Last week I participated in GISHWHES 2014. GISHWHES stands for The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, and it was a doozy! Two of my coworkers were on my team, along with twelve Americans from various parts of the country. Team LeviathanLovesRhymesWithFezzik managed to do several of the nearly 200 items, sometimes accomplishing what we thought was nearly impossible.
Here are some of my favorite item submissions from our team:
#3 It's
"me time." Spoil, pamper and be decadent to yourself like you never
have before. Oh, and P.S., you’re dressed as a Stormtrooper.
#4 Clearly your bicycle is underwhelming you with its current performance. Convert your bicycle into a warp-speed spacecraft. Ride it.
#16 A family of at least four enjoying a formal dinner. All of the place settings, serving utensils, dishes - basically every non-food item above the tablecloth - must be made from Legos.
#28 Stage a mini-newspaper boat regatta in a public fountain with at least four competing vessels. We must see intense competitiveness and gambling.
#33 Batman or another superhero playing bingo at a crowded recreation center.
#37 "When I grow up I want to be..." Have a child dress up as what they want to be when they grow up (lawyer, doctor, ballerina, dragon-slayer, etc.). Then stage the photo in the environment they would be working in.
#42 Some regions have legendary monsters like the Loch Ness Monster in Loch Ness, Scotland or the Abominable Snowman in... well, wherever that creature lurks. Catch the mystery monster on camera that haunts your hometown.
#46 VIDEO (up to 30 seconds). Let's hear "Carry on My Wayward Son" on a giant pipe organ (antique preferred) in a cathedral or church, played by someone wearing a sock monkey hat.
#47 Cavemen get a bad rap, but really, they're no different from you and me. They like to dine at fine restaurants just like us!
We had so much fun with this one, I made a video:
#48 Four people use their bodies to form a table. Enjoy an elegant dinner for two at this body table.
#74 Be the messiah you were always meant to be. Walk on water (must be a lake or pool). We must not see anything under your feet except for water. Not that we need to say this, but: no photoshopping!
#82 As you know, William Shatner loves horses and clocks. Modify a cuckoo clock so that when the hour strikes, instead of a bird appearing, a tiny Captain Kirk on a horse pops out.
# 88 Make a mosaic Elopus, 2 meters in diameter, made entirely of natural objects (i.e. no plastic, human-made materials, only leaves, rocks, dirt, flowers, wood, etc).
#90 Gingerbread villages are always so cute and quaint. Make a gingerbread village that shows urban blight: needle exchanges, prostitution, heavy police presence, etc.
Note the dead prostitute and the cops eating donuts:
#106 Lets see a fully dressed, face-painted Geisha mowing the lawn.
Little known fact: Geisha's have been engaged in a long-standing battle against Flamingos!
#109 Obviously everyone's favorite captain of the USS Enterprise was Jean-Luc Picard. Create a heroic Captain Picard using condiments (mustard, relish, ketchup, etc.) for paint.
#117 (three edited side-by-side-by-side images). Collect fruit from a tree on from which the fruit hangs over a public sidewalk. Make jam from the fruit. Eat it. (Provide 3 photos edited into one image).
This was om-nom-nummy!
#134 You or your pet, in period costume, seated on a Game of Thrones-style kale throne. Make it so good that GOT producers would want it as a marketing poster.
#147 It’s summertime and everyone loves a lemonade stand. But then again, every Tom, Dick and Harry is setting up a lemonade stand in the summertime and the market is flooded. Respond to consumer demand and carve out your own niche. Let's see two children manning a “Hot Pasta With Jam Sauce” stand.
#154 Sculpt John Barrowman's head from duct tape.
MY ULTIMATE FAVORITE: #164Your friend is in bed, not feeling well. Feed them a big bowl of warm (not hot) chicken noodle soup. One caveat: instead of feeding them with a spoon, use a leaf-blower.
We also had members become certified in CPR, renew their vows, and join the Bone Marrow Registry! It was a fun but exhausting week. I think that next year I will book the week of GISHWHES off of work so I can truly immerse myself in the craziness that it entails. Thanks for the fun, team LeviathanLovesRhymesWithFezzik!
