What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
(and remember, you can always e-mail me if you love or loathe anything you're about to read)...


   Thursday, January 29, 2004

CYNICS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

I always enjoy checking out The Onion every Wednesday for its subversive snarkiness (who can't resist headlines like "Bush 2004 Campaign Pledges To Restore Honor And Dignity To White House" or "Area Priest To Get Out Of Priesthood As Soon As Parents Die"?).

Imagine my surprise, then, when I see an advertisement on the site from the Business Software Alliance featuring some "wacky" scribbling on a yellow legal notepad, reading:

The three worse [sic] business practices:
1) Hawaiian shirt Fridays
2) Cover sheets on TPS reports
3) Using unlicensed software!!!

Love the triple exclamation points. A handy link then directs you to their site, where you can learn more about the pain of software theft and report any piracy in your area. Huh? It's ridiculous enough that the BSA might believe that the average Onion reader will find that amusing but downright crazy to believe that the reader will take it seriously. Onion readers have long been a tech-savvy lot and I'm sure that they've got their own opinions on software piracy. Another silly example of ad-money wasted on the wrong audience!

Labels: George W Bush

THE NOT-SO-STRAIGHT-AFTER-ALL PARTY

I haven't seen my lovely friend Danielle since well before Hanukkah started so imagine how pleased I was to get an e-mail from my friend/her boyfriend Josh, planning a surprise birthday party. Suddenly, our lack-of-getting-together was not rudeness or apathy on anyone's part but a savvy way to deflect Danielle's suspicions. Telling her I'd be too busy to see her on her birthday is easier when I've already told her I'm too busy so many other days.

Turns out it was a karaoke party -- alarming at first but fun once you're ready for it. Christopher was there, along with the not-quite-gay-enough Keith (more on him in a bit). We all spent more time pouring over the songbook than the menu. I sang Bowie's "Let's Dance" and, obviously, an Elvis tune, "Burning Love" (that one required a couple of pints first).

What amazed Danielle was how, well, gay the evening turned out -- despite us homo men being wildly outnumbered by the straight girls in the place, all the songs chosen were lavender nuggets like "Relax," "Flashdance," "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" and "Back in Black" (AC/DC? Oh, please!) "It's like a gay bar in here!" squealed Danielle with delight and even Josh slow-danced with me and the others at one point. "I don't know which team I'm on anymore!" he said. "You're on Team Guiness!" yelled Keith. Christopher, Keith and I did a strange sort of three-way slow-dance to some country song -- especially unnerving after Keith had looked up from the songbook at the two of us and announced, "We should do a threesome!" I heard some part of my brain yelling, 'Poker face! Poker face!' and was unable to look Christopher in the eye.

Keith interested me in the way he seems so straight. I don't even know what he's doing or not doing to make me say that, but there it is. Normally, I hate those personal ads that declare the subject to be "straight-looking, straight-acting." I don't know what that is, especially when all the straight guys I know use hair products and slow-dance with me. The SL,SA thing always seems a bit self-hating to me, but then I chat with a guy like Keith and realize, 'Oh, this is the kind of guy they're looking for -- direct and unassuming, basic masculinity.

I wasn't trying to hit on him but somehow it became apparent that we were ending up together. By the time the evening was winding down after last call, Danielle and Josh were leaving just the two of us -- "for your date," she said. Minutes after they left, the karaoke guy announced that Keith and Josh were due up to sing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" so we got up to drunkenly besmirch a dead man's good legacy. It was fun, though, and despite standing outside a straight bar on Yonge and Davisville at three in the morning, we couldn't help but make out in the street. Keith had earlier praised Hamilton but now I said, "Good thing we're not in Hamilton -- we'd be getting our asses kicked right about now!" He laughed and waved down a taxi to my place, where he turned out to be gay enough indeed -- but I've said too much already.

Thanks for a lovely party, Josh, and -- once again -- Happy Birthday, Danielle!

Labels: friends, oh l'amour

RATHER QUITE EXCITED

I just found about Toronto's "British Isles Show" on March 5-7 at the Queen Elizabeth Building, National Trade Centre. The British Isles show is a massive trade show focusing on "the Best of Britain".

I'll be able to bask in my deep anglophilia -- meeting Coronation Street actors, indulging in my beloved chocolate Hobnobs and drinking copious amounts of tea. Maybe I'll even find one of those talking Daleks I keep seeing ads for in Brit magazines. And hey, there's a draw for a vacation in the actual country!

If that sounds like your vision of heaven too, check out www.bmartinpromotions.com/index.htm.

YIKES, DAGOSTINO'S SUPERMARKET MIGHT SUBPOENA ME

I got a smirk out of this story concerning Mike Rowe, a Canadian high-school student who thought it'd be funny to call his website MikeRoweSoft.com. Well, Bill Gates' evil corporation didn't get the joke and they sued the kid to take away his site. (The company's lawyers in Canada, by the way, are a firm called Smart & Biggar -- this just gets funnier all the time.)

Mike relented -- changing his site's name to Mike Rowe Forums -- but has set up chat rooms for people to lay down comments. I particularly liked this bit from a Fort Worth Telegraph article:

Mike's father, Kim Rowe, confirmed that his son had struck an agreement with Microsoft. Rowe said his son could not be interviewed Friday because he had to study for final exams.

