July 2005 Archives

Ok, the show part is up. This week has been long and mentally draining. The Mike Stuff is put on hold indefinitely.

I've been dreading writing this. The piece that has the sole purpose of explaining what The Mike Haddad Show is. However, after receiving an email from someone who thought that the show was more than it is and was asking for references to have his reality TV shows produced, I decided that it was time to do this and that I'd better make it good while I'm at it. Reality TV, by the way, happens to suck but I wished him good luck with his endeavors anyways.

The problem with describing what The Mike Haddad Show is comes from the fact that it's developed a lot from what it originally was meant to be: A stupid little blog. I guess in some ways it still is a stupid little blog, but to me and a few others it is something more than that. I hope that it might end up meaning something for you too.

For me, it has become much more than just my personal (or not so personal) blog. When I started the blog way back in March 2003 I was only 16. I wasn't sure what I planned on doing with the blog, but I had oodles of experience with HTML. Good HTML too if I do say so myself, as opposed to the shoddy coding that you see on a lot of the sites. So I dove in head first and decided that I would just figure it out as I went along. It shows. Looking back on the older entries I find them less than satisfactory. I wouldn't ever take them down though. They are as much a part of my growing up as puberty, and the first time(s) I got laid. I look back on them just like I look back on memories I have throughout elementary and high school. And I shake my head at them all the same.

I did the angsty teen thing really well. It doesn't surprise me that no one read my poor little Blogger hosted blog. I wouldn't have read it either. It was hardly ever funny. For the most part it was just a rehash of what had happened to me in school that day, a detailed post about who was dumb and why I was better than them, or what stupid things we did on the weekend when we thought we were cool.

I like to think that by the time I was done studying English in England over the summer of 2003 and had come back from my cruise I had learned something about how to be funny in writing. Unfortunately this would be proven false. Although the writing I did while I was there got large amounts praise from my teacher, by the time grade 12 had started I had gone back to whining about pointless things, which is not the same as being funny. It is different, and lame, and differently lame. In retrospect it was caused by a combination of things: high school was bothering me; my relationship had seriously started degrading at the end of July even if I ignored it; I was getting tired of having to do the straight half of life.

University came and gave me a chance to do things the way I wanted to do them and a second chance at being funny and having a good blog. This chance was to be wasted. I was still jaded from drama over the summer and too annoyed by University to actually do a good job. It wasn't even drama of the gay variety. It was plain old short angsty teen drama. Mono kicked in, and I found myself struggling to stay awake so blogging was only used as an outlet when I needed to get something done so I could stay sane. Eventually I started to recovered, and was given my third chance. Enter The Mike Haddad Show.

The original idea for The Mike Haddad Show came about in May 2004 while a group of us were at Queen's University for the EMC program. A bunch of us were sitting downstairs in the common room while I flirted with this really hot guy and we watched TV. That was when The Brendan Leonard Show came on. Soon the conversation changed to how I should have my own show much like The Brendan Leonard Show, only with less suck. Not much happened until 7 July 2004 when four of us decided to try and film the purchase of items with only coins. It didn't work out too well, but it was still funny for us. That experience would leave the idea of the show buried in the back of my mind until it could flourish.

I think flourish is a good word to describe what happened. The show turned into a project for me to keep myself occupied with. Natasha jumped on and helped me plan the photo shoots, and I'm sure she will continue to do so. Eugene is harassing me to get guest bloggers. Mel is in love with the photo gallery. The other Mel is helping setting up the other half of the project. Heat constantly comments. I'm sure some of the other characters drop by to visit sometimes too. You dropped by too, if you're reading this. So you should say ‘Hi' once and a while. I know you're there. Which is cool because I haven't even had to talk about boobs yet, and that is a good thing because I don't think I'd look good with boobs.

Eug screams out

and it's no pose.

Cause when he dances,

he goes and goes!

Ok, I promise to have rewritten and completed all of the stuff for the Show Section and the Mike Stuff by next Sunday.

I swear.

It's a shame that I've slept so much this week, or else I would have been ready to drill through the book and be finished before breakfast. It's ok though, I'll probably be finished by Monday. I have to finish rereading Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. Handing out at Chapter's proved to be very good times though. Mel and I got there around 11:00 and proceeded to get my bracelet thing, and then went off to take pictures of all the little kids that dressed up. It was amazing. There was one kid who looked JUST LIKE Harry Potter. Pictures will be posted to the gallery as soon as they can be uploaded. Taking 110 pictures at Alyssa's doesn't seem like such a bright idea now, especially since it's taken about 45 minutes to upload the pictures from Wonderland, and there are only 63 of those. I'm such a camera whore.

