Math(s) Joke!

I made a math (or maths, for you English) joke today via email. My mom sent myself, my sister and uncle the following message

On 5-Nov-09, at 5:10 PM, Ursula Yanchak wrote:

cleaned out 1/2 of a file drawer. Threw out 98% of the STUFF in it

To which I replied:

On 5-Nov-09, at 5:16 PM, Natalia Yanchak wrote:

Great work! Only 94.12% of the filing cabinet to go!

I know, I know. This is barely funny. As a reply, it’s fairly snarky and irritating. My mom is obviously proud of getting through half a drawer, but I’m pretty sure the filing cabinet has three drawers equally full of out-of-date documents. Like phone bills from 1989. My parent’s house is packed tightly, albeit neatly, full of stuff. My mom has taken on the mammoth task of clearing this stuff out. I commend her enormously, and only wish we lived in the same city so I could come over and help her a little bit every day.

Anyway, I did the calculation…more precisely, I did a calculation, the result of which was the punchline to my joke.

I’m just stopping here. This whole thing is stupid. The funniest thing, is that the joke is on me because my math is probably totally wrong.

MATH(S) = FAIL
JOKE = FAIL

Post-Halloween Sugar Rush

Last night’s haul was pretty good, I’d say. For a 4-year-old, that bag full of candy must seem infinite. Thankfully, she agreed to bring half of it to a Day of the Dead dinner party, which alleviates the pressure to eat the junk for mom & dad.

So: the costume. I realise, looking back at my blog, that I kind of over hyped the whole Squidward costume thing. Here are a couple pics, just the costume (the mask is the saving grace), then one with the cousin, before hittin’ the streets.

I was kind of surprised that I didn’t take a proper photo of my daughter in the costume. I think Halloween is too stressful. It’s like a race against time to get ready and get out there at dusk, but before it’s too late. The last thing on my mind was: Daughter, please stand very still and pose for some photographs. Actually, I always found it stressful, and never really liked it as a holiday. Too much pressure. Some of my teenaged costumes included “rocket scientist for NASA/nerd” and “hardware store lady.” As a child I went trick or treating dressed as a bunch of grapes, with dozens of purple balloons attached to my body. I think that is the true meaning of Halloween: fun yet traumatizing. The candy is like a buffer, a self-medication to soften all that embarrassment and confused moments of: “Why did I dress up? What am I supposed to be?”

Much like life.

Philosophy of Hallow’een

The philosophy of Hallow’een frustrates me: it is a 100% #firstworldproblem. It is a consumer’s holiday, an event which promotes nothing but shopping. Even the notion of generosity is overlooked: we buy candy to give away to kids, but can you imagine how better spent that money could be? Say a normal family spends $20 on candy, $35 on a costume and another $20 on decorations. What if they instead gave $10 of that $95 to a charity? Like the Food Bank or Dans La Rue, to feed street kids real food? Maybe its because when I was growing up, I always wore those orange cardboard UNICEF collection boxes. That was a great idea, great marketing, but it disappeared.

Maybe I was set off by watching a show last night that took you inside people’s over-the-top Hallow’een homes. Or perhaps because I saw costumes at the big box store, and was grossed out by how cheaply they were made and by how flammable they looked: a fairy costume for kids ran $35 before tax. Don’t even get me started on adults who dress up. Mind: blown.

So I do appreciate the moms that recycle costumes, or DIY them (a friend is making a paper mach horse for her son’s cowboy costume). I’m into that: keeping it imaginative, fulfilling and fun. Not expensive and competitive, which I think some people get carried away by. It’s more fun to be ghetto that to be the best.

Speaking of which, I’ll post some progress pics of the Squidward costume tomorrow.

Squidward Costume Anxiety

For Halloween this year, my 4-year-old has told me she wants to dress up as Squidward Tentacles from Spongebob. I’ve been to the big box stores, and there are no Spongebob character costumes, which leaves me one option: DIY.

This is a fine line: I don’t want the costume to be unidentifiable, or ghetto, or not fun to wear. Also it’s getting cold outside so it also has to be toasty. This is not going to be easy. Maybe I can woo her with a frilly princess dress…

This mask would be a quick fix, only it is overpriced and probably adult-sized:

This looks uncomfortable. And too literal:

Quaint. Not my style:

The fun-ness would be in active legs: the extra pair of legs attached to her real legs so each pair of legs (one real, one fake) moved in tandem. Also was thinking of adding the Krabby Patty hat. Need to get to Value Village to source a white trucker’s hat.