As you may know by now, I volunteer on the Lantern Committee for the Vancouver Folk Music Festival each year. Every year we have a theme (or themes) that the new lanterns are encouraged to fall into. I say encouraged, because lets face it... there are some of us that will find a way to squeeze whatever it is we want to make into the theme... no matter how far a stretch it is. Inevitably, every year there is at least one Doctor Who lantern, which took some tricky roundabout explanations last year when our theme was Under The Sea. Our fearless leader Marya is very accepting though, and as long as you don't build a lantern that is too big (or when you break that rule, as some of us have been known to do, promise to store it yourself, and not in her storage space!) she's willing to accept just about any lantern so long as it is safely constructed.
This year we had an awesome theme: Monsters. Or more specifically due to the height at which we carry the lanterns: Monsters Over The Bed. There was tons of room for interpretation there, and I am proud to say that many of our committee members took rather geeky routes in their lantern choices.
Before showing you some of this years awesome monster lanterns though, there are two lanterns that need special attention. This past year we lost one of our own. Andrew was a long-time member of our team, always at the ready with bizarre topics of conversation and jokes that were so bad they were funny. Andrew loved bacon, toilet seats, glitter, and making people smile. He often walked around wearing his purple top hat, and was also known for his Baby Cthulhu costume. In tribute to him, two lanterns were made by committee members this year: The Hat, and Cthulhu.
Todd is the longest running member of our team. He was instrumental in keeping the lantern committee (and thus lantern procession) going when it was in danger of being dropped. He started working on his squid lantern several years ago... exactly how many years ago is up for debate, but it is definitely more than four and less than ten. This year, life got in the way and he was too busy to be able to volunteer, but he did show up for Friday night procession with a wonderful surprise for all of us. He finally finished his giant squid attacking a whale, and it is glorious! A true work of art, every bend and curve carefully constructed and flawlessly papered. I aspire to one day be able to build and paper with his level of skill. Todd's attention to detail is out of this world, something that takes a great deal of talent, time, and patience. It is no wonder it took so long to make this masterpiece.
I only have one clear picture of Lin's newest lantern, even though I could have sworn I took several. While I can almost
pronounce the type of prehistoric sea creature it is, I cannot for the
life of me spell it... I know this as I spent about half an hour trying
to Google it in order to type it here. Sorry Lin! If someone can tell
me the proper spelling I will edit this post accordingly.
My
lantern this year was the cute, but slightly obscure Adipose from Doctor
Who. Lin and I tend to have an unofficial contest between us to see
how many people can correctly identify our lanterns. This year I think
she had 3, while I had 8. In addition to those 8 correct Adipose
identifications, there were several elephants, owls, R2D2, an igloo, and
a woman who was very adamant that I had made a penguin. She actually
stood there arguing with anyone who would listen and dare to say it was
something else. I wonder if that last woman had spent the majority of
her day in the Beer Garden? Other lanterns with their names/descriptions captioned below.
Yesterday was rather hot and muggy in the Lower Mainland. It was as if Mother Nature looked at the calendar, realized that it was July 1st, and decided to turn up the thermostat. The heat was so bad at work that they tried turning off some of the lights in the back to cool off.
I walked to Safeway on my way home, and while I was paying for my groceries, the woman behind me in line asked for carry-out service. Jokingly, I asked if she thought the carry-out lady would carry my groceries the ten blocks to my house for me.
"Ten blocks!? You're walking ten blocks in this!? I can give you a ride, your food will melt, it's really hot out there," offered the woman behind me.
I assured her that I could walk, no problem, had nothing frozen to carry, and pointed out that I only had two bags and that most of my walk was through the forest, which is shaded and therefore not as affected by the heat. Both the woman and the cashier stared at me agape and pronounced that walking through the forest was even worse... dangerous even! I laughed this off, assuring them that it was perfectly safe during daylight hours, and I walked through it daily on my way home. The Semiahmoo Trail is a well-known and well-traveled walking trail that starts near my work and has a pathway leading from it less than a block from my house.
