Sacrilegious Content Advisory

Wow, haven't blogged in quite some time now. I really gotta stop starting every other post like that. Not a lot new going on, so I guess that is why it's been so long. I'm just enjoying the summer too much I guess.

Anyway, the point to this post. Yesterday, after work, Rae and I were flipping through the channels when we stopped on Bravo. This weird film was on called Circa, that was a story about some strange circus magician, his abused assistant Lisa, and the sad clown she falls in love with. It had absolutely no dialogue and was told though short scenes with the actors, an couple performing interpretive dance sequences, and the music by a three piece band comprised of a stand up bass, a jazz drum kit and the sad clown singing and playing the accordion. As you may know, I have an appreciation for depraved and dirty clowns and the baroque carnival style, So we ended up watching the rest of the film. The three piece band struck me so much that I did some internet sleuthing to find out as much as I could about them and it turns out that they are a band from the UK called "The Tiger Lillies"that have been around for quite some time and classify themselves as "The world's foremost Death Oompah band". Some notable songs featured in the film, Circa, were a haunting rendition of "Send in the Clowns", "Souvenirs" which is a great story telling song of a man who traveled the world collecting STD souvenirs, and the song that dropped my jaw and brought Circa to a climactic end, "Banging in the Nails" featured in the embedded video below. This must be a fan video because… well it just doesn't make sense. Regardless, I may have a new favorite band, enjoy.

My First Video Uploaded to Flickr

Last week Rae and I went to my friends cabin at Winnipeg Beach for the third consecutive year. What began as coincidence, by the third visit, has become an annual tradition. We arrived on Thursday night and were welcomed by high winds. After a dinner with Jamie and his Mom at an Italian restaurant (can't remember the name of it but their Penne al Diavlo with Italian sausage was incredible), we took a walk down to the beach front to find that the beach was gone. It's quite dark, but the video shows just how ferocious Lake Winnipeg was that evening.

Canaday Day at the Downs

Last week I spent Canada Day with Rae and a few friends at the Assiniboine Downs. Lost more than I won but it was a beautiful day spent with good friends and I had the opportunity to see Canada's rarest race horse (pictured above and below). This horse is rare due to it's amazing, steel blue, coloured eyes and that it is the only one of it's kind that is also a registered race horse. These picture don't do justice to just how striking this animals eyes look.

Leo Mol 1915 – 2009

Manitoba's finest sculptor passed away last Saturday. Leo Mol died at age 94 leaving behind an impressive collection of sculpture on display at the Assiniboine Park, Leo Mol Sculpture Garden.

I have enjoyed photographing his sculptures that can be seen on my Flickr account here.

Fathers day weekend

The reason I haven't been posting is that since returning from holidays I've been busy catching up on things. This past weekend being no exception. After doing some freelance photography I did manage to get out and take some photos that were blogworthy. The weekend began with attending the UCW (Ultimate Cage Wars). I won five seats at a table through 92.1 citi Fm. The main event on the card was canceled and it was mostly submissions but a good time was had by all… except maybe for the guys who lost their fight. Then after an early photo shoot the next morning, Rae and I went to the new Pixar movie, "Up", which is a definite must see for any Pixar fan.


After the movie, we took in a Goldeyes game with our friends Carol and Don. The Goldeyes managed a bottom of the eighth, come back from behind win (9-4) over the Joliet Jackhammers to end a multiple game loosing streak. Lets hope it's a sign of a good, long winning streak to come. I've only been to a few Goldeye games and even though I am not a huge baseball fan, for great seats at $12 a pop, I think that these games are the best value for your buck for any sport in Winnipeg. Pictured above is the game winning hit by Big Dee Brown of the fish.

I'll try to posts more regularly.

Fotune Teller of Old Havana

I really have to get over being shy about asking strangers for their picture, because I saw many interesting portraits on our trip to Cuba. With the lady above, I couldn't resist asking. When I did she held up her index finger and said "One peso". I dug into my pocket to get one and realized that I gave my last peso to a museum attendant that let us into off limit areas. I replied "Desculpe, no peso" to which she smiled and posed for this picture.

More on my Flickr

Tropicana Havana

On our second full day in Cuba we decided to take a tour of Havana plus Tropicana Show. We were picked up at our resort at about 8:30 am, did the tour of modern and old Havana, stopped in nearly every bar that Ernest Hemingway drank (incredible lush), had dinner and went to the Tropicana show. On arrival the women were given carnations and the men were given cigars. Then we were sat at a table with a liter of rum for each group of four and a can of pop each. Whatever we didn't drink went onto the bus to take us back to our resorts at nearly 4:00 am.
Good times.

Compay Segundo and More From Cuba

Here is my favorite souvenir from Cuba. It is a painting of the late great Compay Segundo. Señor Segundo was a master Cuban musician in the 30s and 40s that had received a resurrection to Cuban fame with "The Buena Vista Social Club" recordings initiated by American recording artist, Ry Cooder. I found the photograph that this painting was inspired from here.
The song below, titled "Chan Chan", quickly became a favorite of mine. A few more photos of the trip to Cuba have been uploaded to my Flickr Photostream.

