business idea with zero chance of profitability #4,539

What if I started a dating website for newly arrived immigrants from the Czech Republic?

www.czechmate.ca hasn't been scooped up as a domain name yet.

luge, bobsleigh, skeleton... you're cut

I've had just about the craziest month and a bit I can remember. It's like non-stop.

I went onto here today to write something and realized I had a couple rants that I failed to publish during the recent madness. So I apologize for the tardiness and now-irrelevance of this rant, but what the fuck...

(Funny to look back in hindsight less than once month later and realize how quickly we move on from the Olympics and how I couldn't tell you the names of the gold medalists in bobsleigh. I bet you couldn't either. Don't go google it either.)

From the vaults (written Feb. 19, 2010):

Let's go back. Waaaaaaay back. Back when I was slinging muck in Iqaluit. At that time, I was speaking with some Frozen Grapes at length about Olympic events that needed to go. Hammer toss, you were there. Skeet shooting, I remember seeing you hovering around. I think water polo even made an appearance.

Anyhow, after having a couple beers with a new friend of mine following work, and surveilling the ubiquitously ubiquitous Olympic coverage, I am ready to add bobsleigh, luge and skeleton to that list.

Now don't immediately get up in arms about this, I'm going to rationally explain how I came to this decision.

As a disclaimer, I'm not discounting the abilities that these athletes have in these pseudo-sports. Bobsleigh, luge and skeleton Olympians are the best in the world at the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton. There is no doubt about that. But my big beef is that I'm sure there are better potential lugers out there somewhere and the real reason these guys are competing for medals is because only one percent of one percent of one percent of people have ever even thought about giving the luge a try, and maybe one percent of one percent of those people have actually given it a shot. Are you telling me that these bobleighers and lugists could seriously beat Lebron James or Usain Bolt or Alex Ovechkin if they were given a luge and a couple hours? I think not. These people are Olympians by default. They were failed basketball or hockey or track stars, so they wound up doing bobsleigh and luge and skeleton.

Again, I'm not taking anything away from these people. I saw that Georgian dude get killed and I watched skeletoner(?) after skeletoner get the shit kicked out of them on that course. Really, that sport takes balls and a few loose screws. But it brings to light a problem I have with the winter Olympics in general - namely, the athletes there are the best in the world at what they do, but only due to monetary or climatic factors. The truest and greatest athletes are probably not competing. In the summer Olympics, the fastest runners and swimmers face off against each other. It doesn't matter where you grow up, if you are a fast runner, you are a fast runner and you are going to move up through the ranks.

It's not like that with skiing or hockey. How many people are immediately eliminated from ever being an Olympic skier, based on where they grew up or how much money their family had. Maybe some kid growing up in the Prairies was born with all the innate gifts it takes to be a superstar skier, but they lived thousands of miles from any sort of incline they could ride down on skis? Or what about the poor kid in a city who has the required strength and skill to be a hockey player, but can't afford the pricey gear and registration? Who really knows who the best lugist is? What do you need to be a luger? Explosive speed and balance? The best short distance sprinter/acrobat could be skateboarding somewhere in Canada right now, or could be sitting on an apartment step in Jamaica. Who knows?

So that's why I watch these things and find them entertaining for a while, but I'm not 100 percent sold we're seeing the best of the best...

seriously?

Standing in line for FlyLo last night, I saw this poster and nearly crapped. I didn't think it was real. After suffering through work today, I got home and remembered the poster. I googled it and it's legit...

As T.O. would say, getcha popcorn ready!

No effing way. DJ Premier and Pete Rock... In person? Damn...

Manhattan Records presents DJ Premier VS Pete Rock -A Legendary DJ Battle trailer from getfunky on Vimeo.

if money was no problem...

If I didn't have to worry about money again, I'd buy a Cadillac, tear the roof off it and throw like $30,000 into a stereo. Then, on the first spring or summer day, I'd just drive around slowly under the sun, blaring SpottieOttieDopaliscious and not think about a damn thing.

...but because money is, you know, something I have to think about, I'm going to take a little nap after this robotic work day.

(At least I've got Flying Lotus to look forward to later tonight... Gyeeaahhh!)

new dilla

YEEEHAAAAAWWWWW!!!

Dilla-mentary...

Stussy - J Dilla Documentary Prt3 (of 3) from Stussy on Vimeo.