Today I started work at my co-op placement. It was nice, the people were incredibly friendly. Mono caught up with me around 3:30pm when I found myself struggling to stay awake, but I was back on track by 4:00pm so it was all good. I'm enjoying it, even if it's volunteer. I hope I'll get a really good work report, and I might take another coop job in the fall that pays. However, don't expect too much about the workplace. I know better after reading dooce.

So instead, I'd like to focus your attention on Gwen Stefani and all the things that are wrong with her solo album. Don’t get me wrong, I love some of the songs. She’s just an idiot. I say her, because although it is the producers fault in the end it falls upon her to know what the hell she’s doing. She seems to be throwing around these Japan references in an attempt to make us believe she knows her shit. Well no, she doesn’t know it, not one bit. Her shit is just bananas, and it makes me want to scream "�?�ん�?�" over and over again.

I’m convinced whoever had the majority of the input on that CD spent a week in Japan, and maybe visited Harajuku once before coming back and starting production. Probably Gwen Stefani herself; although the fact that she can’t pronounce Harajuku makes me have doubts about whether she’s even been to Japan at all. Harajuku is pronounced "hah-rah-jew-koo." The ‘jew’ and ‘koo’ should actually have the same end sound, but I find it easier to display it in English like this. Gwen Stefani, in her brilliance (or lack thereof), seems to think that it is pronounced "hah-rah-jzhoo-koo." I don’t even think that ‘jzhoo’ is correct phonetically, and this only because I can’t think of ONE WORD in English that has that sound in it.

Gwen Stefani doesn’t even know what a Harajuku girl looks like. She wasn’t kidding when she said that she dresses them wicked. She dresses the wicked alright; wicked BAD. When I first saw the Harajuku girls in the ‘What You Waiting For’ music video I remember thinking "They don’t really look like Harajuku girls." After I saw the ‘Rich Girl’ music video, and finished releasing the contents of my stomach all over the common room, I screamed out "That woman has no idea what a Harajuku girl is, never mind how to pronounce the word properly!" I found it amusing that she could butcher the pronunciation, while Eve pronounced it properly (albeit with an accent). Harajuku girls are not slutty punk girls from the 80s, no matter what Gwen Stefani thinks. I’ll prove it to you too. These are Harajuku girls. JRock is a big influence, but it’s not always the case. Cute is as popular as scary hot. See where I’m going with this? This is a fun gallery too. I ran out of words to use in sentences.

As a Japanese student at UWaterloo, there are all these little things about her that irk me. For example: her psychotic contract. Now I haven’t been able to verify this, but I’ve heard it separately from three different people that I consider reliable sources. The consensus seems to be that Gwen’s Harajuku girls are not allowed to speak to anyone but her. Some nonsense about how they are the physical embodiment of her imagination and her imagination shouldn’t be able to interact with anyone without speaking through her. Yes, I’m not even sure what to make of that one. However, I do know one thing. It’s hard to say you’re going to go back into Japan to get you lots of brand new fans when they don’t even know that you’re butchering their language in your attempt to be cool. I don’t expect it to get any better when they realize it either.

I’d like to take this opportunity to say that Mariah Carey friggin’ rocks minasan no haha and that I wish that she was writing emo songs so that I could say she wanted to put my entries to music for her albums. I’d also like to say that this has nothing to do with JD, and that I don’t care if you don’t believe me or not; it doesn’t. Also, Three Doors Down’s ‘Away From the Sun’ sucked; all of it.

I’m really glad that when shit happens and I end up what would be considered ‘depressed’ I don’t actually get emo so much as I get really fucking angsty. Luckily, Simple Plan and Dashboard can also be angsty, so I don’t feel bad for throwing their name around. I need to establish one thing though, before we dive into the fray: People are stupid.

Today’s target in particular is a variety of homos that I’ve had the ‘tune of coming in contact with. I say ‘tune, because I’m not sure it should be ‘fortune’ or ‘misfortune’. So I cut it down. It’s just ‘tune. By the way, comments like “Bisexual: A fag who has installed windows in his closet" make me want to give you a free one million punches to the face, no matter who you are in my life. However that should have been a separate thought from the ‘tune one. I just couldn’t figure out how to work it in later so I threw it in here.

