A LINK TO THE ATLANTA ZOMBIE WALK

try this one kiddies

http://www.myspace.com/aryerstudio

this should work

Ludites unite!

Romero & the Dr. keeping warm!

Cube This Pumpkin Face!

I am happy to report, the pumpkin who violated me is about to go under the scalpel and let me assure you...there will be pulp..oh yes...there will be pulp. Seeds too! Just discovered the seeds are far better slow fried in olive oil with some BBQ spice than the traditional baked method. Had a fantastic time at the set of "Diary of the Dead" over the weekend and will have a full report in the next 48 for ya.

To hold you over, check out this link to my friend Angela's blog:

http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/thrasher1252001/slideshow?.dir=/131bre2&.src=ph

I hope that works. The old Ludite here tried to post a shot of Romero and I this weekend, and I ended up linking to some foreign porno site featuring electricity and zucchinis. Anyway, check out the Greyhound gal's slides of the Atlanta zombie walk. Great ghoulish fun.

Now, if you will excuse me I have a pumpkin to get meadival on!

A bloody Halloween to you all!

Remembering Trevor Berbick

Today I find myself thinking on the passing of a very old friend. As most of you have heard by now, heavyweight boxer Trevor Berbick was found dead this weekend, apparently with the back of head smashed in by a blunt object. An ongoing land dispute seems to have been the motivating factor and a suspect is in custody. A sad but not entirely unexpected ending to a troubled life. Due to having fought Ali in his twilight and the shattering loss to Tyson in his prime, Trevor's out of the ring antics always garnered more copy than his boxing. It's a shame. When I knew him back in 1979/80 he was an up and coming force to be reckoned with. Much is made of his time spent in Montreal but in fact when he came from Jamaica he set up camp in Halifax first. Back in those days of old, my dear friends John and Jean Moraze puchased the old Misty Moon and Tap tavern. They kept the Tap running and let the Moon rest. I would be snuck in to the Tap kitchen and ride the dumb waiter up to the vacant night club above where I was given a small back room office to put my little fanzines and such together. After a couple of hours of good work, I'd scoot back down to the kitchen in the dumb waiter and be sent off to my night job with a nice old leathery steak and some cold mash. Still like the stuff!
It wasn't long before Trevor and his camp put the ring up in that open sapce and the training crew wanted me out of my little office space and I remeber Trevor coming over to my spot in his gear, drenched in sweat from his recent workout and looking around my tiny spot. He damn near filled the room with his hulking figure, eyeing my posters and assorted clippings, and clutching the galley for an upcoming 'zine, he looks back at his handlers and says "if this crazy assed white kid wanna write around a bunch of boxing "(black men)" then he's ok with me" and that was that!
I watched him train for a few months before he moved on and I follwed his career right to the end.
I share this with you for a much larger reason than just remembering Trevor. It is to remind you that while the papers and news will make much of his violent and disturbed life, there once was a young man with dreams and ambitions.
Dreams and ambition. Bad choices no doubt had a lot to do with how his life turned out, but, while others choose to remember him as a criminal, let us remeber for what he was......a boxer, through and through.

Sore Cubes

Even taken a pumpkin in the nuts? I don't recommend it.

Sore Cubes

Ever taken a pumpkin in the nuts? I don't recommed it.

Sore Cubes

Ever taken a pumpkin in the nuts? I don't recommend it.

Sore Cubes

Ever taken a pumpkin in the nuts? I don't recommend it.

Sore Cubes

Ever taken a pumpkin in the nuts? I don't recommend it.

Sore Cubes......

Even taken a pumpkin in the nuts? I don't recommend it.

Belinda the Dog

Some women will, excuse the pun, simply dog you no matter what you do. Such is the Case with the ongoing hissy pit san-box cat fight between Peter MacKay and Belinda Stronach. Poor Peter is in the proverbial dog house for a barely audible remark made during a nasty heckle fest in the House of Commons. Of common what I'm not sure but if mudslinging were a recognized sport out folks on the hill would be up there with the best of them. This pile of doo doo stems from a seeming random question from an MP, "what about your dog?" to which a voice similar to MacKay's replied "you have her" while motioning to Stronach's empty seat. Now correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me we haven't had such a lively bunch of politco fools since the days of ol' P.E. Trudeau and his mattress wearing out ways. You see, for my worldly friends not keeping up on our Canadian ways, this thing between Peter and Belinda has been brewing past the boiling point for quite some time now, oh, say, back to a little over a year ago when the two were live-in lovers and Belinda (as the story goes) decided to do a walk and dump (without the baggie), as in, Peter, you is dumped and, by the way, I'm no longer a Conservative. Then off she goes for a stroll of leisure across the commons floor to join the Liberal party.
I swear I can't write fiction like this.
So Peter pulls his socks up, helps put Harper in the PM's office and goes quietly about his business as minister of foreign affairs while Belinda becomes embroiled in a nasty divorce proceeding between recently retired Maple Leaf Tie Domi and his wife.
Now, the way I was raised, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...chances are pretty damn good it's a duck.
Sometimes, a politician should be given the liberty to tell the honest truth and call a dog a dog when it warrants.