GLAMOURAMA

A guy at the pub last night started another one of those "gay-men-are-just-shallow-and-bitchy-and-I'm-so-tired-of-this-scene-yada-yada-yada" routines. I've never been sure how to respond to these since half of me thinks, "Yes...and?" while the other half thinks, "Cheer up, for Christ's sake!" It occurred to me though that, as with all things, it's simply a matter of how you look at it.

If I may begin by generalizing madly, gay men love glamour. Whether it's movie stars, supermodels, porn actors, fashionistas or just people with that extra something, we gravitate towards them, worship them and strive to be them. While the rest of the world tells us we're an amusing diversion at best, abominations at worst, homosexuals strive for definition at all costs, and a glamourous definition is best.

A popular buzzword a year or so ago was 'flawless.' That was -- and I don't doubt it still is -- the goal: flawless clothes, flawless hair, flawless looks, flawless surroundings. Hell, isn't that what's made Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray" still relevant after over a century? None of this is new, but what my complaining guest at the pub is rankled by is the dark side of it all: in striving to become so much better than the "ordinary" people who disparage us, we run the risk of scraping away any of the quirks and imperfections that make us human.

Looking around the pub on any given night, seeing so many pretty boys with the same fashionable haircuts, the same Abercrombie and Fitch clothes, the same pinched faces giving nothing away, I often think of the Borg Collective from 'Star Trek' who "strive for perfection" with their one group-mind. It's not that far a stretch, I tell you.

Fortunately, this person's only noticing the glamour. If you cast your eye past the people who shine the brightest, you'll be pleased to see that there's a great number of interesting attractive people either content enough with themselves to embrace "the ordinary" or, better yet, bold enough to celebrate their individuality, quirks and all. They're the ones acheiving a new kind of glamour -- a less-brilliant colour perhaps but a deeper, richer colour -- and I hope those people get more attention from now on.

EMOTIONAL INFLUENZA

Having weathered an unpleasant cold-or-flu-or-something-like-that for the past month, I was finally back to my prime physical health (I know, I'm giggling at that, too). Why then, did I suddenly feel so miserable? Despite spending an enjoyable and productive weekend on Project Home (Don drove me to IKEA -- he's the best!), I nevertheless felt that familiar gloom around me, tugging at my coat.

As I attempted to explain to my friend James today, my experience of depression seems odd to me in that I generally feel optimistic, sensible and grounded, yet surrounded by a swirling vortex of pain, grief, corruption and despair. Some days, I feel pleasure at this sense of walking safely in the eye of the hurricane; other days, I feel it closing in like a wall of fire about to consume me. Some days, I feel this is all some phantom wind created by my own neuroses; other days, it feels like Reality itself, rushing in to confront me with all the evils of the world, the suffering of others, and the cold fact of my own mortality. On those days, I am such a Downer.

I suffered through one of those this week, triggered by the usual small but stubborn irritations of life, and it occurred to me afterwards that all this is really like an emotional version of the flu. The symptoms start small but increase in severity until becoming painful and debilitating, before the mind can create antibodies to fight it off and slowly recover. Today, I felt a bit down and more than a bit grouchy but could tell I was on the mend.

So is there an emotional immune system? And what, then, is the emotional equivalent of echinachea? Religion? Friendships? More sleep? We've all learned from the pop songs that money can't buy happiness but, as we sadly discover in our lives, love doesn't always cut it either. Neither does a good job or lots of friends or all sorts of otherwise necessary parts of a life. I'm realizing that, phantom or no, that rushing spiral of misery is always circling and fighting it is a skill I'm still working on.

Labels: friends

NOT QUITE OVER THE MOON

Seems the Russians are excited about George Bush's bold new NASA proposals. I wish I could join them. I've long believed in the goals of space exploration but never completely convinced of our current means to do so.

Basically put, it'll cost a frigging fortune.

Here on Earth, billions starve while our food, air and water is increasingly contaminated. If America is so set on throwing its cash around, I can think of a long list of terrestrial places to start. Now, I'd like to think that this is money that would be diverted from America's massive military-industrial-complex spending but, truly, when's the last time that happened? Since the ploughshares ain't coming, the space program might be a wonderful way of turning swords into spaceships. Trouble is, this announcement is coming from a president who's currently in the midst of a war and racking up the biggest deficit since Reagan -- the kind of runaway debt Clinton spent nearly a decade reining in, to the detriment of many.

I'd feel better about Bush's plan if it weren't so nakedly obvious that this is an election year stunt. Having buggered up the planet with his fiscal, environmental, military and foreign policies, Bush is baldly diverting our attention elsewhere. He points to Mars, yelling, "Keep watching the skies!" while Earth sags under the weight of the burdens he's helped impose.

I have my own NASA initiative: instead of finally bankrupting North America trying to save face, Bush could simply send a single rocket carrying himself to the International Space Station, where he could serve indefinitely as a Russian research assistant. That space program will be cheaper and more valuable to the future of our planet Earth.

Labels: George W Bush

JOIN THE CLUB

Few things start the New Year off right for me like David Edelstein's annual Movie Club at Slate.com. Each January, he gathers five prominent film critics via e-mail to spend an entire week(!) quarrelling over the past year's best and worst movies. For anyone who questions why I'd enjoy reading such a thing, I'll turn it over to Edelstein himself (from the Club's final post):

"A work of art doesn't end after you consume it. It has a finish, like wine...Sometimes that finish is quick and sweet, and sometimes it's bitter and lasts for years. Sometimes it upsets your stomach. In all cases, exploring our own responses—and bouncing them off people we like and respect—is among life's greatest pleasures."

Amen.