“Superman Returns” is good.

On a combination of tips and advice from my boss, Teddy and my own body, I all but cut refined sugar from my diet. Where I ingested at least 200+ grams a day when I subsisted on pop for liquids, I’be now toned it back to little more than 35 grams per 24 hours period. A secondary bonus of this has been keeping my caffeine intake down to one cup of tea a day.

After shaking a strange feeling that I just needed a chocolate bar or a can of Coke coupled with a few days of bad headaches, now I feel great. Instead of waking up feeling like I need more sleep, no matter how much I sleep, I feel spry after 6 hours a night. My energy level is still pretty shitty (I’m an over-weight computer geek) but now more consistent and mellow than the peaks and crashes I went through before.

Long time readers will remember I went through a few major dietary changes, only to relapse a little worse than before. The trick this time will be to take things a step at a time, little by little, and get used to each step before the next one. I’m thinking I’ll be used to bottled water and real fruit juice in another week and be ready to packing lunches for work.

Can’t say I’ve enjoyed the direction they’ve gone since “Undertow.”

So there’s a little incident at work this morning that requires calling the illustrious Toronto Police Service for help. Truth be told, the Security staff and myself thought it was a problem for at least paramedics, but 9-1-1 knows best, right? In the end we had to talk to both, and I came very close to asking, “Did you not realise this is the kind of shit you volunteered to deal with when you put on the hat and gun?” The cops hate the place enough I didn’t want to give us another red flag.

Frankly, they were shit-heads, the cops and the paramedics. Someone was adrift, possibly abused and catonic, autistic or experiencing post tramautic stress disorder, and their reply, “Why did you call us!?” The cops cops then shuffled what turned out to be just another scrote along, but not in time to call off the paramedics. Both took turns pissing and moaning about the whole sordid affair. I couldn’t help but think the main reason for their hostility was the Security Guard uniforms. Security tends to be these fuckers vent their woes.

But like I said, they’re woes they signed up for.

What did they think? It would be Lethal Weapon and donuts? The big city’s corners are dark and shitty fucking places, ask Teddy or Erik, I seriously hope they weren’t surprised to discover this. Frankly, between responding to a gang war, assault in progress, domestic disturbance, or all the “cool” calls or some annoying vagrant, I’ll take the call to chase away the scrote. I’m trying, but I just can’t fathom (I really can’t) what a new cop or paramedic would think he was getting into if not the worst humanity has to offer aside from a battlefield.

They just wanted the cool car, the gun, the uniform, the easy poon-tang and the action. Little do they know what the action means, and just how damaged their psyche will get for joining the Police for all the wrong reasons.

As a child, I was often told by many people that I would come to miss school and want nothing more than to go back to the school days.

Getting teased incessantly and then punished for defending myself? Ridiculous teachers and guidance counselours raving about how if I didn’t get straight A’s I’d be blowing people for directions to the YMCA? Redundant, monotonous classwork and homework?

Like hell.

To vest or not to vest?

When the Age of the Dead comes, some will want to look their best, some won’t have a choice, and the smart ones will want to outlast the rest. Bearing the following in mind will go a long way to putting you in that last group. Depending on your sense of style, it might go hand-in-hand with the first. By “Clothes” I’m going to be focusing on the torso, arms and legs, as headgear get its own discussion later. What you want your final ensemble to be will depend, as always, on a variety of factors, the least of which should, as always, be style.

Read more

Note: The contents of these tips will be changing as I revise them. You get to watch me start from the rough draft and go up. The ideas will be largely the same if you only want to read them once, though.

It’s important not to overlook the little things when the gauntlet drops and the Age of the Dead begins. Something as simple as footwear can leave you tripped up, left behind, injured or worst of all: short a brain. There’s a fair amount of debate regarding what makes for a good pair of shoes in the Post Apocalyptic Era, and personal tastes will obviously vary. Nevertheless, one should take the following into consideration when choosing the shoes or boots that will ambulate them through the End of Days: Durability, Weight, Traction and Noise.

