Author Archives: Rob MacD

Guilt Free Blow Job

Having been raised by parents who choose a hard-day’s work over paying someone else to do it, I always have a tinge of guilt whenever I contract out some of the household chores we are faced with. I hate mowing the lawn and in the past have paid a neighbourhood kid to do it, even though I feel like it should be me. Now that my son is of lawn-mowing age, the job now passes to him, and I don’t mind paying him to mow.
My father is a very handy man, always was, and continues to be so even at his advancing age. Because he always did home repairs himself, I have a hard time calling a plumber or carpenter to do a job that I feel I should probably attempt myself. (Un)Fortunately, I realise that I don’t have the skills or knowledge of a handyman and often, when I do attempt some pretty basic stuff, it usually ends badly, and so that makes the phone calls to fixit people a bit easier.
Trouble is, once one begins to call repair people, it becomes a bit of a habit and one begins to rely on their services to accomplish more and more. If I’m not careful, I’ll soon be calling a contractor to come and replace the roll of toilet paper in our bathroom everytime it runs out.
With the hard-work ethics of my ancestors in my head, a good-enough back, sturdy legs and a general-enough knowledge of how things should be repaired (but not the ability to carry repairs out) I should not rely so much on others (not that I do anyway, but I should do so even less).
And so, this year, as winter began to show its full force, I vowed to do my own driveway shovelling this year, even though it’s so easy (and not that expensive) to get a ‘professional’ to clear it.

Yesterday, though, the decision was easy. A 9 foot high, 15 foot long drift behind our car, combined with a 7 foot high, 10 foot long drift at the end of our driveway is just insanity. So, a 5pm call to our neighbourhood snowblower, and by 9:30 last night, the driveway was cleared.

Wonderful. And guilt free.

But not to worry. I’ll be shovelling, as promised, until another major storm hits the neighbourhood.

It Was A Scream

Last night, during the storm, four of the island-dwelling Sketch 22 members performed a half-hour gig at UPEI. It may have been the only event not cancelled.
We performed at The Wave for an alumni fundraiser. The Wave is not a good place to perform sketch comedy when the only means of voice amplification is one’s own vocal chords. It is basically a big empty concrete and steel room with acoustics that are dead. That means when one speaks, the sound waves, immediately upon leaving one’s mouth, dissipate into nothingness. To combat this, one must scream. Unless you’re Sam Kinison, screaming lines of comedy is not the ideal method.
Fortunately, it was only a half hour of screaming our lines, and even then the crowd seemed to enjoy us more than I thought they would. The crowd was an odd mix of old fuddy-duddy wallets and around-my-age keeners. We were introduced as improv performers, and I’m sure many of the people had no idea who or what we were, but there were plenty of laughs.
We performed
-Wessie Doucette and The Tyne Valley Motivational Experience
-Moe Gorman (Moe wrote a new song just for the event)
-The Right Eloquent Island
-Road Crew (the musical)

Tomorrow night, we perform at the Confederation Centre for Madly Off in All Directions. Looking forward to it.
While we’ve been looking forward to these performances, I believe we are moreso looking forward to having them done and in the can (so to speak), so we can get down to the business of writing for next summer’s show.

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The Thinking Is The Doing

The difference (at least “A” difference) between me and successful people (I know, I AM successful in certain ways, and every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings – attaboy, Clarence!) is my inability to finish something once I’ve initially thought about it. To me, the thinking is the doing.
I’m talkin’ artistic ideas. Tons of great ideas have bounced around in this brain, but they don’t get any further than the thinking of them. I’m too lazy to flesh them out, I guess. And if I do manage to push an idea past the thinking stage, to the actual working on it, I must ensure that I keep tight-lipped about it. The second the idea gets voiced to another person, it’s like a pin bursting a balloon, and the idea gets immediately relegated to the ‘forget about it’ pile. The thinking is the doing, and the telling is the producing.

So, I need someone to come up with a computer program, some device I can plug into my brain that will automatically make hard copies of all those brilliant theatrical and cinematic thoughts that never get done. Then I need a device that can take those hard copy ideas and silently work them up into full-fledged written text.

Once that’s accomplished, I’ll be one prolific writer. A prolific writer that has tons of shitty computer-generated plays and screenplays stuffed into the drawers of the desks in my home.

Friday Night Lights

I watched the movie Friday Night Lights the other night. It took me a while to get into it, and despite a bit of problematic story-telling, I was quite glad I watched it. For those who don’t know, the movie follows a Texas high school football team as they attempt to win the annual State Championship. Billy Bob Thornton plays the coach.
In the movie’s small-town Texas, high school football is king. The team is expected to go all the way, and nothing less will be accepted. The movie does a good job in conveying the pressures that such expectations have on the team. It focuses on a couple of the players (one in particular, the quarterback), and through their stories we get a good sense of how much pressure these kids are under.
The problem I have is that the story of the quarterback starts off, gets us interested in him, but then kind of gets lost as we montage through the game of the season, as they march towards the inevitable big showdown. I wanted the movie to remain focused a bit more on this character and felt a bit cheated that it didn’t. But this is a relatively small gripe, and one shouldn’t really criticize a movie for not being what one wants it to be.
Billy Bob, while having star billing, really doesn’t have a lot to do (although he does that well). There is a great speech at the end that he gives to the players. I really appreciated the message of that speech.

Kind of a quick, scattered review. A pretty good football movie. A pretty good sports movie. A pretty good movie.

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Sunny Day School Closure

Yesterday was a beautiful day. Cold, but beautiful. And school was cancelled for the Eastern School District.
Some parents were upset that school was closed on such a picture-perfect day. I, howeve, completely understand the reasons and agree entirely. In Charlottetown, many roads were narrowed to one lane only; sidewalks were not cleared and walking to school would have been a desperate and dangerous adventure. Has anyone tried walking in Charlottetown when one is forced onto the roads? It’s truly a life-endangering adventure, as many drivers seem to have the opinion that the road is no place for a pedestrian. Normally
I can’t speak for the validity of closing country schools that rely almost entirely on bussing, but I can only imagine that many side and secondary roads were likewise difficult to travel down.

Yeah, it’s a bitch to have to scramble to find a sitter, but better scrambling for a sitter than for a casket for your killed-by-traffic child.

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London’s Borning of Punk

For me, watching this (it’s a 10meg .avi download) was akin to what Billy Graham might feel like if he saw a video of the sermon on the mount.

It’s The Clash performing London’s Burning in 1977. This has made my weekend. If I had a time-machine, I’d go back to that exact moment so I could see the rest of the show.

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The Icon-stein Monster

Don’t know if it’s showing up on your browser as the favicon for this site, but it’s showing up on mine.  The lovely DaveM sent me a tiny little pixellated Annekenstein Monster.  I made a couple of small changes to it, basically to make the braids bigger and make the colors contrast a bit more, but I like it much better than the blocky red face thing I had.

Thanks Dave!

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Tag, I’m It!

This is a link to a Technorati Tags Bookmarklet that allows one to add tags to their blog posts.

This is a post to see what it does.

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A Licking Pussy

Dirty monitor screen?  Get this bit of flash.

As for the title… Good Gods of Google Search, what have I just done?

Heil Harry??

Prince Harry wears a Nazi outfit to a costume party and is up shit creek for it.

Somewhere, presumably in a post-death holding tank, Bob Crane and Werner Klemperer are high-fiving each other, thankful for the attrocities they got away with.

I wonder, will there ever be a time when wearing a Nazi outfit to a costume party is not seen as an evil act, or morally reprehensible?  The world is so serious.