The Reservation Has Been Made

Ten O'Clock

Yonge and Bloor

Toronto

under name: Bernice (Natch.)

The Rite of Patchyface

IT COMES IN THE NIGHT.

It comes unpredictably--not with the new moon or the Sabbath--but it does come, sure as the crashing tide.

No one knows why it comes. It comes for us one by one, slithering on its belly from turbid waters and descending upon its victims like a horrible living shroud.

No one knows why it comes. But when it does, and we hear its clarion call, we dare not ignore the summons. We are helpless to resist it; it has impelled our fathers and brothers for thousands of generations. It comes like a force of nature, and when it whispers we cannot but obey.

"Maybe I should try growing a beard."

Thus is the rite begun. Thus is the veneer of cultivation that makes us respected by our superiors and admired by our mates cast away. Thus is the care and forethought that is the hallmark of our very humanity and the essence of agriculture, trapmaking, and toolcraft swept away into barbarity and darkness, casualty of the rite.

The animal adapts to nature; the human commands it. Hairlessness is humanity's mark because of all the apes, only Human sees himself in glass and imagines a different face peering out at him than the one he sees. Of all the apes, only Human collects seeds and sows them in virgin ground; only Human creates shelter where there was none. When we answer the call of the rite and ignore this humanity in us, we touch a deeper heritage and a more remote ancestry: that of the feral ape.

Humanity is smoothness. To shave is to live.

And yet it's been 8 days. How long can I persist? How long can any of us resist our essential humanity?

Any how long before I hear the bellowing of that ancient ape again?

Pants Party!

Hullo all.

There will be a DT Christmas Miracle (event!)


So, myself, Elvis Thrust, And My Mom are going to the public exhibition of the basketball contest featuring the Raptors of Toronto on sunday. (Section 318! Come Find Us!)

But that's not the event

It's Dinner!
at the yonge and bloor Korean Grill House! At Ten Oclock Pee Em, In Toronto!

Join Us!
All of Us!!

Myself &
The Lover &
Seabaht &
My Mom Thinks I'm Funny &
Mr. Skylight

We should make T-shirts.

A Happy Christmas to All!

Don't fuck it up.

Songs on Abbey Road Better than Abbey Road

(Or, "There Was No Cane in Citizen Kane!")

Imagine, if you will, a world in a universe very like our own.

In which I actually wrote this post before completely forgetting what the hell it was going to be about.

Did you enjoy it?

what is the last day of school?

the last day of school is the day when the weight lifts no, thats not it, the last day is the day when your not giving a shit becomes legitimate, when you can finally stop caring because you stop feeling bad about it because you know your education is worthwhile but its finally the day when you can celebrate not doing something worthwhile, for at least a while.
it's buying a bottle of tequila at 6 pm on a monday and feeling great about it
it's beside yourself looking forward to drinking said tequila with your roommate and muthafuckin champion of a homeboy mr. skylight or frank white or whatever the fuck he's called these days in the theatre tomorrow at two watching avatar.
it's the cute girl at toi, moi, and cafe (lovely place!) winking at you and pointing at the bottle of tequila sticking out of your pocket wishing you a fun night as she hands your cafe latte over.
it's the lets go to bifteck cause that place rules
it's the holy crap all of st. laurent is empty but bifteck is totally packed cause some australian girl is having her going away party and your one friend you run into there explains it to you holy hell she has a lot of friends out on a monday night in december
it's drunk walking home really having to piss (steven king said piss was the best word to describe piss, urinate or pee makes you sound like a total pussy) thinking that st urbs and moro is really not that far away.
it's whatthefuckaresomanypeopledoinginprovigoatoneinthemorning
it's lets be quiet so as not to wake up the roommate who has exam in the morning
it's im home time to pee
it's do i brush my teeth, yes because people will judge me if they find out i didnt
it's lets go to bed bernice
it's lets write a desserttickets post bernice
its hey look lets welcome stop having a boring tuna he accepted the invite that fucker is going to spain and will report from such
it's good night everybody
it's i get to go home very soon
it's good night everybody

Housekeeping IV: A new hope

HI KIDS.

