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ltmurnauYes, another amusing non-work-related interlude. Been having quite a few of those lately, I wonder what's wrong.
Friday night was cold and clear and busy. I got home first, then Mxo and Aki came home from Japanese school and we got him kitted out as the Evil Christmas Tree. Unfortunately we did not stop to take any pictures. Aki did quite well candywise - we didn't go more than 300 yards from the house but he got bags full. To be fair, though, there seem to be fewer and fewer children around every year, though there are just as many actual children. Their costumes were uniformly disappointing too - few if any of them had made any effort beyond opening a package.
As usual during that week, I was ravenous and the candy was calling me, but I avoided it except for one nine-gram fifth-size candy bar that had been made in Brazil, Mxo picked them up cheap - greasy bad chocolate. Spaghetti break then I went to Kevin & Crystal's place in Fernwood for a house party. I walked to the university to catch the bus and of course it was full of drunken hollering students. Yeah, I remember my first beer too.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seaofrain, scuttle, epexegesis, shada, and shadesofwinter all came, Eve brought her digital camera and we made a little photo-drama whose story line changed every time she took a picture.
Saturday I took Aki to the monthly Artist Trading Card session at Xchanges Gallery, where he traded off most of the 20 cards he had made for some things he liked. We'll see if he makes some more, I sure hope so. Later we went to Toys R Us, for the first time in a very long time, to find him a new Bionicle for his birthday. I was surprised (and then again, not surprised) to find out that this was the only toy store in all of Mayfair Mall - I thought Toys and Wheels was still in business.
But then again, on looking in the phone book I find there are not many toy stores left at all. Most of them have been given over to "educational" purposes, or the overt Conscription of Fun. I could go off on a riff here about how so much of children's lives these days are in fact constructs of an adult's idea of what childhood should be or contain. I was a child not that long ago, (OK, well not long ago in the cosmic scale of time) and my entertainment wasn't dominated by Motown music and Swedish-made round-edged wooden toys that had been previously passed by a panel of pedagogical PhDs. But I won't (I can alliterate like sixty, though).
In the rain on the way back we sang the theme song to The Alexei Sayle Show:
Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?
A-L-E-X-E-I S-A-Y-L-E
Who's an ugly bastard and as fat as he can be?
A-L-E-X-E-I S-A-Y-L-E
Alexei Sayle, Alexei Sayle
We love to hear him swear on the TV
Alexei Sayle, Alexei Sayle
We love to hear him swear on the TeeVee-e-e-e
E-E-E
Everybody give three cheers except the BBC
A-L-E-X-E-I S-A-Y-L-E
(spoken: "who is that fat bastard?")
That night I went out to Gary's place for his birthday party - I hadn't been out to his place for almost a year. They had done a lot of remodelling in the living room, mainly tearing out a wall between the LR and kitchen that for the most part was there to make things dark, and turning it into a sort of island/sidebar. It was dark when I got there but I am sure the place looks great in the daytime. It was Gary's 40th birthday, and when the clear booze ran out people started ransacking his liquor cabinet, which consists of about 30 bottles of assorted things, each with an inch or two of stuff in the bottom. First to emerge was the bottle of mezcal he and Cam and I were drinking on New Year's Eve 1984, and which had not been touched for almost 20 years. God that was vile stuff - I still remember the melted-plastic flavour of Mezcal Belch. But that did not seem to bother most of the others, who got into that and then the ginseng brandy and the "hooga mooga jew" Chinese medicinal wine (I don't know the actual spelling of the stuff). The latter two bottles are just as old as the mezcal, and are probably illegal to buy outside of a liquor store now since these things used to kill off so many winos...
Sunday I rested - it was a nice clear day and I meant to take a bike ride, I really did, but instead I stayed inside downloading things and eating chips. Aki and I watched that old flying saucer movie "This Island Earth", so he got his first look at a B-Movie Alien:
http://www.kryptoys.com/picsfolder/islandcolor.jpg.
Oh gee, I look for an image to link to but all I can find are ones of friggin' action toys for me to buy and fondle, what do I look like here, Comic Book Guy?
