The House of Irony / October, 2005

I’ve been laid up for a couple days, just chilling out, refreshing the batteries. It gave me the opportunity to finish watching the first two seasons of Deadwood. By Christ, is TV getting better or am I getting stupider? It seems everything I take the time to watch rocks my fucking socks off.

For those that don’t know, the show could be described as a combination of your favourite western, Shakespeare and the Sopranos—but really, it’s just one in a string of successes by HBO, and just another chapter in my redefined relationship with television. Used to be I didn’t follow a single show, and now it’s my preferred format, over movies.

I suppose it’s hard to compare the two mediums fairly, as they appeal for different reasons, but TV has started adopting many of the theatrical traits, the high production value most obvious. TV also has a distinct advantage, in that the viewer is engaged on a weekly basis, allowing for a deeper familiarity, with the ability to follow events only hinted at while watching a movie.

Speaking on the subject, are there any new series I should be keeping an eye on? I like to watch the shows a season at a time, but I’d love to hear any recommendations.

While settling a bet at work I came across an interesting theory, that the Masters of the Universe motion picture was actually based on the Fourth World series of comics by Jack “The King” Kirby as much, if not more so, then from the He-Man cartoon and action figures. This was nearly as exciting to me as the rumoured Ziggy Stardust comic by Kirby, and I was about ready to file this story under wishful thinking too, until I did some further digging that brought up this quote from John Byrne.

“The best New Gods movie, IMHO, is ‘Masters of the Universe’. I even corresponded with the director, who told me this was his intent, and that he had tried to get [Jack] Kirby to do the production designs, but the studio nixed it. Check it out. It requires some bending and an occasional sex change (Metron becomes an ugly dwarf, The Highfather becomes the Sorceress), but it’s an amazingly close analog, otherwise. And Frank Langella’s Skeletor is a dandy Darkseid!”

Well, at least they tried to get The King involved. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Lucas.

This was discussed on Spacejunk a while back. You take a frontal pic of yourself, follow the instructions, and then you select the options to see what you would look like with different racial traits. Hilarious fun, please treat yourself. GO GO FACE TRANSFORMER

Yesterday I was at my grandmother’s wake; friends and family were there for the viewing before the funeral.

My uncle was talking to a man that I gathered was an old friend, which he hasn’t seen in some time. After they finished their conversation the man approached my grandfather, my grandfather’s eyebrows raised and as he shook the man’s hand yelled WINTLE!

That’s right; my family has a history of Wintle relations that I was left in the dark about. Me and Mark Wintle got to chatting about Steven and the other WIntles and had a marvelous time. I was born and bred to interact with Wintles. I love them, and miss Steven dearly. One thing I have learned in my life is that where there are Wintles – there are friends.

Being the rampant survivalist that I am, I like to be prepared for any eventuality that may lead to me being one of a handful of people still alive. Praise be to the Lord, then, that I discovered a Zombie Infection Simulator.

It is my sincerest hope that this is a fully scientific and thorough digital representation of such an outbreak, as I’m basing much of my strategy on these simulations. I must express concern though, the spread seems unstoppable, and I’ve watched many a virtual human fall victim to its horrible grasp.

Adding insult to injury, some goof even made a game of it, though it does afford a potential solution to stemming the flood of undead. Perhaps I should be stocking up on missiles and nukes, as a preparatory measure.

Be vigilant, my friends.

..or, the insult that made a legend out of a house.

Rarely does a day go by where I’m asked about the genesis of the name and meaning of the House of Irony. Finally, the truth can be told.

The very first House of Irony was located in The Rose City over a decade ago. One of the members of that household was named Gord. In a fit of rage over a long forgotten slight, Gord sputtered out an insult to the other roommates. “This is nothing but a…a…a House of Irony!”, he said.

The room fell silent. Everyone looked at one another in awe. Finally, an excited chatter arose, and we gleefully adopted the name simply because it sounded cool. To this day, the majority of House of Irony members both past and present have no idea what irony actually is. But we can take solace in the fact that by taking this name to our hearts we managed on pissing Gord off more then if we had actually tried.

Again, another good reason to live in New York. Every year these guys throw a Warriors Halloween party. The idea is to get a bunch of your friends together, pick a gang name and a theme and rock out. It can be a gang from the movie or you can make one up, as long as you all match each other.