Cuba 2009

So we returned from our great trip to Cuba on May 1st. I meant to post about it much earlier but came home to find that my laptop battery was dead, so it has taken a little while to get pictures online.


One of the great things Cuba has to offer, and something that became a great subject of my photography taken there, were all of these vintage cars. What was cool was that they had, not only classic North American models, but also some old Russian and European cars like Skoda, Citroen and weird three wheeled trucks.

There are only about 7 pictures uploaded to my Flickr page, but in my defense I haven't even pulled them off of my camera yet so expect more soon.

Money Flavoured Chips

Mmmm, money flavoured chips. Actually it's for a contest where you name the unidentified new Doritos flavour. The winner gets $25,000 and a percentage of the chip's profits. The design of the bag makes me want to get a mask and a black and white striped shirt, and get pictures of myself running from different banks with my hands full of these chip bags a la cartoons.


On the Easter weekend Rae and I found an ice breaker on the Red River near the south perimeter, breaking ice and drawing a crowd.

More 2008 Guardian Dojo Challenge

I've just posted more of the 2008 Guardian Dojo Challenge pictures that I took last November. I haven't been at all diligent going through the gigabytes of pictures that I took on that day but, as many of you know, life get's busy. I've been a practitioner of the philosophy, especially when it comes to action shots like these, that quantity will yield quality. I am now trying to go in the opposite direction and really plan out my shots and trying to cut down on my insane number of archived pictures. It is getting hard to find that one picture in my head amongst the thousands of pictures in my archives. I know that I will still have to let the Rebel burst when I am capturing a crescent kick to another man's face, but at the same time I am working on really learning my camera so I can focus more on composition rather than scrambling to get the settings right.

Pictured above is the Guardian Dojo's Sensei, Diego Beltran, breaking a baseball bat WITH HIS F***ING SHIN! see more of the recent upload of the Guardian Challenge here. See pictures that I took last year at my good friend and Guardian Dojo student, Adrian Shum's photostream here or some of the pictures of the band Fubuki Daiko on his photostream here.

The Crusty Bun

This blog is more and more becoming a restaurant review and promotion blog, however biased it may be. In spite of my bias and friendship with Andy and Frieda (owners\operators of the Crusty Bun), The Crusty Bun is one place that I think anyone would agree is world class bakery and café. It's a brand new place at 1026 St. Mary's Road. I recommend that anyone who enjoys wholesome, hearty, fresh baked goods, drop in and visit The Crusty Bun. Try the sunflower seed bread, it is a favorite.

Pictures above is a picture of head baker and owner, delivering a fresh batch of buns.

Damn Straight

Here is a CD layout design that I recently did for Jack Straight's debut EP release "Coming Alive", that I think turned out really well. The goal, inspired by the Jack Straight wordmark that was provided, was to emulate the look of an old 70's vinyl EP jacket that has become worn over time. Last week I attended Jack Straight's CD release party and took a bunch of pictures. The show rocked the Park Theater with songs from "Coming Alive" as well as some covers including Led Zeppelin's, Bring it on Home, which I thought was a high point. Not to say that their original songs weren't impressive. This is one band, that I did layout work for, that I can honestly say doesn't have a bad song on the album. I encourage you to check out their myspace here and hear for yourself.

You can see some of the choice pics here on my flicker account.

New Pro In Town

As of 11:33 AM local (Winnipeg) time, I am the newest Flickr Pro Account member. Above is a photo of a waterfall near La Fortuna, Costa Rica, which is the first picture that I posted on Flickr over seven months ago. Now that the warmer days are on the horizon (trust me), I hope to get out and do a lot more shooting.

Proud New Canadian

I have been quite lazy lately in that; just now I am posting about an important event that happened on the 12th of this month. My good friend "the Ragin' Kjin" Kyung Mi Jin became a Canadian citizen. Rae and I took in the ceremony on the Thursday afternoon at Winnipeg's Union Station along with another friend of mine, from Thompson, Dean Barkosky (in the background of this photo). I encourage all of those who know and support Kyung Mi in her decision to join our great country to send her a note on her flickr page. This last batch of photos I posted on my flickr account marks the 200th photo. I guess it's time to go pro.

Buchstaben Museum

As anyone who follows this blog knows, Rae and I have been taking German language classes for over a year now. Obviously this is done with hopes to visit Germany and other parts of Europe. Berlin is definitely on our lists of cities to see and among the many things there are to see in Berlin, the Buchstaben Museum is one site I will not miss. It may be a sign of Rae's and my Font Nerdedness but I'm sure that we have many friends who understand and would join us in our excitement to see a museum all about letter forms.

To learn more click on the picture above or visit www.buchstabenmuseum.de

Two in a Row

Wow, a post two days in a row. I don't think that's happened since I started this blog last August. I have been doing a lot of video rendering, DVD encoding and archiving at work lately and have put pen to paper for the first time in forever (Danger would be proud). Seriously, I haven't doodled much since college and when I did it wasn't much to show, Not that this one is spectacular, I just kinda liked it.

