And they’re calling it: Saturday Night with Samsonow.

It all started up in the brains of TheEdmontonian.com creators Sally and Jeff. Several weeks ago, we met over dinner and drinks and started to discuss it. Sally has some background in video editing and both she and Jeff have become pretty damned skilled at creating and editing some great video content on their website (check out Jeff’s most recent video on the SOS Fest). As two people who are trying to push the boundaries and raise the bar for what alternative media can provide in terms of entertainment, content and information, Saturday Night with Samsonow seemed like a step in the right direction.

Over that fateful dinner, Sally pitched the idea to me, and I thought it was awesome. “How can I help?” I asked. “Can I be a guest?!” As you can probably guess, Sally thought that would be a good idea.

Here’s what the sign looks like outside TheEdmontonian.com theatre*:

And yes, I’m writing about this because I’m going to be one of Jeff’s first guests — and I believe Pepe Duenas from the Mystery Ponies is the band leader (or just the band himself. That remains to be seen).

The show starts at 9pm MDT on a live stream hosted at TheEdmontonian.com. Be there, or be marginally disappointed!

*TheEdmontonian.com theatre doesn’t actually exist… yet.

This afternoon, my roommate shared a YouTube video with me. In the mountain town of Jasper, the Jasper Sustainability Club for Youth recently organized a flash-mob dance-party that rocked down Patricia Street. It’s a powerful and fun demonstration of community, communication and togetherness. I’ve watched it twice now and it makes me smile, so I thought I’d share it with you:

When I first heard that Christian Audigier — designer of Ed Hardy — was putting out a wine line of wines and actually calling it Ed Hardy, my first instinct was to Google Ed Hardy to see exactly what that was. I had a pretty good idea, but it’s not in my regular vocabulary or everyday life. As soon as I figured out what it was I ran to my nearest drugstore, loaded up on hair gel, covered myself in eagle and skull tattoos (temporary of course), grabbed my shiniest, tightest little shirt I could find and my good friend Lynda and headed out to the Inglewood Wine Shop in Calgary to pick up a bottle or two.

Imagine how delighted I was when I found that they were doing tastings in their front room; I wasn’t going to have to buy wine without tasting it. Excellent!

You know how when a friend asks you to try out a new recipe, and you recognize a flavour but you can’t quite put your finger on it? That is what drinking Ed Hardy wine is like.

There are three wines in this French line available for purchase in Calgary; a Rosé, Chardonnay and a Cabernet Sauvignon. No one knows for sure who the maker is at this point, but looking at the bottle, Christian Audigier definitely put his personal “style” into the labeling. Overall, this wine is middle of the road. It’s not bad, it’s not great, but if you can buy it on sale it’s a good bottle for starting your night out. It’s not for serving to your friends with discerning tastes. They’ll just make fun of you.

In case you’re still interested in giving these wines a taste, it’s probably due to sheer morbid curiosity — the same reason I sampled a few Paris Hilton perfumes. I’m even more embarrassed to admit that I liked one of them enough to buy a bottle. No, it’s not Paris’ scientific work that made the perfume. She just bought the product. Still, I feel wrong every time I use it.

Anyways, back to wine.

Ambrosia for Douchebags

The Rosé was quite dry for me — subtle, not sweet but not tart either; ultimately not amazing. The Chardonnay smells quite sweet, like a Riesling. The taste lingers on your tongue and in your mouth. This is where you start to really notice that something else has been added, but you don’t know what. It seemed like it was an extra sweetener, but it’s hard to tell. Being a red wine drinker I often find it hard to appreciate white wines, thankfully I had a white wine friend with me… although she wasn’t too fond of this one. For me the “something different” also seemed like something wrong.

Finally, we tried the Cabernet Sauvignon. Now here again you’re allowed to look down on me. I really didn’t mind this wine. If you can get it on sale it’s not a bad purchase. It’s not my favorite, but it was a different wine than I’ve ever had before. The Cab Sauv definitely tastes like something other than a regular wine should — there is definitely something else in this wine. What it is we may never know.

The flavour is “modern,” another easy drinking wine with a lingering taste. Again, this is not a wine to impress your friends with, well unless your friends look like they walked right off of Jersey Shore, then this just might be the ticket. If you just want to try it out, I think you’re like a lot of people and keep in mind that it’s a matter of physical taste, not an unfortunate wardrobe decision.

— Lisa McRitchie

The e-mail: Such Tweet Sorrow – a Shakespearean play performed over social media.

Over the next five weeks, six actors will be tweeting a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, largely improvised from a structured plot.

Oh, and did I mention it’s being put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company? Yeah… that kind of makes it a big deal.

Like good artists, director Roxana Silbert and the RSC actors involved have decided to embrace a new medium to find a new way to create art. To witness it on the ground floor is… frankly, exciting.

Now only time will tell if this creative use of social media will be successful, and will pave the way for future performances, but I, for one, will definitely be following it, and will give my two-cents on the whole shebang when it wraps up.

You can watch the whole thing unfold by following @such_tweet on twitter.

Like the Justice League but with less justice

I was summoned that evening by Brittney Le Blanc who informed me my presence was required, as a representative of the Unknown Studio (Scott was doing “real work”. Chump), to discuss forming an informal association of new media properties — a group of local media concerns that fall outside of the scope of the mainstream. She told me this after, of course, she said, “Come and have food with me, Sally and Jeff at the Manor Bistro.” An opportunity to sit down with Brit and my colleagues from TheEdmontonian.com is not be taken lightly. If you throw food into the equation, it’s more or less mandatory.

We’d spoken off and on about combining our influence as a means of attracting more readers (or listeners, as two podcasts, including this one and UserCreatedContent, are members of LEM), attracting advertisers and simply helping to give each other any assistance — be it technical or promotional —that was required.

In short, the League exists as a loosely affiliated group of new media organizations in Edmonton who have pledged to help each other bury any bodies we leave in our wake.

We have an about page on our website that says, “The League of Extraordinary Media is an alliance of Edmonton new media producers working together to raise the profile of the city’s flourishing online community.”

True, but wordy. So here’s a more polished mission statement, borrowed from an old toast from my student newspapering days: We strive for World Domination, in a modest Canadian way.

That is, at least, the cheeky version of it.

To put a finer point on it, we want your eyes and ears. We want to provide Edmontonians, Albertans, Canadians and global citizens with alternative media for their consumption pleasure. We want to present the world as we see it in a manner you might not have considered before. We want your comments, your thoughts, and your ideas.

We want to be a part of the community, not merely an observer of it.

The people who form the membership of the League — Brittney Le Blanc from TrueBritl.com; Ramin Ostad, Corey Satermo, Matthew Dykstra, Anthony Bacchus, Tyler Satchwill, and Michael Jones from UserCreatedContent; Sally Poulsen and Jeff Samsonow from TheEdmontonian.com; and Scott C Bourgeois and myself from the Unknown Studio — are all trained communicators in some form. And we love these tools of authorship and the potential for storytelling they afford us.

We hope the League can live up to its name. We think it will. Either way, we want to hear from you.

Our ‘coming out’ party

One of the ways we wanted to present the League to the world was by organizing a really fun party for people. But we wanted the party to have some twist to it, not just an excuse to get together and drink and shoot the breeze (which is also acceptable). Brittney and Sally came up with the idea for a swap meet; a place for you to bring “your poor, your tired, your crap you don’t want” and see if you can’t come away with some prize(s) you’d prefer to have over your junk.

That’s when YEGSwap was born (check out YEGSwap on Facebook).

But it’s not just a swap meet. It’s also a concert, featuring Edmonton artists of all genres, including The Mystery Ponies, Lyra Brown, and the Joe.

Did I mention there would be drinks?

AND there will also be a chance to earn a “Swarm” badge on FourSquare, for you über nerds out there.

For $2 you get unreal entertainment, and the potential to grab some swag via swap. The first of many event hosted by the League.

See you there.

“You just follow the recipe,” she said, likely looking at me like I’d just asked the dumbest question on earth.

“But what the hell is Demerara sugar?” I probably asked.

“It’s just sugar!”

In spite of my stupidity, my desire to eat cookies and other sweet confections would force my mother into the kitchen to watch over me and ensure I knew what I was doing. Eventually, we established a pattern, once I was able to bake on my own without completely screwing up: I would bake, and she would follow me around the kitchen cleaning up after me. I was in her domain, and she needed things to be just so. My mum’s still like this. She kicks up a fuss at Christmas about having to do all this cooking, but when you offer to help her, she basically tells you to fuck off and stay out of her kitchen.

So you can imagine how I feel now that I’m dating a wonderful girl who nearly became a pastry chef… Yes, about 20 lbs heavier. And I’m perfectly OK with that.

Rachel nearly became a pastry chef, it’s true. But after attending SAIT for awhile, she decided it wasn’t for her. “It felt like being a pastry chef was 25 per cent baking and 75 per cent cleaning up the kitchen.” So she decided to move to Edmonton and go to the U of A. Lucky for me she did.

The other night, Rachel and I set about doing some baking. She received a couple of baking recipes books for Christmas:

The first one was given by my brother and sister-in-law, since they know how much Rachel likes baking (and, I imagine as with all the givers of recipes books, they hoped that she would eventually bake something for them) The Happy Baker, a Dater’s Guide to Emotional Baking is actually an excellent cook book, and not just for its recipes. Author Erin Bolger includes some hilarious illustrations and cute stories about lovers scorned… and then drowning their sorrows in baking. Functional and humourous!

The second book is actually one that I came across at Urban Outfitters. I sure can’t fit into their misshapen clothing, but the knick knacks and books they sell there are outstanding! Hello, Cupcake! is less a recipe book, and more an instruction book on how to decorate cupcakes and cakes very elaborately. And since we weren’t feeling especially artistic that evening — at least I wasn’t. I mean look at the dog cupcakes on the cover! — we ganked an outstanding recipe from the book for chocolate icing. This we would use to festoon our cuppin’ cakes in chocolatey goodness, followed by the haphazard placement of sprinkles.

Here’s the icing being whipped into shape by Rachel:

This stuff tasted heavenly, and all it was was cocoa, milk and icing sugar, really. If I could have, I would have just ate the icing. It was that good.

But we weren’t just making cupcakes, oh no. We also made delicious chocolate haystacks, a decidedly powerful combination of sweet and salty, with just a hint of marshmallow. We also made toffee crackers, which was unsalted premium plus crackers covered in toffee, then covered in chocolate, then covered in almond sliver. Both of these treats were from The Happy Baker.

I know, right?

You can see the final results of this great experiment below. Oh, and also what our delicious cupcakes wound up looking like.

The kind that melt in your hand... in a good way

A deadly combination of chocolate, toffee and healthy almonds!

Look at those sweet cuppin' cakes. Now with sprinkles!

And sometimes it means helping out organizations in Edmonton. When the Christmas Bureau invited us to their media launch back in November, we were surprised. We didn’t think we’d made that much of a splash in Edmonton. Looking at our analytics and show download info, however, tells us that we’re doing something. Something good.

And then we get emails like this one, from a few days back:

Adam and Scott,

As we’re getting most of the campaign wrapped up and receipted, I just wanted to say thanks for your support this Christmas! I can speak for both Dianne Brown, Campaign Director, and Wendy Batty, Executive Director, when I say that we’re really glad you came out to the Campaign Launch.

Also, thanks a lot for the advertising that you ran through The Unknown Studio! As far as I know we’ve never had that type of support before; however, online donations are up from last year, and I have to assume that at least a portion of that is because of the support/recognition we received from the (awesome) online community in Edmonton.

For your information, we came close to reaching our goal of $1.6 million this year and provided festive meals to 69,000 less fortunate Edmontonians. In such a tough economy and with so much need this year, I’m happy to say that Edmontonians still stepped up to the plate and made sure we did well.

But again, thank you for your support! I, personally, won’t be around next year, but don’t be surprised to get an invitation to our Launch again in the fall.

Liam Peuramaki
Campaign Assistant, Christmas Bureau of Edmonton

Liam’s assumption of what kind of traffic we drove to the Christmas Bureau website was generous, as our numbers indicate we sent only about 20 people his way, but it’s the thought that counts. The Christmas Bureau helps Edmontonians, therefore we help the Christmas Bureau. And while they didn’t quite nail their ambitious $1.6 million goal, they came close, which definitely says something in these economic times.

