stories

I’m going to take a moment to talk about a friend of mine, who we’ll call Johnny (because his parents did)

Johnny’s at university now, so neither I nor my York-bound buddies see much of him, but even before he went off he was the kind of guy who’d drop off everyone’s social radar for months at a time, only to re-emerge for a week or so with some terrifying new device to show off. You see, Johnny likes building machines, and Johnny likes to see what kind of trouble he can cause with household or otherwise easily obtained materials, so Johnny builds a lot of weapons. In his shed. Just for laughs.

His personal armoury, to the best of my recollection, includes: three air cannons, one of which is capable of driving a carrot through a wooden fence at a distance of several feet; a flamethrower that he built for a mutual friend; a jet engine (“it doesn’t get a lot of thrust but it is quite pretty,” he says) and, terrifyingly, a microwave cannon. I saw him down the pub on Saturday after finishing my shift (he was back in York for the Easter holidays; I think he’s probably gone back now) and he told me that he’s banned from one of the labs at university after a professor caught him amidst some potentially terrifying experiments with lasers (I’d had an amount to drink, but he was saying something about using electromagenetic fields to somehow intensify commercially-available laser pointers? I forget). He said something about modifying a nailgun at one point, I think, to increase its range and accuracy.

He’s a laugh and a half and generally polite and friendly but holy shit I am glad we are not enemies.

As a bit more background, I work for a ticketing agency that is wholly owned by an arts venue.

For some reason, the management of this venue feel an urge to hold quarterly meetings of the whole organisation (mostly, they happen so the Marketing department can continue to justify their existence).

In 2002, myself and the 2 other members of the IT department had a mild obsession with the Upright Citizens Brigade (particularly the finale of season one) and an overwhelming desire to not attend these meetings.

Enter Tuvok.

With the Tuvok action figure, we could safely send 2 people to the meetings, yet semi-truthfully say 3 members of the IT team were there.

In the intervening time, the other 2 have left and others have come in, but Tuvok has maintained his record of perfect meeting attendance, something that nobody else in the IT department can boast.

Being an office drone, small distractions such as this are what make life tolerable.

I just don’t know what will happen when Tuvok finds his way home.

Sometimes, many happy accidents come together at once to bring a little joy into your life. I’m going to tell two of those stories.

First, I went to see 300 on Friday afternoon with Josh. We both enjoyed it well enough but found ourselves leaving feeling like there was a better movie lying there somewhere. As we walked, I figured it out – the movie had no sense of humor about itself, it didn’t let itself be the rollicking bloodfest we wanted it to be – it was taking itself too seriously.

At the very moment we were wondering how to give it that sense of humor, we walked past a van blasting AC/DC.

Someone please cut me a 300 trailer scored to “For Those About To Rock.” Please.

Story two: I finally got around to pulling the pictures off my camera from when some friends visited, and found, nestled among the drunk people and smiles, this tender moment:

Worf, you’ll teach us all a lesson about love, you old dog.

Hey everyone! I’ve never had a blog before. I had something called a “Deadjournal” in 2002, when it was a fairly funny play on “Livejournal”, (and it was invite only! I felt so special!) but I think I made about 4 posts and couldn’t be bothered to do anything else on it.

But here I am today! I sometimes do things on the internet. Today LRR put up not only a video I wrote, but also my comic (which is not very good.)!
I even found time to do a doodle at work:

It kind of looks like an ugly doll in a devil suit.

And now for a good story:
I live in a very Chinese part of Vancouver, just about at the intersection of 41st Ave and Victoria Drive. I can tell it’s a very Chinese part of Vancouver because there is a bubble tea house on my block that has menus that are all in Chinese, but you can get ones that are bilingual. It also stays open until 2:00 am on weekends, and serves the kind of Chinese food that sounds like a good idea at 2:00 am, provided you have been drinking all night. Last time I went I had some of a friend’s fish ball soup, but we all debated ordering a side of crispy fried pig intestine.

There is also a Chinese market a block away, which is hells of cheap, but their food goes bad fast, and sometimes it’s bad before you’ve gotten a chance to eat it. Once I cut the end off a perfectly normal looking zucchini and a rancid brown goo poured out of it. It had somehow rotted from the inside, with no discernable outside symptoms, such as the a sloshing noise from it’s liquid interior.

Anyhow, 41st and Victoria are also very busy streets, and my apartment faces out onto the road, so I’m used to a constant stream of car and bus noise, well into the night. I was sitting in my living room at about 10:00pm, trying to finish my comic (which was mentioned earlier) when it seemed like all outside noise stopped. This sudden silence actually caught my attention far more than anything else I’d heard that night, so I looked up from my work, but I got distracted by trying to draw just the right look in panel three, and went back to work. Gradually the silence was filled by what sounded like a woman singing on the street. I was almost about to get up, and see what kind of woman could make all the cars and buses and people stand still long enough to listen quietly to her song, when I finally nailed the right nose-to-forehead-to-chin ratio. By the time I had finished what I was doing she had walked by, and the traffic had started up again.