I've added this "rate posts" doohickey, and this retweet doohickey, for the sole reason that I thought they might be fun. If anyone objects to either one on moral, legal, or religious grounds, I'll be happy to get rid of it.

On that note, anyone have any fun ideas they'd like to see implemented? I thought about a "top comment-leavers" reel but kiboshed it cause I couldn't decided if "commenters" or "commentors" looked less stupid.

mgmt

DT presents: Important Proteins in Cancer that are also Related to Music!!!

MGMT:

• Popular indie band alleged to have given Bernice a cookie once, short for management
• Important DNA repair protein and tumor suppressor, short for O-6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase

Ras:

• Reggae record label
• Potent oncogene implicated in a large proportion of human cancers. Kinase located upstream in many signalling pathways

Myc:

• The Music for Young Children program
• Potent oncogene that stimulates proliferation and DNA damage among other things

P27:

• Seminal Swiss rap group, known to perform with a full funk band backing them
• Inhibitor of CDKs important to cell cycle progression. Subcellular localization has been tied to prognosis.

MMP:

• Polish record label. Short for Metal Mind Productions (robots!!!!!)
• Short for matrix metalloproteinase. Important protein in metastasis, cleaves basement membrane fibers releasing growth factors and clearing space. Secreted from tumor associated macrophages and transformed epithelial cells.

Slug:

• Rapper from Minneapolis
• C2H2 transcription factor. Down regulates E-cadherin. Implicated in cancer, probably through EMT.

Functional Death Receptor:

• Metal band from Green Bay. Claim to mix heavy metal with death metal as well as doom metal. Check out their Myspace!!!
• working cell receptor that binds ligands triggering apoptosis. Loss of function can lead to cancer.

P53:

• Imporvisational music group with weirdly extensive wikipedia page
• The gaurdian of the whole fuckin' genome! Probably the most important tumor supressor in the biz. Controls a wide variety of processes inculding apoptosis and progression through the cell cycle

Coincidence? I think not.

In other news the guy beside me in the library has been stroking his chubby girlfriend's enormous ass for the entire amount of time it took me to right this. What is up with that?

A Friday Feast of Fun!

To Quote Michelle Obama's Family Rabbi, "This song rules because the chorus is un-fucking-stoppable. not just unstoppable, un-fucking-stoppable"

I've hit a new low. In fact, I've hit a bunch of them. Three so far.

Come, loyal followers, sit upon this erudite knee as I regale tales of a boardwalk supreme, a place where courtesy, decorum, and class are swapped in favour of hair gels and Ed Hardy T-shirts. A place where lite beer flows as fresh as the water it takes like, where you're just as likely to find a skinny bitch on the rag (that's vodka, club soda, and cranberry juice) as you are to find a skinny bitch on the rag (that's an emaciated... you get it). I'm talking about the pure, blissful genius that is MTV's Jersey Shore.

It's eight people sharing a beach house in the land of the Jovi, all hoping to have the ultimate Jersey summer, filled with boozin' and bangin' . This shit is beyond reality TV. It's unreality tv, because who had any stinkin' clue that this place, like this, actually existed? I'm learning more about the world, plain and simple, exposing myself to new cultures and new ideologies all at once. I've seen the future, and it has a fake tan and a stupid nickname. This, my friends, is Guido.

This week, "Guidette" Angelina's home-girls Alana and Elena swung by the shore to visit, which led her to skip out on her job at the custom t-shirt store as she dealt with the fight she had with her married boyfriend. Get the picture?

DJ Pauly D, of the pierced wang and italian flag tattooed across his back, has been hooking up with fake-tittied J-Woww. Yes, her name is J-Woww.

Muscleman Ronnie has been hooking up with Sam Sweetness or something like that, who's right on the verge of kinda-hot (the delightful upper-limit of the girls on the show). Sweetness was previously hooking up with Mike, who calls himself "The Situation", in some reference to his abs that I can't even begin to understand. Ronnie and Sam just had a really adorable date. At least, adorable for the Jersey Shore.