"No really, I can give you a ride," she insisted after some back and forth. "I promise I won't try to kidnap you. I have enough kids at home, I don't want or need any more!"
I laughed, said thanks anyways, and walked home as planned, chuckling the whole way.
My awesome landlady C and her youngest son N took me to pick up my new aquarium the other day.
It was quite the adventure, filled with a few mishaps, all punctuated with N's endless chatter. Almost seven year old boys can be extremely chatty!
I was planning on getting a 46 gallon tank with a bow front, but the one I'd picked went up in price since I'd been in a week before, so we looked at the other tanks available. The 60 gallon tank was on for $50 less than the 46G, and C was quick to point out that it would fit in the car, no problem... so my arm was twisted and I got the bigger tank. N and his mom helped pick out some decor for the tank, and the staff loaded the tank into the car... then realized that with N in the back seat, there wasn't enough room for the tank and its stand (which comes assembled and not in the box as we'd assumed) so we unloaded the tank, loaded in the stand and drove it and the myriad of items that we got to go with it and took our first trip home. C and I unloaded the stand and other items, she fed the kids, and we headed back for round #2. I should note that nearly the entire time, N was chattering away and asking questions that only almost seven year olds seem capable of coming up with, punctuated by the constant refrain: "How much longer?!"
The 20 G tank looks so tiny next to the 60 G!
We loaded the tank into the car, got ready to head home, and noticed 2 chips in the corner of the tank. Several phone calls later, the staff at the Strawberry Hill store had located another tank... in Langley, given me a nice discount because of the inconvenience, unloaded the damaged tank, and sent us on our way. I should point out that C is awesome and barely flinched at the thought of detouring to Langley. Luckily the new tank was in mint condition - the staff there and C, N, and I all checked thoroughly!
N picked out the Chinese Dragon.
We used our awesome girl power and got the tank downstairs to my suite without incident or any male assistance (other than ten year old L closing the door behind us) and put it in place.
The rest was up to me. You may have read my How To Set Up Your Tropical Aquarium post, if not, go check it out to see what it was basically like to set up the tank, only 3 times bigger. :)
It took what felt like a thousand trips with buckets of water to fill it up, not to mention setting up all of the cords and tubes so that they'd be as unobtrusive as possible, and I used some of the tank water and other items from the old tank to help jump start the biological filter.
The tank is now set up and after getting the levels and temp in the correct range, I just transferred a few Zebra Danios and my Pleco into it. I think Danio's are ninja fish. They are very good at eluding human attempts to capture them. I suddenly see the value in the over-sized nets that the local fish store staff use!
Pleco expertly hiding behind a very short green plant.
True to form, I've seen Pleco move only once since going into the tank. Eventually he's going to realize that he has a lot more room than usual, and will probably redecorate the interior of the tank as he likes to do, but for now, he's "hiding" behind the shortest plant in the tank... he's not going to win any awards for hide-and-seek anytime soon.
For months now, every time I go to take a bath or shower I find a spider in the bathtub. Every. Single. Time. I don't know what it is about my bathtub that is such a draw to spiders, but it seems that there is some sort of spider law that a single spider must take up residence in there at all times. I carefully remove the spider using a yoghurt container and a piece of paper, relocating little Igor or Charlotte to the back yard, yet the next time I go to use the tub, there is inevitably another eight-legged critter in there waiting for me. It's like my bathtub has a vacancy sign that only spiders can see:
Spider residence now available!
Must fill immediately!
Move-in ready!
Disclaimer: Slight chance of free relocation to a more outdoorsy abode. Take possession Today!
It's funny, I seem to have a history of critters of various sizes entering my homes (or yards) uninvited. I've had frogs, raccoons, squirrels, hummingbirds, cats, bunnies, and dogs appear in our house or yard without invitation... not to mention the numerous critters our cats used to catch and release in the house when I was a kid, or the animals our neighbors would bring to my mom to rehabilitate. We wound up with several unusual birds that way... golden pheasants, crows, ducks...
I've written about the frogs who have not only appeared in my garden, but have hopped right in the door and across my living room floor - more than once! I actually thought that the little frog was one of the kids toys left out during a recent visit with N&J, until I saw it leap a couple of feet up and to the right.