The Christmas Bureau will always be near and dear to the Unknown Studio’s heart, because they were one of the first organizations who thought to invite us to a PR event. They consider us to be media, of a sort. That kind of recognition ups the stakes for us, and makes us want to improve. So, aside from being an inspiration for what they do for citizens, we appreciate the recognition.

To everyone who donated, or otherwise assisted with the campaign this year, thank you. We hope to see you again next year!

At the time, I hadn’t played Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which was discussed in the final segment of the show. This is a game where all of the UCC guys agreed: the story line is incredibly engaging, and the whole thing basically plays like a movie. This was a major topic of discussion, as most of us agreed that one of the most revolutionary leaps forward in gaming recently is a very deliberate attention to detail on storyline.

If you’re into games, I highly recommend you subscribe to UserCreatedContent — Edmonton’s only video game podcast… And not just because I’m on it either. These guys are the future of citizen-video-game journalism and a great addition to the Edmonton Podcasting Scape.

Regardless, Scott and I had Marliss Weber on the Halloween episode of the Unknown Studio. Marliss is an editor at See Magazine, and she has a keen interest in stories of hauntings and ghostly encounters, particularly as they take place here in Edmonton. Marliss has gone on a few ghost hunts in the city, even, using such scientific tools as digital voice recorders (DVRs) which have the uncanny ability of picking up ghostly sounds inaudible to humans. If you download the latest ep of our show, some of her tales will no doubt give you chills.

With so much anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts of these hauntings, why is it so hard for me to believe in the existence of this ethereal plane? I think it’s because often the mind sees what it wants to see. In spite of the often, incorrectly touted notion that we only use 10 per cent of our brains at a given time, the human mind is a powerful device. And though a science like psychology is still in its infancy (at least in relation to other more traditional sciences), it helps to explain a lot about why we see what we see.

Add the power of the brain to external forces, such as magnetic fields, and you get apparitions people swear are real. I dug up this old article to illustrate the point:

“Individuals prone to paranormal experiences are sensitive to weak electromagnetic fields and to man-made electrical fields, which are becoming more prominent in the communication age,” explains Persinger, who has studied the link between magnetic fields and paranormal experience for 15 years. [...] In our increasingly electronically charged world, it would seem that midnight apparitions are really just clock radios rather than ghosts.

So should we dismiss the notion of ghosts entirely? I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s enough evidence to say decisively one way or another whether ghosts exist or not — though admittedly I’ve done very little research on the subject. And to my knowledge there are only three scientists who were studying paranormal phenomenon anywhere in North America…

But Drs. Venkman, Stantz and Spengler lost their research grant, all because of a crotchety old dean.

Well.

It’s been one of those months.

October arrived with the ferocity of a rabid, nearly-extinct Tasmanian Devil, and it appears poised to hand the keys over the November with the vigor of an over-coked Bohemian reading beat poetry at one of those hipster coffee houses. Put another way, it’s been an exhausting month. Consequently: not as much writing as I’d hoped.

That doesn’t mean I, and others like me, haven’t been up to all kinds of stuff. They have been. Hence, somewhat, this list:

• Last week, Mack Male launched his much-anticipated ShareEdmonton online calendar, a hyper-local event aggregator that promises to become a central repository of all things #yeg. Check it out, play around with it, and send Mack bugs and feedback.
• Mack and fabulous Calgarian DJ Kelly came up with a very interesting idea: pay everyday Albertans to go on sabbatical — so they can improve the province for everyone. Read about it here and here.
• The Edmonton Oilers have started out the hockey season with some fantastic success. Can it last? Also, note that their record is tied with that of the Calgary Flames.
• My cousin’s restaurant, the Manor Bistro, soft-launched its new visual identity this month. You can check it here. They’ll be launching new menus in November as well!
• The ICE Conference takes place at the beginning of November, and I’ll be demoing one of dub5′s products — a scheduler we developed for the SHINE Clinic.
• Rachel and I carved pumpkins last weekend with her roommate (and roommate’s boyfriend). You can see pics here (Mine’s the normal Halloween-style one).
• Scott and I are recording the Halloween episode of the Unknown Studio this evening, with guest Marliss Weber. Should be a creepy one! Look for the episode to come out on Monday, Oct 26.
• On that note, for all things Halloween, particularly in Edmonton, point your browsers to dEdmonton!
• This very interesting article on Search Engine Optimization has been the centre of some controversy. It’s definitely worth reading if you’re into that sort of thing.
• At some point very soon, I need to see these movies: Where The Wild Things Are, Zombieland, Paranormal Activity, Astro Boy, Cirque du Freak, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (I love Terry Gilliam), among others.
• Finally, I’ll be a guest on the next episode of Edmonton’s only video-game podcast, User Created Content. I’ll let you know when it’s posted so you can give it a listen.

I snapped this pic in our back alley, and wanted to share it with you:

1. A reason why she needed this from me (and the answer to that can be found here).
2. Precisely the same information from her.

Well Brittney, being the tremendously good sport (and awesome person) that she is, happily complied. Here, then, is Brittney Le Blanc for you, in living colour — she’s one of the finest Edmontonians out there, and I figured she should have her day in the digital sun as well.

Your name: Brittney Le Blanc

Twitter: @britl

Other place to find Brittney on the net: her fantastical blog

On the job…

Your official job title: I don’t have one, but I’m called Wonderkid a lot, even on the schedule — so let’s go with that. Basically I work in the newsroom, reporting, doing web stuff, and writing. I wear a lot of hats (figuratively and literally).

What’s the best part of the job? No two days are the same. I really don’t know what to expect when I walk through the station doors. Also, I’ve been incredibly curious ever since I was a little girl. Teachers used to hate it. Now I get to ask as many questions as I want!

What’s the worst part of the job? The hours can be a little bit scattered. Just as no two days are the same, my hours on those days might also not be the same. One day I might work 6am – 2pm, the next 12pm- 8pm. It can make it hard to plan things in advance.

How long have you been doing this? I’ve worked with the station almost three and a half years. I’ve been in the newsroom for a year and a bit.

What sort of education did you have to pursue for this job? I went to NAIT and took their Radio and Television Arts program. It was a fantastic program, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the industry. It’s very hands-on, and the groundwork it laid made working at an actual station much easier to adapt to.

What skills and experience would you say are necessary for someone to succeed in this industry? You NEED to learn to multitask. At any given time, you’ll be doing about eight things. Learning to “listen multitask” is a huge help. Listening to multiple things at the same time is key. Also, it would help if you have six arms, a motivation to learn and better yourself, and never sleep.

What attracted you to this career? As I mentioned before, I’m VERY curious. I always want to know what other people do, how things work, and where things come from. I’m on a quest to never stop learning, and this job definitely helps with that.

What’s the atmosphere like at work? Depends on the day, and the news of the day. Some days, it’s a blast. Everyone is on their A-game, we’re laughing, producing lots of interesting news stories, and everything just clicks. Other days, there seems to be no news and it’s a lot harder to keep momentum going.

What is an average day like? That’s tough, it really depends on the day, and what I’m doing that day. Normally I would say I come into work, catch up on stories, what people are working on, and either work on/find stories to chase, upload stories to the website, write/rewrite stories, or any other multitude of things.

What are a couple of misconceptions people have about your career? That it’s easy or we only like to follow crime stories and depress the public. We’re not trying to frighten the public, and our job isn’t easy. When news breaks, riots happen, explosions, etc, we are the ones who head out there. We try to bring the most accurate and informative news to our listeners/readers, even when that means dealing with families who’ve just lost a family member or friend, or people who really want nothing to do with us.

I think a lot of people also think we do whatever news stories please us. And although you personally might not care about the Dominos Tournament happening in town or a multi-vehicle collision, we try to bring the community the news they want.

What is the best/funniest/worst thing(s) to happen to you at work? I think one of the funniest moments was covering the big storm this July. I happened to be a few blocks from the CN building, so I drove over there to report from the scene. I wasn’t expecting the storm, so I was wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and my thin iNews880 jacket. A reporter from the Journal and I got caught in a torrential downpour and were pelted with golf ball sized hail. Meanwhile, we were just trying to keep our equipment dry. I was thoroughly chilled and I think I looked like a drowned rat all night.

Another great moment was when the random meteorite streaked across the sky. We all were working and didn’t see it, but the phones went crazy. People saw everything from alien sightings, to communist spy balloons.

One of the worst things we deal with is talking to families that have just lost a child. Amber alerts make our hearts race. It’s all about getting as much information out there as possible. Talking to friends and family of the missing children/teens is nerve wracking. There’s nothing you can really say to comfort them. Everyone gets a terrible feeling in the pit of their stomach until the child is found.

Brittney in #yeg

How long have you lived in Edmonton? All my life. I love this city!

If you weren’t living here, where would you be? Rome. Or possibly Ottawa or Vancouver.

What is your favourite part about Edmonton? I LOVE the High Level Bridge. It’s got to be one of my favourite things. I guess the people in Edmonton are okay too. (Kidding!) I love the community; people are always willing to help each other out. When we need to, our city really bands together.

What is your favourite festival to attend? I haven’t really had the opportunity to attend many this year. The only opportunity I have to go is when I cover the stories. However, I would have to say it would be between the Fringe, Symphony Under the Sky, dEdmonton, or Winter Lights.

What is your favourite restaurant? Probably Mongolie Grill, but it really depends on my mood.

When friends/family come to visit, what’s the first attraction you tell them to visit? I love to show them our River Valley. Of course, they usually just want to head to West Edmonton Mall.

All about Bee Elle Bee

If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing? If I wasn’t in radio at all — I might be a writer. Or maybe work at a pub. I’m not really sure, radio’s been my passion since I was just a little girl, there’s never really been another option.

What is the most interesting job you’ve ever had? I used to work at a little kids birthday place. Part of what I did was run birthday parties for children ages 1-13. To this day I probably could get a bunch of kids in and out of a party room in 30-40 minutes. I also still kick butt at Laser Tag, and could fix any arcade game with jammed tickets.

Favourite Television show? Until I recently got a PVR (thanks company Christmas draws!) I didn’t really watch a lot of TV. I can’t narrow it down to one — but I love How I Met Your Mother, Chuck, Dollhouse, Buffy, Heroes, and True Blood. Although, I’m finding a lot of fault with the last one lately.

Favourite Movie? Amelie, Chasing Amy, Becoming Jane, and both the Die Hard and Batman series.

Favourite Book? Don’t judge me, but I love Pride and Prejudice, Atlas Shrugged, the Fountainhead, Sophie’s World, The Magus, Hardy Boy books, Anita Blake books — and more recently, the Sookie Stackhouse series.

Favourite Musician(s)? Matchbox Twenty, hands down. Then it’s a mix of songs. I find it really hard to have loyalty to one group — I mean look at what Third Eye Blind is doing now. That’s just weird. I love Country music though.

If you could have any super-power, which would you want? Instant teleportation. I wouldn’t have to worry about parking, I’d get more sleep, I’d cover WAY more news and stories… I’d be unstoppable. Plus, I could travel more.

What’s the biggest problem the world faces today? Apathy. A couple of months ago, Lesley Primeau invited Mack Male and myself on her show to discuss Twitter. A man older than both of us was frustrated that “Generation Y” was paying so much attention to the problems of the world, and at home. He wanted us to be more selfish. I think it’s that sort of thought that gets us in trouble.

We need to think more of others, more of our community — both at home and around the world. People 30 and under SHOULD care about politics, should worry about our future, and the future of our city. I’m not saying there aren’t people our age now who aren’t leading the way, but we need more than just them. Apathy won’t get us anywhere, we need passion and smart minds collaborating.

If you won the Lottery, what is the first thing you’d do? Pay off my debts. Really lame, I know. I would probably also throw a big party and buy all my friends Egyptian cotton sheets. I love really nice, soft sheets. I would then buy a penthouse apartment downtown, install A/C, and buy myself a dependable car. I’d save the rest, but probably do something silly and frivolous, like buy myself 365 pairs of new socks, so I’d always wake up and experience that wonderful new sock feeling. (For those judging me for not paying off my Mom’s house — she’s already done that.)

