Doomed Internet Project #995,228,135

Teaching Americans how to behave.

Working in touristy areas like Gastown, Granville Island and the Quay, I've seen some beauts. The French woman who loudly and Frenchly slagged everything in the store before buying the hideous and hideously overpriced sweater known to the staff as "the Dead Ostrich." We ventured an "Au revoir!" and suggestions for local restaurants all in fluent French as we were packing up her loathesome electric blue monstrosity. She couldn't leave without it, so she had to stand there realizing we'd understood every word she'd said.

There were also the obnoxious Germans, and the Saudis who seem to think they carry a little bubble of the Kingdom around with them…but mostly, there were the Americans.

Someone once asked me why we never saw any polite, quiet Americans, and I replied that we did, but we just mistook them for Canadians. We grew tired of answering, "Why are all your prices in Canadian dollars?" and "Why does your money come in different colours?" and "It's just the same as Seattle," which I kind of enjoyed hearing because it was the signal for Frances and me to start talking in French. Her French was dreadful, but it was good enough to shut the Americans up.

"Remember," I said to one truly obnoxious fellow, "when you got on the big silver bird [insert hands making plane shadow puppet] you left your country."

Linkie o’ the Day: Beautiful Agony

Beautiful Agony 1It’s amazing what you find clicking on “most recently updated” on WordPress. It tends to be more interesting than the “Most popular” which, this week, is Scoble-iffic as always, with strong showings by Dead Raj Kumar and MIT marathoners. BFD! as we say on the W3! By clicking on “Most Recently Updated” blogs, I’ve turned a computer animator on to Canuck Immortal Windsor McKay, found something that will get the nasty red mildew out of my bathroom (is it related to red tide? Apparently yes!) and now, have come (or is that “cum”?) across Beautiful Agony, the least nekkid, most interesting sex site I’ve ever seen.

Beautiful Agony is dedicated to the beauty of Beautiful Agony 3human orgasm. This may be the most erotic thing you have ever seen, yet the only nudity it contains is from the neck up. That’s where people are truly naked.

The videos were made in private by the contributor (and sometimes their partner). We don’t know what they’re doing, or how they are doing it, we just know it’s real and it’s sexy as hell. Make your ears blush by putting on your headphones and turning the sound to eleven.

Beautiful Agony 2Yes, there are free samples. Look for the ones with the red borders and the text underneath that says ‘free sample’.

New agony comes five times per week (at least).

Note to micromanagers everywhere: this must be your spiritual home, because at this very moment, up at the top of the page, it quite clearly says, in large grey-on-white-eurostile lettering, NEXT VIDEO DUE 2 HOURS – 54 MINUTES. I mean, are these people on some kind of a production schedule? Excusing themselves from the dinner table because they’re due “on camera?” The mind boggles. The gonads boggle also, quite an interesting sensation. And since the site isn’t dedicated to filming sex as such, just filming the successful climax (sorry) to Gasmquest, and since we all have our good nights and our off nights, it must be asked:

How do they KNOW??????

Beautiful Agony 4Hey, is that Clay Aiken? And really, who leaves their glasses on? Is that woman a German graphic designer or something? If this is all too much for you, there’s always Jean Michel Jarre’s Beautiful Agony. Slightly different, and almost free!

Today in Giant Squid News: WereSquid

Because Easter's almost over and we're suffering from Giant Squid Withdrawl. If we hadn't had hashbrowns and fried eggs for lunch, we'd have ordered calamari for dinner. Anyhoo, stole this in a very baroque manner off Gawker, where it is not posted. I told you it was baroque; actually, it's all very Da Vinci. Click here for the latest from the original source website.

WereSquid

Easter Fun: Quiz from the Guardian, warm up your encyclopedias (or is that encyclopaedias?)

Easter in SevilleHere's an Easter quiz from the Guardian, so you know it'll be multi-culti and sprinkled with obscure jokes designed to keep the grad students chuckling knowingly well into the wee hours.

How did I do? Well, not bad for a person who has only been to church once this millennium. Then again, it was for Easter last year and we did the "wait till dawn" thing, whatchamacallit, it's got some obscure Latinish name like everything they do in church. I should adopt that trick; it makes everything sound vastly more impressive. How nifty to say you are "Abluting" instead of going to take a shower.

Anyway. I went to church, as I was saying. Once this millennium. In a vast stone church that does get a little hard on the feet and back, I must say. Not to mention the old fellow in the robes that Carinthia told me to copy was disabled and couldn't do any standing up most of the time, leaving me sitting there like a lump until I realized I looked like I was protesting or sumthin and jumped up. Why couldn't she have told me to copy the bustling lesbian, or the perky Filipino who quite obviously lived for what he could do with his voice, and man-o-man was this ever his day, for lo, main preacherguy was sick and dude had to do most of the reading and all of the singing which I do not remember from my small-town Anglican upbringing.

