Failed Approaches to Defending Ship Memorabilia Purchases to Your Spouse

• Oh my god, it's not like I said ANYTHING about you wanting to BRONZE Sebastien's shoes? And he has weird feet.
• It's like this, OK, you loved Richard Gere in "An Officer and and Gentleman", right? Well, it's kinda like that. Except without the subtle gay subtext.
• Well, you did make me eat kale. KALE. *looks meaningfully at 1/2 empty plate*
• I could just get a Veritech fighter. 1/60 scale.
• Oh, so your love of anachronism stops as soon as we need 2 feet of bookshelf space for a 110-gun Spanish Galleon with flammable rigging. What? It is.
• I promise this has nothing to do with me calling it "Davey Jone's Locker" down there.
• You said no to my rubber ducky, my rubber sheep, AND my inflatable Betty Boop, and NOW THIS? What is WRONG with you?
• Don't you dare bring my LP collection of "The Captain and Tenille". They are TOO more important to 20th century pop culture than "Sonny & Cher".
• Well, you DID make me learn all those knots. 
• My interest in it has nothing to do with the fact that your lines have evolved from a schooner to a East Indiaman to a 120 gun 1st rate. Nothing at all.
• I'll promise to stop christening and naming our cats. Or prepending their name with HMS, okay?

Prospective iPad 2 Owner With His Thoughts.

Look, I know I live in a state and a city which thinks quinoa is a reasonable substitute for a starch and that gears on bikes an abomination. I know that all my coworkers, immediate family, and extended family who live in this region all love "The Wire", "Arrested Development", and now slightly hate "Arcade Fire" ever since "the Grammy incident". I know there are almost more recycling bins outside my apartment complex than there are elements in the Periodic Table, but still.

I have some expectations.

It'd be nice if the lineup wasn't ten blocks long. Like, 15 people. I could handle waiting for 15 people. But only if those 15 people don't have an itemized list as to why the iPad 2 is really the one to get, and, in the long run, actually quite a bargain.

Also, could the people in my immediate vicinity please not have tumblrs or blogs or twitter accounts that they casually try and advertise? How many streams of information do I need about new Apple products and product rumours and supposed long-term strategy and finalized, objective data on battery lives? Like, ten, at the most, and I already got them.

I happen to like black mock turtle-necks, ok? And jeans. I liked them about two years before Jobs (our prayers and thoughts are with you Steve!) got the look, ok? It'd be awesome if no one pointed tha tout.Or asked me how much my impersonation fees are.

Also, Rio is a perfectly good company. And my iRiver doesn't need replacing. The first 10 hipsters in that lineup who make a crack at it, or the fact that all I have on it is 1/2 of "Razor's Edge" and the "Blues Brothers" soundtrack get a very very hostile stare.

Uncomfortable Movie Synopses

Predator
Ethnics die first. Austrian herrenfolk survives thermonuclear blast in a jungle without cover.

Death and the Maiden
Doctors who systematically rape and torture for a totalitarian regime can afford extremely expensive chamber music seats.

Robocop
Only a horrifying amalgan of machine and half-dead man, funded by and developed for a private corporation for profit can save a major city in decay.

Ocean's Eleven
Eleven hardened life-time criminals are justified in robbing millions from a legitimate business man because he's somewhat cold and happens to be dating the head criminal's ex-wife.

Untouchables
Federal agent has nearly all his best friends killed in a bloody war over a substance that's legalized a few years later.

Red Dawn
Every conflict to ever descend upon Afganistan, transposed to Montana.

Breakfast Club
Over-privileged white kids in the suburbs feel hard done by, get high, have a make-over, collaborate on a letter.

Top Gun
Man learns about commitment only by having his best friend die in practice.

Barton Fink
Wrestling movies pay the bills, not Great American Films.

Monsters Inc.
Entire species are reduced from a warrior band who strike terror in the hearts of millions to a laughing stock of cheap-gag vaudevillians in a desperate bid to keep the lights on.