What’s the best part about being you? I can honestly say I’ve never met another me. Which, upon reflection, is probably a good thing for the rest of the world. The best part about being me is the experiences. I always go out there and try new things. I try to never turn down a good experience — as long as no one gets hurt.

In our last episode (the Seventh), Scott said at the very end of the recording he didn’t expect that we would make it past episode three — having the short attention spans that we do and all. But I can honestly say this little venture of ours isn’t a chore — not even remotely; it’s something I look forward to every recording. In a perfect world, Scott and I would be doing this full time on top of running an Unknown Studio website and doing all the other hilarious random things it is that we do. And we would be paid vast sums of money for our troubles.

Anyhow, we launched Episode the Eighth yesterday and I think it’s kind of a neat listen. Not only did we get to talk to the Festival Organizer of Edmonton’s Pure Speculation Science Fiction Festival (taking place at the Shaw Conference Centre October 2 to 4) Mr Brent Jans, but I really feel as though Scott and I are starting to hit our stride. We sound comfortable. We sound like we’re having fun. It’s because we are.

To those of you who’ve given us a listen, even if you haven’t been into every episode topic: my thanks. It’s great to have your support, and tremendous to receive your feedback. I’m glad to say that more great content is on the way (in our next episode, we talk politics with Daveberta and Duncan Woytaszek).

Scott and I are also going to have a website developed that will probably become home to all my blogging — and Scott’s, as I will force him to write. The Unknown Studio Podcast will always be the flagship, of course. But we’re both so encouraged by how things have gone that we want to become bigger and better.

This is, hopefully, where you come in. If you have criticisms or kudos, we’d like to hear them. Please email me at adam [at] theunknownstudio [dot] ca and share your thoughts with me and Scott. We’re also looking for show sponsors to help us manage our hosting costs and our eventual development costs for the new site.

Above all, please keep listening. That’s why we’re doing this, after all — to share our stories, and those of others in our community.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far.

Oh sure, there was the occasional Hungy Hungry Hippos grudge-match or a Jenga throw-down. These would invariably apex with me or one of my brothers becoming extremely annoyed, throwing a game piece at someone and accidentally hitting them in the eye. The grand finale involved the thrower running away, saying, “Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.”

Oh, and we sometimes played Sorry! as well.

Having aged significantly, if not graciously, since then I’ve learned to temper my emotions and have swung somewhat in the other direction. Whenever I play Monopoly, for example, I now try and make deals to keep everyone in the game for as long as possible (socialist douchebag, I know) until I have to start knocking people out of it. Except I’ve never won a game of Monopoly. Perhaps it’s time to revise my pinko strategies.

There wasn’t a revision of strategies earlier last week per se. But it afforded me the opportunity to get together and spend some Unknown Studio downtime with my co-host Mr. Scott C. Bourgeois, his lovely finacée Anita, my lovely girlfriend Rachel, and the lovely Brittney Le Blanc.

We started the evening with a quick dinner, and proceeded directly to Scott’s gaming lair — a true Nerd Cave. Check out all the games he had (and I think this constitutes but a third, not even, of his collection):

Behold: evidence of nerd-kind.

Since we were waiting for Rachel to join us following a meeting, we decided to play a few short board games. The first was called “Giftrap.” In the game you get to give the other players presents, advancing your tokens over the board if other players like your gifts, and you like the ones you receive from them. I know, weird concept, right? It was hilarious though! Probably the worst present was a cryonic chamber. The best was a trip to Greece. Damn shame it wasn’t real…

Anita and Brittney show off their gift bags.

I think Anita won… It really didn’t matter, though. For such a simple concept we had a hilarious time. And that, friends, was the greatest gift of all.

It was like Christmas come early — in board game form.

Next, we played a game whose name escapes me, but whose board and game tokens were exquisitely designed. You were given three cards each, all with a series of random lines on them. The object was to lay the cards out on a board, taking turns, to create a path for your little player. You lost by being run off the board or colliding with another player. You won by being the last man standing. I did not win.

I chose the green token. Rightly so, for a green-horn like me.

We moved on to the next game, knowing now that Rachel was on her way from her meeting. A quick card game was in order! This one was called Fluxx. We each had a hand of cards to start with and some basic rules. We then played cards — some had new rules on them, others had information on what it would take to win, others had objects you kept and displayed in order to win… It was strange and hilarious. I’m going to buy Fluxx for sure and force my roommates to play it with me.

A fluxxing good time. Ugh, weak.

Rachel joined us, and the real game began. The last time I was over at Scott and Anita’s we’d started playing Tales of the Arabian Nights, but I didn’t have a chance to play through to the end as I had to leave early. This night, though, I would have my chance.

In order to properly prepare for the NerdFest about to take place, Anita was kind enough to bring Scott and I some Alley Kat Mead while the board was prepped.

Mead indeed!

The game began shortly thereafter. It’s a simple game to play, but there are a lot of steps involved in a players turn, including moving, dice rolls, having “encounters” (some extremely awesome, some mundane), gain story and destiny points, use earned skills, etc. It’s kind of like an RPG in super-simplified board game form. The excitement was palpable. I felt the need to stand up for every turn. Sometimes, on my chair.

Planning my next move, while Scott reads from the game's story guide

In the end Brittney won the game, but completing her adventures, getting the necessary story and destiny points, going back to Baghdad (the starting point of the game) and having an Encounter — if it sounds very sexy, that’s because it was. In this picture, Brittney and Rachel mock all their opponents:

Brittney and Rachel laughing at their enemies

It was a great night, and I hope the start of many more such events. Board games are so much more than Scrabble and Monopoly. I’m glad I had a chance to discover this is such good company. And all without throwing a single game piece at anyone’s eye.

SIrna Kolrami is a smarmy Riker-hating prick

Throw a weird finger-wiggling strategy game into the mix, some war games and that insufferable over-achiever Wesley Crusher, and you have yourself some TwitterTrek.

Here’s what Chris and I had to say about the season 2 episode “Peak Performance“:

ChrisHenderson: After an extended hiatus from narcissisim, @bingofuel and I will be live-tweeting #TNG tonight

Bingofuel: are we really watching an episode with Dr Pulaski? She’s like the ugly school marm of the enterpise #tng

CH: she is a much better doctorb than Beverly “The Red Headed Monster Spazz” Crusher. Bite your tongue.

BF: Ooh the Strategema episode… Back when #tng was Data-centric.

CH: @bingofuel Well, you’ve had too much Boone’s.

BF: Pulaski = Bones = #epicfail #tng

BF: Oh yeah this dude is Zakdorn, not to be confused with Michael Dorn

CH: This episode: Picard entertains a hedgehog-like military strategy academic on his ship. No, it’s not Ignatieff. #TNG

BF: Kolrami doesn’t have faith in Riker. Probably because he keeps breathing through his mouth.

CH: Riker is going to “Command the Hathaway.” IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE: http://is.gd/3ts0s #TNG

BF: Riker: “I prefer brains over Braun as well.” Riker, you aren’t in some seedy bar trying to pickup a Zakdorn slutte

CH: Worf is making model ships that he spends a great deal of time on and then lets his temper destroy. Just like his relationships. #lonliness

BF: “acting ensign”. Acting. Bahahahahaha #tng

CH: In this episode, Riker is commanding a ship to play a war game against the enterprise. And he gets to build his own crew. Takes Worf, Geordi

CH: Oh, he also takes Wesley Crusher to be on his crew. Because Riker is enough of an ass that he will lead on a young boy’s innocent crush.#tng

BF: I like how Strategema is played by attached little hair dryers to your fingers #tng

CH: They’re playing, Strategema, a board game now that is somehow less technologically advanced than a Nintendo 64.

BF: Riker, the jock, just got beat by a nerd! Unacceptable. #tng

CH: The Hathaway, the ship playing war games against the Enterprise, is in worse shape than Michael Jackson’s reputation as a babysitter. #tng

BF: Riker and his ragtag crew are on the Hathaway. What a piece of shit.

BF: “Nice job Geordi.” yeah right on genius, you found the ship’s on-switch

BF: Pulaski is Data’s Strategema pimp in this episode, apparently

BF: Geordi: “Wesley! Go and find me the opposite of matter!”

CH: Pulaski is such a middling jerk. She’s making Data play Strategema against the Strategema Hedgehog! #tng MACHINE VS. NERRRRRD!

BF: Data lost… to a NERRRRD #tng

BF: Kolrami has a big hate-on for Riker. I think he’s beardcist

CH: Picard thinks Riker is the best officer he’s ever served with. I guess Starfleet highly regards 1st officers who are unapologetic lotharios.

BF: What’s the #tng equivalent of cigarettes? Because Pulaski sounds like she smoke ten packs of that shit a day

BF: Data: over analyzing Riker’s battle technique; overusing his dippity-do android hair gel

BF: Come to think of it, Kolrami looks like an octogenarian Oompah Loompah

BF: The Riker Lean is prominenty featured in this episode

CH: Picard just not-so-subtlely revealed that he has a massive crush on his first officer. Riker has a good Riker-lean going on.

BF: It’s weird how the Ferengi are the go-to species in he first two seasons of #tng

CH: Holy good god! Quark just showed up! Wearing a massive chain of gold pressed latinum. The Ferengi are so bloody stupid.

BF: “ferengi” sounds like Italian for rotten pasta

BF: That’s right quark… Go back to the promenade and peddle your shitty mojitos #tng

CH: @bingofuel SPACE mojitos.

BF: Now Data is figuratively beating the piss out of Kolrami at Strategema. And that little bitch is a sore loser

BF: Data used the phrase “busted him up” proving that he is actually a lower middle-class urbanite with a penchant for douchebaggery

CH: This episode was so Riker-centric that @bingofuel grew a beard during the course of our tweets: http://twitpic.com/iepud

• Scott and I recorded and launched episode seven of the Unknown Studio last week. This show, we interviewed Dan Tencer, host of Inside Sports on 630 CHED. Dan’s a knowledgeable guy, and it was fun to spend an hour picking his brain. Thanks for being on the show Dan!
• Since Daveberta and I collaborated on the Ed Stelmach poster awhile back, we’ve finally settled on a concept for a Brian Mason poster. However, it’s tough finding decent hi-res, Creative-Commons-licensed pics of Mason. If you know where I can find any, please drop me a line in the comments.
• The NHL pre-season is officially underway, and in typical OilersNation fashion, one of our writers Wanye Gretz has selected his star and his goat for the year. Who will yours be? (I went with Khabibulin as my star and Staios as my goat.)
• On the podcasting front, I’ve been listening to friend Ramin’s podcast User Created Content over the last week (caught up on my most recent episodes!). Give them a listen if you’re into videogames. These boys have a great little show!
• I managed to track down a fantastic bottle of wine last week. It’s Argentinian: Fuzion Shiraz-Malbec. At $11.99 a bottle, you’ll be amazed how good this wine is! The real kick in the nuts, though, is that in Toronto you can usually find this bad boy for only $9. Damned privatized liquor sales!
• On the heels of Kanye West’s VMA outburst, you can now get Kanye to interrupt your own website, using Kanyelicio.us. I don’t care for Taylor Swift’s music, but Kanye’s just such a overbearing douche… Still, I love his music. So much internal conflict!
• And just because he was so well-behaved when I took some pictures of him this week, here’s Vinny the Husky doing what he does best: laying around, panting, and looking cute:

Data the Enabler forces Scotty to imbibe.

Last week, Henderson and I wound up at the same dinner party, and wouldn’t you know it, but our gracious hosts were fans of the Trek. Since Henderson and I are shameless histrionic personalities, we live-tweeted the whole thing for an audience that exists primarily in our own imaginations.

Here’s what happened when we sat down to watch Season Six, Episode Four: “Relics”

ChrisHenderson: I like this episode. Riker has a beard. It makes me feel safe. Yet, extremely vulnerable.

Bingofuel: Riker, how would you know the value of the earth’s orbit around the sun, you mouth-breather?

BF: Ah yes, the Dyson Sphere: also known as solar bubble wrap. also known as Planet Condom.

