facts.

the cost of a 100-200-300W 3-way light bulb is almost 7.00CAD. that's retarded. but also very, very bright. and two of them are twice as expensive, but also twice as bright. which is also twice as nice.

tiger woods pga tour '06 comes with a free mug if you buy it at best buy.

philosophy classes make my mind feel fuzzy sometimes.

sport chek on calgary trail has only 2 gym bags in stock. both of them are crap.

peanut butter wolf is a peanut butter crappy dj. but his song selection really is stellar.

don't, don't... don't believe the hype.

jh..

(still more stories to come)

the country that the world forgot

luxembourg. the tiny country nestled between germany, belgium, and france. we stopped for the afternoon in luxembourg city and walked around the old town, which was both quite nice, and surprisingly empty. tired after 4 days of rally intensity, the lazy afternoon was welcome. from luxembourg we made our way south, to...

france. as much as i like france, it loses a lot of its charm when coming from germany. the french highways are crap in comparison, and you pay for the apparent privilege of driving them. you pay through the nose. toll roads in france are ridiculously expensive, but i suppose that's partially a result of having the sncf run so well throughout the coutry. we drive for most of the day, and retired to a rest stop for the evening, as we were all too accustomed to doing by that point in the journey. what we weren't accustomed to was...

being robbed. we settled in for the night, comfortably in the back of our opel meriva-home, and fell asleep. the windows were cracked open some to let fresh air in - we would have been sleeping in a steam room otherwise. it was something of a shock to awake to the sound of my bag being reefed through the window opening by what i assume to be a dirty frenchman (dirty because he was stealing, not beacuse he was french). i remember screaming something not very nice at him (though at the time it sounded like someone else screaming it, a beside-myself experience, if you will), and wrestling my bag back away from him. i opened the door, ready to pursue him and do whatever instinct instructs that you do when confronted by thieves, but decided that getting shot/stabbed/mauled/raped/laughed at in my underwear in the middle of nowhere in france at such a late hour probably wouldn't much be worth the story. my apologies to you, for that. as it turns out, all of my belongings were still in my possession, the result of the window not being open enough to quietly slide any of them through. will, though, wasn't so lucky. they only managed to take one of his belongings through the slightly-too-open window, but unfortunately it was his camera. quite shaken, we took a while to gather ourselves, and drove to the next gas station rest stop. the moral of the story, you ask? in the end, it's that if you're going to sleep in your car, do it somewhere well lit (as bad as that is for sleeping) and well-populated. in general this means sleeping at a gas station. hopefully you can learn from our mistake, not from yours.

there is, of course, only one way to make things better after such a violation, and that, my friends, is a visit to nice. one word: beach. well, a few words, really, like 'rocky', 'slightly uncomfortable', and 'naked old people', but hell, it's the mediterranean! you didn't hear me complaining, golden grandparents or not. the city was in the same shape that i left it last year - hot, sunny, busy, and expensive. but it was great. it ended up being 4 days on the beach, complete with hot sun, hilarious beach vendors, and as many good looking girls as you could ask for. and if that wasn't enough already, it was france, which meant monoprix sandwiches that rivalled even last years mortadella masterpieces, giant yop that was even bigger than england's (750ml plus a bonus 10%? uh, yes please?), french pastries, and a native language that i stood a chance at understanding. if you happen to go, watch out, though. there were almost daily sightings of sea serpents, and even a few mud sharks. and let me tell you, you do not want to get stung or bitten by one of those.

through a somewhat awkward interaction initiated on their part, we made friends with the girls that worked at the 'american' bar in nice, so after some coercion in the evening i ended up dancing (gasp) on a table in the smallest, sweatiest, loudest club i've seen to date. retarded. but the band was actually really good, so it was actually kind of fun. and the aussie girls were really nice, and it was nice to speak english to someone other than ourselves. and they were cute, i'm not going to lie.