My mother was Buddhist and my father was agnostic; he'd have been athiest but he always believed in hedging your bets. So I don't know why I ended up at Anglican churches except maybe my mother was socially ambitious for me? I was baptized in a Presbytirian church (sp? who knows?) because that was the only one on the base and my mother would NOT allow me to be baptized in the village Catholic church. Idolators, she called them. But I think that really, she just wanted to be sure she understood the ceremony, and they were French who spoke Latin.

Once she did, ie once the ceremony was actually underway, she was horrified to find herself and my dad promising to raise me in the "fear of God" etc etc. I'm not exactly sure what else she expected from the only Protestant clergy in a hundred miles, and a Scotsman at that, but oh well, she promised, horrified though she was, and I got to go to Sunday School as long as I wanted.

In typical Canadian fashion, I went to whatever was handy: Baptist, United, Methodist (that was fun, if strange), Anglican, Baptist again, Presbytirian again although obviously that didn't go so well or I'd know how to spell it, eh? and finally Anglican again. I think I finally settled on Anglican because when I went to boarding school I stayed in the house of an Anglican minister (don't tell me to call them priests; he wasn't all up on the priest thing any more than me) and he didn't mind answering my questions. Instead of doing it by spouting off bible verses, he actually thought about the answers and discussed them like a rational person would do. Because if religion is, in fact, true, then it's rational. Was it Chesterton who said God doesn't break his own laws? He probably said it better, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, I do not recall, from the distant mists of my childhood memories, any 4th century gold icons, incense, or singing at the Anglican church, which was usually just the Baptist church borrowed for a couple of hours on Sunday or something. So this here big-city Anglican church is quite the eye-opener, I must say.

Quiz. It's a blog post about a quiz. Here's the quiz. And here's a sample of the questions:

Why is Orthodox Easter celebrated at a different time from Easter in the western Christian churches?      

It is based on the Gregorian calendar    

It is based on the date of Passover    

It is based on the Julian calendar    

Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, a new socialist calendar was introduced to fit better with the spring harvest 

And here are my results, which aren't bad considering that Polish fertility customs were not taught in any of my Sunday Schools, including the Ukranian one in Winnipeg:

Easter quiz

You scored 5 out of a possible 10

Not bad, but perhaps you should have paid a little more attention in Sunday school

PSA: How to Sleep on a Plane

Courtesy of Traveler's Ed, we present some very useful tips for sleeping on a plane, an endeavor at which I've never achieved any kind of success. With the help of these handy hints, however, I'm looking forward to at least achieving a state of complete, Zen-like boredom, a huge improvement over my usual homicidal Berzerker rage. On planes, I meant.

Sleeps! on Planes!

Sleeping on Planes
A recent study found that the popularity of red eye flights is on the increase. I'm among the fans of the red eye, and explain this phenomenon thusly: in most cases, time inside the tin cans we call planes is utterly lost time. It can be stunningly dull, uncomfortable, antisocial, aggravating, a modern Purgatory for the living.Magazines and light reading offer some semblance of real life. And sure, many try to work, but we all have the nagging suspicion that the person staring into their laptop is a) trying to impress; b) is an inefficient workaholic who can't put it down but isn't getting anything done; c) is just waiting for us to look away so they can alt-tab back to the Solitaire game.An airplane is an atrocious environment for work. Your aisle mate peeks at your email or spreadsheet, cellphones are verboten, airplane phones are prohibitively expensive (and who wants to broadcast their calls to a cabinfull of nosy, trapped people?)

Here are my tips for sleeping on planes, whether they be all-night red eye flights, or midday puddle jumpers.

Best seats for sleeping
Avoid completely the last row in the plane, and any seats just in front of the exit row. Think twice about bulkhead, exit row, and aisle seats.

Good Seats
Go for window seats near the front of the plane

More seat tactics:
If you know what kind of plane you'll be flying on, check airline Web sites for seating charts for the specific plane. Here are a few more resources for this information:

Seating Charts, by airline
Airline Seat Maps
Carry-ons: one (or none), then make two.
If you have two full carry-ons, one might end up under your feet – goodbye sleep. Try this: take one carry-on.

Blankets and pillows – stake your claim.
There are never enough blankets and pillows to go around. Board early and stake your claim.

Neck pillows
I've found few neck pillows really work…I turn them around; this works like a charm.

Footware suggestions:
This is a controversial subject.

Far more at the actual site. Click on the link for all you need to know about flying away to Dreamland.