Category Archives: news

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.

Goats eh?

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Know Your Goat, just, you know, not THAT WAY.

Know Your Goat, just, you know, not in THAT WAY

This is a totally, completely, utterly gross story and you will love it. You will curl into the fetal position and cup your hands protectively over your bits, but you will like this story.

It’s a true story. For once. It comes from my mother, who was in charge of medical records at the King Fahd Hospital in Riyadh in the 80’s.

Saudi males who are not married are not supposed to notice they have penises. Seriously, they’re supposed to just pretend it doesn’t exist. So when a Saudi male who was not married was admitted the the hospital where my mother worked and the diagnosis was “ruptured penis” naturally all the typists in medical records were DYING to know how it happened. They were all Westerners and somewhat starved for scandalous sex gossip of this type, or even the sight of a penis, if only in their minds’s eyes.

What made it even more bizarre and in-your-face was, the doctors told him he needed some exercise and so every day he would get out of his room and go for a s…l…o…w… walk up the hallway. Down the hallway. Up the hallway. Down the hallway. With a determined look on his face and his legs bowed as if he were riding a Percheron.

My mother was not a shy woman. She was not what you could ever have called retiring. Or bashful.

So, one day she saw the doctor in charge of that patient in the hallway and walked up to him and said, “Doctor So-and-So, my typists can’t even concentrate to do their jobs, they are so distracted by this. How did it happen?”

He was used to my mother. He knew those western women were crazy and my mother was the craziest of all of them and, thus, not to be trifled with.

He looked up the hall. He looked down the hall. He looked up the hall. He looked down the hall. He leaned in and whispered, “The goat bolted.”

Operation Global Media Domination: The Dogfight Situation

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Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

Long, long ago, on June 25, 2006 in fact, I uploaded my first video to YouTube. Then what happened? Then, I basically ignored it for four years.

That video has now had 824,393 views.

I’m impressed, to say the least: my other videos average less than 100 views, and that’s even if I put them in my blogs. And god knows, I can’t take credit for how well this has done Mind you, I got this one while it was very fresh (it’s not original, by any means, but it is public domain). I was cruising around Fark, as I have been wont to do whenever I wont for diversion and there it was. “P47 guncamera footage from WWII, recently declassified” and I clicked, saw that it was just what it claimed to be and amazing footage, saw additionally that only a few people had watched the video so far, downloaded that puppy without hesitation, and uploaded it to YouTube.

So, basically: it was fresh, it was fascinating, and it was named what it was about: WWII Dogfights in Colour. I put it in: Category: News & Politics. Tags: War, Planes, WWII, Dogfight.

Since then, I’ve had a Brazilian television show ask me if they could use it (I passed along the contact deets for the original uploading and if I still had them I’d add them to the Notes) and just got an offer from an LA music company of cash money to add their music as a soundtrack. Very cool, and actually quite smart of them. As long as the song they want to add isn’t all “Go Nazis” or whatever, I see no reason not to say yes.

You’re no doubt curious to see the video, so I shall not make you wait any longer. It’s silent, but it’s deadly.

And don’t neglect the comments; there’s an interesting and quite intelligent discussion of air strategy. I’m proud that my video has broken the trend for YouTube comments of unspeakable stupidity.

Oh, Ship!

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Cthulhu sez wutz goin on in this boat

WE NO HAZ UR BUKKIT DOOD!!!

It’s not all fun and games out there on the deep blue sea.

That’s CCTV footage of the giant cruise ship the Pacific Sun, being shaken up like a snow globe by the powers of wind and water or perhaps something a little more sinister. If you cruise around LiveLeak, Break, or YouTube you can find any number of videos entitled “DEADLY 20 FOOT WAVE” and so on, but really, a 20-foot wave is nothing. For devotees of Cthulhu such as my fine self, we don’t even notice anything under “Cyclopean” unless, that is, it’s non-Euclidean.

Non-Euclidean waves will always have a special place in my heart, as will the HPL geek who wrote this spell-checking program and included the word non-Euclidean therein.

If you’re a sea geek like me, you probably watched, though claimed not to enjoy The Perfect Storm, but of course you had the book years before. And from that book, you probably remember many terrifying oceanic factoids, such as the fact that waves far higher than the theoretically possible maximum of 150 feet are routinely spotted via satellite imaging, and that a rogue wave once blew out the pilothouse windows on the Queen Mary, and further you remember that the pilot house windows on the Queen Mary are – get this – 92 feet above the water line. The wave was so tall that, even at an altitude of 92 feet, it was sufficiently thick and powerful that it crushed steel-framed, reinforced glass.

So yeah, enjoy that cruise vacation.

Dolphins KNOW, man. THEY KNOW

They're actually saying Iä! Iä! Iä!

Hot Tub Hobo!

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Paging John Cusack: I sense a sequel. Calling all angels…

Sadly, this call could not be completed as dialed.

Mark Eskelsen, the Hot Tub Hobo

Mark Eskelsen, the Hot Tub Hobo

It seems Mark Eskelsen, a true aficionado of convivial outdoor bathing, free spirit, alfresco-dweller, and (at least mentally) time-traveller from reformed hippieville Beaverton, Oregon, is not a rock. Nor yet is he an island.

He is a loser.

From the New York Daily News (really, we’re getting our Cascadia news from NYC now? really, interwebs?):

The 45-year-old called 911 from his cell phone on Sunday morning and identified himself as the “sheriff of Washington County,” Beaverton police said. He then asked for medical attention, later admitting that he wasn’t the sheriff.

Eskelsen also said he had been in the hot tub for 10 hours and that his towels had gotten soaked.

“I just need a hug and a warm cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in it,” he told the 911 operator.

In fact, the police lied: the poor man actually called 411, as any right-thinking, cocoa-seeking hot tub hobo would do in a time of need. Can you imagine the conversation he and the friendly operator must have had? If not for the fact my readers are still recovering from my recent OD on YouTubes, I’d post the scene from 28 Days where Sandra Bullock’s character is driving around wasted in the stolen limo wearing her underwear and drunk-dialing 411 to find a wedding cake, right here. But I won’t.

The operator knew a true human emergency when s/he heard one, and handed off the unsuspecting hug-seeker to 911 emergency response, who promptly responded to our warm-hearted if pruney-toed protagonist’s cri de coeur by calling in the SWAT team to roust him from his roasty roost and put him on ice in the cooler.

And to think: all he wanted was a hug, a cup of cocoa with marshmallows, and some fresh towels. Really, when it comes right down to it, we are all Juan Mann, alone.

“…how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!… There can be no peace without hope.”

~ Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague (Trans. Stuart Gilbert), p. 262-263

Emo Luv

Emo Luv