April 10th, 2009, 6 Comments »
Yesterday I was in Toronto and a dude in a suit and tie rolled by me on a long board. It got me thinking about how often I see men over the age of 25 riding a skateboard. I sometimes see them riding around with their young children, which is kind of charming.
That got me thinking about video games. I remember being kind of shocked to learn, a few years ago, that the average age of a gamer is now 33 years old. That is, that a significant majority of gamers has achieved the age of majority. Having grown up with video games, that shouldn’t surprise me (I still play them), but it does. I guess I always associated games with toys and play, and those were things that adults didn’t typically do.
Are there other ‘childish things’ that our generation exported into adulthood? Also, when I was young, video games and skateboards were mostly boy things. Are there analogous examples from the girls of the seventies and eighties?
6 Comments »
December 4th, 2008, 5 Comments »
I still have a Google Alerts feed set up for the all-too-common title of our ebook, “Getting to First Base”. As you might imagine, the results it generates are quite varied. I’ll be happy when we finally decide on a name for our forthcoming dead-tree edition, so that I can monitor the web for something a little more unique. Fingers crossed on that front.
Yesterday Google Alerts served up a link to this post on a blog entitled My Life. As Impacted by Neve Campbell. From an introductory entry:
Neve Campbell and I were students together for five years at Vista Heights Public School. We were enrolled in a French Immersion program in Mississauga Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, Canada. The following is the story of my life as it relates to her.
Weird, eh? Almost all of the entries were written in April, 2007, and they’re quite exhaustive. They include a couple of class photos and extensive tales of life near Neve. They’re quite detailed:
I remembered her telling me that her younger brother had been diagnosed with asthma. We were sitting in class at the time and she began asking me all these questions about what it was like for me growing up with asthma. As she led me away I had this bad feeling she was going to tell me this brother of hers had died.
When she finally spoke, she told me that she had made arrangements to go to a private school the following year and she wouldn’t be coming back for grade 5. This was bad news, but it wasn’t the kind of ‘end of days’ news that warranted this degree of seriousness.
It’s all a bit creepy, and there’s a certain tone of Penthouse-Letters-Without-the-Sex to the whole thing. There’s no easy way to confirm the veracity of the blog, but if its faked that takes some serious dedication. Also, if it was fake, the author might have done a better job of promoting it.
5 Comments »
July 7th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Rebecca wrote a short history of the Stanley Theatre, and it reminded me of one of my favourite movie-going experiences.
On May 24, 1989 (I know the exact date thanks to this page), Rob Stover, Steve Lee and I cut out of Grade 10 afternoon classes. We drove (Steve had his license very early) all the way from our safe West Vancouver enclave over to the Stanley Theatre. We sat in the front row of the balcony and watched the first matinee show on the opening day of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
My friend Rob was a huge Indiana Jones fan, but it was a bit of a thrill for all of us. That was in the midst of my Premiere-reading period–I was a cinephile from early on.
The Stanley was a gorgeous cinema, and I miss seeing movies in that grand old space. It’s a lovely theatre, too, of course. It’s a pity the Arts Club doesn’t make consistently engaging shows to play inside it.
7 Comments »
May 15th, 2008, 8 Comments »
Travis wrote a nostalgic post about hot dogs and their role in the lunches of our youth. This bit took me right back:
I used to even get them in my lunch—my mom would get them as hot as possible and put them and the boiling water into a pre-warmed thermos in hopes that they’d be at least luke warm by lunch—which to be fair, usually worked unless it was REALLY cold on my bus ride. So I’d have warmish hot dogs for lunch, then forget to bring the thermos home and the hot dog water would get really fetid and make the thermos useless for anything except more hot dogs, and the cycle would perpetuate itself.
I don’t recall having any problems with fetid water, but maybe I was a more disciplined kid.
These days I only eat turkey and chicken hot dogs, and try to avoid the bargain basement variety. I think I’ve said it before, but the turkey smokie from the vendor outside of London Drugs at Granville and Georgia in Vancouver is terrific.
8 Comments »
