A Fine Vintage

Happy June, everyone! Let me tell you about a store I visited recently.





Doesn't that look inviting!

What we are looking at in this picture is actually the back entrance; the front entrance to the store is inside the Cherryhill Village Mall, a small one-floor shopping centre surrounded entirely by retirement communities. This probably goes a ways towards explaining why most of the rest of the mall closes at 8:00 on weekdays, at 6:00 on Saturdays and at 5:00 on Sundays. In fact that's why I even went into this convenience store, Bob's Westown Varieties, in the first place; I wanted to buy some cough drops, and the Shoppers Drug Mart (as well as most everything else) had already long since closed.

It's not the prettiest architecture, as you can tell from the above -- and as you could probably figure out by noting that there are zero pictures of the mall on its own website -- but inside these walls you will find hidden treasures. Mystical, ancient, mysterious artifacts of eras since gone by. The store may not have had cough drops, but along its hallowed walls I did find something interesting enough to warrant further comment.

Behold as I beheld what curiosity and two dollars can find you in a London, Ontario convenience store:





Happy Birthday! (Well, I'm sure somewhere it's somebody's birthday, anyway.)

Along one of the walls in the back of the narrow store, mingling with various hand tools and sets of cheap pencils, was a peg of Sesame Street and Muppet Babies candles. Pretty retro-looking, right? They may not be the prettiest things, but I admired the initiative that (I assumed) the Disney Corporation must be taking to revive its franchise holdings by targeting the nostalgia market.

A reasonable assumption, right? Right! It just wasn't the right one, because when I flipped them over to see when they had been made I found out that they aren't retro -- they're just amazingly, amazingly old.



This is no Disney product; in fact, this even predates the original attempt to sell the Jim Henson Company to Disney, and that was in freaking 1990. This predates the Jim Henson Company name! These candles were manufactured in 1988, back when Muppet Babies was actually still on the air -- and somehow they have managed to sit, unpurchased and undetected, on the wall pegs of a London, Ontario mall convenience store for the past twenty-one years.

Until I bought two. Hell, why not? They were a dollar each, and I'm sure I'm bound to run into somebody having a birthday eventually. Besides, a little misshapen though they may be, they're actually pretty fun to look at:



Relics of a bygone era, aren't they? I was giving Disney (or anybody, really) way too much credit when I initially assumed that they were modern products, because just to look at them you can feel the eighties practially radiating off of them. The half-French packaging is how you can tell they were intended for the Canadian market, if the Toronto address didn't also give it away; even the sticker on each candle cheerfully proclaims "Bon Fete", even though you're expected to just cover it up with one of the cardboard numbers on the back of the package.

This may sound like an implausible story, but candle aficionados need not take my word for it; there are actually two more of these still hanging in that store, one of each character. So if you're in London, Ontario and want to surprise the crap out of somebody on their birthday -- or want to hock them on eBay, I guess, if you think you can turn a profit on them -- get on down to Bob's Westown Varieties! For all your hilarious twenty-one-year-old birthday candle needs!

This Blog Post: Much More Than a Blog Post

I don't think I understand why people do this.



For the benefit of anyone who may have trouble reading the sign -- and, to be fair, in real life it's a little bigger -- the highest signboard on this tower reads:

"THE BREAD STORE®
MUCH MORE THAN A BREAD STORE!"

What? No. That is not how that works in the slightest. Something has gone wrong here.

Yes, I know, some stores out there make a point of building a caveat right into their signage; I'm sure we're all familiar with "The Dollar Store With More!", for example, where the "with more" is actually what you're paying because most of the crap in the place is priced over a dollar for no good god damn reason. But this, this is a stretch even beyond the already distended borders of the concept.

"The Bread Store: much more than a bread store". Okay. Follow me on this one and see if what I am saying makes sense. If you have a store, and you would describe it in one sentence as being 'more than a bread store' -- are you still with me here? -- I would think that, in this particular circumstance, it would be reasonable to conclude that you don't name it "The Bread Store"! No! Stop that!

I can understand, given the limited amount of space on a retail sign, that it could be difficult to convey the store's concept of 'bread and stuff' succinctly. (Let's assume for the moment that "Bread and Stuff" is already taken.) "Get Baked" wouldn't really focus enough on the 'bread' part; "Loaves Around" wouldn't really focus enough on the 'stuff' part. "The Bread Store With More", besides being a possible trademark violation, would make me want to hit you. "Bread & Circuses" is cute, but runs the very real risk of flying over the heads of your audience (a feeling I'm quite accustomed to, so I know what I'm talking about here) -- and it would shut out any potential future expansion into Winnipeg, where the name is already taken. I got a strange hometown, man.

