and repetitive that over time the braks even out, and the people who win money are invariably the skilled ones, and the people who lose money are the stupid ones.  Since poker – contrary to what you see in the movies – in largely a game of calculating odds, playing probabilities and unfolding strategies, it’s something I can learn, and I enjoy doing things I can learn to be better at.

My basic strategy right now is to sit for awhile in the ten cent bet limit room and only call when I have a really, really good hand.  In poker terms I’m tighter than Scrooge.  Since in the low limit rooms you’re playing the worst players on the site (I play Poker Stars) you win through this method, albeit slowly.  After awhile I’ve won a buck or two, enough to enter a tournament.  Then I lose, because the touraments are all no limit and just sitting around waiting for unbeatable hands doesn’t work for long in a tournament.  (If you don’t know how to play poker and don’t understand this, don’t worry about it, I’ll soon be done talking about poker.) 

Part of the reason I almost never win anything in tournaments is that I such at remembering people.  Apparently, the really good players can see who they’re playing against and remember their strategies.  So these people see “RickJay1971″ and know I hardly ever bluff and so bail out faster than an Iraqi fighter pilot once I raise.  So I never win any big pots and then when something goes wrong I’m toast.

This amazes me because I can’t remember names for shit.  Not just on Poker Stars, where the names are all things like - well, I’m playing a sit ‘n go right now and am presently fighting with Mas1 Rayanp, nygaard85, and sahan11yu, among others.  You can’t expect me to remember such nonsensical names, but I can’t remember REAL names for anyone I know well.   This is problematic in my job because I meet people all the time but only once a year.  They usually remember my name, because my arrival is something of an event, but to me it’s always “middle aged white guy who works in production or something.”  I’m becoming fond of people who keep little holders full of their business cards on their desks, because I can pick up and study the card and pretend to care about keeping it when in fact I’m just reminding myself what the person’s name is. 

The card itself will end up in my laundry room.  I’m forever collecting business cards.  Wherever I go people hand ‘em over.  I always make a point of taking them, inspecting them carefully, and then putting them in my shirt pocket.  I will then forget they’re there and, at the end of the day, I toss my shirt into the laundry room, where the cards fall out.  They then spend weeks, even months scattered about my laundry room floor.  I have no use for them because all the people I meet are in my company’s contact management software.  Now, to me, the software is useless because it’s full of names and, as I’ve explained, I don’t remember their names anyway.  The software, and the cards tell me the name and company, but I don’t know who’s who and when I get there I still don’t know who they are.

I did once have a customer who had business cards with people’s photos on them.  I liked them.

I’m no better at this in personal life.  I met this once person at the Switham’s wedding and MBW said something about her as if I’d met her.  Well, as it turned out, I HAD met her.  And had absolutely no recollection of her at all.  Then when MBW explained, with her infinite patience, where and how I’d met this person, I was like, well of course – now I remember her.  So why hadn’t I remembered before?  No name to put to the face, that’s why.

If you can unravel how human memory works you’ll make a billion hillion dollars.  Why can I remember all the World Series MVPs but not people I meet or where I leave my keys?

Theodore

You may have noticed, if you are a regular reader of this blog (and if you are, why aren’t you getting other people to read it?) that there haven’t been many updates lately.  I haven’t been in a jovial mood.

This Monday our little cat Theodore was put to sleep.  His health was declining and his kidneys were at some stage of failure, which in cats is invariably terminal.  So, we had to let him go.  It was very gentle, and MBW and I held him the whole time.

Theo was a great cat.  MBW and I rescued him from the Kingston Humane Society in 1998.  He sure wasn’t the best looking cat there; when stressed, Theo would shed with almost amazing speed – hair would fall out of him within, literally, minutes of encountering stress – and so by the time we found him he looked like he’d lost a fight with a gang of electric razors.  But he was the friendliest cat in the shelter, bar none.  He loved nothing more than to be with people and he’d take all the love you could give him and ask for seconds.