other random fun included will generously giving people cigarettes when they asked if he could spare one. we soon learned that any time someone asks for a cigarette, they really just want to sell you "mmm...hashish?" and despite this ulterior motive, they accepted will's cigarettes. of course. if you visit nice and you smoke, be warned.

while will was swimming he somehow ended up with a stray hairband wrapped around his leg, which he brought back to shore. needless to say, i wore it for the better part of the rest of the trip because it's europe, and really nobody even gave me a second look. it was nice. both the hairband and the lack of care, really.

every night we'd end up going for walks along the beach, and we'd sit with our drinks (mad fantas for me, shit's on point) and throw rocks into the water. the promenade and quai were always full of people out enjoying the evening, and true to euro-style there were a bunch of inline skaters who'd set up cups along the concrete and do all sorts of crazy footwork through and around them, weaving their feet at somewhat unbelievable speed. as silly as it looks when you first see them, it's actually really impressive when you watch for a bit. talented kids.

g's premonition of flowered skirts and sunsets didn't really come true, but i did meet a particularly nice bulgarian girl on the promenade one night, so g gets at least a bit of prediction-credit for that. somewhat sadly saturday morning soon came, which meant that like it or not we were off on the long and winding road to...

jh..

"drive it like you own it!"

germany. part deux. or i guess it would be something like "teil zwei" if we're going to be linguistically correct, which, of course, we'll try to be.

we landed at the cologne/bonn (i can't even type out the proper names with the cool german letters any more, *sigh*) airport for a second time and i managed to turn on some sort of previously undiscovered charm in talking the rental car desk into giving us a free upgrade from a toyota yaris to another opel meriva. (as for the charm, i liken it to the scene in old school where frank "the tank" has to give an answer in a debate regarding economics whereupon he fully blacks out and somehow gets it done. god, that movie is classic already.) so we were off, this time in a black meriva, driving faster than ever before thanks to our (still naive) familiarity with the lay of the land. in other words we got away from the airport on our first try. this was celebrated by a...

land speed record. we quickly set a brand new meriva land speed record of 192 km/h. it's the black paint that did it. we were pretty much one with the night or something lame like that. anyway, we stopped at a gas station for dinner, which consisted of chocolate milk, pringles, and what the germans try to pass off as salsa. it's really more like ketchup mixed with bbq sauce and maybe a spice or two (they lvoe paprika. it's in pretty much everything there.) ick. we slept at a rest stop and were soon off to western germany and the area surrounding the city of...

trier. hq for the omv adac world rallye deutschland. i bought a rally guide at the info booth we woke up next to, and we were off to scout stages. in the end, we abandonded the "on foot" approach and i said screw it, we're driving. so we did, and i got to drive a stage of the world rally course in germany. i can't tell you how much fun it was. or how many times will whimpered from the passenger seat that i had to slow down. (to his credit, i'm a nervous passenger, too. especially when someone's driving far too fast on single lane roads along the side of a mountain where you can't see oncoming traffic until it's way too late. did i mention how effing FUN this was?) so we drove another stage that day, and yet another two the next. even going 80kph on some of those roads was getting extremely sketchy, i really can't imagine what it would be like going 150. granted, the cars are built for it, but still...

the city of trier is damn near impossible to find anything in, with unmarked streets, one-ways, and two ways that terminate into one-ways and one-ways that terminate at brick walls. retarded. the old town is very nice, however, and we spent most of or evenings there walking around and eating ice cream. but enough about that crap, back to racing.

