Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 

Well, a little bit of food and a lot of extra sleep later has found me alive and happy and…ready to go to work…well, at least I’m still alive. That’s got to count for something, I suppose, since I wouldn’t be able to count if I wasn’t.

Anyhoo, today’s little bit of nowhere is something I’ve been meaning to write for quite some time, and for various reasons either something more interesting to write instead has come up, or I’ve been away from the computer. Or Blogger’s been flipping me the binary middle finger.

About 2 weeks ago, Mel & I were joking about the hair upon my chest. It’s not shaggy by any stretch of the imagination; I highly doubt that if I were to take my shirt off, a hunter would mistake me for a bear and try to skin me or remove my gall bladder. On the other hand, my genetic code has handed down to me a nice layer of padding over my pectorals, which tapers off the closer it gets to my bellybutton.

I’ll pause for a moment to let many of you cringe at the subsequent offending mental picture.

Okay, moving right along, our conversation got me thinking about the hype surrounding shaved or hairless chests. Personally, I don’t see the big deal. Then again, I might flinch if a guy took off his shirt and it looked like someone had glued a border collie to his chest. I’d probably flinch even more if a girl took off her shirt and looked like that. But I can’t exactly wrap my brain about how, when pressed, we only hear of people preferring a naked/hairless chest. (Who knows? Maybe the ones who say they prefer hairy chests are quelled because of their “liberal” views of chesthair.)

So I sat there thinking to myself, “What’s the big deal about a hairless chest? Why do so many guys cave under the pressure and shave?” Alas, possessing hair upon my noble and manly chest--

I’ll pause for a moment to let many of you snicker at my overblown egomania.

--meant that I could not properly understand the hairless state of mind. In order to understand, you must first experience. So I stood up in front of the bathroom mirror, lathered myself up and shaved my chest.

I’ll pause for a moment as the ramifications of what you’ve just read sink in, which will no doubt be followed by lots of hysterical laughter at my expense. *Shrug* Everyone has to have a hobby, I suppose. And to those of you who recall the leg-shaving fiasco from the Delmo Dress Incident, you will all be proud to know that not once did I nick or cut myself while saving!

Now I can truly say after experiencing life without chesthair that all the hype is overblown. Personally, I’ve spent the last two weeks feeling oddly naked and having to squint through the brightness of my ridiculously white chest now on prominent display. Muscle tone isn’t the problem; the gymnastics and weight training programs I took while I was growing up saw to that. Given my gangly stringbean condition, I can’t exactly bulk up without suddenly looking a character from Utena--all broad shoulders, all skinny legs. Perhaps if I were able to tan I might be able to improve upon a complexion that’s currently whiter than the paint on our kitchen cupboards.

But all of that is a moot point right now, since I’m letting my chesthair slowly grow back. I’m not about to regularly shave my chest; I don’t have the money to afford all the razors I’d go through. In the meantime, the itching has at long last begun. Which disturbs me, since Mel was giving warnings left and right about how much I’d be itching almost non-stop days after shaving my chest. It’s been roughly two weeks now, and the itching has barely registered. I get the occasional need to scratch at my chest, but I’m happy to report that when it comes deforesting your chesthair and then letting it all grow back, my forest is hassle-free!

I’ll pause for a moment to let you make a face over how horrible that particular analogy was. Thank you, and good night.


Today’s Lesson: you cannot burn a CD if you put the CD upside-down into the CD burner. It took me two failed attempts before I realised what the problem was. Yes, yes, all at once now, if you please: “BAKA.”

But look at it this way, at least I didn’t mistake the drive for a cupholder!
posted by Phillip at 5:32 AM

 

Just when things have finally calmed down after the Easter weekend, and I have a few minutes to sit down and pull another little bit of nowhere from out of my hat...in the morning, Blogger tells me it's gone and fubar'd itself, and then in the evening I'm knocked flat on my ass courtesy of some sort of vile little 24-hour bug. Figures. But a little patience and a lot of sweating the bug out, and I'll probably be discovering some new obstacle standing in the way between me and blogging.

I blame the Evidence Mice. They're cunning, those little buggers.

In other news, apparently Mel sounds like a kid whenever she answers the phone. When someone from the local newspaper called asking us to subscribe, and Mel answered the phone, he asked, "Are either of your parents home?" To say she was vexed would be stating the obvious. Then again, sometimes I lack that whole "knack for subtlety" thing.

Again, I blame the Evidence Mice.

