A Dime a Dozen Blog

It was something like -20 today with the wind chill here in New York.  This pic is near the skating rink at Bryant Park.  I registered my new domain name today, and have started work on the forms for business registration.  After about a year of back and forth, I finally decided on New York for the expansion office.

The idea is to have two strong regional centres from which to run the company and expand further.  Vancouver will be at one end of the continent and New York will be on the other. My Vancouver office is a couple months away from being able to operate without me, which will leave me free to get creative and start building.

Seeing as our head office is in Canada, I’d naturally been thinking about expanding to Toronto for a while – but no.  We in Canada can all pretend that ‘T-nought‘ is the centre of the universe, but at the end of the day it is what it is – a big fish in a small pond, and in spite of its pretentions, it’s second rate (at best). I only have so many years to live, and I’m not going to waste any of my time with the second rate, and neither are my customers.  So it’s New York City.

I get my Green Card on January 5th and I’m set.  The preliminaries are all done, and this time next year, I hope to have boots on the ground in this city.

I’m in New York visiting Cathy’s family for the holidays, Merry X-mas by the way. Today when I was doing last minute shopping I went to hit the ATM for more cash and discovered that my card was dead. I tried logging into my online account with my iPhone but it kept giving me an error message. So I called the bank and they told me that my card had been ‘compromised’ – i.e. the pin number had been skimmed from some fake machine back in Vancouver.  When I was able to check the balance again, I saw that my account had been nearly emptied.

Being in New York and right before the holidays, there’s literally nothing I can do about this. I can’t get my money back, not for a while anyway (there’s some form I’ve got to fill out) – and although I’ve got a bunch in my PayPal account, I can’t transfer it over quickly enough for it to be useful.  Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to access it because my bank card has been cancelled and I can’t get a replacement here.

So tomorrow’s Christmas eve, our big dinner, and to all appearances I’m going to be as peaceful and cheery as one of the Whos from ‘the Grinch who stole Christmas’. You know how after the Grinch stole all their Christmas presents and roast beast, they still went out to the square to hold hands and sing Christmas carols? Like that.

But come on, we’re talking thousands and thousands of dollars right before Christmas – I’m pissed. I can’t sleep I’m so angry.

So while I paste some sh*t-eating grin on my face, and do some ‘aw shucks’/'don’t cry over spilled milk’ routine for Cathy’s family – here’s what I’m really going to be thinking about:

The top ten things I would do to that asshole who stole all my money:

10. We’re not supposed to have a Christmas tree in our apartment – but we did anyway. At the end of Christmas we had to sneak the tree out, so I took some bolt cutters and snipped it into tiny pieces and fit the whole thing into a single garbage bag.  That was our Christmas miracle for 2007.  I bet I could do the feat again, this time using nothing but a criminal, a shoebox, and toe nail clippers.

9. Deep fry his extremities and make the world’s first ever ’screaming tempura’.

8. I’d scrape sand paper over his entire body, smear him in sh*t and let his whole body become a giant, throbbing, puss-filled infection.

7. I’d peel him.

6. The trusty ‘putter to the spine’.

5. I’d invent ‘diahrea boarding’. It’s like water boarding but with a twist.

4. I bet you can kill someone with humidity. Like if you sealed a room off and left a really big pot of water in it to boil dry. I bet you could put so much moisture in the air the person would drown. Not quickly mind you, but you could probably kill them.

3. Fire.

2. Cut off his balls and then stretch his emptied nutsack over his face and suffocate him with it.

1.

If I ever find that person, I don’t know which of those things I’d do – but I suspect that the freakier it is, the more likely I am to get off with an insanity plea.  And worst case scenario, I do get sent up for suffocating some guy with his own scrotum – at least everyone in prison will think I’m a total psycho and leave me alone.

I’ve noticed that people who read my blog tend to be well hung geniuses.  Which comes first: the reading, or the monster dong?

