On the plus side....LOTS of time to do things now

Well I've just had a life experience that millions of other people have had, but one which I have never experienced until now. I was laid off on Thursday.

Now in the indusry I was in, it was always possible that my job would disappear, and in the last little while, it became more and more obvious that something was going to happen. When the training guy doesn't have anyone to train for months, and it doesn't look like there would be for many MORE months, well the writing was on the wall. To be fair, my ex-company was very good to me, and I'm on no financial distress now or for the next several months at least. However, it did present me with the following insights.

1-my house is REALLY dusty. Having the time to actually look in corners, behind televisions and under sofas made me realize I've bee a bit derelict in my cleaning duties. Now I'll finally have time to test that Shamwow.

2-I'll be able to go bowling on a weeknight. Usually weeknights have been reserved for mundane maintenance duties like laundry, grocery shopping and shovelling snow/ cutting grass, depending on the season. Now I'll be able to wear those supernaturally comfy rent-a-shoes whenever I want. BTW, did you ever look at the word "weeknight" and read it as "wee knight"?

3-I'm surprisingly unperturbed. A lot of this has to do with the generous settlement my ex-employer has given me, but right now I'm pretty relaxed about the whole thing. Someone, somewhere apparently said that everyone has three or four careers in their lifetime. Looks like I'm in for my next one-what will it be??? Male model? Lunatic reclusive candy maker? Shamwow salesman? It's like the entire universe is suddenly my oyster, and I'm the irritating bit of sand that will make me a pearl!

4-If I want, I can sit in my PJ's and eat macaroini and cheese all day long.

5-telling your friends and family is the worst part of the entire experience. Having to repeat bad news several times is like living through it all over again. I think it's especially hard on the last person to be told. While they're coming to grips with the shock of the news, you're already onto blase. I think we all need a loud-mouthed schnook in our lives who will happily spread bad news for you.

Anyway, that's what's new this week. Now I'll have plenty of time to do more blogging :)

Confusion...or correction??

Ever notice how easy it is to mistake or transpose words you've heard or read? I'm becoming convinced that our minds are actually correcting the mundane and blase, and making the world as entertaining as it really should be. Here's a few smidgens from the last day or two.

I was listening to Steve Miller singing "Jet Airliner" on the oldies station in the car. For some reason I was singing "sweet old jet airliner", and I think I like that version better. AGF (awesome girl friend) told me about a co-worker of hers that has been singing "it's a family of bears" to the song "It's a family affair". Now THAT is infinitely better than the original.

Today I went to a friend's used bookstore (Zed Books-if you're in Winnipeg, check them out!!). I bought a copy of Rita Mae Brown'd mystery "Catch as Cat Can", which she "co-authors" with her cat, "Sneaky Pie Brown". When my friend checked through the book he said "I though this said "Sneaky Brown Pete". Again, a MUCH BETTER NAME.

In my office at work I have a copy of a 1950's-era wrestling poster, featuring a match with someone named "Dirty Dick Swailes". As if that name wasn't goodenough, a co-worker caught a glance at the poster and said "I thought his name was Dirty Dick Sweaty Balls". Easily, the BEST WRESTLING NAME EVER!!!!.

Mistakes? Or raw, unexpurgated creativity???

Thoughts on Mo-Town

Last week I returned from a two-week business trip to Detroit, Mighigan. The motor city's economic woes have been well documented over recent years, and they are still evident in parts of their downtown, where you can see 30 storey buildings boarded up from top to bottom, and struggle to find a retail outlet larger than a pharmacy. Instead of belabor the obvious, I thought I'd share some good points about my visit to Mo-Town.

Greektown-I ate here on a number of nights, and the food and service in every restaurant was great. I especially liked some of the older places, where you can still still on a wooden chair at a wooden table covered with a red-checkered tablecloths, or sit in a booth. One place had the best deep-dish pizza i think I've ever eaten.

The Detroit Red Wings- I was able to see a Wings/LA Kings game on my visit. The Joe Louis Arena (or the "Joe" as people call it) is an older place designed as one large bowl, rather than in a series of decks. Every sight line is great and they served the world's best beer, Lienenkeugal (sorry about the spelling), shipped in from Wisconsin. They even played Stompin' Tom Connor's anthem "The Good Old Hockey Game" at the start. Lots of tradition, great beer and a free water bottle.

Windsor Ontario. OK, so Windsor isn't officially part of Detroit, it's south, across the river. It was nice to see the skyline of Windsor, and from my hotel room, I was able to see part of Caesars hotel and casino between the towers of the GM headquarters in the Rennaissance Center. Unfortunately, all I could see were huge red letters spelling "SARS", but hey, it was a nice view.

Great popcorn-one night I went to see "Sherlock Holmes" in one of the Rennaissance Center movie theaters. I have to admit, their popcorn was probbaly among the best I've tasted, and I think they used real butter.

Folks=the people I met were generally nice. At the place I usually had breakfast (Anton's breakfast and lunch), I was usually addressed as "honey" by the lady taking my order. For a city with a reputation for violence, the people I met were quite nice.