Anyway! All I'm suggesting here is that you could have given this a little more thought, because it seems entirely counterproductive to cultivate a public image that stops and contradicts itself before anyone can even get through the door. It's like when a pizza place puts out an advertising campaign for their chicken wings that never once mentions the pizza they sell. As first impressions go, "what were they thinking" is probably a bad start for luring in customers.

This post was originally going to have a lot more content in it, but now I'll have to put up the rest of it tomorrow because I have a headache about the whole thing. Thanks a lot, The Bread Store Much More Than A Bread Store. Now I've got to go lie down.

Je ne comprends pas

Gimme a break; gimme a break! Break me off a piece of that Uptown Magazine!

I can't imagine there's a lot that I would want or need to say in support of this column, because quite honestly it speaks for itself. In one language, because that's all it knows how to do.

I'm quite rubbish at French, as anybody who has ever witnessed me speak or read it can attest to, and I've hit the point where I have to acknowledge that this will probably never change. I've had my best intentions many a time of maybe going back and learning it, but let's be honest -- I'm twenty-five years old and already I routinely find myself standing in the kitchen and trying to remember what I went into the kitchen for, so what the hell chance do I have of picking up an entirely new (though not entirely 'foreign' -- lol see what I did there) language.

Alas! Alas. Not all is bleak and dreary around here, however -- I went to the Value Village yesterday to pick up some intramural softball equipment (read: I bought track pants) and came back with information, which of course is the commodity I enjoy dealing in the most. Check it!



Value Village half-off sale this Monday! Oh hells yes! I have class that morning from nine 'til noon, unfortunately for my purposes, and I have two (!) papers due the next day -- so I'll just have to work ahead a bit first, I guess, because no way am I passing up on this.

I've made no secret of my penchant for thrift stores, and even less of a secret of my enthusiasm for thrift store sales. I've had tremendous luck with the Value Village half-off sales in the past -- most notably finding a badass long suede coat for fourty bucks last fall and a tube organ (!) for ten bucks (!!) last spring -- and even if I don't find anything as dramatic as that, it's always (always) worth a look when a place like this holds a sale like that. This is important! Check your local listings!

cookiieee aahhhhhh

I am twenty-five years old and I still draw Cookie Monster on my school notes.



My art had a reason this time, though! (Not like last time, I mean.) You can see in the snippets of scholastic notetaking above that the professor of this class brought up Cookie Monster first, specifically to mention that she likes to introduce herself to the first-term reference students by showing them the old clip of Cookie Monster at the library and building from there. (Please note that, aside from a cute example of a reference interview, this is also a good snapshot of the hilarious old-fashioned librarian stereotype. Look at him shush! Look at the bow tie! That's adorable!)

So the notes above are from the first day of Evaluation and Use of Children's Materials, Birth to 7 Years, and I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to have gotten into this class. The peculiarities of the University of Western Ontario graduate registration system meant that I had to go right down to the wire on today's add/drop deadline to get into this course, and now that I've successfully been enrolled I can A) avoid taking the alternate course, Human Resources Management (and no offense to whoever the prospective professor would have been for that one, but I think we can all agree that I'm more suited for children's librarianship than for high-level management) and B) finally draw up my assignment schedule for the term and find out when I get to sleep this summer.

Yes, it's another big term! A brief cross-section of the reading lists across the five courses: Kay Vandergrift, Marshall McLuhan, Beatrix Potter, Michael Geist, Eric Carle, Raymond Williams, Scott McCloud, Dorothy Kunhardt, The Law Librarian blog, the NoveList electronic database, Adobe Photoshop CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques, Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Useability, Podcasting for Dummies, and multiple sections of the Canadian Copyright Act. A strange clump of readings, perhaps, but not as strange as having an assignment due this coming Monday! For one thing, the term just started this past Monday; for another thing, Monday is a holiday. But! If I ever need a morale boost, at least I know that I can always count on stuffing several cookies at once into my mouth and making audible chewing noises while cookie fragments go flying from my terrifying, gaping maw.

