TWIG Notes XXV

It’s the twenty-fifth installment of This Week In Garrett! And This Week In Garrett:

- Earth Day came and went with hardly any fanfare. Do people still care about Earth Day? It’s a pretty vague day to celebrate, and not long before that was ‘turn off all your lights for an hour’ day too. I can’t say we did anything special for Earth Day. I have a feeling people are generally tired of save-the-earth movements the last few years. Besides, what good does turning off lights really do when there’s an oil rig leaking crude oil, non-stop, into the ocean? Or when an Icelandic volcano does more in one week to reduce CO2 emissions - by grounding airplanes - than any human effort?

- Saturday was probably the last stag I’ll ever attend, as my friend Nigel is being wed in a few weeks. We went to Castle Fun Park for activities, Sammy J. Peppers for food, and the Caddyshack for naked ladies. Funny story: at CFP we all tried our hands at a strong-man hammer device, where you smack a giant target with a hammer to measure your strength, on a scale of zero to one thousand. Everyone hit about 830; I hammered home about 710. Standing around waiting, we watched an eight year old kid, a 40-ish mom, and an elderly man all beat my score.

- I had roughly two and a half weeks to read Fordlandia, a book detailing Henry Ford’s dallying in the Amazon to try to grow rubber and to create a picture-perfect Norman Rockwellian town in the middle of the jungle. It’s a fascinating insight into early capitalism and cultural ignorance, but also an interesting account of Henry Ford’s blend of common sense and craziness. He felt people should be paid well, be able to buy whatever they need, learn to grow gardens and provide for themselves, but also feared government, was adamant about prohibition, and had a lot of bad things to say about Jews. I strongly recommend reading it.

- Earlier in the week I bought tickets to see Metric, at the Malkin Bowl at Stanley Park. The ladyfriend and I haven’t seen a concert since May 2007. Metric is a pretty hip Canadian band right now, and I missed out last time they came (to be fair, I wasn’t ‘into them’ as much at that time). Ticketmaster fees paid on two tickets: nearly $40.

- There’s a few things I really like about working in downtown Vancouver: it’s a transit hub; there’s nearly endless options for lunch; ample people-watching opportunities; and a bank machine is always nearby. One of the events I always love to see, however, is expensive cars being towed while their car alarms are going off. I’ve seen it happen a few times: rich asshole driving a Bentley or Rolls or [insert stupid imported car type here] parks in front of a fire hydrant, or a loading zone, or simply a spot where parking isn’t allowed, no doubt thinking he’ll just be a few minutes while he gets his cufflinks polished or her implants massaged. It takes about 60 seconds for a tow truck to string the car up and drive away, and it brings me great joy knowing that the rich person in question is going to have to deal with a tow truck driver or impound lot, no doubt furious that he or she has to deal with the lower-class plebs that shop at Mark’s Work Warehouse. Having lots of money and an expensive car does not grant special parking privileges.

- I subscribe to GQ magazine, and I’ve noticed a marked decrease in females featured in its pages. Last month’s issue had zero photo spreads of hot celebrity women; this month’s has one photo. When I started subscribing there’d be at least 2-3 pages of some cleavagey trollop per issue, but lately they’ve seemingly been replaced by ads of oily hairless dudes in their underpants. I think GQ is trying to turn me gay.

A Glimpse Into Domestic Life With Me

The other day the ladyfriend and I were watching an episode of The Family Guy, and the first ten minutes of the show consisted of Peter, the father character, singing Surfin’ Bird by The Trashmen. Below is a short clip from that episode - if I could have found a good quality version of the entire sequence, I would have.

Why is this pertinent? Well, when viewing this episode I immediately realized that it was a mirror of what it’s like living with me. You see, on days that I feel I have the music in me, my ladyfriend is subjected to pretty much the exact same behaviour from me. In fact not long ago I was singing Papa Oom Mow Mow to her, which earned me confused looks at first followed by a look that said something along the lines of “I’m going to hurt you if you keep singing that song.” And that look may have stopped me that time, but I get the music in me at least once or twice a week. I am a tone deaf human jukebox.

