Category Archives: Etiquette

Hump Day Unicorn Chaser: Chairdancing Edition

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chair dancing with the has-beens: SURE to be a hit

Chair Dancing with the Has-Beens: GET ME CLORIS LEACHMAN ON THE PHONE THIS INSTANT

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, the fine, and near-forgotten, art of Chair Dancing, is sadly overlooked in the realm of vicarious pleasures deemed suitable for reality television. Crocheting with the Has-Beens? Sure. Chair Dancing with the Hotties from the Office Upstairs That You’re Not Sure What They Do But It Must Be Software, They’re All So Young? Not a chance.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a damn shame. Because, in an Orwellian world, chairdancing is freedom. They can take away our Aeron Chairs and replace them with crappy stationary ripoffs from Ikea, but they cannot take away our ability to bop mindlessly to Backstreet Boys while remaining seated. Because this, ladies and gentlemen, yes this is chairdancing in the Twenty-First Century Anno Domini:

It’s come so far! Remember the video that started the craze, way back in the last century2004?

NEVER FORGET!!!

Watch Out!

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Genuine Fake Watches
Image by orangejack via Flickr

I posted this in the technical support forum first, for reasons that probably have more to do with the fact that I’ve had three Martinis than any other ones, but where was I? Oh yes, stories about my mother’s time in Saudi Arabia are popular, as are Schadenfreude tales, so I thought you’d like this.

My mother was working in Saudi Arabia and got a boyfriend there, an American CIA agent whose day job was teaching battlefield communications and whose night job was running a private casino/brothel for blackmail purposes of the US government. She figured it out when all his paycheques came from the Pentagon, and I figured it out when I heard he’d been in prison on a 20-year sentence, was released when he agreed to serve in Vietnam, and that his CO in Saudi in the 80’s was (coincidentally?) also his CO in Vietnam. As for the blackmail, it went “hello, PrinceWhatever, we have photos. We would like the development contract for X province”.

Anyway they bought a fake marriage certificate from a Filipino forger who was, apparently, legendary in the days before desktop publishing and swung through Riyadh once a year (she briefly considered buying me a Harvard PhD but it was $500 and she cheaped out, which is why I still have to scramble for a living BUT I’M SO OVER THAT) and lived as a married couple. I met that guy’s son many years later in a small town in Indonesia, but that’s a tale for another time.

My mother brought Jerry From Alabama, her boyfriend, back to Vancouver to meet her daughters. Well, the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree and we’re both very opinionated my sister and me. And while my sister isn’t a snob, I did get that gene, plus her share. My sister somehow got the “obliging” gene (and GOD knows where she got it from) so she adopted his accent instantly and he could NOT figure out why he liked her better than me, right from the start. But then, maybe he was just psychic.

So, we’re sitting at dinner with Jerry, and my mother has obviously told him I’m a snob (taking credit for her ,work? I dunno), and at some point something happens And. Dude looks me in the eye, takes off his watch, hands it to me (WTF?!) and says, “What do you think of that?”

I look at it. It’s a “Cartier” but the second hand ticks, it doesn’t sweep. I turn it over, and it has the classic beefy Cartier back.

I say, honestly, “That’s a really good fake.”

He collapses in mortification, and my mother collapses in laughter.

Flamewar of the Day: Gawkers

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Rear Window: no parking in rear

No parking in rear

This actually happened last week, which is right and natural when you consider what a shitstorm last week was: when ELSE would it have happened, right? Instead of our usual fun flamewars, toying with the early drinkers and short bus riders of the blogosphere, this one went a little bit sideways and turned into something akin to watching hara kiri right there in the comments section on Gawker. What people are willing to do in front of strangers, and blame upon those strangers, never ceases to fascinate me.

There’s no question I was guilty, but what of exactly what, nobody is quite sure, except for the victim, who is quite sure of many things despite being quite wrong.

What is pretty much certain is that some grownups still have to learn that lesson about when to keep your mouth shut, the one most of us learned around the time we first encountered those savvy genii of the interwebs, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, not to mention Socrates, who came later (what with him being an old man and all).