I'll try to make it more of a habit.

Happy St. Patty's Day

I used to have a passing interest in a site called worth1000.com. I thought that it was a great site for the Photoshop contests and challenges although I never actually posted anything, just critiqued. However I was torn between that and another facet of worth1000. In addition to the Photoshop contests they had logo design competitions for companies too cheap to hire a designer. IMHO this only exploited talented amatures by paying $100 for the winning logo.

Recently I received an Email (which is weird because I had no idea that I was on their mailing list and haven't even visited the site in a year or two) advertising the launch of their new online photo editing, vector program, colour editor and effects editor, all named after birds to go with the Aviary theme. This was in response to Worth1000 members complaining about needing expensive software to enter their contests. I tried the vector program and it's not that great but could never replace Illustrator. It will be interesting to see how it takes off and whether it will force the bigger guys like Adobe to come down in price. I look forward to trying out the other applications when I get the time. They have video tutorials but I think that you have to sign up with Worth1000 to save anyhting that you make. If anyone out in the blogosphere tries it out, let me know what you think. you can find it at aviary.com

My Mom Has Joined Flicker

Hopper 1 Originally uploaded by heyjudexxoo's

My mother has joined the flicker community. With her retirement she now has the time to get out and enjoy herself and post pictures about it. If you like pictures of Quilts, Crafts, or things found on the ground, I encourage you to help me encourage her by visiting my Mom's flicker page and leaving crass, mindless, thoughtless, ignorant, boorish, oafish, asinine, graceless, tasteless, tactless, clumsy, heavy-handed or all around buffoonish comments on her pictures. Just don't be mean, it was her birthday last Sunday.

Happy Birthday Mom
Love,
Doug

New to my Blogs of Note List

This addition to "The Best of the Blogosphere" list, to the right of my posts, is long over due. Justin Currie's, "The Art of Currie" is blog that I frequent via my friend James' blog "kalamafraz". Why I hadn't added him earlier, I don't know. If you don't already know Justin through Kalamafraz, you should check out his tremendous talent on The Art of Currie.

Late Blog

Well this post is about two weeks late but as they say, better late than never. The picture above is of the beautiful tulips that I bought Rae for Valentine's Day. You can see more on my Flickr Photostream. Also missed was a post about Louis Riel Day in the third Monday of this month that also marked the half year (182.5 day) milestone of my smoking freedom and the birth of Blog Therapy. Not a day goes by that I don't feel like lighting up again but I guess I've been stubborn enough.

The Legend of the Fox

A friend of mine recently decided to learn how to play the piano. His motivation was to be able to just step up to a piano and entertain friends. When I heard this, I instantly thought of The Man Show's late great master of ceremonies, The Fox. If you remember TheFox (featured in the above video) and you knew the 'Los (my friend learning the piano), you would understand the connection (sorry 'Los, you know it's true).
If I were to learn piano I would want to follow in the footsteps of the great Victor Borge or Rolf the dog.

Skating at the Forks

This past weekend Rae and I took advantage of the warm weather and went skating on the Assiniboine River at the Forks.


There, we watched friends play in an annual, river curling competition. The people we went to see ended up winning the tournament for the second year in a row. Congratulations Don, Dave and the rest of your team.

To see more of the weekend at the forks visit my flickr page here.

Der König von Schnitzel

Tonight Rae and I enjoyed dinner at Winnipeg's only German diner that I'm aware of, the Kraut King (located under the parking lot on the corner of Garry Street and Portage Avenue). This wasn't our first time trying this restaurant and it is sure to become a regular treat. If you've been following my blog, you'll know that Rae and I are taking German language classes. When we learned about a popular German dish called Currywurst, we really wanted to try it and as far as I know, the Kraut King is the only place in Winnipeg to get it.


At the heart of the Kraut King is the grille. There is something that I appreciate about the open kitchen concept where you can see how a kitchen is kept. It may be paranoia, but I've seen enough of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares to be wary.


Kraut King also makes a fine Wiener Schnitzel. It was served with a tasty spicy mayonnaise for lack of a better description. They also offer great Bratwurst, large Pretzels and more dishes.

If you don't mind curry I would seriously recommend trying the Currywurst.
See more Kraut King photos here.

Photographing my food has been inspired by my friend K-Jin

Great Caricatures

President Barack Obama
Originally uploaded by robotalphabet

Recently, my friend at KALAMAFRAZ has been researching caricatures. A while back I came across the work of Mark Hammermeister on his flickr page, robotalphabet. There you will find some wonderful caricature work in vector as well as other traditional illustrations. I especially like his Tommy Lee Jones.

Have You Ever Wanted to Fly?

It's been a while since my last blog, but now that the holidays are over and life is resembling what passes for normal, I'll try to be more consistent with blogging. for starters I should probably get off of my ass and make a new banner. But in the mean time you should really check out this video that reminds me so much of my favorite dreams, it's scary. Like most people I have had one of those ultra realistic flying dreams which are among my favorites. In this video, these guys are doing it for real. I got this video from Rae's coworker, Karen.

BTW, happy new year and all the best in 2009!