BF: Like Worf’s going to be able to increase the oxygen level! He’s the security officer. Ask him to shoot something. LIKE THE EMITTER ARRAY!

BF: Geordi: “I’ve never seen a transporter jury-rigged like this before.” Me: “Technically, you haven’t seen anything before.”

CH: So, yet again, the Enterprise found something extremely dangerous and mysterious to beam down 3 of their 5 most senior officers to. SAFETY.

CH: Scotty is in this epi. He was stuck in a transporter. How did he gain all that weight, when he was broken down into his constituent parts?

BF: Scotty just looked at Worf like he had two heads. Or, you know, one really fuckin’ big misshapen one.

BF: I like how Scotty’s regaling Geordi with old engineering tales, and Geordi’s just, like, checking his text messages and shit.

CH: Scotty and Geordi are nerding out over ship engines. If they get stuck in the turbolift, they’ll probably be tempted to touch silly parts.

BF: Scotty, you’re 147 years old. TAKE IT EASY… and drink this bottle of whiskey.

CH: @bingofuel Geordi doesn’t find Scotty’s stories nearly amusing as listening to @souljaboytellem

BF: Geordi’s so 9-5. SCOTTY’S 24-7

CH: Geordi is annoyed and thinking about shipping Scotty to the USS Barack Obama, where old people have their fate decided by DEATH PANELS.

The USS Jenolan, aka the Little Ship That Could For As Long As The Enterprise Needed To Escape™

BF: uh oh, the scotsman just found the Bar of the Future™. Let the 3D drinking games begin!

CH: Apparently being a Lt. Commander also allows you to tend bar at 10-Forward, which, if I do say so, is the stupidest name for a bar ever.

BF: Scotty’s the Original Gangsta. No bloody “A,” “B,” “C,” or “D.”

BF: FUCK YES. Captain Picard is downing Aldebaran whiskey shots with Scotty. I want to go on a starship pubcrawl with them! SPRING BREAK

BF: How come no one ever goes into the holodeck and says, “Load the muthafuckin’ Tron laser-bike program, and disable the safeties, bitch”?

BF: Scotty’s hangover wisdom is first-rate!

BF: The Dyson Sphere conjures images of Miles Dyson, creator of the Terminator. My advice to the crew of the Enterprise: DON’T GO IN THERE.

BF: When has auxiliary power NOT failed, nameless ensign?

BF: Riker will see about getting main power back online. Probably by head-butting a computer terminal.

CH: @bingofuel I think it’s more likely that he’ll seduce it and then use his cold-hearted manliness to leave it yearning for him forevermore.

CH: Scotty laughs at everything Geordi suggests. Scotty is a damn racist.

BF: Scotty: “I never wanted to be anything but and engineer… an Ewan MacGregor’s body double in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.”

BF: Fact: the USS Jenolan is named after the Jenolan Caves in Australia. Booyah… uh, and prosper.

BF: New fact: the FORMER Jenolan… it was destroyed by the Enterprise. No respect for history.

CH: The Enterprise just shot the gap on the Death Star: “SISTA BE DRIVIN!”

CH: Geordi is the Chief Engineer OF MY HEART. Incidentally, I’m Admiral of my own bathtub.

BF: @ChrisHenderson I wish *I* had a bathtub admiral! SISTA BE BATHIN’!

This is the first it what will “hopefully” become a semi-regular series of posts… as long as @ChrisHenderson and I can find time to sit down and nerd the hell out… Mad thanks to the teams of monks at Memory Alpha, the finest wiki-reference for Trek on the whole planet.

Hilarious link? Copy, paste and broadcast it to any number of people you know or are merely acquainted with. Find an embarrassing email? A weird image? Share it with the world. Encourage others to copy and paste. That’s how memes develop.

Ah yes, I love the smell of Internet in the morning!

However sometimes people “abuse” copyright and don’t properly credit artists or seek artists’ permission to use their works — a fact caused in part by the extreme lag and lack of ductility inherent in the law. So it goes.

Thankfully, we’ve born witness to the rise of Creative Commons, and many artists, writers — and poorly labeled “content creators” — are rightly jumping onboard. However, this still makes accessing and using older works complicated, and the notion of mashing these older works up with new stuff is typically met with extreme skepticism, if not extreme litigation. Still, [sometimes] anonymous mash-up auteurs soldier on, for their love of music or film (or whatever they’ve managed to mash-up) — of new permutations and potentials for collaborations that never were.

My first exposure to mash-ups was a really good one — exemplary, in fact. It wound up being one of the more popular music mash-ups to date. It caused a stir in the copyrights and copyfights communities. It launched a DJ’s career at least somewhat. It’s even stood the test of time.

It was DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, a mash-up of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vQF2JzpNi0]

After The Grey Album, I was hooked. I managed to stumble upon mash-up master dj BC from Boston, who did an unbelievable mash-up of Dixieland Jazz with the Wu-Tang Clan called Wu Orleans. And once you hear Wu-Tang rappin’ along side to The Dirty Dozen Brass Band you’ll never look at ODB and crew the same again:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhPmfNUOdkQ]

(Admittedly the version above isn’t synced correctly, but you get the scope of radness, I hope.)

Next, dj BC cranked out the second “Beastles” album he’d done, this one called Let It Beast. The Beatles were back, only this time they were benefitting from the outstanding lyricism of my favourites: the Beastie Boys:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJs9MOUNVwU]

Most recently, I’ve come across Jaydiohead and the Hood Internet. My friend Pauly’s even gotten into the mash-up scene and started a site called Paulcasts (and by the way, he’s definitely an unplucked gem. Share and share often). If Pauly’s any indication of the passion mash-up artists have for music, then only good can come from this. And though the frothing foaming mouths of hungry litigators seem, for the moment at least, less pervasive than they did even a few years ago, you can bet your ass the old-man-run record labels still haven’t figured out what to make of all of this.

What they’ve failed to make, also, is money — which they could be doing by the truckload, I suspect, if only they had the brains to collect the very best mash-up artists, pay them handsomely, and earn a tidy sum off their talents. Or, since the landscape of ownership has changed so much and the methods of production and distribution are cheap as free, at least find some way to encourage this and try and earn revenue off royalties — nothing exorbitant and extortionist like the Big Labels’ halcyon days of money-swimming à la Scrooge McDuck (himself a mash-up of Donald Duck and Mr. Lodge from the Archie Comics, I think) — but enough to feed the necessary mouths and turn a princely, if not kingly, profit.

Alas, after all the time since Napster, LimeWire, and Bit Torrent, no one’s figured it out. So people continue to hide and seek and steal. And download and share. And culture propogates across the virtual landscape, onto MP3 players, USB keys and maybe even the radio waves (at least the college ones) into the real landscape. And I think this is a good thing, this building upon of culture, this combination of ideas and sounds.

Besides, I’m dying to hear whose lyrics can be mashed up with the Beatles’ music next…

This is the third in a short series of posts about my family’s history, living in Canada as landed immigrants in the 1950s and 60s. You can read the second tale here, and the third one here. This particular series discusses my mother’s experiences living and working on a southern Alberta farm as a child. This will be the final post of this brief series.

There is a particular curse word in French that is quite vulgar when translated literally into English. However, the French no longer see it as such. It’s as common an insult in French as “idiot” is in English — it’s long taken on lesser connotations. If you aren’t sure what the word is, take a look at the first syllable in the word “connotations.” Maybe now you can imagine its English equivalent.

You’ll also find this word —con (pronounce like “cone” but the a very shortened “n” sound) — in the first syllable of the French word for jam: confiture. Georges, the beloved French farm-hand who worked for my grandfather when my family had its farm in southern Alberta, could not — nay, would not have breakfast without bread. And he would not have bread without his confiture. Mum and her twin brother René knew this. Knew it so well, that one morning, they decided to hide all the confiture.

So when Georges sat down that morning to help himself to breakfast — his bread and confiture — there was none to be found. Thus the question arose, “Où est la confiture?” Georges was asking.

“Oh, tu veux de la CONfiture?” came the response from the twins. “Je ‘n sais pas où est la CONfiture.” This particular emphasis and inflection was, quite sensibly, a great source of consternation for poor Georges. Georges le con. Not kind. And likely no help that my grandparents found that little gag particularly funny.

Georges eventually left Canada and headed back to France, though I think it had more to do with the fact that he really missed France. I don’t think Georges was integrating well in western Canada. I doubt the twins were helping much.

My mother and her brother stuck it out in Canada, though. Matter of fact, all my mum’s family did.

René steadily made his way eastward, stopping in Saskatchewan to join the RCMP, where he developed a deep-seated aversion to Shepherd’s Pie. He eventually found his way to Montréal, got married, had two children who are now in their 30s and worked as an RCMP member in charge of protecting federal politicians when they came over from Ottawa. He was front-and-centre during the FLQ Crisis.

René is a nationalist who guarded Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, among others. Both of them, he says, were very nice, very cool people. Some other federal leaders — I’m sure you can imagine which ones — he doesn’t speak so fondly of. René (and his wife) is retired now and spends most of his time cycling and cross-country skiing in and around Montréal.

Mum stayed in Western Canada, in Alberta. She made her way up to St Albert, a bit of a haven for the French among the blue-collar anglophones in the centre of the province. She worked at a law firm, and eventually met my father, somehow convincing him not to become a priest. (I learned this fact about three days ago. Needless to say, a series on my father is in order.) Mum married dad in 1969, got pregnant in her first year of University and spent the next 25 or so years raising three boys, including myself.

I think she did all right.

Mum speaks with a clear fondness for the farm, but is happy to be a city girl now, where she has access to creature comforts she’s become accustom to. And all the confiture she would ever need.

This is the third in a short series of posts about my family’s history, living in Canada as landed immigrants in the 1950s and 60s. You can read the second tale here. This particular series discusses my mother’s experiences living and working on a southern Alberta farm as a child.

I wish I could say that my Mum and René left Georges be. But if they had, I wouldn’t have such tragic and funny stories to tell. So we plod on, and discuss some of Georges’ evening habits… and his fears (aside from the twin spawn of my grandparents).

When I last spoke with Mum and René, they told me and my brothers that Georges had a bizarre aversion to gophers. He didn’t dislike them as some people do magpies or mice. He was afraid of them. Evil vicious little things, he thought.

Naturally, the twins wanted to leverage this little-known fact. And since the last story I told you dealt with Georges’ morning routine, I’ll tell you a little bit about his evening routine.

It would seem, through some clandestine reconnaissance, René had discovered Georges’ method of getting into bed. The man liked to climb under the sheets, and jam his feet toward the foot of the bed underneath the covers. René’s mischievous brain conceived of putting a bunch of brushes into the foot of Georges’ bed just underneath the covers. Combine Georges’ foot-shoving behaviour with a fear of gophers, and you have a truly nightmarish way of falling asleep.

René found some brushes and did just that. These would be the gopher stand-ins and would help Georges’ learn the true meaning of terror. But what’s terror without pain? Nothing, according to my uncle. So he found a detached sledgehammer head.

He found it because on the farm, these things are always lying around somewhere. He also found it because he went out looking for it thinking to himself (en Français), “I’m going to find something very very hard — the head of a sledgehammer — and place it in Georges’ pillowcase.”

And that’s what he did.

And then it was bedtime. It actually never occurred to me to ask my mum if they went to bed early or late. I think it really depended on the time of the season. Sometimes you had to stay up late working and always you had to get up early. Georges was no doubt settling down for a good night’s sleep after a long day of back-breaking farm work and avoiding the twins. My mum and her brother were no doubt barely containing themselves in their own beds as they waited and listened for Georges to discover the gift they’d left for him.

From Georges’ perspective, and in my imagination, it went down a little something like this:

Position self on bed. Slide feet quickly into the foot of the bed under the covers. Feel something unusual brushing against feet, triggering thoughts of evil gophers. React by stiffening and slamming body very hard into the mattress… and pillowcase. Bash head on sledgehammer head that used to be a very soft pillow. Experience a combination of terror and extreme pain simultaneously. Nearly wet self. Hear laughter of irritating bugger children. Become enraged. Curse loudly in French.

