I often come to my own site to read the daily Deep Thought, and I just realized the last time I posted an item here was over a year ago, in 2006! I have a few things in the queue that I keep meaning to post here, but the truth is that all of my free time has been taken up with Pete Nema fun:

PETE NEMA

I update that site a few times a week, so it’s a good place to go to find out what I’ve been up to. I realize I’ve also been completely neglecting Meatsicle, and I have a build up of stories for that site. I guess they’ll just have to wait…

Aparna Jain is not only the wife of one of my colleagues, she is also a local Toronto artist. She generally works in pencil, both graphite and colour, but here’s the media that interests me most: Pyrography. To me that sounds like creating art by obessively setting fire to things, but (and you may be surprised to hear this) it turns out that’s not quite right. It is, in fact, the art of etching a drawing into wood using a hot tool.

Check out her work on the Art Work by Aparna site. She is also a featured artist at Curry’s.

So last night while I was out photographing the first punk show I’ve been to in as long as I can remember (and getting some sick shots), some wiener broke into my car and stole my car stereo and a fake leather jacket. Which, you know, sort of pissed me off. Since I have the serial number of the car stereo, I decided to report the theft to the police (I guess even if I didn’t, I should as least report it for statistical purposes). The police officer who took the report told me that she filled in another report earlier in the day where the victim had his window smashed and all they took was $0.35 from the ashtray.
 
At least the thief who stole my stuff had the courtesy to jimmy open the door without doing damage, and only left minor marks removing the car stereo. So, well, that was nice of them, eh?
 
Back to the factory stereo, I guess. No more iPod in the car. Sigh.

You know how when someone catches you off guard and says something nasty to you, it’s only later, after you’ve had a chance to replay the conversation in your head, that you come up with what you should’ve said? Like, for example, I live in the Beaches area of Toronto and if you don’t already know, parking is a little tight around here. So I took my car out in the morning, and when I returned there was nowhere to park. This is a normal occurance. But there was a woman with her 10 year-old kid sitting in an SUV near the top of my road waiting for something, but taking up two parking spots. So I open my window and ask: "Could you do me a favour and either move forward or backward so I can take the other parking spot?"

 

And she responds: "There isn’t enough room." I’ve lived on this road for 11 years. The two spots in question are some of the most spacious spots we have on the road, so I respond "Oh, there is enough room, if you could just pull up a few feet". So she puts the car in drive and budges forward about a foot. Not quite enough room for me, and she still has about four feet in front of her, so I ask her to move forward some more. She budges forward another foot, just enough for me to squeeze behind her, so I wave at her and pull my car in behind.

 

As I get my kids out of the car , I confirm that I’ve parked in very tight so as we pass her, I say "You could even pull forward another 2 feet, if you like". And she says, quite sarcastically, "I’m glad you’re such an authority on this."

 

Now that’s what caught me off-guard. I thought we were two adults being polite to each other. So this is the part of the conversation that I wish I could do over. Since it caught me off-guard, all I said was "I live on the street, so I’m familiar with it." A pretty pathetic response, I realize. But the really witty responses only ever come to you later, after you’ve had time to think. You see, what I really should have said was something else. So in my head she says "I’m glad you’re such an authority on this", and rather than just explaining that I live on the road, what I really should have said, and it took me a while to come up with this… what I really should have said was "F#@* off, bitch." See what I mean? Witty.

 

No really, I think what I should’ve said was "Thanks for helping me out and being so polite about it". Either that or "I’m not an authority, I’m just not a moron". Okay, so anyway, she was driving a beige Toyota SUV, license plate number… no, I’m not going to give you her license plate number.

 

Just be aware that when you visit areas of Toronto that aren’t as spacious as your suburban paradise that parking spots are very important to the residents. It’s tough enough to park around here without someone taking up two spots. I live with the tough parking because I love the beach, the bike path, the local shops, the lake, and many other things. And I deal with the lack of parking many times a week, it’s just the way it is. And it’s fine… people need to park their cars when they come visit the area. But they don’t really need to be bitchy about it, do they?

“Where you been?” you ask? Well, aside from the office, I’ve been here all along. But with frequent vists to my Pete Nema Flickr account, as well as my own Flickr account. I’ve been out photographing a few indie bands, and I went and enjoyed a night watching Dweezil Zappa play Zappa.
 
Seriously, Dweezil did his father proud. He hired some amazing musicians and put together a tight recreation of what I imagine a Zappa concert would’ve been like. (I own about 20 or so live recordings of Zappa, so even though I never got to see him on stage before the cancer got him, I have a pretty good idea of how these shows went). Terry Bozzio came out and played drums putting more effort into that than I do riding my mountain bike. Steve Vai also joined in for quite a few songs. Napoleon Murphy Brock was unfortunately absent, which was too bad, but what can you do. It was an excellent tribute show, a tribute show with Zappa’s genes present.
 
And during the day, I’m still working on the best J2EE performance diagnostic tool available, PerformaSure.

I just posted a news item on Pete Nema Indie Music Reviews basically looking for concert reviewers that might be interested in covering bands for the upcoming NXNE festival in Toronto June 8th - 10th. Even if that’s not you, have a read through the article to learn about some of the bands I think would be a good bet for a night out.

I’m sure nobody comes to this site often enough to notice, but my Photoblog has been stagnant for over a month. This is mostly due to the fact that I didn’t have a camera for over a month. My Panasonix Lumix FZ5 was being repaired for the 2nd time (one pixel was stuck red) and it took forever for them to get the part. But now it is fixed and back in my possession. In addition, I’ve finally purchased a DSLR… I decided to go with a Canon 30D which I received early last week. The first photo from my Canon is featured today.

It turns out there is an organization in Toronto called Wavelength and every Sunday night at Sneaky Dee’s they run a pay-what-you-can concert featuring independent Canadian artists. Recently, the lead singer from Basement Arms invited me to come out and write a review of their set. I was hoping to practice a little concert photography as well, but I hadn’t received my DSLR yet. Anyway, there was another guy there doing basically the same thing, so I got some photos from him and included them in my concert review of Basement Arms.

A new concert review was posted on Pet Enema tonight of Elbow at The Opera House in Toronto on April 18th, 2006. If you saw this concert and have photos you’re willing to let me post, please contact me.

I was pranked last night, live on internet radio, by Dr. Lego from Prank The World. You can read about it on Meatsicle.