People we love: the crochet lady

If I catch the right bus in the morning, i get the privilege of sharing space with the crochet lady.

I think she's the first person on the bus every day, because she always gets the same seat.

Everything she wears in ornately crocheted: dress, hat, mittens, multiple handbags... and naturally, she spends her time on the bus making tiny, complicated little stitches.

I think she speaks crochet. Which explains why she doesn't relate very well to the other people on the bus.

I think she lives in a cozy, warm crochet cocoon. She crawls in after taking bus home from wherever she goes every day. It would suck in the summer time; but now that winter has arrived, I'm filled with envy.

You see, we have the opposite problem. A bunch of men built scaffolding behind our building. They took off all the bricks, some of the wood and other things that I'm afraid to find out about. It's not cozy at all.

Now I know how I cope during major home renovations: I pretend they're not happening.

Nope. Those guys aren't outside my kitchen window in 15 below weather. Nope. We're not going to collectively (with our neighbours) spend tens of thousands of dollars fixing the back of the building. Nope. Not happening.

I just look out the window and think there are Dozers outside, doing their good work while I have inane and probably ultimately frivolous indoor Fraggle adventures of my own.

Maybe I can invite crochet lady over and she can make a giant cozy to cover our house and keep us warm while the bricks are missing? I think she's up to the task. Maybe she is riding the bus waiting for just such an opportunity.

Cornemuse: the naughtiest children's show ever

Our toddlers rock out to a Quebec TV show that features sexy ladies dressed up as furry animals.

At first glance, Cornemuse looks like a furry cuddle party Burning Man theme camp. Grown up ladies in furry costumes talk in baby talk, play games, cuddle... The kids love it.

In fact, it's written by child psychologists, geared to make tots feel good about themselves.

See, with Cornemuse everyone wins: Mom and dad get a little eye candy. And the kids learn something deep.

Football fans are fat and ugly

I had two run-ins with the Grey Cup this week.

On Thursday, my friends and I ended up at the Sheraton downtown. We were just going for massages... but had to elbow our way through a horde of fat, cowboy-hat wearing rednecks to get to the elevator.

At the elevator, a huddle of ridiculous men -- one painted blue, one wearing viking horns and the last one wearing some kind of hat made out of a two-four -- crammed into the elevator ahead of us.

My friends took one look in the elevator and refused to get in.

So we shared another elevator with a couple of Grey Cup cheerleader types. Ladies: how do you gird yourself against the horror of an ogling by thousands of fat, drunken brutes?

And then today I made a fatal mistake. I decided to take my two-year-old to the Biodome. Which is... yes, next door to the stadium where football fans were gathering for the big event.

As soon as I left the metro, I could tell something was wrong. There was a whole lot of neckless fat people milling around the entrance to the stadium (and why... does your neck disappear after watching, say, ten years of football?).

These folks were at the stadium six hours before the game... not lining up for tickets... just kind of milling around dangling their backwards cro-magnon hands. Like they arrived in Montreal that morning and didn't know where else to go.

Buddy, it's going to be a long day...

My mom and viral marketing

There's something beautiful about people who don't get viral marketing. Like my mom... she forwards me viral marketing emails because she genuinely likes them. Usually, they're nothing clever: a cute animal, a recipe. An email makes her smile and then it heads my way...

And when I see her message, I think: "crappy affiliate viral marketing bastards... tricking my mom and all her friends... filling up my inbox with things I've seen 50 times already..."

But the truth is, the recipes and cute animals make my mom genuinely happy. And when I occasionally tell her to stop forwarding them, she gets hurt.

And then she forwards me something she can't resist... something that makes her so happy, she has to share. But she attaches a passive aggressive little note to the email in defense of the cute animal/viral marketer.

The note will say something like: "I know you don't like these, but this reminds me of you when you were little..." And I feel bad and mean for telling her not to send me little kids and kitties. And I respond, telling her she can send me anything she likes...

And she'll never know that the little smiley at the bottom of her rabbit-licking-bunny email goes to a website managed by a Latvian fake Viagra spam ring that uses the proceeds to fund human trafficking.

