Category Archives: Culture

quiz: what flavour Martini are you?

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To tell the truth, I’m horrified at the idea of flavoured Martinis in the first place. Oh sure, it was a kick ten years ago at Delilahs (I never DID get all the way through the Martini menu, at least, not that I recall…) but when one is a grownup one should not order Bartender’s Rootbeer and the ilk except on Eighties Night. And one most certainly should not call it a Martini.

Nonetheless, this is one scary-accurate quiz. Oogatz! It knows me as well as my best friends (you can tell they’re my best friends because I let them pick up the tab).


You Are a Chocolate Martini


You’re an elegant drunk, who only likes the best bars and the most expensive drinks.

A bit of a cheapskate, you’re likely to mooch ten dollar drinks off both friends and strangers.

You should never: Drink and dash. You’re gonna get caught leaving someone with the tab!

Your ideal party: A posh celebrity party you crash, with an open bar.

Your drinking soulmates: those with a Classic Martini personality

Your drinking rivals: those with a Blueberry Martini personality

How to make tennis interesting

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Like this!

Married To The Sea

Married To The Sea on making tennis more interesting

Patron Saint of Procrastination?

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Father Adelir Antonio de Carli

Father Adelir Antonio de Carli

There’s no question Father Adelir Antonio de Carli was a good man. There’s no question Father De Carli was a nice man.

There’s no question that Father De Carli was a dumb man.

And now, there’s no question that Father De Carli, last seen in April headed out to sea carried by a bunch of helium-filled party balloons, is a dead man.

Father De Carli (name variously reported as De Capri as well), who was trying to beat the record for staying airborne via party balloons, has been found by the crew of a tugboat, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, which is, in a way, poetic: he’d been trying to raise money for a spiritual rest stop for those nomads of the landmass, truckers. Unfortunately, he’d been planning to travel inland, but Nature had other plans for him.

So, why am I being so mean about a nice fellow who took on grave personal risk and ridicule in the pursuit of the service of his god and his fellow man?

Because Father De Carli did not attempt learn to operate the GPS which was to relay his coordinates to trackers on the ground until after he was airborne.

From Gizmodo:

I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am.

Now, as one who has always distrusted such devices on principal, and whose experiences with them have done nothing to dissuade me of my view of them as functionless Yuppie fear-sops and technofaith fetish amulets in the shape of bricks, I must say that even had the device functioned as such devices are known to do, it would have done nothing more useful than electrocute him when he hit the water, which would probably (in brutal retrospect) have been quicker than what ultimately happened.

May Father De Carli rest in peace, and may we all learn never to take off in a lawnchair pulled by a thousand helium balloons without proper preparation.

At least a windsock!

Father De Carli is airborne!

Father De Carli is airborne!

Quiz: the fireworks test

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I think I mentioned last year that Vancouver had pot leaf-shaped fireworks on Canada Day. This year I forgot all about the fireworks, so I have no updates for you. Instead, I present this Firework Personality Test:


What Your These Fireworks Say About You


You are focused, single minded, and intense.

You don’t let others see your intensity often, and when they do, they are quite surprised.

You burn brightly, but you also burn steadily.

You have the endurance to get the one thing you desire most.

Happy 4th of July! Jesse Helms is Dead!

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Yay! Something everyone everywhere can celebrate today. America is free! Free of one of the most malevolent and powerful doctrinaire bigots it’s seen since Emancipation.

Let’s all sing along with Klaus Nomi, whom Helms would have hated on general principles, even though he’s not black. Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead!

There are some great comments over on Gawker, but it appears the site is down right now. Instead, let’s look at a sliver of what the Guardian had to say about him:

Senator Jesse Helms, member of the US Senate’s foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86. To echo this newspaper’s memorable comment on the death of William Randolph Hearst, it is hard even now to think of him with charity…

He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms control measures, opposing international aid programmes as “pouring money down foreign rat holes”, and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in Southern Africa.

In domestic politics he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress”, voted against a supreme court justice because she was “likely to uphold the homosexual agenda”, acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord…

Robert Pastor, whose ambassadorship to Panama was scuppered by Helms in 1995, commented that, “nothing Jesse Helms did in his entire career will enhance America’s national security more than his retirement.”

I wish the CBC had had the courage to call it like it actually was. For their mealymouthed obit, click here, although why would you?

Here are some quotes from Helms himself:

I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time. That’s the kind of customers we need!

I’m so old-fashioned I believe in horse whipping.

To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.

Rest in place. Let’s build a monument bigger than the pyramid of Cheops on top of the bugger, lest he try to claw his way back.