The Free Thinker

Is it just me, or does picture messaging almost never work?

For a long time, I've had virtually no use for it. After all, I was carrying around a T616 which is a first-gen camera phone that is completely useless. If you have direct sunlight on the fourth Sunday of the month during the year of the donkey you might be able to get a usable low-res picture. Might.

But now I have a very nice 2 megapixel phone. I even grabbed a flash attachment off of eBay. This thing takes decent pictures. So once in a while, I figure it's fun to send a funny picture to someone.

Last weekend at the club I took a pretty funny (and highly sketchy) picture of myself with the bathroom attendant. I sent it to three people and none of them got it. Something always goes wrong.

I have no trouble sending. Which is great, because that's the part they charge you for. But half the time the recipient doesn't get anything, or they get a notice saying they have a picture message and they can't pick it up. Or something else goes wrong.

I'm not doing anything esoteric here. I'm sending a picture message, a feature that's been on phones for three or four years now, from my stock Rogers phone to my friend's stock Rogers phone. I figure by now I've paid out four or five bucks for photos that went into oblivion. It's right in that sweet spot where it's not enough to be worth complaining about, but still enough to bug the crap out of you.

This should just work. Is it any wonder this hasn't gotten off the ground yet? Look how long it took text messaging to really pick up, and that's about 45 times more reliable. If a communication channel doesn't work at least 99% of the time it's virtually useless. Do you have to phone someone every time you send an email to make sure they got it? No, but I have to text my friends whenever I send a picture message.

I'd send Rogers a photo of my ass and ask them to kiss it, but that'd probably be another 50¢ down the toilet

Image courtesy of Seth W.

Oh yeah, you knew this was going to come up today. So today marks the anniversary of the day Hallmark (and, I presume, the flower industry) pulled off a bit of marketing genius and turned February 14 into yet another consumer orgy. Without lube.

Anyways, this is the first Valentine's Day I've been single since 2002. In fact, the 2002 one is the only one that really counts. Before that I was in the closet. And when you're in the closet, every day is like being single on Valentine's Day. Actually it's like every day your dog dies, you get fired from your job and then you get mugged on your way home. And on top of that it happens to be February 14 and you're single.

But I digress.

I'm actually not too broken up (teehee) about the whole deal. I mean, sure, it'd be nice to have someone. I love doing all that romantic crap. My first real Valentine's Day fell on a Friday, and I wired up Tavy's stereo to wake us up to "Friday I'm in Love." Those were the days.

But hey, nothing to complain about really. When I'm looking at my fourth consecutive single Valentine's Day I'll bitch. For now, I'm actually moderately comfortable being single.

It's sort of like being a consultant. Sure, I won't rack up as many hours as a staff member would. But I'm always visiting new "clients" and every "project" is unique. I get to do all the interesting work and leave all the boring stuff for the next guy.

And best of all, I get to charge an arm and a leg. Okay that part was a joke.

Image courtesy of everettt.com.

Okay that's it, you're all on notice. That's right, yesterday was my one month blogaversary and nary a card, comment or blow job have been forthcoming.

On a serious note, it's been an interesting month. Since then I've had around 295 visitors and 427 page loads. Not too shabby Adam, not too shabby.

It just goes to show you, it doesn't matter what inane crap you write about on the Internet as long as you throw a funny illustration next to it and end with a snappy one-liner. In other words, you can slip in whatever you want as long as you finish off properly.

That's what she said.

Damn, I was doing so well. This weekend seemed like a slam dunk. Since I've been sick all week I thought it'd be easy to avoid going out. And it was. All week it was the last thing on my mind. And then something terrible happened.

I got better.

If I'd been sick just one more day I would've been home free. Where the hell is all that antibiotic-resistant bacteria when I need it?

Anyways, I went out to a bar Saturday night with a friend and had a decent time sober. Got home at 2 AM and went to bed. I set the alarm for 6 AM, got up, showered and headed you know where. It was funny, actually. I felt like such a fine, upstanding citizen walking down the street at 7:30 AM on a Sunday.

So I got there at 8 AM and started having a pretty good time. I figured I'd leave around four or so. Then it was five and I still didn't feel like leaving...Then one "sketch hour" later it was 9:30. And before I knew it was 2 AM. I was at the club for eighteen friggin' hours, smashing the sixteen hour record set the weekend before. I swear there's a rip in the space-time continuum in that dank basement of joy.