Ryan Kesler!!! ...and other thoughts

I was letting something that happened at work earlier this week marinate for the last couple days and I was prepared to right a little post about it, but as I was waiting for a buddy to finish something up before heading to lunch today, I snuck a peek at tsn.ca and read the headline that Ryan Kesler signed a mammoth extension to stay with the Vancouver Canucks. Since I’ve been told that my devoted support for Kesler makes those close to me feel a little uncomfortable, I feel I would be doing a disservice if I didn’t give my reaction to the signing here. So you'll have to hear about the first time I've ever felt anything near sympathy for someone in a suit until later.

First, I’ll start of by saying FUUUUCKKKKK YEEEAAAHHH!

Kesler was a impeding restricted free agent and I was more than a little concerned that he would be offered some mega-deals this offseason. It was one of the things that had been nagging me throughout the season. (Now we just have to sign Mason Raymond back for something reasonable.) Kesler had quickly become my favourite player on maybe my favourite Canucks team ever (well, ’94 will always be my favourite until we win one). But I was always a little anxious that maybe he wouldn’t be wearing the blue and green next season. Now I can rest easy.

Ryan Kesler, or Maestro Kes Wes as I call him, has come a long way in just a few years. I don’t think anybody predicted he would be doing the kinds of things he is doing now – playing Selke caliber hockey, while averaging nearly a point-per-game on the Canucks’ second line – but he keeps doing it every night.

I remember back in early 2008, when my sister had won some fifth row seats to a Canucks game and I flew down to the Garage to watch them take on Joe Sakic and the Avs. (Sidenote: it was the game where that guy shot pucks in from centre ice and won a million clams. We sat beside the zamboni entrance and before the intermission, Bobby Orr waited for about five minutes. I was a little tipsy and yelled out “Yeah, Bobby!” He looked over and smiled and nodded. And then he looked a little longer at my sister and smiled and nodded. Pimp, Orr what?) At that time, Kesler and Burrows were infuriating the opposition, splitting time with the second and third lines. I remember watching this Kesler kid just take the puck and start flying. He had game-breaking speed and I remember two rushes distinctly where he took the puck behind his net and started breaking down the ice with such speed that it was like the entire arena held its breath to see what he was going to do. He still had stone hands, but he was just playing at a different speed than everyone else. He was just flying all over the place, crashing into people and drawing penalties. I guess that’s where the man crush started. I was more than a little tipsy that night. Yeah, I was drunk. As a show of appreciation for my sister's free tickets, I went to the Canucks Store and dropped like $400 on two jerseys: a vintage Black and Gold joint for my sister, and a new replica Kesler ‘17’ for myself. I felt no regrets.

So yeah, he’s come a long way. I even remember by buddy Tooms thinking I was mental for buying that jersey back then. “Why didn’t you just buy a Rick Rypien jersey?” But I knew. I knew.

So here we are now. We’ve got Kesler locked up for six years. $30 million is a lot of cheese, but with the way he has played the past two years, I think it’s money well spent. Not only is he putting points on the board and playing lock down defense, he plays with a chip on his shoulder. I don’t know if it stems from him being cut from all the rep teams when he was 13, or the shin splints that nearly derailed his career when he was 16, but he’s never satisfied with anything. I’ve never seen him give up on a play. He dogs people down the ice when they carry the puck. And like Brian Burke said “he’s a huge prick.” Everyone seems to hate the guy. Even I started to dislike him with all the “I hate Canada” and “Roberto’s fighting it” talk. Actually, no I wasn’t. I was proud of the guy. Sure he was talking up a storm, but he was backing it up with his play. He had guaranteed the U.S. would medal a year before, and they did. Isn’t that the kind of player you want on your team. When he scored that empty-netter in the Olympics and everyone around Montreal and Canada was throwing stuff at their televisions and swearing about the guy, I did a abbreviated Tiger fist pump. Kesler had arrived.

The guy will be the Canucks’ next captain and it was evident as far back as 2007, when he threw down with Jarome Iginla and didn’t get completely tuned up.

He leads by example and with his mouth. Hell, he even dusted it up with Willie Mitchell in practice and the next day they were clowning around.

And not only that, he is one of the only good interviews in the NHL. He doesn't pull any punches and he actually seems like a funny dude. He pulls pranks on teammates and jokes around with guys like Burrows, Bieksa, Raymond and Bobby Lou.

