Are you ready for a scarifying spooktacle of horror-tanic booportions??

So we’re only about 15, maybe 20 minutes into the in-flight screening of Fantastic Four on the plane from Edmonton to Ottawa, and it’s already fairly clear this is one of the most retarded films ever made. Oh! They just got blasted by space radiation. Still don’t care.

Anyhow, in case you didn’t already know, Kristine and I are going to be in Montreal for the next three days, where I’ll be writing a travelogue for Rue Morgue about this four-day Halloween party called La Grande Masquerade. It sounds like it’ll be pretty cool, actually—last year the event drew about 75,000 people, and this year they’re expecting closer to 100,000, they say. There’s lots of street events during the day, some ghost tours through Old Montreal, and a bunch of parties happening every evening—so I’m looking forward to getting a chance to unwind in a place that isn’t Edmonton, even if it is still technically business.

But yeah, the hosts of the festival are the ones footing the bill (whoa… I just looked up at the movie for a second and for some reason the Human Torch and whoever the hell Jessica Alba is supposed to be are snowboarding for some fucking reason, even though I thought they were still in space. Oh no he’s on fire now look out Human Torch! Use your flame powers to fly or something! Also, it’s amazing that Jessica Alba can’t even pretend to look smart enough to believably deliver a line like “Something has fundamentally altered our DNA.” And it’s equally hard to believe that the technology they’ve used to make the Thing’s latex suit has managed to progress so little since the days of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. FUCK.)

Okay, ANYHOO, as I was saying, the hosts of the fest are paying for everything, and they’ve put Kristine and I up in what looks like a pretty swank boutique hotel right in the heart of the Old city, and they’re also offering to take us to an apparently rad costume shop called Ponto so they can buy us something to wear for the big warehouse party on Friday—that’s the horror-themed one, and subsequently the only party I’m interested in for my purposes, though there are also parties on Saturday and Sunday with fantasy and superhero themes, apparently, which would no doubt be hilarious. But we’ve only got a couple free nights in town, and it’d be nice to get out and maybe go see a gig or something.

But whatever we end up doing, it’ll be a welcome reprieve from Vue, which has become increasingly intolerable for me over the past couple weeks. Things got so bad that I was actually fantasizing all day Monday about getting off of work and buying a bottle of port, of all things. I mean, hey, I like port about as much as the next guy, but yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever been port-guzzling mad about any job I’ve had before. Anyhow, it was tasty. So fuck all y’all.

…and through, the magic of time travel, I’m now writing from my room at the Hotel Gault in Old Montreal; I’m also kind of late for the opening party for this thing, so I should probably head out and see how out of place I can possibly feel since I don’t yet have a costume. Surely, there’ll be other writer nerds there who didn’t dress up yet, right? RIGHT? I’ll keep you posted.

AND HORRIFIED.

Tides have turned for the stupider

Well, in response to my mad, bad, and rad post last sometime where I said I hated working at my newspaper, the following day saw fit to further increase my detestation of the poor little rag.
One of their best and brightest veteran reporters crossed the front lines to The Other Paper, leaving me as the My Newspaper Daily's only available fill-in guy. What that means is that I was given full-time hours this week. Wahh. Poor baby. All my dreams are coming true.
Unfortunately, I think my news-writing gas is just about all burnt up. The same problems still exist there--stories are about as long as your average 43-year-old virgin's penis (how long is that? Short, I guess) and I find myself ashamed to want to cover the things I'm interested in, becuase I know that little stories and big issues put together into the same word-place make ugly, sad little misrepresentaive sensationalist puke-pots. Also, I was told yesterday by the writing coach that my sentences are too long for My Newspaper Daily's style. "There should never be a sentence longer than 15 words," he said, running a tiny lawnmower over his scalp. I agreed that some of my sentences were long, and also found that using shorter sentences made my stories shorter. So that was good. I actually appreciated having a real proofreader. I've been at that paper for almost a year and a half, and that's the first time anyone's given any semblance of a shit about my writing. I haven't been edited in ages, either.
SO maybe this isn't all that bad. I haven't been offered a full-time position there yet, and when I asked if I should know anything before I bought a ticket home for christmas, the answer wsa "well, go ahead and book it, because everything's still up in the air. That's great. I'm the last casual worker there who hasn't been offered full-time work. That's ok. I never really asked for it, because I seem to be able to maintain the mindset that I'm not looking to settle down here or anything, and thereby manage to sabotage any attempts at job-creation or -getting.
Anyway, I want to write something funny, but I can't think of anything. I guess you can all just pretend I have a clown hat on.