I've mentioned the hummingbird that I had to rescue from the eating area of our house, and the squirrels who ate from my hand. I learned how to patch up drywall when mom and I cut several holes in the wall to rescue a baby squirrel who got stuck in the wall of our house.
Let me see if I can clear up some of the other animal appearances...
There was a giant neighborhood dog that used to break into our backyard and patiently wait there for me to come out and give him pats and scratches behind his ears. He knew how to push open the gate latch in order to enter the yard, where he would visit with our dogs. He showed up on the sundeck a couple of times, scaring the begeesus out of me before I realized that it was my furry and unnamed (to me) friend. Our neighbors across the street had a black lab named Shadow. He had an electric collar linked to an invisible electric fence around his yard. He would carefully weigh the discomfort of the shock he knew he would receive if he left the yard (provided the fence was turned on, which it often wasn't) against how much he wanted to visit his neighbors. I found him lurking in our carport numerous times. Often I wouldn't know he was there until he was nudging his head against my hand to tell me he wanted to be patted, RIGHT NOW! He managed to scare each of us more than once because he just blended into the shadows, so you rarely saw him coming. He loved our neighbor Mr. G. Mr. G was a quiet neighbor who usually kept to himself, but when Shadow was around he would just light up like a little kid, and made a point of visiting Shadow in his own yard every day so that he wouldn't get zapped crossing the invisible fence.
It was Mr. G who found a tiny baby black and white bunny in his garage, thought it was ours, and asked me to come retrieve it. While we did have a rabbit matching that general description, Domino was about a hundred times the size of the little guy I found hiding in Mr. G's carport.
A few years ago we had a raccoon mama that moved into the shed in our backyard. She found a large Tupperware container and used it to create a nest for her babies. She let me take several photos of her, cooperating as long as I didn't try to get too close.
raccoon babies
When I was a teen, my mom stayed up late one night baking several dozen muffins to take to work the next day. She left them out on the counter to cool overnight. We woke up the next morning to find that every single muffin had at least one bite missing from it. We scolded the cats, thinking that was the end of it. A week or two later, I was in my bedroom downstairs when I heard a rustling sound in the hallway. The bag of cat food was kept there, so naturally I assumed that one of the cats had gotten into the bag and was helping herself to a snack. I called out an admonition, but the rustling started again after a brief pause. I peered down the hallway to find two beady little eyes staring back at me. Those eyes didn't sit on the face of one of my cats, but on the masked face of a rather large raccoon. The raccoon had discovered the cat door, let itself in, and not only helped itself to the cat food, but to the muffins mom had made earlier. To get the muffins, the raccoon had to go through the cat door, up the stairs, onto the kitchen counter and back out again without being discovered by one of our dogs or cats. I really don't know how the furry little bandit managed it!
Speaking of our cats... around the time of the raccoon invasion, we had two cats, Quixote Anne (not to be con fused with our former kitty, Don Quixote) and Kira. Kira appeared one afternoon in a nearly empty flower planter on our sundeck. We went outside, heard a pitiful mewling sound and found a tiny, very dehydrated kitty curled up in the dusty planter. How she got there, where she came from, and how she instinctively knew that ours was a safe place to go, we will never know. We called the vet, described her condition and were told to try to give her some water via syringe or turkey baster, but not to hold out much hope. If she made it through the night we were to bring her in, but not to bother right away as she was unlikely to make it. (In hindsight, it seems like the vet on duty was not very compassionate. I've met vets since then who would have insisted we bring her in immediately, planter and all in order to avoid jostling her.) Against the odds, we managed to get Kira to drink some water, and she gained enough strength to curl up in our laps and purr like mad. The vet was quite surprised when she went from deathly ill to remarkably healthy in a short span of time. Her growth was stunted, but she was a lovely and affectionate little kitty who liked to curl up next to our dog Gandalf. At nap time, she acted as if he was her mama, he in turn tolerated her unassuming presence. Quixote on the other hand, he avoided like the plague after an unfortunate encounter in the eating area (of hummingbird fame) where he cornered her, then didn't know what to do with her, so he kept barking while lunging at her while she swiped her claws at his nose. She won the battle, he skulked off with a few nasty war wounds, and that was the end of their chances at a lasting inter-species friendship.