And that's what is truly beautiful about people who don't understand viral marketing... hopefully they never will.

The questionable ethics of thrift shopping

I've haunted thrift shops for as long as I can remember. Most of what I wear comes from garage sales and thrift shops, with an occasional new thing thrown in to bring it all together.

I always thought I was doing the right thing -- for all kinds of reasons -- when I bought my stuff second hand. I could justify it. After all: I'm not rich. Plus, when I buy my clothes, I give cash to charities, etc. etc...

But now I'm not so sure. Hear me out:

We have toddlers. Two of 'em. Recently, J and I pounced when we saw a new box of diapers at a local thrift shop. We threw it on our cart along with all the kiddie clothes we were about to buy... We paid, and left.

Then I started to feel bad. Really bad. Shame.

J and I both have decent, full-time jobs. We do okay. Unlike a lot of the people shopping in that thrift shop, we can certainly afford to spend $30 on a new box of huggies.

So what the hell were we doing, snapping up essentials for our kids in a thrift shop, right in front of people who regularly struggle to feed, house and clothe their kids?

I'm no longer sure how I feel about this. Of course, I'm not going to run out and start buying all new clothes for my kids. It's second hand all the way, baby.

But I'm going to thrift shop more selectively. Next time, I'm going to think about whether I'm buying something that someone else will truly need.

Usually there's enough to go around. But when there isn't, I'm asking all of you to stop, look around, and ask yourself if you belong in that thrift shop. Maybe you do. And maybe you don't.

For our part, J and I resolved to donate a bunch of diapers and formula to a food bank over the holidays. Because as parents we know how much this stuff costs...

One week, no Internet at home.

Can you believe it, we made it through a weekend and five whole work days without the Internet at home.

You know what? It was awesome.

The good things about having no Internet at home:

More sleep
No late nights writing and surfing when, really, I could have been sleeping.

Better sleep
I went to bed with a clear brain, rather than being overstimulated from ingesting a lot of useless information.

Happier kids = happier parents = even happier kids
Every night before bed, the kids ran around the house singing and dancing. And so did we. They didn't once clamour for big peoples' distracted attention while we checked our email. Because we couldn't check our email.

More peace
One less distraction meant no cranky adults because one of us is on the web while the other cooks/does dishes/washes kids.

Reassurance
I admit, I did take my laptop out to a cafe to "catch up" on flickr, facebook, etc... And was totally underwhelmed by what I was missing. Do I really need to read everybody's status updates, every day? Did I miss any crucial emails that needed an immediate response... ummm... no.

More peace
Oh yeah... I already mentioned that one. I love getting to that point where I have to figure out what to do because I can't suck away my time online. It feels scary, and awesome...

Less chaos
There's just a lot less crap lying around the house and I think it's because we're keeping the house clean. TBD...

The bad things about having no Internet at home:

We couldn't find somebody's postal code
So I had to take the letter to work and look it up there.

J had to spend 20 minutes talking to a help desk
This rates as the biggest, no-internet-at-home annoyance yet.

I can't download the next episode of Generation Kill
But that's what friends are for...

I'm Woody Allen's son (not...)

I'm starting this post with two facts:

1. J is a prankster.
2. People always tell J that he looks like Woody Allen.

So on Saturday night, we were at a Halloween party. As usual, total strangers kept telling J that he looked like Woody. J is always amused.

But this time he upped the ante: He told a total lie. J told a huddle of people that, in fact, his mom had a tryst with Woody Allen in the 1960s. And that ever since, his family suspected that he was Woody Allen's son, but had never verified it.

Then J sat back and watched the awestruck little huddle as they worked the room... they spoke with other little huddles. Again and again, then those huddles turned around to gawk at J.

This will come back to us.

As often as we can, we go to parties hosted by this one organizer. Every time, we get to know more regulars and our paths cross at subsequent parties and festivals. It's a little community of sorts.

I know... it's only a matter of time before someone wanders up to J and says, "Hey, aren't you Woody Allen's son?"