In the meantime -- for those of you who happen to be in London and reading this right now, UWO Librarians Without Borders will have a fundraising crafts table set up tomorrow at the Western Fairgrounds' weekly London Farmer's Market. Who doesn't love a good farmer's market? That's where I'll be spending the day, so let's see how long it takes for me to abandon my tablekeeping duties entirely and skitter off to find farmer's market stuff. Fellow table attendants, consider yourselves warned!

Resent This Article, and Future Considerations

Uptown Magazine! The surreal adventure that will become your world!

I'm a little late in getting around to mentioning it, but I'd written a reasonably timely column about the untimely future passing of Geocities. I was pretty sure that the column conveyed my nostalgic, if irrational, sense of loss and disappointment in the oncoming disappearance of the site -- or at least I was pretty sure until I received this actual, unedited, one-hundred-per-cent-serious reader response to it:

"I resent your Uptown article. Geocities rules."

It went on like that for like three pages (!), but that was -- and I'm not kidding -- the word-for-word opening statement. So for any readers out there who may have been confused or misled, rest assured that my affection for GeoCities has endured to this day. Part of it is the amateur content aspect, of course, but another part of it is the archival function that it has faithfully served right up until, well, now. Aside from the most flagrant of flagrant copyright transgressions, nothing has been deleted off of GeoCities in the past decade or so unless the original creator went in and deleted it; you can go back and find hundreds of thousands of old GeoCities pages left frozen in time and exactly as you'd remembered them, save for the occasional advertisement that Yahoo! added to them retroactively because Yahoo! is headed by useless, gibbering morons who are seemingly incapable of making money off of anything.

I ran a few randomly inspired Geocities-themed Google searches, just for kicks, and ended up with all kinds of various GeoCities pages. (For sanity's sake, make sure that your speakers are turned off if you decide to open all of those at once.) Some of these pages are just flat out way better than others, and back in the day it seemed that for every one great page there were a hundred intolerable ones, but you can feel the effort that people put into them -- and it's all going to be gone, poof, the work of millions of people from all over the world just like that. What the hell, Yahoo!, what the hell. The Internet Archive, marvelous as it is, can only do so much at once; you couldn't give them a heads-up first?

Somewhat related to this topic, it was about half my life ago (!!) that I originally started puttering around with webpages on GeoCities; its impending closure coincides with my ultimate acknowledgement, in my old age, that it's soon going to be time for me to bite the bullet and actually pay money for webhosting. Not with Yahoo! Ha ha, oh goodness no. But in the two and a half years or so that I've been on Blogspot -- is it seriously like two and a half years now? -- I've written a lot of feature-length items and image-heavy posts, and it's always irked me that they couldn't be properly condensed for skimming them. I've heard similar complaints from people reading the blogs; it's hard to check them frequently if doing so brings up hundreds of images, but in their current enclosure there's no way to index or present them without having to load the entire thing every time. That, plus the soon-to-be-sudden disappearance of my hilariously awful old Geocities pages that I haven't touched in a decade, is making me strongly consider the prospect that it's time for me to cough up the dough and establish something somewhere that is both flexible and permanent.

This is all fruitless musing right now, of course! This is something I'll have to look into in the future, because right now I have neither the money nor the time necessary to further the thought. I start my third, and assumedly final, term of library school tomorrow! It's crunch time! (Note also that my classes this term include a web design and architecture course, a publishing and media course, and a public sector internet broadcasting course; it might be smarter to make big internet decisions after I've been exposed to these.)

In conclusion, GeoCities! You were a miserable piece of crap, but I'll miss you all the same.

Oh Well Look Who's Alive

Hi, everyone! Who's really good at blogging? THE ANSWER IS ME I AM SO GOOD AT BLOGGING.

Yes, it has been a while, you might have noticed. Last I'd posted, back in -- February? Jesus Christ -- back in February, I had expressed my intentions to write more often and in retrospect that was tremendously funny. Oh, I ended up writing more often, all right; my assignment load when printed could probably be expressed in tons, especially given how many assignments in that last stretch were A) twenty pages in length, B) worth 40% or more of the term, or C) both. Ah, graduate school.

So it was mostly radio silence from me around here; we'll call it an extended March Break! I didn't get a March Break in real life, so I'll retroactively apply it here. That it extended to encompass April is unfortunate and pretty awful, but in my defence shut up I was busy raarh grr etcetera. (Defence attempts like these exemplify why people should stop trying to get me to go to law school.)

