all the <blank>'s a stage

Ever get the feeling that some series of events has been set in motion purely for your amusement? Toronto: every corner is a free show ...

Last night while lounging on a friends balcony watching the city blink away below, a buddy messaged me and said I should meet him on a patio near my place for a night cap a little after midnight. I made my way over and we staked out our chunk of patio enjoying a cool summer night and casting pointed looks at the bartender who was studiously ignoring us. We opted to belly up to the bar to order a few and while we were there we were dragged into some idle chat with a local barfly who followed us back out onto the patio and invited himself to have a seat.

Being more or less friendly fellows and no stranger to the desire for idle drunken conversation we traded banter with him and inside jokes with glances at each other, when a fourth decidedly shattered man concluded that it would be in everyones best interest for him to join our table too. "Look how beautiful you are!" he declared to the lot of us after shuffling zombie like through the bar and hurling himself with gusto at an empty seat.

He was more or less unable to form a coherant sentance, so he stuck to laughing when we did and uttering the occasional "muth-fuck" of agreement after a break in conversation. "That's a really nice watch", said the first interloper to the shattered man.

"One of you three buy me a beer!", responded the shuffling drunk.

"I'll buy you a beer for that watch", says the first drunk while my friend and I share an amused look. The shuffler struggles out of his watch and hands it over, and chatty drunk straps it on clearly pleased with his good fortune and wanders up to the bar to pay the shuffler.

As soon as he's out of earshot the shuffler suddenly regains the power of speech and tells us "That watch cost me seven dollars, and there's no WAY that girl is gonna serve me". Then tangentally, "I'm queer eh guys, you're cool with that huh?" We assured him he was still welcome at our table and watched with amusement as he accepted his beer from the chatter and proceeded to sip his brew and hit on him with wild abandon, codling his arms and patting him gingerly on the face.

Deciding this was more than he'd barganed for the chatter took his new watch and ambled out making some muted declaration of heading home to smoke a bowl. Which left us with the dejected shuffler who presently inspected his warm half bottle of Coors Light and wobbled his way out with a hearty "fuck this".

death and microsoft taxes

After unloading my 13" macbook earlier this year I've been paying close attention to the subnotebook / netbook space to see what offerings might be available to supplement my on the go computing needs. I recently placed a pre-order with a local distributor to get my hands on one of the new Intel Atom + nVidia ION subnotebooks which should be out sometime this summer.

It seems however that Microsoft has reached is gnarled and grizly arm into my nurge to hold me back! Intel, in keeping with their long standing tradition of bending to the Redmond whim have endorsed some sort of marketing based sales strategy that denies reduced prices to OEM's who go outside their spec limits. Basically this means that because some vendors have opted to use cheap Intel hardware to build small devices with screens and (*ahem* non-Intel *cough*) graphics chips capable of playing 720p HD video Intel is cutting them out of the preferred pricing circle and charging premium rates for their chips. This of course has pissed vendors off and seems to have delayed my sweet geek toy joy.

But not only is my new toy running late, it's now going to cost extra for an OS I don't want or inted to use because of a hardware feature that's a selling point to the consumer.

Yay!

douchebag redux

I discovered today while vainly scrutinizing the phrostuff analytics that not only is the act of googling "republican douchebags" both popular and brining people to phrostuff, it's also got a great new top search result!

There ya go, phrostuff is now your official clearinghouse for all republican douchebag related news and media. I've also been authorized to announce that phrostuff will be partnering with Planet Fruitbat, so all your douchebag republican updates and breaking fruitbat events will be available in one place!

Hurry, go tell a friend!

"oh, was pride this weekend?"

That's what I heard when I mentioned to some co-workers today that I'd spent some of Sunday afternoon wandering Church St and taking in the spectacle that is the Toronto Pride Parade.

"Why do they always do it so early in the summer? I can't believe I missed it again!"

Well I had no answer to that. What's one weekend got over another, really, as long as the weather behaves? Turns out there is a reason it's held on the 28th of June and a damn good one at that, it's the anniversary of a 1969 Grenwich Village riot that broke out when a bunch of police stormed a gay bar and proceeded to arrest people for cross dressing, not carrying ID, or to paraphrase; being gay in public.

"Standard procedure was to line up the patrons, check their identification, and have female police officers take customers dressed as women to the bathroom to verify their sex, upon which any men dressed as women would be arrested"

"We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn't anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration ... "

I'd never heard of this until I perused this Toronto Star article this morning covering NYC's Pride, but after some googling I also found this New York Times piece by a writer who was present at the 69' riots which both clears up some facts and dispels some rumours about the event. He goes into more detail as to what the police were doing there in the first place and how the (then tiny) established gay community reacted.

Anyway, the wikipedia entry and both articles make for a good read if you're interested, but for the impatient I suggest you make your way to one of the many TO Pride 09' photo collections out there.

(photo lovingly borrowed from Andrew Louis / Torontoist)

Something you probably won't see at Caribana

career halting photo

Y'know how everyone says you shouldn't post pictures of yourself doing stupid things on the internets 'cuz some future potential employer may google you and see your dumb ass? Yeah well about that, this here is a picture from my birthday this year and will certainly have detrimental effects on my future career options.

(no, of course that's not a Cambodian opium pipe in my mouth!)

Thanks to Joe and Erin for being seen in public with me in this state, and every one else who came from near and far for helping me ring in my last birthday ever!