He’s also the reason we have Cherokee, one of our other wonderful cats; when conveyed to MBW’s apartment Theo would never stop meowing.  Ever.  When awake, he meowed, over and over, nonstop.  We figured getting a second cat might stop that, so we got Cherokee, and it worked.   Lucky break too, because she’s a great cat.

Theo never lost his love of chasing things, be they mice, laser pointer beams, or in many cases, the other cats, of whom he had not an ounce of fear.  He’d get outside any chance he could to explore, and always came back home.  He was devious in begging for food, loved to beat up the other cats, and his breath smelled like he’d died years before we got him, but one thing was always true; he loved us, and he was the most affectionate cat I have ever known.   He was purring the first time I ever picked up him, and he was purring when I held him in the vet’s office.

And I loved him, and I miss him.

I was going to put up a picture of my little guy but I’m already having trouble seeing my monitor, if you catch my drift.

Amateur Hour

I have devised what would unquestionably be the greatest Olympic sporting event in the history of mankind: the Men’s Downhill Ski For Men Who’ve Never Skied.

The rules of the Men’s Downhill Ski For Men Who’ve Never Skied are the same as the regular Olympic alpine downhill, run on the same course on the same slope, except that the competitors must have absolutely no skiing experience of any kind.  All prospective competitors must have their names submitted by their country’s Olympic committee a full year in advance, with notarized statements from multiple witnesses close to the victim competitor who can attest to their not being involved in skiing.  The IOC would then be able to use private investigators to fully verify that none of the applicants have any skiing experience.  (Exceptions might be made for long-forgotten class trips and such.)

On the day of the competition, the “athletes” would be conveyed to the skiing venue, fully outfitted in ski gear and national uniforms, given ten minutes on the bunny hill to try to learn how to ski, and then promptly taken to the top of the course and, in random order, flung down the mountain.  The three best times among those who make it to the bottom alive – or dead, if what’s left of them slides across the finish line – get the medals.

Make no mistake about it; this would be the most amazing and popular event in sports history.  Consider the advantages of this over other Olympic events:

1.  It’s fair.  The thing I don’t like about the Olympics is that almost all sports are dominated by a small number of countries; name any Olympic sport and almost anyone else can name the countries that win all the hardware.  Skiing events are especially bad for this because they’re dominated by ridiculous little European countries like Austria and Switzerland who are still rich off Nazi gold and the kids all get to school by skiing down the Matterhorn in Spandex lederhosen as they yodel the “Horst Wessel Song.”  Going in, you know most countries have no chance in any given event, and some countries hardly ever win any medals in anything.

But in the Men’s Downhill Ski For Men Who’ve Never Skied, all are equal.  Every one of the 200 or so countries in the world would have the same chance.  Competence is focused, but ineptitude is universal.  Every country would be able to send competitors, and every country would have an equal chance.  It wouldn’t matter if you were from Switzerland or Swaziland; all have the same chance at glory, and all have the same chance at crippling head trauma.  It’s anyone’s guess as to who will win.  Countries that have never won a medal at a Winter Games, even ones that never have snow and can barely afford to send any athletes at all to the Games, would have reason to watch the competition and cheer on their boys.

Furthermore, the Men’s Alpine Skiing For Men Who Don’t Ski competition would be accessible to anyone no matter their income. The fact is a lot of Winter Games sports are heavily dominated by rich white kids whose parents are sufficiently wealthy to allow them time to engage in freestyle snowboarding or whatever the hell else they’re into. But in the Men’s Downhill Ski For Men Who’ve Never Skied event, having the time and money to practice skiing disqualifies you. Everyone from the richest white kid to the humblest subsistence farmer could, assuming they’re not especially frightened of broken limbs and internal injuries, compete and have a shot at winning.

Michael Patasse of the Central African Republic posts an impressive run

 2.  It would be fun. In fact, I believe this would be the most popular sporting event in the history of the world.

Let’s be honest; in most sports at this level the average schmuck can’t tell the difference between the competitors. You can’t really perceive the difference between the Austrian who runs the course in 1.47.73 and the Italian who does it in 1.47.98.

