These ATCs consist of photographs of mammoth bones from an Oxford alumni magazine and linen ads on cardstock.

(Via J-Walk Blog)

Thursday night was Brit Pop Night. It was supposed to be 80s night; luckily it was British 80s night. I had been prepared to leave early in protest if some Jichael Mackson came on. The fact that it wasn’t and that it was pretty good music and that everyone kept buying me drinks made me stay until they kicked us out.

My other group of friends invited me to another 80s night in another part of town. Turns out that that 80s night featured stuff that would have sent me packing. Plus, my friends told me, there were young’uns who asked my friends why they knew so much about 80s music. They nearly snorted in laughter. The answer was of course “‘Cause I lived it, baby!”

Our 80s night had no one. The bartender kept giving us discounted drinks though she warned us to remember for next time that they weren’t on special. Or something like that. I ruined my hearing a long time ago. We were saddened that they ended their failure of a night early. Truthfully, though, it’s been about two years since I was that drunk and I probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

So we decided to take over the Plaza. All of us were entrusted with a mission: to prosletyze and convert our friends and acquaintances so that they join us next time. We will fill that empty dance floor with more of us.

*****

Next up: a confession. I was never cool enough to go to Luvafair. My friends never took me to this alternative music club when it was around (it closed two years ago without me ever being cool enough to make it there).

I don’t know how it happened. I thought I was part of the cool crowd.

In high school, while other morons were in suburban malls, my friends and I would hang out in Gastown, shopping at Cabbages & Kinx, the place we of “darker” persuasion shopped.

We thought we were so different from everyone else. We listened to Depeche Mode and Nirvana, read tarot cards, gossiped about Renaissance witch hunts, wrote epic poetry (read my selected crap here), grew herbs, wore velvet, and drew skeletons everywhere. Well, I was the artist of the group. For some reason, my grade eleven art teacher only gave me A’s in art if I drew bones and skulls. She failed all my still lives.

So I was part of the cool crowd. Right? Right? Yet as soon as my friends secretly got fake IDs, they were going out without me. Then they started coming back with stories about all the guys they snogged and how kissing random strangers was.

And this is what it all came down to: “If you kiss a guy,” said Cathy with the fatigued air of a woman who’d seen and done it all, “Make sure he hasn’t eaten liver and onions beforehand.”

David, of Upside-Down Hippopotamus, asked in Strife on the Subatomic Level: “…do you ever worry that particular pairs of molecules are best friends, and that one ill-fated slice of a tomato might separate them forever?”

My answer is that, yes, I worry about inanimate objects being separated from their friends. One lonely vase atop the kitchen table with one sole rose? Solitary confinement! The poor flower and the poor vase, missing their friends - I even have problems throwing out browned bouquets because flowers were once glorious and to see them wasted away and reviled - it reminds me of the sad decline of Eddie Murphy.

I told David about my students in Japan: “When I worked in an elementary school, my students were worried that the pink magnet were all lonely up on the chalkboard, while the red, blue, yellow, and green magnets had lots of friends. When I got a few more pink magnets, the kids cheered.”

To which David replied, “I think you should secretly replace a different-colored magnet with a pink magnet every day. And when the kids ask where all the pink magnets are coming from, tell them that the other magnets are being recruited.”

In honour of the first annual Rabbit Hole Day, I have been looking out for leprechauns.

The leprechaun webcam is cunningly hidden in this location: “a field overlooking a fairy ring in Tipperary, Ireland. In a dip in the Glen of Cloongallon, Ballyseanrath lies the fairy ring itself. It and its fairy inhabitants are shielded by trees ranged around the perimeter, mainly chestnut, with one magnificent oak over 600 years old. Over the years it provided leprechauns with acorns for their pipes and other Irish fairies with shelter. The tree is protected by an Irish fairy known as a skeaghshee or tree spirit. The camera is concealed in a cavity in its trunk, and a branch supports an antenna!”

