If you’re old enough to remember this, then you’re old enough to hang out with me.

Here are supposedly the 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia. As I stumbled upon this, I also found the single most addictive website for an information junkie like me: tvtropes.org.

So apparently there’s a game in Cincinnati called “Cornhole“. That’s right. And even a movie about it. Need I even comment? If you’re like me (and I know that you are), this is what first came to mind:

This guy agrees. Apparently, Bengals Quarterback Carson Palmer is a big proponent of playing “cornhole” with your children. There’s even a shockwave cornhole game.

The comments to this article about the game are priceless. Some samples:

"Cornhole" is the only name they could come up with? Good thing basketball didn't originate in Cinci or we might be watching game three of the "Rimjob" finals tonight.

I wonder when Hell's Kitchen will feature a salad tossing competition.

You know that Cornholed -- the Movie, has already been filmed and is "in the can".

Ebert & Roper gave it two thumbs in.

Is this anything like the Gloryhole Invitational?

Kids play this at birthday parties and whatnot in Chicago but it's called "beanbag toss".... Because we're not fuckin hicks, that's why.

My understanding is that in order to rack up killer cornhole scores, you have to have a a wide stance.

The game is especially exhiliarating when you come from behind.

The traditional snack during a game of cornhole is fudge. After the game, the participants pack everything up.

See? Deonandia is entertaining AND educational!

I leave you with this, put together by Facebook friend Graham S. about my recent adventure trying to get rid of the mushrooms infesting my houseplants:

One of the joys of no longer living in my rapidly deteriorating apartment building is no longer having to deal with neighbours on the edge of sanity. In my final days in my old place, I was entertained by a series of notices places on the public board. The first, by management, encouraged dog owners to not allow their animals to urinate by the front door. A reasonable request, I thought, but one that elicited all sorts of irrational commentary from the menagerie of pooch-toting weirdos who cluster in that particular hovel. Perhaps you can make out some of the vitriol:

While I’m showing off the low-res crappy photos taken from my smartphone, dig this great decal I saw on the side of a car:

A couple of weekends ago (Oct 3), I attended nuit blanche in Toronto. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a magnificent free evening, inspired by similar events in Europe, in which, from 7pm till dawn, the entire city is turned into an art installation.

I arrived with my curmudgeon hat squarely fitted to my blockhead, and roundly enjoyed mocking some of the sillier things I saw. But I cannot deny that the overall experience was magnificent. There were literally hundreds of exhibits spanning the entire city, with unlikely venues like shopping malls, grocery stores, sidewalks, parking lots, corner stores, private homes and alleyways all transformed into glittering art galleries.

My voyage through the night was one dipped in surrealism, as if I was exploring some trippy parallel universe or post-Apocalyptic meta-world. I was particularly impressed by four experiences:

(1) a continuous awards show in which any passerby can step onto the stage and be heralded for being a star

(2) the Drake Hotel’s use of its wall to project audience Twitter tweets, sent to the hash tag “#bumpinyournuit”. The lag time was so great that I was not able to see my own tweet (“Boogers! Boogers!”) Instead, I give you two images of other people’s tweets:

(3) Something called “The Apology Project“, wherein a battalion of weirdos with paper bags on their heads bump into you and apologize profusely, in a display of classic Canadian passive aggression.

(4) “Dance of the Cranes“, in which two construction cranes atop growing skyscrapers dance a synchronized ballet to classical music, beneath glittering, mesmerizing moonlight.

There are some better photos of the Crane Dance here.

Overall, Nuit Blanche was a wonderful experience, made more so for the spectacle of seeing hundreds of thousands of people peacefully shuffling about Toronto in the wee hours, engaging in somewhat intellectual explorations, all for free.

In Other News…

The Other Ray sends us Charles Darwin’s blog from the Beagle voyages. And P-Dawg sends us this, about the classic “3-body problem”. Yes, it’s nerd humour. If you don’t get it, too bad for you.