Leon
A hardened sociopath almost delves into pedophilia, a girl's family dies, and an entire SWAT team is killed so that a ficus can find a better life on private school grounds.

Belle Epoque
A softcore film is not identified as such due to foreign language, soft-focus, and a superb prop-master.

Run Lola, Run
A screenwriter with career ending writer's block writes the same plot out several times, with small variations, just to make his vignette feature-length.

Things I Would Miss From My 20's If I Had Them In My 20's

• washboard abs.
• any abs at all.
• belonging to a team sport.
• belonging, full stop.
• having a nickname that wasn't used with derision.
• keg parties.
• scratch that.
• having a secret handshake/hi-five ritual.
• cruising down the strip.
• having a car to cruise down the strip with.
• knowing where said strip might be.
• having a favourite band.
• going to quirky cultural heritage days of which I'm weirdly proud.
• beach volleyball.
• not the "Top Gun" kind.
• not  the "Dead or Alive" kind either.
• I'm not sure what I mean here.
• witheringly advanced political views.
• handing out Beat Poetry flyers.
• joining an amusingly mismatched club for a girl.
• getting more interested in the club's activities than said girl.
• a koi pond.

L4D2 NPC's and Infected Rejected Out Of Hand

Oil Derrick Worker:
You never see them, because, well, they're kinda isolated, but you hear reports about them, and they sound terrifying.

Tai Chi Master
If you ever swing that ax faster than an heavily sedated sea sponge, he goes down immediately. But should you go slower, HOO EEEEE!.

Hipsters
You only ever encounter their corpses, they go first.

Vegan
He can be found dumpster diving, looking smug and eating rats.Organic rats.

Flautist
A jazz flautist.

Driver
Sits in his car, a well-notated map of Toledo in his lap, a cold cup of coffee on the dash, and him, crying softly.

Concierge
He stands, looking from the door to his front desk, torn behind a hunger for human flesh and a sense of duty.

Gymnast
Stands below the double rings, arms still on the rings, him looking up, moaning.

Foodie
Fusses and pats you down, emits a low 'humming' noise as he considers, invariably leaves you alone.

Wipeout

In a fit of what only can be described as a radically unfounded enthusiasm for the outdoors we decided to take the kids tobagganing. Living in BC means ridiculous cost of living,  receiving way below the national median salary, but also that mountains are about 30 minutes away, turning the 1000 mm of rain we get at sea level into wonderful, if soggy, snow.

Capitalism dictates that where there are parents desperate to create 'memories' for their children there are cramped ticket booths at the end of interminable lines ready to charge money for it. And they do. For bringing your own sled to go down the mountain. Gravity is apparently a premium resource.

We borrow tobaggans from the neighbours, who have kids who are quite a bit older. This should have sent off alarms for me, cautious dad that I am. But on the other hand, I want my kids to be more or less fearless, and adventurous about things, so I don't really give it a second thought. It's a board, that you sit on, to take you down a very long sheet of ice. If that doesn't say safety I don't know... it does sound suspiciously like the sport that poor Georgian died doing in our Olympics.

We get there, pay the fees, and stand behind the impromptu lines. The hill looks kinda steepish, kinda longish. I do have all the coordination of a inebriated stork in a hurricane, but I figure I can keep things under control. I'm the Dad, for crying out loud. Evolved over the millions of years to, if nothing else, protect the young. From sabre-toothed tigers and rampaging bison and the odd rampaging tribe.

Nothing to it.

But somewhere in the profoundly careful part of me, there are doubts. Serious doubts. I'm the sort of geek who can sprain his ankle if the sidewalk he's strolling on hasn't been professionalliy resurfaced in more than say, eight days.

Owl Jr. and Mrs. Owl go down on a narrow bottomed contrivance, it cuts into the snow and doesn't go terribly fast. I think, oh, this isn't so bad. 