I have a serious problem with someone I’d like to call The Workaholic recently. I’m coming to the upsetting realization that this person will only ever talk to me WHEN HE’S HORNY AND WANTS SEX. Yes, I feel the caps were completely necessary to portray how much this irks me. That and ‘Everytime’ by Britney Spears. However, the ‘Everytime’ thing is probably only temporary where as the workaholic thing is probably not. I know all about the concept of fuck buddy. I have no problem with the concept of fuck buddy. This, however, has nothing to do with the concept of fuck buddy. It wouldn’t bother me so much if this was just some random boy from faceparty. In fact, there was no such faceparty involved at all. So you can see why this bothers me. I guess I just didn’t peg him as the slutbag that I pegged some of his friends as. Although meeting people while they’re drunk at the Pizza Pizza at Church and Wellesley might not be the best time to judge someone, I feel that I’ve made an accurate judgement of character on the group. It just makes me sad.

My friend The Compulsive Liar and I have had an interested history. One which was eventually summed up by another friend with the words “You two would have had sex but I walked in." I have a feeling that some people might read this and think that I’m referring to them. I’m willing to bet you that if you’re reading this, you have no idea who I’m talking about. There’s been no connection between this life, and the one that I met him in. Oh, and Abby just told me that her mom Glenda burns cats sometimes, and she says I should totally go over and join them some time.

As for The Diet Coke of Evil, well, I just don’t get him; at all. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about him. Something just confuses the hell out of me and it bothers me a lot. Normally I can read people. I got nothing on this one. I think that’s what bothers me about it too. So I’d like to move on to some communal problems. The two-week boyfriend cycles: stop fucking getting a new boyfriend every two weeks. Stop expecting boys to read your mind. If you like them, tell them. Do something about it. Don’t sit there and expect them to understand your glances. For example, you can’t be all like “spinning empty bottles, it’s the five of us" and expect the correct reply of “with pretty eyed boys girls die to trust" because that only works with me, and there’s no more room in our white houses. So go try the grey ones down the street.

I'm still having serious SQL errors, and they are upsetting. Especially considering it has completely shut down any chance of further production of the show. Movable Type is being seriously funky; not finishing the installation but working, not properly importing entries, etc. It's not fun. After finding out that an update was supposed to have been forced on my cpanel, it either wasn't the right update, didn't go through properly, or just doesn't like me, because the driver is still the one causing troubles. This is what I learned from the Movable Type support people. I'd hate to work a support job, it must get frustrating.

I've been reading Harry Potter again. I've already finished Philosopher's Stone. The ending made me really sad. It's a really good thing Alex and I decided we were going to open our own school for Witchcraft and Wizardry, or else I might end up going insane. Especially with all the support people I've had to email in the last week. Harry Potter is a nice escape from the world, even if you can't occasionally ignore the fact that the first book took place when he was 11 and like HELL he would have done all of that. Not saying that I'm not going to read the books or anything. Let's be honest, I'm going to be one of the many people lined up at Chapter's to grab the newest one at midnight on friday.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I think I might love to live in family like Ron's. Although now that I think about it I'm having my doubts. I've already accepted I have a ridiculously high upkeep cost, and I'm costing my parents at least ten times more than they bargained to spend when they decided to have kids (nevermind the cost of my brother and sister). For example, even though I got the co-op placement I had to take it as a volunteer or else take not getting a credit this term. That's fine, except the job requires the purchase of business casual clothing. I don't even know what that entails, other than spending more money. Maybe I can get some nice mainly white tshirts while I'm at it.

I was approved for Google Ads. That means I might actually be able to scrounge a low income off of the site, and be able to pay the $10 minimum on my credit card bill for last month. Websites are expensive. I also have a paypal account that I had before that I might use incase people would want to donate, but I don't think I have anywhere near enough readers for that; I'm not cool enough yet. Instead of trying to be cool right now I plan on spending the rest of my time today reading Harry Potter, and then going to my swimming lesson. I was considering telling people to find me a girl to date, but I decided that way too many brains would either explode or implode at that statement and the resulting mess would be much more than I like to deal with.