Unrelated

I don’t think it’s true, but I do enjoy how offensive it is:

Last week, a new study confirmed something essential about women, something that refuses to budge, even though many say it’s long past time. Professors at Trinity College in Connecticut analyzed the numbers of Americans unaffiliated to any religion. While the number of male nonbelievers was rocketing, the overall totals were slowed by women hitching themselves to the anchor of faith: “Gender difference is a brake on the growth of the No Religion population,” says the study, which found that 19 percent of men were no longer denizens of a religious America, while only 12 percent of women live outside the faithful fold. In the past, one could say that women tended the hearth, and men participated in the marketplace. But today?

… It’s hard not to compare women sticking with faith to wives confined to bad marriages: They’re so committed to the institution that they’ll willingly shrink under mistreatment just to maintain their own status quo.

Google picked what was easily the most boring day in the history of the city to do their street view photos.  There are some good views of the city – like this one of West Vancouver from the Lions Gate – but no prostitutes on the streets (excepting these Liberal candidates at a pr event), no heroin shooting galleries, most importantly, no one on the beaches.  The only “gem” I was able to find was this one photo of a drug deal behind the library at Main and Hastings (in the back by the pole).

If you’ve never been to Vancouver’s downtown eastside, now’s your chance to take a tour.  Just click on the photo:

I`ve had a bunch of hits on this site for `Mexidog`Vancouver.  I don`t know why, I`ve never posted on them before.  But for the record, they`re at Burrard and Georgia – and they are awesome.  Get the ‘Mexi’ – it has guacamole, homemade salsa and baked tortilla slices [ici].

So much better than Japadog – for example, you can eat a Mexidog in an enclosed space without fainting.

Back during the election, I put up a post about a gaffe Stephane Dion made. In French he said that he had dreamed of growing up to be a `naturiste`- he meant `naturalist`and not `naturist` (i.e. nudist) . It was funny, but the title of that blog post: “As a young boy Stephane Dion dreamed of being nude in public” – has attracted the attention of pedophiles.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but I looked at my stats today and I got 14 hits in to this one obscure and irrelevant blog post. A post like that on my site should get about 200 hits total and dissapear. This one has had about 1,500 so far.  I clicked through to the referrer blog and discovered a wordpress.com blog that features a lot of pictures of nude boys.

Gross. So very gross.

The reason Im getting links from there is because of a WordPress Plugin that links to similar blog posts.

There’s no way in hell I’m going to say the name of the blog in question – because A. by doing so, I could be libelling them & B. I’m not linking to a pedo site on my blog. But if anyone from WordPress would like to send me a comment I’d be happy to reply with the blog URL.

I was at the zombie walk on the weekend.  I didn’t dress up – but Cathy got professional makeup done and went up to cars to scare children and tourists (mission accomplished).

I love zombies, not in a fetid necrophiliac way, strictly platonic.  I’m obviously not the only one – a group of Ottawa university people have just spent quite a while modelling the rise of the undead – their  report came out this week, it asks what would happen if there really were a zombie outbreak:

An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.

Furthermore, these results assumed that the timescale of the outbreak was short, so that the natural birth and death rates could be ignored. If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilisation, with every human infected, or dead. This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert. Thus, if zombies arrive, we must act quickly and decisively to eradicate them before they eradicate us…

In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often. As seen in the movies, it is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.

I’d like to think I’d do alright if there were zombies.  But then in reality – I don’t know.  First off, when can I start shooting people?  No one wants to be the first guy to shoot a zombie during an outbreak – there’s a hundred percent chance you’d end up in jail.

And where would you get a gun anyway?  I know lots of people with guns, but how am I going to get them to give them up?  And where am I going to go once I have one?

Here, take a closer look at what I’m getting at – this is a zombie scenario for Vancouver.

In this scenario – the source of the infection is a group of Chinese slaves brought in through the port by a snakehead (a people smuggler).

Day One. Police find the body of a Chinese gangster in a downtown restaurant – he’s got bite marks on him, and the restaurant is covered in blood.  It looks like he’s been shot more than 50 times – mostly in the chest – though with one finishing shot in the head.  In his mouth – human flesh.

The media report that he’s a well-known Snakehead – a people smuggler – part of a gang that brings people from China into North America for sex slavery.

You say good riddance and take no further notice.

