ButtercupPunch – “La clique, c’est chic!”

Indio, California Police Tell Local Phish Fans, “Don’t Smoke Pot”"

Indio police are encouraging attendees at this weekend’s Phish Festival 8 to refrain from smoking marijuana to have a good time.  Police aren’t disclosing their methods but said they will be on the lookout for anyone caught doing drugs during the three-day event at the Empire Polo Club in Indio.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials issued similar warnings to attendees at this past weekend’s Cypress Hill Smokeout Festival in San Bernardino, which celebrated marijuana legalization and its therapeutic uses.

Aside from detecting the smell of marijuana in the air, officials were “pleasantly surprised” that there were no arrests made, department spokeswoman Jodi Miller said.

“There was a fight on Saturday, and the crowd basically took care of it,” she said.

Now, I don’t know what a Phish concert is like in Indio, CA, but I do know what a Smokeout Festival in San Bernadino, CA is like, and I know the reason that no arrests were made is because a beautiful pairing of Cop and Citizen came about.  One where every pot smoker in the place was respectful of the Law(man) and kept their weed movement discreet, while every cop was courteous of an individual’s right to smoke and kept their eyes open for violence and crime and things that actually require police attention.  The place was so chill, everyone was in a good mood, happy to be outside enjoying the gorgeous weather and the good music.  I’m not kidding, I didn’t see one angry person the entire day, apparently I missed the one fight.  And not that it should matter, but this was a hip hop concert, with stages full of mean looking rappers hollering about fuck dem po-lice; so go the lyrics to their songs.  And still, the vibe was mellow crossed with soul-funky, the perfect accompaniment to the bass beat in the air.

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Are you a fan of casually abusive blogs, in the style of Fuck You, Penguin?  Do you like to cook?  If you were wondering how to combine these two interests, you might enjoy this blog my friend tipped me to, Cooking For Assholes.

The blog is written by a guy who evocatively describes himself as a “dude who can cook.”  His mission statement?  Behold:

You suck at cooking. You fuck up rice. You think Cayenne is that fat bitch from around the way and Old Bay is the piece of shit that keeps calling the cops on you and your boys. Don’t you think you would get some major action if you were able to pull off an edible culinary concoction? Follow these easy recipes and you will be swimming in the sea of love before you know it. Dap!

Sounds good to me.  If I can’t be tormented by a real-life professional chef, I am open to receiving generic belittlement via the internet and staring at flash-intensive photos of Americanized bangers and mash (I am making that this weekend; it looks good).  As far as I can tell, his only qualifications are being interested in cooking and demeaning his readers, who are more than happy to talk shit right back at him.  I am fine with that, and I don’t mind his Portland-Brah style.

I would, however, challenge him to attempt Kadinsky’s Bacon Explosion.  Hopefully he’ll let us know if he does.

Hi all. I am in a dental high comedy these days, or at least that’s how my man friend is regarding it. Every day comes a text from a faraway land, begging me to send him a photo of my pure white donkey teeth.

Let me explain.

When I was a girl, I was a gymnast. At 17, I fell off the uneven parallel bars and cracked my two front teeth. Combined with the Pearl Drops experiment a  year or two earlier that went terribly wrong and stripped my teeth of their enamel, my chompers were hideous. So I got bonded fillings on the four front teeth. Only once or twice have they needed to be completely replaced.

Little did I know, however, that Canadian dentists are apparently world-renowned artistes on the bonded filling front. When I went to a dentist here and asked him to replace the fillings and to make them whiter, he flat out refused, saying it would be too hard to do and instead, he’d give me four porcelain veneers at $1,500 a tooth. That was more than I could afford, so I went to another dentist recommended to me by a neighbour.

Sure, Dr. Mancini said. I can EASILY replace those bonded fillings and give you a lovely new smile, and I’ll do all four for a thousand bucks. Great, was my reply! (more…)

I did a post last year called Gradations of Celebrity Sightings after tripping over Boris Becker on my way to work, and we all had fun recounting our most random encounters with The Famous (you New Yorkers always win; for the record, I have since seen Bill Nighy outside Pret a Manger – twice!  So, yeah.). 