But in Men’s Alpine Skiing For Men Who Don’t Ski, you certainly could tell the difference between the cab driver from Edinburgh who, having lost one ski twenty yards from the starting gate, goes hurtling through a snow fence and off a 90-foot cliff to a certain death just 15 seconds into his run, and the carpenter from Laos who tumbles down the hill, doing cartwheels for a full 2,000 metres while ski equipment flies off him all the way, finally crawling across the finish line wearing nothing more than his underwear and one wrecked ski boot to the cheering and applause of tens of thousands of bloodthirsty spectators.  Oh, you might not remember whether that last real skier was Lars Larsson or Fritz Hitler, but I guarantee you’d remember Juan Escalona Rodriguez, the accountancy student from Buenos Aires, skier #173 in the Men’s Downhill Ski For Men Who’ve Never Skied Event, whose unfortunate inability to steer left at Turn 7 causes him to hit a concrete lift pillar at 85 miles an hour, resulting in explosive decapitation, his head sailing eighty yards into a crowd of souvenir-hungry Olympic ticketholders. 

And don’t tell me you don’t want to see it. You’re already thinking “Holy shit, this would be the greatest thing ever.” See, it’s one thing to see a bunch of professional athletes zipping by, all looking more or less the same, competing over the tiniest differences in following the same technique. It’ll be quite something else to see N!Ginta from Namibia, who loses his nerve at the last minute and has to be thrown from the starting gate by hired thugs, sailing backwards down Mount Laceration waving his arms and shrieking like a little girl while a billion people watch, unable to tear their eyes from the TV, thinking, “This guy might die, or he might win. Either way, this is fricking awesome.”

3.  It would be true to the Olympic spirit.  The fact is that the Olympics are no longer an amateur sporting competition held for the benefit of brotherhood. They’re a professional sporting contest where full time athletes compete to see who can get some endorsement contracts. I know you know a guy whose sister’s boyfriend’s cousin was an Olympian and finished fifty-third in the 200-metre dog paddle and he just did it for love of sport, but you and I both know he was there with a lot more support than most of us jerks will ever get from the government. As a matter of fact, the whole thing’s so shameless that every four years Canadian newspapers whine and bitch that the government doesn’t do more to pay prospective Olympians to just train full time, the idea being that the taxpayers should have to work their grim, soul-crushing jobs so Mindy from Kamloops can spend all day practicing freestyle aerials and either lose, thereby returning no value to the taxpayers, or win, thereby enabling her to appear in McCain commercials asking us to buy products and pay consumption taxes, thereby returning no value to the taxpayers.

But I am proposing an event that is just about as amateur as you can get, an event where the competitors don’t even have any familiarity with the sport and are competing purely for the sake of competing. They can’t be supported by the government beyond plane fare and a uniform.

Furthermore, you could really expand the size of this event. I think Olympic skiing events typically have 50-100 competitors; there’s no reason the Men’s Alpine Skiing For Men Who Don’t Ski event can’t have five hundred or more. Invite every single country with an Olympic committee to send four or five guys. For most of them it’s their only chance at a gold; they’ll fill the roster. Start at daybreak and heave them down one after another; when one wipes out just send down another even as they’re scooping up the last one. If you start running out of daylight late in the day start sending them down two or three at a time. It would be the ultimate participation event; fully fifteen to twenty percent of the entire Olympic athlete list could be in this event.