My room is a huge mess right now. I have enough space on my desk to keep the book open, and see about a collective square half-foot of desk space. My floor is in much the same situation. The lamp I bought from Ikea is all of my rug because I couldn't put it together. I needed to screw the two poles together, only there is about a foot and a half of cord in between the two pieces with no visible way to move it or stick it in the poles. I take that back, the cord could be pulled through the base. Apparently when I tried that the last time I was just too incompetant to get it right. Now if only I could get lightbulbs for it. Or for my life. I can go both ways.

I'm coming to the conclusion that I am more clever than my father thinks I am. It's totally his own fault to. From a young age he encouraged me to read, and by read I mean read a lot. Combine that with his insistance on taking a large number of enrichment courses, especially business in nature, and apparently good genetics and I seem to be too much to handle. Then again, this is the same father figure who just today made fun of my mother for saying it was hard to park next to the little buggy houses in parking lots and proceeded to scrape the rear tire well along it. Scraping vehicles up against things seems to be geneticly coded into the males in our family; I hit the pole at Tim Horton's avoiding crushing a person and my brother has caused hundreds of dollars worth of damage to our cars which had the blame passed off onto our neighbourhood's bad roads.

So the other day when my dad approached me with an offer it made me stop and think. He offered me $15 an hour to sandpaper some chairs for him. He said something about me being lazy, it being a good offer, and how he had other takers. I looked at him and told him to give it to my sister (the most obvious other taker) because I couldn't care less about sanding chairs for $15 an hour. He said something again about me being lazy and wandered off. That's where he was wrong. All of his emphasis on smart business has worn off on me. I did an analysis on the cost versus the gains. Sanding the chairs properly would probably take 2 hours, tops. So for $15 I'd spend two hours outside in the heat working on sanding chairs. Normally I wouldn't mind suffering through sanding chairs, which is boring and strenuous as hell, but with the insane heat, smog, and humidex warnings that we're going through I thought twice about it. Add to it my chronic mono and the fact that just sitting and my computer coding causes me to need two naps a day and it just wasn't worth it. So the next time my dad offers me something, I'm going to make a comment about balancing income revenues against expense spending and the board of directors not approving. Sanding chairs just doesn't seem to be a lucrative venture these days.

Don't ask me why; I'm asking the same fucking question. However, since I'm not going to be able to answer that question I've moved on to some other ones. Why on earth did I have a dream that Andrea Harris, Susan Smith and two friends started a rather successful band, and then had a concert on the grass at Coronation Park? Since when do I ever dream about punk bands, period? Most importantly: who let them have such a catchy tune with great vocals, and where can I purchase their CD?

Admitting defeat against the internal clock in my body, I went about doing what I always do when I wake up at some god forsaken hour of the morning. I started reading random blogs. That's when I was presented with this: The explanation to all of Xiaxue's current fame, and the return of my sanity regarding the subject. Xiaxue is sponsored by some sort of company, just to blog. What a fucking living. I have to say I'm incredibly jealous, but not in the bad way. For those of you that don't know, bad jealous tends to lead to a series of posts trashing the person that is the cause of said bad jealousy. I already did that, so I'm left with a feeling of 'Wow, I wish I had her life.' Well only partially. I like being a boy and more importantly I like being the boy that I am. I'm not going to attempt to make my blog more like her blog because I would never be able to do that properly. Although I'm sure that we'd end up friends if we were to meet in real life and there are some visible similarities in our blogging style, more obvious to me are the glaring differences. So I can settle with just respecting her for being able to make a living off her blog, and now I'm moving on to try and figure out how I can do the same. I mean, getting paid to type your thoughts (as opposed to "getting type to pay your thoughts" which is what I originally typed; I told you it was early) would make for an awesome living.

From Xiaxue's posts, I was directed to Kottke.org, the blog of a man who lives his life supported entirely by donations from his site. I would say he has a right to as well. I thought I recognized his name, so I went and checked the place I figured I would be most likely to see it: The Bloggies. There he was, his name glorified forever in that html anchor; he had one the lifetime achievement Bloggie in 2003. Why not too, he's been going for over 6 years and although I haven't read all of the archives like I normally do (there's a task that might end up killing me), the tour of his blog that contains a taste of what to be found inside is good times to read; a combination of funny reviews, updates, and random stuff that can be found on interweb (and the full version of the 'Geographically Accurate Map of the London Underground' would have been of great use to me about three months ago). So add him to a list of blogs that I use as a guide to mold what I want The Mike Haddad Show to be, and we can all move on and get on with our lives. Except of course for me; I'll be stuck figuring out how to up the traffic to my site, debating on the usefulness of Categories, and struggling with whether or not I'd want to add Google Ads to the site to help fund some of The Mike Haddad Show Adventures. Sanity is for the weak if you ask me.

