Ceiling Cat Strikes Again…

I don’t know how this came up, but a friend I were discussing the differences between the different branches of Christianity and what version of Bible they used. Anyway,  while looking at the different translations… I apparently came across a LOLcat Bible. Am I kidding you? No. I am actually serious here.

LOLCat Bible Translation Project

It’s even on Amazon for under $15!

Is It Even Worth It Anymore?

I used to be heavy into video-gaming. I have attempted to pick it up there and then. I remember the people I played with and I missed them. However I have to ask myself: is it really worth it?

There was a time when video-gaming filled my social needs, back when everything used to be text-based before VoIP became popular. However that seems to had disappeared for some reason. I admit there’s a few things that perk my interests here and there though.

I don’t know… here, games run between $30-$80 a pop, plus a subscription for Xbox Live? I don’t know. When you’re paying for them for yourself, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal anymore– but when your parents and grandparents are getting them as gifts, then yeah, I will say they are fun. However, when you’re on your own, holding down a job or paying for your own education… it translates to: food, clothes, tickets for concerts, upgrading existing technology.

For now, I have effectively turned my Xbox 360 into a media centre.

Deaf Coffee in Vic

I was surprised to find out that even though there is a Deaf community in Victoria, there are a few CODAs present, and a few interpreter alongside ASL courses being offered at UVic, that there is NO Deaf Coffee or Deaf Happy Hour! So I asked around, and a few thought it was a good idea. So I got permission from the manager a week ago to host this monthly:

Deaf Chat Coffee @ Serious Coffee on Broad

(picture of Serious Coffee logo, inverted colour)
(picture of ASL sign for “COFFEE”)

Fourth Thursday Every Month
6:00-8:00PM

Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing, CODAs, interpreters and signers of all level are welcome!

1280 Broad Street
Victoria B.C. V8W 2A5

Free WiFi Spot
(picture of IHHDC logo)
ihhdc.ca

I know the hands look terrible. I stole it from my scanner from a dictionary. I will touch up on it a bit more once I play around with Inkscape.  It’s not the best thing, nor is any of my posters were decent, however I just wanted to get the information out before November 25th, 2009. Hopefully the coordinators will update it on their website soon.

I am not sure if I should do a vblog for this or not. Anyway, hopefully I will remember to touch up on the poster later, hopefully sooner than later.

Gone Live

Finally set up my router properly. Not only I can use my BlackBerry on it instead of using Rogers’ wireless data plan, I can also take my netbook around the house as well. On top of that I was able to get the Xbox 360 to work with it.

Part of the reason why it took so long was because I had other priorities other than gaming, however I was starting to miss Sean and Wyatt so I hooked the 360 back up. Although what really pushed me over the edge was my frustration of using the ethernet for the netbook. Go figures.

Now I gotta go find out what games people are playing nowadays.. all I have now is Left 4 Dead; used to have Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty 4 as well as Crackdown before I sold them.

Still regret loaning Fatal Frame series, Ace Combat 04 and Godhand out to someone. Blah. Oh well. Not worth buying another PlayStation 2 and drop another few hundreds on reclaiming games I used to like. Did that with the Nintendo 64, and it turned out I don’t really play it that often.

Plov

Mom used to make this, think she learned it from a German immigrant? Not sure. Anyway, I couldn’t figure out how she made it until I translated a Kazakh website. I think I mastered it without using spices… This is a Central Asian dish, popular throughout Slavic countries. I won’t give a recipe since with this dish, just a simple step by step since it’s a staple– like a stew… you know: a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

- Soak a tumbler of basmati rice in two or three cups of water
- Place one or two large peels of onion in the frying pan
- Add a lot of olive oil (about one cup)
- Sauté onion peels until burnt
- Dispose of onion peels
- Add two large grated carrots
- Add one large finely chopped onion once the olive oil turn orangish-yellow, or when the grated carrots softened
- Chop up about a pound or two of meat (beef, pork, chicken, lamb); I like using parts that have a lot of flavour: chucks, thighs and so on about 1″-2″ cubes
- Sauté onion until golden brown
- Add the chopped up meat
- Sear the chopped up meat
- Add the soaked rice (including the water)
- Boil until water evaporate
- Drain olive oil
- Serve

Takes awhile, somewhere between an hour to two hours, but it is so worth it. Before I was doing it the lazyman’s style of boiling the rice in pot, then adding the rice to the frying pan, which didn’t have a lot of flavour.

