The infinite possibility of magic fairy powers

Should it occur that you find yourself trapped in a dungeon, in a less
then ogre form, with your stallion donkey, and your adorably deadly
cat, who has a passion for floppy hats and tall boots, whilst only
manacles, a cell door, and a castle wall armed with a milk frothier
stand between you and your lady love, fear not, because through the
improbable powers of magic, everything will work out.

How you ask? Well I won't spoil it for you, because I think Shrek 2
is a great movie, and worth the sticky floors, and uncomfortable
seats, even if you sit on the end of a row, where boneheads with big
feat tromp up and down past you stomping your feet each time they
pass.

Why on earth would anyone want to endure such a thing, what movie
could possibly entice me back to the sinister theater complex to be
gouged of my 14 dollars for a ticket, and 10 dollars for my death tub,
and sugar barrel (aka large popcorn with "topping" and ten gallon
pop?) Without going into a tirade about topping, and I assure you I
have a tirade stored up all about topping and the other fowl lies of
the theater industry (from an inside source,) I will tell you.

Shrek 2, lets you forget for a moment all the tripe that has been
pumped down the movie pipe line, and enjoy a well animated, well
written, well spoken show. Now it doesn't let you forget for too long
about the tripe, because it slips in all sorts of reference to pop
culture, in a twisted fun way, so you can't hope to not laugh at some
of it.

What it had that so many sequels don't is freshness. It wasn't the
same jokes completely rehashed like Austin Powers 2 and Three, Charles
Angels 2, and Beverly Hills Cop 2, 3. Just to pick on the principle
actors a bit, but in this case it was fresh. Now the moral was the
same, Beauty is skin deep, and thats a great moral anyways, especially
in this age of EXTREME Makeover, and The Swan. I mean what person
can't help but feel ashamed if you tell them the only way they can be
pretty is to go to extremes, or to liken them to the ugly duckling.
Except in the case of the Swan you have fifteen but ugly ducks and one
swan. Can you say early childhood onset eating disorders as popular
mainstream behaviour?

So I digress, the point being that Sherk 2, is fresh, funny, pokes
fun, (even a little at itself,) is appropriate and amusing for all
ages and shows a new level in detailed animation (not life like, but
that is intentional.)

So spend you $$$, support the movie industry, (don't buy the popcorn,)
and tell me one thing?

Do you know the muffin man?

If someone asks if your a god?

You say "yes!"

The Date

The DATE has been set!!!!

Saterday May 21, 2005.

After that, its a poo poo to all you other ladies as I will be married, actually you pretty much have less then a snowballs chance in hell with me now, becuase I am the happiest guy on earth, engaged to the most wonderful girl in the world. So its not like there was any chance, but May 21st will pretty much dash those clinging to some shed of hope. Sorry.

FYI people that is the long weekend up here in Canada, and sort of Erin and I's 6th aniversary, the official date has always been either the 28th, or the 21st, so I think we will take the 21st as official, just for sentimentality of it :)

Woot I'm getting hitched!!!!

peace out!

The Art of Z

Nothing makes my weekend, then sleep, curled up like a cat on the sofa snoozing away a somewhat bleary long weekend. Okay truth be told I can't curl up like a cat, because Erin's cat Ben (a reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible,) can actually jam his foot up his nose if he wanted too. Sooo to rephrase, splayed out, in an uncatlike fashion on the Cottage Sofa, with a book forgotten dangling from my limp hand as I sleep away the afternoon. Add to it a cute girl, Erin, who is similarly entwined in sleep, sharing said sofa, and you have my recipe for relaxation. I could have used a little more outdoor time, but it was cold and buggy, and we were out there a lot helo-chopptering (the verb describing the act of piloting an out of control remote control helicopter.)

Add some dangerous explosives (aka fireworks in a windstorm) and you have yourself a great weekend, or at least I did!

The sinister melancholy of The Tire

I am The Tire
around turn I endlessly
until popping day


I present this haiku to you, as I begin this discussion of the inner life of car tires. Sure its not a great life, I'm sure it is in fact largely a nauseating life, turning and turning and turning, just typing it makes me sick. So between bouts of nausea, I'm sure tires complain endlessly to their neighbor's. Yet neighbor is all they will ever be, as the cruel task masters who enslave them deny them the close companionship of fellow members of their species. Only as young children do they cavort together through factories and stores, only to find that adolescence striped from them as they are rotated and balanced into perfect harmony with a car. There to slavishly carry the car safely over all manner of surfaces, only to end their life shamefully in a mass grave, where they will spend eternity in a purgatory of idleness, or for the unfortunate few, the hellishness of the tire fire. Some few will be forced into further servitude in some new reincarnate form, which the man tries to tell you is recycling.

So if this is their life, is there any wonder why they might wallow endlessly, only to one day find they can take it no longer. In that deepest moment of sorrow to open their treads to some road debris like a defeat samurai general pressing his pressing his sword to his breast.

Like many a tire before, and many a tire after, my tire found this moment of despair and choose, the easy way out. Without ceremony or a sound it was over, and its lifeless shell clung to my car, flapping in the RPM's.

Caught between mourning for my tire, and general loss of vehicle control, I was forced to the shoulder. There I performed the last rites, as befitting my lost friend. Also known as the rites of Jack and Tire Iron. As I raised the car up on the steel, its comrades whipped by in silent salute, each one leave a wake understanding, and as if the car could think, it leaned into spaces left behind, yearning to rejoin with the road and is pack.

