run for the hills...

Don't step on the momeraths....

I've been hearing September is prime berry pickin' time here in Iqaluit, since I stepped off the jet. And after watching the hills slowly explode with colours over the past couple weeks, we went for a little hike and yep, there were berries of all kinds: cranberries, blackberries, big ass blueberries... mmmm... and people everywhere, with gigantic sacks, smiling and picking away.

I ate and ate.

Someone told me -- Kent, I think -- that nothing growing on Nunavut ground can harm you... I believe him (still, I wasn't going to start slamming back mushrooms) and did my best Homer Simpson at the buffet table on the tundra... But I started wondering if, maybe the minute before I'd arrived at the particular bush I was picking my little fruit juice bulbs from, a dog had urinated all over them, and there was me, just shooting them back, grinning obliviously. Is that weird?

Anyhow, yeah, the landscape is quite something to behold. The amount of colour that just kind of showed up, when the tundra was really a dead grass looking green/yellow/brown colour all summer. Now, from afar, it looks as if the hills have rusted over, with the amount of just-darker-than-crimson blackberry bushes creeping out over the moss-covered rock. And when you get up close, hiking around, the tundra is a colourful quilt of reds and oranges and fluorescent greens even... It's bizarre. And so soft too.

And I got the most literal example of scorched Earth I've ever witnessed:

Friction burn

Someone -- or something -- (but most likely, someone) lit a little swath of tundra on fire, and it's just black as coal. Cool contrast to the vibrant colours around it. And it smelled like singed brush.

flying lotus

Gotta love when a good song just up and lifts you out of a fog...

Had a major headache all day, acid belly too, from not even that many drinks last night, and rolled into work. They're doing survey work or something next door and drilling and my head was pounding harder. So I laid on the floor for a second and put on this song and now my headache is history.

Don't know much about this Flying Lotus character, but this thing is going to loop endlessly on the podski for the next week or so, I can guarantee that. Sounds like he's taken the torch from Dilla (or at least some style)...

Here's another one, if you liked what you heard:

Flying Lotus - 1983

Oil Can's All-Stars: #2

With no one from any government agency feeling any kind of responsibility to return my calls, I will turn my attention away from those douchers, to something far, far more important.

After hitting the Can up on his pager (yes, he still rocks the SkyTel pager), he tells me it's cool to release the second name on his illustrious, grotesquely grandiose scroll of famed-named all-stars...

...and so with no further ado....

COOL PAPA BELL!!!!!!

Cool Papa Bell is so fast he can turn off the light and be in bed before the room gets dark!

Cool Papa Bell was a Negro League centrefielder from 1922 - 1946. Cool Papa is widely considered one of the greatest and FASTEST players to never put on a Major League Baseball uniform (he was literally a cool papa at 43, when Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier and played his first game with the Dodgers in 1947).

Honsetly, eh? Like how brutal were people 70 years ago?

Pitching great (and master quotesmith) Satchel Paige described Bell's speed:

"If Cool Papa had known about colleges or if colleges had known about Cool Papa, Jesse Owens would have looked like he was walking."

- or -

"He's so fast he can turn off the light and be in bed before the room gets dark."

For stats nerds, like me, it's hard to judge Bell's career against others, since statistics from the leauges were sparsely kept and much of Negro Leauge history was preserved through stories and anecdotes. Either way, Cool Papa Bell was named the 66th greatest player in baseball history by the Sporting News, one of five Negro League players on the list of 100.

If he's the 66th greatest ballplayer of all-time, he's got the #1 nickname of all time. How cool is 'Cool Papa?' I dare you to give me a better one... Dare you... Impossible... I hope, when I'm a crumpled old geezer, with puffs of grey hair whisping around my ears, my grandkids will call me Cool Papa. I think that would be the greatest compliment I could ever be paid. A tear would run down mine eye, and over my massive, rosacea-ravaged, bulbous nose.

tv's boring. turn on the radio

Outside of baseball and a few shows right now (the Office, Mad Men, Daily Show, Colbert) I'm not finding anything entertaining on the tube these days...

I spent a month without TV (and actually wasn't missing it, to tell you the truth) earlier this month and I started listening to radio again, specifically podcasts. One I'm really into is the Sports Guy, Bill Simmons', B.S. Report.

It's funnier than pretty much anything on TV right now. You can listen to it while you cook (in my case, make sandwiches). The sports fans reading this will be into it (even though there is nary a mention of hockey). And he always tips off good shows, youtube clips and things of that nature. (ie. Mad Men, and The Two Coreys -- which might be the peak of unintentional comedy.)

The B.S. Report Archives

If you want a sampling, I'd suggest the 7/22 episode with comedian Adam Carolla, where the ins and outs of the Karate Kid, the Rocky 'septilogy', horrible movie cliche scenes and Chris Rock's celebrity baseball debacle are discussed at length.

"One's going north and south, the other's to and fro..."

I feel like I could listen to a conversation about movies like this for an hour every day... That's just me...

sphincter tent

I waited for quite a while to see if anyone would crawl out of the tent's ass...

This tent, sitting beside the Sylvia Grinnell River in Iqaluit all summer, has a butthole.

The makers must have had some pretty good senses of humour. They could have made the opening any colour. They chose red.

red bull and jelly belly

Can a man survive on nothing but Red Bull and Jelly Belly?

Fort Herbus' Desk. This one's for you, Alix.

I feel like juice was a gateway drug to Pepsi. Pepsi led me to coffee and now I'm onto that hard stuff... Red Bull.

What's the next logical step?

unbelievably overused

We've got bans on the use of DDT and child labour and lawn darts, so can we please extend this to the use of the word 'unbelievable'? In the last week, I've heard people throw around the word 'unbelievable' like they were lawn darts in the early-nineties.

It's overused. It's lazy. It's misused.

"Wow, what an unbelievable day."

Really, you couldn't conceivably believe that it could be sunny outside?

"Wing Wang's performance on the pommelhorse was unbelievable."

So a routine without mistakes cannot be imagined, and therefore, when it happens, it cannot be believed. Expectations must be pretty low.

Today, nothing is unbelievable. A kid just got decapitated on a bus ride through the Prairies. We've got an atom crusher being built in between Switzerland and France that some scientists are saying could create a black hole on Earth. Nicholas Cage is still being hired to star in movies.

hmmm... uh.. yess.. mmm.. I'm... um... Superman, yes... mmm.

We have reached the point where nothing is really unbelievable anymore. So, please, please, please, can we stop using the word 'unbelievable'. (I will eat a pie of crow if someone finds me using 'unbelievable' in my past posts -- which is not, in fact, unbelievable, because I am unbelievably lazy. Beleed dat!) I am close to getting a petition on the go and sending it to the UN.

Other alternative words: amazing. ridiculous, unique, daffy, gew-gaw.

I have started using 'unreal'... If something strikes me as being beyond belief, then it is just not happening. Hence, unreal.