Now I am off to learn how to make a few Jamaican dishes like jerk, roti and “rice and peas,” and some dimsum recipes. I don’t want to keep paying $8-$15 for lo mai gai…

So What Are Your Favourites?

• Dog– Pembroke Corgi. The little football players! They look small, but pack a lot of punch behind their body mass! And oddly, it’s the only breed I am comfortable being around without having to get used to their personality quirks and that initial “warming up” stage.
• Cat– Turkish Van. My family cat is a mixed Turkish Van, enough said. How can you not like a cat that act like a dog? Including the water-loving part! I am sorry, but the other breeds just doesn’t “click” with me.
• Bird– Raven. I missed these things while living in Edmonton. We had them all the time in Grande Prairie, but when I moved to Edmonton… it was nothing but bloody magpies. And the best part about them? They can stay OUTSIDE! I don’t have to touch them, I don’t have to be responsible for them. All they do is mooch off of people’s garbage. How can you not enjoy a wildlife that you don’t have to own on your own patio?
• Fish– Jardini arowana; or a black arowana will do. Asian arowanas are so nice, but holy crap, they are a lot of money! And it was soooooooooo cool to hand-feed a few of them.Okay. Okay. No fish. They are cool to look at, eh, I am more concerned with the mechanics of self-automatic water-changes than the actual organisms themselves. The downside to fish is– transporting them without killing them.
• Reptiles– Colombian tegus or gold skinks, enough said. I admit, it’s a toss-up between gold skinks and a Colombian tegu. I wouldn’t advocate either one as a “pet,” but I like their feisty personality. Okay, for the snake lovers, yeah, they are nice, however for some reason snakes tend to lend themselves to be more of a “collectible” or a “display” than being a “pet” among hobbyists. No offense, but if I hear one more “breeding plan,” or see one more Rubbermaid– I am going to hurl.
• Rodents– Oh, go screw yourself. I had hamsters and African soft-furred rats, and they are terrible! No, it’s not the bitey part, it’s the cleaning part! I don’t want to dabble in them ever again.
• Invertebrates– Um… no bugs please. No spiders. No snails. No crabs. An octopus is cool, but again, they tend to lend themselves more to being a “display” than anything else. Another group of animals I don’t want to touch again.

Okay, yeah, there are others, however the only “other” I would seriously consider is a ferret– which I do have one as of now, even though he drives me nuts. People who want exotics like monkeys, bears, large cats and so on really need to re-consider and figure out where their head at.

However I tend to be very mobile, and like to travel and often try to be a minimalist, even though I act like I am not. Soo… just a dog and a lizard please. Nothing else… once it goes beyond a dog and or a lizard, it’s hard to keep ontop of things somedays when I am completely scatter-brained. Not so hard to travel around the world with either one too.

Papa! Papa! I am going to Amerika!

That’s right, I am packing up the suitcase and shipping off to America! Gonna get myself a better life! Woha, there Fievel!

No, I am not defecting to the States.

In the past, I have expressed an interest in kayaking. In hindsight, it is a rather naive fantasy. It is an expensive hobby, and what used to be there, whether it’s “untouched wilderness” or “peace and quiet” or “unowned land,” isn’t there anymore, and much of what is being re-told by people are mostly nostalgia; I am guilty of doing the same thing too. On top of that, the whole idea is rooted in the nostalgic experience of spending a few vacations in the Northwest Territories. You know what? That whole adventure wasn’t fun, I just chose to remember only the select few great parts.