Others claim the leprechaun wears red and has red hair. Funny, because a heavily tattooed leprechaun wearing purple rattlesnake-skin boots has been making kissy-lips at me for a quarter of an hour now.

Hebdomeros is getting into the act: he gives us Hieronymous Bosch action figures!

Lady Litblitzin attacks Alice from the sensory side - the auditory and the olfactory.

“All at once, as it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon us - and we could still only imagine it. This is what fasciantes me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.”

Page 7

“Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilicia standing there deserted, and beds of exquisite, decadent, death-fertilized flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. I mean one still had to imagine it.”

Page 16

From We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

According to The Lagomorph in Art, the day after tomorrow is the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day: to commemmorate Lewis Caroll’s birthday, “when you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics….Let’s have a day where nobody’s life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let’s all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what’s there. It will be beautiful.”

Why just LiveJournal? I say we all fall down on Thursday.

It took me an hour and forty minutes to get there. I was forty minutes late. I knew I would be late on the way there; I had hoped that there was some way I would make it on time.

At every red light, I would stare at the clock and calculate how late I could be and still be reasonable. At first, it was fifteen minutes. If I was fifteen minutes late, I could still walk in with a blithe air.

Then, stuck in traffic, at my fifteen-minute-mark, I told myself that in another ten minutes I would be there, with five minutes to spare for parking.

After I was thirty minutes late, I kept going straight. I did not want to turn back when I got so far.

In retrospect, I must have been curious as to how long, in the end, it would take me to get there. I could not turn back until I found out how late I would be.

I must have given up on making it at all, but I did not verbalize this, it remained wedged in the subconscious, giving false hope to reality. I had to know that once thirty minutes passed, I was so irrevocably late the evening had to end there. But I kept going. It felt strange to have almost reached my geographic goal and then make a U-turn for home.

When I made it, the parking lot was empty. I parked as close as I could get and dashed out to feed the metre. With only a few cents in my wallet plus the fourteen minutes the previous tenant left on my metre, I ran to check the metre two stalls over: fifteen minutes. Not enough. I needed an extra hour until parking was free. The next metre, two more stalls down, nothing. Two further stalls down, seven minutes. Another two stalls down, nothing again. This was hopeless, I would not be able to park there.

Running back to my car, I had vague plans that I would find free parking on the next block. And then, when I found none there, I went on to the next block. And I was in the woods and a thick fog rolled in from the sea. If I parked my car there and walked through the woods, I would be a walking billboard for werewolf attacks. I drove back frantically and realized I really really had to pee. I heckled a pedestrian. Then I thought about rolling down the window and screaming my deepest hate towards this moron - who the hell does he think he is walking around in a pea soup-thick fog anyhow?

For the rest of the night, I jeered internally at everyone I met. I looked like it too because I cleared rooms with my scowl. It was because I understood the severity of my tardiness: no matter how many trailers, by forty minutes after the publicized start time, a movie will start. I admitted defeat and turned for home.

To make up for my having driven out all the way from the countryside to the big city, I needed a drink and maybe a bit of retail therapy.

Everything was closed except a bookstore. I picked up a few books I already own and flipped through them. I read snippets from a book about death and then tried to figure out knitting pattern enigmas. A book about genetics here and one about genocide there.

I made it for the drink. I sat at my table watching the waitress wiping the walls. On my right, there were people at the fireplace laughing; they stopped laughing when I walked past them.

After an hour the waitress told me that they were closing. So I came home and it only took me half an hour.

All night, despite my foulmouthedness and vindictive thoughts, I really really just wanted to cry.

Then I noticed, as I wrote this, that beside me is a pink piece of paper with a star and the words Wolf Parade. It’s some band my sister likes. Which rather disappointed me. Because I really hoped it was a message from the beyond.

Crenguţă buzzed about my ankles around cooking time*. I picked up the hamster ball and put her in the living room. She returned to my ankles.