Yes, times were rough; assignments ran high and frequently, pretty much everyone I know in London packed up to leave on co-op terms, and I turned twenty-five which is probably about halfway to death for me. But it isn't all bad news for creative content around here! I diligently continued my column for Uptown Magazine during these trying times, and now that I'm back in Winnipeg for a bit I was able to go and track down paper copies of my published work because I am a relentless egotist. The columns are also in helpful electronic format, which makes them easier to share -- so let's have a look and see if I can't find some content for you guys to read!



Uptown Magazine! Beware of imitators!

It seems like so long ago, now, but I wrote this column shortly after the Obama visit to Canada as a reaction piece to express how incredibly sick I was of hearing about the Obama visit to Canada.

It was all that the news media talked about for the week prior, it was pretty much all they talked about for the week after, and for the very short time that he was actually in Canada it wasn't even worth going near a radio or television. I like him as much as the next Canadian (and we Canadians love the crap out of the guy) but I get it, he came to Canada, stop talking about it.

To give you some perspective, the Obama visit got more coverage proportionally on Canadian television for that week or two than swine flu and the economy combined are getting right now. And we're all already sick of hearing about swine flu as it is! You can understand my frustration.

And speaking of getting sick and fed up:



Uptown Magazine! The Great Valley Adventure! My column from this issue can be read here, assuming it does not explode and kill you first.

You may think to yourself "how hard it is to produce a product that will not murder people outright?", but that is because you are not a major business. Major businesses can't help it! It just naturally comes with the territory that someone will have an allergic reaction, or use the product in an unsafe manner, or... fall ill and die for otherwise unexplained reasons, or get choked to death by majestically unsafe components. Or whatever. It's always something! Quite literally, always something; there's no telling what the next consumer good will be that abruptly keeps consumers from observing their next birthday.

And, well... speaking of birthdays...



Uptown Magazine! Fight the powers that be!

The thrust of this column is that I am old and busted and all washed up, because I am old and busted and all washed up. Twenty-five? Seriously? God, that's pretty much it for me. Surely if I was going to accomplish something it would have shown up by now; now it's too late, my best years are all behind me, and it's just a steady decline of getting older and dumber and fatter from here until the slow crawl of decay sends me to my grave. Happy Birthday, me!

There's another column in this week's Uptown that'll be online pretty much any second now, I think, so I'll keep you guys posted. And there are Stanley Cup Playoffs to talk about! God, I love the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I've done predictions in the past, and they've never been right, but I've always enjoyed doing them; my extended break unfortunately meant that I didn't get to predict the first round, but rest assured that I would have been mostly wrong.

No time for predictions right now, unfortunately! I'm heading out of town shortly, and I won't be able to come back and post anything until Sunday. So Sunday it is; I'll make (slightly late) round two NHL predictions, direct passersby to my latest Uptown column, and basically just fart around because that sums up the vast majority of my writing. Good to be back!

Dig That Car

Well, hello there! Toronto was very interesting, and I have many interesting stories and pictures to share. (It isn't everyday that I exit from an underground concourse to find myself smack in the middle of a thirty-thousand-person protest march, for example.) In fact, I appear to have taken about a hundred and fourty (!) pictures over the course of the trip; selecting and editing them for presentation is going about as quickly as one would expect, and I'm trying to figure out how I might post them here without completely clogging the internet connection of anybody who tries to visit this blog ever.

With that said, I'm afraid that the extended exposition about my recent getaway will have to wait. I know, I know! I said that I'd tell you all about it this week, and I had said that in good faith. But my scholastic endeavors are not going extravagantly well for me in the scheduling department right now, as it turns out; I've got more commitments than Roddy Doyle this week. (Ha ha, oh geez, sorry. A little book humour, there! I'm, uh... I think I'm losing my mind.)

In considering my position for this week I was reminded of a few photos that I took last Wednesday night, while on my way home to pack for the trip the next day. The weather in London never gets very dramatically cold, but it definitely loves to snow a lot around here -- and while I'm sure the locals must be used to it by now, it appears that some people still get caught unawares.







Yeah, wow. Good luck digging your vehicle out, gobsmacked car owner! It looks pretty bad from here, but it's nothing unmanageable; you just have to start digging, wherever it strikes you as best to start, and then keep going from there until you're able to free yourself and move on with your life.

Right? Am I thinking unreasonably here? Well, apparently I must be, because I walked home from school again today -- and that car is still there.