Today's Lesson: in the gospel according to Mel, there is no such thing as too much Cardcaptor Sakura.
posted by Phillip at 5:29 PM

 

You know, there are occasions where I start to believe that there are forces in the universe deeply against me returning to a regularly scheduled little bit of nowhere. Just as I endeavour to start blogging on a more consistent basis, suddenly Blogger keeps eating my blogs, then secretly regurgitating them later on and mocking me when I realize I rewrite something that had already been posted? And then today Blogger crapped out, froze and died on me before I could even type a single letter.

Why is the world against me? What sort of higher power is deathly terrified by my little bit of nowhere? Is it becuase of the Evidence Mice? Is it because of my rampaging sexiness? Sadly, most of you reading this are probably deciding that the "Evidence Mice" theory is the least offensive one...and also the one that makes more sense.

In other news, while I have problems with the corporate giant Walmart building stores near the works of ancient civilizations (even moreso since I actually visited Teotihuacan and saw how beautiful it was) or over mass Hawaiian grave sites (though the idea of a bunch of Walmart workers having to fend of zombie customers is rather funny), I am torn to outright shunning them. Why? Because they have given me the Seasme Street movie Follow That Bird for $7.

Some of you may ask why Sesame Street. Some of you may snicker. Those of you who know of my passion for Jim Henson's work--and please please please may Gaffney be right that the Muppet Show box sets are nigh!--know that I am seeking to collect what I can of his on DVD. While the majority of the Muppet movies still need to be purchased, they're the easier ones to find. I've just got Emmet Otter's Jug Band to acquire and I think I have all the more obscure titles.

"But why Sesame Street's Follow That Bird?" you ask. Two words: pre-Elmo.

Oh, and could someone please do me a favour and smack the idiots at Old Navy who keep making these really tacky song-and-dance commercials? Preferfably with a sledgehammer? Or how about Sledgehammer, I hear he's back on DVD now. And while we're at it, let's also perform grievous bodily harm to Sara Jessica Parker's new Gap "Pretty in Pimp--er, Pink" ads.

Today's Lesson: on hiatus, as nothing on particular value was learned today.
posted by Phillip at 6:36 PM

 

So on March 18th, in trying to keep with a semi-regular period of posting on this little bit of nowhere, I posted the entry: A Day For Everyone To Pretend They're Irish...Welsh...Give Me That Beer Already! And then, an error occurred in Blogger, and that little bit of nowhere was subsequently devoured. Thinking it was doomed forever to rest inside the Blogger gut of errors & oblivion, I decided against rewriting the whole thing, and ate lunch instead. To my surprise, days later my apparently eaten post reappeared in this little bit of nowhere. Of course, this is my second attempt at posting this particular entry; apparently, when blogger tells you that the post has been accepted and will now appear on your blog, it's lying through its textual teeth.

Bah! This is why I'm starting to write these things beforehand in a wordpad document I can save before something tries to flush my poignant words of widsom down then Internet toilet.

Anyhoo, the rest of this past weekend was followed up by work shifts, and a trip to Brantford that saw Kevin & I attempt to write a Confic, but got distracted by sleep, Gabriel drooling onto my hair and Shaolin Soccer. But in the end, we not only got the 3-page Confic introduction written, but we also managed to get the 5-page introduction to the introduction written! (That last sentence will make sense once the script is revealed.)

In other news, Today's Lesson stems from my unwitting discovery made last night that I am in fact not a cat, nor do I have night vision, and cannot see through pitch black. As demonstrated when I tried to locate our bathroom in the dark without turning a light on, and subsequently ran forehead-first into the doorframe. The good news: my head's fine, as it's suffered these sort of heavy impacts before. (Insert your "well that explains a few things about you" joke here.) The bad news: I think I'm going to need some serious tools to fix that dent in the bathroom doorframe.
posted by Phillip at 7:40 AM

 

Today I discovered that yesterday was St. Patrick's Day, much to my surprise. I had not been informed prior of this, so I indeed missed the entirety of it. Though I think in the end I had something green to contribute to this annual tradition. Not that I had green on me, but in me. At least, I'm certain there's some part of my viscera that's a got a greenish tint to it.

However I'm not about to let anyone say: "Oh yeah? Prove it." Why, you ask? Well, mostly because my Time-Life book series Home Surgery Made Easy is on loan to a friend. And I don't want to ask for my Volume 5 back in the middle of an important armchair gall bladder operation.

Bonus points to anyone who knows the cartoon reference to that one.

Today's Lesson: a cat performing a flying leap onto your stomach is not the best way to wake up in the morning.
posted by Phillip at 7:06 AM

 

According to today's Globe & Mail newspaper, Toronto gets the honour of hosting the world premiere of the Lord of the Rings musical. According to the reports it's going to be a sweeping operatic spectacle chronicling all three books in 3 1/2 hours, featuring a chorus line of orcs, Gollum in a tap-dancing solo, and Mike's head imploding somewhere out in Wisconson.

