Introducing Balkan Bee

I met a very cool Croatian girl a while ago. She posted on Couchsurfing asking if people wanted to join her in dumpster diving and I thought that sounded cool and sent her a message. I saw another post from her asking if people wanted to play board games so of course I said yes. I met her at my first Food Not Bombs Toronto serving and we went dumpster diving after. We, along with her friend Anastasiya, found a lot of great stuff – chocolates, fruits, vegetables, yogurt, bread, and more. I invited her to a friend’s gathering where they were probably going to play board games. When we were leaving we saw that she might not have been able to make it to her host’s place before the public transit system shut down so I offered my couch. On the way to my house we went dumpster diving again and found some random stuff – probably 8 packages of hot dogs, pillows, adult diapers, and maxi-pads, among other things. We donated the hot dogs, diapers, and maxi-pads to the Really Really Free Market the next day. She told me a lot of interesting hitchhiking and dumpster diving tips and stories. Apparently, it’s really easy to hitchhike in Turkey and that she hitchhikes alone frequently; the latter sounds all the more difficult when you know that she’s a cute small Croatian girl . In short, she is one serious anarchist and I am amazed by her.

Flight

Another blast from the past.  An extremely short story I wrote a hell-of-a-long-time ago. Enjoy.

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            If I told you I knew how to fly, what would you think?  You’d think I was crazy, wouldn’t you?  Yet I’m not, or I don’t think I am, which comes out to the same thing for me.

How did I learn to fly, I hear you asking.  The same way you learn anything complicated – somebody else teaches you how to do it.  I’d been back for a few months from my most recent trip overseas when I started hearing stories of the theft of plants kept on balconies and the appearance of incomprehensible graffiti on inaccessibly high areas.  Either one could have had reasonable explanations but there were also rumours about a flying man seen darting away from the scene of the incidents.  Curiosity made me wonder if these stories were true.  My foreign adventure had left me flush with cash and I was not yet desperate enough to look for employment, so I decided to investigate.  The flying person seemed to favour residential buildings with fair but not excessive lighting (perhaps to make his work more visible while limiting the chances of detection during his work) and they were grouped mostly in a certain area.  I made a list of likely targets and waited.

Two weeks later, as I sat in a doorway watching the street lights hit the blank wall of the building opposite me I saw him.  He swooped down from the sky and started spraying something.  P…  A… R… W… A… Z… hyphen… I.  Parwaz-i?

When he finished he looked at it for a moment and then flew quickly down the street.  I ran after the flying man but he rapidly outpaced me.  Just when I thought I’d lost my quarry he darted into the open window of an apartment building.  I spent a few seconds catching my breath and noted the exact position of the window.  It was on the fourth floor, second from the left.

I knocked on his door.  There were some footsteps on the other side and the door opened to reveal a short Indian man.  “Yes?”

It was then that I realized I had no idea what to say. “I, uh, I, your window… the building – I mean, flying…”

I was rambling.  I kept rambling until enough of my story had gotten through to him and he grudgingly let me inside.  It was quite small and had only a few bits of cheap furniture, but scattered throughout were fine examples of Hindu devotional art.  The most impressive piece was a statue of Ganesh on a corner table.  It was quite exquisitely detailed and looked to be well cared for.

His name was Jahanbin – it used to be Bitana but he didn’t like the negative connotations.  He laughed then, like he’d just made a joke.  I didn’t get it but gave a polite chuckle anyway.

“Please,” I begged him.  “How do you do it?  What is the secret of flight?  How did you discover it?”

Jahanbin smiled at my outburst.  “Oh, that.  It’s actually quite simple.  I was walking along one day thinking about a particular subject when I tripped.  I fell, but for the briefest of moments I felt like I was flying.  I wanted to be sure so I recreated everything, how I walked, what I was looking at, even what I was thinking.  Sure enough, I felt the same sensation of flight.  I kept redoing it until I could fly for a few seconds, then started experimenting to see what it was that made me fly.  Turns out it was what I was thinking, which is a bit strange since the thought wasn’t that unusual – you’d think somebody else would have flown by now.”

“And what was it?  What was the thought?”  I was becoming quite agitated then and when that happens I start hyperventilating.  I sat down and put my head between my legs and tried to calm down.