Now all that hard work has paid off 30 million times. I just hope he doesn’t develop Horcoffitis. He is starting to get recognition, through a Selke nomination (and I would think an award this year,) an Olympic team spot and even the NHL2K11 cover. He's gotten the respect now. I just hope it doesn’t soften him up and make him satisfied. I don’t think it will.

Just gotta keep the Blackhawks down now...

I am a happy Canucks fan today. Congratulations Maestro Kes Wes.

Other thoughts:

- -- All I do all day is type. But at work, I have so many different autocorrect buttons to fix each of my reoccurring typos, that I’ve become lazy and accustomed to making those mistakes. Now it takes me twice as long to type anything anywhere else.

- - I got sick again this week. Everyone in the office was sick, plus my immunity was beaten down by two weeks of self-negligence. Walking home today, I horked a giant loogie and a pigeon walked up to it and started eating it. I wondered, if I’m sick and spit and a pigeon eats my sick spit, does the pigeon get sick too?

- - I had a flypaper song day today. Every second or third name that I had to call brought a song to my head. I called a lady with the last name ‘Nong,’ and then I couldn’t stop humming the ‘Thong Song’ for an hour. I called someone named ‘Charon’ and I spent the next 15 minutes humming My Sharona. I called a dude with a last name ‘Camacho’ and then two minutes later, I had Big in my head. – I got so much style I should be down with the stylistics- It was a long damn day.

- --- I finally got up onto my rooftop this week and it is completely gorgeous up there. I might spend days on end reading with beers there this summer. I just have to find somewhere to tie up a hammock. Might have to consult Patch about locations, since he could not be talked out of climbing up there at 3:30 a.m. last week after RJD2. What a guy.

- ---- I just realized this week, with temperatures in the low- to mid-teens, that I have the greatest walk to work. It’s only about twenty minutes long and I get to walk down one of the liveliest, seediest streets in all of the country. St. Catherine. There is something bizarre happening each week. Today, there was a fire or something and 10 cop cars, 4 ambulances and three fire trucks blocked traffic on Rene Levesque, just west of St. Laurent. I watched an ambulance try to get to the scene down a small street, but the motorists here basically told him to go fuck himself. They didn’t budge. And when a few did, a couple of the people on the shoulder, sped into position behind the ambulance and took advantage like a halfback behind a fullback.

The street is so great. There are always sketch bags with different excuses – and in differing levels of intoxication – asking for change. There is an aerobics class happening above a Shoppers Drug Mart each time I’m heading home and the girls are ridiculous. I walk past venues like L’Astrale and Metropolis, where there are always excited people lined up down the block puffing doobies, waiting for shows. There are the same classy restaurants with different, happy people dining in them each evening. There are the strip clubs like Pussy Corps, where wannabe mafiosos in full sweatpant get-ups and gold chains stand outside smoking cigarettes, talking into their blackberries in languages I don’t understand and where the girls yell at each other and others. I walk the twenty minutes and watch the spots get seedier and seedier as I get closer to home. The pizza slices are cheaper, the beer at happy hour costs less and the strip clubs do not look as… umm… reputable.

I think I’m more excited right now about what I’m going to see every day walking to and from work this summer than just about anything else. And that shouldn’t make you feel depressed. This place is for the characters.

i bet he's gonna have the...

I was hungry from the get-go today. Usually a Nutrigrain bar or a banana will suffice to tide me over in the morning and then, before I know it, it will be 2 p.m. and lunch time.

At my present workplace, I get a brief 30-minute break to get in all my lunchin'. It sort of blows ace. Basically, after taking one of these three murderous old, rickety elevators (which, by the way I'm now convinced I will be killed in. These things creak all the time and they drop and jolt up and then hover right above where they should stop at a floor and then they drop and let us out. We all get in each morning, looking like we've come to terms with our deaths. The elevators have supplanted a stroke and spontaneous combustion as the most probable way I will expire) downstairs and then walking the three minutes or so to the food court, I have about 20 minutes to stuff my face.

Today I was so hungry, I hit the Vietnamese joint in our lobby. I'd never been before and I was happy to see the huge helpings in front of the sporadically seated clientele.