Day Two. A gun battle breaks out on Kingsway – on TV they say it’s between Chinese and Vietnamese gangs.  But eyewitnesses quickly contradict them, saying that the gang-members were working together, firing on young women coming out of an underground club.  By the time the police arrive, the gang members have scattered.  A dozen ‘injured’ women are taken to hospital – witnesses report that they’re traumatized and out of their minds from the battle.

A report on the news later in the day on  the discovery of 2 mutilated bodies on the downtown eastside.  They’re both well-known homeless people, both in wheel chairs.

Now still none of this is really that unusual.  Gangs fight all the time, sometimes even on the streets.  People sometimes kill the homeless and do sick things to them.

What would you do now?  According to the Zombie Survival Guide, you should be packing up your car with gear and making your escape for your pre-selected refuge.

Realistically, these things are maybe something you’d talk about with the guy at the corner store – you wouldn’t freak out about them though.

Day Three. Riots overnight on the Downtown Eastside.  Police cordon off Main Street and much of Gastown.  Large crowds are fighting with each other and TV helicopters show bodies on the streets.  The police deploy tear gas to no effect.  You watch the shaky aftermath live on TV.  You can’t make out the bodies, and it doesn’t look like anything’s happening.

Firetrucks pass your house – a block of Kingsway is on fire – an old gang hang out.

You’re glued to the TV and the web, but it’s all sketchy and none of it’s personal yet.

Around mid-day, store alarms, sirens again, and then a gun shot.  You run out to see – the police have closed the street – so you join the crowd at the yellow tape.  You hear that an Asian guy smashed the window at the corner store and tried to rob it.  The police shot him.

You’re getting worried now – and you start making calls to people, sending emails asking ‘what’s going on?’.

Night falls and the Eastside is still out of control – police have moved their lines back into Gastown and Chinatown.  Pacific Boulevard is closed for emergency vehicles.  The story makes CNN – the usual suspects are condemning the police for their use of force.

Day Four. You couldn’t sleep.  Sirens all night, shouting, screaming.  Not that unusual for this neighbourhood – but this time it didn’t let up.  Turn the TV on – the riots have spread to Kingsway and Metrotown.  Transit service and major roads have been shut down in order to stop the spread of rioting.

If you were going to make an escape, you should have done it by now.

On TV they’re interviewing eyewitness to an attack on a McDonald’s.  In a mix of English and Tagalog – a woman says that the attackers were zombies.  You put it down to bad English and go for breakfast.

The air smells like burning plastic and you can see smoke rising from downtown and Metrotown.  No cars on the street and few shops are open.  At the store, there’s no morning paper and they’ve run out of milk.  Starbucks is still there and so you buy a coffee and a scone.  There’s light pop playing – just covering up the banging sound from the bathroom.  The barista says that a homeless guy locked himself in there this morning and won’t come out – he keeps banging on the door and groaning.  They’ve called the police.

On the walk home panic slowly edges into your consciousness.  Your part of town is being surrounded by ‘rioters’ (zombies), and unbeknownst to you, you’ve been within metres of one of the undead at the Starbucks.  It’s almost too late to do anything.

With the information you have does a bell go off and tell you ‘a-ha – zombies!’   No – of course not.  You head home, stay indoors, watch the TV and wait.

By afternoon, you get your first glimpse of a zombie on TV – you see him break through the collapsing police line in Chinatown.  He looks like he was a homeless man, maybe 50 or 60, he’s head to toe in blood, his stomach is exposed and gnarled from bites – a broken umbrella is stuck in his thigh.  The camera doesn’t go to static like it does in the movies – you get to watch him for a long time trying to bite through police body armour.  More follow after him.

Finally then you have your ‘a-ha!’ moment, but there are no options left open to you.  Where are you going to steal a gun in Canada?  You can’t drive anywhere, the police have shut down half the roads and zombies are blocking the other half.  Granted people do try and drive their way out – but they don’t get far.

It’s four days after the first infection in the city, and you’re already screwed.

The study doesn’t give us that long to survive after a zombie outbreak.  And it does make sense, I can’t imagine any situation where the government would allow a soldier to open fire in a city.  For me I suppose I would just block up the apartment and fill my old empties with water.  In a pinch I could use a hammer – I wouldn’t mind ‘braining’ the neighbours if I had to.

