Stone Lantern

My current favourite nickname is Shogun.  Thanks to the internet, I didn’t need to wait for anyone else to start calling me a cool nickname, I just got to pick one. In the old days, we had nicknames like Lefty, Fatty or Cockroach. Now its all Desert Scourge and Flameboy.  Or rather Flameboy763 and DezzertsCorj.  I suppose that makes ‘Shogun’ a screen name, but this is the first place I have ever used it on the web.  In truth, I just started calling myself that one day and no one but the Japanese challenged me on it.

The screen names I have picked for myself include Ascii King, a dual reference to my digital prowess. You look like you need a good Ascii King. Say it out loud and it makes more sense. I’ve also been called Darth Jennifer for a brief and horrible time in my life due to the losing of a game of skill.  My favourite moniker, by far, however was High Lord of the LAN.

I love the saddest eagle the most!

I provide computer and network support for a large organization and for many years, “High Lord of the LAN” was listed as my job title in my email signature.  It was silly and fun.  A few of my co-workers from around the province even referred to me as “High Lord” once in awhile and people who didn’t know me always got a chuckle out of it.

Except one guy.

One of our co-workers was temporarily filling in for the boss for three months. During that time, he asked me to remove my joke title and put my proper one in.  He made one fatal mistake, though. He asked me over email so I was able to ignore him. He sent subsequent email requests with the ‘notify recipient’ setting turned on.  Apparently no one told him I was a tech guy.

He was persistent, however and finally he managed to corner me on the phone and ask directly.  Initiate clever plan #2.  Since he was only a temporary boss I decided to agree and then just wait him out.  Well, he was not only persistent, but thorough as well. He would check my emails regularly and ask why I hadn’t changed it yet. I very quickly ran out of lame excuses and had to admit I just didn’t want to change it.

He insisted.

Initiate clever plan #3. Actually, since clever plan #2 wasn’t all that clever, clever plan #3 was still technically clever plan #2.  Anyway, I asked if I could bring it to his boss’ attention. He thought that was a good idea.

It was not a good idea.

Any halfway decent manager can tell you ahead of time that the boss’ boss backed him up, not me. He very politely explained to me that the title could cause confusion and didn’t seem very professional. Well, I guess I did once receive an email asking me what my actual job title was. That was only one email in three years, though and I had received many more in that time complimenting me on my sense of humour. And besides, I just really, really liked that title and didn’t want to change it.

Initiate clever plan #2 (again(again)).

Do what I am told. Pout about it.

I changed it and I was pretty upset for a while. I hadn’t been treated unfairly. I hadn’t been treated rudely. I had actually been treated patiently and given a lot of rope. I felt I had been treated unfairly. I felt their logic was flawed and their attitudes too conservative. I felt their request was made three years too late.

I was wrong.

When you take a job in a professional environment, you are not only agreeing to provide a service for your pay, but also to act within the norms of the culture.  They are paying my salary and it is perfectly acceptable for them to make reasonable demands on me.  So, while I liked my joke title, I should not be investing so much of my identity into something that has so little impact on the profitability of the company.

My happiness is not a reason for me to resist changes that might make the company better.  My employer doesn’t begrudge my happiness and has many initiatives in place to help make my job more enjoyable. Their consideration for my well being is given with the understanding that I will be considerate of their needs as well.

So, I’ve changed my title some time ago. It hasn’t seemed to improve the productivity of the office or my personal efficiency. It hasn’t hurt it either and it hasn’t hurt me.  Now I just drop hints that I am a ninja.

On that note, if some guy in banded mail and wearing a katana shows up asking about me, tell him the Shogun is out.

What I hope you’ve learned from this blog today is that change is good, the will to change is better and spare change is best.

This is a flash cartoon that my niece and I put together one week-end.  It raises a very important safety concern about crossing sidewalks.

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My friend and I went to a japanese restaurant recently.  They brought out a little bowl of miso soup to start off the meal. Miso soup is an interesting little soup that consists of water and wet food.