Post any ideas for good gang themes in the comments. Personally, I think a good one would be to all dress ultra-nerdy and call ourselves “The Mathletes”. We could have calculators with hidden switchblades. “6×4 = PAIN, baby!”

I particularly enjoyed Paul Ford’s lament to a fallen hard drive and his lost music collection, though he hardly seems bothered, instead viewing it as a blessing worthy of praise, calling it a “Loss as Gain”.

This is quite contrary to my own experience, when I lost my entire music collection a number of years ago (while, of course, living at the House of Irony). This was at the height of the Napster era, and my 12GB hard drive was brimming with songs, including all the music from the House of Irony parties—some of which I’ve never been able to replace.

Ahem.

I swore no such thing would happen again, and in the process became more of a collector than a listener, with my strict naming conventions and elaborate backup methodology. And this is no doubt what Mr. Ford is driving at, his release from the new burden of post-consumer life, where your media collection is curtailed only by the size of your hard drive and the management of such a collection becomes more of a distraction than the data itself. When everything is plentiful, the only meaning something has is the one you give it.

I wonder what I might gain from losing it all again, and what shape it would take if started from a blank slate—a theoretical question for sure, but one that I plan to think on more.

My love for the original Turok, Son of Stone is well-documented. For those of you too lazy to click a link, Turok was a comic book concerning the adventures of two Pre-Columbian Native Americans trapped in a valley full of dinosaurs. Turok is my favourite adventure comic of all time, and I thought the creators of the series could never be topped by anyone else. And in a way, I was right.

This past summer I bought over thirty Turoks, including one from the 1950s. I was surprised to find a four page back-up feature inside, something the later Turoks don’t have. The back-up story is called Lotor, and concerns the adventures of a raccoon trapped in a valley full of dinosaurs. In this issue, Lotor’s young are hungry and he must hunt for food without the help of Keenah, his mate, who has been injured by a scorpion. To accomplish this, Lotor must defeat a ravenous Allosaurus and make a tough choice between his family’s safety and a delicious frog. Can Lotor trick the dread Allosaurus? Will his sacrifice doom his family regardless? And most importantly, will Lotor ever find a way out of the Lost Valley and back to his native hunting grounds?

Sometimes in your life you meet people that are an anchor for you. No matter what life throws at you, they are always there with unwavering support and dedication to rally you on. Two friends that I would like to recognize that have always shown me the importance of hard work and dedication are Spirit and Opportunity; the mars rovers.

They are honest, hardworking, take no shit and are rolemodels to us all.

Further proof that Japan is about 12 steps ahead of every other country in the world. CNN is reporting that Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. have created a remote control for humans. No shit.

Basically they put a headset on you and it sends slight electrical current through your ear making you feel off balance and that the only way you can maintain your balance is by turning in the direction the remote controller wants you to turn.

I wanna get a ton of these and put them on my friends. Then me and someone else can have a real life strategy game. Hopefully, I’ll be able to tweak these devices so that you can compel someone to do some sweet katas.

“Aren’t you worried that your pussy will have 2001 written all over it in 2010?” the chick asked her mate. “I hate to say this, but certain things can really date a bitch.” – From Diary of a Married Call Girl by Tracy Quan.

The other contributors to this site are my best friends and I love them all dearly, but seriously, they’re fucking losers and poseurs. Reading this blog you’d come to the conclusion that the House of Irony has its origins in St. Catharines, when really that was only the second house. The first House was situated in the Rose City like it was meant to be, and other then myself it had a completely different cast of eccentric characters, though a number of this current crew made cameos back in the day. These kids today are like the Insane Clown Posse to the original House’s Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, dig?

However, the main thrust of this post shouldn’t be to diss these Johnny-Come-Latelys, but to pay tribute to the ones who came before, those proud Unknown Soldiers of the original House of Irony that should never have their contributions to juvenile deliquency forgotten.

This is a shout out to Jamie, Trevor, Randy and Gord, the original members of the House of Irony. So spend a moment in silent contemplation and hoist a Slurpee in their honour, you fucking jokers.

Hi, my name is Karissa.