In 2004, when I was a student at UBC I
was given an assignment for my Canadian Poetry class: Go see a live
poetry reading, interview a published poet and write a review of the
performance. I went to what was at the time a weekly gathering of
spoken word poets, “Thundering Word Heard.” T. Paul Ste. Marie
was a poet well known in the Vancouver community, and I had had the
honour of meeting him and Shane Koyczan at the Vancouver Folk Music
Festival a year or two earlier when they were there as performers. Backstage, we joked in the lunch and dinner lines for volunteers (me) and
performers (them) while we waited for our free meals. Their unique
personalities and senses of humour led me to seek out their
performances at the festival, and they did not disappoint. I quite
enjoyed their slam poetry at Folk Fest, so when I needed to find a
poetry reading for class, it seemed natural to go to a poetry slam hosted by T.
Paul and frequented by Shane - who you might recognize from his
performance at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I absolutely LOVE Shane's Remember How We Forgot:
I had a great time
at Thundering Word Heard, and meant to go back repeatedly, but only
made it out to one other performance. T. Paul passed away
unexpectedly in 2007. He used to open every TWH night with his slam
poem “Invocation,” insisting on audience participation.
Here
is the review I wrote, followed by the Q&A's I managed to get
some of the performers to participate in. I wish TWH was still a weekly event, as I am sure it would be a treat to re-immerse myself in that world. I would be sure to raise a glass to T. Paul, while remembering not only his passion, but that which he insisted upon inspiring in others.
********************************
March
14th,
2004
Café
Montmartre: Thundering
Word Heard
Enter a dark, low-lit
Parisian-style café, narrow yet deep. Tea lights on each narrow
table are flickering in the breeze caused by the door propped open to
Main St. at 28thAve. A combination of pop-art, photographs, mirrors
and prints cover the walls as an old-fashioned tricycle and a pair of
gauze and feather wings hang suspended from the high ceiling. The
audience fills the many tables, reaching far into the back of the
narrow café. It is 9pm on a Sunday at Café Montmartre.
T. Paul Ste. Marie steps up to
the microphone as his theme music plays. He asks the audience "what
do we need?" "Passion!" is the weak but unanimous
reply. "I'm sorry, what
do we need?" "PASSION!" shouts the audience. This
play between host and audience evolves into T. Paul's weekly
recitation of his poem "Invocation." He pauses
intermittently to ask the audience what is needed. Each time the
response is "PASSION!" "We've got to EXPAND on this
vocabulary, form a mental constabulary arresting ignorance at hand
because knowledge IS power." T. Paul finishes his invocation
with the following lines: "And some days they split atoms. And
some days they kick stones. Today they find our voice."
After completing the
introductions, T. Paul calls to the feature performer of the night,
Paulie Lipman, an American spoken word artist currently touring the
West coast. Lipman has been writing poetry for 18 years, has
produced two chapbooks, You
Are Here and Evolution
of a Dork In Progress,
and two CD's Doing the
Door and What's
With All The Shouting!?
All of Paulie Lipman's published works are available through his
website fearofsilence.com.
Before taking the stage, Paulie
climbs atop his chair in the middle of the café and shouts "I
am feeling the spirit tonight! Now the subject for this evening's
sermon is rooted in the utterance of the Lord communicated unto Larry
who occasionally dabbled in prophecy. And on the eve where Larry
contemplated whether or not to give this prophet gig a shot, the hand
of the lord doth appeared in the heavens and the lord doth proceeded
to righteously bitch-slap Larry. All the while proclaiming: BE NOT
HALF-ASSED!" This is the beginning of Lipman's poem "Potential
Damnation" in which he preaches not religion, but individuality.
The poem holds a caution to measure people by their actions, not by
their "potential."
This touching poem is followed by
the comical "Lacka-Assa-Tosis" in which Paulie Lipman
describes his "medical condition" of having no behind.