And then our kids will come to be known as Woody Allen's grandchildren. As they grow up, they will start to speculate and this lie will ultimately be woven into family lore.

Our kids will tell their grandchildren. And in another 100 years, this party lie will be a sacred family secret... that we are all in fact the spawn of a great, New York actor and comedian. Mark my words.

Bob Harris has his way with the North Korean border

This blog might just turn into a list of all the articles that I actually read in their entirety. Which is pretty rare...

The upside: if they don't make me laugh out loud, then they probably won't make it on the list.

On Boing Boing today, writer Bob Harris visits the DMZ between North and South Korea.

This piece is deliciously skewed, full of awesomely hilarious little nuggets.

Now I have to run out and find everything else Bob Harris ever wrote...

Bob Thurman talks about The Matrix

You've got to love Robert Thurman, using The Matrix to deconstruct reality: "It's just an analogy, but such a great analogy, The Matrix."

Recession tips from the undead

I have a confession: I read compulsively, but find very little that holds my attention these days. There's just too much bla bla bla out there.

But this... this is a rollicking good read:
6 tips for surviving a recession, taught by World of Warcraft zombies

After all, who would you rather trust for investment advice?

A. Investment advisors
B. The undead

Can we really say goodbye to the Internet?

We're all arrogant chez nous because we don't have a television. We never have. When I moved out of my parents' house, I just never wanted one. A few of my gazillions of past roommates had TVs. But most of the apartments I lived in over the past 20 years were TV free.

I used to read a lot of books. And go to movies. And write letters.

Now J and I use the Internet.

Sometimes J and I get all proud, thinking about how other families sit around with their kids and watch TV in the evenings. And we say things like "we're instilling the right values" by playing with our kids and singing songs and all that.

But let's face it: we've just replaced TV with something far less communal -- the Internet. Instead of joining mom and dad on the couch at the end of the day, our kids often see one of us, back turned, staring into a little box.

In their eyes, that little box has a lot of power. Where do mom and dad go? Why is that little box so important that we have to check it several times a day? And do Pingu and the Teletubbies live in that little box?

The fact is, that little box isn't important at all.

So we're getting ready to cut the next big addiction: the Internet. Right now, we're gathering up our big strong selves to turn it off November 1. Yep. Turn off our Internet connection.

Because we live in the middle of at least a dozen coffee shops with free wireless. And I'm sure, after a month of pacing, muttering and realizing I shouldn't have recycled the yellow pages, we'll be just fine.

Maybe I'll even start reading books again.

Loving the way back machine

It's no secret that I've been trying to update my portfolio lately.

The thing is, it's tricky to find something you wrote back in say, 2001, given all the comings and goings of dotcoms over the past ten years. That's the real reason why we love the way back machine... you can find all those long lost nuggets you worked so hard on before they crashed and burned.

I almost got weepy revisiting old sites like this one... Leisureplanet... ahhh... old friend. You coulda been a contender, except you mysteriously burned through $25 million before you attracted any users.

Checking out what the web used to be is like perusing old baby pictures. Sites we knew and loved looked so awkward before they grew up and found boyfriends with fast cars.

Check out:
Google from 1998
CNN, June 2000
Hotmail, 1998
Yahoo! ...way back in 1996
Netscape, 1996 (so self assured!)
Travelocity, also from 1996

Things I like: 20-somethings on bicycles...

I'm kind of old school... being, well, older and raised on the West Coast, I always had a fetish for bicycle couriers. The gritty, dirty ones that smell when you get into the elevator with them. Back in may day, they were hot: rough, fit, street-wise and iconoclastic to the extreme.

Actually, my thing for cyclists goes back even further, to the mid 80s, when Paul Weller and his buddy frolicked around in cycling jerseys to My Ever Changing Moods. Yummy.

All of a sudden, it's chic again to ride a bicycle. Whoo... is it ever. Sometime this summer I started to notice little punk kids, girls and boys, riding sleek little 1970s ten speeds like they were going out of style.

So now it's punk rock to have a stripped down Bianchi: no fenders, no gear... sometimes not even any brakes (or just one brake, if you're not that brave).