In a way I kind of feel bad for Detroit. they are struggling with rebuilding their downtown, like a number of cities in North America. Unfortunately, they are facing the old chicken/ egg conundrum of which should come first, the people, or the shops and services to attract the people. Here's hoping the people of that city can turn their fortunes around

Ruminations on Grey Cup 2009

Yesterday was the Grey Cup, the Canadian Football League championship game, wherein the Montreal Alouettes defeated the Saskatchewan Roughriders 28-27 on a field goal with zero time left on the clock. A thriller for some, a crushing disappointment for others, but for the CFL, another great showcase for the funnest football league on the planet. Here are some thoughs about what I saw before, during and after the game.

1-I hate to say this, but the game looked kind of "cheap" to me. I'm not talking about the game itself or the play of the teams, I'm talking about the way the game was presented. The player introductions are usually done with a lot of hooplah; fireworks, smoke, coloured lights, explosions, screaming cheerleaders and fans, and possibly stampeding moose. This year there seems to be 12 guys waving flags at the players as they ran into the field. The flags weren't even in the team colours. The half-time show, featuring a song or two by Blue Rodeo, had the puniest crowd of "fans" I've ever seen. It looked they asked the grounds crew and some passing lumberjacks to pause briefly in front of the stage and occasionally shake their arms in random directions. The presentation of the Grey Cup itself took forever. By the time the mounties carried the trophy onto the field, all the sober fans were gone, leaving a few dazed Stampeder fans who were still wondering where their team was, and are the playoffs about to begin? I know we live in a PC universe, but couldn't they actually get a pair of mounties the same size to carry the d*** Cup?? One looked like Marcia Wallace in a mountie costume, and the other seems to have a two-by-four up the yin yang. Other than that, it was a fine game.

2-I really love the fact that we have ONE Grey Cup, not newly minted trophies to collect and trade, as the Super Bowl does. Would anyone care how many times a Super Bowl trophy was broken by the players that won it? Would a Super Bowl trophy be left behind in a strip club? Has a Super Bowl trophy ever been held for ransom? I rest my case.

3-Every CFL season, there are a number of loud-mouthed, obnoxious "fans" in Canada who can't seem to tolerate the fact that large numbers of Canadians still like to watch CFL football. They usually surface at Grey Cup time, and can't wait to tell anyone who's listening that CFL fans must be the dumbest of brush-apes to even consider watching the CFL, a league, they say, is full of undersized NFL cast-offs and poorly trained Canadians. They mock the "small salaries" and "small stadiums", and generally try to puff themselves up as being somehow mentally superior to favor the NFL product. Well folks, you can watch whatever you want. The NFL IS a good product for people who like that brand of football, and their players are amazing atheletes. But let's be real here for a minute-we're talking about professional football.....grown men playing a game for our entertainment!!! I personally take satisfaction in the fact that a single CFL players' average salary is in-line with their medium-to-well paid fans, not the operating budget for an entire teaching staff of a middle-sized school, or the development budget for several 3rd world villages. I like the fact that we used to (and hopefully will again soon) had two teams named "Rough Riders". And I love the fact that's it's ours. If you can't at least respect something you've inherited from your fathers and grandfathers, you're probably the type of person who boos their own kids at a hockey game. Get a life and shut up.

Greatest....Store....Ever!

I admit it....I love a bargain. Growing up in a city like Winnipeg, which is frequently used as a "test market" due to the conservative nature of it's shoppers, makes it inevitable that I prefer shopping in bargain palaces like "The Bargain Store", "Giant Tiger" and "Value Village". A pack of twenty pencils where the lead is off centre? Sold! Weird foods from naufacturers that don't exist in this hemisphere? Why not? Light bulbs that make a room darker rather than brighter? Well, if they're cheap, I'll just light some candles! It doesn't matter if it's a bargain!!!

Of these, I think the greatest is a cool store called "United Unlimited". It's a warehouse bargain store, located under a bridge right next to the CPR rail yards. Shoppers at "United Unlimited" are a joyful lot, who temporarily ignore the toxins that are most likely floating in the air to nab the greatest bargains a "bargain" city could imagine! Looking for that velvet cowboy hat, "Gwen Stephani" doll or air rifle? Go to "United Unlimited"! Missing that mink blanket, car wax or computer keyboard? Just haunt "United Unlimited". Can find the right fit for that Roman helmet or Viking Battle Axe? You guessed it! "U.U." has it all!

Perhaps the BEST thing about "U.U." is the flyer that comes to your door. I've tried to scan and post a couple of pictures from the latest one which, among other products, bragged about selling "fake" security cameras for 10 dollars, pints of stain for 1 dollar and my favorie, the "extend your reach by 3 feet tool" (only 8 dollars!!). Among the sale items are the GREATEST entries in any flyer. One picture shows "cool shades" for 2 dollars. I wasn't quite able to make out what I was looking at, until I noticed the "cool shades" were placed on the stubby tail of a large brown Boxer. The other scan shows "my new kitten", in the floor-level pants of it's owner, who is apparently squatting on a toilet with a newspaper in front of him.