Most of my wonderful travelling experiences usually occurred in the cities, not out in the bush or what Canadians like to call it– “the sticks.” If I wanted to go camping, I would rather spend the money I would on the the actual kayak and safety devices on investing in lightweight material– then take water taxis or take a satellite phone and be flown in. So because of this rationale, I am going to change my goals a bit.

What are those? Going to the mid-Atlantic states. Why? I have been meaning to go to, or at least visit, Gallaudet and NTID for quite awhile now. I have made plans to do that for the 20th anniversary of Deaf President Now but that went awry due to personal reasons a year or two ago. I means alongside Amsterdam and Kiev, Washington DC and Rochester are– you know, my Meccas?

So I have decided once I find a roommate to look after the ferret, get a passport and find a stable employment opportunity, which won’t take long, that I am going to the Northeast U.S. and tour there for a few weeks to down far south as North Carolina.

Wish this Canadian luck, and make recommendations if you can! I am going to the Holy Land!

Play: The Josephine Knot

An excerpt from UVic Theatre from this website:

SPOTLIGHT ON ALUMNI
By Meg Braem
Produced by Theatre BOMBUS

Director: Amiel Gladstone
Set & Costume Designer: Megan Newton
Lighting Designer: Michael Franzman
Stage Managers: Rebecca Mulvihill and Amanda Verhagen

Featuring:
Laura Harris
Brian Linds

Preserving the Past and the Ties that Bind
Twenty-five-year-old Samantha and her father travel home for the wake of her grandmother, Baba. In and about Baba’s hoards of knickknacks and preserves – jars of pickled everything, from potatoes and onions to watermelon and cantaloupe – Samantha wades through long-forgotten relatives and personal family memories, discovering anew the ties that bind. Often considered the perfect knot, the Josephine knot joins two ropes together as one.

The Josephine Knot was the winner of “The News,” Playwrights Theatre Centre’s search for exceptional young playwrights, Intrepid Theatre’s “Petri Dish” new play award and nominated for best new play by the Victoria critics “Spotlight Award.”

“…given Braem’s canny ear for dialogue and the unpretentious sense of reality seen in Amiel Gladstone’s direction… Josephine avoids the obvious trappings of family feuds and instead sifts through the emotional debris resulting when a family’s matriarch finally falls.”

Monday Magazine
From Belfry’s Festival ‘08

Sign Language Interpretation: International Deaf interpreter Nigel Howard and Victoria hearing interpreter Mary Warner will provide sign language interpretation for the October 24, Saturday matinee at 2pm.

Box Office: Opens October 7 2008 , Call: 250.721.8000
For ticket prices or subscription opportunities, click here.

Seating Plan: Roger Bishop

See the media release for this show.

Holubchi

I am starting to get in touch with my Russian Mennonite roots, which contained a lot of Ukrainian food. Mom used to make this all the time while I was growing up. At first I didn’t really like it, but thanks to a New Brunswick native living in Edmonton, I developed a taste for cabbage rolls and pierogi (or what was traditionally called verenikje.)

Surprisingly, cabbage rolls were easy to make and turn out to be delicious. Mom used to make this out of ground beef, ground turkey, ground chicken, ground pork and so on. I imagine you can even use sausages.