A younger teenager takes his turn, he kneels on his tobaggan, and it just screams down the hill. I suppose being on his knees increases the speed and possibility of quadrapelegia should he hit a large tree. Whee. There's something familiar about his trip down, and I can't quite put my finger on it.

We go down, and geez, it certainly feels faster when you're on the sled. I brake with my feet, sending snow spray everywhere, we do a little 360 at a very slow speed and spill out. The worst thing is that snow gets into Owlet's jacket. She doesn't exactly enjoy the snow down her neck but wants to go again.

We go down a second time. I slow down again. Except I guess not enough, or we hit a bump. In any case we spill, but don't necessarily get untangled from the tobaggan, Owlet's hand gets dragged across the aforementioned sheet of ice that masquerades as snow and she's screaming.

We get up.  Somehow through crushing guilt and impenetrable sense of failure as a dad and a person, I keep my wits, much to my surprise. I find the injured wrist, but I don't know what's happened yet, just that Owlet is really giving her lungs a proper workout. There's echoes off the mountain, I believe.

First thing's first, I go through basic range of motion, nothing broken, whew. Then I pull back her coat sleeve and really look at it. There's a patch about the size of a dollar bill that's completely white, and I know that a nice swath of skin has been left on the hill.  In about 2 minutes there's going to some serious blood. Gotta get her to the medic tent. We trudge up the mountain to the saddest excuse for a cafeteria I've ever seen and I spot some offical looking teenagers standing around. I ask politely where the medic is, they call one in.

During this waiting time her wrist starts bleeding and it looks ugly. The teenagers are terrible at hiding their shock or their welling pity but I'm keeping things cool yet concerned. At some point they realize that hey, I'm the dad, and maybe they shouldn't overreact. One can really amp up the suffering of a kid's injury by overreacting.

She's actually much more concerned with what the medic is going to do. At this point her body is throwing so much stuff at the injury I don't think she's feeling anything. I spend all my time comforting her that the medic won't give her a shot or something equally horriifying.  Never mind that her entire wrist is eclipse in a pool of red, the medic might put on a BAND-AID. Her chief concern is a Band-Aid that's removed too quickly, something she did herself and still remembers. The things that cause anxiety in kids are weird, funny, and familiar.

At some point another dad comes in with his son, who has some blood in his mouth, he biffed it good as well. He's about the same age. Owlet is then used as a pacifier for that kid, "Oh, look at her, she's much worse", well, at least something good came out of it.

The medic finally arrives, patches her up, and we go for ice-cream, because that's the only rational response to mild childhood trauma, in my book. While watching Owlet wolf down her vegetable oil frozen ice cream synthetic it suddenly dawns on me that the tobaggan that the hotdogging teenager was using was the same model  as the one we used: stiff, flat bottomed, built for maximum speed.

We'll have to go up again, if nothing else than to stave off a phobia of hills, lineups, and tobaggans that I'm sure has taken root in Owlet. But at least I know that my enthusiasm for the outdoors is indeed, unfounded.

General Qualities Required for Yacht Captains Employed by Third World Drug Kingpins

• ability to keep eye contact when addressing employer on the "hottub deck".
• past experience with caring for a ficus.
• general disinterest in female anatomy, especially on aforementioned deck.
• experience with pH balance and chlorination of 1/4 Olympic sized pool.
• enjoys 'Miami Vice'.
• supportive, but not too supportive of recreational drug use.
• able to remove tricky stains from snow-white uniform (mud, grass, human brain and skull fragments).
• refrains from 'punching it' at the first sign of law enforcement.
• comfortable with frequent small arms fire.
• knows how to start and operate a Vecoplan K-Model RG70K Industrial Shredder unassisted.
• can do light cleanup (mainly of bent spoons, dusty mirrors, various lengths of rubber hose).
• fond of Billy Ocean.
• equally comfortable talking out of a search and seizure from the Coast Guard as he is having light banter at the dinner table.
• doesn't press the need to wear 'short shorts'.
• competent enough to serve as a spare 4th for bridge, should the need arise