quiz: what flavour Martini are you?

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To tell the truth, I’m horrified at the idea of flavoured Martinis in the first place. Oh sure, it was a kick ten years ago at Delilahs (I never DID get all the way through the Martini menu, at least, not that I recall…) but when one is a grownup one should not order Bartender’s Rootbeer and the ilk except on Eighties Night. And one most certainly should not call it a Martini.

Nonetheless, this is one scary-accurate quiz. Oogatz! It knows me as well as my best friends (you can tell they’re my best friends because I let them pick up the tab).


You Are a Chocolate Martini


You’re an elegant drunk, who only likes the best bars and the most expensive drinks.

A bit of a cheapskate, you’re likely to mooch ten dollar drinks off both friends and strangers.

You should never: Drink and dash. You’re gonna get caught leaving someone with the tab!

Your ideal party: A posh celebrity party you crash, with an open bar.

Your drinking soulmates: those with a Classic Martini personality

Your drinking rivals: those with a Blueberry Martini personality

the terrible, no good, shitty, completely fucked-up day

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It was a beautiful Sunday. Not a drop of rain, just enough sun to burn off the moisture from the Seawall, leaving it perfect for skating. A slight sea breeze, keeping it cool enough to be enjoyable and Chinatown fresh enough not to attract too damn many screaming shithawks. My chores were done, my work was done, and I was free.

I checked my email.

Suddenly, it was no longer a perfect Sunday. It was a deeply, irrevocably flawed Sunday.

It was the Sunday on which I found out that the contract which makes up 40% of my income had vanished, Poof, into thin air. The company just stopped paying their bills, it seems. The company for whom I’m subcontracting is going to pay me for my work to this point, but not beyond, so suddenly I find myself with a considerable amount of free time and a considerable hole looming in my bank account.

Naturally, I self-medicated in an entirely irrational fashion. I figure if the universe can be irrational to me, I can be irrational right back. I went on what someone on a budget as tight as mine would call a bender: I went to the Ovaltine for a house burger and diet Coke, $7, then I took myself down to the A&N boutique where I bought two new, lacy bras for $4.98 apiece and three summer tees at 3 for $9.99, and then I went for a long walk down Robson where I saw many, many shoes I now cannot afford and even walked right past the 40% off sale at the Gap without so much as going in or even pining much, and then I went to Dix and bought myself an IPA and a Red Truck Ale and a very nice man heard me out and bought me a conciliatory Red Truck as well, although believe me, when I’m on a vegan diet it doesn’t take much to get me quite entertainingly loopy and I was, and then we talked about El Alamein and Monte Cassino and Ypres and many similarly cheerful topics dating from before we were both born.

And then I came home, thought about working out, thought ah, fuckit tonight because, really, how often can anyone, even me, have a day like this, and decided to work my aggro out watching V for Vendetta yet again. If I’m still aggro-acious in a few hours, I’ll suck down a coffee and go out for a run.

Anybody need a blogger?

How to make tennis interesting

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Like this!

Married To The Sea

Married To The Sea on making tennis more interesting

Patron Saint of Procrastination?

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Father Adelir Antonio de Carli

Father Adelir Antonio de Carli

There’s no question Father Adelir Antonio de Carli was a good man. There’s no question Father De Carli was a nice man.

There’s no question that Father De Carli was a dumb man.

And now, there’s no question that Father De Carli, last seen in April headed out to sea carried by a bunch of helium-filled party balloons, is a dead man.

Father De Carli (name variously reported as De Capri as well), who was trying to beat the record for staying airborne via party balloons, has been found by the crew of a tugboat, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, which is, in a way, poetic: he’d been trying to raise money for a spiritual rest stop for those nomads of the landmass, truckers. Unfortunately, he’d been planning to travel inland, but Nature had other plans for him.

So, why am I being so mean about a nice fellow who took on grave personal risk and ridicule in the pursuit of the service of his god and his fellow man?

Because Father De Carli did not attempt learn to operate the GPS which was to relay his coordinates to trackers on the ground until after he was airborne.

From Gizmodo:

I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am.

Now, as one who has always distrusted such devices on principal, and whose experiences with them have done nothing to dissuade me of my view of them as functionless Yuppie fear-sops and technofaith fetish amulets in the shape of bricks, I must say that even had the device functioned as such devices are known to do, it would have done nothing more useful than electrocute him when he hit the water, which would probably (in brutal retrospect) have been quicker than what ultimately happened.

May Father De Carli rest in peace, and may we all learn never to take off in a lawnchair pulled by a thousand helium balloons without proper preparation.

At least a windsock!

Father De Carli is airborne!

Father De Carli is airborne!

Pic o’ the Day: Pelagic Octopus

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Who needs mood lighting when you’ve got one of these? Would go beautifully with the new carpet! I bet that fashionable couple the Nyarlathoteps have one already!

Pelagic Octopus, the tiki torches of the deep!

Pelagic Octopus, the tiki torches of the deep!

From Chris Newbert’s gorgeous Gallery of Translucent Creatures at National Geographic.