ehmuhtuh

Already, the habit of updating this blog every day as I promised myself I would is waning; gotta keep typing. Just as a shark needs to keep swimming even while it's asleep to keep a steady flow of water streaming through its gills, so must I type. If I stop typing for any reason, I'll die.

So as some of you might know, Kristine and I first started organizing this trip to Europe back in late September when we booked our first flight; since then, I've been counting down the number of issues of Vue I had to complete until we flew to Toronto. When we first started the countdown, I had 37 issues to do. Now, looking at the dry-erase U of A calendar I bought in first year after I forgot about a midterm and an essay in the same week, it's saying that that number is now 2. Two! Holy jesus, is this trip coming up fast. Since I'll be away for two issues and there's no one really to take my place, I've got to get my shit together and organize that content. Pretty soon it's going to be zero-hour here, and I'm going to totally start panicking. But for now, I'll just sit here and drink my coffee and eat my cottage cheese and banana. It's almost noon, sure, but it's still breakfast time.

Kristine and I went out to the Dog last night with Dave and Leah and two Gateway kids, Iris Tse and James Storrie, for Kristine's unofficial (yet actual) birthday celebration. It's not hot enough outside yet for the throngs of white-ballcap-wearing assholes to start choking the upstairs patio, so we got to enjoy some spring evening air along with some pints. Ran into freelance illustrator and rock guy Raymond Biesinger who I hadn't seen for a while even though he does spot work for me once in a while; we had a good talk, complete with many utterances of the words "indeed," "hotsville" and "mm-hmm!"

It was hotsville, indeed.

wizards!

Hey, have you ever wondered what a blog written from the perspective of a band of fictional Dungeons and Dragons characters called "The Regulators" would sound like? Then, buddy, greys-deep.blogspot.com is for you. And in case you're too lazy to check, it sounds crazy. Like this latest entry, for example:

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Daring raid by unknown bandits - 10th of Melting
A band of unknown bandits broke into Mr. Koskin's barn overnight and made off with several of his penned sheep.
It isn't known who stole the animals, but lots of small humanoid footprints were spotted at the scene.
Mr. Koskin is asking for help in protecting his farm from these bandits. His family relies on their sheep for making fabric and providing food for the family.

I think 10th of Melting is a date.

now less retarded!

Thanks, Mike, for pointing out how people weren't allowed to comment unless they were registered users; that little bit of pointless bureaucracy has been eliminated. So start commenting on things, jerks. THAT'S WHAT MAKES BLOGS FUN.

foonuccaa indeed, sir.

A photo of some very confusing Edmontonian graffiti snapped by our friend Fish Griwkowsky a few months ago. It's amazing that someone took the time to spraypaint this, isn't it? FOONUCCAA!

gentlemen, to fascination, and all its fascinating causes.

Well, not much to say at the moment, but I think it's worthwhile to note that if you search for our blog title in quotes on Google, you get an entry from some old cached blog by a woman named Courtney which I can only assume is about a cat:

04/17/2003 Entry: "some cats are bigger than others"
Mister has a white feather boa that is his best friend and his favorite toy. Sometimes he walks around with the boa in his mouth, strands of feathers dragging between his legs and getting tangled in his feet. Sometimes he runs at it and pounces. Sometimes he wears it around his belly or head like an article of jewelry.
Work sucked today.

If nothing else, we can at least take solace in the fact that I promise to never write anything on this blog as completely depressing as that. Still, it's actually kind of creepy how someone else wrote that exact same stupid, random sentence on their webpage.

Also of interest to no one, Courtney's now-defunct blog was registered at www.sherwood.nu. Not recognizing the .nu domain, I looked it up, and found the following:

.NU was originally the designated Internet address of Niue, a tiny island in the South Pacific, not far from New Zealand. With a declining population - now just 1200 people since cyclone Heta all but wiped Niue off the map with its 300kph winds and 20-metre waves - the .NU ccTLD became available to registrants worldwide in 1997.

Niue has always had an exotic and fresh reputation - as well as plenty of international interest. It is perhaps most famous as the only nation to offer free wireless (WiFi) Internet access to residents, and it's two main foreign income streams are the sale of .nu domain names, and postage stamps to foreign collectors - the vast majority of whom will never visit the island!

Over 100,000 .nu domains have so far been registered, mostly in the Swedish market, where "nu" means "now". It also means "naked" in French but the French porn industry has yet to really capitalise on the domain.

Must be quite a status symbol to have a site registered on a domain that belongs to a country that was pretty much destroyed by God. And also means "naked" in French.

the future is just over there to the left.

Ah, New Year's 2005 at the old Garneau Pub, before pretty much everyone we knew got jobs and moved to Toronto in the next couple months. (With the exception of one, who moved to Medicine Hat.) If you've never been to the Garneau, it's a ten-table smoke chamber just off Whyte Ave, featuring two pool tables and matching twin hunched Greek owners who hobble to and fro grabbing the asses of their employees and occasionally hosting mob meetings in the adjacent and never-actually-eaten-in restaurant, Plato's Pizza. Which makes awesome pizza.

Anyhow, here's Kristine and I, for the sake of reference. I'm the one who's not a girl (or, if you can't tell, the one wearing a tie). Zoom!

the following things are interesting:

Dear readers, hello. As you can tell, we're just kind of getting things off the ground with this here "weblog," but yes. If you're reading this, thank you. We'll try not to be too boring.

So basically, my girlfriend Kristine and I are going to be leaving for a two-and-a-half-week vacation to Europe in a couple of weeks (headed to the three most obvious capital cities to visit, London, Paris and Rome because we're incredibly original), and we got to talking about setting up a travel blog instead of bombarding people will inane emails making references to places they've never been and waxing pathetic about how weird the food is there and how much they miss everyone; rather than forcing our blatherings upon your friends, we figured we'd let our friends determine how often and to what degree they wished to be blathered to. So here we are. Are you feeling it?

But now that I've spent a couple hours arranging shit and fussing with a colour palette on this thing, I find myself thinking it would be kind of cool to just keep this page going as a blog in general. This was an odd thing to find myself thinking, seeing as I have historically dismissed this medium as too disposable and masturbatory, and especially seeing as I already write a far more disposable and masturbatory column called Life After Gretzky for Vue Weekly, Edmonton's independent news and arts magazine. God knows the last thing I'll probably feel like doing is writing when I get home from a day of more writing--and paid writing at that--but hey. For some reason, I think it's "neat," and frankly, I've done a lot stupider things for that reason than set up a blog. Like stapling my dink to a chair, for example. Or voting NDP in a federal election.

Anyhow, long story in four words: me giving blog try. So join us, won't you, as Kristine and I traverse this swirling fantasia of joy and excitement that is life in the hinterland, albeit a swirling fantasia briefly punctuated by the actual swirling fantasia that will be my first trip overseas. When we get back, everyone gets birthday cake. Every day, for the rest of their lives.