So Close

For the first time since I was about sixteen, I won money in a hockey pool this year. It was quite unexpected, since I really did not have a good team of players working for me, but hockey pools are all about getting hot when it counts. And that’s exactly what happened: my team started racking up points when our pool playoffs started, and I rode that gravy train all the way to a 2nd place finish - in fact losing by only seven points.

This particular hockey pool awards about $160 to first place, but the real price is a shabby glue-gunned trophy that each year’s winner gets to add a trinket to. I’m not sure what I would have added to the trophy had I won, but perhaps next year will be ‘my time’. The winnings I would likely have spent on poutine and Mandy Moore posters a lovely piece of jewelry for my ladyfriend.

As for the other hockey pool I enter every year - which is much harder to win - I finished the season dead last.

Still Got Game

I don’t play video games nearly as much as I used to - as someone who’s had video games in his life since the days of the Commodore 64, the hours I put into playing games for the rest of my life, starting now, will probably never equal the hours I put into playing games before now. It’s probably due to three factors: one, there’s very few games that hold my interest long enough to keep me coming back; two, I’m married, and video games aren’t terribly inclusive; and three, I’m too cheap to buy games, too disinterested to rent them, and too lazy to illegally download them.

In the past 20-or-so years, though, there’s a few games that stick out in my mind as being special. The kind of games that pushed the boundaries of what games were or did something that made me want to play them. One of these games is Rez, and it was mostly the reason I bought a Dreamcast, the doomed Sega machine that died face-down in the muck of the never-ending Video Game Console War. It blended early 2000s electronic dance music and user actions in a new way, with each action executed with the beat of the music. As you progressed through levels, the music would begin to layer, or ‘evolve’, and as you progressed through the game the graphics too would ‘evolve’. Rez didn’t really push the limits in terms of storytelling or graphics, but it was addictive and experimental. It was something to play through for the experience of playing it rather than for the reaching of any particular goal.

I remember trying to spread the Rez experience to people I worked with throughout the years and the reaction was always split down the middle: either someone loved it or thought it was dumb. It’s hard to describe and the experience doesn’t translate well just by watching, but below is a video of one of the levels in Rez, just to show a little of what it’s all about.

Sadly I don’t think games like Rez are (or ever were, really) viable. Games cost a lot of money to make now, and aside from the occasional downloadable ’small’ game on Xbox Live Arcade or the Playstation Network, experimental games just don’t get exposure. These types of games seem to have faded away in the current generation of the Console War, which is a shame.

Seems to me a Strange Thing. Mystifying.

It’s that time of year again, when the Western world observes a holiday to celebrate the death of a well-meaning hippie who told everyone to be good, and whose simple message was combined with a bunch of other parables to create the greatest story ever told: Seaquest DSV The Bible. It’s Saturday today, which marks the time between that same hippie being buried in a cave and the day he came out to save everyone by selling candy-coated chocolate eggs. Or something like that. I haven’t read the Bible, so I’m not clear on the specifics.

But wait! There’s something that’s replaced the story of Jonathan Brandis Jesus Christ this year, and has given us a new idol to cherish. The Apple iPad. In case you’ve been dying in living in a cave, let me fill you in: the Apple corporation has released its latest gadget that costs half a thousand dollars and will be obsolete by this time next year, but will give you the opportunity to do all the stuff you already do on the computer you already own, except now you get to do those things by pointing a finger on a screen.

Look, I own an iMac and an iPod Touch. I bought the iMac because I made the switch five years ago and can’t be bothered to switch back to Windows. I barely use the iPod Touch anymore, because the battery keep dying when I try to look at porn. But I get it - Apple makes computery activities look cool. It’s half advertising, half product design, and Apple has mastered both. But the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, it’s all just gadgetry. It has a shiny screen and goes bleep and bloop and lets you play Tetris and check the weather and find out what street you’re on. That’s all very nice, but let’s remember what Jesus Moses taught us: don’t worship dumb shit. Seriously, it’s what he said God said to say to us. I’m not implying that Jesus is better than the iPad (although Jesus did have a sweet beard, and the iPad does not), and I’m not really sure if people should worship anything, but I do think humans in our part of the world need to quit putting their gadgets on a pedestal. There are better things to do with one’s time and money. Like sleep and horde, which is what I do.