“Are you all right?” asked Jahanbin with superficial concern.

“The thought,” I implored him.  “Please.”

“Ah, well, like I said, it’s really quite simple.  It’s –“

He stopped and looked appraisingly at me.  It was apparent he was having second thoughts about revealing his secret.

“Please, I’m begging you.  I have to know.  Please.”

I started to hyperventilate even more and perhaps I exaggerated it a bit – if it looked like I was dying maybe he wouldn’t have any qualms in telling me what he knew.

Jahanbin then knelt beside me and put his mouth a bare inch from my right ear.  I don’t know why he bothered since there was nobody else in the room but I was in no position to complain.

“Fuck Whitey,” he whispered.

“Huh?”  I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly.

“Fuck Whitey,” he whispered again.

“Fuck Whitey?  That’s the thought?”

Jahanbin nodded sagely.  “That is what I was thinking when I tripped and that is what I think every time I go out my window.  Use it as you see fit.”

And that was how I learned to fly.

Believe It or Not!

Before I started this blog, I was a contributor to one that eventually died a natural death.  However, let it not be said that I don’t favour the reusing of material.  After all, it’s not like any of you non-existent readers ever saw that original blog, right?  In any event, this was probably my best attempt at comedy writing, so I hope it at least gets a chuckle out of you:

The following are all true. A team of scientists, researchers, historians, and other specialists have spent their lives verifying these claims.

Believe it or not…

…the modern flush toilet was popularized by a man named Crapper! Thomas Crapper was head of a London plumbing concern that bought the patent rights from Albert Giblin and proceeded to market the device to great success!

…Michael Jackson owns the publishing rights to all of the Beatles’ songs! In 1984 the ATV Corporation, then owner of the rights, sold its 4000 song catalog for $47.5 million! Although Jackson owns the publishing rights the estates of Paul McCartney and John Lennon still receive their songwriter’s share of royalties!

…Life Savers candy are so named because its inventor’s daughter choked to death on a solid mint! Clarence Crane created the holed candy to allow choking victims to breathe even when the candy is lodged in their throat!

…while it’s untrue that Richard Gere was once admitted to a hospital with a gerbil stuffed up his rectum, it’s true that he prepared for his role in Pretty Woman by repeatedly soliciting prostitutes! He was eventually arrested for this behaviour but the studio arranged to have his record and the arresting officer “disappear”!

…Marie Antoinette was the first to discover cold nuclear fusion! In 1788 she described the process in her journal, calling it “an astounding discovery” with “far-reaching implications”. Unfortunately, all her papers detailing the process was lost in the chaos of the Revolution!

…Nostradamus’ mistaken prediction of a Saxon reinvasion of France in 1889 was actually supposed to read 2009 and was due to a mathematical error! An enigmatic figure known only as “Charles the Commander” shall rescue France in her darkest hour. Modern translations indicate that “Charles the Commander” actually means “Charles in Charge”; the French government has already secured Scott Baio in a secret bunker in Provence to await the fated day!

…Albanians are born without a heart! The exact process is a secret, but it’s known that they must grow one from the seed of a camphor tree and water it with tears from a heartbroken crocodile. Only by tending the tree can they learn to love, though the heart itself must be installed by a qualified cardiologist!

…most people are aware of prima nocta or “first night” from the Mel Gibson movie Lethal Weapon 2, but in real life medieval lords actually performed the act of ultima nocta or “last night”! This was the right of the nobility to enact sexual congress upon persons right before or right after they die. It grew out of fashion in the mid-1700s, primarily because the practice was scientifically proven to be immoral!

…Abraham Lincoln was a secret practitioner of Zhaquan wushu, while his rival, Gen. Robert E. Lee, appropriately enough studied Hung Fut Pai, a southern style of kung fu! During the Battle of Gettysburg the two dueled in an abandoned barn a scant 30 miles from where the great conflict raged. Upon defeating Lee the Great Emancipator emasculated his enemy with his bare hands. For the rest of his life Lincoln would always keep the trophy in a jar close at hand, though he would only show it to his closest associates!

…the secret society of Alamut (more commonly known as the Assassins), generally believed to have been destroyed in the 13th century, actually survives to the present day through a process known as Photosynthesis!