It also tastes like they scooped it out of the pond out back.

The first time I had it, I assumed the kitchen staff in the back was making fun of me.  “Hey, let’s see if the round-eye can tell the difference between pond water and soup.”  So, I didn’t eat it in order to show I was on to their game, but I did leave a good tip.  It’s not the waitress’ fault the chef thinks he’s a comedian.  However, I have had it in larger cities as well and it tastes the same.

Apparently it is supposed to taste that way.

People might be getting their back up right now because I’m bashing their beloved soup. Their beloved pond-water soup.  I would normally be the first person to agree about this kind of cultural insensitivity being wrong, but in this case it’s bang on. My friend proved it to me.

Me: “Hey, this soup tastes like pond water.”

Her: “No, it doesn’t. It’s miso soup and it tastes good. It doesn’t taste like pond water.”

Me: “What’s in it?”

Her: “Seaweed.”

Sometimes, the jokes just insensitively write themselves.

What I hope you’ve learned from this blog today is that soup is not culture but yogurt is. And watch out for the samurai elephants.

Recently, my mother has re-taught me to make native bread. I have built upon this knowledge and twice used it to make delicious garlic bread with cheese.  When I say delicious, it is not an opinion, it is fact. Three people have told me so.

I will now teach you to be cool like me.

Equipment:

• frying pan
• source of heat (stove, fire, several lighters taped together)
• spatula
• spoon
• big mixing bowl
• tiny mixing bowl
• G.I. Joe with kung-fu grip
• bread knife
• flat pan (pizza tray, cookie sheet)
• cutting board
• vegetable cutting knife

Ingredients:

• 3 cups of flour
• 3 tsp baking powder (sorta heaping)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 cups of water (just enough to make it sticky is what you want)
• margarine (you can use butter if there is something wrong with you)
• clove of garlic
• cheese (mozzarella, cheddar or anything that shreds or spreads nice)

Instructions:

1. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt together in the large mixing bowl. Mix it well while it is dry.
2. Add the water slowly. Don’t add all of the water right away. You just want enough water in there to make all of the dough sticky, but not runny. Stir it all up with your spoon until it is well mixed and has a uniform consistency of something you wouldn’t want to put your hand in.
3. Melt some margarine into the frying pan, with the stove element on medium. If you are using a campfire, set it to “two logs”.
4. Drop the dough into the frying pan and mush it down into a circle.
5. Let it cook for 15 minutes on that side.
6. Set the stove to low and flip the bread. To get the bread to be brown on both sides, you need to add more margarine to the pan when flipping.
7. Let it cook for 30 minutes on that side.
8. Set G.I. Joe to watch the bread so it isn’t invaded by Cobra. It’s best to set him up somewhere high, so he can look down on the pan. If you don’t have a conveniently high shelf, you can tie him to the handle of the fridge.
9. Meanwhile, to make the garlic butter you need to remove the skin from the clove of garlic. I do this by squishing the clove with the side of a large knife and pulling off the parts of the skin that look inedible. I also yank out the green core because it looks funny.
10. Chop up the clove into little chunks. You could try to slice the garlic so thin it melts in the pan and impress Ray Liotta, but he doesn’t really care and won’t return your emails. Little chunks is better because they mix well.
11. Mix the garlic and some margarine in the little mixing bowl. I don’t know how much margarine as I’ve never measured, but let’s say about 2-3 tablespoons.
12. When the bread is done cooking, pull it out of the pan and let it cool for a few minutes. You will notice one side of the bread wheel is soft (the fifteen minute side) and one side is hard (the thirty minute side). You will use the soft side for this recipe.
13. Take the bread wheel and cut it lengthwise, removing the hard crust. Cut pretty close to the hard crust as it isn’t the part of bread you are interested in. (Don’t throw it away though. You can slap some pizza sauce and toppings on it for a quick and crunchy pizza bread.) What you should have left is a thick bread with a soft crust on the bottom.
14. Spread your garlic butter over the exposed, warm bread. It should completely cover the surface and glisten wetly.
15. Shred the cheese you want to use and sprinkle it generously over the bread.
16. Let the bread stand like that for about ten minutes. This gives the garlic butter a good chance to soak in. Because we have a thick crust on the bottom, you don’t need to worry about it leaking out.
17. Place the bread on the flat pan and throw it in the oven at about 350 for a few minutes. Just long enough to melt the cheese.