Punk rock 10-speed girls dress like squeegees, but a little more elegant. You can tell they're not squeegees, but in fact lefty college students, clad in big boots, spiky belts, fake fur... stretch pants and cutoffs, layered just so.

And the 10-speed boys... look way too delicious en route to Mile End, sporting little Italian cycling caps. Safety last. Fashion first. Some of the boys wear little caps and mustaches -- as if they grew them to look "just so" on that welcome back Kotter bicycle. Can little Adidas shorts be far behind?

But back to the bike couriers for just one minute. Lately, I'm tuning into a whole new breed, even more delicious than the 1990s variety. As if to defy the 10-speed kids, these road warriors wear dreadlocks, kilts, big fat earrings and giant boots.

These lads don't give a rat's ass for anyone's rules, fashion or otherwise. And it's lovely. One sports a big, curly 1900s mustache. Another has dangly, ladylike earrings shining inside his filthy hair. As if to say: cars suck, being in traffic all day is crazy, and I'm expressing my contempt for it all in my own special way.

Flight of the worms

Every man has a disgusting habit.

Mine keeps worms.

This is actually admirable, when compared with, say... watching sports. Or building little boats in jars.

To be more precise, he vermi-composts. Which means that there's a box of worms and dirt in our kitchen. The worms eat eggshells and vegetables and make them into dirt. He lavishes attention on his worms. They love him back.

Every once in a while, the worms start to leave their warm, dirty home. Maybe it's a bit too damp in there. Kind of like the Fraggles, they -- not all of them, maybe a dozen at a time -- go exploring across our kitchen and I find them in the morning, dried up within a 15-foot radius of their dirt box.

I know, it's disgusting. But you get used to it. Sometimes they travel all the way to the bathroom before contorting into dry, little husks.

Now that I have a one-year-old, I'm even more vigilant about hunting down outriders. I can just see Finn's pincer fingers reaching out slowly. He has one eye out for approaching adults. And the other eye on the worm's journey to his pointy little half open toddler mouth -- the mouth of curiosity, the mouth of delight.

Sometimes I come into the room and Finn has this crooked smirk and I know he's enjoying forbidden fruit. Usually something he dropped there earlier. But you can never be sure...

Now I'm going to go off topic. Back in the cave, there weren't any highchairs. My theory is that babies eat off the floor because some ancient part of their brain thinks that this will help them survive.

Picture a tribe of really hungry people, eating something disgusting and there is little Finnegan, crawling around under their legs, picking up whatever looks interesting. Getting nutrients and learning about roast zebra or whatever.

I'm not sure where vermi-composting fits into all this. Except maybe back in the cave, men thought that finding a disgusting habit would help them survive. I'm still working on this one...

While we're on the topic of knives and greyhounds

It's funny how you forget about things that happen to you until your memory is triggered, by the media or someone else's story or even just a similar feeling.

Back in my Commercial Drive days, I was riding a city bus when a guy holding aloft a large kitchen knife tried to share my ride.

He looked like he wandered out of a busy kitchen somewhere nearby. He was dressed simply, and clearly very stunned out. In my imagination, I thought maybe he had been cutting carrots for 18 hours straight, then walked away from his counter and decided to go home, knife in hand. That would be the amusing version, and probably the truth.

Except now he was on a city bus, my city bus, holding erect a large, sharp kitchen knife. The driver asked him to leave. But instead he stepped into the bus walked down the aisle.

Everyone froze, eyes huge, watching that knife.

I was near the back door. It's amazing how you can move without actually going anywhere. My body went cold and I slowly, imperceptibly started shrinking closer to the sides of the bus. So did everyone else. In total silence. Nobody wanted to stand out more than anyone else.

He continued walking down the aisle, vacant eyed, knife in hand. Toward me, and everyone else near the back of the bus.

And then he walked out the back door and went away.

Unlikely but interesting alternate future: Circus hippie

You only notice the circus hippies if you hang out a lot in Parc Lafontaine. Correction: if you hang out in a specific corner of Parc la Fontaine.

