Grimm's weblog

Today me and DC went out for a little gleam and stock photography roconocanse. All went fairly smooth except for a little tumble I took because some asshole cop left a chunk of horse shoe lying in the middle of my path. I hit the floor faster then MC Hammers bank account. I caused no blood loss though so it wasn't too bad.
Also of interest on this gleam, I was stuck blading in this narrow streetcar loading zone at the cne, when all of a sudden a streetcar poped out of nowhere and started barraling down towards me!! It was a harrowing ordeal. But I kept my kool and skated out of there like a bat out of hell... Meatloaf would have been proud.

So I was just watching When Harry Met Sally on Showcase Diva. Cause that's just the kind of exciting, heterosexual, testosterone filled, Saturday night I ended up having today. So back to the movie; you know what? That young Meg Ryan is damn cute. I always forget that, till I happen to catch this movie, then I always say to myself, "damn shes adorable" and "that damn Harry is a fool".
But that's all I'll limit myself to say on the subject. I'd say more, but my view on that genre of movie is well established, and has been mocked enough, as to not need any further kindling thrown to it.

Last night while out on the town in celebration of Jons bday. I heard the strangest of things. The DJ mixed in from NIN's Star Fuckers into Prodigy's Breath. It sounds weird but it totally worked, when he droped in the opening beat of Breath ontop of the Star Fuckers chorus, it totally rocked. So I'd like to give kudos to Mr Dj, that was excellent work.

Last night was the Sevendust concert, what follows is my recap of it. The setting, Toronto, The Guvernment, 8ish pm, cloudy with scattered showers. We got there after the first band Tallisman finished, we then had to sit through a painfully long sound check for the second band Presence. The long wait would almost have been forgivable if the band had not sucked. I was about to fall asleep from their boring, unengaging preformance. After what seemed like forever, Presence finally wrapped up and Sevendusts crew came out to set things up for thirty minutes.



Once the dust hit the stage though, all long delays and forgetable opening bands were forgiven. Lajon was in top form, even with his new short hair (before the show there were concerns over the loss of dreads. Since we all know what happened to Incubus as soon as Brandon cut off his dreads). The mosh pit was crazy hot, I mean I was soaked in what I assume or at least hope was my sweat, now that is damn hot. I was up front center, right infront of Lajon for the duration of the show. And I managed to get 2 of Clint's guitar picks, one that he was actually using and another unused one that he tossed out at the end of the show.



For a band with four albums under their belt(4th album "Sessions" is out October 7th), they played a pretty short set though. It was just a bit over an hour and although they played a good variety I wish they would have done more from Home and the self titled album. My Ruin in perticual is an absolute favourite of mine, and I love seeing them do it live. The songs I recall them doing were Denial, Waffle, Trust, Crusified, Enemy, Praise, Bitch, and Angels Son. The latter was especially great seeing as how its Angels Son afterall. Bitch didn't make an apperance till the encore and I was getting a little worried that we weren't going to hear it but then BOOM encore Bitch starts up and people went nuts.

So in conclusion it was a good, if not short, show and I highly recommend everyone time travel back to yesterday to watch it. Did I mention the snazzy Sevendust guitar picks I got? I did? Okay then this concert review is over.



*note: NONE of these pictures are recent, so they do not reflect Lajons new sans-dread lock hair-do

Chuck Palahniuk is touring around right now promoting his new book Diary A Novel, and is going to be on Conan O'Briens show on either Oct 29 or 30th, no one is quite sure when.

W00t! Chuck on Conan, I can't wait to see how that unfolds.

Tonight was Del's (DC+ Mel == Del) Jack and Jill pre wedding, stripper free party. I'm tired so I'll keep this description brief. A bunch of rowdy mother fuckers got together to tear the roof off the buildings party room.
There was black jack, and culinary treats prepared by Rob, drinking, dancing(well not really), raffles (I won me a CD rack/luncheon meat server), and mingling, lots and lots of mingling.
I got to bartend for 15min. But NO ONE came to get drinks from me while I was there. Maybe because I have no idea what to do with them alcohol bottles, or maybe because those wussies couldn't handle my specialty drink the patented "50/50 gin and burbon mix".

A note worthy event was Warren aka "The Great White Hype" letting us all down. We all thought he was in, but alas, he got nothing. And that is about all that stands out in my mind at the moment. So now I can go hit the ol' pillow because I'm dead tired and done writing.