It hit temperatures of zero yesterday and the day before (zero! It was flippin' spring out here!), giving the previous snow some time to melt and congeal into ice, and then it snowed like crazy again overnight so this car is even worse off now than it was before. Whoever owns this vehicle has moved on from being surprised by the weather conditions to either A) being completely incompetent or B) having given up entirely on the idea of driving anywhere.

This is what motivates me, right now. There is no way I can let myself end up like this car.

(If you're in London at the moment and want some motivation yourself, feel free to go look at it and regard it with wonder; it's in the parking lot of the UWO store, just south of Sarnia and Western. I don't think it's going anywhere, just drop by whenever.)

So I've got a lot of work to do, and the Toronto trip recap will have to wait for now. But! In the meantime, let me pass along information that you may find useful. Certainly I find it to be very interesting and important information, but I am willing to accept that not everybody is as gung-ho about these sorts of things. To wit:



It's on, suckers! Next Monday it's half-off at the Value Village, and you can expect me to be there bright and early just to see what I can get my hands on. I did the same with the last sale and ended up with a coat so impressively swanky that I couldn't possibly have ever afforded it under normal circumstances; I doubt my luck is so strong as to set up a feat like that twice, but hey, you never know.

Will James Howard survive his gauntlet of assignments and obligations? Will he return to report on his adventures in the big city? Will someone dig that car out? Tune in next time!

Everyone Knows Birds Love Sports and Doughnuts

I'm flying back to London in the morning! My goodness, where does the time go.

My vacation time in Winnipeg seemed a lot shorter than it actually was; granted, this may be because I slept through a lot of it, but in my defense I really did need a lot of sleep. I was tired! This graduate school stuff can take a lot out of a guy.

Fortunately, I did get out and about from time to time to see some of the sights, haunt the old haunts, that sort of thing. I went to the city's premiere vinyl store, for example, and blew half of my GST cheque on goofy obscure records. Be sure to ask me about the records another time! This post is about something else entirely, but those are a good story too.

Anyway -- one of my favourite weekend curiosities in the city is Mulvey Market, a big ol' flea market that convenes every Saturday and Sunday south of Osborne Village to engage in the sale or trade of antiques and knick-knacks and memorabilia and paraphernalia and whatever else you might be looking for. (It's very quaint, to the point that it doesn't even have a website. Dude, I know! What century are we in? You'll just have to take my word for it that it exists, strange a practice as that is in our modern times.) Mulvey Market is an entertaining destination (to me, at least!) because the possibility always exists that I will walk in there and see something that surprises and astounds me with its very existence. That's the kind of possibility I like best!

Because I stared at it for a minute and ultimately decided that it was worth five dollars, I dropped five dollars on this thing:



Check out this handsome copper and plaster plaque! About a foot across in diameter and weighing as much as my little sister's dog, a stampprint on the back identifies its manufacturers as the "Modern Artistic Plaque Co.". (Whoever they were.) This is actually the third piece of Winnipeg centennial commemorative stuff I own, behind a very nice coffee-table book on the history of the city and a 'bumper sticker' that is actually like two feet long. This is the curse of an Honours in History, or of being interested in history to begin with: everything is god damn history, so it's hard to avoid getting wrapped up in things that any sane and reasonable human being would walk past without a second thought. Still a nice plaque, though! Very decorative, very charming.

"Oh, Jesus, that was thirty-five years ago," the greying gentleman behind the table announced absently, half to me and half to himself, when I lifted the large construction-paper '$5' sign off the plaque and inspected it. "I remember it like the other day. Wow."

The optimism of centennials is always a hoot, isn't it? All of your problems safely disappear well behind you when your age hits a round number! You can see the clean streets and thriving trees and streamlined skyscrapers rising from that second zero on the plaque, in contrast to the churches and oxcarts of the zero before it, because Winnipeg has finally shaken loose its humble agricultural origins to become a teeming megalopolis! A city of tomorrow! A true leader in global prosperity and inno--haha whoops we're bad at everything brb

I figure this was five dollars well spent, and when I one day have enough money to buy a house I'll be sure to hang this plaque with pride above wherever I keep the beer.

This, however, was not to be the biggest surprise of the day! No, my main source of shock and awe arose from another stall at the opposite end of the market, where I found myself staring dumbfounded at a pair of matching items that I had never so much as conceptualized before.