Yesterday was a good day for LJDrama. Mel had sent me a link to a girl's livejournal (city_glitter) and told me to start reading at the first post on 4 July, 2005. Now since I've been on the internet since before I even started going through puberty, I've learned a thing or to about it. I think one of the first things I said to Mel after I had finished reading it was "I don't believe it. It's fake isn't it?" Was it ever fake. Experience though, has shown that fake makes for some of the best LJDrama. This is no exception. Apparently another LJ user and friend (or former friend) of city_glitter's got suspicious. foxfur called up the hospital the cat was supposed to be at that was listed when city_glitter started asking for money; the cat was no where to be found. Using what I can only describe as an awesome display of internet skills that would have made Napoleon Dynamite proud, foxfur discovers that this is not actually happening and makes this post about it in her livejournal. $12000 donations later, city_glitter makes this post claiming it is in fact true, despite her random discovery of money and need to refund everyone else. city_glitter's friends get all pissy and go off to foxfur's livejournal and tell her that she's a huge bitch for doubting city_glitter. In turn, her friend's break out the weapons of mass internet pwnage and completely destroy any credibility city_glitter had for the next 25 years to life.

Don't stop yet. This is when it started getting good. The highlight happened in what LJDrama correctly described as "moment of pure psychotic awesomeness," city_glitter came out and said it was all lies, and she was the lying liar that told them. It was apparently all part of some grand scheme to be friends with anjimoto, some woman who rescued a cat that had been tossed out of a moving vehicle and wound up with her internet friends helping her foot the massive bills. Needless to say, she wasn't impressed.

Most important in all of my blog hopping discoveries is Maxiguee Land. As great as that whole LJDrama cat thing was, it was only a one time thing and good livejournal drama comes few and far between. This blog on the other hand is by a boy whose writing style reminds me of my own. I'm not sure if he'll take kindly to that statement, but when have I ever cared whether or not someone took kindly to a statement I make (take a gander at the bottom of the sidebar). This blog has been added to the list of random blogs I visit on a regular basis, including dooce, Blurbomat, Xiaxue and myboyfriendisatwat. They provide me constantly high levels of amusement that can hardly be topped. Except by work-safe pictures like this.

So I signed in to Movable Type today to be greeted by a link telling me that the 500 server errors totally weren't my fault. So you're just going to have to deal with it for a little bit longer, apparently the fix is going up tonight. Which is good, because I wanted to talk about something other than terrorist attacks and I wasn't sure how I was going to start that shit off.

Last night was killer. After missing out on going to the gym on Wednesday, I decided I would make up for it by going to the gym and working out before my NLS training. That was a bad, bad idea and I totally blame Olek for not warning me before hand when he visited me. The visit though was nice to have, but I digress. After the 15 minute mark in my lesson my shoulders freaked out and didn't want to do the front crawl anymore, making me almost immobile due to the fact that my legs had done their freak out about 5 minutes beforehand. This left me floating in the pool, similar to the way a sponge would float. That is to say, it's a good thing that Glen Abby isn't very deep because I started to sink after a while.

Once I did get in my groove things went well. I did sculling, which is crazy painful after a few metres, similar to the way jumping in front of the car doing 60 is crazy painful. However it's apparently important if you want to be a lifeguard that saves lives, as opposed to the lifeguards that just sit there and look pretty. Since it seems I'm being shoved into the former category, which leaves me to believe I'm seriously going to have to practice sitting and looking pretty if I ever want to achieve anything in life.

I have a phone interview for a co-op position at 2:00pm. I'm supposed to be reviewing their website to understand the company before hand. A huge chunk of it is like someone took my BUS111 notes and stuck them up on a website, the website being plain with a boring green colour scheme. So with that settled I went back to browsing Flickr. When I come back later and post about how the interview didn't go well and I don't think I got the position, you'll know why.

Originally there was a list of 5 countries that were said to be targets for terrorist attacks. Four of them have already been hit: United States, Australia, Spain and the United Kingdom. There's only one country left. Three guesses which country it is.

