Category Archives: Archive

Viggo vs Evil Elf, a trip in the wayback machine

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Aragorny, eh?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but here’s a little something I wrote for North Country Public Radio back in 2002, when several crazy American strangers decided that nothing would make them happier than to fly me back East to meet a Danish-American movie star.

So they did.

There are so many reasons this trip is impossible. So many GOOD reasons. It IS impossible. But of course that has no bearing on the situation whatsoever; we are dealing with Americans here.

It must be pretty good; their previous record hits in a day was 700, and this went to 3500. When the hits are down, mention a Danish-American movie star, Beautiful Agony, Mango Porno, the blogs of murderous Goths, or, apparently, Foley‘s emails. Sure winners, every one. 

It could be some time before I’m back online (although, given that I’m in Ontario, it can be no more than fifteen seconds before I’m in the vicinity of yet another television with the volume up high) so this should tide you over till then. 24,000 words, if memory serves. Plus bonus photos!

from the vault: my firstest-ever blog entry

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Terminal CityAnd I stand by it to this day!

Terminal City is a home for my observations from and about the Downtown EastSide of Vancouver. It is not affiliated with that zine [now deceased] or the snobby club downtown.All rights reserved, in fact, all rights revert to me including the right to own property. I’d like some, please. You can email it if you have a broadband connection, right?

You are welcome to read and to forward from the blog as long as you properly list me as the source. Forwarding or appropriating content from this blog without properly crediting the source indicates your acceptance of the fact that I will remove both your right AND left legs, slowly.

Have a happy!

Welcome to Carrall Street

ghost story part two

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From the Archive.

So there I am again, staying with James, only this time I brought my friend Katy. Because she is “new” she gets the upstairs room, which I forget to mention to her is haunted. But it is. But she doesn’t notice. Odd.

But maybe not, because there I am, staying in the basement, right near the Indiana Jones tomb which I see has a nice new wooden frame around it now, all polished in an unhealthily obsessed way. I mean, if you had an unexplained little half-tunnel in your basement that looked like a home for a coffin, would you fix it up nice? Anyway, I have to pass through the room with the tomb every time I go upstairs, which is a trial in the dark, let me tell you.

But if the ghost does not bother Katy it sure bothers me. It doesn’t poke, it bangs. Kathunk, kathunk, ping, ping, ping, BANG. **BANG**. Ping, ping, ping. Kathunk…you get the idea. It was a long night, especially when I went upstairs to get a drink and it banged and pinged its way up the stairs ahead of me. I told it it was dead and it should be quiet and go back to sleep or whatever it is that dead people who are not haunting do.

James’s partner Tony says it’s just the heater, but that fails to explain how the heater can preceed me invisibly up stairs, or how it can stand in the hall, all invisible and everything, waving and doing for all I know jumping jacks to get us to notice it. I notice it. I glare at it. It does an invisible Tasmanian Devil routine every time I pass it to go to the bathroom, but all I ever say is “You’re dead. Get over it.”

You know, I think it’s very much like a little dog that wants to play. Give it a little attention and it’s a happy puppy. I bet it lives for my visits…on second thought there’s got to be a better way to put that.

Ghost Story Part One

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From the Archive

So this is the story:

There I am up in Vernon, staying with my friend James. His house is haunted. I told him that last time I stayed up there, told him that not only did his new house have ghosts, but they were very pushy ghosts, poking at me every time I got up to go to the bathroom.

And he just looked at me like I had just crawled out of the gin bottle, which I had but that was not related!

If I’d been sober I’d never have told him at all.

James goes to sleep early, but I stay up till all hours and thusly encountered the poky ghosts. They poked me all the way from the living room (which I think aught to be reserved for the living; I mean, just look at the word but you can’t get these dead people to listen to reason, you can’t even get them to stop poking you and pay attention. You sure can’t get them to agree to split up the house, even though it’s just so obvious that the basement room with the unexplained Indiana Jones tunnel just big enough for a coffin has to be ghost territory and the living room, I mean **hello?** the living room, should be for the animate to lie on the couch and watch Space Channel in peace with no spiritual visitors, no, not even if the Omen is on again) through the French doors, all the way down the hall and into the guest room, where they continued to poke at me from time to time as I lay in the bed, until finally, finally I was forced to address the issue directly.