When at last the rites were finished, we left that shoulder, by that road, where one poor tire ended its days. In one final salute to their lost neighbors and long time friend, engine, car, and tires all roared back to the road throwing up dust, tears and a piercing shriek.

And such is the way of tires.

Here is the shelf from three angles after the second coat. Acutally the back only got 1 coat.]

Another image of the first coat

Here is the shelf after the first coat of stain. Looking pretty snazy

I don't know what to do with all this sawdust and scrambled eggs...

Phew, sanding and Fraser, seem like opposites, blue collar and high brow, but hey that's me. I mean I'm a yuppie intellectual computer geek, I just happen to like to get my hands dirty with a little bit of construction.

So tonight I sanded a large portion of "the shelf" do do do, and after moving it out of the basement to improve air flow, I replaced the hand with a electric palm sander to increase sawfust flow, and that flow was still straight into my lungs. So I will be coughing up hair balls for days In spite of that, the shelf is coming along smoothly, hopefully I will be able to put the first coat of stain on this weekend, maybe even the second.

So where does Fraser come in, well he is the reason I am not doing more sanding, I wanted to see the finale. I admit to having drifted away from the show in the later years, but it was a show I always enjoyed, witty, loquacious, quirky, and just real, even when it is at its most eccentric and crazy, there was always a taste of how it was real life. So tonight I watch and join a loyal following of watchers to bid adieu to Dr. Fraser Crane.

And the front

Back of shelf ooooo ahhh

Here are some images of the shelf I have been working on, I have finished construction but I still have to stain it, you can see my garage is filled with the standard misc crap, but we just have a billion times as much.

Here is my Kipling Prank, the funny looking pac man, and the words up in the top boxes stand for Software Engineering, which is the disipline I graduated from. It is about 5:30 am and we have all been up late working on it. Since I didn't blog when I did this, and it is one of my fondest memories of school, I wanted to post it up.

Genetically Modified Crops

Organic, Shmorganic
Its all a load of bull, modern farming techniques, and I only loosely
call them modern have allowed man kind to overcome the theoretical
limits on population size, instead of over population, famine and war,
we have over population, and war. Although population is leveling in
out in most developed nations, and famine does exist in the third
world, but wait it doesn't have to... (I'll get back to this.) My
first point is the we have been GM'ing food for years, breeding
livestock for specialization, grafting and fertilizing plant lines to
get the best, GM just lets us do it in a few less steps, then along
comes a bunch of no nothings and want us to switch back to stone age
methods, maybe I should hunter gatherer myself some beef while I'm at
it. Organic food means lower crop yield, lower quality crop and more
waste, but what is worse, to make it appear like it is the same
quality crop, marginal crops are trashed increasing waste, and making
the poor starving people even more starving, fortunately I think the
avg. starving person is ignorant of that particular form of food
waste.
Then you take the starving third world nations, where crops could be
modified to thrive in marginal conditions, instead, we stop
development on them, as there is a fear that they are dangerous.
Anyways the most recent hit to the GM food industry was here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3703791.stm where a major GM
company stopped/postponed research on GM wheat because of market push
back. I can understand them not wanting to waste money on the
project, I just think the market has its head screwed on backwards.
BAH!

More from the JC

Okay, so now that I am good and blasphemous, JC is Jacqueline Carey. Her works are wonderful, maybe not for the young, or offendable, but wonderful none the less. I actually feel her work is better then Tolkien, and that is saying a lot from me. Anyways here are the three books she has in print

Kushiel's Dart
Kushiel's Chosen
Kushiel's Avatar

Hey it might just be, yes it is a trilogy. What is sad, yet refreshing is that she has committed that this set of characters story has ended, which I admire, since I feel too often now days authors start on these unending epics which can never be brought to a satisfying closure for the die hard fans, and tends to weaken early work. Its not that more couldn't be done, they are great characters, but mercifully she is going to leave them alone. Yet fear not, because she just announced (more or less recently, I don't check her site daily or even weekly,) a new book. Yeah! So below I have copied the synopsis from her site, sounds good to me, I eagerly await it. I encourage anyone to hit their library or book store and try the first one in the series. They are big, but they tantalizing your intellect, emotions, imagination, and intimacy.

Geoff Out!


Synopsis from her site:
Banewreaker:
Volume One of the Sundering
In the Seventh Age of the Sundered World, the world of Urulat lies uneasy under the shadow of Satoris Banewreaker, whom Men and Ellylon name the Sunderer. Wounded and defeated in the Shapers' War, banished by the Six Shapers who are his kindred, the Sunderer has raised a mighty army of Fjeltroll in his fortress of Darkhaven. At his side are the dreaded Three, his immortal generals. Together with the Sorceress of the East, they have conceived a plot to conquer the sundered world of Urulat and bring all of existence under their dominion

This is their storyÂ… and they're going to lose.

For a red star has risen over Urulat, and the time of the Prophecy has come. In the halls of the Rivenlost, the wizard Malthus studies the portents, and in the depths of the desert, a child is born with the mark of destiny emblazoned on his palms, unaware that the fate of the world will rest in his hands. A valiant company of travelers undertakes an impossible quest to retrieve the dagger Godslayer and destroy the Sunderer. As the forces of Darkhaven move to thwart their plans, events unfold to reveal the intricate linkage between triumph and tragedy, between good and evil.

The Sundering asks the question: Which is which?