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.

Avatars of Feminine Power: Bad Role Models

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Endora was the shizznit and don't you even TRY to say different or I'll turn you into a newt. A special-needs newt

Endora was the shizznit and don't you even TRY to say different or I'll turn you into a newt. A special-needs newt

One of an ongoing series featuring Angie Dickinson, Suzanne Pleshette, Catherine Deneuve, Catwoman, Britney Spears, Mylene Farmer, Vanessa Paradis, an Iraqi police woman in training, Rembrandt’s Pallas Athena, Barbie, and now, Endora from Bewitched.

I always wanted to grow up to be her, and I think I may have finally succeeded. Now to get my hands on that wardrobe!

Pucci Galore!

What I like about her is…seriously, everything. I even dyed my hair red for a couple of years! She takes no prisoners, takes no shit, takes names and kicks ass, and she was right: her daughter married a total dork. Derwood was a feeb. I’m sorry, all you Derwoods or Darvins or Dickwads or Whatevers out there, but you’re just not good enough and it would be cruel to let you go through life in a fog of self-delusion, correct?

Endora would NEVER stoop to psychoactives. Other than Martinis, of course

Endora would NEVER stoop to psychoactives. Other than Martinis, of course

Do you know the Sedona Method? Its aim is to give insecure, dweebish people a feeling of accomplishment. Regardless of whether or not they have, in fact, accomplished anything.

You can see why Endora and I would have a problem with that, yes? [clue for Derwoods: say Yes]

So, from Endora I have taken my vociferous contempt for the inferior, my belief that if one is magical enough one can get away with anything, and my taste for earrings of true splendiferositude.

Endora enjoys Champagne mainly on the plane over Spain

Endora enjoys Champagne mainly on the plane over Spain

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Endora and me: can we help it if we're fabulous?

Endora and me: can we help it if we're fabulous?

Playing with the Stones

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Lithophone
Image by raymond_zoller via Flickr

Bear with me, because I’m going to be tinkering. This entire post is going to be tinkering with the audio player at WordPress and seeing if I can get the Telephone Your Blog thingy to accept mp3’s, which would be a nifty trick indeedy. So, like I said, bear with me.

First attempt: Bog standard WP audioplayer with hotlinked mp3 from the Guardian’s piece on lithophones, computer-enhanced xylophones made out of the stones of the Lake District. This would be, I suppose, that upon which the Druids rocked out.

Okie dokey, it appears the Guardian podcasts allow hotlinking. Booya!

Now on to test the Telephone Your Blog thingy with a downloaded and uploaded via telephone mp3; the same one, because yea, I am very lazy.

So now, I have to save the mp3 to my hard drive, then I open Skype because the office phone won’t make a long-distance call and I still don’t have a cellphone and wouldn’t use the minutes on it for this even if I did, and I dial the number and punch in the code (how does one do that on Skype? Guess I’ll find out) and then I somehow play the mp3 into the headset which would be much easier with a proper mic and not just the headphones propped up against a hardcover of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince so the mic hovers around one of the speakers. At least, I THINK that’s the speaker; it might be an air vent or, more likely for Eve here (that’s my computer) an inlet to allow the gin in on those rare occasions it doesn’t make it from the glass into my mouth with the precision one hopes, but has no right to expect, it would after two already and where was I? Right, Harry Potter and the Lithophones of the Lakes. I’d better bring up an mp3 player, too, hadn’t I? I’ll take a flyer on Windows Media Player, because Zune and iTunes kill the speed on this computer. Wish me luck; did I say that already?

Oh, I’m gonna fart. PAUSE. Oh, it wants to tell me something. Apparently xvidcore.dll cannot be found. Well, that’s great, because I wasn’t looking for it in the first place.

Okay, so here’s what happened. I got Skype to open, and got it to call the blog. Then I input my code and started jabbering, which you can hear above. It appears that as soon as I took my earphone jack out of the computer and double-clicked the mp3 to play it, Skype crashed. That’s probably because, instead of Windows Media Player, which I had open and wanted to play it on, the darn thing opened Zune, which is huge and baroque and always kills things on my computer and causes the fan to go into classic silent-film-worthy conippification fits. So. Must find small, slick, non-interferesome mp3 player OR load the puppy into something I can play on the stereo while running Skype on the computer.

The life of a worker-arounder is not a restful one.

Oh, and then I had to go in and steal the telephoned/Skyped mp3 from the standalone post it automatically made called Audio Post and put it here. And now I think I’m going to go off and read Harry Potter and ponder some more.