And it was there that I would become the receptacle for some racism that I almost completely didn't tune into. (I would say reverse-racism, but honestly that's the stupidest term I've ever heard of. Wouldn't reverse-racism mean something that was the complete opposite of racist? The way the term reverse-racism has survived almost makes it seem like white people were so confident with their racist prowess that they took pride in the term 'racist' and if anyone was racist toward them, it could not be real 'racism,' but instead something else. "Hey, that was racist. You're being 'racist!' But you can't be racist. That's our word! You're being racist to the racist. That's like... reverse-racism or something." How arrogant to think that someone can't actually be racist to you, but only reverse-racist.)

...anyways...

I sat down at the counter and the lady slid me a menu. I was in my own zone and probably looked a little self-important or something, only because I was so zonked from work that I sort of just floated downstairs into a chair without really acknowledging anybody. The ladies spoke Vietnamese amongst each other and with the smiling dude behind the grill. Numbly, I ordered the vermicelli, which brought a laugh from the lady as she looked at the guy and nodded and said "B1," which just so happened to be the number of my order. The man laughed.

They laughed for a while and then they said something back and forth to each other. They kept laughing. Weird. They were having a grand old laugh, really.

I snapped out of it and turned to the girl.

"Did you guess that I was going to order the vermicelli?" I asked.

"Yes, B1. Vermicelli," she continued laughing and then the dude at the counter laughed too and nodded at me.

Of course the whiteboy would order the vermicelli.

I never realized white people had their own food stereotypes. (Next time you're with a white person at a Vietnamese restaurant, see if they order the vermicelli.) I laughed along with them, feeling only about 5 percent the self-consciousness Dave Chappelle felt after ordering the chicken in 'Killing them Softly.'

The vermicelli was delicious by the way.

party time is over and i can't even show up to work late tomorrow

Ooooh boy.

Feels like it will be a while before I'm fully recovered from the past couple weeks. I literally had the crap kicked out of me by good times. I was almost back to normal last week actually, until the RJD2 show. I had been feeling about 92 percent Herman at the time and was able to string together a couple coherent thoughts and articulate an idea or two without 'umming' or 'ahing' or losing focus. But that night set me back. Big time.

I think I might be near 92 percent again, following two of the laziest days I've had in a while. Watched Moon last night. You should check that out. Good sci-fi doesn't grow on trees.

And just to let you know, I'm judging how I feel based on my shits and let me tell you, there were a couple over the past two weeks that even I was embarrassed to call my own. The bubbling, molten ooze in the toilet bowl reminded me of the contents of those radioactive bio-hazard canisters from the Ninja Turtle movies.

But life has been grand and once I'm able to process the past few weeks, hopefully there will be a nugget or two worth sharing.

She was good. Berry, berry good.

But it's Sunday night and it's right back to work again and I'm definitely feeling the lost hour we got gypped this weekend.

I kind of have a beef about this whole Spring Forward business, and it's not that I'm angry about the fact that we lost an hour, but just how we can no longer use it to our advantage.

You see, our lives are too easy now and we don't do anything for ourselves. We used to need to know about this daylight savings time stuff and program our clocks the next day. It was always great meeting up with people the next day, because you either knew or didn't know and plans always got messed up.

But in our world where a bar of soap is becoming obsolete (I dropped a deuce in my roommate's bathroom the other day because I didn't want to disturb any guests near the kitchen and I washed my hands with this goop from a bottle marked 'physiological cleaning gel.' Man, are we kidding ourselves. What's wrong with a bar of soap?) I can no longer stroll into work an hour late with a self-satisfied grin on my face on Monday and lie and blame it on daylight savings time. That was the one benefit of this dopey ritual. Now, though, our cellphones automatically jump ahead at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning and they narc us out and kill any opportunity for an excuse.

Another reason to ditch the cellphone, I suppose.

yeaaahhhhh... i just don't care....

I know it's been a while, but I was visited by the STELLAR FELLARS!!! And you know, what happens during a bachelor party stays at a bachelor party...

..so I can't talk about the Madafakaz or the shoes thrown at high-rise windows or Surfer Blood or shot glasses in indiscrete places or RJD2 (such a wicked DJ, but why do you feel like you have to be Adam Levine? Just be a fucking DJ)

All I have to say from the last little bit is...

...me and the Patch were looking at hockey highlights after the blur of the weekend and we heard that Alexander Semin of the Washington Capitals pulled a boner, as they say, during a shootout.

So, as avid hockey fans and youtube aficionados, we tried to google the video.

I typed in "Semin Shootout."

Let's just say, I was not expecting the results I got.