Anyhow, there aren’t zombies and unfortunately life is lame and regular, so it doesn’t matter.

But there is maybe one relevant part of the study – my favourite part in fact:

Acknowledgements

… RJS? is supported by an NSERC Discovery grant, an Ontario Early Researcher Award and funding from MITACS.

Update – turns out this wasn’t the first government-subsidized zombie study. The CBC has another one here: http://bit.ly/lVeLJ

This is from one block of Granville Street in Vancouver, between Robson Street and West Georgia:

I’ve got a client – my FIRST client actually – and they won’t pay.

I was so totally excited when I landed that contract.  It was worth $9,300 – all due up front.  So I took the business, signed on and started work. I invoiced and waited the two weeks for the cheque to come in.  Then three weeks, then four.  Then I sent a reminder.  And waited.  Then another reminder and brought it up in conversation.

They couldn’t pay.

I had hired staff to help out on this project and six weeks in the customer realized they couldn’t pay.  So we negotiated a deal – they pay a deposit of about $2,500 and the rest is due once files are cleared one by one.

Files are cleared – and I invoice again.  One week, two weeks – waiting , waiting, waiting.  No cheques are showing up and then I get an email from the client – changing the terms again (maybe for the fourth time) and saying that they won’t pay another cent until every single part of the service is delivered.

Now – am I to really believe that a company who tried to dodge payment twice will really come through when they say they will?  They signed a contract that said they’d pay up front – they violated that.  They made a verbal contract that said they’d pay after each file was cleared – now they’re violating that.  So now they say once all files are cleared, they’ll finally really serious pay this time – pinkie swear.

Scew that.

Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on, shame on … well you ain’t gonna be fooled again.

So I told them to pay by this Friday or I stop work on all files.  Obviously I’ll never do business with them again – I don’t want to.

But here’s the question – by withdrawing contracted services for which a deposit was paid, do I have a legal leg to stand on?  Next, am I going to this nuclear option too soon?

I’m satisfied with what I’ve done – mostly – but I’m a little worried about the consequences of it all. I’m so sick of suing people and being sued.  My promise to myself was not to spend a cent on lawyers in 2009.  I spent about $5,000 or so on lawyers in 2008 – that’s a week in Italy with Cathy – Milan, Lago Maggiore, Como – drinks, tapas, etc…  – all wasted on idiots.

Cathy and I saw Julie and Julia today – and to be honest, I really liked it.  I like an embarrassingly high number of ‘chick flicks’.  The movie is about a blogger – Julie Powell – who wrote a blog detailing her project to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s ‘Master the Art of French Cooking’ cookbook.

The movie didn’t make me the least bit hungry so I can’t say the food part of it was all that interesting – but what struck a chord was seeing how excited Julie got when people first started noticing her blog or when she got her first comments from strangers.  I remember that, and it was really really cool.

My blog’s first comment was naturally negative. I worked on a reply for hours, then said screw it and deleted it.

The first link to my site was cool.  Not long after that I got one from Small Dead Animals – that was amazing, I got more traffic that day than I had got the previous 6 months combined.  I got another from HotAir, from LittleGreenFootballs, from Michelle Malkin, from Slate Magazine – that last one really excited me.  A friend’s university class was even asked to read my blog.

I used to pay so much attention to traffic – I watched daily for the first 1,000 hits – then the first 10,000 / 25,000 / 100,000.

The first time my name appeared in the newspaper I cut it out and put it on my office wall.

There was the first time a total stranger recognized my name when I introduced myself – that was creepy actually.  The first time someone famous said something nice about me – I clicked on the link about a hundred times.

I used to be so into this blogging thing.

I’ve taken a few steps back from it – for business mostly, but also I discovered that if you don’t blog for a few days your blood pressure drops and you’re more interesting at parties.

I’m not writing this thing to be famous, to be read, any of that.  I just like to write.  I get very few chances to write about anything – so I write here and keep in practice.  Before I wrote the blog, the few times I had to write anything it came across as pretentious.

If you’ve written a blog, then you know that if it does nothing else, it helps you develop your authentic voice.  And thankfully, I’ve discovered that my authentic voice isn’t pretentious.