…the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Kelo v. New London extended the definition of eminent domain to “physical property on one’s person being underused or not generating enough tax revenue where such seizure is for the public purpose”! This means the U.S. government is now authorized to take into possession any citizen’s heart, lungs, spleens, etc. if it can demonstrate that such organs are underutilized and its seizure can serve the public good!

…the newest science of eschatology describes the study of the LiveJournal postings of Jennifer Eschat of St. Paul, MN, greatest of all modern thinkers! Stanford University has already begun offering a bachelor’s degree in eschatology and has plans to expand the program into graduate-level studies!

…the Jesuits are the literal Army of Christ! Ignatius Loyola, their founder and the first General Superior, started the society after dreaming of Christ and him on a beach with a varying number of footprints. His Spiritual Exercises actually contain cleverly concealed lessons drawn from history’s greatest battles, and more are added after every century. The ubiquitous schools are essentially indoctrination centres where the most promising are trained in the military arts. When the final trumpet is sounded the Societa Jesu will take up their swords and cruise missiles and charge the army of the Beast written of in Revelations, who, in a surprising turn of events, will turn out to be Scott Baio! Baio will by then have wrested control of the International Civil Aviation Organization and filled it with his most loyal and battle-hardened cronies. He will only be defeated by the pure love of an Albanian. The last war will begin in the tenth year of the reign of Jennifer Eschat Caesar!

…formica was developed as a cheaper and more reliable substitute for mica, the most widely used electrical insulator of the time!

Since you read all the way to the end, you’ve proven yourself worthy, and may now watch the video you were probably Googling for when you clicked on this post by accident:

I wonder why the Greatest American Hero has the symbol for China on his chest.  In any event, I think the definitive version was by George Costanza:

I have a new blog (in Korean!)

Sorry, old blog, but I don’t think it’s working out.  I don’t really want to update this thing anymore.  Maybe in the future I’ll change my mind but for now I’m gonna shutter this thing.

See, I didn't completely waste my time over there

As I mentioned in the title, my new blog is written in Korean.  Why?  Well, I went off to Korea for a couple years and spent a lot of time and effort trying to learn the language.  A friend of mine suggested I start writing a diary in Korean to retain what I learned; I told her this was stupid and I’d write a blog instead.  My language ability is at the level of a four year-old Korean kid with learning problems, so I’m forced to keep my posts short and include a lot of pictures.  Mostly it’s been about Couchsurfing and my travel pics, with some random shit thrown in every now and then.  If you can read Korean, or you just want to look at my pictures, check it out:

The Wandering Groo

I’m still alive

Not that anyone cares, but I was out of the country for a couple years and didn’t feel like adding anything to this blog.  It’s weird that WordPress kept it around, actually, but I guess it wasn’t too much of a drain on their servers anyway.  I don’t know if I want to write stuff on here again because frankly, it was kind of a pain coming up with stuff to write way back when.  This might well be the last post on here, or it might be the beginning of a new series.  Stay tuned and find out.

Fuck tha police

I think I’ve only used my “Fuck tha police” tag once, so, in an attempt to make quota, I will put up this video of the RCMP killing an unarmed man at the Vancouver airport. You may have seen this already, but there’s no harm in seeing it again.

If you’re the impatient type, fast-forward to the RCMP’s arrival five minutes in. Don’t fast-forward too far, though – if you overshoot by a minute the guy is already dead. To top it all off, the man who shot this video had to sue the police to get the tape back. They said they needed it for their investigation and wouldn’t release it until after the coroner’s inquest (which can take anywhere from a week to a year). Luckily, they caved under threat of a lawsuit. As for those officers, I hope they get charged (or at least fired), and I hope the man’s mother sues the shit out of the RCMP.

Lest anyone think I’m picking too much on the Canadian police, I will link to this story from The Smoking Gun: Arrested For Salting A Police Officer. A McDonald’s employee put too much salt and pepper on a burger, but since management was always bitching about waste she went ahead and served it anyway. It was just her luck that it was a cop who ended up with the overly-peppered-and-salted burger. The guy took a couple bites and then went ahead and arrested her for “Reckless Conduct”. She spent a night in jail and had to post a thousand dollars in bail money.

