Sensible Youth
I Got a Free iBook Yesterday

I have a laptop!

Filet-o-fish has a
website!
Everyone is pulling onto the technology superhighway.
"Tooth Exam"
"When ingested, the bug can cause diarrhea, often with bloody stools"
I watched several headlining news reports tonight warning Americans to discard any bagged spinach they've purchased, as it is linked to an E. coli outbreak. "One person has died, nearly 100 have been sickened and the outbreak has spread to at least 20 states." More info
here and
here.
But I'm not American. Surely the gigantic spinach salad I had for lunch wouldn't have been grown in the States...
"Federal health officials have linked the E. coli outbreak to spinach products from Natural Selection Foods, based in San Juan Bautista. That company distributes
Earthbound Farm-labeled produce, and is the largest seller of organic produce in the United States."
Let me check the spinach in the fridge:

The back of the package says "Grown in San Juan Bautista".
Now I play the waiting game, and stay near a toilet.
"Symptoms of e. Coli infection include: diarrhea, vomiting and more severe complications like: anemia and kidney failure." If I die, I am leaving Andrea in charge of taking down my blog and MySpace profile so I don't end up on
MyDeathSpace.
Character Sketches

New show opening next week, please come, it is going to be so very good.
Part of
SWARM, "Vancouver's annual festival of artist run culture."
More info at
www.parkingspot.ca.
Drunk E-Mail Checking
My Advice to You
I recommend:
-that you catch the number 22 Macdonald Bus, vessel #24, driver John, travelling along Pender Street at 4:50. Every Monday to Friday at this time it becomes the Trivia Bus, and you are given the chance to win fantastic prizes! Fantastic if you like chocolate bars. Today I won a package of Reese Peanut Butter Cups for knowing that Ethiopia was the country where coffee was first discovered (which, as the driver explained, occurred when a farmer's goats ate the coffee fruit off the plant and went crazy). The whole trivia process is all very democratic: three people are allowed to give answers, then we have a vote by clapping for who we think is most right, and then he announces the answer. All of this is conducted over the bus's loudspeaker, and if you win you get to go up to the front and introduce yourself.
-that you go to Chinatown and buy some dried crucified lizards for a puppet show. They come two to a pack, but don't be a fool like me and pay $2.90, that is the sucker's price. Go to the place around the corner where they are $2.80. I would like to try cooking them, I asked how and was given an answer that I think was "soup". After some intense Internet research, I was only able to find out this: "The sight of a gecko skeleton - bearing a marked resemblance to a translucent bat - can be a little unnerving. Cut up and heated in rice wine, the hardy lizard is used to treat everything from coughs and kidney infections to asthma" and "Ok those dried lizards on sticks is to cure serious sickeness. I ate them b4. U have to put it in with other chinese mecidine in order for it to work. It taste pretty sweat too!!!!" and the slightly more anecdotal "The only things with legs that chinese don't eat are tables, chairs and humans".
Vancouver Matters
The UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture has
a call for submissions for a series of publications about Vancouver.

"The proposed investigations seek to engage Vancouver as a material condition – to explore what the city is made of, the codes that have constructed it, and the manifestations produced as a result. Work will be presented in three volumes: a resource dictionary, a code handbook, and an architecture guidebook. Contributors are asked to align the concepts of material, code, and their constructed products with any number of meanings and experiences, and to speculate upon their consequences using a variety of mediums."
I am working on something for this, but am so swamped with other things that I may not be finished in time. But if you are smart and talented you should certainly consider getting on board with this project.
Film At 11

I'm curating an art show that opens this Friday at the Parking Spot gallery in Gastown. Come, bring your friends, meet my friends, have beverages, think about paintings.
For more information please see
www.parkingspot.ca.
Wiley Wiggins, Fornication Guru
Got any burning banging questions/concerns/woes? My friend Wiley has started penning a sex column for Box Magazine to put your mind and member at ease:
Do you have a suspicious rash on your inner thighs? Does your boyfriend not wash his balls but still expect a blow job? Is your girlfriend jealous of your porn collection?
Wiley Wiggins has the answers. As part of the Box expansion plan, Wiley will be joining the magazine's staff to answer your weekly sex queries. So, if you have any questions that you've been dying to ask, shoot them my way and I will pass them on.
Love,
Bunny LeRoi
Editor: Box Magazine
bunny@box-mag.comUpdate: Letters and responses can be read
here.
Keats

