A couple ink drawings I made. The first one is the Heiroglyphic Monad, which I was considering as a tattoo. I think it looks kind of cool, even if you don’t know what it is, and the fact that it has meaning in this crazy alchemetic symbol-logic appeals to my love of the esoteric. The second one is just made up.

Hey wait, that’s not it! That’s just what came up first when I did a google image search for ‘vancouver olympics mascot’. Silly me. Here they are:

At first I felt like they succeeded at creating a design that was just fine thank you, something I can easily ignore because it’s just sort of cute and nothingy and fades into the background of lame bullshit that is constantly in our faces. At least it wasn’t a totally offensive boondoggle like the London 2012 logo, which really is just awful and hard to look at. With the precedent of the fibreglass Spirit Bears that plagued Vancouver for years, my hopes were minimal to begin with, and were met satisfactorily.

My next thought was that I’m not so big on the whole co-opting native symbols to promote an ubercorporate sporting event thing. I agree with Only, it’s distasteful. The designers had a tough job, though, satisfying the goals of both being marketable to a diverse global consumership, and also appeasing the Canadian anxiety about our shared identity (or lack thereof) as an immigrant nation, with our own unique baggage of colonial slash genocidal shenanigans to live down. So that’s a lot of pressure, and I think the results are basically passable. And hey, the kids love ‘em, so that’s a big win.

I really think they should have just gone with the marmot though. Marmots are cool. When I was looking for a job a few years ago, browsing a government job database I found a posting for employment as a marmot watcher. You see, Vancouver Island’s golden marmot is endangered, there was only about 200 left in the wild, and they were being predated by bald eagles, which were also endangered, meaning you couldn’t shoot the eagles. So the solution they devised was to hire someone to camp out with the marmots for the summer to scare away the eagles. And I thought that would be a pretty good summer job. You know, just hanging out with the marmots. I don’t really have qualifications or experience in that field (a literal field), and I can’t remember what the listed qualifications were, but if one of them was “must think marmots are cool” then I would have been a shoo-in, because I think marmots are totally cool. Also, last July bald eagles were removed from the endangered species list, so they better watch their backs, is all I’m saying.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but you catch the most flies with a whole bunch of dead people all piled up on top of one another. Henry Kissinger came out with that bon mot while putting pepper on his baby-seal steak, during a strategy session with Dick Cheney, who smirked and thought it was quite clever indeed.

Not my chair, not my problem. That’s what I say.

He was opening for CocoRosie, but I didn’t stay to see them. I read on Pitchfork that they were arrested the next day, probably for bringing some Vancouver souvenirs back across the border.

The first opener was pretty rad though, a French beat-box guy named Tez. Here’s a youtube video, for your viewing pleasure. Note that he’s not using any instrumentation, it’s all mic.
Click here to view the embedded video.

Apologies for the lack of updates lately. More delicious content coming soon, I promise!

I always do my laundry on Sunday morning. Outside of work, it’s one of the few true regularities in my routine. It’s not that I look forward to it exactly, but I do like having my whole wardrobe clean and readily at hand. There are two laundromats within a block of my house, one of them is run by an old, deaf recovering alcoholic. He’s a nice guy, but he moves very slowly and it’s a bit difficult making yourself understood and so I always feel bad about asking for change, because he’s usually outside smoking and it really seems like a lot of effort for him to parse the request and fish through his pockets for the correct denominations. So I usually just go to the other one. It’s cleaner and brighter, and it’s serviced by two friendly asian teenagers who spend all day instant-messaging.

Today, however, when I returned from the coffee shop to put my clothes in the dryer, a homeless man was stripping down his layers and stuffing them in a washer about fifteen feet away from me. The tang of rancid body odour and stale cigarettes, comingled with an undeniably fecal effluvium, was truly overpowering. It was inescapable, and I actually literally threw up a little bit in my mouth. Tossing my clothes in the nearest dryer as quickly as I could, gagging and choking uncontrollably, eyes watering, I ran out gasping. It was so pungent and foul that I’m afraid it’s permanently tainted my olfactory sense.

Now, I’ve been to the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo, so I’m no stranger to offensive-smelling humans. I’ve been around gamers. (A friend of mine used to work in a game store — Warhammer, D&D, Magic:The Gathering and all that — and he told me once his least favorite part of the job was having to pull the particularly unwashed roleplayers aside and give them the talk about hygiene.) But Jesus, this was in an entirely different realm altogether. If apartheid had a smell, this would be it. That’s the only way I can decribe it: it smelt like racist oppression; its pungency was positively hegemonic, and deeply unjust.

And that, friends, the story of the worst thing I ever smelled, thanks for reading. :(

Wow! You are truly a student of the Bible! Some of the questions were difficult, but they didn’t slow you down! You know the books, the characters, the events . . . Very impressive!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes ]]> http://www.baboonpalace.com/2007/02/03/184/feed/ 3 http://www.baboonpalace.com/2007/01/23/state-of-the-union-liveblogging/ http://www.baboonpalace.com/2007/01/23/state-of-the-union-liveblogging/#comments Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:24:27 +0000 scott http://www.baboonpalace.com/2007/01/23/state-of-the-union-liveblogging/