I like knitting, the colour pink, filet-o-fishes, teen movies, construction paper, sewing, sleeping, manilla envelopes, pinking shears, baking, and jumping rope.

Talk to you soon!

Love,
Karissa xo

The New York Times is reporting that The White House is stepping up its War on Terror (or maybe its War on Crime.. I’m not sure) and has gone after America’s finest news source, The Onion, for using the presidential seal in one of its radio broadcasts. The Onion does a weekly parody of The President’s radio addresses.

It’s good to know that our friends to the south take their wars on things seriously and don’t spend tax dollars on frivolous endeavors. I think I’ll declare a War on Hunger so I can go out and spend donation money on bacon. “I find this bacon guilty of war crimes! And sentence it to spend the rest of its life in my stomach!”

Oh yeah. That’s some tasty justice right there. Maybe while I’m at it, I’ll sue a steak for punitive damages.

Thanks to Dave J. for the heads up on this story.

T-shirt hell just got a jump on the Christmas holiday blues with a couple new shirts and some totally sweet wrapping paper. Nothing tells your family that you love them more than wrapping paper which instructs them on how to properly end it all.

Australian and Danish governments are getting disabled dudes hookers. This is killer shit!! I can see dudes throwing themselves at machinery to get sweet ass comp and hooker stamps. I wonder what celebrity visage would grace the cover of these hooker stamps?

I’ve always had a bad relationship with time. It’s not that I’m bad at keeping appointments, it’s more that I struggle to correctly identify its importance. This manifests itself in two ways – I misjudge how long something with take to complete, and I fritter time away on inane things, effectively letting it slip through my fingers.

It is my hope then, that my recent purchase of a Casio GXS-900 will at least partially improve my ability to view time as an asset. I had been trying to get by with an incredibly clunky Fossil watch, but its functionality is limited to a barely legible timer.

The path to the Casio started with an info-ad in Wired on the Casio GW-400j, an absolutely insane watch of limitless personal metadata, all in a wonderful yellow. Too bad then that it’s a Japanese Import available for $229US—not exactly the amount I wanted to spend. I completely bought into the G-Shock brand though, and set my sights for something available locally.

I went around to all the local department stores, trying on a bunch of G-Shock watches, before finally settling on the GXS-900. It was the cheapest I found, at $45CDN, but was the only watch I found for under $100 with all the features I wanted: Countdown timer, multiple alarms, multitasking. It was also the one that fit the best, the others feeling too big on my wrist. Funny thing is, only after buying it did I realize it was a kids watch. The little animated figure should have been a giveaway.

After the week with it, I’m definitely glad it’s mine—the usual feeling of buyer’s remorse is nowhere to be found, I’m incredibly happy with it. I do have a couple gripes, but they’re minor: the light doesn’t stay on when switching modes, the button to turn the light is inconsistent, my wrist is a half size between holes in the strap.

As to whether the watch will have any effect with me and time, I can’t be sure. I certainly play with it enough, but still find it difficult to remember that it’s on my wrist. I’m sure once I grow used to it, I’ll be forever timing how long it takes me to do everything.

For instance, this post took me 25 minutes.

Dear DC Comics/Time Warner,

I recently purchased a comic published by your company entitled 1st Issue Special. In case you weren’t already aware, this particular title was conceived to be a showcase for new concepts and characters, allowing your company to gauge public opinion and determine whether the property had enough potential to garner its own series. My letter specifically concerns issue #4, cover dated July, 1975 which contains the first, and presumably the last, appearance of Lady Cop. I say with very little hyperbole that the sole published adventure of Lady Cop is one of the greatest comic books I have ever read.

I am writing you today to enquire as to the possibility that I may obtain this wonderful character from your company. During the past twenty years Lady Cop has languished in obscurity, nearly forgotten by a public that needs her heroic deeds now more then ever. Your reluctance in publishing the further exploits of this exciting heroine is both regrettable and avoidable.

If you are unwilling to accommodate the masses need for hot Lady Cop action, then I implore you to sell the rights to Lady Cop to me so that future generations will thrill to the perils of that most lady of cops. Or, as Lady Cop might say, “Let the girl go—you’re not in a jungle!”

Sincerely,

Steven
House of Irony