Little Person, Big Deal

WARNING: THIS BLOG IS PROBABLY OFFENSIVE TO THE CAST OF 'BIG PEOPLE LITTLE WORLD'

Last night's outing settled it once and for all.

I'm a degenerate.

Let's start this story from the beginning, last weekend at the horse races.

My parents came to visit me all the way from Manitoba. That's about a 17 hour drive from there to Grande Prairie. For some fun family activities I decided to take them to go gamble on horse races, where they actually did fairly well for themselves. My friends also show up where I learn something major. A once in a lifetime show is coming to Grande Prairie...

A dwarf dancer. A tiny person tit-show.

A small person stripper.

This is the aptly named Tiny Tina

Right then and there, in front of my parents, it's decided.

We. Are. Going.

Let make it clear here, I wasn't bringing my parents, they were leaving town the next day, but all my friends and girlfriend were coming with me to this show. How could you not? This is something to be remembered forever, the time a pint-sized stripper came to Grande Prairie.

This was going to be huge, everyone knew it. But because this has been a fairly busy week I forgot all about it until Tuesday night. Someone said "Who's all going to see the midget stripper tomorrow?" and the room full of people erupted in jubilation. I especially was excited, and was probably the most enthused person there next to my girlfriend, who has a weird obsession with little people.

The excitement only grew over the next 24 hours.

I woke up in the morning thinking "It's tonight, it's finally here, I'm going to see dwarf dancer."

All day long at work I made plans and contacted people to see who was going, when, what the plan was, I was so excited to go. Some of my coworkers gave me a strong look of disapproval, but whatever, it's a strip show that you'll only get to see once. This is history we're talking about here!

I could hardly contain myself when I got this text from a friend at 4:15pm

"U will not beli8v3e who i just saw!!!!!! the midgit stripper just got off the plan at airport!"

Oh man oh man oh man.

So finally, around 8:30pm (the show started at 9:30) I had a crew together and we went to the strip club. We were all just stoked!

And we get there, we each get drinks and settle in. We're not in perv-row, the seats right up against the stage, but we're pretty close. About as close as you can get and still sit down. The place was packed! I'd never seen so many people at the club before, and they literally had to turn people away at the door.

I'm quite certain that the strip-joint had never even heard of the word 'Capacity' before last night.

And as we're sitting there, the announcer says something terrible,

"Who came here to SEE A LITTLE PERSON DANCE?!?!"

and it hits me like a 120 pound midget thrown in a dwarf tossing competition,

That is exactly what I came to see, and that makes me a terrible person.

So then Tiny Tina takes to the stage in a little (no pun intended) schoolgirl outfit and does her show.



The way I can best describe her performance is through this quote from Seth Rogen in The 40 Year Old Virgin:

Oh, man. I had a weekend. We went down to, uh, Tijuana, Mexico, ya know. And there was this guy there and he was all, "Hey, you gotta come and check out one of these shows." And, you know, it's a woman fuckin' a horse. And you're thinking "Oh, a woman fuckin' a horse!" And you get there, and it is not as a great as you thought it would be. It's kinda gross. I mean, it was really givin' it to her. To be honest, we all just felt bad for her. Kinda felt bad for the horse.

It was like that. I was all, "Yeah! Let's see a midget stripper!" and then I got there and it was a midget stripping. I'm glad I saw it, it had to be seen, but I dunno what to think now. I guess it was just kind of awkward. People were laughing.

But otherwise, she just wasn't that great of a stripper. She didn't work the poles, she didn't play any stripper games, it wasn't a very good show. 6 out of 10 at best!

She did, proportionally speaking, have a very nice bum and toned body though. So extra points for that.

Anyway, if Tiny Tina comes to your town, be sure to check her show out. It has to be seen.

And that's all I have to say about that.