It starts in the spring, when you see weird looking vans next to the park. They're always there... and they look... homey. With curtains, and guitars and and maybe a cat.

And then you see the guy eating his breakfast in the park. Hey: who needs to live in the country when you can sleep, eat, and practice your tight rope in a manicured pastoral paradise, for free? Hell... you can bet I'm jealous.

It starts slowly on summer afternoons. It can even take hours for the circus hippies to string up their tight rope. One climbs a tree, there's a lot of tossing and looping, pulling taut, testing... And more tree climbing to get on the rope, arms a-kimbo.

People who hang in this corner of the park don't even stop to watch anymore.

Then the other circus hippies appear. Jugglers. Fire stick people. Hula. Tumbling. Stuff I don't even know the word for. At the peak of summer, there could be several clusters of circus hippies cavorting. Others show up and play music, bring kids and dogs.

It's all very civilized. The circus hippies are beautiful. Tan... lithe... All summer long, the vans come and go. Some are just visiting, maybe from other circus hippie parks? And then the weather turns colder, the days shorter, and one by one they start to slip away.

Until just one van remains. Maybe he's the circus hippie park custodian. Maybe a bit of September warmth will bring out two or three more dreadlocked cavorters. And then they're gone, somewhere else beautiful no doubt.

Six random paragraphs

The wicker man
I was biking to work yesterday morning and I saw this awesome guy. He looked like that scraggly guy from the front of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. He had a little pointy beard and a floppy kind of witchy rain hat on his head. And he was riding a bicycle that was all about wicker. Yes, wicker. He had woven wicker into both of his wheels; they looked like big, flat rattan pancakes. And he had multiple wicker baskets on the front, sides and back of his bike. Go wicker man!

The 1970's: pre-stained
I promised J that I would blog about one of his obsessions: pale creamy yellow utensils and furniture from the late seventies. His theory is that people in the seventies started to manufacture things that looked previously cigarette stained. Because everything already looked all dirty back in the sixties and seventies anyway.

Hey, this is Jason here, correcting the paragraph, immediately above. We have all seen appliances in that awful tallow yellow colour, right? A yellow fridge, or stove. It dawned on me a while back that these disgustingly coloured appliances actually match cigarette stained kitchen walls perfectly. So I figured that in the early 70s, when these colours started appearing, it was a market response to tired 50s moms, who could no longer muster the strength to repaint their kitchens and wanted something that matched. There. Get it? Jason out.

Hey, how come my parties aren't this much fun?
And by looking up "1970s yellow" I found these amazing party photos. These people look like fun.

Fireside chat for other cyclists
One of the things I love about Montreal is that we're a city of anarchists. Nobody does what they're told. If you tell a Montrealer to do something, she'll often go out and do the absolute opposite.

Still, I had a secret moment of glee I heard that the police were out ticketing cyclists. Because, as much as I endorse the city's "do whatever you want at your own risk" credo, I've seen cyclists do some pretty retarded things... risking their lives just to look cool or save time or hell if I know...

The way I see it, we're never going to get respect from drivers if we're riding our bikes all over the road as if we don't understand how to read traffic signs. At least, as cyclists, we need to act like cycling is a choice... not something we do because we're too stupid to go out and get a driver's license.

Hoedown at the anti-hippie nudist dock

I spent part of four weeks on Saltspring Island this summer. It's pleasant there. Most of the people who move to Saltspring are either very rich, or new age types who walked away from other lives to do something different. Like fix rich peoples' chakras.

Normally I'm intrigued by new age people. I think a lot of them have figured something out: that life actually has meaning. This is refreshing.

But when you get to Saltspring Island, life has lots and lots and lots of meaning. Everyone you meet has so much... time to tell you about it. They've all found the answer. Your soul is their cottage industry.

But Saltspring has another very special and kind of person: the anti-hippie. No, they're not gun-toting rednecks, but dark, scary white trash hippies that live in the woods and hate everyone.

We met some before our swim, one afternoon at the nudist lake. The dirty hippies were drunk and stoned, reeling like sailors, stark naked on the dock. They had long hair and sinewy, tanned bodies and faces all twisted up with hate and hard living.

