what a strange fetish - science fiction - science-based fiction. watchin the animatrix, i couldnt help but notice how it made me feel. i only had time to be forced to notice it when i went to the washroom to take a leak. i felt like things were possible, a coolness. the only thing i can think of that took me to a place like that before science fiction, was probably "kung-fu movies", ok - "martial arts movies", like "Enter the Dragon". (i am NOT putting the period inside the quotation marks. or the parentheses. or the brackets. the parentheses and brackets usually are contained within a sentence, and therefore will not contain the period, but rather the period will follow them, concluding the sentence, goddammit.) (the exception being the "aside" parentheses, containing a whole sentence, or several, that might be a commentary rather than part of the story - hence the parentheses - and so the sentences behave "normally", but these "asides" are demarcated by the parentheses. whether the period should be inside the parentheses or outside, should not be a rigid rule, but rather be dictated by whether or not the parenthesized content was itself a whole, a unit - um, i think i'm typing out my ass and so should check this out on wikipedia before opening my big keyboard.

um, i found in wikipedia that i had no idea of what i was talking about. in american english there is a convention or standard of having the period at the end of a sentence always inside the quotation marks, if there is a quotation at the end of the sentence, regardless of whether the period was actually included in the original of what was quoted. unless we're talking scientific or technical writing - then no. ( hehe, awesome sentence.) this rule was developed as a result of the need to protect the small and fragile pieces of type like the period and the comma behind the bigger and stronger quotation marks in the printing press.
and apparently the british convention is to use logical quotation.
and all this time i thought it was about parentheses - silly me :)
but i did find out that the british dont say "period" but rather "full stop", which in turn dispells some of my confusion about some of what the dopefiend says.
apparently "full stop" is sometimes used in canada, but i havent noticed. yet another word fallen victim to americanization here. right after chesterfield.

back to the main body, omitting parentheses and all, for now - martial arts movies and many sci-fi movies have made me feel like maybe more in life is possible than i've been led to believe. i wonder if anybody's done a study on what kind of class of people, what kind of personality trait is necessary to go for this sort of entertainment. what causes some people to be completely enthralled by this sort of communication, as opposed to ppl who love wwe wrestling.

what is it that makes us geeks?

the time leading up to the holidays was dreadful, the holidays themselves werent much better, and i'm back to the grind. hitting another low point on new year's day, i was thinking about a fellow blogger's advice to just force myself into a positive mindset, think happy thoughts, *make* it happen. but i just couldnt/wouldnt - didnt happen, i wondered if i was simply more comfortable because more familiar with the depressed metal state or something. but i'm not really depressed most of the time, i dont think... either way, fast-forward to to my shower today, and i suddenly felt that i wasnt really down, and felt almost... positive or something. and then i remembered trying to feel happier when i wasnt, and thought that its so much easier to do when ur not totally down. and then i remembered my ex's "therapy" as advised by her doctor once - put little red stickers at various places around the house and places you look, and every time you see one of those - think a happy thought - a way to get the mind in the habit of thinking and feeling happy. so i decided to finally try it too - i put one little penguin sticker on the coffee maker, and one above the comp screen - that way my earliest moments of the day should get the positive vibe going. and i thought to make a new years' resolution - even though a few days late - i'm going to try to post at least one positive thought on the blog every day.
so - ...
man, my happiness kinda fizzled there. think happy, or positive. its friday tomorrow! thats kinda good. hmm.
this is depressing - i get brought down so easily. i get to smoke up and listen to the dopecast's 100th episode tomorrow morning..? well, that, the fact that its friday, and the fact i made this resolution should count for something. we'll see tomorrow.

time flies

wow - so much has happened since my last post...
...we started getting hints that phx might be pregnant again, we went to toronto to visit phx' family, then we went to niagara falls and got thoroughly soaked by mischievous winds, flew to germany, got one of our bags lost by an arrogant LTU check-in lady, visited phx' family in germany, went to the town where they make jagermeister - very cool town, went to poland for 3 weddings, got sick, got followed by rain everywhere we went, spazzed out time and again at the horrible roads and drivers in poland, and the lack of clothes dryers, decided that the european union has no idea what they're getting themselves into accepting poland into their ranks, because poland is evidently a 3rd world country, trying to get into the 2nd world. we ended up spending more time on the road than sightseeing, and forget about relaxing. then we drove back to berlin, flew to dusseldorf, and got separated by LTU which wouldnt allow me to fly back to canada because they didnt think my canadian citizenship card was proof enough that i'd be allowed back into canada. their single nice employee helped me get in touch with the canadian consulate, and i got an emergency passport about 3 hours after phx and boogie flew off to canada. i got a cheap hotel, a delish doner kebab, check out enchanting dusseldorf by night, and flew off back home next day. an eternity later i was greeted by the very pretty vancouver airport, and a retardedly long wait to get past the customs booths, followed by a nearly as retarded wait at immigration, where nothing was moving, where i was just supposed to drop off my stupid emergency passport, followed by another retarded wait to get out of the carousel area - the vancouver airport may look pretty, but has an unworkeable system of getting travelers through. next time i may fly to seattle. i've come to hate travelling though.
finally past all the waiting, i was greeted by phx and boogie with a flower - i was very glad to see them :)
in a couple of days we went to a carepoint walk-in clinic - this chain seems to hire mostly 'doctors' who are unprofessional enough to have their own successful practice, where one of their 'dudes' confirmed that phx is pregnant, and proceeded to prescribe her antibiotics which she'd just told him she allergic to.
i went back to work, which is still a clusterfuck, and my right front tire fell off - i'll be retiring my car, i think. then we went to visit phx' parents, enjoyed some great mother-in-law cooking, and saw the abomination that is 'stomp the yard' or whatever - which i give a rating of 5 beers to get through. it was like the fast and the furious of dancing, but worse.
found out dopefiend is in vancouver, visiting uncle weed, and hope they have some sort of meet-up with the fans before dopefiend goes back to london.

