FRAT PARTY! (TM) gets animated.

so i was looking through the pictures from FRAT PARTY! again and i noticed that quite a few of them were a bit repetitive. this gave me the idea to animate them. i love these.

in both of these first two pictures we all look like we’re posing as flash bulbs explode in front of us, which i suppose in a sense we are, but it’s nowhere near as glamorous as that sentence sounded.

ryan riding the mechanical sheep is amazing, followed by jo-ann and i which is almost creepy because it’s quite like a video, slightly on the wrong side of dirty, and almost seems 3D

GIFs = amazing. end of.

catching up part 2: FRAT PARTY!

so it’s been just over two weeks now since my epic birthday celebrations, otherwise known as FRAT PARTY! the theme seemed like it was going totally tits up the morning of the party, but somehow by 8 o’clock in the evening, it was all systems go! it really was jocks and sluts a-kimbo and, as you can plainly see above, an inflatable sheep.

as a sidenote the woman who sold me the inflatable sheep, in san francisco of all god-forsaken stores, gave me quite a bit of attitude. bitch, please! you work in a store that sells fucking inflatable sheep, let’s calm down the bitch-face judgement-tuts a little!

going through my photos of the night was both hysterical and a little disappointing as my photo taking skills devolved rather early in the evening meaning that i don’t actually have a lot of pictures of everyone, including (in alphabetical order) christine, dani, kathy, mikhaila, noel, sam, sarah, scott and stephanie. also, i have no pictures of me conquering the beer bong. am hoping i can fill the holes in my own collection with those of others. stephanie, for instance, has already posted a brilliant album on facebook.

hopefully, someone got some pictures at the bar also, as i have no pictures of that portion of the evening including amber, shaun and zoie. i’m hearing some rumblings that christine has some particularly embarrassing pictures of me but as i look positively model-esque from every possible angle i find that hard to believe. see example below.

anyway, disastrous photos aside, it really was a fabulous birthday celebration and a wonderful send-off. i didn’t even vom! although a few of the girls did, one in real FRAT PARTY! style right off my balcony. brilliant.

a few quick stories:
1. scott kept trying to photograph his junk to no avail. at first because he was using the wrong camera. then because he couldn’t quite work out the physics of flash photography in pants.

2. scott and kathy bought me a big bear as part of the FRAT PARTY! celebrations that i finished in its entirety, a significant portion of which through a beer bong.

3. the highlight of the night might well be the DJ playing ‘don’t stop believin’ and me running screaming toward the dancefloor only to find jo-ann in much the same state coming from the opposite direction looking for me.

4. noel ended up with four cowboy hats stacked upon her head between the time we left my apartment and our arrival at the bar. i still don’t really understand how.

5. i vaguely seem to recall trademarking the term FRAT PARTY! at one point during the night and subsequently referring to it as ‘FRAT PARTY! TM’

6. we fit 6 people on my floor that night. myself, ryan, laura, candace, jo-ann and trevor. the smell of fried chicken permeating the air everytime we opened the fridge was the only thing that made it problematic. we had a bought a bucket of kfc and refrigerated it for the next day but did not think through the stench it would create.

all in all, an amazing night.

catching up part 1: operation hot ham is a go!

so, i’m now living in my fabulous new vancouver apartment out west. while there will be (much) more on that later, i thought it best to catch up on a few momentous occasions that occurred over the past few weeks that have yet to find their way onto the interwebs.

the first such occasion was my birthday weekend which was broken into a few portions, the first of which consisting of a night at the black dog on june 25th, the night before my actual birthday. it was a fabulous night, despite a slight chill in the air / the overshadowing of farrah fawcett, that started with ryan and i running into josh and quaffing our first pint on the patio with him before the masses started to arrive. said afforementioned masses included (in alphabetical order) amber, bobby, bouchard, jo-ann, noel, trevor, and rose.

anyway, it was quite a quiet night which served more as a bit of a hot ham night for friday but it was lovely and relaxed and a perfect evening on the fabulous rooftop patio at the black dog.

as i said it really was a fantastic evening except for one significant faux pas that occurred later in the evening. bobby had been at a gravity pope function for a significant portion of the night and he arrived in the same club monaco shirt as the guest of honour. ONLY BLOODY ME!

