Category Archives: Lush Life

Monstro escapes, terrorizes Eastern seaboard

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The world is your lobster 

Yep, I wouldn’t wanna be a Massachusetts mussel with this insatiable leviathan prowling around out there.

Monstro the monstrous lobster has been set free to slake his bloodlust once again on the unsuspecting bivalves of the Atlantic coast. After holding the rapacious crustacean thirty days in captivity, his captors bowed to pressure from special interest groups and released him, to prowl the sea bottom once again. Truly the End Times are upon us; note the name of his temporary resting place: quaintly charming, or sinisterly forboding?

The giant lobster caught 100 miles off the Massachusetts coast spent last month in the lobster tank at Angelica’s Restaurant in Bethlehem. He recently was returned to the water, just off the southern tip of West Island, five miles from New Bedford, Mass.

Fred Cunha, the restaurant owner, bought the 37-inch Monstro with his 15-inch-long claws from a New Bedford fishing boat in mid-October. Cunha estimates Monstro is 50 years old…

After persistent lobbying from diners and his 7-year-old daughter Angelica, Cunha decided to raffle off Monstro, with the winner deciding whether to send him to the ocean or the cooking pot.

So Monstro lounged in the restaurant’s tank with Mr. Crabby, Angelica‘s pet 2-pound lobster, feasting on minced crab and scallops…

Until…

daylight reveals Downtown EastSide shock/horror!

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Well, for some of us anyway.

It’s remarkable what you can get accomplished when:

  1. you wake up at 8am
  2. WordPress won’t let you post because of server issues

I found the paperwork the government required of me, straightened my living room (somewhat), recycled several large sacks of old newspapers and flyers, stopped by the Downtown EastSide Women’s Centre, read the Bad Date Sheet (I meant to swipe one to post on the blog; apparently some fat white 30-something is kidnapping and robbing hookers and dumping them in godforsaken Cloverdale several times a week; now that the news is out, all 300-pounder suburbanites can kiss their chances of a cheap BJ goodbye), swung by the Salty Tongue for a yummy sammich and my free (loyalty programs rule!) mocha, full-fat, damn the torpedos, filed my taxes, made it to the government office on time and got that out of the way smoothly, thanks to finally having found said paperwork, dropped the taxes off at the tax office, picked up my free facial mask at Lush (thanks to the goody bag at the Rare dinner), snagged a free kolachy from the Kolachy Shop, also due to goody bag at said Rare dinner, grabbed some veggies for dinner from Sunrise Market, and attempted to take a look at the new Costco in the hood, although I was turned back at the door, as apparently  you cannot browse in Costco unless you’re a member. I tell you, I have no problem getting into the Vancouver Club or Shine, but ain’t nobody getting past the door bitch at Costco without their little token of membership.

Yep, without question this was the most productive day I’ve had in a very long time.

Hella boring for the blog, though.

all I want for Christmas: a roundup

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A Christmas lecture from Linus. Ah, what does he know?Besides world domination, that is.

Just in time for the opening of shopping season, we at the ol’ raincoaster blog present a brief list of swag suitable for gifting to everybody’s favorite blog bitch. We have spared no effort in our gruelling research, trolling the blogroll yea, even unto Vicus Scurra, where we find naught but impractical suggestions for the unusual deployment of root vegetables. Oh, those crazy Brits and their anal turnip fetishes!

Is that why they’re called rutabagas?

In any case, here, as a result of simply hours trolling through BoingBoing, Go Fug Yourself, and Metro‘s emails, is our Christmas Wish List (to date, management reserves the right to add, say, a Tiffany Ribbon Bracelet or a Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator at any later date).

Che trooper!

how to stuff a blog

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blogwars! 

from Gawker, who helpfully shares some blog-stuffing tips for the sake of their Dark Lord, Nick Denton, who is slumming it this week as a writer for Valleywag (fluffing the VC’s, Nick?). One gawktease commenter has requested my email, claiming many and varied interesting Gawker tidbits, but has yet to put out for me. I’m not going to wait forever, baby; show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

Meanwhile, I appear to be the only one who reads these tips and thinks “those would work for blogging drunk, too.” See the rest of this blog for examples.

  • Photoshop and other graphical tricks can often disguise the fact that your posts have little or no information in them.
  • “This thing looks like that thing” never gets old. Ask Kurt Andersen!…
  • Engage the commenters. Sure, some of them can be truculent or deliberately obtuse, but the involvement of a comment community can really make any post – no matter how vapid or desperate – appear to be a riot of activity.
  • Don’t be afraid to be hypocritical. Worried about castigating someone for committing the exact same practices in which you usually engage? Don’t give it a second thought! Who remembers? And if someone does, and e-mails you an angry response, hey, free post!
  • Naked chicks amp up clickthroughs. Rock ’em…
  • When all else fails, never underestimate the power of a screengrab to masquerade as actual content. It’s quick, it’s easy, and requires little effort on your part.

    • Sirens

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    from the Archive

    Sirens sometimes and screams, always. Warbling squalls of screams, gusts of them, scream fronts, the ambiguous kind that could mean something very good or something very bad. When it’s men screaming it’s that much more intense, whatever else it is. The worst thing is, you can’t see a thing. There’s nothing there, not by the time you get your courage up and your shoes out of the hall closet. Fifteen syringes between the corner and the first driveway, piles of torn bread scattered across the grass like abandoned snowdrifts, and a plastic bag skydancing in the warm exhaust from a cop car as it rolls down the alleyway. The ghosts look at you funny, and the buildings seem to sigh and close their eyes in exhaustion. And there is no-one there.

    Then the screaming starts again, just a little way over, and by the time you get there, there is nothing. It could be aliens trying to abduct Downtown EastSiders, using the sound like a turkey call; that would explain the lack of…well…any thing. They’ve all been beamed up. But then wouldn’t there be fewer from day to day? And there are more, or at least plenty, thank you very much. Maybe they put them back after the anal probe; I can see why they scream.

    Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Astoria now sells hard liquor. Junkies are usually nice and quiet, just sort of slumped there, but booze makes you publicly loud; check out any Earl’s after nine at night, or just take a walk around Yaletown. It’s good for a laugh; they say all the same things, just really, really loudly. “Bob, how was London? Great, great. Did you recover your investment there? Great, great.” Good for Bob, you think. And who the hell is Bob.

    Maybe the screaming is related to the new supersupply of crystal meth. This is the stuff OJ used to take; not sure if he can afford it now. In Asia it’s called Yah Bah and the clubkids get whacked on it and rumble. It’s infamous for the violence it causes, so maybe the screaming is a secondhand effect.

    The other day a 74-year-old man stabbed a middle-aged man to death over an old debt. They were both in line at the soup kitchen, just around the corner from my house. There were probably a hundred witnesses, on which there were probably 175 outstanding warrants.

    Sometimes I feel like screaming myself.