Rain, apostrophes, droids, hate-pop and Rosa Parks

Well all’s rainy and chilly on the West Toronto front. Although I can’t bitch too much, seeing as we didn’t have to turn on the heat in the apartment until a couple of days ago, and we were even used the air-conditioning the first day or so of October. Work = busy, and with the big mo-fo of a Halloween party coming up next weekend, there will be more interesting post forthcoming.

As for tonight, I ended up getting drunk at one of the few and shitty neighbourhood pubs. The place is an ongoing joke because it’s called, fucking get this: “Shox’s” and, before you marvel at the punctuation complexities of the “x’s” know that their logo has an eight ball for an “o” and two crossed pool sticks (or “stix”) for an “X.” They play the worst ‘90s dance music, despite the place being a pseudo saloon with pool tables and a menu, and I was told I’d have to take off my toque, due to their no toque or bandana rule, which makes no sense, as there’s hardly anyone in their to begin with, much less “gangbangers” and the bartender with the aging rock skullet is infinitely more offensive in the head department. Nevertheless, the designers (Gary and Brett) and I got drunk in that impromptu way that lead to good conversations, bad hangovers at work, and inane blog posts about bar font. Gawd, I miss the Black Dog…

Not much else to report, other than I did a piece for Access, that freebie mag you see outside of HMV and, really nowhere else. I wrote a bit about how the new Star Wars movies suck (yeah, obvious, but I tried to give it a new spin), and it turned out OK, and it was fun. Freelancing in general is much more fun when you don’t have to do it for a living, I’ve found (not that there’s anything wrong with doing it for a living, of course). Anyhow, the link’s here: http://www.accessmag.com/78/jedi.php.

Other than that, I’m still weirded out by the link Collin sent about the Nazi version of the Olsen Twins earlier this week. See, some laughably heinous stupidity at http://www.prussianblue.net/, and read the bizarre interview these little Aryan puppets did with Vice: http://www.viceland.com/issues/v11n10/htdocs/hello.php. Not a lot of groups dress like the Swiss Miss, and like Barney, Green Day and, er, Holocaust revisionism. Gross.

In non-racist news, here’s some poo-etry from yesterday’s Dose. I dedicate it to anyone reading who’s ever had a wildly inappropriate sex fantasy.

“I don’t think he meant to cheap shot me”

Harmless play turns tragic

The technique that makes our ears bleed

An artful solution

When real sex doesn’t do it for you

Remembering Rosa Parks

(Dose, October 26, 2005)

another enchanting evening...

Hey! So Kristine and I actually had a not-very-boring weekend these past two days, and while that may not seem so fascinating to those among us who, say, live in big cities where things happen and all their friends are, it was big news to us. After spending the last two late evenings putting grade-two swear words on the same garage door with hockey tape (the photos of the second evening should be going up right away), Kristine and I took a breather from our own juvenile retardation and checked out the controller.controller show at the Victory Lounge (it turns out, by the way, that one of the guitarists for said band is an ex-Gateway kid named Colwyn Llewlyn-Thomas, who was a photog during the Jimmy Jeong years and also the goalie for our campus rec team one season. We talked for a bit. It was neat.) following dinner at the Tokyo Noodle House and a rousing dart tournament at the Dog. All in all, rad. And, no doubt, fascinating for you. Anyhow, here are some more shitty phone pictures. Are you hot for it?

Though Kristine made a valiant comeback from a 3-1 deficit to tie the series, Team Priest Bear (me, right) eventually wore down Team Vampire Cat (her, left) and took home the seven-game 301 series.

A single-panel photo essay by Kristine, offering a rare glimpse of some of the famously retarded graffiti in the Dog's women's washroom. Enthusiasm for the vagina train, apparently, is not shared by all bar patrons, and particularly not by those who, having no fucking clue what the difference between "your" and "you're" is in the first place, tend to create words that float playfully in between.

Again, no flash, so this photo sucks. But you might just be able to make out the fact that controller.controller's drummer is wearing a orange kitty-face bellaclava, complete with little cat ears on the top. And a sparkly cat-themed T-shirt. All considered, a bold look.