There's also a Slate-dubbed "unfortunate little person" called "Snookie", whose obnoxious attention seeking is compounded by her addiction to pickles and drunk-to-the-verge-of-barfing-like-a-freshman guidos, one of whom spat out the immortal line "i think we're on the same page". It was his only one of the episode. Speaking of Snookie, I know from the season preview that there's an episode in which she gets punched in the face. I can't wait for it. That's how low I've sunken.

And then we have Vinny, who really doesn't contribute as much as the rest, but once he got in a fight at a club. That was kinda cool. Go Vinny.

It occurs to me that I could, and probably should, make this incoherent rambling into some sort of observation on modern reality television and the numbing of North America's collective brain. Thanks, MTV. But I'm going to end that preachy shit right there, because I'm really damn glad this show exists. Am I going to try and be Guido? Fuck no, our knight Thug Wrangler fills those crisco'd shoes quite smoothly, thank you very much, although I can only dream of one day being able to look directly in to a camera lens and espouse "fuck it, it's the fuckin' jersey shore! what do you expect?". I love it because it reminds me of two important things. 1. the outside world exists, and there are some really entertaining real people in it. 2. I am much better than them, and it's fun to know that. they are all selfish, manipulative, and I would pay never to speak to them in person. Yes, I understand the irony of exploiting them on television for my own entertainment. But, if that's wrong, I don't wanna be right. Besides, I'm three deep already. No way I'm turning back.

One last observation: Whenever the tanned unite to make a spitoon of one another, a female hand is always raised to the camera, attempting to block the view of the actual act, as if we can't tell that theyre doing the tongue-dance. Tough shit sister, this is my damn entertainment.

But on a more serious note

It has come to my attention, just today, that The Big Bop and the Cameron House, two enjoyable and familiar Toronto bars-cum-music venues, will be closing pretty soon.

Yesterday, I read with significantly greater shock and horror that the Carlton Cinema is sharing a similar fate after today--its last day, December 6--when they'll be screening Monty Python and the Holy Grail with popcorn as its own Last Supper.

I don't live in Toronto most months out of the year anymore, so my sentimentality may be unfounded, even exaggerated. But I am sad. Mostly for the Carlton. Regardless of my support for the establishment as of late, and regardless of how much direct involvement I'd had with any of the three above mentioned venues in my meager near-21 years of being, it never occurred to me that they would die.

(I won't pretend to make this a universal message, because it's pretty specific; if you don't want to indulge my sentimentality, you can scroll away now, leaving with the simple message that the closure of these Toronto sites is sad and makes me feel old.)

I can recall a dark night in June of '05 (I think it was '05) when ICGYABL and I went to the Aquabats show at the Reverb and Bernice slept through it; or when some of us saw Juice Money Orchestra at the Kathedral, immediately surprised at how not-shitty they were. There was a time when some of us stumbled, underage, into the Cameron House, never carded, and ICGYABL bought a CD from some hip indie-folk four-piece on a whim. Perhaps most importantly, I can remember going on several--and I mean several--dates at the Carlton, and seeing some of the best films of the last five years there.

It's inevitable that venues close, money gets tight, and the Capital-M-"Mainstream" wins out over smaller film and music spots. I am not surprised that these venues have finished, nor do I think it's for the worst that they did. Mostly, what is affecting me is the realization that moving away from home does not keep it preserved in a museum or cryogenic ice-chamber. I cannot return and find everything the way it was. Though I experience this every year, the Carlton's death was the final nail in the coffin of my childhood.

Soon I will be 21. That's adulthood no matter where you are on the map. The closer school gets to completion, the closer my summer jobs get to becoming life careers, I begin to ask: where is there stability?

In which I realize I am absolutely more like you fellas than I realized

Bacon-wrapped scallops, fresh from the Halifax Farmer's Market, sizzling on my stove.

And OHMYGOD they were delicious.

From the guys who brought you Baconnaise...

Mmmvelopes.

Envelopes... that taste like bacon.

So, after thousands of years and kajillions of horrible tasting envelopes licked, we’re happy to report that J&D’s Bacon-Flavored Mmmvelopes™ are here to save the day. No longer will envelopes taste like the underside of your car. You can enjoy the taste of delicious bacon instead.

What's next... lemons and limes that taste like candy?!?!?

I'm happy that progress can be so delicious.



ps good luck on 'xams, all y'alls.