I'm still waiting for the Broadway musical versions of: Final Fantasy 8 (wherein Squall is still an angsty dick), Excel Saga (which would have to be directed by Nabeshin, no question) and CSI (where Grissom will sing, "The evidence will never lie/with each case it will catch our guy!").

And yes, I can hear you all scream, "Sacrilege!" from here. But I'd rather prefer the exclamation of "Heresy!" instead. It's so much more colourful. ^-^

Today's Lesson: bad movies can still have good soundtracks. Amazing...
posted by Phillip at 5:28 PM

 

...discovering that your local library has the Neil Gaiman audio CD. I have to say, just hearing his Brit accent as he tells us how the Queen of Melanesia stopped by to do the gardening just has me melting into a puddle of fanboyish goo. But the good kind of goo. Not the "and all that hentai doiujin you have on your hard drive is why I never use your computer mouse" kind of goo, it should be noted.

Speaking of things related to books and happiness (but not body odour; that was yesterday), it is with much belated rejoicing that I sit here with an authentic "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" Gryffindor scarf wrapped around my neck. Sure it's huge and in wheeling my chair around I've almost strangled myself three times, but I'm thrilled to no end that not only did Ginny kindly put this scarf up for auction, but that people voted for Chulthu to be its recipient.

For those of you unaware, Ginny did not have a pressing need for a Gryffindor scarf, and put it up for auction in a most colourful way. Hopefuls for the scarf could enter a reason why they should get the scarf, and the general public could vote based on the entries. Here was mine:

Dear Ginny,

I have a little Elder God who is anaemic (possibly due to a boating accident he had when he was younger), and he frequently gets the chills from the cold, harsh Canadian winters. This poor little guy, who for the sake of anonymity shall be referred to as “C-chan”, is used to the more tropical climate of Latitude 47 degrees 9’S, Longitude 126 degrees 43’W. Already I’m saddened to say that with the recent bout of snowstorms we’ve had, C-chan has spent these last few weeks burrowed beneath a Harry Potter duvet and trying not to shiver his bulbous anthropoid head right off his winged body. It’s disheartening to watch C-chan try and use a Kleenex, his facial tentacles blowing horribly in all directions, instead of him being out devouring Christmas carollers or driving customers insane as they wait in the lines of the local Walmart.

Now while he’d rather make me suffer eons of terrible madness in some dimension of non-Euclidean proportions than let it be known to the general public, I will have to confess that C-chan is very much a Harry Potter fan. Maybe it has something to do with the giant squid in the lake; I don’t know. But as already indicated, C-chan adores anything to do with Harry Potter. He has Harry Potter bedsheets and posters, all the movies on DVD, and all the books in hardcover. He even has one of those dreaded “unnameable” brooms. (You know the vibrating ones of which I speak.) It would mean the world to us all if he could curl up beneath a blanket, snuggling up next to his plush Hermione doll, with his Gryffindor scarf keeping him and all his impossible appendages safe and warm.

So please, vote not for me, but for C-chan. After all, when he does eventually get over all this cold and rise up to enslave humanity, those of you who voted in his favour will certainly be shown mercy (and be eaten last, as opposed to everyone else, who’ll just be eaten beforehand.)

Please, won’t somebody think of the Elder God?

For those of you wondering, in the end "C-chan" received his scarf and has been able to survive the worst of winter as a happy Gryffindor fan...which is somewhat countered by the way he's eaten any other Gryffindor fan he's met. Then again he's also eaten every Harry Potter fan he's met...not to mention every non-HP fan too, so I guess it all balances out somewhere. And since he's busying himself with plans to drive the rest of humanity mad (purportedly by financing another Catwoman movie), C-chan's graciously allowed me to play with the scarf until he sees fit to devour me.

So in closing, I thank you, and C-chan thanks...and looks forward to devouring you all.

Today's Lesson: when the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over.
posted by Phillip at 5:52 PM

 

It's been...what? 15 days since this little bit of nowhere last went static? And some of you are probably fretting and laying down conspiracy theories about why it happened. Was it due to the various things life throws at you hitting me in the face with such force that I had to be taken to the hopsital to ensure I didn't have a concussion? Was it just plain laziness? Has it been fatigue, both physical and with the world at large? The answer lays somewhere between a little of Columns B&C, and a whole lot of Column A. And just to add some zing, we'll thrown in a little paprika too and let the whole thing bake in the oven for half an hour.