Oh yeah, I have a blog! All this twittering and Facebookery have distracted me of late. What else? Oh yes, I just bought property! The horror and stress of adopting a mortgage has drained me of energy, such that the thought of creating cohesive blog-worthy sentences has been unappetizing.

But here I am. Where to begin? Oh yes, some random surfing brought me to this site:

Rochelle’s Japanese Experience

It’s relevant because Rochelle has used a photo of me in her post, clearly cobbed from this location. I don’t mind, really. I just think it’s funny.

Meanwhile, almighty Zod’s quest to prevent me from walking continues unabated. First, he dislodged a lumbar disc on my right side. Then he did so on my left side. Then he sent thugs to push me over in a cafe, bruising my knee and giving me a lip for several days. And now he got me drunk so I passed out on my floor in an awkward position, waking up with my disc herniated yet again. AUUUUGHHHH!

In yet more random news, my MicroSoft column will now be carried by MSN.ca. Yayyy, more readers!

Meanwhile, Cousin Ajay sends us news of Bebe Gloton, the breast-feeding doll. No comment.

And in other news, Chamika sends us the Best Che Guevara T-Shirt Ever:

Lastly, the Other Ray sends us… um… Christian porn.

That is all.

Today, it’s all about me!

There’s a new article up at Skiffy.ca. This time it’s a review of the really tremendously good Torchwood: Children of Earth miniseries.

My latest column is up at The MicroSoft website.

My most recent radio interviews are now archived on the reviews page (finally updated after 5 years of idleness).

And if you’re in Toronto this coming Friday, July 24th, come on down to Ryerson University where I will be judging the first ever SpeakOut Slam Poetry contest! I’m sure it will be a lot of fun, so don’t sit at home watching TV, come out and jeer –I mean support– your local slam poets.

In Other News…

Sean M. sends us The 10 Most Awesome In Search Of episodes. He also points us to the, um, Indian He-Man:

How can we top that? Well, how about news from The Other Ray that someone is claiming to have been impregnated from …wait for it… sperm from a swimming pool. Yeah.

Ray also sends us the following chart showing just which human broadcasts aliens are presently listening to. We’re all screwed; you know that, right?

Am busy cleaning my apartment, so I don’t have time for you people right now. You get three things today:

1. Thanks

Thanks to Dr Qais Ghanem for inviting me and a friend back on to CHIN radio Friday to talk about Guyana. I’ll link to the MP3 as soon as I have it.

Thanks to the CBC’s Andreanne Baribeau and Nora Young for having me on the radio show “Spark” yesterday to talk about Twitter haikus. The show will be broadcast on the 10th, I believe.

Thanks to the Muchmor public school in the Glebe, where I was invited to speak to a class of 9 year olds. A special thanks to the little girl who proposed building a giant yoyo filled with mail, that we could drop from a helicopter to deliver mail to remote people; and to the little boy who insisted on giving me a minute, blow-by-blow recap of Jurassic Park 2.

2. Angels and Demons

I hate Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. I’m sure the plot was okay, but it was so poorly written that I felt myself getting dumber with every page. I had to stop after the first chapter lest I be rendered into a retarded lemur…. or, worse yet, a Republican.

So I went to see the movie version of Angels and Demons with trepidation. The first half hour was head-slappingly retarded, with dialogue that was likely written by George Lucas. The nex hour or so was surprisingly good, with excellent direction. Then the ending was more chimp-level cliched nonsense. Why do bother?

3. Daily funnies:

Cousin Ajay sends us this. Is funny:

Cousin Ajay also sends us this, with the comment that he fears it might turn kids retarded:

Cousin Ajay is on a roll. (It’s a figure of speech; he’s not actually riding bread.) He also sends us Helen Keller’s twitter feed. Go look.