the rally was insane. we scoped stages as best as possible beforehand and chose what we thought were the best stages to watch. for day one we chose a stage that winds its way through the steep hillside vineyards not far from the town of neumagen-dhron, which itself isn't far from the also small town of piesport (those of you who like your white wine might recognize the name from 'piesporter'). there are a bunch of areas that are designated no-go zones, naturally because they're dangerous for fans to be standing around in while the rally cars are bombing down track, more or less on the edge of control. the great thing about the german police is that for the most part they don't really care, so after a half-assed attempt at crowd control, they just stood back and let us do whatever we wanted. hence, there i was, standing on a 3 foot high retaining wall in the middle of nowhere in germany, with wrc rally cars flying by my knees a few inches away. it was AWESOME. it was close enough that you could smell the car tires, and that you actually had to take pictures and then pull your arm back so that you didn't get hit by the race car. i could have lost my arm taking pictures! how cool is that? throughout the day i more or less just ran up and down the mountain shooting photos of the race - hiding in stairwells, standing in the grapevines, perching on retaining walls, sprinting across the track to where the press photographers were shooting from and then taking off before the marshalls could get their hands on me. it was retarded, and unreal fun. the next days' stages involved climbing trees, scaling old building frames, sitting quite literally inside a guard rail whil the cars drifted (slid sideways) around the highest speed corner of the stage and barrelled by a few feet from us, and eating as much rostwurst (rot, not weiss) as was available. god, that stuff is amazing. the best sausage product i've had anywhere, at any time. mmmmmm. if i lived in germany, i might stand a chance of gaining weight sometime in my life. but maybe that's just wishful thinking.

another cool thing about rallies is the fan support. one of the subarus (sarrazin)went off the track in the vineyards and the car was being held half on the mountain by the vine posts. so what else should happen than 20 fans leaping the wall onto the track and pushing the car back off of the precipice onto the road. he only lost something like 40 seconds, which is rather amazing considering that anyone in a normal car would have ended up in the hospital, their car being more or less written off.

yet another (i could do this all day, but i won't) cool thing about rallies is the crashing. it wasn't cool that the co-driver ended up quite hurt in the crash, but the sight of a citroen rally car upside down ten feet in the air is a pretty awesome sight. they lost control on a long straightaway and just spun out a bit onto the grass. this would have been fine and fully recoverable had they not slid sideways at 150 km/h into a small drainage ditch beside the road. the car hit the ditch and was instantaneously upside down, as i said, about ten feet in the air. insanity. if only i'd had my camera at the ready...

alright, enough about rallies, as i'm sure it means little without some pictures (which will come sooner or later, whenever i get around to making a slideshow. meh.) thus ends our adventures in trier. luckily for us our adventures continued the next morning, when we left for...

jh..

nerd alert

google earth is rad. i just pinpointed not only my own house, but also the exact tree into which the aerobie flying disk was originally thrown, in a park in fulham town, london, england.

sometimes technology is simply too much.

too much fun!

jh..

"a foggy day, in london town..."

when i left last you on the edge of your seat, it was with an exhilarating and yet somehow heart-wrenching account of the influenza-centered week spent in copenhagen. and then i disappeared. to...

london. we landed after an early morning flight and caught a coach from the airport to victoria station, and the underground from there to fulham, where g was to meet us. and meet us he did. and he even carried our tent to his apartment for us. and he was wearing a camel-skin shoulderbag, which if i may say so, was both stylish and functional.

i hope he won't mind my making public the knowledge that the apartment he shares with his homey, naomi, is a glorified shoebox. he'd described it as small, but said that i wouldn't really get it until i saw it. and boy was he right! 4 of us staying in a room no larger than 15 by 15 feet, and that includes the bathroom, kitchen, and balcony. but to be perfectly honest, it was really cute, and as comfortable as you could reasonably ask for. it was really quite nice of them to have us stay there, as cramped as they knew it would be. and overall the week was great, and here's a summary, in the all-too-sterile-feeling point form.

scrabble. or properly pronounced, "skrbl". mad scrabble was played, which was really, really fun. just a tip: if you play against g, you will lose. it doesn't matter if you're up on him by 40 points at the halfway point. you will lose. LOSE. get it? but you'll also have fun and he'll probably teach you some new words and let you know that several of the ones you want to use aren't really words at all. but he'll let you play them anyway, because he knows that you're going to be losing anyhow, and the margin of his victory is secondary to the fact that YOU LOSE. because you will.

pretzels. properly pronounced as "zzlls". you eat them while throwing down on the skrbl tip. they're salty and pretty good.