Cabining got postponed a week, leaving tomorrow. Back Wednesday!
Just Live'r
Summer is creeping in, or was. Last week's sunburns and patio lunches have been replaced with rain and long pants. But I remain optimistic.
Yesterday I had an interview for what would have been the most fun and perfect radio job. I was one of three candidates they met with, out of what I assume was many applications because the position was so wonderfully awesome. I was nervous, and talked a lot - mostly ancedotal stories that did not really answer the questions properly. My hope was that they would find me endearing; not endearing enough, evidently. I hate work interviews more than spiders and bell peppers combined, and was scared all day, so at least I did not throw up on them.
Working full time would have interfered with my tentative August travel plans, anyhow. Toronto, Montreal, New York: I will be in your backyard soon enough.
Not getting this job also means I get to spend Sunday through Wednesday on Keats Island, in a cabin.
Tomorrow morning I am running to save livers. My liver, your liver, the liver of our collective conciousness. Photographs have been promised to all those that are sponsoring me, and will probably end up on here, too.
Just Lovely
see more
The Best Day
Lately I have been entering as many contests sponsored by local television stations as possible. This is my second win in a month:

Yes, I will be having a Burger King party. And yes, you can rub me for good luck.
You Can't Rollerskate

Song of the week:
Roger Miller - Buffalo Herd (link will expire in 7 days)
I Welcome Your Responses
I am tentatively on the look out for some work this summer. Anyone hear of anything?
I am worried that if I wait too long, nothing good will be available:

Help a girl out?
About Owls
Let me tell you what is definitely not a good idea. Spending time looking at
barn owls in streaming video instead of writing your Irish cinema paper that is due tomorrow.

In fourth grade we had a learning unit on owls. We read "Owls In the Family" by Farley Mowat (which I remember liking), and had some volunteers from some owl rescue center visit our class, and best of all, dissected owl pellets.
Do you know owl pellets? They eat their prey whole, so every once in awhile they cough up a turdish looking mass of indigestable mouse fur and bones.

Does this mean they don't poop? I can't remember.

Anyway, we took them apart with tweezers and barbeque skewers, and then were instructed to glue the bones onto a piece of black construction paper in the shape of a new animal. Only the lucky kids found whole skulls, so the rest of us had to crudely draw one on with chalk.
To Do:
- re-read "Owls In the Family"
- search eBay for owl pellets
-
frighten some children:
Update: More fabulous owl mascot costumes to be found
here. This site alone carries 11 different variations, that is insane! How specific are your owl costume needs that you need to pick from a selection of almost a dozen? (And, why do owls always wear graduation caps?)
Vegetable Animation
I bought a Mimosa today, aka "The Sensitive Plant", because I am sensitive.

Watch
this movie of what happens when they get near wind, or heat, or when someone touches them.
The leaves of Mimosa have the capability to display thigmonasty (touch-induced movement). In the sensitive plant, the leaves respond to being touched, shaken, heated or rapidly cooled. The speed of the response depends on the magnitude of the stimulus. Hitting the leaf hard with the flick of a finger will cause the leaf to close in the blink of an eye whereas a gentle touch or modest heat source applied to leaflets at the tip of a leaf will result in a slower response and the propagation of the stimulus along the leaf can be observed.That is kind of how I feel these days.
THIS IS NOT A BLOG POST
I got my BC identification card in the mail. Since I am
scared fairly certain that if I get behind the wheel of a car I will spontaneously black out and kill all my passengers plus probably some priest and an old lady who are crossing the street, I have never applied for my driver's license - which means that the only legal photo ID I've ever had was in the form of a passport. This my picture:

Who even has the guts to let people see their license photos? I am so ballsy.
It's exciting, because it looks just like a driver's license, except they make it moderately clear that it isn't one:

I am 182, maybe 183 centimetres, NOT 180. Somebody wasn't doing their job.
Also, while we are looking at official photos of me, here are some recently from a photobooth. I took them under the false belief that I could use them for my new passport, so I am trying
real hard to look exactly the same in each one.