Kitchenware
- A Dutch oven or cast-iron casserole dish
Ingredients
- 2lbs of lean ground meat (I used 1lbs of lean beef, and 1lbs of lean chicken for this one)
- 1 cup of uncooked long-grain rice (I used Thai jasmine rice)
- 1 large onion
- 1 large head of cabbage
- A can or jar of pasta sauce, tomato sauce or tomato juice (I used tomato sauce, mom traditionally did it with tomato juice)
- Seasoning and herbs (I used parsley, black pepper, cinnamon and thyme)
- 1 can of cream of mushroon, or 2 tablespoon of sour cream (optional)

Instructions
- Boil rice
- Sauté onions until golden brown in a frying pan
- Remove frying pan from stove
- Add ground meat to frying pan (no heat)
- Season
- Mix up the seasoning, meat and onions
- Boil cabbage in a separate pot until tender and pliable (or take cabbage out of the freezer, freezing the cabbage will have the same effect as boiling it)
- Remove rice from heat once done
- Add the meat to the rice pot after rice is done; mix it up
- Peel the cabbage leaves gently from the core
- Remove the hard non-pliable part of the cabbage leaves
- Take a large spoonful of the meat and rice mixture, place in middle of the cabbage leaf
- Fold sides, then stem, then top leaf
- Mix the tomato sauce or juice with cream of mushroom or sour cream
- Add a thin layer of tomato sauce or tomato juice to the Dutch oven or casserole dish
- Place folded cabbage rolls in the Dutch oven
- Add more tomato sauce or tomato juice for a second layer of cabbage rolls
- Place a second layer of cabbage rolls
- Cover the top layer with more tomato juice or sauce
- Cover with a lid, or if you don’t have a lid, use leftover cabbage leaves to protect the rolls from drying out (I added a layer of sliced mushrooms instead of cabbage leaves since the Dutch oven has a lid)
- Bake at 350F for an hour (or if the meat is already browned, reduce cooking time to half an hour.)

CrackBerry…

Finally got myself a bloody BlackBerry. It has been so long since I got a QWERTY-type phone. The last one I had was from Nokia, and I lost it at Hudson’s on Campus once late one night. Either that or it was at the Duke’s.

Immediately, I was able to see the benefit of it for the Canadian Deaf. No more being isolated on the freakin’ bus! Plus I can keep ontop of my e-mails and read RSS feeds during my spare time when I am out and about. Plus, it’s nice being able to get a semi-decent camera for a quick snap around town rather than taking my half-broken Canon PowerShot (which I will be using for doing videoblogs.)

So yeah, I picked up the BlackBerry 8900 Curve. I would have went for the 9000 Bold, but I figure there wasn’t much difference between the 8900 and 9000.

I am glad that Banjo pushed me over the edge to get it, rather than the iPhone.

Got Hacked…

Well, that sucks. Someone got me interested in paying World of Warcraft again, so I went to retrieve my old account from my e-mail, then I found out someone merged my Warcraft account into a battle.net account under a Hotmail account on April 12, 2009; I don’t even use Hotmail.

And oddly, instead of addressing me as “Andrew,” it addressed me as “Ryan.” So that is a red-flag for someone hacking into my account. All I can say is: good thing I don’t have a credit card, or otherwise there would be a much more serious case of identity theft here.

So  not only I am out of a valid CD key, I have someone that got access to my parents’ information from 2006. Not happy.

Anyway, I contacted the Blizzard Support Team, hopefully they can sort out this crap.

“What You Want To Do With Yourself?”

What I want to do with my life? Everyone asks me that, and when I ask at them… it’s usually along the line of “get rich” or “get famous.” Thing is, I don’t think about that, yet people look at me oddly for that. When people ask what I am looking for in a girl, I don’t really have an answer. Actually, I really don’t like it when people ask me these questions.

I don’t have a dream house; a dream car; a dream girl; dream job; no real overly ambitious plans or anything of the sort. So what do I want? Simple, really, decent food on the table, a roof over my head and to be able to enjoy what I have with no one else expecting anything from me. I means sure I would like to teach, travel the world, and be with someone. However those are vague, I see myself doing them, but I don’t see the situations I would wound up in, or anything that resemble end goals.