On an excellent night out a while ago, my friend Shanelle and I ended up having many, many drinks with a slew of papparazzi who’d been camped outside a nearby hotspot with their heavy-artillery camera equipment.  This was even better than an actual celeb meeting in many ways, as they were happy to share horror stories about their predatory ways and inside scoop on the stalking-for-pay business.  For fun, they even gave us a mini-celeb experience, shouting “Tailfeather!  Tailfeather, over here!” blinding us with flashbulbs and rapid-fire shots, so that passers-by stopped to gawp and try to figure out how we were famous (and we could have been any one of Britain’s roughly 10,000 reality show “stars”).  We giggled, thinking that probably a few of those people would go home and say they saw someone famous outside a Mayfair pub.  “Who was it?”, their friends would ask excitedly.  “I’m not sure… But definitely someone.  One of them was blonde, and there were papparazzi.  It must have been that drunk bird off of Big Brother!”

That evening eventually wound down when the papparazzo who’d been chatting up Shanelle got a text that Leonardo DiCaprio was at a SoHo lounge, and slipped off into the night after a money shot, gruffly whispering at her not to tell any of his friends where he’d gone.  I was reminded of this recently when the boy and I were out for a Thai meal at a little place near Goodge Street and he froze with his fork halfway to his mouth, clearly deaf to whatever riveting story about my office I was in the midst of.  His eyes tracked a group of skinny hipsters as they were warmly greeted and led to the more private dining area downstairs.  “WHAT,” I said.  “You totally just missed the part of my story where Todd stood in front of my desk and clipped his fingernails with my scissors.  That was the climax.  What IS IT.” (more…)

And just last week she had me so excited about the St. Louis Ram’s coif, damn you, Rihanna! 

I am going to have to go back and watch all the happy, pick-me-up movies you guys suggested in Tailfeather’s excellent post, because today people are pissing me off.

Things that annoyed the crap out of me today:

1. Another lost pair of expensive tweezers. I loved these ones and they were pricey. I had them ONE DAY and now they’ve vanished. Somewhere in this house, there is a black hole that sucks up my tweezers. And it is bugging my ass. Not to mention my brows.

2. People who come to town from back home whom I barely know but want to have dinner with me. I realize this makes me sound like an misanthropic C-word. But come on. We smiled and said hello on the streetcar maybe twice a year in Toronto. But now because you’re in town, I am supposed to give up a hard-earned weekend night of doing nothing to have dinner with you because I am the only person you know here? No. Just no. And please stop asking. If we didn’t go  out for dinner in Toronto, why would we go out here?

3. My firewood man. He called at noon to say he was coming at 4. He called at 4 to say he was coming at 6. He never showed, and turned his cellphone off. Piss off. I waited around all day, gazing longingly at my fireplace, telling it sweetly: “Don’t worry! Soon I will have wood and you will be roaring happily once more!” It’s just bad business not to show and then to turn off your cell, isn’t it?

4. My big dumb hound dog who refuses to go out in the rain and so has dropped a load twice in the basement on the new carpet. I have been kicking her out in the backyard because if you put her on her leash and try to make her walk, she just lies down, but she still seems to be saving up her business for the basement rec room. And because she’s not going out for walks, she is getting bored, and tonight ripped into a whole package of toilet paper, chewed on a bunch of rolls and made a big mess. It is hard to force a 55-pound hound dog to do something she doesn’t want to do, or to reason with her at all, or to punish her. She either hangs her head in shame, or wags her tail thinking you’re kidding. Cats, I must say, are a thousand times more dignified. They’d kill themselves in shame and horror if they shit on the carpet, they really would, and always go out in the rain to relieve themselves.

5. My fucking landlord. For three weeks my washing machine has been malfunctioning. They sent a repairman who couldn’t fix it and told me they’d get back to me the next day. Nothing, and they don’t return my calls or e-mails. Doing one load of  laundry takes about five hours because the digital controls are malfunctioning and the machine automatically turns off after 10 minutes. This is pissing me off and making me crazy.

That’s it for me today! What’s pissing all of you off?

Happy Friday, Hookers!  It’s been forever and a day but we finally have a new Ganja Gab for you.  Today’s topic is about relationships and the recreational user.

So I read this article about marijuana and dating/relationships, and it’s pretty straightforward if not predictable in it’s content.  Cannabis is an interest to regular users of the plant just as travel or bird watching is to others, and it certainly helps to share interests with the person you love.  The blogger goes on to talk about the importance of communication, morality complications, the divinity of “weed heightened conversations” and the like, and in the end we are reminded that trust and love will conquer all (such as).  A reference is made to how “smoking might get in the way of a regular relationship” following along the lines of one partner being pro-smoke and the other partner being anti-smoke – yeah yeah, that’s all well and good but why doesn’t anyone talk about the weed problems between couples who DO smoke?  Such as: (more…)

It is nearly Friday (FIST PUMP!), and I am, as usual, thinking about what movies I will watch this weekend.   I used to watch several a week, but no longer have that luxury as there is no video store within miles of me and I have thus far refused to subscribe to LoveFilm, the UK’s overpriced answer to America’s Netflix.  I think I’ll finally give in when the boy arrives and can share the monthy subscription fee, but for now, I tend to rely on my ever-growing film library.