movies. renting them, going to the theatre to see them, even making them. okay, not making them, but watching them. it must be a sight, 4 grown people sitting on a single bed all watching dvds on an apple laptop, using subtitles to complement the not-quite-loud-enough internal speakers on the computer. but i love movies, so these were nice times.

the science museum. we spent a full two days there, and when i say full days, i mean from mid-afternoon (when we woke up) onwards to closing time just before dinner. but it was great times! nanotechnology, space, the human body, the list of cool stuff to learn just keeps going on and on an on. like did you know that they've built a submarine small enough that it can tug hemoglobin around your body like a nano-sized tugboat? no, you didn't? well, that's probably because it's a complete fabrication. but there are tons of cool nano-things that they have built that are actually cooler than that. and even cooler than that was what will bought in the science museum store...

aerobie flying ring. these things go for miles. puts frisbee to shame and makes it a game that should only be played by the tired or invalid. of course the day we got it, will threw it into the top of a tree in the park. to his credit, it was pitch black out as we were playing in the middle of the night. we got it down the next day by throwing rocks at it in the rain, and promptly got it stuck in a smaller tree. but when you do play with it, you get comments like "holy crap. you're playing with him?!" as some kid points at you a couple hundred yards away from your playing partner who understandably missed your last (and somewhat slightly out of control and overly energetic - sorry, g) long-bomb throw across the better park of hyde park. buy an aerobie. fun times will ensue.

the tate modern. the museum of modern art. it's really cool. you should check it out. on the real.

giant yop. i love this stuff. yop is one of the best beverages ever conceived. and you can buy it there in 750 ml bottles. it's almost too much yop, but since that's technically not possible, it's almost enough, but not quite.

english fish and chips. quite good, but strangely sickening and heavy. i don't think any of us actually finished the meal completely.

street-corner nerd cover rap session. there was this band across the way on oxford street who were playing some kind of ethnic music with drums and whatnot, so g and i started rhyming classic rhymes over these goofy beats, and it totally didn't work, but it was hilarious and we killed a good amount of time doing it. in retrospect we should have put a hat out of something. i'm sure we would have gotten a couple of quid for our efforts, or lack thereof.

haircut. thanks to apes i had my hair cut in london. then we had lunch in a little alley off of brick lane, which was really cool. it's too bad that there just aren't places like that here at home. home is nice in its own way, but good god is it bland here. anyhow, the haircut and afternoon with april were a lovely prelude to the evening's...

roots show. it wasn't a hip-hop show at all, really, but it was good. massive talent in that group. my favourite was the guy on the keys, who absolutely killed it. and the fact that they were giving out promo packs on the street afterwards complete with rolling papers and filters. retarded.

reading. i read something like 4 books in london, which was great. in the shoebox, the park, the rain, the train, you name it. i don't read much here at home, because of school and whatever else, so it's a nice change of pace to go away and enjoy a book or twelve.

so a big thanks to g and naomi for having us. it was really a great stay, and i think i ate enough muesli over the weeks to last me for a year or two. i thought that will drank enough beer to last him for a while, but i was soon proved wrong. very wrong. after a train ride and rather short fight, we found ourselves back on al-too-familiar terrain, namely...

jh..

to my future wife

not really, but i think i'd marry sarah harmer on the merit of her singing voice. there's something about it that i can't get enough of. she's sung me to sleep for the last few weeks in heat, cold, parties, explosions, air horns, and rain.

so thoughtful of her, even if she didn't think of it.

stories to come.
jh..

aha!

i knew i'd forget! when i was in copenhagen astrid and marianne were nice enough to take me to their gym to work out and make myself all big and whatever (yeah...whatever), and in true scandinavian fashion, the gym had a beautiful, dark hardwood floor. everywhere. i felt guily even stretching on it, let alone dropping weights. who puts hardwood floor in a workout facility? i mean, honestly.

a rhetorical question, of course, the answer to which is: the scandinavians. and they're even more wonderful for it.

stay tuned, kids.

jh..