Finally, I’ll leave off with another video, this time involving the use of pepper spray. A cop went through a Wendy’s drive-through and thought he got short-changed. He went into the restaurant and started making a scene, then approached the teenage girl who served him and accused her of stealing his money. When she refused to be intimidated, he pulled out his pepper spray and let her have a blast, then subsequently arrested her. The kicker is that, as the video clearly shows, the girl had no opportunity to steal his money and the cop never gave her the twenty dollars he thought he did. He was just being another dickhead drunk on his own power.

I don’t know about you, but I sure feel protected and served.

Intelligence fucking blows

I guess I should explain what I’m talking about, for those unacquainted with the depths of Canadian TV. Intelligence is a TV show on CBC about a big-time pot smuggler in BC. He ends up as an informant for the RCMP, but he uses them just as much as they use him. The show goes into his operation: his grow-op people, business partners, rivals, and others. The show also goes as much into the other side of the fence, showing intelligence and law enforcement people from both sides of the US-Canada border clashing and colluding to varying degrees.

Sounds interesting, right? Ed Brubaker sure made it sound that way when he gave the show a mention in the latest issue of Criminal (Criminal’s a decent crime comic, by the way, have a look if you’re into that kind of stuff). He said, “If you’re a fan of The Wire or The Shield, you need to track it down.” Like most Canadians, I make it a habit to stay away from Canadian-made dramas, so I hadn’t heard of the show -but I am a fan of both The Wire and The Shield, thus leading me to download the first season (and let me just say it was a total pain to find torrents with enough people still seeding). It was a major disappointment. Yes, the premise and the plots are fairly interesting, but the execution falls far short of the standards Brubaker compares it to. Where The Shield has crackling intensity, Intelligence has boring characters. Where The Wire has gritty realism, Intelligence has a bland atmosphere. In fact, if I had to describe the show in one word, that’s what I would use: bland. I’ve met enough government types to know that in real life they’re actually pretty bloodless and uninteresting, and the media probably makes drug smuggling more exciting than it actually is, but that’s the advantage of fiction. Take some fucking creative license, for God’s sake. The biggest crime when producing entertainment is not to make it entertaining. Even when a potential gang war pops up, the way it’s presented on the show is pretty bland and low-key. Actually, “bland” pretty much describes every this and every other drama made for Canadian TV. Maybe I’m not being entirely fair. I know the two American shows have much bigger budgets, which lead to better production values; the budget on Intelligence probably only amounts to The Wire‘s coffee expenditure. If the producers of Intelligence had access to the same kind of money, maybe they’d be able to create something as good. At the very least they wouldn’t have to keep setting so many scenes at night (which I suspect they’re only doing to take advantage of cheaper equipment rentals) and they could show more complicated set pieces and maybe an action scene or two. However, I keep thinking about Robert Rodriguez and how he supposedly shot El Mariachi with a budget of only sixty thousand dollars. Or think about the first Saw movie – shot for a hundred thousand, made tens of millions. I know there are differences between TV and movie production, but the point still stands that if the people in charge are good enough, they can find a way to make interesting fare while working within restrictive budget limitations.

(This raises the question, “Why aren’t the people in charge good enough?” This one is fairly easy to answer. The most talented and ambitious creative types overwhelmingly choose to go south, and not just for the money. The creative opportunities are just so much better, and you get to meet and work with some of the best minds in the industry. With those kinds of incentives, you’d have to be an idiot to stay behind in Canada. You do occasionally get a Cronenberg or an Egoyan, but they tend to be few and far between. Everybody else deserves to get stuck directing episodes of The New Adventures of Sinbad.)

What Intelligence reminds me of the most is MI-5, and what I was hoping the show would be like. MI-5 has the same premise, except it’s actually good (at least the first couple of seasons were, before they started trying to ape 24). The kicker is that British TV channels don’t actually have that much more money than its Canadian counterparts. I think it’s made by a private broadcaster, though, while the CBC is government-owned through-and-through. Maybe it’s true how they say that government work kills creativity? In any event, that’s another show Intelligence can be be unfavourably compared to.

I think I’ll have to revise my original title. Intelligence doesn’t fucking blow. Given what I imagine are a small budget and a limited talent pool, Intelligence works well enough with what it’s got. In other words, Intelligence is good for Canadian TV. And that statement tells anyone what they need to know about this show.