Knowing what little I do know about Georges, I would imagine the poor man had a very awful sleep that night. Nightmares of some kind of terrible reverse Whack-a-Mole dancing over his brain. Désolé, Georges!

In my next post, I’ll tell you about how the twins were able to ruin Georges’ breakfast. And I’ll cap off this short series with some words on the kinds of things my uncle and mum have accomplished since their childhood.

Antony Ta, whom I know through Twitter and his frequent commenting on OilersNation.com, has also been a contributor to my old writing stomping grounds the Gateway at the University of Alberta. You can read his stuff here.

And, of course, you should check out his new blog, and the latest addition (at least as near as I can tell) to the Oilogosphere: An Oilers Refinery.

I guess life on the farm is extremely routine and regimented. It has to be. Mum lived on a dairy farm in southern Alberta, near Lethbridge, for most of her childhood. I remember hearing stories about how awful the children in her school were to her and her twin brother René. You don’t speak the language, you’re different, and so you’re the object of extreme prejudice by the other — more Canadian, more normal — children. I count myself lucky I never had to experience anything like that. But whatever happened at school, Mum was lucky enough to have René, a built-in best friend. I can’t imagine what it’s like having a twin sibling…

In any event, school was soon forgotten when René and Mum got home, or when they had to wake up first thing in the early morning to milk the cows. Ever present, though, was their desire to bug poor Georges, the wayward Frenchman who never stood a chance.

Georges was a man of particular habits; he liked his toast his certain way and he liked his daily schedule his certain way. What he didn’t like were children, due in large part to my grandparents’ kids and their constant interference with his routine. This was a time before even television or the web. Kids had to occupy themselves somehow. René and Mum occupied themselves with disrupting Georges’ life.

Georges had a pair of slippers he always kept on the porch. In the morning, when he’d wake up, and before he had breakfast, Georges would go upstairs, open the door to the porch, step outside, slide into his slippers and keep right on walking, as though the slippers magically found themselves on his feet. Without a misstep, Georges was on his way.

Until the morning René nailed Georges’ slippers to the deck, my mother watching on, complicit in the whole scheme.

I imagine it a morning like any other, only this particular morning saw Mum and René on the edge of their seats at the breakfast table. And so it went: Georges hauled himself up the stairs, through the kitchen, out the door, onto the porch and into his slippers. However, on this particular morning, his full stride was stopped completely short. I imagine his thoughts of confusion as he tumbled face-first into the floor of the porch; an immediate sense of panic, turned to confusion, then realization at what was going on, then rage and some concept of whole was responsible — all before he experienced a great deal of pain.

Mum never mentioned Georges swearing, not with curse words, anyway. He’d say things like “Espèses de cons!” and “Mais qu’ils sont fous!” Nothing terribly earth shattering. But this time, the curses came fast and they came furious as Mum and René giggled until they were disciplined by their parents.

A single, solitary example of the life Georges led in Canada.

In my next post, I’ll tell you a little bit about my Mum’s discovery of Georges’ bedtime routine… and his fear of gophers.

And I know my parents have conducted themselves both wonderfully and questionably throughout their lives. That’s human nature. But my mother and her twin brother were always up to no good, particularly when they were children; particularly when they were new immigrants (moved here from France when they were just kids); particularly when they were living and working on my grandparents’ farm in southern Alberta.

Mum and René were, more often than not, up to no good. By their own admission, they reveled in scaring the living shit out of their nieces and nephews playing late-night hide-and-seek — my Mum’s eldest sister, herself a mother of ten, is about 15 years older than mum, which means Mum was an aunt at a very young age.

But Mum and René took particular pleasure in tormenting a Frenchman named Georges, who came to Canada one summer looking to work as a farm hand. The Canadian government hooked Georges up with my grandpa, himself a recent immigrant who spoke both official languages (Truly, I think he understood some English, and relied on his children to help him with the rest). I think the government figured on this being a simpler transition for Georges than sticking him with a bunch of English farmers, language barrier and all. What they didn’t figure on was a pair of mischievous French kids.

I’m a first-generation Canadian. Both of my parents are European immigrants who jumped on boats in the 1950s with their families (my father’s family with five children, my mother’s with ten!) and made their ways here to start new lives. My dad led a distinctly urban life, even when he lived in Holland. My mother was raised on a farm both in France and in Canada, though you wouldn’t know it now for her love of all things urban. I take a great deal of pride in my origins (and having spoken French my whole life, identify with that particular part of my heritage), and seeing my mother and her “beau frère” recount their childhood memories last weekend was nothing short of beautiful and inspirational.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to share with you some of Mum and René’s stories, providing context about their upbringing as it relates to their present dispositions. I recognize fully that my parents, my wonderful aunts and uncles, will not be around forever — another sad fact of human nature. I’ve always told myself I’d write a book about my family, since so many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins have such a diversity of experience and I tend to manage to drill down to the interesting bits of their life-stories. I hope you’ll join me over the next little while, as I discuss the poor Frenchman Georges, who didn’t stand a chance in my Home and Native Land.

Our paths didn’t cross so much between then and now, but Scott and I managed to meet up a few times to discuss launching a podcast. We didn’t know what we were going to call it, we didn’t know what it was going to be about, but we knew we were going to do it. If it killed us or drained us financially (I doubt it will do either, but what’s a good yarn without poverty and death?).

Scott and I met twice over the period of a few weeks to hammer out the details. We decided the focus of the show should be, well, not very focused at all. We would discuss issues relevant to where we live (Edmonton), but that could mean just about anything. That’s the way we want it… a talk-show, with guests, that we find interesting. Our hope is that others will find it interesting as well. That remains to be seen.

Coming up with a name for our baby wasn’t easy. And now I think I know what it’s like to be a parent, minus the 3am feedings, shitty diapers, minimum 18 years of vigilance and discipline… OK I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about if I’m bringing parenting into this.

Still, in order to name our PodBaby (which, now that I think of it, would have been a hilarious name for the show), we enlisted the help of brainstormer extraordinaire, Mr Daryl Hooke. Among the list about about 20 ideas Daryl had, Scott and I really glommed onto “The Unknown Studio.”

So that’s what it’s called. We recorded our first episode at the iNews880 studios (where Scott) works over the weekend, and we’ll produce more, expecting to do one show every two weeks. It was a blast — huge thanks to Brittney Le Blanc, a web editor from iNews, for being our very first guest.

Scott and I are trying to line up more guests, and we have a ton of show ideas… But we could always use more. So if you have an idea for a show, drop some science in the comments section.

And before you leave, make sure you download our first episode!

I spoke with my dear friend @andrealown over Skype tonight about the re-purposing of a blog we created last fall in Toronto, this time with a sharpened focus and eventually visual identity and branding. But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post, because I also met with @scottybomb at Next Act for a beer and a discussion about the creation of a loosely-Edmonton-focused podcast which would feature local guests, and topics that we enjoy and think others will too.

Scott and I had mused about this several tweetups ago, when we had occasion to catch up from our commonly held days at the U of A‘s student newspaper, the Gateway. I’d expressed interested in starting a podcast, and Scott — having had experience producing several — was interested in doing one more consistently and covering his own personal interests.

Then we didn’t really talk about it for a few months.

BUT THEN we started talking about it a few weeks ago, and we were finally able to meet about it tonight. And if the stars align, in the next few weeks, we’ll have launched our inaugural podcast, which we’re hoping will include minor celebrities and other high-larity. But before any of that actually happens, the show needs a name. And we need your help.

We created a shortlist of names, that we certainly aren’t married to. We’d ask you to vote on your favourite, and if you think they all suck, suggest an alternative. Then it’s podcastin’ time!

[polldaddy poll=1691451]

Pal ‘o mine and blogosphere titan Dave Cournoyer was once told to govern [himself] accordingly when he was rather hastily threatened with all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo over the fact that he owned the domain name edstelmach.ca (read about the controversy here and here). It’s a phrase that gets kicked around hilariously still, every now and then, and one I used the other night on Twitter to chide the Alberta Legislature during the third reading of the much-publicized Bill 44.

My quote was used in a CTV Calgary story today. Which is cool. But the description of my profile picture wasn’t terribly flattering (nor, I should say, is the picture):

“note: #bill44 trending on twitter. The eyes of the world are upon #ableg. GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY,” warned Edmonton user Adam Rozenhart, who goes by the username bingofuel and has a crown of broccoli stuffed into his nose on his profile picture.

I expect no less than accurate reporting from the likes of CTV, which this certainly provides. And I chuckle every time I read my own descriptor. Yet I can’t help but think that it might be time to change my profile picture.

I have decided that I shall henceforth govern myself accordingly (h/t to big Davie C). As such, I’m taking requests for what type of legume or fruit should next grace my nostril. I will use this object in the taking of my next Twitter profile pic.

And please, nobody suggest the use of gourds.

Working for Ignition Media‘s been really exciting and extremely eye-opening. I started in January with the title Account Manager. However, it’s a small shop — only five employees plus the owner — so we all sort of wind up doing a bit of everyone. I’ve been trying to carve out my niche in new business and social media.

We’re trying to find innovative new ways to increase brand impressions for current clients, as we cultivate new ones. Of course, this has meant a lot of research into using Twitter, Facebook, and online games to try and increase traffic and enhance the overall user experience for client websites. We’re looking into the creation of interactive microsites for some clients, and just additional features on current sites for others.

I’ve been paying close attention to online games. Here are some that I find compelling, fun or just weird.

• My Brute: I talked about this site in a previous post. I’ve been playing it as often as possible and am trying to sort out a way to leverage the engine for monetization. I’ve leveled up high enough so that I started my own clan. The thing I really dig about this site is that it’s pretty simple, doesn’t require a lot of effort to play, and it provides incentives for the user to return every day by limiting the amount of times your character can fight in a 24-hour period.
• Spymaster: This showed up on Twitter last Friday, and although it can be a spammy (I’ve lost a few followers because of the updates it posts to my timeline), the amount of information you broadcast is completely up to you. Spymaster was created by the people at iList, and appears to just be a fun side project. However, I can see a lot of potential for this kind of mini role-playing game that leverages Twitter to promote itself and recruit players.
• Night Hunger: There’s a chain of restaurants in the States called Buffalo Wild Wings. They have a pretty hilarious flash website, and a series of awesome games as well. One of those games is a choose your own adventure style with hilarious animations and dialogues. You have to fight off scary beasts in your quest to find delicious hot wings. It’s pretty funny how clueless the character is. I’m not very good at this game because it gets really difficult after the third level, but I play it fairly often because it makes me laugh.
• Wing Wednesday Blazing Challenge: Buffalo Wild Wings was a bit of an inspiration for Ignition. We decided to develop a game concept for Hudsons Canadian Taphouse. You’re at a table of some stereotypically Canadian characters, and you’re attempting to steal their hot wings from them. The game launched last Friday. Now the key is to get people playing it, talking about it and sharing it with their friends.

We’re hoping that the creation of this game leads to more opportunities to create this sort of content. It’s fun, it adds layers of interest to a website & brand and, if successful, it could turn into more customers patronizing clients’ businesses. I’m interested to hear any ideas people have (or better yet, examples of) for online games that help promote a brand, a product or a service. Provide links and commentary!

A few of my dub5 colleagues and I regularly give Mack the gears for the way he signs off from Twitter every night. “Sleeping,” he says, and we’re meant to believe that this is actually what he’s doing. Mack’s a pretty neat dude, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know him a bit better over the last six months. That’s why I’m fairly confident in saying that he’s probably a cyborg (not to be confused with a Cylon).

In light of this, the notion that the man actually technically sleeps is amusing to me. So I decided to create a poll here so the rest of you could chime in. Rather than have “Sleeping” be Mack’s last tweet of the night, I think it should be changed to something else. Let’s see if we can get a ton of people to vote in this poll…

[polldaddy poll=1582276]

About a month ago, Nissan Canada undertook a rather unusual marketing strategy for the launch of the Nissan Cube. Rather than access their typical advertising channels — TV spots, radio ads, etc — they set out to do try and build buzz in a rather novel way: entirely by word of mouth. Viral marketing using social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and other social web tools isn’t entirely unusual. However, it’s the scope and scale of this campaign that’s really remarkable.