John Lennon - Working Class Hero

A Sticky Situation

I have this habit where I like to examine things, in great detail, that I find on the ground. The amount of thought that I dedicate to some of my finds is somewhat startling, even over the most mundane of discovery.

For about two weeks now I’ve had the joy of walking by a large lump of gum just outside of work. And by a large lump I mean a tree sized stump of gum so massive a hippo couldn’t swallow it.


For comparison’s sake, I borrowed a quarter from Kristi Mingo so I could give you guys some scale of this miniature horse-sized lump.

We both agreed that this is way more gum than any normal human should be able to chew. That thing’s got to be at least three pieces of Dubble Bubble masticated together and spat out! Bear in mind too that this is after most of the moisture has been baked out from laying on asphalt and being driven over. Who knows how big this was when it started?

If it is in fact Dubble Bubble, and that’s the type of gum I suspect it is, between the massive amount of saliva they’d be producing and all that gum they’d be chewing, the masticator in question must have looked like quite similar to this:


Kristi suggested that I should smell the gum too. I know taking pictures of a lump of gum on the street is one thing, but smelling it is a completely different ballpark. So the gum will remain unidentified.
If it happened to be that awful Bazooka Joe however, that poor person’s mouth would be bone dry and there would be several teeth lodged in that lump.

Anyway, what’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever found on the ground?

Review: Cyrus

Cyrus just came to Grande Prairie last weekend, and I was first in line to see it...mainly because I didn't have anything to do Friday after work and I try to spend as little time at home as possible when undesirables are hanging out there.


Speaking of undesirables in your home, that happens to be exactly what Cyrus starring John C Reilly and Jonah Hill is exactly about!

The movie begins with John C Reilly's (whose character is cleverly named John) ex-wife walking in on him masturbating. We then discover that he's a deeply depressed man, whose life has been in shambles for just under a decade since his wife left him. For some unexplained reason, John and his ex-wife are still best friends, and she invites him to a party so he can get out and meet people.

At the party, he drinks far too much, get loser-pissed, and catches the eye of the beautiful Molly, who he takes home that night. This sparks off a loving new relationship. But as always, there's a catch. John's dream-girl Molly has a freakishly passive-aggressive, manipulative, 21 year old son living at home with her. And so the tug-of-war for who gets to have Molly begins...

Cyrus was an excellent movie! It's certainly a film that's darker, with a lot more dry humour, than John C Reilly or Jonah Hill ever do, but they make a great pair. The previews made this look a lot more slapsticky and silly than it actually is.

John C Reilly does an excellent job of weaving a believable character into his usual “I'm saying ridiculous things!” routine. Jonah Hill on the other hand is (in my opinion) funnier in this movie than anything else I've seen him in. He's actually acting in this movie, and is totally believable in the role of a sociopathic son whose sole purpose is to drive people away from his mother.

It also moved along at a great pace. At no point in the movie did I start drifting off and wondering when scenes were going to end, and they didn't spend any time at all on extraneous details and scenes that either didn't matter or weren't funny.

Overall I give Cyrus:

8.5/10

The Pros: Hilarious! It's really dry-smart comedy for the most part. The main characters were all believable and endearing, and the story, while not new, was done quite well. The pacing and delivery was exactly how a comedy film should be made because it didn't get stale.
Jonah Hill's performance should definitely be noted in this one, and I think this was a good step for his acting career.

The Cons: To harp on the story, it seemed a little too similar to Step Brothers, starring Wil Ferrel and John C Reilly, in some aspects. I doubt this role was too far of a stretch for John C Reilly. He was enjoyable, I liked him and everything, but there was very little from him in Cyrus that we haven't already seen in 3 or 4 other movies.
The humour isn't all the accessible to a broad audience either. I have a feeling that people are either going to love Cyrus, or they're going to hate it, and there won't be much grey area in the middle.

If you like John C Reilly, go see Cyrus. You're going to love it. If you like dry humour, you won't go wrong with this pick either. However, if you like physical humour, or comedy more akin to that you'd see in Anchorman or Step Brothers, you'll only enjoy the first 25 minutes of this show.

