Category: General

My favourite comedians are:

Eddie Izzard: British transvestite. His comedy is quite cerebral but also surreal. Lots of talk about culture, history, geography, and Scooby Doo. “Dress to Kill” is my favourite DVD of his.

Patton Oswalt is great because he’s a total nerd, and also hilarious. He knows D&D, comics, and H.P. Lovecraft. He’s the main character in the new Pixar film, Ratatouille, but blurbs in the media mention only other actors. I’m going to send him a copy of the new album if I can find out an address.

One of my new faves is Demetri Martin, who is occasionally on The Daily Show. His jokes are very Stephen Wrightesque.

I also like David Cross, and Stephen Colbert, old school Steve Martin, and of course all the chaps in Monty Python.

If you don’t know who these people are – seek!

I can be funny sometimes, and I have this silly little dream of doing standup comedy, not as a career or anything, just for something fun to do. So when I say a joke, I try to remember to write it down. So maybe, some day, I’ll have a “set.” In the meantime it’s inbetween live Thickets song filler.

for Mom

This “Be A Guest Host on Turner Classic Movies” would be awesome, but not open to Canadians like me. Also, have you heard about this TV series coming up, “The Sarah Connor Chronicles?” Weird.

So CampyCon was a lot colder than last time! Next time, we try July or August I think! My mantra of “no bears” was not successful, for not only did we see a black bear on our drive up the mountain, but there was in fact bear prints and scat in our camp! Oh dear.

We got the same campground as last year

but there was so much snow on the ground that we couldn’t pitch our tents in the nice area that we used last time:

But we found an alternative and set them up.

Sadly, due to last-minute tragedy Geisel had to cancel, and Messel didn’t make it up either, but we had Joseph to fill in.

On the first night we had some BBQ and played Fantasy Scrabble! The rules of Fantasy Scrabble are simple. 1. Do not talk about Fantasy Scrabble (to jocks). 2 Rules are the same as regular Scrabble but any word you can shoehorn into a fantastical setting are worth double points.

Ours was a very difficult board, I wanted to see a lot more ‘swords’ and ‘gandalfs’ and ‘xorns’ but oh well.

After that I ran some Spaceship Zero – the “Asteroid X” adventure which was fun but we were getting sleepy and distracted. Luckily I got in a lot of marshmallow roasting – I loved it! When will they make Splenda marshmallows? We went to bed after 1:30am and I worried about bears in my sleep, and the birds woke me at 5:30 am because I’d left my earplugs in the ‘house.’ But I perservered and we all got up another 5 hours later, had a very sausagy breakfast and played some Magic: The Gathering.

Apres that, Jason fled and the rest of us went on a hike. A long hike. A long, arduous hike through the snow, and I was still way overdressed. But it was lots of fun and we found a weird empty cabin and a collapsed outhouse (hopefully before it was used but we didn’t check).

We went through character generation for GURPS Goblins and it was more arduous than the hike, (I don’t think GURPS will ever be my system of choice) but when we finally got to playing it was lots of fun, and we all spoke with East London accents. Through no fault of Geoff’s I started to fall asleep during the game, but we managed to wrap it up and hit the tents, and Joseph gave me a +1 Blanket of Sleeping.

The four of us had to pack into Simon’s car with all our gear, with comical results.

Huzzah, CampyCon!

Four Photos from my hike up The Chief with Joyce ‘n’ co.

This is The Chief. It’s on the way to Squamish.

Going up is tiring

Joyce enjoys crack.

At the windy peak you can see Squamish in the background.

I can’t believe I’m going to be away from the internet for almost 48 hours. But at least I’ll have tabletop RPGs to keep the nerd quotient high. No bears!

Sorry I’ve been neglecting you, my little blog. We’ll spend some quality time together soon, I promise. I will say that I got my personalized pens yesterday and they look good.

Also, in case you’re a comic book fan, Scott “Understanding Comics” will be at Sophia Books next Thursday.

Because it had been so long since I’d bused out to Chilliwack, I called Greyhound to remind myself of the schedules. It was lucky I did so because that’s how I found out that there was a strike and I wouldn’t be able to get there by bus at all. I had to borrow Joyce’s car and I got in a minor scrape in North Van going to pick up Mario. Victoria Day weekend means terrible traffic and in fact I have never seen it so bad for such a stretch. It was seriously stop and go from Vancouver to Abbotsford.

When we finally pulled up to the practice space, which is above an RV place in the industrial area of Chilliwack (where Mario used to live) the entrance was blocked off with vehicles. “What gives?” I asked Mario, and he told me that there have been a lot of break-ins and other criminal activity. There was even a SWAT team down the road to arrest one of…Canada’s Most Wanted? Ah, sweet Chilliwack. I helped Mario bring his equipment in and then I decided I should bring in the swag from the trunk just in case. As I was walking back out to the car this man came running out into the street wearing nothing but his underwear (it was not a sunny day), ducking and weaving and looking around like he was being hounded by chupacabras! He barked at me a couple of times and so I decided to get in Joyce’s car (“Stan” as it is known) through the passenger seat and lock the doors. In case he started whacking the windows or jumping on the car like an angry chimpanzee I put the key in the ignition so that I could drive away if need be. I sat there probably for about five minutes as I watched him do his feral monkey gait in and out of the street and parking lots. Finally he got far enough away that I thought I could make it back to the jam space without being accosted. As I opened the door I heard a dinging noise that I hadn’t heard before, but in my state of mind and unfamiliarity with Stan’s working bits I dismissed it. Foolish, foolish me. I had just locked the keys in the car.

Mario had, in the meantime, called the police and in about 15 minutes three cars showed up and grabbed monkey man, who as it turns out lives below the jam space, in the RV park. I doubted that the cops would just get my car open for me but I had to ask. They did call a tow truck though. While the band was practicing in the building I waited out in the rain and sang along softly to myself. Another 20 minutes and $52 later I had the car open again.

The weekend picked up from there. Good thing too.

I was watching a program on PBS the other day about how important apex predators are to the ecology of an area. In the 1930’s they shot the last wolf in Yellowstone. Since then, they’ve been trying to figure out why certain trees haven’t been growing and why the river has been “dying” – eroding away its banks and leaving silt. Turns out because the elk had nothing to run from they were eating the young trees and the willow on the edge of the river that holds the boundaries of the river. Also wolf kills feed dozens of other scavenging species. A few years ago they reintroduced a wolf pack and the system is being rejuvenated – including the return of beavers and all of the benefits that they provide the system.

IT’S NOT ALL YOU WANT TO EAT, IT’S ALL YOU CAN EAT

I went to BC Sushi for all you can eat last night. The food was okay (not nearly as good as Minato by my place) but I saw shark fin soup on the menu and I was somewhat disgusted. I think sharks are pretty amazing. Shark fin soup is a “delicacy” – more like a status symbol. Because it’s expensive, it’s served to impress, for example, wedding guests. Depending on who you go by, many species of sharks (and big fish in general) have lost 80-90% of their numbers in the past 40-50 years. We know so little about our local environments, the sea is an even bigger mystery, but we’re starting to see how the reduction of shark populations is screwing things up. Nevermind that shark fins are pretty tasteless – they add other stock to give the soup its flavour. And nevermind that sharks are full of mercury and are therefore dangerous to eat, thanks to our pollution. So don’t eat shark fin soup. It’s wasteful, pointless, and dangerous to everyone. And I won’t be giving BC Sushi any more of my money.

Even though I don’t eat any fish, I keep Canada’s Seafood Guide [link] in my wallet to inform others about which fish are harvested sustainably and which ones are endangered or are fished in a way that wrecks the ocean.