Where is the Umbrella?

As the saying goes, it never just rains, it pours! In my case, the sky has indeed been relieving itself in copious amounts while the dance card is truly log-jammed. Our Festival of Authors is in full swing with more events in the pipeline than you could swing a dick at. Mark Z. Danielewski was here over the weekend, being interviewed by J.S. Foer and promoting his new "road" novel. This week is hopping with Atwood, Mowatt, Janet Fitch and many. many others.

I was hoping to be able to give you the advance poop on Thomas Homer-Dixon's latest book The Upside of Down but I've yet to crack the spine. This follow up to The Ingenuity Gap will be hitting your shelves November 1st and I'll give the heads up to my peeps in Chicago, the T H-D will be hitting your town in the middle of the month. As old Billy Red would say, "dontcha dare miss it".

Now I must go get my beauty rest so I'm at my best for the GWAR concert tonight. Sleep well my friends!

God Bless The Suicide Girls!

How cool was it to see some of the Suicide Girls on CSI-New York last night? Closing in at almost five thousand legit SG's and thousands of SG wannabes, last night's episode featured a half a dozen vets including two of my personal faves Fractal and Nixon. Sadly, it didn;t take long for the SG faithful to start crying "sell out, sell out" etc. etc. which is a shame because, if nothing else, the gals made some scratch for some new tats for are all to oggle and I'm all for that! As well, great to see Nixon, as always, get the last word!

I'm supposed to be on set of the new George A. Romero film DIARY OF THE DEAD tonight but with the rain and this seasonal cold I have it will more than likely have to wait til next week. The Intarnational Festival of Author's starts tonight and I have a full week of events to report so one must do what they can to remain in proper health.

By the way....what the hell is with those damn polar bears on LOST?

Streisand and the Mid-Life Crisis

Part of the problem with this whole mid-life crisis business is it causes you to revert to the hormone driven teenage stage of life where every damn thing you do is stupid. Why in fucking hell's name was I thinking of going to a Barbara Streisand concert? As ol' Uncle Nash says, "he'd rather stick shards of glass in his ears than sit through one of her shows" and shit damn he has a point.
Alas, I am happy to report I came to my senses and was able to pull a Grudge 2 and turn shit in to gold. No doubt about it, her Babness was THE hot ticket in town and everybody and their mom wanted to go. For real! When jokingly offering my ticket to my local bar manager he reported his mom was shut out of the proceedings to which it was simply the right thing to do to ensure she was there. We end up with a happy mom of a the bar manager, and as we all should know, a happy bar manager makes for a happy patron! Judging from the clips I saw on the news, I'm not sure my hearing could have taken it anyway. I'm still suffering from the Who concert in London a few weeks back and from the looks of all the spandex and hairspray in that crowd, if one were to spark up a joint they would be at risk of starting a fire in the ACC that would surely rival that tire dump inferno we had in these parts a while back.
So, another day arrives and everybody is happy. I get to keep my dignity and estrogen levels in line and with any luck my hearing will be up to snuff for the GWAR concert monday. Anybody for green slime? Shit, that reminds me of my favorite Babs story. Back in the early 80's there was a punk band in Newfoundland called DA SLYME who, rather than pay to have covers printed for their records, spray painted their logo on other covers. My copy is Streisand 's WET with a big ol' DA SLYME emblazoned across her honker. Damn, think I'll spin TRUCK STOP MAMA right now.

The Pond in Hell is Freezing

As if one needed yet another sign of the impending apocalypse, allow me to say I am in fact going to see Barbara Streisand tonight, and after the dreadfully boring Iron Maiden show last night I'm quite looking forward to it. It would be hard for me to knock the Maiden boys, having seen them so many times over the years, and rather than a bunch of old geezers, the crowd was mainly 14 to 17 year olds which I found quite surprising. They seemed to be having the time of their lives so we'll just leave it at that.
Why Babs? She's never played Toronto before and as a cultural observation exercise I figured it simply could not be missed. Besides, I've been involved in a Julio Iglesias riot....why not shoot for a Princess meltdown. Also, I must confess I have sat through Lentil and it wasn't nearly as horrible as I had been led to believe.