Now normally there is nothing I avoid so much as addressing an issue directly. Now normally there is nothing I avoid even more so much as confrontation with a disincorporated intelligence; it’s faintly embarassing, as my own fleshiness points up the issue of their ectoplasmicism. We are both made uncomfortable. So this is something I generally avoid. I am not, however, normally poked at so agressively. Sure, one or two quick tentacle-feels, maybe even a tentative arrow prick, but nothing like what I was undergoing now. I **had** to take action.

“You’re dead. Leave me alone.”

And did it do me any good at all? Hell no! Got not a moment’s peace from that time on; poke-a-rama it was, with me all the time going, “hey, stop that, you’re dead! Leave me alone! Oh, fine, ignore me, but you’re still Dead! And I’m Not! Ow!” You know, it wasn’t my finest hour.

operation global media domination: porn stalker!

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TIAWell this is odd. Sometime in the last 72 hours someone (no idea who) labelled my blog as porn, using the handy-dandy WordPress “Label this blog Adult” feature. Someone on the forum told me this is supposed to flag it for review and, if the blog is indeed found to be porn, it’s taken off search engine updates, dropped from the “Next Blog” “Tag Surfer” “Blog of the day” “Top Posts” and “Latest Posts” rolls, and the blogger can no longer post comments, which I found out when I tried to inform whatsername with the Starbucks iced coffee coupon that it is, in fact, legit.

Well, now I have reason to believe that the instant someone tags the fucker with “Porn” it sticks, and only an appeal will get it out of the gutter and back into the starry sky.

So that’s what happened. Sometime last night it dawned on me that my hits were half, count ’em, half what they should normally be, and that for some reason my posts weren’t showing up where they should.

And this does not take me to my happy place.

I posted a question in the forum and sent in a Support Contact Form, as one is supposed to do. About six hours later (in fairness, it WAS the middle of the night) I get an email from Barry saying sorry, we checked your blog, it’s fine, it had been “porned” and it’s not, so you’re good to go.

Surely, I thought, surely that would have given me some kind of period of immunity, like a vaccination.

Silly me.

“Referrers” is a stat table that lists the links that people have come to your blog through, and how many came through each. For today so far, mine looks like this:

Referrer Views
wordpress.com/tag/porn 11
wordpress.com/tag/porn/7 8
colddesert.blogspot.com 5
topix.net/who/cloris-leachman 4
wordpress.com/tag/porn/6 3

Yes, someone has gone through 8 or more pages of Porn tags on WordPress, looking for mine. No doubt thinking if s/he can whine “oh but she has 22 posts tagged “porn” it’s an open and shut case. Well it’s not, because I have never posted porn on this blog and I defy anyone to say it’s not PG-13. Particularly since Photobucket took down my pictures of large public sculptures; okay, so the Boris Vallejo was a bit edgy. Believe me, I’m well aware of those boundaries, having dealt with that issue for several years.

Let’s take a look at some of the blog entries tagged “Porn” on the ol’ raincoaster blog, shall we? Because we know you like to look at porn.

BoingBoing on TWAT, which reproduced a BoingBoing post of a RyanAir ad about people (small, distant, probably Irish people) taking their clothes off at an airport.

Operation Global Media Domination: The Rear View, in which we discover I’ve been linked to by both LibertyForum and Nastyfuckingporn.com, a link blog.

If Men Wrote Advice Columns, a joke column I found on Fark.

Beaver Shots. The ever-popular. Beavers swimming in the Okanagan.

Check into the Paris Hilton, an SNL skit starring guess who? Dirty puns, nothing more.

Ah yes, the infamous Marketing Tips for Hookers, an original piece of humour blogging from the Downtown EastSide, featuring stories that were just too funny to go in my book.

The Shebeen Club: Book Banning, Free Speech, and Mein Kampf. How ironic.

Had a minor heartflip an hour ago when it appeared I’d been re-porned, but Barry now tells me that’s not the case and probably would advise me to take two asprin and get a life, if he weren’t such a polite lad, but he is, and he can’t help it.

UPDATE: all my comments, including the ones on this very blog, are now being labelled Spam and held for approval. Swellerific.