Renting movies here is expensive.  So expensive, in fact, that it’s arguably the same price to just buy movies I like at the Computer Exchange or Tesco as it is to rent (new releases aside).  A big reason I’ve held out against LoveFilm is that I relish browsing.  I find the most interesting indie flicks, foreign films, and documentaries  that way.  I carry a handful of selections around the store before agonizing over my final decision.  I pick up movies I’ve never heard of and evaluate the cover art and the reviews.  I like that it’s tactile and there are always surprises.  This is my major objection to online shopping in general – so sterile, and so limited by your existing knowledge.  I far prefer to wander around a video store for 90 minutes, or spend a happy half-day at the bookstore.

But that is not the only topic of this post.  Oh, no, you see, the primary topic is actually Movies That Are Guaranteed to Cheer You Up, aka Pick-Me-Up Movies.  What I did is make what I like to call a “pun,” tying in two different ideas with a little “wordplay” – movies that uplift you, and my own side-rant about liking to physically pick up movies.  God, I swear my writing gets better with every post.  So, onwards! (more…)

Something strange has happened to me very quickly since moving to America. I can no longer tolerate the cold. In one year, I have become one of those wimps who starts shivering and puts on a sweater when it gets under 70 degrees Fahrenheit … that’s 20 degrees for you Canadians. On the flip side, however, I can happily endure a weeks-long heatwave with just ceiling fans. I barely turned the AC on all summer and instead lolled around in 100-degree temperatures feeling like Blanche Dubois, negligees, gin and tonics and the odd popsicle keeping me cool.

And now Blanche is wearing eight layers of fleece and plans not to move her ass away from the big brick fireplace in her living room until the next heatwave comes along.

Tomorrow it is supposed to get cold here, and by cold, I mean the brutally frigid temperature of 45 degrees — that’s about eight degrees for the Canucks.

I have been lighting fires since I got a few pieces of firewood yesterday, but I am fretting because the terrible cold is approaching and I need more. So when I walk Dolly through the foresty parks and streets here, I have been gathering small sticks and branches. Tomorrow, I am ordering a whole cord of firewood to be delivered to the house and I swear I will rarely leave this couch over the next six months. Surely to God I won’t be expected to brave anything close to freezing, will I? What do you think I am? CANADIAN?

I can’t express how happy it makes me to have a wood-burning fireplace. My last rental had only gas fireplaces, and those are like fake hooters, if you ask me. Insultingly fraudulent. The last time I lived anywhere with a wood-burning fireplace was my childhood home, so I couldn’t be more thrilled.

And it’s just what I need, by the way — another reason to park my ass on the couch. At least now I have a lazy hound dog who will be joining me, an equally shivery teenaged boy and two warmth-addicted house cats.

Big news, BCP Friends, so gather round.  I have an announcement.  I, Tailfeather the Neurotic, am taking the plunge.  I am throwing caution to the wind, I am running with the metaphorical bulls, I am skydiving into a kiddie pool filled with Kool-Aid.  I am allowing the Boy Person to move in with me.  I am nervous.

Never a big fan of commitment, this is a big deal for me.  It took eight months of dating before I could use the word “boyfriend” – I actually just prefer to call him my “person” or even “partner,” the latter of which is acceptable in the UK and I kind of like because it makes me think of cowboys in tight Wranglers and weathered hats.    

Howdy indeed.  Anyway, I am nervous for a number of reasons, the principal of which is commitment-phobia and loss of freedom.  Smart or not, I think a lot of my adventures (both real and imaginary) have been tied to romantic relationships and travel.  I went to France, met a Swedish boy, and fell in love.  We were together for over two years, trans-Atlantic.  I have dated men from Scotland, Venezuela, Ireland, Honduras; I have dallied with boys from Israel, South Africa, Italy, Colombia, Croatia, Mexico, Germany, Australia, Palestine, Canada, and Queens, New York.  I met a Spaniard in Prague and traveled with him.  I have a taste for the exotic and the promises of the unfamiliar, and living in such an international city as London makes the skin on the back of my neck prickle with excitment.  My life isn’t on a set course yet, and I savor the buzz of possibility I feel here, surrounded by foreigners and the potential for new places, new experiences. (more…)