(ohh ya and Bashtard Mills'ed it by falling asleep and showing up to the party around 10)

OMG I just found the coolest thing: Teddy: A Sketching Interface for 3D Freeform Design. It's a simple java applet so you can start playing wiht it right away. And then after you have tons of fun with it download the stand alone version called SmoothTeddy, it lets you save your models, and paint them!! I'm off to make some bad ass chibis :)

In what has to be the coolest movie news I've heard in a while, Fox is releasing the directors cut of Alien in theatres this Halloween!!

The last cool Halloween movie that I remember getting re-released was Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. And that movie didn't do as well as I hoped. As I recall, me and the girl I took to it were the only ones above the age of ten in the whole theatre... whole theatre consisting of maybe fifteen people. Not that we didn't enjoy* ourselves, being huge fans of Mr Skellington and all.

And speaking of Tim Burton. Word on the street is that he's close to signing Johnny Depp to star as Willy Wonka, in his twisted remake of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. I wonder if Marylin Manson will get at least a cameo in this movie.

[addendum] enjoyment as in giddiness, no monkey business, in a room full of kids was implied (you bunch of weirdos).

Some cool news coming out of Sony about the PS3. Accordign to this Register article, the PS3 will offer backwards compatibility with the PS2 and PSX. Thats damn nifty.

I did take note of one part of the article that didn't sound right: PSone runs on the PlayStation 2 through emulation rather than actual hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software... Now by saying "emulation rather than actual hardware", they make it sound as if everything is happening in some kind of Bleem! style software. As far as I knew the PS2 achived backwards compatability thanks to it's use of the original PS1s processors as its I/O sub processors. It's not like I'm saying that this feat couldn't easily be achived by sticking some EmotionEngine chips into the PS3 (maybe 16 like in that cluster they showed off once;). What I'm saying is that either the article is wrong, or misquoting, or I'm way off base here and should shut up(but I doubt it).

Bashtard's friend John is leaving town sometime this week for a trip to Fiji(I believe), so to send him off tonight, a bunch of us went downtown to party it up. They decided to go to Milwaukees(no one listened to my Phoenix suggestion). This place is down on Adelaide St. just off John St. The music was lame to say the least, it was all that Much Music pop countdown crap. There was some decent looking eye candy but most of em were nothing "this guy" would be interested in. Except for this one, fine looking brunette who we dubbed Christina. She was wearing a small, white, mid riff bearing, camisole. Along with some form fitting powder-pink, pair of trackpants that gave just enough of a glimpse at the outlines of her Brazilian cut bikini panties(das right GRRRRR). She was pretty damn cute, and I would have endured dancing to some Beyonce for this femenina. But she had none of it, according to Bashtard when she sat down near us she checked me out then made like she was looking at a poster, when I turned my head to make some eye contact, she looked away. Rest of the evening I kept trying to make eyes at her but she never responded, I gots totally stonewalled. My theory is that I was too damn intimidating, what with this cool hair, piercings, and fine looking ensemble I had on. Ohh well, it was HER loss!!

Later on in the night, as things were winding down, this girl that had totally stonewalled John, came by to chat me up. John was on the other level so he missed it all. But ya, this girl came by and started chit chatting with me, asked if I worked down at Futures(the bakery) and... I don't recall what else she said. Then when we exchanged names and shook hands, she took mine and started licking it. I said "Why thank you" in a very StrongBad kind of voice. I then turned around and that damn Bashtard was pushing me back into her. She started talking to me again, and asked me: "are you putting on a peep show for me later?", my coy retort to her was "would you like me to?" again in a very StrongBad kind of voice. A song, that I can't recall, then blasted through the sound system and she took off to dance. This girl was a little inebriated, and not really my "thang" so I stayed back to chill on my chair. But that damn Bashtard had none of that, he shoved me off my chair and forced me to go dance with her. So I grudgingly hit the the dance floor, the Sweat dripping over my body, Dancing getting just a little naughty. After a few tunes she went back to the lounging area where we had been, to sit back with her girlfriends. Cypress Hill was on by then so there was no way I was leaving the floor, I gots my groove on till management told us to get our asses out of there. And so ended our evening, next time I need better music to work with damn it.

I just found the most ammusing of pages: The Devil's Dictionary.

It is a collection of rather "skewed" defenitions of words, that computer nerds should find entertaining. Such as: "information architecture, noun: A vital component in the development of Web sites, used to round the budget up to the next hundred thousand dollars."

