The kiss that ends your life

I have never before really appreciated what kind of a massive kiss of death those devices are. I am, of course, speaking of Blackberries that are suddenly all the rage. Email, PDA and cell phone all in one unit, they are incredibly useful and are very geeky in a non-nerdy sort of way.

They also spell the complete doom for your free, personal time, especially if you use them for business and not just for personal stuff.

The trouble is, once your customers know you have a Blackberry, you're expected to be always available to them. After all, you carry your email with you wherever you go now and it's also a phone; why didn't you answer that email I sent you at 3am? It's even worse if they have one of these gadgets too and they never leave it at home; you're suddenly at the mercy of a workaholic who monitors his or her email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I suppose people once thought about cell phones the same way, too. But cell phones are nowhere near as convinient or multifunctional as a Blackberry, no matter how sophisticated it is. It seems to me, however, that every advance in telecommunications technology serves to eliminate free, personal time, which is the exact opposite of what futurists of the 1950s and 60s believed.

This, of course, should not be taken to mean that I'm anti-tech or that we should abandon all technology and return to the farm(life on the farm without technology was no picnic in the park, either, despite what some people think). It just means that we really should be careful about how the technology is used, especially if it is brand new.

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And now for something really exciting! Blackberry / Futurist

African AIDS Benefit Concert

So, apparently, more than half the currently living victims of AIDS in Africa are women and girls. That was on a poster I found in the office lobby today. WOW! That's some amazing mathematical and deductive reasoning skills these people are showing off. Amazing! Who would've thunk that more than half the victims of a classless and boundaryless disease would be women and girls when they make up somewhat more than half of the general population.

I guess, based on the emphasis of the poster, we're not supposed to care that slightly less than half the victims of AIDS in Africa are men and boys. I guess they don't count, not being human and all that.

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And now for something really exciting! African AIDS / Benefit

Well, that was... different

So, when I set my PVR to watch Bloodsuckers, I didn't actually realize what I was doing. You have to understand, I've been under a lot of stress lately, what with working 18 hour days and nights and all that. But still, I offer no excuses.

Imagine a really violent Canadian movie with little sense of the art, but lots of blood and gore and bits lying about, add a few goofy space vampires with an over-developped delusion of adequacy, a slightly over-the-top in a I'm-uber-hot-and-dumb-at-the-same-time sort of way super-Green who hates humans and there you have it.

Basically, the year is 2150(or something) and the humans have spread across the galaxy, which, funnily enough, is populated by various clans of... vampires. The vampires, much to their own dismay, find humans not only annoying but also rather tasty. And so it goes, vampires vs the humans vs the vampires. Add to the mix a crazy Green(one born in Oshawa, Ontario, no less) who goes around lowering human base defenses so the vampires can go in and eat them because she believes humans are inevitably evil and the vampires good. The plot, such as it is, follows a band of human vampire hunters.

Oh, did I forget a hot vampire chick who's on the side of the vampire hunters? She can make all your dreams come true through the use of... vampire Tantric sex.

Few things blow up, but many rounds of ammunition are expended, and hilarity ensues. There's even an Alienesque vampire that lives in a host, and makes him(or her) eat other people when its hungry.

All in all, it's mindless fun. If you're looking for a plot, forget about it. If you're looking for something for your eyes to see while the brain takes a nap, you've come to the right place.

P.S. Did I mention that the interior and the bridge of the ship the vampire hunters are flying is the Eureka Maru from Andromeda? Well, it is.

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And now for something really exciting! Bloodsuckers / Vampires

Bitch are you fo real?

I don't know, is it just me, or is Sons of Butcher really funny, in a sick, perverted sort of way? I mean, ewwww! This is a show that needs to be seen to be believed. Crude, rude, perverted, sick, disgusting. In other words, it's a Canadian cartoon, more than likely paid for by the Federal Government. But hey! This is Canada, the land where nothing is filmologically impossible if you approach the Powers That Be in the right way.

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And now for something really exciting! Sons of Butcher

How to freak out your optometrist

I went for my trial contact lens checkup yesterday, and scared the hell out of my optometrist. The last pair he gave me to try didn't agree with me, and when he shined a light into my left eye, he said, “What the hell? Have you got two lenses in there?” I said, “No, but these things have been giving me extreme problems since I started wearing them a half a week ago.” “No kidding,” he said. “Take them out and dump them immediately. We don't want to confuse your brain any more than we already have.”

Yes, we don't want to do that; it's confused enough as it is, the poor thing. I love my brain; it's my second favourite organ.

I'm fairly far-sighted, and according to my optometrist, most contact lens manufacturers have been concentrating for years on near-sighted people, mostly because there haven't been all that many far-sighted people lately. But, apparently, they're on the rise again, and the manufacturers have been caught napping. He says when they ship him trial pairs for him to give to patients to try, they almost never send him positive-power lenses for far-sighted people, which explains he almost never has any to give me and has to special-order them. Not only that, but there are far more lens choices for negative-power people than for the positive-power. The situation is beginning to improve, but we're still the bottom of the barrel.

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And now for something really exciting! Contact Lens / Optometrist

Welcome!

Welcome to the “Conversational Intercourse” blog. The dictionary defines conversation as “exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas”; intercourse is defined as “connection or dealings between persons or groups”. That other, third definition, isn't really important for our purposes here, except that there'll be some of that.

So, what will this blog be about? It'll have illustrated short stories, it'll have discussions of current events, of things that I discover about the past or the present, and maybe even the future. I'll have rants, it'll have (hopefully) wise discourses on varied subjects, and maybe, just maybe, it'll have something you'd like to read about on a regular basis.

Thank you for stopping by; I certainly hope you'll be back later.