A good friend of mine, who designed the look and feel of all the Nation websites we’ve developed, found out about Nissan’s “Hypercube” campaign, and decided to sign up just for fun. He created a Twitter account (@ekymson), and filled in his Hypercube profile. At the beginning of the week, Eldon received an email saying that he’d been selected as one of the 500 Hypercube finalists. He now has a 1 in 10 chance of winning a Nissan Cube.

When he first received the email, Eldon wasn’t certain he’d be able to participate, being the busy guy that he is. But a few of us managed to convince him to put his design skills to good use. The hypercube contest asks finalists to create an update a canvas throughout the month. You can see Eldon’s canvas here.

I’ve taken it upon myself to help Eldon get as many votes as possible, to try and get him into the next round, where finalists are judged by people selected by Nissan Canada. I may have even scored Eldon a TV interview for next week. I’ll update when it’s been confirmed.

Please go to the Hypercube website, register and then give Eldon your vote. Let’s see this Hypercube thing through to the end!

Most everything I say, tweet, or write is designed to elicit a specific reaction from people — often shock or laughter. I’m usually quite satisfied. But sometimes I’ll say something without thinking (OK, oftentimes) and the results exceed my expectations or go off in an entirely different direction. That’s what happened this morning on Twitter when I suggested #yeg tweeps create an Edmonton Twitter Boys Calendar for 2010. Yeah, that one went of the rails pretty quickly as people grabbed on to the idea. Before I knew what happened, I was placed in charge of producing the thing.

And now that I think it’s a good idea, I want to do it. But I need your help with some suggestions for how this should work, so please provide me with comments below. We may decide this isn’t feasible. We may decide it is, and just produce PDF copies. Maybe in subsequent years, we can get a company to sponsor us to supplement the money needed to print it. In any event, read on…

We’re going to do a 12-month, 30-box calendar which may or may not get printed. Photographers’ and models’ time will all be donated and the #yeg twitter community will decide where the proceeds should go. I would suggest we print these calendars out, if we can find a good rate someplace from a company who recognizes that crowd-sourced semi-nude, semi-sexy calendars are Always A Good Idea™.

Each month will include one (or possibly more, depending on the response we get) active Tweeps from Edmonton.

Other considerations: who to select as models, how many per month, how to select the models for each month, etc.

Let’s discuss this in the comments below. This is a huge brainstorm at this point so any zany idea goes. And if you’re going to tweet about it, we’re using #yegtwitterboyscalendar as a hashtag. Please broadcast this link far and wide and let’s generate some good discussion!

Top three tabs among my tweeps

1. Gmail & Twitter tied for first (13/23 respondents)
2. Facebook (8/23 respondents)
3. Google Reader and iGoogle tied for third (6/23 respondents)

Commonalities and Observations

• Every single respondent had a Google site open throughout the day. Gmail, Reader, News, Docs, whatever. We are, everyone of us, Google whores.
• At least one other twit keeps an OilersNation tab open, like me.
• Two respondents always have the Environment Canada site open — the same two always have CNN open.
• Two respondents indicated they typically use RSS Feed Readers to surf the interwebs.

And some other things…

If you responded and said you used a non-browser app to interface with Twitter, I didn’t include you in #1 above. However, it’s fair to say that nearly everyone who responded indicated that they always have Twitter open in some form on their computer.

I asked people which 3-5 five tabs they keep open all day. In total, between 23 people, we had 88 browser tabs open, or 3.83 tabs each.

Who cares?

Well, I do, obviously. I was just curious, because I always have three tabs open: Google Reader, OilersNation.com’s Admin interface, and dub5.net. Oh, and some days I keep Google News open.

Finally, doing polls like this on Twitter is fun, and I plan to do more and publish the results just for fun. It’s always interesting to see who responds.

The very excellent Shauna of @out_inc fame is blaming me for her own coffee inadequacy. To wit: “BAHH! Coffee FAIL @bingofuel keep your Coffee bad juju on your end of the city please, thank you ”

Now, I’m not going to pretend what “juju” means, but I know I don’t like being blamed for Coffee FAILs that are not mine. So, Shauna, you can take that coffee and LOVE IT.

Also, I spilled coffee today as well. It just hasn’t been a great week for me. But this time, I blame the Tim Hortons cup manufacturing process. Glue came unstuck. And I didn’t even win a free coffee.

I promise I’ll write an actual blog of consequence sometime this weekend. In the meantime, go scald yourselves.

This time, it was like I was drinking more than the capacity my mouth-hole would allow. Coffee spilled over the sides of my mouth and onto my desk, thankfully not ruining the very fabulous nerd shirt I’m wearing today. I blame the lid on this cup of coffee for this most recent fail. Also: my own ineptitude.

It’s a rare thing to come across a company with exemplary customer relations. Oh sure, sites like The Consumerist help to keep businesses in check, but quite often those businesses pegged as unscrupulous or negligent undertake damage control to manage their reps rather than proactively serving their customers. It’s a sorry state of consumerism, but a reality many of us have come to accept.

Sweet shit, it sure doesn’t have to be this way. And today, when I got home from work I was confronted with a new reality: not every business is a bag of douche.

Before Christmas, I ordered three T-shirts from Glennz Tees. They have outstanding designs for T-shirts, and I came across them through an ad on Boing Boing (I think). In any case, my shirts arrived, they fit perfectly, and they always elicit great reactions from the people who see them — mostly laughter or expressions of “you’re such a geek.”

Today, when I went to check the mail, there was a package for me, and I caught a glimpse of the Glennz wordmark before I opened it. To my surprise, it was a single T-shirt with the exact same design as one of the other ones I’d ordered a month and a half ago. Weird, right?

The T-shirt was wrapped around a thick card. The front of the card featured the same graphic as on the T-shirt, and the following words:

Hi, We fear that you may have received an “It’s a Bottle, Jim” shirt that had two of the blues reversed during the printing process. Please accept this corrected shirt with out apologies. Thank you for shopping at Glennz! (If your original shirt was fine… well, now you’ve got two great shirts.

I didn’t notice. Probably wouldn’t have. Ever. Other distinguishing consumers might have seen it, and this is probably one of the reasons why Glennz sent the other shirt. But it also demonstrates a pride they take in the quality of their merch, in their customer relations, and in generally being better than most other companies out there, who’d have turned a blind eye, or waited for someone to complain.

I’m sure there are lots of businesses out there who treat their customers well, and who go above and beyond. I’ve not come across many. Glennz is one of the very few.

**UPDATE**: I sent an email to Glennz.com, thanking them for being awesome. Glenn Jones, the NZ designer who creates all the T-shirts responded to me personally. Here’s what he had to say:

Hi Adam

Ive seen your blog post, and it was much appreciated.

Yes the print error was noticed internally a little while after that shirt was reprinted during the christmas rush. Although we never had any consumer feedback about the error, we do take alot of pride in the quality of our product and we made sure that all who received that wrongly printed shirt have been sent a replacement, which we think was the right thing to do

Thanks firstly for your order, and for your email

Glenn

<3

• There’s a place in BC called Hudson’s Hope which, for me, evokes images of Hadley’s Hope Terraforming Colony on LV-426 from the Aliens movie. I imagine a town of more-or-less happy British Columbians who occasionally suffer the effects of monsters busting open their rib cages.
• This Lil John mashup is awesome; this recommended video I received at the end is not.
• I don’t know what peanut butter and jelly sandwiches have to do with SEO, but PBJ is defined on this SEO terms page for some reason. So is sausage link — cute.
• I absolutely love TweetStats. @missmarsh introduced me to it. Wordle is also rad… Creates some really excellent artwork!
• You know those road signs that tell you the bridge it out? Yeah, here’s how to access them to change their messages (via BoingBoing).
• Uh, what the hell?

Cullite Creek wasn’t a particularly nice spot. It was a beautiful location, but we arrived at the end of Day 6 with the wind sweeping through the cove and up and creek making it less than ideal. We immediately erected our giant tarp as a wind shelter, but we also weren’t located in the best camping spot. When we arrived on Day 6, we were so hungry that we ate two meals for dinner—having already planned to exit the trail on Day 8 instead of Day 10.

We broke camp rather quickly in the morning, knowing full well that the ground we had to cover to get to Thrasher Creek would all be overland. In order to make it around Owen Point—which was the beach route—we would have had to beat the tide and hop larger-than-life boulders as well. Julia had done this part of the trail before. This time we were going to skip it. It’s supposed to be an amazing part of the hike, but very challenging. We figured the overland trail would be less technical. You’d think after seven days on the trail we’d not have been so naïve.

At this point in our trip, we were taking on the most challenging portion of the West Coast Trail, a full 13 km worth. We were tired, we were hungry, and the weather wasn’t particularly nice—overcast and always with the threat of rain. I would say that Day 7 and the beginning of Day 8 marked the lowest point of our trip, in terms of emotion and exhaustion. We were reaching our limits and most of our discussion (what little of it there was) during the walking parts of our days turned to nachos and beer.

(Me, after hauling ass across Camper Creek in a cable car)

Day 7 was challenging, frustrating, and de-motivating. Already tired, we were forced to hoist ourselves and our packs over massive fallen trees, balance on those same trees, move around uprooted plants… This was some of the slowest going on the trail. And by the time we arrived at the 70 km point, which marked the fork in the road to continue to the end of the trail (at the 75 km mark) or head down to the beach at Thrasher Creek, we still had a minimum of one km to hike.

We stopped briefly at the 70 km sign and applied a lot of bug spray. The air was still, the sun blocked by the forest canopy, and the mosquitoes were plentiful. At this fork in the trail we met a trio of hikers—a elderly guy, probably in his 60s, hiking with his grown sons. As we applied our spray and watered our dry mouths, they proceeded up the one km switchback trail to Thrasher, a trail soaked by tiny streams of water, flat, slippery stones, and hidden roots.

We followed and pass the two sons soon enough, crested the trail and began our descent toward the ladders that would eventually take us down to the beach. As we approached the ladders, we watch the elderly guy take a spill, which seemed like not such a big deal. As we approached to assist him, he was breathing through his teeth and rubbing his left knee.

“I’m OK,” he told us, though the expression on his face belied his words.

“Are you sure you don’t need a hand,” we asked him.

“No, no, I just need to catch my breath, stretch out my knee and walk it off,” he said. He wished him luck, mentioned that we saw his sons not too far behind us, and started our descent.

I wish there was something we could have done to help the man, but he seemed fine. He’d just need to tread lightly the next few days so he did exacerbate this injury. He climbed down (more bloody) ladders, and found our friends Sandy and Kat again. They warned us that the tide liked to creep right up to the camp site here at Thrasher, and Kat then showed us their second-choice campsite right next to the creek just off the beach. We appreciated that our few-days-old friends were so eager to help us. We setup, ate, and crashed. We were exhausted and eager to exit the trail. After Night 7, only 5 km to go.

Day 8 – The Final Haul

Sunlight, and a strong desire to leave the trail grip us in the morning. I get up first, and make for the composting toilet, picking up our food from the bear locker after I’m done. Who do I see limping down the beach but the elderly guy who took the fall the previous day. In that condition it’s doubtful he’ll be able to continue the hike. He’s not just limping a little, he’s limping A LOT.

We ate a quick breakfast, both agreed it was time to leave, and out to hike the last six km of the trip, and some of the toughest as well. This portion of the trail was a CONSTANTLY up and down. Consequently there was no fast-moving, easy walk. This was a HIKE and the kilometre markers seems much further than 1 km apart.

I don’t recall talking very much at this point except to snap at each other. A bit. We took very few pictures, as the goal was just to get ‘er done.

Around the 73 km mark, we started seeing fresh, new, clean hikers arriving on the trail. They were very encouraging to us. Lots of “You guys are almost done,” and “Great job!” was heard. I being the grouchy dude I was (am?) thought about how funny it would be to tackle each of those people, sit on them, and then shout at them about how hard the trail is while I force them to sniff my armpits.

But I didn’t do that. Because I’m BETTER than that.

By the time we reached the end of the 6 km, we were bagged. We photographed our dirty boots, called the ferry driver, and checked in at the trailhead office. There, we discovered the elderly dude who was limping around actually had to be EVACed from the trail. He and his sons were fetched from Thrasher by a zodiac, and they were being brought back to the office. The man’s wife and presumably one of his daughters was on-hand and we had a chance to tell them about how we witnessed his little fall.