A couple of my favourites were for: web standards, slashdot, comments, and e-mail.
But the rest are really funny as well, so go read them.

I'm going to share a secret with you, even though I shouldn't because it is a Pat®-ented secret. But I'm feeling generous so I'm going to release this baby under a CC:ShareAlike 1.0 license.

Now time for the main event, my Bitesize Surprise sandwich. To make this baby you will need some cheese. Cheddar, Havarti, Mozzarella, etc. whatever floats your boat. You will also need some nice fresh bread, and one slice of a kosher pickle. It MUST be kosher, and make sure to shake off as much pickle juice from it as possible.

What you do is layout the cheese inside the bread, in an overlapping roof shingle fashion. Then you ask a loved one* to wash their hands; proper hygiene is mandatory. So you ask them to wash their hands, and then while you look away, they are to place the slice of kosher pickle somewhere within the roof shingle pattern of cheese and close up the bread.

Once this baby is closed up it's time to take it for a ride. So start eating away and enjoying that delicious creamy cheese. After a while of chewing away at it, you should bite down into a tart pickle surprise!! If all went well, and you used a properly bite sized pickle slice, then you should only have to endure that stupid tart pickle taste for a couple of chews while you work on that bite. Then you'll be back to that delicious cheesy wonderland and will have forgotten all about that disruptive pickle.

So there you go, Bitesize Surprise, share the recipe with your friends and family.

* If you don't have a loved one then you most likely never will. You'll die sad and alone, most likely by your own hand, maybe capped by a junkie you ripped off. Either way, you might as well just not read the rest of the recipe, it will be of no use to you.

This morning I got a call from a noizex client. The guy that runs the company had organized a staff field trip type thing, and someone had to cancel so he called me up and invited me to go with them. The field trip in question was a free hot air balloon ride!! It was awsome, we went up in the third largest balloon in Canada. It holds 10 people and is gigantic; 12 stories high gigantic. We lifted off from Bradford, just south of Barrie, and ended up somewhere east of Hallibourton (or a name sort of like that, I dont really recall). The pilot said we went up about 2000 feet at the highest point. From there you could see lake Simcoe and Toronto/CN tower/lake ontario, well Toronto was a bit hazy because it was kind of far but you could still make it out without the binoculars.

The pilot was a 20 year ballooning veteran and was quite good at manoeuvring the giant behemoth of a balloon we were in. He brought us down a foot above some swampy pond and we floated over it for a bit then he took us down lower and basically skipped the basket over the water before lifting us high up again. Once we were back up we saw single engine planes flying by us at the same altitude, they do this "pilots wave" thing where they tilt their wings towards you as they fly by, sort of like a wave. We then dipped back down over farmers fields, and freaked out some cows, you could hear them moooooooooing from pretty high up as they ran down to one corner of their field, apparently they dont like the balloon or the sound it makes when the fire is on. We were at the tree line level for a bit and I reached out and grabbed some leafs from a tree, it was pretty damn cool. After that we flew around for a while longer, passed this giant secluded house out in the middle of nowhere, the pilot said that it belonged to the manager of 80's crap legends Rush. We all laughed. After flying around for a bit longer it was finally time to land. The pilot radioed the chase team that was driving around tracking us from the ground, and asked them to go get clearance from a farmer so we could land on his field. The farmer said it was cool and we touched down on his hay field, we didnt really stop cause the wind picked us up and we started hovering about a half metre above the ground down the field. We left a pretty cool looking path of knocked over hay all the way down to the point where the ground crew caught up with us and anchored the balloon.

Once safely on the ground, you have to "share in the oldest of ballooning traditions, a champagne toast". I toasted and gave someone my cup. The ground crew then drove us all the way back to the starting off point, which turned out to be quite a bit away from where we ended up. We then went to Montanas in New Market, I was waiting for Jcloth to come by, since he lives right down the road from there. Once he arrived we were there for about another 5minutes while I finished my cranberry on the rocks. Then NOTHING of significance happened, I said bye to everyone and we left.

So in my opinion ballooning is BAD ASS, and we need to get a crew together to go back up there, because it is quite the fun little adventure.

ps. Why am I home so late? After Montanas, Jcloth and I went down to another pub to hang out with other people, then we went to the office to annoy Rob during the scheduled maintenance window :)