Okay, enough reviews for now. Stay tuned for Thursday's blog, when I discuss a lump of gum I found on the ground.

Literally. That's what it's going to be about.

Spammalot

At some point, for some reason, every blog seems to get hit up by spam-bots. I suspect mine gets targeted because I link images directly to my site without re-hosting them somewhere else.

I've pretty much solved the problem by making my comment section a little more difficult to post on. Once an article is two weeks old, I have to approve any comments. I just thought I'd share some of the weird spam I've been getting lately.

Here's one of half a dozen I got on this post:

buy Wellbutrin to consider approving them
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buy Kamagra Soft Flavoured 12-year results? he said.
buy now Sildenafil (Caverta) and should be considered as first-line treatments,
online Avapro Kantarjian noted....

And it just goes on and on like that, with links covering the entire thing, all leading to shady penis enlargement sites. Not that there's any penis enlargement sites I would particularly trust, but I shouldn't assume there isn't actually an Honest Abe's Oversized Knobs site or something.

But the past couple days I got some spam I'm really on the fence about. First indicator that it's spam is that comments are anonymous, but this is one from my review of She's Out of my League I was a little confused about:

It is simply matchless theme :)

What the heck does that mean? I approved it because I figured that it would make sense to somebody, and maybe someone really does think She's Out of my League is 'matchless theme.'

But here's one I found this morning from my post about those guys who stand in bathrooms and hand you towels and stuff.

Genial brief and this mail helped me a lot in my college assignment. Gratefulness you for your information.

Whaaaaaat? Okay Anonymous, now you're just messing with me. Best as I can tell he/she/it meant

"This was brief, the article helped with my college assignment. Thanks for the info!"

So if anyone has any interpretation theories of these comments, or better yet, Anonymous, if you're out there, keep on posting these weird comments, they're definitely worth the read.

Or, finally, if it's a computer, I don't think we'll ever have to worry about a Terminator style apocalypse. The robots are going to be too busy selling us Viagra to destroy mankind.

Thems the Breaks

Well, I had a lively weekend filled with golfing, gambling on horse races, and tipping side-by-side ATVs onto my leg.

The Rhino side-by-side is a little top heavy, more-so than I realized actually. If you don't know what one looks like it's exactly like this:


When I decided to drive it pretty much sideways with it down a river bank I happened to be cruising by, I leaned a little too far the wrong way and its roll bars landed right on my left leg. It looked exactly like this:

So when I got home I wrapped my foot up, and thought I'd be just just dandy. Here's a photo of it pre-hospital visit.

It doesn't look too bad here, but you can see my puffy toes

But as I lay in bed Saturday night (early Sunday morning) the excruciating throbbing prompted a visit to the ER for some drugs. When I got there I sat in the nearest set of wheels and waited for the next two and a half hours for painkillers so I could sleep.

Being that ATV rollovers are fairly common here in the Peace, the doctor decided a stop for X-Rays was warranted. I hoped with every unbroken bone in my body that a hard cast wouldn't be required. I mean, I could hobble along on my swollen yam of a foot, so nothing can be broken, right?

This looks waaaaay better than before I put the tenser on. Beforehand it was roughly the size of a large office air conditioning unit.

As it turns out the very tip of my left fibula (I think that was it, the small, long one in your lower leg) was broken. This required me to be fitted with something sturdier than a tenser, this situation calls for a ROBOBOOT!

Seriously, that's what this thing is called. A Roboboot. I read it on my medical papers. I feel like Robocop stomping around in this thing.

I have to return to the hospital in a week to see if the bone is any better and if I can ditch my Roboboot. In the meantime though, I have a hefty bottle of hard drugs I can sleep away the week with.

Gotta love codeine.