“Darling, if the phone rings and I answer it and I engage in a very long conversation and the dumpling water boils over the edge of the stove, you, my sweet little rodent, shall be burned to a fraction of your former self,” I explained to the hapless hamster. I then picked her up again and deposited her beyond the kitchen and the living room and into the hallway.

Then I made a phonecall.

When dinner was ready, I concluded the phonecall and sat down in front of the television with my home-cooked feast. The place was very quiet. No hamster noises, no hamster ball banging against the furniture. I got up from the [coffee] table and began calling out Crenguţă’s name.

Crenguţă!

Crenguţă!

Crenguţă!

Crenguuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuţă!

The hamster made no reply.

I went from room to room. No hamster anywhere. I turned on the lights and checked again. I shut off the heating to avert another hamster heating vent disaster. I crawled on my knees and looked under all the tables and into the nooks and crannies. I went down the stairs, to see if the hamster circumvented her barrier and took a tumble. At the foot of the stairs, no hamster, no hamster ball. I stood very quietly in all the rooms listening for the telltale sign of a hamster breathing. Nothing.

Just in case, I repeated everything.

I went from room to room. No hamster anywhere. I turned on the lights and checked again. I shut off the heating to avert another hamster heating vent disaster. I crawled on my knees and looked under all the tables and into the nooks and crannies. I went down the stairs, to see if the hamster circumvented her barrier and took a tumble. At the foot of the stairs, no hamster, no hamster ball. I stood very quietly in all the rooms listening for the telltale sign of a hamster breathing. Nothing.

She’ll turn up, I thought as I sat down to my bok- and gai choy.

After dinner, I went on another search and rescue mission. A fourth expedition again yielded no discoveries.

Crenguţă and her hamster ball were gone. They plum disappeared off the face of the planet. I looked into the kitchen sink to make sure I didn’t accidentally mistake the spherical hamster travel contraption for an errant dish.

Mysteries like this prove one thing.

There are ghosts in other planes and their reality intersects with ours. Ghosts, as everybody knows, are mischievious. They take things to their side and return those things when it’s convenient for them, if ever. That’s why socks return solo or car keys reappear where you certainly did not put them down. It’s ghosts. Or fairies. Not the nice fairies Disney churns out, but the mean nasty fairies of old.

So my hamster went to the other side. That’s why she wouldn’t leave my ankles. She knew they were after her. I suddenly regretted taking her out of the room. I also shuddered to think that there were invisible ghosts watching my every move.

I sat down in front of the computer to do some work. Out of the corner of my eye, the hamster ball appears. Right at the foot of the stairs, where surely I would have tripped on it had it been there moments ago.

Like the despondent mom in Poltergeist, I knew my hamster had to be somewhere near. There was no dousing in ghost slime or ending up in a pool-ful of skeletons; to find a recently missing hamster, one must stand very still in the middle of the room and the hamster will come to you**.

Sure enough, Crenguţă herself then appeared in a corner. The ghosts returned her to our side.

Or else, the aliens who abducted her completed their anal probes.

*Yes, I am realizing my New Year’s Resolutions; I learned how to cook bok choy and gai choy.

**Provided you have no history of having excessively prodded the hamster.

(Via Raspberry)

Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

You are the single biggest feature of the surface of the Earth. You cover 28% of the planet, more than all the land put together, and contain enough water to fill the moon. You also contain, almost as an afterthought, four-fifths of the world’s islands. If your coastline were to be stretched out straight, it would reach around the world five times, and a lot of people would get very wet indeed.

I wanted to be Al-Azizyah, Libya, the hottest place on earth. I’ll study harder next time.

I do recommend this quiz. In fact, if you are too lazy to follow the links, let me ask you the following questions:

1. Has sex ever been interrupted for you by your partner stopping to take your pulse?

2. Do you harbour whales?

3. Kittens! They’re dying. In pain. Look at them writhe. Writhe, writhe, writhe. Cat hurt. Are you some kind of monster?

4. Have you ever obliterated a village?

5. Would you consider yourself to have nurtured and advanced civilisation recently? Describe in an essay no shorter than 500000 words.