What you will end up with is a delicious, bland looking loaf of cheesy garlic bread using no yeast.  If you want to spice up the breads visual appeal, just sprinkle it with something colourful, like parsley or crayola.

This makes enough garlic bread for four people, two of whom can be fat. If you want to make a smaller loaf, only use 1 cup of flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/2 cup of water and 1/3 tsp of salt.

What I hope you’ve learned from this blog today is that knowing is half the battle, knowledge is power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, kill a librarian.

First blog posts always seem to be about the act of writing that first blog post.  It’s as if, the bloggers are talking themselves through it and encouraging themselves to continue as they write, but their thoughts end up on the keyboard and get in our eyes.  This intro is usually followed by the claim “I expected I would string myself up by my own shoelaces before I ever wrote a blog.”  Even though it’s perfectly clear that they have been excited about writing a blog for a while and just couldn’t find a good topic.  Still, I never thought I would write a blog.

The next, standard blogger step would be to free myself from the burden of thought by pointing out that this is a vehicle for spouting my crazy outlook on life and will just be about whatever topic calls to my soul. In blogging terms this means I will do no planning and hope each day (week, month?) that something funny happens to me on the bus ride home. Speaking of which, nothing funny happened to me on the bus ride today.

I suppose it is also customary to explain that my spelling, grammar and format will be atrocious due to the fact that this blog is mostly meant for me and I don’t care who reads it and if you don’t like it go read something else.  And hey!, I don’t have an editor like newspapers, so you get what you pay for.  This blog is free and raw and unedited and therefore, somehow more true to real emotions and the way things actually are than some article that is merely spelled correctly and worth reading. Blah, blah, blah.  Well, you know what else is free?  Garbage.  I could get all the free garbage I want and yet, I choose not to.  Spelling, grammar and writing style are all important to me, so I will do my own editing and try to improve as I go. If you notice any mistakes, please point them out to me knowing that I perceive each one as a mark of failure on my soul but the email will still go into my fanmail bucket.

Now that I have explained that there will be no planning, I can tell you what I plan to do. I want to be funny and popular, but of course, saying that would be blogocide by creating an expectation that I won’t be able to live up to. Instead, my goal is to provide insightful and original humour. Barring that, I can accept being formulaic so you at least know when you are supposed to laugh. You were supposed to laugh right there.  I am also a big fan of self referential stuff. It might have been overkill to point that out though considering I’m a blogger, blogging about bloggers who blog about blogging. The smurf smurfed a smurf.

I will conclude my first blog in the traditional way of saying “So keep watching.” or “stay tuned” because I feel those are really effective, free marketing gimmicks.  Not free as in speech or even free as in beer, but free as in blog. Now, I know it’s not normal to have a conclusion on a blog to sum up your thoughts. You are supposed to just stop writing and hope you’ve ended on a good one liner they can take away, but I am a child of the eighties.  Back then every TV show had a thirty second moral at the end of it.  What I hope you’ve learned from this blog today is to live life and love hard.  And, when life gets you down so bad the world is closing in and you can’t see any way out it, just hang in there a little longer.  But first give the doctor your shoelaces.

Stay tuned!

P.S. Here is the point where I’m supposed to consider going back and editing it, but then, seeing how much work it will be, I tell myself “If I don’t publish it now I never will” and just reflexively hit “send” or “publish” or “violate”.