Of course, the medal winners could cash in after the fact because, quite frankly, I think the winners would be hailed as the greatest heroes in the entire history of sport. Think about it.  Most Olympic winners are no surprise, and in many cases it’s almost the minimal expectation.  But in the Men’s Downhill Ski For Men Who’ve Never Skied, just surviving will be the exception.  When Ramanathan Arulanantham from Sri Lanka, defying the odds, somehow pulls himself across the finish line, his face bruised and his underwear pooped, just a few seconds faster than that guy from Uzbekistan who crossed the finish line ahead of his own right arm, the world will hail him as the greatest athletic hero of all time; here is an ordinary man, a common dude, who braved an impossible task and somehow, incredibly, won.  Isn’t that a hell of a lot more impressive that seeing people who do that shit full time do it for the millionth time?   I’d put that dude’s poster up in my living room.

It’s Good To Be Me

Today is my birthday, so today I get to set aside my usual humility and self-effacing manner and be honest about myself:  I am the most magnificent human being to ever walk the face of the earth.  Everything about me is awesome. 

For one thing, I’m amazingly handsome and ridiculously sexy.  I’m so good looking I can barely leave the house; women swarm around the house in hopes of catching a glimpse me.  It would make MBW jealous if not for the fact that she’s perpetually distracted by my incredibly good looks.  Every woman wants me and every man wants to be like me, and in fact some of the men want me, too.  Oh, and since I know you’re thinking about it, the answer’s eleven inches, and it’s prehensile, intelligent, and can fix me a sandwich when I’m hungry.

I’m also the most brilliant intellect on the history of the galaxy.  My IQ is immeasurably high; teams of the world’s best psychologists have tried to measure just how smart I am and the best answer they can offer is “somewhere between 350 and a zillion.”  I’m so smart I have the entire Internet stored in my brain.  In fact, I can’t even keep all my brains in my head.  I have to leave some of my brains at home every time I leave the house, and even with just some of my brain I’m smarter than the last 25 Nobel laureates combined.  There is nothing I don’t know, can’t solve, or am unable to figure out.  My brain is so powerful I don’t even pay gas bills to heat my house; I just walk around and think, and the energy coming out my head is enough to keep my house warm.

In addition to being the best-looking and smartest human ever, I’m also an absolute paragon of virtue, kindness, savoir faire and coolness.   My very presence inspires others to reach their own pinnacles of effort, honesty and achievement, even though they’re sadly inferior to my own. 

Everyone who knows me loves me and finds comfort in my approval, my confidence, and my gentle (yet sexy) manner. 

Quite frankly, until I was born the human race was little more than a gang of monkeys.  I represent everything that sapient beings can accomplish and should aspire to be.  I’m the next step up the evolutionary ladder from mere Homo sapiens.

 Feel lucky you’re reading my blog.  You’re that close to greatness.

Rick’s Favourite Movies, Part 6: “Back to the Future”

Part 6 in our ongoing list of my favourite movies is “Back to the Future.”

Great Scott!

I’m not sure what to say about this movie except this; It’s perfect.  “Back to the Future” was, absolutely and without question, the BEST movie made in 1985.  The five movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars were not up to the quality of this movie, not even close.

What about this movie isn’t perfect?  Script?  It’s perfectly paced, with not a shot, not a scene, out of place.  The story is wonderful, the jokes numerous and hilarious, the pace fast without being frantic, the characters memorable (and much more interesting than in most big budget type films) the villain hateable.  The film is magnificently shot, colorful, beautifully designed and perfectly done in every way.  The score is a terrific mix of a great orchestral score with just the right amount of pop music (and the pop music fits the movie, rather than being forced in.)  The acting is sensational – Michael J. Fox, Leah Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover and Tom Wilson all deliver slam-bang performances.   Everyone remembers Lloyd as Dr. Brown, but Leah Thompson’s work here is some of the best comedic acting ever done in a movie.

I can’t offhand think of a movie I’ve ever seen that was so flawless.   Even great movies usually have something wrong with them, even if it’s something small; “The Godfather” has a few little story quirks that resulted from editing, and other films make little mistakes or have scenes you think probably could have been left on the cutting room floor or drag in parts or what have you.  Not this movie, though.  “Back to the Future” is an absolutely perfect film, every frame from the first to the last working together to achieve the best entertainment you’ll ever spend two hours watching.