Maybe it's because I don't randomly hate people just for living that I fail to grasp the logic behind terrorist attacks. Maybe it's because terrorists do randomly hate people for living that terrorist organizations fail to see that attacks like this just push more and more people towards agreeing with Ann Coulter when she makes statements about invading countries, killing their leaders, and converting them all to Christianity.

I've decided that I'm going to mention some stuff that has been floating around in my head; some angst that I want to deal with. I'd like to start of by saying that I did enjoy going to Holy Trinity for grade 11 and 12, and I'm thankful for the experiences I had and the people that I met. With that said.

FUCK, I wish I had just told the Catholic Board to fuck themselves and gone to WOSS. Aside from the fact that the school is ghetto like Jane & Finch or Dufferin & Dupont, and the fact it has the worst mathematics program in the history of ever, I think I would have had fun. Just so you know, I'm totally not joking about the math thing. At the end of second semester in grade 12 I spent my fourth lunch and fifth spare at White Oaks teaching people in a Data Management class how to manage data. I learned that I could never ever be a teacher, because I don't have the patience.

I really feel like Trinity robbed me of the two better years of high school. This is in no way the fault of the teachers or school administration, despite whatever occasional run-ins I might have had with them. This falls on the board, somewhere between 'Bad Planning' and 'I Just Hate You'. The kids at Christ the King went through the exact same thing. Literally. With our school, mirror imaged. Only they managed to get school spirit going, and didn't have to deal with the River Oaks Grade Nine Attitude.

Of course, this is all just speculation. I could have gone to White Oaks and HATED IT with the core of me being, similar to the way I feel about fake Louis Vuitton bags and the snobby white women who carry them around, acting as if they are the hottest shit since Paris Hilton and actually believing I don't know that their bag is fake. I mean, hello, GAY? That alone is a reason why I think I would have had fun there. Even if the mainstream WOSS Homos graduated by the time I was in grade 10, I still would have been much more in the loop than I was at Loyola or Trinity.

In other news, it just dawned on me that I have an ultrasound appointment at 9:50am and I was supposed to stop eating after 12:00. Now I know that I was drinking water on and off until now, but I can't remember if the sandwich I finished was before or after midnight. I'm willing to be it will be out of my system in the morning, but if not then they can just shove it. But not push it. That's reserved for me, and any one else who can push it good. Push it real good.

I've finished the gallery section to the point where it is viewable, and matches the theme of the site. There are a few things that need further tweaking but I'm happy with how it looks so far. A few more pictures need to be uploaded before it's full. Then I need to rename all the pictures. Maybe. So, go and enjoy it.

Today I had my first in what will be many (or maybe not so many if I'm good) swimming lessons. It was the Adult Swim Level 1 and 2 class. There were two instructors, and seven students in the class including myself. I enjoy the ratio. Already, we were split up into two smaller groups of 4 and 3, and as part of the three we're each getting a lot of individual attention from our instructor. I told her that I signed up for a refresher because I had forgotten all of the technical stuff about swimming and the program was recommended by a lifeguard friend after I told him I wanted to get certified. She said she's going to try and think of what I would need to work on specificly so we can focus on that. That my friends, is good times.

The Galleries are up!I'm still working through the program, and I'm going to try and turn signing up off. So feel free to look around at the pictures; some of the galleries are empty and I'm not sure what the browsing is like yet because I haven't done the css for it yet. However, if you are browsing and you notice that it still lets you sign up, PLEASE DON'T. Doing so will cause me to have to delete your account, and send a letter to the Queen of England requesting she verify your stupidity to which she will reply, avec full English accent: Very well, *STAMP!*.

All of the Monthly Archives are now XHTML Strict compliant. That took way too long. I need to go back through some of the older ones and filter out some shit that doesn't need to be there. I've found a lot of entries from LJ that accidentally got imported onto the show when I didn't want them to. Deleting them has led to gaps in entry id numbers, which doesn't cause any problems except for the fact that I'm hugely anal.

I've downloaded the programs for building the Galleries. I'm going to probably do that tomorrow before my doctor's appointment, and then in between the appointment and my swimming lesson. That's right, I'm officially taking the lessons so that I can eventually do lifeguard certification. It's going to be fun. Lessons are Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:00pm to 10:00pm. That leaves Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for going to the gym. Rollerblading sporadically throughout the week and possibly joining Mel at the gym for her Hip Hop classes which run on Sunday as far as I know.