OK. So today I have some work to do. I need to find:
1) Kids plain brown polo shirt.
2) Grey long-sleeved shirt + 2 pair matching leggings/pants.
3) 6 pairs grey sport socks to go over her hands & shoes. And stuffed one to be extra feet.
4) White trucker hat (possibly with blue bill).
5) Try to make a Squidward mask. Maybe some sort of mask/hood stuffed into the shape of his bulbous head and nose? And paint on a frown with makeup? I need grey face paint.

Seriously, I am into this costume over the standard fairy or princess. But it has to be fun. I’ll update developments as they come. You must be at the edge of your seat in anticipation!!!

SAVIOUR + EOHBS is 10

There are two things happening Murray and I wanted to share with you.

1) We’ve made lots of videos, and have never worked with a more PRO dude than director Christohper Mills. I think we get each other, so we’ll let him do the talking:

“We had 12 hours to shoot one video, and ended up shooting 2 videos in 10 hours. It was a near perfect day.

Everyone in the band was plugged in and slathered in baby oil, and a giant fan blew dust all over the room. Everyone was on point, we had our shit together, and got a ton of great performance in the can.

Then, as an afterthought, I pitched the idea of laying SAVIOUR down to tape – just because we could, and because it was my favourite song on the record.

MURRAY and THE DEARS very generously obliged, and, as always, MURRAY consumed himself with the song, and delivered what for me, was one of the most honest, most real music video performances I’ve been lucky enough to shoot in my 12+ years of making videos.

AUX.TV has been generous enough to pony up to help us get the very simple, post work done on this little nugget. I hope this song is as transformative for you as it has been for me.

Love, Christopher.”

Following SAVIOUR is DISCLAIMER or “the best video that nobody saw.” The “short film” premiers at 7PM ET on AUX.TV.

2) In the Fall of 1999, Murray, Roberto, John Tod and I holed up in Andy from The Nul Set’s house in Westmount. We drank all his parent’s booze (even the peppermint schnapps), moved their dining room table into the kitchen and put mattresses up against their century-old windows. Then we made an album: End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story. We made an album and had no idea what we were going to do with it. No label wanted to release it because, at the time, it was too out there. Now Magazine described it simply: “Expect riots.”

So to celebrate our first album’s tenth birthday, we’ve decided to give the album to you; no remix or remaster, no extra tracks or a tacky badge. If you haven’t heard it, then you should: it’s the original hot mess.

Visit our online store and get a free, high quality digital download of End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story with any t-shirt order.

OK, OK. Enough of the sales pitch.

Just a huge thank you to you, for your support over the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. However long it’s been. We’ll always love you back.

Natalia

P.S. Murray pledges that The Dears will deliver the greatest rock album ever made, sometime next year.

My Addictions

I do not consider myself as having an addictive personality. The things I am addicted to are hardly addicting, and unlike actual narcotics, the “drugs” are not so life-destroying that they’re working on a vaccine.

Could you imagine? A vaccine that protects against internet addictions? Might have helped if one existed.

1) Facebook – Under the pretense of gaining social interaction, winning friends and emboldening friendships, I am addicted. PerezHilton.com used to be my web-based addiction but I got off that; now its just Facebook: What are the people I know saying? And doing? Or planning to do? Lately, I’ve been thinking of going cold turkey. Like with Perez, just shutting it out, deleting the bookmark. Done. If only it were that easy.

2) Costco – This is very middle-class, M.O.R., and normal of me. But I will take any excuse to go to Costco. Philosophically, I am into the way they promote environmentally conscious products, like treeless paper towel and biodegradable dishwasher soap. The pretense, however, is not our earth but my pocketbook. I believe I am saving money. Hopefully I am because I don’t have the patience or time to actually sit down and build a comparative spreadsheet. Over the years I’ve honed my ball-parking skills. Like ball-parking whether or not a tour is going to lose money. You know, big, little picture things. I’d like to think I’m saving. Big time.

So: a painfully boring blog post, but at least learning experience, wouldn’t you agree? Now you know I am a shrewd, anti-social neurotic. You didn’t know that before…did you?

Fucking hell.

UPDATE: Since posting this, I realised my list was totally partial, forgetting such weaknesses as video games, conditioner and pizza. The list goes on.

Mailing List

Today (it took months to realise it) I discovered out the mailing list sign-up sheets we collected at the merch table on our May/June North American tour. I wasn’t sure what to do with it (which is why it sat around for months) but some inquisitory emails later, I figured it out. It involves data entry: there are over 300 names, so its gonna be a few hours of work.

