Bad News Central

I’ll freely admit that I know absolutely nothing about cars.  Whenever I take my car in for a tune up, I fully expect to get royally fucked up the ass.  I accept it, bend over, and pay my bill.  My talk with the mechanic afterwards usually goes something like this:

Mechanic: “So, that’s $60 for the oil change and tune up.”
Me: “Sounds good.”
Mechanic: “Plus another $40 to replace your air filters.  They were pretty clogged.”
Me: “Of course.”
Mechanic (realizing I have no idea what he’s talking about): “We also had to rotate your tires.  One of them was on backwards.”
Me: “Oh no!”
Mechanic: “Yeah, so that’s another $75, plus $20 for replacing your lug nuts.  They were pretty corroded.  Another 10km and they would have burst into flames.”
Me: “That could have been dangerous.”
Mechanic (getting more confident): “Plus another $50  to adjust your ailerons.”
Me: “Yeah, it’s been a while.”
Mechanic: “And your flying buttress was covered in marmalade.”
Me (frowning): “That’s what I thought.”

So obviously I’m no mechanic.  Neither are the fine folks who work for Fountain Tire, apparently.  I took my car in to them today for a quick oil change, and now the engine won’t start.  I’m not even sure how that’s possible.

I dropped my car off at 9am, walked the half-hour trek back home, and made some breakfast.  Right as I was finishing up, I got a call from Fountain Tire.  They needed to replace my air filters (they always need to replace your air filters, even if you just stopped in to use the bathroom), and they told me they were going to clean some gunk off of my battery terminals that was causing a low voltage.  It seemed pretty reasonable compared to the usual gouging I get when I take my car in, so I agreed.  It looked like I would have my car back in no time.

An hour or so later I got a call from the mechanic again, although this time he seemed slightly distressed.  I needed to bring in my remote starter right away.  Things had gone horribly, horribly wrong since I had dropped my car off nearly two hours ago for a routine checkup.  I rushed right back to find that my car wouldn’t start, my remote starter wouldn’t remotely start, and my remote locks would no longer remotely lock.  My battery was dead.  My car’s computer was spilling out of the dashboard, and there were meters hooked up to everything.  You know those hospital scenes in war movies, where they show some guy with his guts hanging out as half a dozen doctors pump him full of morphine and wheel him behind a curtain?  That’s what my car looked like.

Let me remind you that I was having my oil changed.

According to the manager, this wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t mine.  This was just one of those things that happen from time to time.  Then he let me fix my own car right there in the drive bay (using my own tools) as the rest of the staff went to fix a problem with the Fountain Tire Courtesy Shuttle.

I swear to God I’m not making this up.

A customer came in to have a flat tire fixed, but they waved him away because they were too busy fixing the Courtesy Shuttle.  I needed to look up a certain company so I could get help rebooting one of my car’s components.  They didn’t have the white pages handy and the mechanic didn’t seem to understand Google, so instead I used the yellow pages and spent an hour playing “guess the category listing”.  My car still wasn’t working by the end of the day, so I had to call up a client to tell him I couldn’t make it to his house for our appointment, thus costing me several hundred dollars in lost work.  Then the helpful Fountain Tire staff put my car into neutral, rolled it into the parking lot, and went home.  So did I, but I had to walk.  Apparently I hadn’t quite earned Courtesy Shuttle privileges.

I’m supposed to be driving to Las Vegas next week, but as of right now I don’t have a car.  I can’t go to work either, because I’m an electrician, and they don’t allow you to take a hundred pounds of tools and wire reels on the bus.

On the other hand, maybe I don’t need all those tools and supplies to do my job.  I could always just do it like I was a Fountain Tire employee - go into the client’s house, pull the lights out of the ceiling, turn off the main breaker, and leave.

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I vaguely remember having a discussion with Rob a couple nights ago about the state of this website. He told me something about putting me in charge for a couple weeks while he’s away.

Mark my words.

I am going to fuck this up.

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The exact moment I knew Fringe Fest would be my kind of weird was when I picked up my tickets from a man dressed like Frankenstein and a woman dressed like a witch. I still have no clue behind the context of this. The play we were seeing consisted of four naked women talking about their sex fantasies, but fortunately Frankenstein was not involved in any of them.

Calgary’s Fringe Festival has been operating and gaining popularity for four years now, but for some reason I’ve never got around to seeing it until just this year. Even worse, I only managed to get out to see one show, which goes against the entire point of becoming media in the first place – namely, to mooch as much free stuff as possible, and then write off everything you actually had to pay for as a business expense. A true media representative would have seen every single play several times simply because it was free (and then demand a free meal on top of it), and I’m terribly sorry I never held up my end of the bargain. I’m still learning. However, I did get to witness several experienced media personnel succeed where I failed, and by copying their moves I’m pretty sure I can become as lecherous as major network reporter by the next time this festival rolls around. That’s my solemn promise to my readers.

I didn’t mean to miss so much of the festival, but regular readers of this site will remember that I’m a moron. In typical fashion, I showed up on the wrong day because it was Wednesday, and I thought it was Thursday, and Wednesday’s shows started later than every other day, so I showed up to a completely empty festival with nothing to do for eight hours. The good news is that this gave me a chance to talk to some of the festival volunteers, occasionally not even of my own free will. The Fringe Fest volunteers were incredibly nice, and if I made eye contact with someone but didn’t go over to say hello, they’d get up to come over and say hello to me. The only downside to this is that I had to explain my ineptitude at reading the calender over and over again until I wanted nothing more than to crawl in a hole and die. Everyone I talked to had plenty to say and one or two shows to recommend, so by the time I ended up leaving I’d basically been recommended every single show at the festival. The sheer variety of shows was staggering, from drama to comedy, and from children’s plays to adult shows with full frontal nudity. Everyone had a different play to recommend me. One particularly nice man (who’s name I forgot to write down) sent me on a walking tour of the festival grounds to check out all the theatres. The festival grounds are the streets and buildings of the community of Inglewood in Calgary, and I’ve been through Inglewood many times before, but it wasn’t until this walking tour that I really saw some of the lesser-known parts of it. Even the main drag was interesting, as every single building and storefront was decked out in Fringe Fest posters. It was strange seeing the community done up so well, and yet not seeing anything at all going on. I really felt like I was missing out on something awesome. Turns out I was.