Living the dream

It turns out those Army boys in Iraq have it made, assuming they can get their boss to leave them alone.

US soldiers shy from battle in Iraq

WATERTOWN, New York – Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here in upstate New York say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed “search and avoid” missions.

See, I do this kind of thing all the time, only I call it “avoiding work”. I’m glad “heroes” can be just as lazy as the rest of us.

Aliff [an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division] said he participated in roughly 300 patrols. “We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralized, so we decided the only way we wouldn’t be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time.”

“So we would go find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine,” he said, adding, “All our enlisted people became very disenchanted with our chain of command.”

I guess I was suffering with a lack of morale whenever I goofed off at work. If I was more motivated I probably would have been working more enthusiastically. The only problem (for my boss, that is) is that I saw no reason to work harder. It’s not like it would have changed anything – there still would have been more work to do and I’d still get paid the same. Maybe being the guy everybody else dumps their work on is its own reward. For now, I’ll follow the lead of the brave boys in the US Army:

“[S]earch and avoid” missions continue today across Iraq. “One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time,” he explained, “He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone.”

That’s pretty much the dream of any wage slave: Get left alone to drink Shasta Cola, listen to music and shoot at cans. Really, who can blame them? It’s a crappy situation to be in a country where everyone hates you, you don’t know the language, and your bosses are idiots. It’s nice to know that the American work ethic is alive and well. To quote Homer Simpson, “If you hate your job, you don’t quit. You just go in everyday and do your work real half-assed. That’s the American Way.”

Dumbledore is teh ghey

JK Rowling outs Dumbledore as gay

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has revealed that one of her characters, Hogwarts school headmaster Albus Dumbledore, is gay. She made her revelation to a packed house in New York’s Carnegie Hall on Friday, as part of her US book tour. She took audience questions and was asked if Dumbledore found “true love”.

“Dumbledore is gay,” she said, adding he was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, who he beat in a battle between good and bad wizards long ago.

The audience gasped, then applauded. “I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy,” she said.

I always wondered about this but the books are fairly unclear about his relationships. The most I could get from it was that he was a “lifelong bachelor,” which can be code for “gay as a maypole” but could also mean he just never married. It’s nice that Rowling came right out and said this but why didn’t she put it in the books? I don’t think there are even any gay characters in there aside from the now-outed Dumbledore, so I figured it was another one of those fantasy worlds where everyone has “normal” sexuality. Maybe the wizarding world is just as homophobic as the real world, so Dumbledore covered because he didn’t want to get fired from his teaching job. This still leaves the question of why it wasn’t mentioned in the books. It wouldn’t have taken much either, maybe a line or two about how much Dumbledore loved Grindenwald. I hope it wasn’t just so she could trick homophobic fans into buying Deathly Hallows.

This revelation raises some interesting questions, chief of which is “who else was Dumbledore nailing during the intervening years?” Snape, perhaps? Hagrid? Or maybe Dumbledore schooled a young James Potter in the ways of manly love. I bet the fanfiction people have written all that and more, even before Rowling dropped this bombshell. Who knows, there might even be a T.H. White and Dumbledore slash out there. Maybe that’s where White got the idea for the Merlin character in his books. Or maybe Dumbedore is another one of those sexless, non-threatening gays that keep showing up in conventional fiction. The more I think about this, the more annoyed I get at Rowling for not having the strength of character to put this bit of story in the book. I think it would have done kids some good to see a positive portrayal of a non-ambiguously gay character. Oh well, we’ll just have to hope they get it right in the movies.

Carson to Santa Monica Pier Bike Route and Public Toilets

Do you own a bicycle? Do you live in the Carson, CA area? Have you ever wished you could bike to the Santa Monica Pier but didn’t know a route? Do you get nervous if you’re too far from a toilet? Are you a cheap bastard who won’t buy something just so you can use a store’s john? Well, worry no more because I wasted a couple hours making the following map (click on the picture to go to the Google map):

The route is clearly marked along with many points of interest, including public toilets. Now you can bike to the Santa Monica Pier while remaining aware of how far you are from the nearest john! No more will a weak bladder or an unexpected diarrhea attack inconvenience you!  Start living your life today!