Apparently, they were going to keep going, slowly, and hike the trail anyhow. But the guy aggravated the injury when he went to fetch water from the creek. It was pretty sad, actually. He became, I think, the 22nd person at that point in the season to be taken off the trail. It definitely made me feel fortunate that I didn’t take a bad step. I probably fell over a few times because I was tired and carrying a heavy pack, but nothing serious. It made the triumphant end of the hike a little more somber. At least he was going to be OK.

And who has time for somber anyway, when there’s a pub in Port Renfrew waiting for us. A pub with hamburgers and, you know, food that isn’t freeze-dried.

The warden in the Parks office called us a cab. And by cab, I mean a dude with a pick-up truck who apparently shuttles hikers back and forth between the town and the trailhead office. He kindly dropped us right in front of the pub, where we spent the next four hours drinking and waiting for the bus back to Victoria. Kat and Sandy were in the same spot as us, so we said our goodbyes.

At around 4pm on July 3, 2008, we left Port Renfrew, and bid the West Coast Trail farewell. We were stuffed (from the pub), buzzed (from the pub), and exhausted (from everything else). We slept the entire ride back to Vic, and would spend the next three days reintegrating with society at or near the Inner Harbour. As the days from the end of our hike increased in number, the vow we shared to not return for a long time seemed more and more ridiculous. Personally, I will be back on the WCT inside of five years. This trail, this section of VanIsle is probably some of the most beautiful, powerful scenery in all of Canada. If you’re thinking about hiking the WCT, stop thinking and start planning.

And yes, the nachos taste so much sweeter when you’ve had to haul ass through 75 km of beach and forest wilderness with your home and all your belongings on your back.

-fin-

>> the rest of the trip:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V (you’re here already)

The morning at Bonilla was cold, and wet. Today we would push ourselves. A discussion at some point that morning brought us to the realization: we eat too much. Or rather, the food we’d planned to bring wasn’t lasting us as we thought. We needed energy, and lots of it, to clear the next 27km. Hiking this thing in ten days, as originally planned, wasn’t going to happen if we were expecting to eat at all the last few days. So on Day 6 from Bonilla point, we would hike 11km to Cullite Creek, if we didn’t feel like killing ourselves when we arrived at Walbran campground, only about 5km down the trail.

We hiked the soft, wet sand along the trail to Vancouver point, just as the tide made our way on the beach impassible. We made for the overland trail: damp roots, high steps, wetness.

I recall this part of the trail being tough and discouraging. Just endless up and down. We came across about a dozen hikers who all said the stay at Walbran would be lovely. But we’d arrive there by late morning, and staying the day wouldn’t work with our food supply. We stayed at Walbran for a snack. It was a lovely camp ground, though, pushed slightly inland and defended by tall rock sentries at either end of the beach. We checked out the Walbran Creek “office” before we continued  down the overland trail, past Logan Creek and up to Cullite, which would end up being miserably cold and windy.

This part of the trail is best summarized photographically with roots, overland boardwalk and exhaustion due to cable car:

And so when we arrived at Cullite, we hunkered down for the night. Tomorrow, Day 7, would be our last full day on the trail, and we were soon to learn, the most challenging section of our hike yet. There would be a lot of snapping at one another, grunting, and constant use of words beginning with “f”. I’m going to leave Days 7 & 8 for the next installment of “The Wet Coast is the Best Coast.”

>> see also:

• Days 0 & 1
• Days 2 & 3
• Days 4 & 5

It’s hard to leave a place you completely fall in love with. It’s hard, knowing you might not ever see a place again. That was my struggle to leave Tsusiat Falls the morning of our fourth day. We spent two days in this magical place, where a rush of fresh water tumbled into a small pool, which eventually meandered its way into the Pacific Ocean. But we had to leave. The reason for our journey wasn’t to stay, but to carry on and hike all 75 kilometresof the West Coast Trail.

We awoke at about 5am, the sun barely a glimmer on the horizon. The steady sound of the falls played us through our morning routine: a jump across Tsusiat creek to the other side of the beach, to the composting toilets. Wash up, pack the tent, roll up the sleeping bags, eat. We needed to leave before the tide climbed above 2.1 metres, otherwise we’d have to hike the overland trail and miss the incredible sight that is the Hole in the Wall at Tsusiat Point.

As we hiked out of the site, crouching beneath massive pieces of driftwood I cried, something I couldn’t believe I was doing. I cried because I knew it would be many many years before I would see this place again, wade through the cool, fresh water, sit on a rocky stump and watch the grey whales breach way off in the distance. Julia looked puzzled, but the glint in her eye told me she understood how I felt. In a perfect world, we’d have made our lives here, greeting hikers and saying goodbye to them as they passed through the campsite to conquer the trail.

We said goodbye to Tsusiat at about 6am and headed toward the Point, stepping past the footprints of three hikers who’d left earlier than we had.

The hike to the Hole in the Wall was about two kilometres, made easy by a soaked beach which supported us and the weight of our packs. We were treated to the sights of eagles perched on rocky outcroppings, and the zooming past of fishermen’s boats anchoring themselves off the shore and fishing for halibut in the cool, rough waters.

When we arrived at Hole in the Wall, we knew we’d made the right choice by suffering an early-morning wake up. We passed through a giant rock hole, around which the water lapped furiously into the sand and rock, splashing mist upon us. In the distance, a sentry eagle watched schools of unseen fish swim past. He was gathering his strength for the day’s hunt.

We walked fast through the overland trail after we left the beach, through damp forest and Aboriginal reserve land to a tidal lake called Nitinat. Nitinat Narrows are too deep to wade, the current too strong. We waited for a boat to come and take us to the other side. When it finally did, after only a fifteen minute wait, we managed a quick rest before we trudged through the bog on the other side. Boardwalks were half-buried and broken along the way, and our gaiters barely kept our socks dry. But the mud slowed and tired us. By the time we mounted a cliff overlooking the ocean, we were beat. And we still had another seven kilometres before we could stop.

On our way through the bog and up the dirt paths, we met a group of hikers being followed by a dog named Charlie Parker (we weren’t to discover his name until the next day, so we just called him Dexter). Charlie met up with us at the end of the day, at Cribs Creek campground. He spent much of the evening walking up the beach with us. When he grew bored, he set off further down the trail. We wouldn’t see Charlie again on our journey.

Day 5

Another early morning on Day 5, as we attempted to beat the hot sun. This day, it wouldn’t matter as we would be covered by cloud with the threat of rain all day. This would be an easier day for us, though. Not covering 16 kilometres, like the previous day. This was a day of grace, not unlike our two-day stay at Tsusiat. But the eight kilometres we would cover this day wouldn’t be easy, as the lack of sun contributed to a subdued mood.

From Cribs Creek, we made our way about two kilometres to a point on the beach leading into the overland trail via a series of ladders, rather than concern ourselves with a great deal MORE stairs and ladders at the base of the Carmanah Point Lighthouse. This bit of forest hiking was damp, full of roots and technical stepping, which made for some exhausting going. When we arrived at Carmanah, we took a few photos, mused about what it must be like to live and work at a lighthouse on the trail (according to the board posted at the entrance to the lighthouse grounds, living there is nothing short of “awesome”) and kept going.

About one kilometre after the lighthouse, we found ourselves at Chez Monique, a makeshift home belonging to Monique, who’s lived on the trail for around 19 years. She’s argued long and hard with the government to stake her claim on the West Coast Trail, and she is appreciated by hikers wandering along the trail from both directions. She offers gourmet hamburgers and delicious breakfasts (including beer) for a hefty price. Julia and I could only afford a chocolate bar each.

It turns out Charlie Parker belonged to Monique. He wanders up and down the trail and only comes home when he gets hungry. This is complicated by the fact that hikers will often feed him (not us, though. We didn’t have a bit of food to spare). After a quick stop and a refresh of our supplies we continued down to Bonilla Point, home of a lovely waterfall and tiny campground. We arrived at about 1pm, and made camp. Then slept till dinner. We needed to catch up after so many early mornings. We met up with Sandy and Kat while we were there, but they were on their way further down the trail. So we used their tree branch to hang our food and provisions. Sleep. That was our priority.

>> see also:

• Days 0 & 1
• Days 2 & 3

Stone on meeting then governor Bush at a Republican breakfast: ”I wanted to prove that even though people thought I was a leftist I wanted to hear what they had to say. The minute I walked in the room the sound of the silverware kind of died. People were like, ‘What’s he doing here? Satan has walked in.’ But I met George Bush and I remember thinking that this man was going to be president.”

We decided that in order to maintain a decent schedule of walking—to be able to arrive at our campsite with a decent enough amount of daylight left to set up camp, eat, and clean up—we would need to wake up early. Like, around 6 or 7am. Since we’d just spent our first night on the trail, we were running, ah, a little late.

The “sleep” that first night was rather furtive for me. I had visions of mice chewing my new tent to pieces. Most anyone offering advice about the trail won’t tell you how to survive a bear or cougar attack. But they will tell you that if you have anything in your tent that smells remotely interesting, a mouse will find its way inside (usually by chewing a hole through the tent wall) in order to get to it. All I could hear all night was their scurrying and squeaking. I would often clear my throat or shift in my sleeping bag to discourage their invasion.

We were greeted that morning by a lovely sunrise and a cool breeze. Breakfast up, tent down, packs packed. Some bickering (actually, considering the ways in which you rely on your partner on trips such as these, there was surprisingly little arguing), and then onwards. We would need to make 13km in order to get to Tsusiat Falls, the most stunning campground on the trail.

The hike wasn’t too bad, initially. We even made friends with some Canadian Naval Officers who took a trip to the WCT at the last minute. Sandy and Kat (I think her name was Kat… I missed it!) were a great pair to bump into every so often along the way—very friendly, and often helpful.

The last kilometre of the day was brutal. We arrived at the top of Tsusiat Falls which was fairly technically difficult (a lot of stump jumping) and included a pretty dramatic increase in elevation. Once at the top of the falls, our journey upwards continued. It was frustrating. A lot of high-stepping and using our trekking poles to haul ourselves atop tall ledges. When we finally crested the maximum elevation, we were greeted by a series of about four tall ladders down to the beach. Neither of us was particularly thrilled with the last 30 minutes of our hike.

But once we stepped off the boardwalk and onto the sand, everything changed. Fine sand interspersed with massive hunks of driftwood and the tents of already-arrived hikers dotted the landscape. The ocean stretched out in front of us, broken up by points of rock and the vague shadows of the US mountains to the southwest.

All of this, of course, was completely dwarfed by the roar of the Falls themselves. Huge, wide, fresh-water chutes drained into a waist-deep pond, which in turn drained into the ocean. At its most crass, Tsusiat is a place to shower. At its most romantic, it’s the most awesome place on the Trail. The photos we took hardly do it justice.

We set up camp next to Kat and Sandy. We ate dinner with Jeff and Cheryl. Before bed, we decided we weren’t going to leave in the morning. Tsusiat was too beautiful to just be an overnight campground.

Day 3

This time, the mice made their mark. (This would be the first and only time on the trail that they would cause us any problems. And given the few horror stories we’d heard about holes in packs and missing food, I think we came out of things rather well.) My beautiful new tent had tiny bite and claw marks on the sides and rear screens of the tent. I was not a happy camper. But my soaring spirit couldn’t be deterred.

It was around 9 or 10 when we crawled out of bed. Cheryl and Jeff came by to bid us farewell. They were only going to be on the trail for seven days, and we were scheduled for ten. We could afford to languish, and they couldn’t. We knew them for a brief few days, but it was still sad to see them go, knowing the chances of us catching them on the trail were minimal.

Sandy and Kat left as well. Those two were movers and shakers. Sad to see them leave too, but we’d meet up with them several more times in our travels, so no worries.

With all of the other campers on their ways up and down the trail above the falls, we were left to do our own thing for the whole day. There were only two other people at the site with us. So we showered, explored the beach and some caves, and just hung out in the sun. It was a nice break from two days of straight hiking. It was great to wander around in sandals the whole time.