A few days later I managed to make it out to the festival grounds again, this time with my beautiful assistant/girlfriend. The show we ended up seeing was called Inviting Desire, which promotes itself as “a theatrical aphrodisiac” from Dance Naked Productions. There’s not a single part of that last sentence that didn’t catch my interest. We went to pick up our tickets from the previously mentioned Universal Creature Feature monsters, and ended up overhearing one of the volunteers grumbling that “the media gets everything for free”. This has become my new personal motto. I want to get it tattooed on my arm, with the text circling a picture of a leech.

While we were waiting for the show to start, an excited (and breathless) man ran on to the stage with an important announcement: Fringe Fest 2009 had just become one of the highest grossing fringe fests in Canada. From what I’ve seen, they’ve earned it. Congrats, guys, you put on a hell of a festival.

Speaking of a hell of a show, Inviting Desire was fantastic. The show consisted of a small group of women reading aloud and occasionally acting out real sex fantasies sent in by anonymous women. All of the women were attractive, sometimes they were attractive and naked, they didn’t shy away from anything, and they really did give the show the total balls-out insanity it needed to work. Being able to take such an uncensored glimpse into what goes on in a woman’s mind is fascinating. Looking at the faces of the other men in the crowd, I obviously wasn’t the only guy having his mind blown. Every man needs to see this. It improved my sex life (really). I learned more about women by watching this one play than I really care to admit. If you can bring along a date to this show and not get laid, then you may as well just give up now and become a eunuch. I really can’t recommend it enough.

That’s the beauty of Fringe Fest right there. I could have seen a stage adaptation of a children’s book, but instead I found myself at a show where a naked woman bent over and screamed “Fuck me, daddy!” as another woman pretended to be violently whipped. The ground between those two extremes were also well covered, so if you can’t find something in there that catches your interest, then the problem is you. I had a great time, and I’ll definitely be back for next year.

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Has anyone else noticed the sudden incline of zombie-oriented video games lately? I have an impressive stack of very serious and horrific games dealing with the slaughter of masses of undead. In recent memory, there’s Resident Evil 5, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, Prototype, fuck, even Call of Duty 5 has zombies in it for some reason.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane, to a time when killing zombies, (is it considered killing if they’re already dead?) was a more carefree and ridiculously humorous occasion. We weren’t dealing with epic tales of civilizations collapsing, and facing the internal struggle of butchering your reanimated loved ones in a high resolution fully three-dee rendered bloodbath. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. How many of you remember a little old classic game called Zombies Ate My Neighbors? It was a top-down shooter on Genesis/SNES, in which the joy of killing zombies was in a more simple and charismatic fashion. There was no plot or character development, no explanation of what may have caused the outbreak, just the good stuff: run around and kill zombies with whatever you can find. The primary weapon of choice, the noble squirt gun. For reasons unexplained, zombies spontaneously exploded on contact with water. The slew of other usable weapons were vast for its time, and extremely imaginative, pop cans as grenades, weed whackers, popsicles, and I really can’t remember the rest right now. If you haven’t played this game before, go fucking play right now. What are you even waiting for? Shit!

Anyways, enough with the nostalgia. I got sidetracked. The game we’re talking about right now, here, today, in all its bloody zombie massacre glory, is found on the newly renamed Indie games category on Xbox 360. Its called I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES IN IT!!!!1, and it is fucking brilliant. Go download it now. Stop reading this right now. Get off your fucking computer and boot up your 360 and download the demo. Nay, scratch that. BUY the damn game. Its only a dollar! I can name a thousand worse ways I’ve spent a dollar before. Parking stubs, upgrading fast food meals to super-size, buying some shitty toy from a dollar store, wouldn’t you want to spend one dollar on a fun game?! Do it? Don’t have a 360? What kind of person are you? Do you call yourself a nerd? Because if you do, you’re wrong. Go buy a 360 right now exclusively for this game. This fucking game. Go. Now. Fuck. Do it. Are you back? Did you play the game? Isn’t it fucking awesome? Are you glad you listened to me? Get used to listening and doing the things I tell you because I’m pretty much always right.

First impressions, you move with the left stick, aim/fire with the right. Simple enough, easy to learn. The game seems pretty staple, generic for the first 30 seconds or so, until the fucking ground starts flashing and you suddenly realizing the lyrics to the song are emblazoned across your screen in gigantic seizure-inducing beauty. Turn up the volume and absorb the games rich, immersive original soundtrack. Scream with delight as you pulverize endless hordes of zombies, among other enemies, with rockets, lasers, shurikens, and fucking FLAME THROWERS! Everyone loves flamethrowers. Grab your friends. Its four player. Get high. Its probably even better if you’re high. The game will blow your mind in half and then have sex with your newly formed brain crevice.

Go buy it if you haven’t already. Honestly, its the best cheap-thrills zombie game we’ve had in over a decade, and its only a dollar. Its a bizarre instant classic in a sea of pure shit we’ve come to expect from the Indie games category.

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