Some of the handwriting is wobbly, some scritchy, some firm and confident, while some is barely legible. I guess we do generally play in bars, where concert-goers are likely to have been drinking. Also, low merch-area lighting is probably a factor. As I leaned into it, wondering if an “s” is an “a” or an “r” is a “p,” I found jokes.

How, you may ask, is a mailing list funny? Some jokes come direct from our friends, making up unbelievable names and fake email addresses. Those are just inside jokes. Then there are the sincere thanks, warm regards from strangers that are really great. Then there are the eyebrow raising domain names like “suckthis.net” and “fuckhat.com” littered among the gmails, yahoos and hotmails.

I really appreciate the short moment everyone took from their evening to sign the sheet: that 30 seconds opens a dialogue, allowing us into each person’s world in a small way. And that’s a cool thing. So if you did sign up, you can expect a note from Murray in your inbox.

And if you haven’t already, you can join here.

New Favourite Website

CLICK HERE AND HAVE YOUR MIND BLOWN.
Thanks to @juniorpande for sharing. I just lurvs it.

Touring, c. 2004

I was cleaning out the garage a bit, when I came across a box that has literally been in storage in some way or another since 2004. It was a box of touring stuff, cleared out of a van or trailer or rehearsal space at some point during our lives. These items, circa 2003-2004, are extremely culturally significant for several reasons.

In 2004, things like digital cameras, portable DVD players and a GPS would set you back at least $700 for the crappiest one out there. Now they give these things away when you open a bank account. Back then, to tour we absolutely needed:

Maps of America’s more complicated cities (note that one map is of JFK airport).

Guide book. How else would we find a decent restaurant? Or a museum? Remember, this is pre-WiFi and they hadn’t even invented the iPod yet, let alone the iPhone. There was no app to make a decision for you. You had to use your brain.

We were touring in an RV with trailer (a photo of our rig in Kamloops, BC). It was really a huge step up from a van with trailer. We had a kitchen, a pisser, and we could all sleep in the thing and therefore not have to spend hundreds of dollars every night on hotel rooms. It was like a tour bus you drive yourself.

I have a million of these in our house. These are the electrical clips you need to attach the trailer’s lighting system to the RV/van’s running and brake lights. U-Haul or wherever made us buy a new set of these every time we rented a trailer (of course because we’d forgotten to bring our old ones or quite simply, left the clips on the previous rental when we returned it). I have a ton of these and also trailer locks of varying security levels.

We used to occasionally stay in bonafide trailer parks on some of our North American tours. Yes: actual trailer parks where we often feared for our lives. But it was cheap. Also, in a RV we would need to fill the water tank and empty the toilet, which was gross, but this book, The Next Exit, was a life saver. It told us where to go, where to stay, which truck-stops would accommodate us, where the next Cracker Barrel was, etc. Now, GPS can tell us all these things. But back then, you had to know how to read and use common sense. For example, pulling up to a trailer park in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and wondering: “Will we be attacked by dogs in the morning? Let’s try the next one.” Or waking up and seeing Confederate flags everywhere. We got driven out of a trailer park in Memphis, TN by a old man riding an ATV and wearing a Confederate flag hat. But we saw Elvis that day so it was OK.

Tuesday’s Links

Some things I’ve seen lately, that have struck me as a little interesting:

The $150 Space Camera. At first it was just a curious headline, then the thought of it was really, really heavy. Space is not that far away.

Women Rescued from Reality TV scam. I don’t know who is more desperate in this situation? The captives or the captors?

Want Your Own Dinosaur? Place your Bids. Is this morally responsible? Like, should ancient things belong to anyone? They should be everyman’s.

The Mythbusters at The Emmys. From Adam Savage’s Twitter. He is such a nerd. And hilarious. My crush continues.

An entire house, tented. Insane pesticide or some kind of anti-bug bomb ensued. From Jeff Castelaz’s Twitter. See, in Canada if you just wait it out a few months until winter, all the bugs die of cold anyway. Ya, right…

VMA Fug Carpet: Lady Gaga. While sometimes irritatingly annoying, Ms. Gaga’s fashion shenanigans can be eye-roll-inducing. But I agree with Go Fug Yourself: this red outfit is amazing. That is some sci-fi, video game, Silent Hill-quality avant-garde shit, for which I give her mad props. That getup, my friends, is OG.

Ok. Now go have a productive week. I’m gonna go…scrape.

UPDATE: Heart Attack Grill. HOLY SHIT. MIND BLOWN! Watch the YouTube clip at the bottom of the page.