A.G.F and I are saving these flyers, and to our bestest buds in Pile O' Bones and further points north, you can expect your own copy of the flyer soon.

But you have to come the the 'Peg to actally shop there!! See you in the bobble-head aisle!!

Do you work with Sims???

I've just decided. I must work with Sims.

As most people know by now, "The Sims" is a very popular computer game franchise that allows the player to create and control any number of little simulated people. The player can select how they look and dress from a variety of heads and bodies, buy and furnish houses for them, get them jobs, dates, pets, children, and basically live out an entire "Sim" life based on the player's whims.

I've decided I must be working with Sims for the following reasons:

1-my boss has Betty Brant's hair. If anyone remembers the old Spiderman cartoon from decades ago (yes the one with the coolest theme ever, the one that assures us that Spidey can indeed, "do whatever a spider can". Welcome? Fame? Nope....he is, naturally, ignored, his only reward being "action".....and plenty of it). Anyway, that was a pretty long aside, The point is, Betty Brant, the secretary of the distrurbingly Hitler-esque J. Jonah Jamieson, had a strange helmet of a hair-do with evenly-spaced bangs in the front, and a little flippy lip around the shoulders. My boss, a youngish male, has the very same hair-do. Betty Brant hair on a young male body. Would anyone else other than a Sim combine these attributes on purpose??

2-outrageous conversation. In The Sims, the characters "converse" in a strange set of heiroglyphics that seem to indicate they are talking about cars, planes, desks buildings with columns and other assorted images. The conversations never seem to make much sense, other than the fact that some Sims appear to enjoy talking about cars, the sun, etc., and others register their displeasure by repeating the glyph with a little red X through it. Our Sim conversation this week came from one of our Big bosses, who gave us a "state of the company" address, which was so laden with unknown acronyms he could have been talking in some sort of lost mutant groundhog tongue. All I know is that some charts showed red lines going up, and others showed them going down. Sims communicating in their own Sim language??

3-the ultimate proof: irrational behavior. In The Sims, the characters can be occasionally confused if, say, their access throug a doorway is blocked by something; a Sim cat, Sim person or a Sim garbage can. Sims usually react by pointing at the offending object, shrugging their Sim shoulders and shaking their heads as if to say "Wha?". The Sims can get so perplexed by their little problem that it's possible for a character to "starve to death" just standing around waiting for the blockage to resolve itself. Today one of the bosses was told that a worker's telephone didn't work; it was emitting a loud buzzing sound making it impossible to converse with anyone (whish was the employee's job). The boss advised that a replacement phone be installed, and was informed that it was tried with no success-there must be something wrong with the telephone line. The bosses decision: well there's no place else for them to sit, so the employee will just have to sit there and try to do their job on a phone that didn't work!!!.

Keep an eye out for Sims in YOUR workplace. It's fun and educational-and they're easy to lock in closets!!

WOW...visible people!!

We (being AGF and I) have just returned from our favorite second-hand store with armloads of goodies, including, for myself, entire Visible Man and Visible Woman model kits, with instructions....all for only $7.99!!! (they came in the lid of a Visible Man box-maybe not collector-worthy, but still cool to me!).

For those who don't remember, the "Visible Man" and "Visible Woman" were educational plastic model kits put out by a company called "Renwal" of Mineola, New York in the 1960's and early 70's. They were 1/5th scale representations of the human body, showing skeletal structure, organs and representations of the nervous system, and they looked like the creepy models you always stared at in your doctor's office as a kid (either that or you stared at those weird calendars portraying industrious little bug/human hybrid communities involved in a variety of smurf-like activities....anyone remember what those things were called??). The Visible Man and Woman were really detailed kits, allowing the builder to assemble a human torso from bones on up. The body was clear plastic, and there was a large chest cavity allowing the builder to poke around and explore the arrangement of organs, or pretend to build a Frankenstein monster, whatever floated your boat.

The Visible Woman, though an intriguing concept to pre-pubescent males of the time, actually including a perfectly-scaled fetus and infant, which would have made a terrific educational tool for parents giving their kids the "birds and bees" talk. The kits could be built as-is or painted in realistic colours, which were suggested in the instructions (apparently the upper surface of the Transverse Colon is "greenish-pink" while the Rectum is "brownish-pink". Try to find THOSE colours from Testors!!)

I've posted scans of the first pages of the instructions, and I'd be happy to make and send details scans if any collectors wanted copies for their own use. Just respond here with an e-mail addres you'd like it sent to. No viruses included, promise!!

Anyway, finding these old model kits at a bargain proce was Better Than Awesome, especially when one of the ladies said they have collectors price their vintage items, then price them lower than suggested retail!!!! AGF was able to pick of some coolio doll dresses and shoes, as well as a couple of books. Bargain stores..always BETTER THAN AWESOME!!!