As far as I can ascertain, as of late I've been in the throes of what could be called mild apathy towards writing. I think I've been having more throes than is either needed or called for, and overall they leave with this complete lack of desire to do...well, not a lot of anything. Even writing an Email to people has proven a troublesome effort, and my lack of energy or desire has done nothing to help.

On the other hand, I've been doing a lot of reading, which is at least a good sign that I haven't turned my back on writing altogether. In the past, if I've needed time away from writing, I go back into my near-voracious "bookworm" state. While I can't even hope to rival the speed at which Mel eats through books--so to speak. I'd rather not have people conjuring up images of Mel having a candlelight dinner and pouring ketchup over a paperback copy of Patricia Cornwell's "Blowfly." After all, as any good connesseur knows, mystery novels should always be served with mustard.

Anyhoo, while I'm not as much a bookworm as Mel is (though right now she's waving a bookwork plushie at me to show that there is no physical resemblance between her and the viral plushie), I've been reading a lot more books with a lot more impressive speed than I have in recent months. I personally find this rather encouraging, since in the past it's meant I've been recharging my batteries, and will sooner or later launch back into writing full-force. I'm hoping that's the case here. I like writing, and hate having as many unfinished stories & projects as I currently do. A number of them would need a month or so of solid work and they'd at least be finished. Maybe not presentable, but finished, and right now I can settle for that.

As it is, I still have waiting for me once I get back into things: an accountant discovering that there's an infrequent subway station on the line which leads into a sunny field populated by nothing but fairies and sunflowers; a horse who thinks it's a unicorn, and subsequently that she lost her horn somewhere; a fox who speaks in rhymes and riddles about missing princes and dark forests; a knight who rides day and night in an infernal crusade to cut down true love wherever he finds it; and the great & terrible Cthulhu becoming the victim of his own corporate theme park.

Speaking of reading....

Libraries in San Luis Obispo County have had their own rules banning offensive body odour since 1994, but the policy became law after the board of supervisors last month adopted an ordinance that lets authorities kick out malodorous guests. Visitors to 14 libraries and a bookmobile also could be asked to leave for fighting, eating, drinking, sleeping, playing games, and printing or viewing illegal materials on library computers.

"The point is to make the library a comfortable, safe place for everyone to use," said Moe McGee, assistant director of the San Luis Obispo City-County Library.

A strict code of conduct, officials argue, is needed to ensure one patron's right to use a public library doesn't infringe on the rights of another.Yet the law can raise tough questions for librarians, said Irene Macias, Santa Barbara's library services manager. "What is bad odour?" Macias asked. "A woman who wears a strong perfume? A person who had a garlicky meal?"

The webpage for this can be found here:
http://news.sympatico.msn.ca/Home/ContentPosting.aspx?contentid=
7c441b0745894efca3d003b62cb4b3b2&show=False&number=
0&showbyline=False&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc


And Today's Lesson is: a cat does not belong in the oven, no matter how much he might think otherwise. By the same token our oven door, when opened to allow for cleaning, can hold the weight of your average male cat.
posted by Phillip at 10:18 AM

 


From CBC's online news site:

Japan aims for moon base by 2025

TOKYO - On the heels of its successful rocket launch on the weekend, Japan announced plans to send people to a station on the moon by 2025.

"We will include [the lunar station] as one of the future goals in our new long-term vision, which we are going to submit with the government's Space Activity Commission by the end of March," an official with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency told Agence France-Presse on Monday.

Japan's space agency, or JAXA, also aims to set up a satellite system to transmit alerts for disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis.

Satellites would send information to cellphones on Earth, added the official, who asked not to be named.

The official was responding to a news story in Monday's edition of the Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun, which reported JAXA is drafting a long-term plan to develop vehicles like NASA's space shuttles by 2025.

Japan's space plans call for robots to explore the moon by 2015. Within two decades, technology could allow humans to stay on a solar-powered lunar research base for extended periods.

The international space industry doubts Japan will become a major player at launching commercial satellites, but its technology could contribute to regional tsunami warnings.

On Saturday, a rocket designed and built by the Japanese successfully placed a satellite into orbit. The $155 million US satellite will assist weather forecasts and aircraft navigation.

In 1972, Japan became the fourth country to launch a satellite. Aside from its lunar mission, the country aims to be the first to collect and retrieve samples from an asteroid.

In other news, snowstorms have been braved, groceries were bought, and now I am forbidden from eating any of the freshly-baked cookies cooling out on the rack. This is bad enough since I was also forbidden from eating any of the cookie dough. Being a notorious cookie monster is a reputation that sometimes just works against you. Oh well...

Today's Lesson: it's harder than you think to try writing something deliberately bad.
posted by Phillip at 1:29 PM