Read more

Despite the variety of tenants I deal with at work, one thing remains the same: They cannot cope with trivial interruptions in their precious routines. It’s sickening, people phoning me livid and screaming because the escalators had to be shut down for service. I’m a fat lazy git and I can handle carrying my bag up a single escalator without straining. Minor fluctuations in the temperature, air flow, or light and I’m getting calls about how it’s suddenly become frigid/boiling, stagnant and giving everyone headaches or so dark they can’t see their hand in front of their face. I felt that a solution to this epidemic of pettiness would be mandatory military service.

Now, before you get squirrelly, I’m too Canadian to openly support any blanket solution. I don’t support a draft or mandatory military service per se, but this is a good arguement for me to change my mind. Think about, even just a harsh seight weeks of basic training: confidence courses, waking up at 0500 every morning to CS gas being thrown in the barracks or the classic banging garbage lid, military food. Some people might need a longer stretch of tough living, but the result is the same: Perspective. When you’ve spent a whole weekend in -20 degree weather shitting in a bush and eating rations, a burnt out light doesn’t seem so big a deal anymore.

I don’t rush the trains when I take the TTC, because I know there’s another one five minutes behind it and I’m good enough at managing my time to be able to handle a five minute delay. If the A/C breaks down in my building, I wear less clothes, open the windows, get a fan going, and acclimatise to the heat until it’s fixed. I don’t throw a dramatic hissy fit at the super about it, because then he’ll be less willing to help when a serious problem comes up. Being on the receiving end of a tenant wanting a full theft report written for fingernail marks on her apple gave me the persecptive to realise everything’s not worth getting a stress rash over.

It’s either my option or Erik’s Genetic Standards Enforcement Officer. I’ll let him explain that one.

I’m reading Dan Abnett’s latest work for the venerable Warhammer 40,000 universe and he’s once again revitalised my fondness for the setting. Games Workshop has a tendency to simply lift their setting concepts from everywhere else, and their Fantasy setting’s hodge-podge of generic Elves and Dwarves demostrates that, but 40K has grown so much over the years. That, however, is largely due to the efforts of authours like Mr. Abnett.

Until the Black Library came along the settings were simlpy tinsel for the miniatures based table-top strategy game and it showed. The names of all the various dramatis personae from the selection of adapted races (Elves became the Eldar, which I learned much later was one of Tolkien’s names for his elves, oh well) were ripped directly from religious and classic fantasy sources. Take the Primarchs (Geek alert), led by Horus, nicknamed the Bright Star, the chosen, greatest of the God-Emperor’s genetically bred soldiers. Horus then turns on the Emperor and becomes the greatest enemy Man has ever known. Familiar? Horus’ iconography is an eye, to boot.

The Eldar all came from Sumerian and Egyptian myth, and the list went on. I grew tired of it after a while, because what little fluff there was in the edition I played vanished with the new edition. The result was what little vignettes were stuffed into side-bars among had been so compressed and diltuted it painted a really dreary picture of the setting. Thanks to having whole novels little details came out that gave the setting a life that keeps me reading about it.

Too bad I don’t play anymore.

The phone has been the subject of much “debate” (read: “argument”) with my friends, family and co-workers too many times in the years since I moved out. It seems it’s my responsibility, nay duty, to answer the phone when it rings and talk to whoever is on the other end. Furthermore, the fact that I have no cellular phone makes me a luddite fanatic. My response, frankly, has been crafted, moulded and perfected thanks to years of repeating and refining it like multiple filterings of a good brew:

Fuck off

Being articulate takes effort, and while I like the old saying, “Never argue with an idiot, they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” Fact is: a lifetime of experience isn’t enough for these mooks. Think of a McLaren “dumbing down” to race a bunch of doled-up Honda Civics down Highway 7.

Read more