My mom came home on Saturday with one of those big squishy exercise balls, you know, the ones you balance on and strengthen your core abdominal muscles with? I quite welcomed it, on the whole - I thought it might be a nice addition to my current fitness program of sitting in front of my computer spamming companies with my CV. I don’t know what to think about it now, though. In my current hierarchy of exercise-equipment esteem, it falls somewhere between ‘More or less useless’ and ‘Tool of Satan.’
For starters, you have to blow the thing up manually using a little plastic tube that looks as if it’s already been used to smoke crack by every member of the Korean factory from whence it came. Eww. “You go on and blow it up, honey,” Mom said, “I’ve got weak lungs.” For those few of you out there who don’t know, my vascular system is more or less crap, and I faint quite often due to low blood pressure if I try anything too butch or sporty, like, say, yawning or standing up. But, I love my mother, so I inflated the stupid thing: and promptly blacked out.
When I came to, I tried a couple of the exercises listed on the handy instructional sheet that had come with the ball. The least complicated one involved just sitting on it, which I did - very inadvisably - in our living room. I fell backwards two seconds later and hit my head on the coffee-table. Apparently, my core abdominal muscles could use some work. But I’ll be buggered if I’m using that thing to do so.

In other news, the helpful Kelly would like to point out that the absinthe sold in Canada lacks the actual poison, err, I mean recreational substance that makes real absinthe so ‘entertaining.’ I thought I’d mention it to our friendly neighbourhood absinthe fiend, and he disgustedly corroborated this fact. “Yeah, it’s a goddam travesty,” he complained. “That Hill’s stuff you get around here, it’s got like two milligrams per litre of wormwood oil, compared to the real stuff you get in Europe, which is like ten to twelve.” Very interesting. At any rate, even without the wormwood oil, you can still entertain yourself with Canadian absinthe, since it’s 140-proof no matter what kind of herbs were dumped into it. He’s out of the stuff anyway, which sounds like relatively good news on the whole, but there are whispered rumours of overseas suppliers coming through for him. Sigh.

“The obscenity “fuck” is a very old word and has been considered shocking from the first, though it is seen in print much more often now than in the past. Its first known occurrence, in code because of its unacceptability, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, “Flen flyys,” from the first words of its opening line, “Flen, flyys, and freris,” that is, “fleas, flies, and friars.” The line that contains fuck reads “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.” The Latin words “Non sunt in coeli, quia,” mean “they [the friars] are not in heaven, since.” The code “gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk” is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now: i was then used for both i and j; v was used for both u and v; and vv was used for w. This yields “fvccant [a fake Latin form] vvivys of heli.” The whole thus reads in translation: “They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].” “

So I just got back from a bout of do-gooding (good-doing?) and am typing with fingers clinically frostbitten, but feeling righteous nonetheless. Yessir, us canvassers for the Alberta Lung Association, we’re a tough breed. We’re like… we’re, like, the few - the proud. Or something like that. My brother claims cynically that I’m just doing this to upgrade my karma, but the truth is, they called my house and said “Do you have anyone there who might volunteer for us?” and I basically went “Sure.” That was three years ago. So folks, keep in mind for future reference: if you ever want me to do anything for you, ask. I’ll probably do it. “Will you?” “Yup.” Just like that. I’m going to go run my fingers under hot water now.

Hey, Rob - if your stomach is still accusing you of being a gluttonous chicken-ball eating jackass, take heart - it’s not your fault.
I found this article on the front page of cnn.com and had a good chuckle about it, and when I went back seven minutes later to get the URL for this blog posting, I found the front page literally taken over by news about the war on Iraq. I read a couple of the articles and blinked in dismay - I thought Bush was going to oust Saddam Hussein, not vaporize him. Apparently not. I have a feeling that this is going to be a very, very short war.
Oh, and did anyone read that little blurb in the Journal about how the U.S. tested out that huge-ass MOAB (the Mother of All Bombs) just to ‘impress’ the rest of the world, and it turns out they only had the one bomb and couldn’t make any more? I thought that was hilarious. Yeah, pretty intimidating, guys!

Well, my ex-best-friend-since-I-was-twelve would like me to know, and I quote, “As of last year, Absinthe is legal in Canada. Get with the times, sister!”
Luckily, I don’t have to edit my last posting, since I said it was illegal ‘practically’ everywhere, which leaves a dandy loophole for me to say something like, “Of course it’s legal in Canada, I knew that. I just didn’t feel like mentioning it to my impressionable absinthe-hunting acquaintance.”
Oh, and in case anyone in St. Albert is wondering about the billion-bird strong flocks that are probably dive-bombing your chokecherry trees even as we speak: they’re probably Bohemian waxwings.