and i'm late for work again.

steal this interview

the most recent installment of the viking youth power hour is a previously unreleased interview with abbie hoffman, conducted during the course of the chicago 7 trials, with a bunch of commentary by the then 16 year old aspiring journalist tommy laporte, and the viking drunks. towards the end of the show i could swear you can hear some of them snorting right at the table. again.
all i knew about abbie hoffman up until hearing this show was from "steal this movie", and like the extra features on the dvd. i've never read "steal this book". i gotta say that actually hearing the actual dude was... disappointing. he didnt sound like the leader of a concerted anti-establishment effort i thought he was - he sounded like a rebel looking for a cause, or someone who sorta felt what was going on, but didnt stop long enough to think it thru, so a lot of his thinking and acting seems to me now, was done on the fly. who knows, maybe he was bigger than that - maybe he wanted to appear more "wild" in this particular interview than he was, maybe he didnt care about how he appeared thru this interview at all, possibly also because of the trauma of being on trial, and on such a scale. but even the dude that interviewed him was confirming my present feeling about him: that the dude was more of a force of nature than a logically thought out activist.
during the course of the of the interview he argued against any notions of impartiality and objectivism - he wanted people personally involved in the situation - the political situation in the states at the time - he wanted people to feel. hmm, maybe he wasnt so much against objectivism, but against apathy. anywho - gotta go to work.

phx and boogie went to kelowna to chill with gran and grampa, and i stayed at home. kinda weird - this appartment suddenly empty. felt lonely. but then i plunged into trying to fix whatever is wrong with the friggin' talon - battery got charged ok, car started ok, got it into the underground garage, cant say i feel like i found the source of the problem, why the abs seemed to be on, but not full on, until it drained the battery. maybe the nicked wires i found, dried and insulated? but it just doesnt feel like that was it. then by chance i discovered that the pin on which the alternator pivots has all but fallen out! i fucked around for hours, but couldnt get a new nut on there properly. i'll have to drain the oil, take off the filter, and then maybe i'll get enough space to get at it enough to just tighten it a little bit, so that i can hopefully safely get to my parents' place, where i can comfortably work on it, with the tools and good lighting there. our building's strata doesnt allow any kind of car work in the garage. i wonder if they'll slap me with a fine. it could happen, like the guy on the 2nd floor that installed laminate flooring in his suite - had to take it all off and pay a fine. our police state starts with our police strata :)
i worked until midnight last night. today i dont wanna go back there, hence this entry, but i gotta go. its felt like my life is too busy for a while now.
listening to some robert anton wilson and philip k dick - may both of whom rest in peace. the viking youth talked a bunch about them, so i wrote the names down and d/l'd what was available. ray kurzweil too - pretty sweet. watched a short bio on philip k dick last night - seems like he was just a crazy dude! there's a group of people out there who enjoy the creations of crazy people. you could probably easily extend that family to most artists. "most" - me and my weird preoccupation with always allowing for exceptions , alternatives, and exactitude. hehe - or exactness :) sometimes. to communicate as exactly as possible what i mean. or someone else. translation is like a riddle or a puzzle. i love it when i am able to use a saying or proverb, or any phrase that is not a straight-forward statement, to convey exactly the idea behind another such statement in another language, especially when the two statements use different subject matters to illustrate the point they're trying to get accross. now thats a convoluted tangent if i've ever seen one :D

i've recently been listening thru the viking youth podcasts - these guys are cool.

apparently in iran an unmarried woman will be punished with 100 lashes if she 'allows' herself to be raped, while a married woman will be stoned to death. was this mohammed's idea?

its fucking cold out there, and i got a shitload of stuff to do today. i dont really wanna do any of it.

why are there so few good books available in audio book format?

gonna be late for work again, because i just couldnt stop browsing thru Lorenzo's pics of Burning Man 2006.
i gotta make it out there one day...

i've just discovered podcasts - awesome! :)
i've so far only been listening to matrixmasters.com
was happy to find some terence mckenna there that i havent heard before, and started listening to some new peeps. some interesting shit, some not so much, this one dude who alternated between sounding too stoned to answer questions, and eloquently explaining some other points. this was from burning man though, raising the probability of him being at the very least burnt out, to near-certainty. the second last speech that i listened to today was by the dude, Lorenzo who runs matrixmasters and who undertook the podcastage, and i was really pleasantly surprised by the quality of his speech, and its content. i recommend listening to it :)

i've recently started feeling that the environment is beyond "saving", and that we can now at best hope to just keep it as healthy for as long as possible, until we can start moving "off-world", so more should be now spent on space technology. mind you, it would probably be cheaper to send garbage off-world than to try and terra-form a whole new planet or moon. still, we have to be able to master traveling and living in space soon, because the earth wont have enough resources for a second go...