But by not blogging as much I’ve built up a huge backlog of posts that I’d really like to write.

Here are 10 of them – in no particular order:

1. I am an assimilated American Indian.  I try to remember ‘who I am’, but as an atheist it’s really hard.  There’s not much of a secular aboriginal culture.  You can really lose yourself.  I spend a lot of time with white people, and I forget that I’m not one of them – that is until the odd time when I’m with one of them and catch site of the two of us in a mirror.  And it’s a big surprise.  Really, a big surprise to look into the mirror and see how dark my skin is and how different my features are compared to theirs.  When it happens, you feel like a sham.

If I had the time, I’d write about that, try and find other assimilated people and see if they have the same feelings.  I’d like to know where it comes from.

2. Our work permit system is so screwed up.  It doesn’t take you long to find people online selling Canadian work permits.   Less than a month ago in fact, I had one of these foreign career agencies contact me and ask for help in breaking visa law and getting their people in to Canada on dubious work permits.  They wanted to give me $1,500 a head for that.   I’d love to write a detailed expose of them, the system and the Canadian companies who enable this.

3. Native urban development.  This has been on my mind for the last few weeks.  I’m thinking about native reserves in urban areas, and how they don’t have to follow the rules of any of their neighbouring communities.  How do those communities react to this?  What are the outcomes?

4. The declining rail service in Vancouver.  BC joined Canada because they promised to assume our debt, and build us a rail line.  The rail line is symbolic of our relationship with Canada.  A few weeks ago, with no notice to any of the stakeholders, CN discontinued rail service to Vancouver’s container port.  I think the bulk trains are still going through – but the trains carrying containers have stopped.  It’s symbolic of something – maybe how boring I am.

[- gross, a centipede just came in the room - we have centipede's in Vancouver now?]

5. Michelle Obama isn’t hot.  She looks like that Ferengi – Quark – from Deep Space Nine.  Put the pictures side to side and you’ll see what I mean.

6. A hit piece on a certain few loser bloggers I despise.  One on a certain unstable race-bating foreigner; another on a small town snarky IT guy; one on another foreigner in the capital who knows what’s best for indians.  The race bater talks crap about me all the time, the snarky IT guy allowed a cruel comment on his site about Cathy’s daughter, and the foreigner in the capital called me a fascist.  The last one sounds funny – I should rephrase that.

7. Anti-government parties.  I.e. parties whose sole – stated – objective is to stop the government from doing anything.  I’d like to research if they exist anywhere, and how well they do their job.   I like the idea of them.

8. Christian atheism.  I think the war on christmas is dumb.  Christmas is an awesome holiday, I think we atheists should do to Christmas what Christians did to Saturnalia – take it over.  There are a lot of good things about our present society – essential things – that we shouldn’t fight against, we should just take them over.  Christians like to make this argument to atheists – ‘what would you do without x, y or z’?  (x,y, or z being christian values of one kind or another).  The answer to them is to say that we atheists would do the same thing as Christians did before they believed in ‘x’ – we’d steal the idea from someone who did.    It’s not that clear here, but if I had to time to write it out you’d see what I’m getting at.

9. BC’s red line with the federation – the one thing that they could do to us that would be that one final step too far, and that would galvanize our latent BC nationalism.

10. The definition of a political blog.  I’d like to define one so that when people ask for their blog to be included in that top 25 list I do, I can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with some confidence.

I did the Grouse Grind today.  My lungs aren’t 100% yet, so I had to abandon it half way – I was a bit bummed by that so I decided to walk home.  On the way I passed through the Squamish Reserve and saw this sign:

OK – to be honest it’s not like if you vote for the chief you can win a cash prize – that’s sort of what I’m implying in the title. You attend the info session, you win a cash prize – still, even just that is unseemly enough.

I looked into it, the vote is about the land the Squamish were handed back in Kitsilano – the little park to the east of Burrard Bridge.  They’re voting about whether or not to permanently lease the new land for development.  I’d vote for that – it brings them a step closer to self-sufficiency. Also, it’d be funny to see white liberals get all pissed off about having Indians dig up their park for condos.