Why I like the Usual Spot

Coyote dropped by today to drop off an item for one of my secret projects and to collect an aspidistra I'd set aside for him. I enticed him to stay by offering food but then set him to work on a little home repair project.

By ten o'clock, we were a bit tired and thirsty, so I suggested we make our way to the usual spot for a beverage.

Not wanting to leave the aspidistra outside in the bicycle trailer where it could be stolen, I brought it in and put it on our table.

"Maybe this will help us meet girls," suggested the C-dog.

"Not likely," I said. (You'd think the Coyote would know by now that when he's at a bar with me, there'll be no young ladies approaching. It's not like when he's on his own cutting a swath with cagey American coyotes.)

Then the waiter came and asked what beverages we'd like. Coyote ordered his usual libation and I ordered a dark frothy ale (only a small one.)

"And what would you like?" The waiter stared at the aspidistra.

"Our friend will have a glass of water," I said. "No ice."

A few minutes later, he brought us all our drinks. The aspidistra finished his first. Chugged it, you might say.

Keep on Struttin'

Mayor Lex Luthor thinks Ottawa needs to become more swagger worthy. Seems we don’t have enough pride about our town and we need to express it via some kind of new strut. In fact, our mayor is so confident about its impact he thinks citizens may even add a gratuity payment on our tax bill once the swagger takes hold.

I think Lex is on to something. Seeing that the ESIs are now promoting contests, I suggest we put out the call for a new Ottawa swagger.

So get out your video cams and send us a demonstration of what you think Ottawa’s new swagger should be. My nomination is a perennial Ottawa favourite called the bureaucratic two-step: one step forward, two steps backward. Get your ideas to us pronto. We’ll need to rehearse it in time for the Senators Stanley Cup victory parade.

For inspiration in designing a swagger you may want to consult this web-based utility

Of lists and trysts

Metasexual or not, Audrey says blogs need more lists. So she took to the keyboard and tapped out one of her own to spice up the ESI site:




My favourite things besides sex

1 old houses
2 champagne
3 dancing at the Marina Beach Club in Benalmadena, Spain
4 my friends - The IO, Fourth Dwarf, The Chair, The Research Director, Conch Shell, Aggie/Eigga, Coyote, {redacted}
5 books and magazines
6 sunshine
7 sparkly skirts
8 the colour pink
9 Jamaica
10 The Sunday Times
11 my little Canon camera
12 chocolate
13 kissing
14 activities leading up to sex which aren't sex
15 men who read
16 Chris Chelios
17 The Strokes
18 Rome
19 taking baths
20 roses

Introducing the Metasexual

Metrosexuals are so last decade. Now, apparently, the übersexual tag is jostling for alpha-male position among social pundits. This intelligence from no less an authority than Guy Stuff, appearing on Global TV at the flagship time of 2 a.m. weeknights, not too long before something called Booty Boat, about which I'm sure 4th Dwarf knows.

Large, distracting moving CGI greenscreened into the set design help them to do wonders with their $1.95 production budget, and the nine guys in the tiny audience corral look rapt -- probably because their bug-eyed insomnia is worse than mine.

Anyway, we know that pundits propound these kindsa social labels because if they can coin one, write a very thin book about it, and hook it into the prevailing American zeitgeist, even for a nanosecond, well! The route to wealth via the lecture circuit, bookstore self-help sections and guest appearances on Oprah, The View and Dr. Phil is assured. (Extra points if ya can crack CNN or Fox News. And Canadian channels, sadly, count for nothing. Market's too small.) You know, explaining that metrosexuals are narcissists who pluck their eyebrows and wax their backs (very good reason why coyotes don't go that route...), whereas übersexuals are less sexually-ambiguous "guys' guys" types, say, like George Clooney or George Clinton.

Since ESI: The Sock Puppet Movie seems to have stalled in pre-development, and a dog's gotta eat, this scam interests me. As more of a punster than a pundit, I propose we create the Metasexual category: Just off the top of my (unwaxed) head, those of any gender who are not back-waxers, are totally into self-referental wanking in Emergency Meetings, are more concerned with quasi-analysing the relationships of others than their own, and are given to lengthy circular theorizing, at least when their collective Attention Deficit Disorder is properly medicated. And obsessive-compulsive about blogging. Did I mention blogging?

Metasexual. Ya read it here first. A meta category so fresh, even Wikipedia doesn't have it yet. But we can fix that...

Image: BBC North Yorkshire

Another Weekend in Outer Space

Jupiter Ray Project

The Jupiter Ray project is a band. They played at Irene's on Sunday night. They have a cute lead singer named Shannon. She is married to the guy who sings beside her. He has a good steady government job. The band has enough material for one set, so for upcoming performances, we can expect opening acts. (Like Casey Comeau and the Centretown Wilderness Club who are worth seeing on their own.) Their name came from a TV show with a cult following, maybe the Simpsons. They fired one of their first drummers because he was too heavy (with the drumming, this wasn't a weight prejudice thing) and there are no hard feelings.

[How do I know all this? I ask questions. I was really smooth with the marital status: "Is that tall, attractive, blonde woman the lead singer for the Jupiter Ray Project?" I asked one of my informants. Upon being informed that she was, "What does her husband do?" See... That's the smooth way to find out if she's single.]

Here are some of the ways their music has been described by others:

• Folk rock;
• Country rock;
• Canadian roots;
• Melodic, rythm-centered, moody, often trippy, usually acoustic, roots-based music;
• Roots-rock-reggae with a touch of ska and soul; and
  
• Soulful country.

These are all fine with me. If the band is called something like "the Cowboy Junkies"...

But when they're called "The Jupiter Ray Project", I want laser beams, lyrics about robots and DNA and a theremin instead of a fiddle. (Even if it is that incredible Michael Ball fellow playing the fiddle.)

Plan 99

Given the disappointment at Irene's on Friday, I was pessimistic about the Plan 99 reading on Saturday. It was in this bar on Elgin Street called the Manx. Still, Plan 99 is from Outer Space, so perhaps I'd be in luck.

And I was! Being completely unfamiliar with this Manx place, I had no idea that it is the closest thing Ottawa has to the Mos Eisley Cantina.

This fellow Steven Ross Smith began reading what we'd been told was "poetry", but I quickly realized it was something entirely different: viral software intended to shatter a human brain into a Tralfamadorian time warp where all of a life's moments happen simultaneously.

I innoculated myself from this by jotting lines down as I was able to catch them:

the contest poem is an unfettered dog...

recombinant dna alphabet drives me...

maze, a white-tipped sea...

five and a half decades slipping away...

Then Shane Rhodes read his viral programming. His work had more of a narrative flow and would have been less effective at creating time rifts, but most of the audience had been weakened by Ross Smith.

"The only way I've found to kill cockroaches is to tell them tales of depravity."

I was excited that he would be reading about the Birth of Venus until he mentioned it was a pretentious poem about a Botticelli painting, not an ode to the creation of a planet.

"How pretentious can you be when it's printed on napkins?"

But he ended the poem with the words:

"...uranium collapses on a deuterium core."

So it wasn't a total loss.

Oddly enough, he described his concluding piece as a country/western poem. In my experience, the old west and outer space often do not mix well (every cowboy plot episode of Star Trek, new or old, sucks.) But it's been suggested I should be more open-minded (i.e. FireFly).

Before leaving the Manx, I should point out that the art on the wall by an artist named Jenn Farr made me nostalgic for a number of alien planets I've visited.