The Julio riot was a gas! He was doing a signing tour to promote the Starry Night album, showed up late and left early. All of these blue hairs pushing the guards and knocking the security barriers over. Some serious fun that was!

I'll let you have the details on tonight's mess in the morning!

How To Make 22 Million From Shit!

22 million is a lot of cake! This is what that piece of crap film The Grudge 2 managed to steal from an ususpecting public the weekend. I say steal because there really is no other word for it. I'm all for bad movies as long as they give me some form of entertainment and I must tell you it has been a long long time where the escalator ride paased as the best entertainment of my movie going experiece. I don't wish to bore you with the details of why this film fails so badly but I will say I found it more than a scary day when this red blooded hetro male found himself more turned on by the young Asian man in hero role than the female lead, who, if she were any more wooden you could make a fucking boat out of her ass!
So , save your money, and, if you happen to be in Toronto tonight you can join me at the Iron Maiden concert. 40 to 50 year old men squeezing their fat asses into leather pants they wore when they were 15 trying to give themselves whiplash. Trust me, it doesn't get any scarrier than that!

A Happy Friday the 13th to Y'all!

Let the mayhem begin folks! Starting this fine autumn day off with a viewing of Freddy VS Jason which is always a sure bet to get the juices flowin', then gonna drag my ass out to see Grudge 2. Let's see what kinda shit the scraggly ol' black haired bitch can still up this time around and will somebody get that little blue boy some fucking iron supplements or something. Failing that, at least turn the damn heat up in that spooky ol' house....kid looks like he gots the hyputermia or sumptin!
And speaking of cold shoulders, check out the dude who dropped 400,000 pounds on 26 holographic letters from Voltaire to Catherine the Great. That's, like, close to a million of our Canuck bucks but by all means, I say these scribbles are worth every penny because in one of these said letters ol' Volly calls Cathy "fat and ignorant".
FAT AND IGNORANT!
To this, if memory serves correct, I think the Great C had a French agent lace the Voll man's go go juice with some flesh eating disease or some shit like that.

Fat and ignorant. Could very well describe the idiot who dropped that much quid to own these letters, but, who am I to throw stones!

Truth Is Always Stranger Than Fiction

So the plane involved in this horrible New York accident was being piloted by pitcher Cory Lidle. I had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of times, once as a Jay and another as an opposing player with the Athletics. Always happy and smiling, it was a shame many players never accepted him in the dugout, some still being angry at him for "scabbing" during the lockout/strike. Today you can read all about this pretty much everywhere but let me leave you with this thought. A baseball signed by Lidle, if you could find one, would on average sell for 10 dollars on eBay. The demand simply wasn't there. As of last night, that same ball was fetching close to 500 U.S.! I might also add, sadly, there were a lot of forgeries hitting the market as well. I'm not sure what this says about our society but it sure as hell says something.

May we all wish the Lidle family well during their time of despair.

Is the World Just a Little Off?

I've been sitting here for a few hours thinking about that idiot in North Korea playing with his atomic firecrackers, the US of A and the problems overall in the Middle East and the general situation in Africa. While giving myself one grade A headache the CNN breaking news ticker tells me of a small plane crashing upside the face of some building in New York city.

Details to follow of course.

I'm thinking, haven't we seen this episode before and, really, do we want to see it again?

Some Thoughts

I was nice to see a Thanksgiving come and go without the vegan nut-jobs going on a verbal rampage and threatening to spike every turkey from here to Istanbul. It may in fact be the only positive to come from the post 9/11 world, being nobody is tolerant of this type of nonsense any longer and any group making such moronic threats would wind up in a veggie Guaccamolio prison camp! So, nobody got sick and died from cyanide bird but some poor folks got mighty damn sick from spinach and funky carrot juice. Excuse me for saying this, but, ironic no?