Alright, alright. I lie. I am not such an apathetic person as I have made out to be. I can see myself planning out trips for the springs and summers, with a Prembroke Corgi on my lap, with papers and flash drives scattered across the floor as reminiscences of previous writing projects, with a backpack ready to go at the door at a moment’s notice. I admit, it would be nice to have someone that can speak my language, and can laugh at my inane comments riled with seemingly absurd references.

The funny thing is that I never really gave any serious thoughts about what I want to do with my life in term of career or anything like that, and the things that I do enjoy– I do them free-of-charge. The only time I ever did cash in a cheque from someone else is when I didn’t really enjoy the labour. It has been six or seven years since I was popped the question “what do you want to do with your life” and really… I never found an answer that was satisfactory enough for the people I interact with: I just want to have fun via the outdoors, have a roof over my head, some food, and someone or something to share it with. That’s all I ever wanted for the last ten years or so.

You know what? Just give a damn dog, a notepad and a backpack. Oh, and some food too.

Hmm… Halloween

Well, last year, I didn’t go as anything. Last year, I was thinking of the George Romero’s blue zombies from Dawn of the Dead (or its Japanese counterparts like Junk and Stacey), except I wasn’t sure how to go about doing that and I didn’t feel like going to Value Village for the clothes needed. Traditionally, I went as a doctor for two years– one was parodying Hale+Guu.

Off-shoot: That remind me, I need to get caught up on the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and the latest in zombie movies. It have been more than a year since I last saw them.

Anyway, so, yeah… I don’t have the lab technician jacket that I had three or four years ago, and I really don’t feel like dying my hair until my acceptance at UVic is confirmed. So, I am just going to be lazy– put on some black pants, blue dress shirt, a skinny tie, some white shoes and get myself a black fedora and go as a rude boy. Yeah, I know. I am not particularly creative this year, but I don’t want the stress that go with paying attention to details with the props, make-ups and dyes and all of that this year.

So zombie flicks, horror games (wish I still have my Fatal Frame games, should had never lent them to  someone who turned around and sold them), and dressing up as a rudeboy.

Stealing from the Rich… Giving to the Poor…

So… I think I got a theme for a chapter: Deaf Robin Hood. It came out of a comment when a member spoke about a few people, including me, “snatching hearing aids” form the under-privileged children under the “free hearing aids” program for Third World countries, when I criticized they should be offering services like funding more deaf schools and setting up hearing centres– not free hearing aids or free technology in a poverty-stricken country. So I aptly replied and mocked “for every kid you snatch a candy from, I will snatch your hearing aid. Then give them to the poor.”

It will be interesting to write about. A Deaf Robin Hood? Stealing from corrupted corporations, then giving them to the poor? Time to do some brain-storming here.

Ableism versus Disablism

I am just looking into the implied nature of the neologism for discrimination against ability. Ableism, disablism; same concept. Both words, ableism and disabilism, are valid words that are accepted in the UK and in North America. Well, a Deaf man changed the way I thought about disability especially in regard to Deaf advocacy and activists (or -ism). He suggested changing “disabied” to “enabled.”

You see, the inherited problem of the word “disability” is that it has an implied meaning of focusing on ability, not one’s sensory losses or disorders. That’s why Deaf people don’t like being called “disabled,” nor do the blind or little people. So… if we call sight losses, hearing losses (or lack of hearing), neurological disorders “disabilities,” then it translate to “can’t do.”

Because I had have a strong stance against being called disabled, I often turned down support because they were connected to branches such as “disability services” or “centre for disability” or “resources for people with disability.” Why? I feel that accepting those terminology are working against the very things we are trying to tell people: “treat us as equal, we can do anything you can.” And as long we accept that, the glass ceiling will always be there.

Sometimes I feel that using the terms “disability advocacy,” “disability activism,” and “disabled rights” are actually counter-productive because of the very nature of the root word itself. So… now that being said, when you’re using a neologism surrounding discrimination against ability, use “ableism,” not “disablism.” Otherwise that strong stigma attached to “disability” will still be oppressing us while we are trying to accent our abilities.