So this guy I know calls me up and instead of “I had a lovely time yesterday, and don’t worry, I’ll give you back that twenty I stole from your purse when I thought you weren’t looking” I get greeted with “Do you think $340 is too much to spend for a bottle of absinthe?”
I said, “Whaaaa?” And that was pretty much all I got to say for the rest of the conversation, except for the occasional “Wow, that sounds great” when he stopped to breathe.
For those not in the know, the herbal liqueur known as absinthe isn’t quite as glamorous as advertised. It’s true that Edgar Allen Poe was a big fan, as were Van Gogh and several other slightly fucked-up artists back in the day, but frankly, absinthe is a bad deal. You’d be better off heading into the woods with a bottle of vodka and a pair of hedge-clippers. Listen, the stuff actually induced seizures. You can’t tell me that’s good news. If you cracked open a bottle of absinthe and took a couple of swigs, you’d be about as likely to have pleasant hallucinations as you would be to have excruciating liver pains and twenty-four hour projectile vomiting. Yay!
Anyway, it’s illegal practically everywhere except the UK, probably with good reason, but there are a couple of places to buy it on-line. Sigh. You know, part of me wants to talk this guy into spending the $340 on shiny baubles for me instead… but part of me really wants to go visit the guy in the hospital afterwards and say “I told you so.” Heh.
Also, ‘Teenage Wildlife’ is my third-favourite David Bowie song.

Speaking of names, I now want to change mine after seeing proof that this movie exists. Now what am I supposed to name my debut movie when I break into the porn business?

I know way too many Mikes. I can think of at least a half-dozen off the top of my head, and I probably graduated with another four or five whose last names escape me. At any rate, like anybody else, I distinguish them with nicknames, picking one characteristic that differentiates each Mike from the next, and the nicknames (because I am an idiot that way) tend to stick. So one particularly-delightful Mike I know goes to breakfast every Friday morning at the Power Plant, and since this is how I met him and usually kept meeting him, he got the moniker ‘Breakfast Mike.’ Another Mike, who could have been called any number of other things, ended up with the nickname ‘Hot Mike,’ because when I met him I thought he was hot (but really he was only hot ‘cos he was single and so was I, at the time - sigh - you know how these things happen). Now it turns out Breakfast Mike doesn’t like his nickname and wants ‘Hot’ for himself. “Can’t do it, man,” I told him, “it’s been taken.” I suggested he be satisfied with ‘Hort’ Mike, which is almost as good, in my opinion.
It took a while, but he’s worn me down. I told him that I’d post the entire thing to my blog, and he can have ‘Hot’ Mike because after Hot Mike himself reads this, he’ll probably either get really annoyed or his girlfriend will come over to my house and poke me in the eye. Either way - no longer hot. So Mike, I hope you’re happy - your name is now no longer associated with the most important meal of the day.

Inspired by Mark’s and Rob’s early blog postings, I got to wondering, What was I thinking a year or two ago? As it turns out, something like the following, excerpted from a March 20th, 2000 journal entry:

“…Yeah, so what if my degree is worthless. So what if I won’t be able to get a job after I get out of here. So fucking what? I love genetics. It is a love whose month is ever May. I just want a job with some evil corporation somewhere, not even upper-echelon management, a job with no future but lots of gel electrophoresis and plates of viruses and plaques and agar on a hot plate in the back of the room and a list of things to accomplish every week and a little X-ray machine and fifty thousand test-tubes and my own centrifuge and… yes, okay, it does bring tears to my eyes. I want it so bad I can practically taste it - and it tastes like Roccal and ozone, like latex gloves and methanol. What am I doing…”

Hmm. So it seems evident that two full years ago I realized that I was pretty much destined for peaceful unemployment and entire mornings spent in bubble baths. Interesting.

My latest literary endeavour has just reached the magical, official novel length of 45,000 words. Hooray! Only one problem: the main character, in fact the narrator, remains anonymous. I couldn’t think of a name in the first couple of paragraphs, so I just kept putting it off; and now that I’m galloping towards the end, I feel slightly sheepish that I still haven’t thought of something to call the poor bastard. Any ideas? If anybody thinks of anything halfway reasonable, e-mail me. The guy is about five-nine, dark-haired, and ‘exudes the gaunt charisma of some drug-ridden actor.’

On the other hand… maybe it would be more, like, literarily effective if I just left him without a name. Yeah. Just end it and not give him a name. Because names limit people, right? Right. Great. That just made my life about 12% easier.