While his poems contain a substantial degree of humor, Lipman has a
number of insightful messages to share with his audience. Having
dropped out of college, Lipman believes in the school of life.
"Sometimes ya gotta quit reading and writing… get out and
live." When asked if he had any words of wisdom for aspiring
poets, Paulie Lipman replied: "Keep at it. A goal to strive for
is to be personal and universal at the same time." He certainly
achieves this goal in his own work.
Following Lipman's performance,
the open mike portion of the evening begins. Poets and musicians are
each given ten minutes to perform. Some performers choose to combine
poetry with recorded tracks of music and background noise, while
others read from their own chapbooks. The most entertaining moment
of the evening occurs when accordion-playing Rowan Lipowitz asks if
there are any requests from the audience. A joker in the back of the
café calls out "Hit Me Baby, One More Time!" Instead of
going on to a more serious suggestion, Rowan indeed begins playing
and singing the pop song. There is little in this world that can
compare to a thirty-something Jewish, accordion-playing man singing
one of the best-known and most-hated songs to emerge from the
commercial pop-music industry.
Once the crowd has contained
their laughter, Vancouver poet Fernando Raguero takes the stage and
performs a number of his works, many of which can be found in his
chapbooks two
dragonflies mating on my toe
and one hand tied
behind saturn. "Ode
to Suburbia" scoffs at the cookie-cutter style of suburban
greater Vancouver. Raguero's single-line poem "Warm"
paints a vivid image of downtown Vancouver. "It gives me a warm
fuzzy feeling when I see two crack dealers overcome their differences
and embrace." His poetry contains simple, everyday language
which does not hide the message with "too many big words."
Raguero encourages poets to "keep things simple, there is great
beauty in the ordinary, things don't have to be complicated to be
great." Raguero's final poem "Measuring Stick" is a
tribute to "all those who have been called weird of strange or
whatever." Through the poem, Raguero points out that the
"weird" and "mad" person's perspective can be a
wonderful thing.
The night continues with a number
of performances both of spoken word and music. Cole Robertson
performed for the first time, reciting his poem "What can we
know of another?" T. Paul encouraged Robertson and the other
first-time performers to return and share more of their work in the
following weeks. Cole Robertson's self-published Chapbook "What
Happens" is currently only available through the author. If his
performance is any indication of his ability, his work will soon be
found in more established publications. Cole's advice to other new
spoken word poets? "Write all the time. Perform even if you
think you aren't good. You'll get better."
As the evening draws to a close,
Laughs are had, tears are shed, and Thundering
Word Heard founder and
host T. Paul Ste. Marie brings a special energy to the evening. New
performers are given warm support and encouraged to return.
Returning performers of varying skill and renown are welcomed back to
the stage. The audience is energetic and supportive of all
performers. The food and coffee are amazing. I recommend attending
Thundering Word Heard's
open mike night each Sunday from 9 to midnight. Those wishing to
perform should arrive at 8 to sign up. Arrive early as the tables
fill quickly.
****************** Q&A ************************
Cole Robertson:
What
poem(s) are you performing tonight?
"What
can we know of each other?"
How
long have you been writing poetry? Do you write prose as well? Do
you prefer one over the other?
3
years. Yes. No.
Do
you have any published work? Chapbook(s)?
Sort
of. (He
gave me a copy of his chapbook "What Happens")
How
long have you been participating in spoken word?
This
is my first one.
Do
you have any words of wisdom or encouragement for the aspiring poets
of tomorrow?
Write
all the time. Perform even if you think you aren't good. You'll get
better.
Paulie
Lipman (Featured Performer):
What
poem(s) are you performing tonight?
"Potential
Damnation," "Lacka-Assa-Tosis," "First Ever,"
"DJ," "Orion's Example," "History After
Hours," "Slowly Written Suicides"
How
long have you been writing poetry? Do you write prose as well?
18
years. Not really, no.
Do
you have any published work? Chapbook(s)? If yes, where would one
find these works?
Yes
2 chapbooks (You
are Here and
Evolution of a Dork in Progress)
2
CD's (Doin
the Door
and What's
With All The Shouting!?)