Judge for yourselves, as always. This is from the comments section of a Gawker post about a “Spiderman” who freeclimbed a 58-story building with suction cups and was arrested for trespassing once he got to the top.

If residents gave him water en route, he can persuasively claim to have been a guest who was there with their permission.

@raincoaster: How about the floors in which nobody gave him water? If I invite you to my apartment does that mean you get to visit all my neighbors? How about reckless endangerment of parked Dodges? How about his impending Darwin award nomination? Questions, questions for the jury..

Seriously, this will be only a misdemeanor, no? 

raincoaster promoted this comment

@lethedrinker: Presumably even if you don’t invite him in, if your neighbors are okay with him walking by, he’s allowed to walk past your door via the hallway. He didn’t invade the apartments.

@raincoaster: Well, he climbed past their windows without their permission. I’d consider that an invasion of privacy.

This happened to me a few months ago. I live in a high rise condo looking directly at a bay, so privacy is not usually a concern. It’s a 1BR with a window in the BR; the LR has floor-to-ceiling doors to the balcony.

I got a notice saying that the window washing crew would be there on a certain date, and that they did not clean the windows in the LR, so I shut the blinds to the bedroom and thought I was all set.

Imagine my surprise when I was seated in the LR wearing only panties, and the crew appeared in my LR window to clean the glass balcony! I gently sank lower in the chair and raised my kindle to try and hide the tits. Not that they are anything to look at, I just prefer that people don’t.

They took 30 minutes to clean the damn balcony, and I couldn’t move in all that time.

So, with respect, your defense fails.

raincoaster promoted this comment

@Registered: Isn’t there some merit to the argumenet that by keeping the blinds up or door open, one implicity lowers the threshold for reasonable expectation of privacy. According to my lawyer friend, cops often use this excuse (made up or otherwise) to get around fourth amendment restrictions – not directly relevant to the privacy argument..

@lethedrinker: I don’t know about open front doors – they’re against the fire code here, must close automatically – but if I live in, say, a 26th floor condo that faces directly onto the ocean (or bay, in my case; you’d need the Hubble telescope to look in unless you are on a scaffold cleaning the windows ) then I would say the police lose their case.

Also, are you suggesting that people should live in caves with the blinds shut and the doors closed, or else lose any right to privacy? Bushish. 

raincoaster promoted this comment

@Registered: I said reduced not lose any or all. Bushish? I bet such dubious arguments existed long before either Bush and will continue to be used till 2084.

Anyway, it was a generic comment not specific to the 26th floor dwelling, bay watching, automatic door closing kindle readers.

@Registered: If you got a notice that the window washing crew would be there washing your windows on a certain date and you’re sitting in your apartment topless in your panties, SOMETHING ain’t an accident. And it ain’t invasion of privacy, either.

Surf the Net like a pro!

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marriedtothesea.com

Oh come on, man. Get a grip on yourself.

That also (for no particular reason) reminds me of this post:
Everything That’s Wrong With Pop Culture in Two Photos

Yep, that’s about the whole of it. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. Maybe this one?

there's a metaphor in here somewhere

But it’s fine. Really.

I'm from the internet

Sadly, ultimately I do not think this will end well. It never does. Remember that blythe surfer at the start?

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Critical Mess

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Have you ever, say, gone for dinner with some friends? To a Japanese restaurant? And one of the friends? Invited one of his friends, whom you didn’t know? And his friend? Turned out to be a bit of an ass? The kind of ass who wheels his bike into the restaurant and jams it between your knees? And then says, “Could you watch that for me? I’m too worried about it to leave it outside”?

Yeah. Me neither. And I’m over it anyway.

By the way, at the last the Critical Mass ride in Vancouver of which I heard details, they ran into a little old lady in a wheelchair. Who was crossing with the light.

The unbearable bikeness of being…bourgeois:

the unbearable bikeness of being...bourgeois

and a slightly edgier iteration of the mindset seen today on the Downtown Eastside:

Is this upward mobility or downward?

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