i can tell you, it was initially a little awkward, but being adept at complex social situations such as these i masterfully comforted the rest of the group, expertly deflecting attention away from the clear breach of fashion etiquette occurring before their very eyes.

and by the way, that’s totally sarah bouchard giving a rude gesture to the camera in the background. tisk tisk ms. bouchard. we see you.

new vocabulary: hot ham

hot ham is the opposite of cold turkey. when going cold turkey one completely removes something from their life whereas hot ham is the slow reintegration of something into your life.

examples:
1. i’ve been on antibiotics all week so i’m going hot ham on thursday before getting completely wasted on friday.

a series of unrelated images.

i often take pictures with my phone with the thought that i will later blog about them. as you may already be thinking, that rarely happens so now i’m putting them all up at once. hurrah!

this one is taken from the east-side wall of savoy. there used to be quite a cool piece of graffiti featuring heath ledger as the joker that incidentally my friend amber was mildly obsessed with. this person was obviously not amused by its removal.

this is the spot on whyte where southside sound used to reside until it went out of business a couple of weeks ago and now vivid print is preparing to open. some of you may recall that i blogged vivid print ages ago. they are fantastic and therefore this is good news, despite the obvious flaw that i’m moving in less than a week.

this picture comes from a fantastic night out on my last visit to calgary. after closing out twisted, kathryne, laura and i headed to tubby dog where we arrived just in time for last orders. incidentally, when asked for a name, we chose simply ‘vagina’ and then when our dogs were ready the (it has to be said FANTASTIC) tubby dog employee yelled out ‘VADGE’ to the assembled throng of late night hot dog enthusiasts. brilliant.

this is from the empress on their most recent beers for queers night during pride week. the poster is from their pride float which was an old school bus done up like a hippy van with protesters holding signs inside; one of whom was presumably not wearing any pants. we did go to the pride parade (a first for jo-ann and myself) but we ended up just bee-lining for the beer gardens (queer gardens?) and watching the parade arrive at the finish. it was fantastic, obviously.

this is a picture of the view from the roof of the business building where i had class a few times during the spring semester. class on the roof is amazing.

i had to snap a picture of this as i walked by. one has to support fellow recessionistas and as you all know, i’ve been rocking the discman, recessionista style.

this was in the paper and i just love the headline. THE DAYS OF SMILY AND NODDING ARE OVER! hysterical.

this was in the garbage room at work. could there be a more disgusting description for a tub full of fat? it’s probably from fucking chili’s where it seems as though everything on the menu has been through the deep-fryer at one point or another. speaking of chili’s, when it first opened jo-ann and i decided to give it a try on three separate occasions, enjoying none of them, and wondering on each subsequent occasion why we’d gone back after disliking it on the previous one and then two occasions. obviously, we became angry at both chili’s and ourselves for stupidly returning to a restaurant have never liked. we have a pact never to return to chili’s

this is a sign from the west edmonton mall transit centre. now i’m sorry but isn’t the act of waiting for a bus at least a little similar to loitering? this seems like a ridiculous and unenforceable rule. surely if someone accused you of loitering you could just say that you were waiting for a bus. isn’t the point of bus terminal for you to loiter until the arrival of a bus?

and this has been my life in pictures for the last few months.

red square goes west.

AMAZING.

by the way, if anyone has an extra ticket to the pet shop boys show in vancouver, i’m dying to go and missed the buggery ticket sale.

also, why is there no studio version of this edit of the song. IT IS IMMENSE.

summmmmmmmer!

so summer’s here and that can mean only one thing… FREEZE POPS! that right, freeze pops. i f*cking love freeze pops. they’re so perfect and far superior to their double sticked brethren.

why do i love freeze pops so much you might ask? well, here’s a handy list of reasons. hurrah!

1. they’re incredibly cheap. like i bought a bag of 27 at superstore for 3.97! that’s practically like stealing them.

2. they come in delicious brightly coloured flavours like orange, red blue and green. and in freeze pop terms, colour = flavour.