Behold as I beheld, then purchased for fifty cents a pop:



What? Wait, what? whaaaaaaaaat

I realize some among you may not recognize what this represents, so humour me my exposition. Pictured here are solid rubber figurines (in the grand old California Raisin style), about three inches high, produced as mascot-themed promotional material for a peculiar little C-list restaurant chain named Robin's Donuts. "Who?", some of you may be asking, which is sort of my point. Robin's Donuts had room in their promotional budget to produce toys? Robin's Donuts had money?

For the unfamiliar or uninitiated, I would best describe Robin's Donuts as a palette-swap of Tim Hortons except smaller, sadder, brazenly downmarket, and completely irrelevant to the national discourse. The coffee and the food are unassuming, but really no worse than anything else you've ever eaten out of a coffee place; what usually comes to mind when I think of Robin's is that I don't believe I've ever found one that struck me as attractive, where I've walked in and gone "oh well this is nice". It always seems to be dark brown ceramic tile, depressingly low lighting, and impossibly garish yellow paint; I routinely eat in random street-corner diners, because I enjoy the ambience of little rundown eateries, and even I find Robin's Donuts dingy and unpleasant.

Claiming a hundred and thirty locations on its website, Robin's Donuts is a pretty common sight in Winnipeg and other areas across the country (particularly in northern Ontario where the chain was founded) -- but I suspect that many of this blog's readers will have never heard of it before, especially because there are a total of zero Robin's Donuts locations in London. Or in Toronto. Or, uh, anywhere in Quebec. A hundred and thirty locations don't go as far as they used to, I guess.

Robin's Donuts was apparently bought up wholesale in 2006 by Coffee Time [PDF], so its glory years clearly must be far behind it. Certainly they don't sell toys there any more, which brings me back to my original confusion -- when in the hell did Robin's Donuts sell toys? These aren't cheap-quality toys, either; these are some pretty well-made and respectable toys, which seems quite strangely out of character for the franchise.

So to recap, as you can imagine, I'm still quite surprised by the whole idea of there actually being Robin's Donuts figurines. The next mystery is why the hell they appear to be playing sports, but I think anybody who could provide me the answers I seek must be long gone by now.

Do you suppose the mascot is actually named "Robin"? And which of these is actually the mascot? There are two here, after all, obviously sculpted to represent different genders. If you look again at the franchise logo, the facial features and goofy white scarf are consistent with both models -- but the logo doesn't have prominent eyelashes drawn along the sides of the eyes, so I have to assume that the boy robin is the actual franchise mascot. What would the girl robin's name be, though? Would they both be 'Robin'? But then, if they're both robins named Robin, why is the "Robin's" in "Robin's Donuts" singular and not plural? And why did they even make two different AUGH I AM THINKING WAY TOO HARD ABOUT THIS



Here's a closer shot so you can better appreciate the detail on the male robin, who for now I will suppose is the mascot and then refuse to contemplate the matter any further. The sweatband is so we can tell he is playing basketball, because we are stupid and can't figure out why he has a basketball in his hand. Admittedly, the dude's got the Allen Iverson look going pretty convincingly, which is no mean feat considering that the toy might actually predate Iverson's NBA career. Well, that and he's an anthropomorphized bird rather than a black guy, but I figured you gathered that part already.

So if the boy bird loves basketball, what sport does the girl bird enjoy? Well, a lot of little girls are big into soccer, but both softball and volleyball have really taken off in the last couple of decades, but then again tennis has prominently featured women athletes for a long time now, so I guess the--



Ha ha ha ha, who am I kidding. Figure skating ahoy!

You can't see them, because my fingers are in the way, but the figure skates actually do have blades molded at the bottom. This would be a nice touch, except that -- ha ha -- the blades mean that the figure can't stand on its own, which is why my fingers are in the picture to begin with. This is a reasonable interpretation of actual skating, but is still bothersome to deal with. (The initial picture above of the two toys together was taken by propping this figure against the other one, which stands up just fine with no problems. The stunts I have to pull sometimes!)

Both figures are branded on the back, incidentally, in case anyone might doubt their legitimacy:





Is it just me, or does that ponytail look exceptionally painful? Why do these birds even have hair? Isn't that--no no shut up not thinking this over

It's more obvious in the first picture than the second one, but both toys are datestamped; each toy has "© 1996 Robin's Foods" printed on the butt in embossed lettering, which at least tells me when (although not why) these toys came about. I could have tried for a better picture of the copyright information, then I envisioned a scenario where I would have to explain to somebody why I have pictures of rubber bird ass on my blog and ultimately I decided to save myself the hassle.

