post of the week

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Post of the day

Mr. T

Does this ever happen to you?
You think of a celebrity, often from the 80s, and *BAM*, 2 days later, you find out they have a reality show/new album/recent arrest. It's happened to me recently: Boy George, Cyndi Lauper, David Hasselhoff, Joey Lawrence...

And now: Mr. T.

Sure enough, he's got a reality show starting next month. (This according to wikipedia.)

And so while your appetite is whetted, but not yet satisfied, here is Mr. T singing "Treat Your Mother Right (Treat Her Right)"

It's supposed to be from his video, a vintage 80s production, called:
"Be Somebody or Be Somebody's Fool".
And yes, it was targeted towards children.

Happy Friday!

p.s Here's the summary of the video from wikipedia:

In 1984, he made a motivational video called Be Somebody or Be Somebody's Fool. He gives helpful advice to children throughout the video; for example, he teaches them how to understand and appreciate their origins, how to dress fashionably without buying designer labels, how to make tripping up look like breakdancing, how to control their anger, and how to deal with peer pressure. The video is roughly one hour long, but contains 30 minutes of singing, either by the mob of children accompanying him, or by Mr. T himself. He sings "Treat Your Mother Right (Treat Her Right)," (video available here) in which he enumerates the reasons why it is important to treat your mother right, and also raps a song about growing up in the ghetto and praising God.

chomsky

So has anyone else been paying attention to Hugo Chavez's recent rampage through New York City?
Jon Stewart had a riff last night on how Danny Glover met with the Venezuelan president in Harlem yesterday. After Chavez called Bush "the devil" in front of the entire U.N. General Assembly earlier this week. Thereby managing to upstage the visit of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nice work, Hugo.

Furthermore, as the NYTimes pointed out today, Mr. Chavez's regret that he had never met one of his favourite American authors, now deceased, was a little premature. Because Noam Chomsky is not dead.

The NYTimes actually called Chomsky up and sent over a photographer, just to make this point.

Hee. this makes my week.
No, wait, this & the next post I write.

the end is not nigh

the end is not nigh. My remarks were taken out of context. If that apology is good enough for the pope, it's good enough for me.

Insomnia again. What better way to kill the time than to record what I"ve been up to recently?

I spoiled myself this weekend and spent hours soaking up the last rays of summer. Paddling against the wind into the waning summer sun in the last hours of the season, yesterday afternoon, was so sweet.

Anyway, not that we've had much summer since early August. The last 4 days were its return and end. Biking, rollerblading, and finally kayaking down by the Lachine canal. It was close to bliss. Blisters aside.
I also stopped by the wave behind Habitat 67 to check out the surfers. So tempting to jump in and just ride the current (to my probable death).

Tonight I went to my German class and had my first hockey game of the year. Fortunately/unfortunately, I'm the best player on the team this year. I got the first penalty (an accident, I swear). Good fun but brutally tiring, especially when you're alone out front.

In the final minutes, I ran the puck up and took a long shot, which the defense (the very one who played the role of nemesis the entire game) caught between her knees(!). No, I'm not talking about the goalie.
Three seconds later I was somehow on my belly, being pulled along the ice by said nemesis, with my stick (and the puck) lodged between her thighs. And she was skating backwards. It was quite the surreal moment. Not like I was trying to extract my stick, at least not while she still had the damn puck!

goats made me do it

* Goat-free roads made me speed
The Canadian tourist board should advertize with this in Switzerland: "certain regions goat-free since 1927"
The BBC actually bothers to report:

Canadian police spokesman Joel Doiron said he had never found a goat on the highways of eastern Ontario in his 20 years of service.

* Sudan man forced to 'marry' goat
(This actually made the top 5 most-emailed BBC list last week. And it's 6 months old.)

* New recruit joins Terracotta Army
hmmm, i guess there's really no way to work a goat into this one. oh well.

Is the end nigh?

I present to you, the jury:

* Sunday: plane lands in downtown montreal

* Monday: 5th anniversary of September 11th, 2001. and I speak German.

* Tuesday: I'm home sick from work. Zaboumafou molests a porcupine.

* Weds: gunman opens fire 2km west of my workplace, killing 1.

* Thursday: home sick from work again.

What's next?

kids tv

I'm home sick today, so I turned on the tv for a few minutes and caught up with Elmo and Zaboumafoo.
Zaboumafoo is not my favourite kids' show, but it's charming. Basically it's two guys and the pseudonymous puppet lemur. They bring exotic animals into their tv set, and the camera films them as they scurry for cover. Then the editing room makes it look like the animals are interacting with the hosts. Evil. Genius. Someone's got to appreciate it.

And... on Sunday a plane made an emergency landing right in the middle of Parc avenue. Not 700 metres from my house. I bet all the tam tams attendees were wondering whether it was a hallucination. Too bad I missed it!

songs that cheer me up

Belle and Sebastian always lifts my mood. Something about their instrumentation, and completely ridiculous but spot-on lyrics. They write great songs about ugly ducklings. I'm listening to "Expectations" because it's currently my favourite off their TigerLily album. The mariachi trumpet is just so bizarrely perfect.

I'm having a blah day. This morning I woke up too early, eager to capture and bottle this start-of-school feeling for the workday. We moved offices and the new ones are really really nice. And now I can bike over the mountain to work (and did).

Unfortunately the workday wears much longer than the average schoolday; my enthusiam expired a few hours ago. I'm feeling the afternoon fatigue with no coffee at hand alas.

This weekend was pretty blah too. If I list the stuff I did, I actually got quite a bit done. (Built a huge campfire, tented up north, went walking and reading, a bit of hammock duty, fun meals with friends, biking, saw Bon Cop, Bad Cop, got awesome deals on clothing I actually needed, got a new fridge. I even cleaned parts of my apartment that had never been cleaned.)

But the weather was drab. And kinda cold. And I'm still tired. And I'm still nursing scabs from my run in with the sidewalk last week (it won the scrap). And (yes still), I'm taking scope of my life in the wake of the relationship hurricane. And real available friends seem thin on the ground.

Yes, i'm whining. life isn't bad. i hope the tone of this entry isn't too depressing! I"m just tired.

I've started to think that life yields diminishing returns. This is not suicidal. It's just an observation. Or rather, I suspect, it's just aging. sigh, maturity.