We planned to leave early in the morning (5am!) on Day 4, to beat the rising tide at the Hole In The Wall point, about two kilometres up the beach. I’ll tell you all about how I cried in the next post.

>> see also:

• Days 0 & 1
• Days 4 & 5

The trail was created by the Canadian Government around the turn of the century. Originally called the “Life-saving trail,” the WCT served as the point at which the survivors of shipwrecks could be accessed and rescued. For a good long while now, it’s served as a hiking trail maintained by Parks Canada and three Aboriginal tribes whose lands the trail passes through.

This year was the trail’s 100th anniversary. Since we’d talked about hiking it for so long, Julia decided it was time to suck it up and just go. So we booked all our travel, permits, and accomms at each end of the trip, bought gear and food, packed and got ready to haul all this stuff on our backs for over a week.

And really, when you think about it, 75km isn’t that far. If you’re really hoofing it, you could probably cover that ground in a day. On flat ground. On flat paved ground. And that was sort of my attitude going into it.

I’ve been backcountry hiking before, and I’ve done more than two dozen day hikes in the Canadian Rockies. But I’m not in the greatest shape of my life. Still, I didn’t figure this trip would be quite as exhausting as it was. This is all completely mitigated by where you are when you’re on the trail, and that fact that you’re actually, you know, doing it. But still: we planned for ten days on the trail. In reality we stayed for eight. Here’s a multi-part series about our adventures on Canada’s beautiful West Coast Trail.

Day 0

We arrived in Victoria in the evening, having struggled that morning back in Edmonton to ensure our packs could hold everything, and that they’d make it past the airport security people without hassle. It was a busy morning, as we had to also get the dogs to the kennel, which is past the airport. A lot of driving around. I was looking forward to parking my car for ten days.

When we arrived in Vic, we took the airport shuttle to our hotel, checked in, bought some food for the evening and generally just acted lazy. We tried to expend as little energy as possible. I filled up our fuel bottles with the white gas that had been purchased for us, and dropped off at our hotel by friends of ours in Victoria. I stupidly haven’t thanked them for doing that for us yet.

We slept early. We had a bus to catch the next morning at 6am.

Day 1

5:30am wake-up. Walk five mins down the street to catch the Trail Bus. 6:00am we leave. Two hours later we drop off some hikers at the Port Renfrew stop. Pick up a few other hikers. Then, for the next 3.5 hours, we drive the bumpy, winding logging roads across to the Bamfield side of the island. We’re dropped off at around 12:30pm, a half an hour before our scheduled trail orientation. We won’t get onto the trail until about 2pm.

At the orientation, we’re warned of campground wash-outs, cougars and bears, and various other reported hazards from the trail. I’m amazed when an elderly fellow walks into the park office and tells us he’s just finished the trail—solo—in six days. This dude had to be in his late 60s. And walking the trail for him seemed like it wasn’t a big deal. So it shouldn’t be for me, right? Uh. Right.

We leave the trail office after filing all our documents and buying ferry passes (mid-way through the trail is a giant tidal river at Nitinat Narrows that’s impossible to cross except by boat), lug our packs onto our backs, and start the 12km we’re meant to cover that afternoon. We made for Michigan Creek campground, which we’re told by several finishing hikers was very busy. We cross a beach, realize the videocamera we’ve brought is busted (later discovering this is due to a manufacturing error and learn of a recall taking place) and haul ourselves across about 11km of wet, muddy overland trail.

Walk 1km through a city, and it probably won’t take you that long. But kilometres on this trail are tough slogs. Big tree roots or soft sinking sand add a ton of slow-down to what might otherwise only take a few hours. That first day, all told, we hiked about 5.5 or six hours. And that was with about 30 minutes of stop-time to take photos, eat, and explore the grounds of the Pachena Lighthouse.

By the time we arrived at Michigan, we were tired, sweaty, and hungry. But we were treated to a beautiful sunset (see the top of the post), in front of which countless gray whales were breaching in the distance. We met a wonderful couple from Arizona, Jeff and Cheryl, who we would see often over the next few days. And we didn’t have to walk again until the next morning!

Now that we’re back home, the thing I miss the most about the Trail is the constant, reassuring sound of the ocean as the tide advances and recedes. You fall asleep to it every night. And this first night was heavenly, but for the sounds of mice scurrying all around our tent.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about the two wonderful nights we spent at one of the most beautiful places on this planet. I cried the day we left. I would have stayed forever if I could have.

>> see also:

• Days 2 & 3
• Days 4 & 5

Now, many people mistrust accoutants. At the very least, they consider these people to be loveless number-crunching robots. But for some reason, these people are eyed with as much suspicion (at times) as lawyers. So calling them Creative Accountants is going to have some negative image consequences. When I read “Creative Accountant,” I think of cooked books and pseudo-legal tax evasion. Whether that’s the intention or not (I’ll assume it isn’t) is irrelevant.

The people at CMA need to think long and hard about what a marketing campaign like this can do to their good name. And just so you have a taste of what I’m talking about, check out this YouTube post below…

[youtube=http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=OAWcYue1l7Q]

I grew up with two brothers. The group dynamics of three boys in a five-person family are complicated to say the least. But we weren’t slouches. We knew who buttered our bread, and we also knew the best ways to get things out of our parents: get the youngest child to ask them.

My little brother had this supernatural power of getting my parents to agree to ridiculous things. My older brother and I caught on to this. Consequently, when we figured we were in need of something as simple as Dairy Queen Blizzards, a Nintendo, or a new car, little brother would have the unenviable task of asking for—and somehow receiving—the object of his (or our) desire.

If our household was a country, it would have been Canada—run by some older folks who had some, but certainly not a complete, understanding of the behaviour of their progeny (let’s call us kids provinces, then). I was exceedingly relaxed as a kid. Didn’t really get worked up about anything. Was contented to enjoy the clouds drifting by and languish in just being. I guess that makes me British Columbia.

My older brother was far more uptight. He would answer only when asked, would worry about niggling details and minutae of life, and watch a lot of hockey. Let’s call him Ontario.

My little brother, then, who always got his way whether it was fair or not, could probably be called Quebec. He could get Mum and Dad to agree to anything, and in my eyes at least, he never got into trouble. I blazed the trail for doing bad things. I was punished. And he just got to do bad things while my parents tsk-tsked at him, patted him on the bottom, gave him $20 and told him to stay out of more trouble.

Now that we’re older, the playing field is far more level. Big bro still worries, little bro is far more self-sufficient, and I’m living in Alberta… wishing I was in BC.

But if you look at the actual Nation of Canada, in spite of the fact that the provinces are older and potentially wiser, Quebec is still behaving like a spoiled youngest child, making noise about how it’s special and should get the things it wants as a result. To wit, this piece from the Globe and Mail:

Daniel Turp has started a petition to convince the ICANN, the international authority responsible for Internet domain names, to create an extension that would be unique to websites in Quebec.

Mr. Turp says one way to identify a nation is for it to have its own web extensions and that if his efforts are successful, Quebeckers would use the extension .qc.

I used to buy into the Quebec as a distinct society thing. But the fact that one speaks a different language is not in and of itself adequate to give a group of people a mark of distinction. Quebec operates under French common law. OK, that’s distinctive, I guess. But where does one draw the line? Beyond a certain point (and I certainly think we’re beyond it), all of this becomes petty nonsense. A good point was made in the discussion section of this article:

S Roddick from Ottawa, Canada writes: The last time I looked at a map of Canada, Quebec was still there. If Daniel Turp really thinks that International Standards Organization is going to agree with that he’s out to lunch. It requires that the Root DNS servers be updated for it. Not that I think that that is impossible but if one state, province, territory or district gets one why can’t all of them… Do you really know how many individual subdivisions of countries there are in the world. There are 83 states, 10 provinces, 2 federal districts and 17 territories in North America alone. That’s 112 entries for North America and 195 country entries. If Mr. Turp wants to get the domain names set up for this that’s ok, but I doubt he will get exclusive access to them for Quebec. [snip]

I know squat about the technical implications of adding a .qc domain to root DNS servers, but “S Roddick” makes an interesting point. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.

The whole situation reminds me of an old O Henry commercial where two Inuit are sitting out in the Arctic cold. One of them is enjoying a chocolate bar, and when his cohort asks him if he can have some, he’s told: “If I give one to you, I have to give one to everybody else.”

Whereas this ad contained only two actors, Quebec’s move affects internet users/companies/denizens/whoever the world over. Maybe instead of bickering over petty nonsense like this, Quebec’s government should be worrying about the real economic and social issues affecting its people. If I were in Quebec, I’d have grown tired of this whinging a long time ago.

And I’m supposed to be all chilled out like BC…

Also, congratulations to me on my 100th post!

This past weekend, I went down to Kicking Horse with Fish, my brother Josh, and a big posse of people. The trip was arranged through Backside Tours, a company based out of Edmonton that organizes tours focused on balancing the party with the riding (as opposed to just focusing on drinking, which is what many of the other tour companies are known for). We stayed in some unbelievable accomms: Whispering Pines condos. We had ten people in our unit, and each of those people got to sleep in a nice bed, enjoy a private hot tub, eat in and a huge kitchen and chill in the comfy chairs of a big living room. We also played our fair share of drinking games.

Sunny, clear skies, calm nights and warm temperatures made sure we didn’t waste anytime: good runs, a few tumbles, and clean, fresh mountain air. I wish I wasn’t home. Must take advantage of the rest of winter. I recommend you do the same.

I think you can clearly see where they got their inspiration from:

]]> http://theunknownstudio.ca/2008/02/a-bsc-with-a-major-in-warp-theory/feed/ 1 http://theunknownstudio.ca/2008/02/security-theatre/ http://theunknownstudio.ca/2008/02/security-theatre/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:53:57 +0000 Adam Rozenhart http://scientyst.wordpress.com/?p=89 Ars Technica has a great piece on the new TSA blog. Author Jon Stokes asks a very salient question, one I’ve often considered myself:

My experience in airport security line conversations over the years is that everyone who takes a moment to turn three or four neurons’ worth of attention to the much-hated liquids policy comes to exactly the same conclusion: if it takes, say, 20 ounces of bomb juice to blow up an airplane, then you can just send two terrorists with 10 ounces of bomb juice each on board, and they can combine their bomb juice to make a 20-ounce bomb. So why the seemingly idiotic limits on the amount of liquids in my carry-on bag? And why, if I’m in the security line with a bottle of water or a cup of coffee, can’t I just drink some of it to demonstrate that it is not, in fact, bomb juice?

• The USA: “The United States was founded in 1776 on the principles of life, liberty, and the reckless pursuit of happiness at any cost—even life and liberty.”
• Japan: “In 1945, two atomic bombs were dropped on the nation of Japan, destroying entire cities and instantly killing millions of citizens. However, some survived, and from the radioactive ash rose a mutant race of super-submissive, ultra-vulnerable people able to feel 100 times the shame of any ordinary human.”
• India: “Mired by rising poverty levels, polluted groundwater that threatens the lives of millions, and a rapidly crumbling infrastructure, the nation of India has every intention of addressing these problems just as soon as it finishes telling Midwesterners how to install Windows XP on their home computer.”
• England: “For nearly 200 years, England ruled over 500 million people on six continents—a time in which it was commonly said that the sun never set on the British Empire. Today, however, the sun sets on the British Empire at precisely 5:47pm GMT.”
• Italy: “Italy is known as one of the most racially intolerant nations in the world, where citizens base their opinions of other ethnicities on appearance and stereotypes alone. But then, what more do you expect from a bunch of greasy, filthy womanizers?”

More here.

I, personally, am a sucker for gadgets. I know some girls who like purses. Some people like shoes. I like watches. And anything made by the wizards at Apple. But that’s not the point. I also really dig watches. I own three, and I want more. My latest acquisition was the Biohazard Watch from Tokyoflash. It was only about CAD $150, and even though you need to do math to decode the time, it’s an incredible conversation piece:

This thing made it to me, direct from Japan, in five business days. Which is really unreal. The Japanese know how to do online commerce. Nineteen shopping days before Christmas. Maybe you know someone who needs a really awesome watch?