3. they’re fun to eat and always melt the perfect amount so you get some delicious coloured juice at the bottom

4. they’re convenient. again, unlike the ridiculously designed popsicle that requires a wrapper and 2 sticks to hold the whole damn thing together, the wrapper and serving tool are ingeniously combined into a tube. a engineering feat that remains unmatched in its amazingness to this very day.

5. because of point 4 they’re infinitely less messy than other ice-based treats, including popsicles, and anyone who knows me knows how much i hate having things stuck to me.

6. they’re eco-friendly because they’re not shipped frozen.

wow. i didn’t think i could actually come up with any more than a few points on what is essentially flavoured ice but i guess that just goes to show you how fantastic freeze pops are. BUY SOME IMMEDIATELY AND REVEL IN THE ARRIVAL OF SUMMER!

cheesed off.

IMPORTANT NOTE: before beginning this blog post i find it prudent to point out that i love cheese and would never say a disparaging word about this most delicious of foods.

ok, with that out of the way i can get on with my cheese-related rant. i’m tired of seeing commercials for cheese of the television. they seem to be on an aweful lot – the one airing right now is terrible but that’s, surprisingly for me, beside the point – and they basically push you to purchase cheese. THIS IS RIDICULOUS!

to me there are only a few reasons that you wouldn’t buy cheese:
1. you don’t like it (!)
2. you’re lactose intolerant
3. it’s too expensive

cheese producers can do nothing about the first two problems, but they could very much do something about the third. THEY COULD SIMPLY MAKE CHEESE CHEAPER INSTEAD OF WASTING MONEY ON RIDICULOUS AND WASTEFUL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS. seriously, it’s not like cheese is suffering from a lack of exposure. short of some hideous form of amnesia nobody forgets about the existence of cheese. awareness is not the problem! but if cheese was cheaper i’m pretty damn sure people would buy more of it, i sure as hell would.

mmm cheese…

oh, and as a sidenote, i am similarly annoyed by the edmonton international airport’s current marketing push. WHAT IS THE POINT OF ADVERTISING AN AIRPORT? surely if i live here, this city’s airport will be my first choice when booking a trip. it’s not like i’d see a edmonton international airport billboard and suddenly think: ‘ooh, we have an airport? i should really book a trip!’ RIDICULOUS!

MARKETING FAILURE!

a not so dry run.

so candace was up for the weekend and we had a bit of night out on friday, as jo-ann, trevor and i had missed cinqo and wanted to make up for it. hence, we had cinquel! it was tequila and cerveza and maracas and all kinds of fantastic, as you can probably tell from the photo above.

anyway, we had a rather modest amount of drinks at my apartment before heading out to suite 69 for some deck time, followed by dancing up a storm. one of the reasons we wanted to hit suite was to evaluate it as a venue for my upcoming 27th birthday. as many of you know, suite 69 was at one time the locale of choice for nearly every night out we had but after a few bad experiences we ended up phasing it out. so, we wanted to check and see if things had changed at all, and to our delight suite 69 is back with a vengeance. it is fantastic again. hurrah! bit of a new layout, more wall dancing space and a window overlooking the staircase.

aside – i once rather unfortunately fell down said staircase and subsequently forgot about it until waking up with the mater and pater of bruises right across my backside. dan, my roommate at the time, and i were perplexed by the massive bruise and spent the morning postulating where it could have come from until we received a phone call from the cannon-turners explaining the previous nights tumble.

back to the night at hand, though, it was both a fantastic evening in and of itself as well as a great ‘dry run’ for my upcoming birthday. if there is one thing that can be said for my group of friends, we invest an aweful lot of time and planning into the perfect night out and we are now one step closer to my birthday frat party! hurrah! CINQUEL DE MAYO!

guilty pleasures: atomic kitten

once upon a time there was band called atomic kitten. it was the early part of the 21st century and they unsuccessfully tried to resurrect the girlband that had been so popular in the latter part of the 90s. in all honesty they were a bit of a cheap knock-off, but some of their songs were undeniably catchy, including above: ‘the last goodbye.’ having a video set in liverpool (fantastic), it is a relatively standard pop affair with the girls singing in different locations before coming together at the end for a little bit of a sing-a-long. brilliant.

atomic kitten: WE WILL NOT FORGET.