I had a blast, and I don't really regret it, but let's not make a habit of it, okay self? Regardless, a few lessons learned:

• If you buy drugs in bulk to last you a few outings, you'll go out at every opportunity because in your mind you only have to pay for cover.
• That mega-sketchy girl you remember from the first time you went to the Zone doesn't want to talk to you.
• Don't lend your driver's license to somebody to crush up something, then forget about it and wander off.
• Do take a picture of yourself with the sketchy bathroom attendant and show it to everyone.
• People who would normally ignore you or be absolute pricks will turn sweet as sugar if you offer them gum.
• Deko-ze is too busy when he's spinning to notice you blowing him kisses.
• The club is way more fun in the late afternoon when there's actually room to dance.
• Going out from 8 AM to 2 AM when you work at 9 is a bad idea, but you can pull it off if you really want to.
• Of the people you'll meet in a night, at least half of the conversations will start in the bathroom.

That's all I can think of at the moment, but at least I didn't get gum in my armpit this time. Oh, and I can almost see my abs now. I've got washboard-mostly-immersed-in-water-but-still-barely-visible abs!

It'd probably be a good idea to take next weekend off, but unfortunately I've already bought my ticket for Rauhoffer, so that won't be happening. Looks like I'm going to have to go home the weekend after just to break the cycle.

So I'm at the club Sunday afternoon and I go to take off my shirt. I turn and there's a string of gum going from my armpit to the shirt. That's right, I got gum in my armpit. This raises two key questions:

1. How the hell do you get gum in your armpit?
2. Whose gum was it?

That's right, I didn't even get the consolation of knowing whose gum was stuck in my armpit hair.

I swear this crap only happens to me. Not only that, in my altered state I felt like going around and telling everyone. I was almost so excited to have the funny story that I was glad it happened. But in retrospect it was even more embarassing than the time I ran around Stereo with Kit Kat on my face for 90 minutes...and nobody told me.

They say when you club a lot the weekends start to blur together. Luckily for me there's always a minor disaster to make each one special.

Sometimes all it takes is one juicy, beautiful, GENIUS quote to take an old issue and put it back in the spotlight. That's exactly what US congressman Gary Ackerman did yesterday in a comment about their military's "don't ask don't tell" policy that lets them boot gays out at will:

For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they're very brave with the terrorists. ... If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they'd get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad.

Of course this quote spread across the Internet like wildfire. Personally I don't find the idea too too scary...until I consider what would happen when their cycles got in sync. Now that's a bloodbath. I don't even want to think about the PMS.

As a former j-schooler I feel qualified to criticize those who were actually good enough to take up the craft. It helps me feel better about my college roommate being the Toronto correspondent for the New York Times.

So when, once in a while, I come accross a story where the reporter hasn't done his homework I call them on it...to myself. Like years ago, on CTV, there was a story about this study that showed that putting dogs in retirement homes cheered up old people. I can just imagine the meeting where they decided to cover this:

Reporter: "Breaking news boss, people like animals and we've got the science to prove it.

Editor: "My God! I'll warm up the chopper!"

Hey, kudos to the scientist who managed to get a big fat research grant to study this crap. But shame on the journalist for reporting it without a critical eye.

With that in mind take a look at this garbage. Allow me to pull out the most shocking revelations:

Yup, it's true. You can lie on the couch all day long, graze on snacks and still lose weight. That's right — no exercise required... Thing is, you'll have to reduce the calories you consume to lose that weight. And the less active you are, the more calories you'll have to cut.

This just in: your body burns a certain number of calories per day. If you burn more than you eat, you lose weight. If you eat more than you burn, you gain weight. You can increase what you burn with exercise or cut what you eat with diet. This is not news people. We've known this crap for decades, and the fact that this would surprise anyone is a sad reflection of the state of health education in our country. It gets worse further on:

Oh and don't bother doing specific exercises to target fat in certain parts of your body, either. Study says that doesn't work. You may get very good at doing sit-ups, for instance, but if you're taking in more calories than you're burning, those rock hard abs will still be covered by a layer of fat, if that's where it tends to gather on your body.

Wow, stop the presses. Of course you don't burn tummy fat by doing situps. Your body isn't like "oooh, he's using his stomach muscles, better use that tummy fat." Your arms would run out of energy pretty fast if they had to get it all from arm fat, wouldn't they? It's called the spot reduction myth and I can't believe people are still falling for it. Let's not even get into the fact that situps burn fewer calories than walking.

This whole obesity epidemic thing has caught my eye for a while. For me, it's hard to understand how that can happen to someone. But really, if people don't know these very basic facts about maintaining a healthy weight, whose fault is that? We have an education system for a reason, you know.

It reminds me of a scene from Super Size Me. This obese girl is attending a talk by Jared, the dude who lost a ton of weight thanks to Subway. She says she wants to lose weight, but can't afford to buy all those sandwiches. Because, you know, you can't make a sandwich at home or anything. It's not like they keep the ingredients a secret, you can see them all through the glass.

Anyways, if this "journalist" is anything like I was in j-school, he had a deadline coming, put it off too long, and had to come up with this lame crap to fill the space. But at least I wasn't getting paid.