Friday night was cold and clear and busy. I got home first, then Mxo and Aki came home from Japanese school and we got him kitted out as the Evil Christmas Tree. Unfortunately we did not stop to take any pictures. Aki did quite well candywise - we didn't go more than 300 yards from the house but he got bags full. To be fair, though, there seem to be fewer and fewer children around every year, though there are just as many actual children. Their costumes were uniformly disappointing too - few if any of them had made any effort beyond opening a package.
As usual during that week, I was ravenous and the candy was calling me, but I avoided it except for one nine-gram fifth-size candy bar that had been made in Brazil, Mxo picked them up cheap - greasy bad chocolate. Spaghetti break then I went to Kevin & Crystal's place in Fernwood for a house party. I walked to the university to catch the bus and of course it was full of drunken hollering students. Yeah, I remember my first beer too.
seaofrain, scuttle, epexegesis, shada, and shadesofwinter all came, Eve brought her digital camera and we made a little photo-drama whose story line changed every time she took a picture.Saturday I took Aki to the monthly Artist Trading Card session at Xchanges Gallery, where he traded off most of the 20 cards he had made for some things he liked. We'll see if he makes some more, I sure hope so. Later we went to Toys R Us, for the first time in a very long time, to find him a new Bionicle for his birthday. I was surprised (and then again, not surprised) to find out that this was the only toy store in all of Mayfair Mall - I thought Toys and Wheels was still in business.
But then again, on looking in the phone book I find there are not many toy stores left at all. Most of them have been given over to "educational" purposes, or the overt Conscription of Fun. I could go off on a riff here about how so much of children's lives these days are in fact constructs of an adult's idea of what childhood should be or contain. I was a child not that long ago, (OK, well not long ago in the cosmic scale of time) and my entertainment wasn't dominated by Motown music and Swedish-made round-edged wooden toys that had been previously passed by a panel of pedagogical PhDs. But I won't (I can alliterate like sixty, though).
In the rain on the way back we sang the theme song to The Alexei Sayle Show:
Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?
A-L-E-X-E-I S-A-Y-L-E
Who's an ugly bastard and as fat as he can be?
A-L-E-X-E-I S-A-Y-L-E
Alexei Sayle, Alexei Sayle
We love to hear him swear on the TV
Alexei Sayle, Alexei Sayle
We love to hear him swear on the TeeVee-e-e-e
E-E-E
Everybody give three cheers except the BBC
A-L-E-X-E-I S-A-Y-L-E
(spoken: "who is that fat bastard?")
That night I went out to Gary's place for his birthday party - I hadn't been out to his place for almost a year. They had done a lot of remodelling in the living room, mainly tearing out a wall between the LR and kitchen that for the most part was there to make things dark, and turning it into a sort of island/sidebar. It was dark when I got there but I am sure the place looks great in the daytime. It was Gary's 40th birthday, and when the clear booze ran out people started ransacking his liquor cabinet, which consists of about 30 bottles of assorted things, each with an inch or two of stuff in the bottom. First to emerge was the bottle of mezcal he and Cam and I were drinking on New Year's Eve 1984, and which had not been touched for almost 20 years. God that was vile stuff - I still remember the melted-plastic flavour of Mezcal Belch. But that did not seem to bother most of the others, who got into that and then the ginseng brandy and the "hooga mooga jew" Chinese medicinal wine (I don't know the actual spelling of the stuff). The latter two bottles are just as old as the mezcal, and are probably illegal to buy outside of a liquor store now since these things used to kill off so many winos...
Sunday I rested - it was a nice clear day and I meant to take a bike ride, I really did, but instead I stayed inside downloading things and eating chips. Aki and I watched that old flying saucer movie "This Island Earth", so he got his first look at a B-Movie Alien:
http://www.kryptoys.com/picsfolder/islandcolor.jpg.
Oh gee, I look for an image to link to but all I can find are ones of friggin' action toys for me to buy and fondle, what do I look like here, Comic Book Guy?
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