Xorton's Rant

When Creed from The Office reacts to a hearing about a water birth he remarks: "Must have been like low tide on Omaha Beach." he wasn't far off. Keeping with the World War II analogies, a regular birth is a lot like the result of a platoon of soldiers that has just been fired on at point blank range by a Tiger tank's 88mm canon. There's a lot of screaming, shouting of orders, and of course blood and rather nasty looking red chunks everywhere... and I do mean everywhere. It's all over the bed, on the underside of the bed, the floor, and up the walls, even six feet away. I didn't check the ceiling closely, but I imagine it was there too. I'm glad we agreed on a hospital birth. Before the fact, I'd imagined that I would have had difficulty with the birthing process... fainting and what not. I found that when I was in the midst of it, I really didn't have time to be anything else but clinical about the experience. By the way, thank you all ...

My daughter has arrived! While I think the name in the title to this blog it pretty darned cool, her actual name is Iona, which I hope will result in significantly less teasing at school. For the record, only one person guessed correctly. For those of you interested in the details, she weighed 8 lbs and 6 ounces at birth and is 21 inches long. She has light ginger coloured hair and the attitude to accompany it. Being first time parents, we have received all sorts of unsolicited, though well intentioned advice/observations from others, including: Say Good-Bye to sleep . This is completely inaccurate. While, it's only been a few days, I find that we haven't had to say good-bye to sleep, we've simply had to adjust when we sleep... such as having a thirty second kip while waiting at a red light (people are always helpful in reminding you when to go), or while collapsed on the shower floor. Additionally, places that had once been considered as ludicrous places to take a...

Recently we cancelled our traditional cable television service. We've begun this "experiment" on the basis of a couple issues: One, we really don't like shelling out hard earned dollars for a multitude television stations of garbage, for a small number of stations we actually watched. We used to watch four stations (History and Discovery being a couple of them), however with the long slide into sub-par content, we were reduced to two. Discovery has essentially become a showcase for pseudo-scientific programming (I don't count crazy people with educational "degrees" from non-existent universities majoring in ancient aliens talking about invented "theories" science), while History generally doesn't show actual historical programming any more and mostly airs reality television about people living in swamps and the like*. I don't count that as history, although I fear their marketing department believes it to be "history in the mak...

It's been a busy couple of months for me, so I've been on something of a sabbatical from blog writing. As most of my readers are aware, my partner and I are expecting the imminent arrival of a baby daughter. Many people are still curious as to the name we've picked. My nephews (who are always entertaining), when prompted to make a guess answered with: "Is it 'Star Wars'?" Certainly the most unique guess we've had so far... they certainly know me well! Considering female character names from the series, 'Mon Mothma' would certainly make for a unique name (I know Leia is pretty run of the mill at this point)... although not necessarily one that I would punish my own child with. One of my friends recently made a slip when we were discussing that point and called the character 'Mon Mothra', which while being very amusing would not make for a very child friendly name. I think it would make for an interesting (I hesitate to call it ...

Released : March 2001 Publisher : Nintendo Developer : Rare Platform : Nintendo 64 Type : Action-Adventure Graphics : Narly Game Play : Narly Originality : Narly How many hours I’ve wasted : Blank-eyed soulless stare The Nostalgia Factor : Narly Any game featuring a cartoon squirrel with a pint on the game cover and starts off with the theme music for A Clockwork Orange requires further investigation. I first encountered Conker's Bad Fur Day   at a friends house. He'd rented the game from a local video store (there's a dated term) on the basis of the afore mentioned squirrel on the game cover. After playing all evening, (and feeling slightly shell-shocked) I promptly ran out and bought a copy. Conker's Bad Fur Day, is one of the most demented, violent and hilarious games I've ever played (easily trumping Sierra's Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry series). Don't let the Nintendo label fool you... this game was designed for a purely a...

I'm sure it comes as no surprise... I hate the Olympics. I've always hated the Olympics and with each passing year I usually end up with at least one more reason to dislike them. I was introduced to the whole thing back in grade four. One of our classmates was selected to run with the torch, so the school made a big to do about it. At the time I thought it was pretty cool that one of my friends got to run with a big flaming stick, although I really didn't understand the big fuss over the Olympics itself. We had to talk about it every day in the "Current Events" portion of class, which always seemed to be dominated by sporting events at any rate. Naturally I never contributed anything as far as sports were concerned, and even on days where it was my turn to bring in an article to talk about, it never got around to my turn as the discussion about how the "Leaf's" were playing always seemed to take up the whole session. The teacher thought I was p...

Decorating is always a challenge, particularly for people you haven't met, and even more challenging for those who in addition to not having met, have yet to develop a sense of style or the ability to communicate it. Of course, that could be said of a lot of people, but in this instance I'm referring to unborn babies. I've recently completed painting my yet to arrive daughters room. I had to fight the urge to paint the whole thing black. Black is such a versatile non-colour. It goes with everything, you only need one coat of paint for it, it's gender neutral, and it doesn't matter when your toddler writes all over it (particularly if you confiscate all the white and lighter coloured crayons). Of course, that would pretty much fulfill the ingredients for guaranteeing that you end up with one of those damned imo kids at some point. On that note, we decided to paint the room two colours... a very light blue and a very light yellow. At first the yellow didn...