Pieces

I have discovered, yet again...I'm not a big fan of lobster. My old friend Christian (a Maritimer by fate) joined me for the big boil last night and a fine eve was had by all even if he did end up with most of my crusty! What was more interesting, however, was one of the gifts he brought me. Those reading this who know me on the personal side are well aware life is in a strange place right now, and because of this, my bud sprang for a 25th anniversary Star Trek the Motion Picture plaque signed by Shatner and with an actual piece of the V'ger space craft. Now, this actual "piece" is a black malformed hunk of plastic which if one were to see it kicking about on the floor, they would pick it up, wonder what the fuck it was and how it got there and then promptly discard it to the trash! Christian and I on the other hand have no doubt spent a good work week in hours staring at this damn thing as if we'd just discovered the HOLY FUCKIN' GRAIL!

This got me to thinking, in the middle of the night when one SHOULD be sleeping, on how many pieces of things I have. Again, those who know me are well aware of my passion for collecting signed cards, but, in recent years there have been several game-used insert cards to grab my attention. These are cards with a swatch of jersey, pants, cap, shoe, jock strap, anything you can cut up added to the card.

I have thousands of said cards.

I have pieces of wrestling ring mats mounted with signed photos. I have pieces of hair. If I was unable to get a good sample from my piece of Elvis Presley`s hair, I could probably clone him from DNA swabbed from the pieces of his leather jacket, stage used jump suit or film worn silk shirt I own.

I have pieces of brick from the Berlin wall, a piece of the yellow brick road (yes...THAT yellow brick road) and I even have a piece of brick from the old O Pee Chee factory in London, Ontario. No longer standing, this was the meca of hockey card manufacturing and should have been declared a historical landmark in my opinion.

I have soil as well. Dirt from various famous people`s graves, dirt from Woodstock, even earth from the holy land. What I do not have is a piece of the cross. Yes...that cross. I`ve been offered pieces several times and in my estimation if one were to gather all of the pieces of the cross floating around you could crucify a small country.

Then there are body parts. Pieces of bodies. We won`t talk about that here.

Happy Birthday Alexander Keith!

Today is October 5th and were he sill alive Alexander Keith would be 211 years old and no doubt if he were still alive he's be one cranky old shit! The famous Scotish brewmaster whose Indian Pale Ale carries his name also holds the fine distinction of being interned in the only graveyard to have a traffic light. Located in midtown Halifax this graveyard, of which the name escapes me at this moment, is in the Guiness Book of World Records for this fact, strange as the only reason the traffic light is in there was because of poor city planning and the light had to go on the corner inside of the fence. His tombstone is a modest one of red granite with a bronze inlay of his family crest, modest as in about 18 feet tall which is in fact modest when you consider he was easily the wealthiest man in Halifax back in the day. One can also pick some killer magic mushrooms at his gravesite at the right time of the year and then stroll down to his original brewery, which is still standing, and get so hammered you might bloody well think you were back in the 19th century.
Like that Irish holiday, St. Patrick's wake, Maritimers one and all celebrate this birthday event around the world by drinking way too much followed by fighting and fucking. Here in my new homestead of Toronto, I will be attending a lobster boil at the local Irish pub which has hardly any Irish clientel but rather is filled with a mix of English, Scotish and Maritimers who all drink, fight and fuck too much.

The big draw for this local event being held at Murphy's Law is the raffling away of a Keith's mini bar, which in reality is nothing more than a wooden beer keg that somebody took a ban saw to, slapped some hinges on and threw a couple of shelves in. I can just see some blasted git staggering home with this damn albatross over his back. This is even stranger when you consider Murphy's is located on a strip of Kingston Road property which was host to one of the bloodiest English troop losses in history. Seems the English soldiers, who were notorious for drinking, fighting and fucking way too much, got into some kegs of some bad hooch and starting fighting each other and when the dust settles a fuck load of them had kicked the bucket! Hell of a way to beat the hangover I say.

So, the hour is approaching and I have a rubber lobster with my name on it. Wherever you may be, raise a pint to old Alexander and let the bibulous fornicating and bickering begin!

james mirtle - A hockey journalist's blog

james mirtle - A hockey journalist's blog

this is only a test

life is only ever a test

From: Broken Feet and Busted Prose

at last
the hugs are all gone
and those precious congratualtions
so duly in order
had spread their wings
float on barroom air
smashed their precocious
little heads of glory
on the nicotine stained reality
of a morning come too quickly

at last
the tears had all dried
and the waves
like nausea for breakfast
crashed their spacious
universal drop of hope

smothered, for pity
tiny beads of sweat
on a life strained face
of an evening gone too far

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes

My friend Candy Minx is helping with this blog till I get warmed up. Here is one of her latest paintings.

Experimenting

I am taking a test run...is this working? hello? hello?