The dirty hippies were cussin', fightin' and spreading hate like nobody's business.

It sounded like this: "Hey, man, I just want peace and love, you know. But he's here spreading bad vibes. And man he... HEY YOU SCUMBAG M*****F***** you get away from my dog!"

Next came naked hippie wrestling on the dock, the tattooed one versus the tall lanky one with the dangling... oh... nevermind.

All I can guess is, a place like Saltspring dredges up it's own special brand of counterculture to juxtapose all that sickly sweetness and light. In a way, they were their own special brand of homegrown punk.

Because two-year-olds are very devious

We live with a two-year-old. Things don't always go her way, as you can imagine. We're beginning to learn that she will always find a way to get what she wants.

Sometimes her machinations are very complex. It can take an hour, or even days for her to figure out her next move. And then "whhhtttt", she does it. Fast as a viper. Right behind our slow, dumb-ass adult backs.

I used to think that two-year-olds were just overgrown, mono-syllabic babies. Toddlers, they call them. Which is a kind of disarming word, like they're not responsible for what they do; like they're little wind up toys.

What I know now is that two-year-olds are hyper intelligent. She's smarter than the two of us put together. And she has boundless energy. And lots of time to watch adults blunder through their overcrowded lives.

If our two-year-old could say all the words she wanted to say on any given afternoon, we would be living with Sarah Silverman.

And then, all of a sudden, she gets all quiet and overwhelmed by something and you feel all this empathy for this tiny little person who needs you to hold her hand while she goes down the slide.

Let's take a minute to geek out on the Matrix

I watched it again last week: The Matrix.

And now I'm geeking out, 1990s style, on virtual worlds and all that.

I go back and forth. Between thinking that it's pretty cool that we can externalize our imaginations and share them with strangers. And thinking that we're making a huge mistake, retreating into imaginary worlds while the real world around us gets all polluted and broken.

Here in Canada, most of us can go into a clean world of pretty pictures whenever we want to. Whether we use TV, movies, video games or the Internet, it's really all the same thing: alternate realities that inform us, and distract us.

When we're walking down the street, those alternate realities are in our heads: advertisements, songs, websites, stuff we want. You could even say that our daily lives, our homes and identities are built from ephemeral consumerist daydreams...

Meanwhile, someone else grows our food, makes our clothes, builds our roads and houses. Many of us who work in media spend all day building alternate realities for other people. We make money that pays someone else to deal with all the unnecessary aspects of hard, cold reality.

Don't get me wrong, we're a long way from living in little Matrix pods, factory farmed by giant, hungry robot bugs.

But I also wonder... maybe the hippies have figured it out. (Then I remember my recent sojourn to the land of the hippies, Saltspring Island, where we met dirty old hobo hippies who had gone over to the dark side... but that's for another posting, another time.)

Despite their bad music and questionable hygiene, maybe the hippies really have broken out of the matrix. And maybe, next year, I'll try growing my own food. Just to see how it feels.

Handbags, and women, and handbags

Yesterday I was in an elevator and I fixated on this woman's giant, leather, fake Gucci handbag. And I tried to understand it.

What was in there? I. just. never. understood. purses.

Then later, I was leafing through a glossy magazine. And again, all those ads for handbags. A lot of handbags... giant purses held in front of skinny legs. Purses, glowing like magical talismans. Purses glinting in the sun.

What kind of power do handbags have over us?

We all know the analogy of a purse as a woman's girl parts, right? Handbags don't speak to men. They speak to other women. In a power language that only other women understand.

Work with me here:

So why not blow 10k on some kind of big ass, super expensive Italian handbag? It's like saying: "my #*%& is more expensive than yours..." Fair enough. It probably is.

But how do you extend that analogy to the fake Gucci handbag? Compared to the real deal, a fake Gucci handbag is pragmatic. But it's also a fantasy object.

And this is where I stop, because I still don't understand purses. And I feel mean, for wanting to deconstruct another woman's handbag. Sorry.