Special Ed sends us Captain Kirk’s Best and Worst Moments. (Yes, it’s the real Kirk, not this new poser.) The list is missing the bit where Kirk has nasty Captain sex with the hyperfast accelerated woman who can kill him with a scratch, yet somehow manages to avoid any and all abrasions. That’s skill.

Special thanks to Dr Qais Ghanem for hosting myself and Dr Robert Huish on Dr Ghanem’s radio show last Friday. Hopefully the MP3 of the interview will be posted very soon.

A further thanks to the organizers of the CSEB student conference this weekend for inviting me to be a judge in theit epidemiology poster competition. Ironically, this weekend I also judged a literary contest with co-judge Shanthi Sekaran. Shanthi’s new book is getting a lot of attention; I can’t wait to read it.

What am I doing now? Procrastinating. How? By watching the UK version of The Apprentice. Man, I love this show! Well, I love most things British. It’s so delicious watching Brits argue. Their turns of phrases sound so cute and alien to me that it’s impossible for me to get too emotional about it, only highly entertained. And I love that their equivalent of Donald Trump, Sir Alan Sugar, is an enormous prick who doesn’t take shit from anyone, and whose firing decisions appear to be both consistent and justified! What a change!

Okay, back to TV…

Check it out…

An sign of intelligence from space? Now if only we could find a sign of intelligence here on Earth. (BOW! HELLO! TRY THE VEAL, I’M HERE ALL WEEK!)

(Video of alien intelligence here.)

The BBC apparently stands for “British Broadcasting for Christ” because it’s received 115 complaint emails since announcing its new Head of Religion is a Muslim.

Um… why does the BBC need a “Head of Religion”?

I’m sure many of you have seen this:

Well, it’s a lie!!!

So revel in your pervishness, my droogies.

Remember my review of the new Star Trek movie? Recall that it’s a JJ Abrams project, much like two of my favourite TV shows: Lost and Fringe. Well, I just finished watchin the season finales for both shows…

…Wow! Now that’s writing! HOWEVER… JJ is showing his unmentionables. All three products –Fringe, Lost and Trek– rely heavily on either time travel or alternate realities. I’m a little sick of this science fiction crutch. Suddenly I’m not too optimistic about the continuing resolution of either of the TV shows. I’ll let you know.

I’ll leave you with some Facebook goodies. First up is my new profile pic, the Hasselwat:

And lastly, here’s the profile pic of my friend Sara F. Looks like he’s been out all night drinking, no?

I regularly Google random words and phrases. Don’t ask why. Just assume it’s part of my charming quirkiness. Well, today I Googled “real women”, then clicked on “images”. One of the earliest hits was this.

Please only click the link if you’re fully emotionally and spiritually prepared. Afterward, you may need this.

Having one of those mornings when I feel I have squirrels in my pants:

And how is this for progress? India has a somewhat mainstream pornographic comic: The sexual adventures of Savita Bhabhi:

Meanwhile, Darth Vadum sends us this real-life attempt by a doofus to get out of jury duty:

That is all. As you were.

Being laid up at home with a bad back has compelled me to download and watch a LOT of TV, even though I gave away my TV set 4 months ago in an attempt to wean me from the glass teat. Last night, I watched 6 straight episodes of season 2 of Celebrity Apprentice. Jesse James is my new hero! (And Melissa Rivers is just freakish.)

Last week, in full lumbar pain mode, I watched the entire 5th season of Entourage. And since I Google absolutely everything as I watch, know what I learned? That Jason Patric is the grandson of Jackie Gleason! Bet you didn’t know that.

And speaking of lying on my back in lumbar pain… three cheers for Arthrotec!

And speaking of TV, Mary Ellen sends us the following photo, the only comment for which I will make is, “But in what order?”

Now, as you know, I sort of play sitar, and I’ve often had a fondness for a certain Guns’N'Roses song, “Sweet Child of Mine”, which I actually sang aloud in India 13 years ago. Well, Sarah M. sends us this: