Monthly Archives: February 2007

the four seasons

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It’s not exactly Vivaldi.

Canuckistani terroristNow, one thinks, one does, if one thinks at all well, that us Canuckistanis have some right to boast about our weather. Oh, other countries may have visible seasons; I’m sure England has snowdrops at some times but not others and maybe even snow on alternate leap years if you reserve ahead, but it is a fact universally acknowledged that no Canadian child grows to maturity without freezing his little face to a huge, immobile piece of metal at least once. And quite a number of them are familiar with the terrarium-like view of a livingroom window that looks out onto snow piled up halfway to the top; it’s a little like being Jacques Cousteau of the North in your semi-submersible split level, only without fish and sharks and other nasty, squidgy things slithering past the porthole, and thank God, I say!

Tell me about the weather.

Indonesia, a gecko's eye viewSo when I was in Indonesia, they did. Oh yes, they said, very obligingly, we have four seasons just like you. I gave them my “don’t MAKE me come over there and straighten you out” face, but they appeared to be serious.

Betel nut is a very strong drug, it seems.

Wherever I went, up and down the equator, through fields lush with banana trees, mountainsides covered in jungle and echoing with the cries of invisible monkeys, or cities of corrugated tin, thatched palm walls, and glittering skyscrapers airconditioned to the recommended storage temperature for sushi, people would insist that they had four distinct seasons.

Jacarta SkylineOne day, the oppressive and unvarying tropical sauna of heat and humidity, along with the banal and ubiquitous politeness of the people and their cruel and pointless insistence on this obvious absurd falsity finally became too much for me, and I snapped.

“WHAT FOUR SEASONS?!?!?!?!?! What four seasons do you people have, in the name of all that is holy?!?!?!?!”

They looked at me as if I’d suddenly pulled a broadsword out of my purse and was threatening babies. They kept their hands where I could see them. They moved slowly, so as not to startle me. And one of them answered my question, in a soft, calming voice:

“Mangos, pineapples, bananas and jackfruit.”
Duh.

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quiz: your beer personality

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You Are Guinness


You know beer well, and you’ll only drink the best beers in the world.Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them.When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all – especially about subjects you don’t know well.But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What’s Your Beer Personality?

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Too Much Coffee Man, an introduction

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TMCM, yo man! 

Reading engtech’s post on his favorite web comics reminded me of my old fave from the deepest, darkest Nineties, Too Much Coffee Man, which I find is now an opera that is packing them in like espresso in a portafilter! TMCM was one of my favorite comics, back when I had a 9-5 or actually it was with Starbucks so it was more like a 5:30am-6:30pm, but whatever, and could afford to buy dead trees.

I am reminded at this juncture of perhaps the most absurd of the various absurdities of working in a cubicle farm. I had a TMCM toque which I treasured for its hip coffeeness and relevance, and I thought it would look cute and edgy sitting on top of my filing cabinet, so that is where I put it.

And every morning it would be on my desk.

At first I thought the cleaners were moving it, although dusting the top of the cabinets every day seemed a bit extreme to me. But after awhile I realized it was happening even when the cleaners had not been in. So I began to test things.

I pinned it to my cube wall. Nothing. I put it on my chair. Nothing. I pinned it on the outside of my doorway: bingo, it was on my desk in the morning.

Turns out that the head of HR didn’t like to see anything poking up above the level of the top of the cubes, nor anything outside the cubes other than slate grey tweed: the only person who could violate this rule was the admittedly artistic and very powerful head of the training department. My boss was staying late every night just to move my toque.

There’s the title of my forthcoming business book, right there:
WHO MOVED MY TOQUE.

Back to TMCM. He would show up in some of the gimme papers in Portland cafes, but the trip to Oregon sort of offset the freebie-ness of the comics themselves, so I had to give it up and start spending fifteen minutes’ pay at the comic shop for the colour issues.

While the title character himself seems to have long since gone to that Great Compost Bucket in the Sky, the comic and the aesthetic and the dream live on.

Oh Solo Espresso!

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5 reasons why I blog

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Kid Blogger! The kid has promise. 

I got tagged for the 5 Reasons Why I Blog meme by Jeremy Jacobs, and answering it will be my entry in the engtech Blog Contest #1.

Do you remember when you were in elementary school and in English class once a week they would write five topics on the board and you would have to pick one of the topics and write a story about it? (oh, and also how they would give you lists of all kinds of different words you were supposed to learn {although I always wondered and worried, secretly, that if they knew I already knew those words they would penalize me in some way, so I played dumb. I would rule in a concentration camp!} and then use in a sentence? Well being literalminded-like, I used to use them all in one gargantumungous sentence, the Sentence That Wouldn’t Die!, the Energizer Bunny of sentences, and that used to piss my teachers off no end but they never did tighten up the wording of the assignment, so what’s with that, eh? I ask you) But quite a lot of the time I wouldn’t like any of the story subjects listed and even might have had a story or two that I wanted to write anyway and thought, like any good, lazy person, why should I write two including one I don’t want when I can write one that I do want instead? Indeed.

So, inevitably after every writing-the-titles-on-the-blackboard moment, the teacher would sit at his desk and brace himself for my approach.

“Do you mind if…” I’d always start, and usually it would go smoothly from there.

“What would happen if I said no?” asked Mr. Lindsay once, in a sudden and inexplicable fit of empowerment.

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quiz: which Japanese subculture are you?

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This looks encouraging. All the more reason to save my pennies and/or look for tips on stowing away on Toyota cargo ships.


You Are a Henna Gaijin!


You’re not Japanese, but you wish you were!

You can use chopsticks with your eyes closed, and you’ve memorized hundreds of Kanji.

You even answer your phone “moshi moshi.”

While the number of anime videos you’ve seen is way higher than the number of dates you’ve been on, there’s hope.

Play the sexy, mysterous gaijin, and you’ll have plenty of Japanese meat.

What’s Your Japanese Subculture?

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