Flight in eight hours! Perhaps I should finish packing.

Wait, Where Am I (or, Three Quick Posts in One)

I've got a pair of gigantic London picture-posts coming, sometime soon. Big big posts. With lots of pictures, numbering into the triple digits. But those will be sometime soon, meaning not right now; resizing, uploading and webcoding that many images goes about as quickly as you'd imagine. Plus, uh, the part about being a full-time graduate student now and everything.

As a bit of transition (or filler, depending on your outlook), I'll post up a few of the pictures I took during the big ooh-life-changing plane ride over here. Winnipeg to London is only a couple hours or so, but I hadn't been on a plane in a good couple of years -- note to self, renew passport -- so everything seemed new and exciting all over again. Hey, do we get a meal, or--oh, uh, cookies. Thanks, they're kind of like food, I guess.

I left Winnipeg on September 2nd, so as you'd expect from Winnipeg in early September it was twelve degrees and raining. I did make an attempt to get some shots of the city as I left, but you can judge for yourself how well that went.





If you squint a little, you can--ha ha, no, no you can't. Don't bother.

Modern aircraft technology is such, of course, that they have goofy little satellite TVs in the back of each seat. It's a pretty handy feature, if you're the sort of person who prefers to watch sports highlights or whatever instead of looking out a window or reading or napping or thinking to yourself. I'm sure they're a hoot, but I didn't really get to check them out.



This was what my screen did for most of the flight, with brief and intermittent bouts of working properly so I could watch this instead:



Hey, guess what? This is better picture quality than I've ever had on any TV I own, so I'm pretty galled by the idea that these things are what the company is buying with my money. This is the same reason why I don't go into Tim Hortons very often, incidentally. If you've got twin widescreen LCD televisions installed in the menu for the express purpose of showing me what a sandwich looks like, what the hell do you need my two dollars for?

Anyway! I digress. I wasn't up there to watch TV anyway, so no great loss. I'm a pretty big proponent of window seats, after all.







Ah, scenery, good times.

The airport in London is a pretty teeny place, so it didn't take too long to find my ride; the woman whose lease I was taking over came to pick me up and drive me to my new apartment, because I was taking over her lease and she probably wanted to make good and sure that I got there to take it.

So, dropped off after a good long drive, there I was. Plunked down in a basement apartment deep within an unfamiliar city, not a friendly face for miles around, no transportation, no phone, and no idea where I was or where anything was located in town. What was I to do in such a situation? Well, write an Uptown column, of course!

(Killer segue! Yes! I've still got the magic!)



Uptown Magazine! Remain seated until seatbelt light is extinguished!

Here's my column from last Tuesday, and it's a pretty good column if I do say so myself. I'm still in talks with the editorial staff about further contributions, because writing for Uptown is one of my very favourite things ever; in the meantime, I'll keep sending in columns like always (albeit maybe not as solely Winnipeg-themed as before) and then wait to see if they hit print. Here's hoping!

So, yeah, great big London posts will be forthcoming. Before I go back to that, though, let me show you a notice that I got a kick out of when it was posted on campus:



I have no idea what this says, of course. Aside from the few helpful clues like "B.B.Q.", "LONDON JEIL CHURCH" and "When", I'm pretty much useless in the face of this poster.

However! As a unilingual Anglophone, I'm well accustomed to working around language barriers by gleaming information from visual cues. And what have we here, in the bottom right corner of the poster?



Why, Picnic Jesus, of course! And look at how happy he is, the little scamp! He's got his ladle, and his soup, and what looks like a little burger... what a cutie! The robes say "I died for your sins", but the hat says "I could sure go for a pick-a-nick basket!"

"Hey, c'mere," I said to a classmate who happened to be passing by. "Is that Jesus in a chef hat?"

"It... yeah, it looks like," he agreed. "Wow."

"Pretty cool!" I gushed. Then, after a second: "Can you imagine if it were Mohammad instead?"

"Yeah," he said, "I really don't think that would go over too well."

And he's right, it probably wouldn't. Still, though! Picnic Jesus! Don't you just want to scratch his little beard? What a great guy.

Anyway. Tomorrow's another big day, so I'd better get back to the books. You'll all hear from me soon enough.