Review: Inception

Three weeks after opening, I finally made it into the theatres to see Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Leonardo DeCaprio


Inception's premise has a unique concept, one where trained agents use an advanced technology to infiltrate unwitting victim's minds to extract information. Leonardo DeCaprio happens to be one of the best of his craft, but is haunted by a shadowy past that subsequently places not only him, but his fellow agents in danger.
Backed by a rich and powerful financier, Leonardo DeCaprio embarks on one final mission in order to erase his criminal record that keeps him from reentering the United States and seeing his children.

I liked this movie! A whole lot actually. The characters were all likable, well acted, and developed just enough that you got an attachement to them but didn't get distracted from the main characters and story. Oftentimes I get distracted by unfinished character development and side-plots, but not so with this movie.

Oh, and there was a surprise for me when I started watching this movie. Who knew that the dorky long-haired kid from 'Third Rock from the Sun' (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) could be an action hero?


The first 1/3 of the movie feels a lot like the George Clooney version of Oceans Eleven. It's a “Let's assemble a crack team to do this mission” kind of montage. You see them quickly running through all the key elements of their strategy, the characters pal around, and then a month later they're all fully trained and ready to go action.

And speaking of action, I couldn't believe how many fist and gun fights there were in Inception! By the previews, I was expecting lots of psychological suspense, but right about the middle of the film it becomes a non-stop rollercoaster of action and edge-of-your-seat suspense.

I actually give Inception a huge thumbs up for the amazing zero gravity brawl it has. Bar none, it's one of the coolest fight scenes I've ever seen. That probably doesn't make sense if you haven't seen it yet, but if you have, you know what I'm talking about.


Overall I give Inception:
9/10

Pros: Great concept, great cast, lots of action, good story, killer dialogue, the list goes on and on!

Cons: One of my biggest pet peeves are 'Million Bullet Movies.' You know the ones, where ammo supplies are limitless, and the bad never seem to be able to shoot anyone. I'd let them get away with the infinite ammo cheat because it's a wacky dream world, but not being able to shoot someone? Come on. Seriously.

Overall: This is without a doubt a must see movie of 2010. Take it in now, because the surround-sound theatre experience is worth it. This is a movie people will be talking about come Oscar time, of that you can be certain. Of all the movies I've seen this year, Inception is one of the best. Take your friends, your family, or just go for a solo movie viewing just do whatever you have to do to see Inception, you'll thank yourself for it.

Cake - The Distance

Nipping it at the Bud

Well, my marriage was a hoax. A sham. A great big fib.

I know some of you are shocked, some may even be angry, but overall this has been the funniest prank I've ever pulled. My girlfriend and I decided to go to Vegas for the Perth/Campbell wedding, and as a joke we thought it would be funny to do some fake wedding photos.

But things really started rolling along when suddenly everyone said we were going to get married in Vegas. Here's just a minuscule sample of the greater conversation leading up to our vacation:

Click on the image to actually be able to read it

And so we were primed to prank everyone. I brought my suit along for photos, one of our friends brought along the real bouquet she caught from wedding we went to, and Jen had a dress she picked up at Le Chateau before we left town.

We had a good laugh at all the facebook messages, emails, calls, and comments from people, all of whom were quite relieved in the end that we weren't actually married. Many said this was one of the best pranks they've ever seen.

But this morning my station's sales manager was chatting with me just before she went on the radio and I gave her the “I'm married, won money, couldn't afford tax duty on rings, blah blah blah” speech, and she said congratulations and on went the microphone:



Afterwards I immediately said it was a prank, everyone had some laughs, but then I got a call from a client who had heard the announcement on the radio too.

So, I now have to officially nip this in the bud before it gets too out of control and anyone sends congratulation cards.

Don't worry everyone, it was just an elaborate ruse. There's nothing to see here, and if you happen to see any more wedding photos, just keep everything business as usual.

To everyone who figured it out as well, thanks for keeping a lid on it and joining in on the joke!