I think I did a good job of being stoic in the last two?
Hello, March
I am just posting something to knock all the sadness down from the top of the page, because nobody likes a gloomy girl.
I have always hated Februarys, and am happy to announce to all of you that February 2006 is gone for good.
Remember that
famous snowboarder who smoked some pot that caused all the fuss over whether or not we can give drugsmokers Olympic gold medals? We met his sister over some bad beers.
Mostly this weekend I just lay on the floor and felt sick thinking about essays. I left the house once, on Saturday, to buy some poppy seeds to make orange poppy seed lobster (shaped) sugar cookies, but decided that I had two trays of funeral desserts in the fridge - maybe enough sweets for now (especially considering I may or may not be diabetic).

(
This is science - it is complex and we are all made up of it. Can you feel it running through your veins?)
My Heart Like Ashes
A memory: A few years back, my grandfather gave me what he claimed to be a "lucky magic" rock. While tending to his garden, an "Indian" (not the kind from India, I assumed) walked over to compliment how nice his parsley looked. Delighted - he was
so proud of that garden - my grandfather grabbed a plastic bag and filled it with vegetables, insisting the man taken them. The man ran off to his pick up truck, and returned with a fist sized piece of granite that he claimed had mystical properties. When my grandfather took it inside, my grandma was worried that it would have germs on it so she sterilized it with rubbing alcohol and boiling water; effectively killing all the magic, I'm sure (this is the woman who gave me a cactus when I was 5 after she had painstakingly tweezed every prickly spine off - although I suppose having two of your babies die tragically would make anyone safety concious - this past Monday morning, after I stayed the night at her house, she wouldn't even let me take my own toast out of the toaster for fear that I would accidentally burn myself). I still have the rock (and the cactus).

Phone calls come in every day; thoughts from Italy, Australia, Argentina.
Thursday is the private viewing for the family - my first dead body. I'm going to write something to put in the drawer of the casket. I think I'll include this photo, too, it is a nice one of my Nonno and I and Lucky:

They used to brush that dog with a broom.
I wonder what will happen to all his hats. Elderly men truly have a far better grasp of style than anyone born past 1935.
Did you know he was a
TV star?
Riposa in Pace
Harry's Song
My grandfather shares a room at the hospital with a veteran named Harry. He has been living there for four years, and I guess he has Alzheimer's because he seems to forget who people are (Nurse:
Your wife is here to visit, Him:
No, you're my wife). He calls women 'baby', a lot.
He wears a mesh trucker cap and spends the majority of his time drinking cans of Sprite or 'C' Plus with a straw. He'll have a few going at any given time, and inevitably one will get knocked over and nurses will be called in with mops to swab around his bedside. Last time I visited he kept calling out for help, so I had to hold the can and straw up to his face - his teeth and mouth looked so black inside.
When he is not drinking soda, he talks to himself. Usually it starts with him crying for help, and then repeating words over and over again until they lose meaning and become sounds, which invariably become new words. I took a few notes today (edited only slightly for the sake of brevity):
my name is mr. osbourne
my name is mr. osbourne
goddamnit, call me harry
my name is mr. osbourne
goddamnit
help me
help me
helpme
hello me
l o me
l o p
elll o p
cello p
cello keys
cherokee
Penguin Studies
A
new photoset on Flickr.



Scientific Ethnicity Research
Andrea and I were talking on the phone, and she said that her experiences in Hungary have led her to the conclusion that Hungarians are probably the most conventionally attractive race of people. I only know maybe 3 - 5 Hungarian people, but now that I think about it they are some of the better looking folk I have come across in my life. So of course, I went to Google to do some Hungarian beauty research:
RESEARCH RESEARCHRESEARCHIn my studies, I came across this dreamboat of a world leader:

Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Maybe I have a new crush now? More studly photographs to be found on his
official website.
He has the distinguished good looks and sophistication of a European Rex Morgan, MD.


According to his biography, he is 42 years old, "very fond of sport", and married with five children (this man is a
machine).
Happy Birthday, Andrea

May all your hopes and wishes come true.