Tonight was spent out at Starbucks with Alex and Dani, after weeks of planning to arrange a date where we could go. Yes, we suck so much that we had to plan ahead to go to Starbucks. It's ok though; there was much reminiscing and Grande Cafe Mocha drinking. They also helped me plan the big upcoming Mike Haddad Show Outing which was nice of them. Check back at that post every once and a while to see if I’ve posted any more updates.

I moved the blog from main.php to index.php, to make it easier to use and register on other sites.

This is going to be short, because I don't feel like getting into the subject into extreme detail. However, if anyone looked at the cover of the Sunday Toronto Star they'd notice that it was the Live 8 edition and that the cover story was entitled "Will it help her?" with a large picture of a young girl working in a field in Niger, two years into a famine. It was followed by an article that gave the answer: No.

No, Live 8 won't help the girl in Niger, or any of the other children dying everyday in Africa because of poverty. First: Africa is big. You can't find a blanket solution for a whole continent. Second: Widely acknowledged, most of Africa is corrupt. In most cases the governments pilfer the aid money anyways. Why send them more money when it's not even going to make it to that dying child that the idiots running Live 8 told you to care about. A much more logical campaign would have been to call for more African government accountability, and a fairer trade from the Western nations. But they didn't do that, because that's not what Live 8 was about.

No, Live 8 was about making the West feel good.

I have some thoughts that I need to sort out right now. I've been trying to write out the show section of the site. It's a lot harder than I thought it would be. I didn't realize how much effort it took to be witty when you want to be witty. Normally it just comes when we're joking around, and it happens. When you need it to happen it's like some sort of big hill you have to go up on rollerblades in the midday heat, while you have blisters. Which I happen to be a master of, since I decided to take a crazy route rollerblading today which ended in painfully gross looking blisters. So if you have any suggestions at all for the content in the show section, please feel free to drop me a comment or an email.

I hung out with Andrea Harris for a bit today. I drove her and two of her friends downtown to Dufferin and Dupont (a.k.a. Sketchy) so that Andrea could get a concert ticket for a big show tomorrow. In return, I got to make fun of people and have fun for an hour and a bit, and they fed me McDonald's. It was good times.

I've been trying to figure out how to get more traffic on my site, and more links to my site from other sites. I've already decided that I'm not going to go around and ask people to link to The Mike Haddad Show because that's just lame, and being cool conflicts with being lame. Also, I would just laugh and someone and/or get annoyed if they asked me to link to their site unless I knew them personally or I had a special section with a random link exchange. So, if you can help with this one once again email me or leave a comment or send one of those pigeons. Pigeons are cool, and we here at The Mike Haddad Show appreciate all things in the realm of cool.

I'm waiting for some software to download. Then I should be able to put up galleries full of the mike haddad goodness much like they have up at webbeh.com.

Today, my mom cracked and was insanely nice to me. I'm not even sure what I did to deserve it. It just shows that this day was fucking awesome after that amazing dream. She took me to HMV, and spent oodles of money on me. I got: 50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin and The Massacre; Mariah Carey - #1s and The Emancipation of Mimi; Nelly Furtado - Folklore; Black Eyed Peas - Monkey Business; and Reggae Gold 2005. She also got me Season One of Sex and The City and Dead Like Me! Holy poop do I love my mommy.

After that I was in my room importing songs onto iTunes and she came into my room and told me she was bored. I was kinda like "WTFace am I supposed to do about it?" but decided to follow her on her random road trip anyways. Nothing has more potential than adventures with my mommy. Let's be honest, she has lots of money and I don't. So we went to look at patio furniture. On the way back I asked to stop at SportCheck so I could look at rollerblades. I wound up walking out of there with a brand spanking new pair of super hot rollerblades, along with pad set and helmet avec SPEAKERS. Drool. I totally rocked the River Oaks/White Oaks area on my rollerblade for like an hour. Now I have blisters on both of my feet, but it was so worth it.

I've also decided to get my mommy to sign me up for swimming lessons because she understands the workings of such complicated and evil things like Oakville Parks and Rec. I couldn't figure out what level of swimming class I should be in. I think we settled on 5 or 6. I'll be ahead on some things, but behind on others. I'm sure I could catch up. I hope that I'm not in a class full of little children though. That would suck. This just in, Olek has informed me there's adult swimming courses so I don't have to deal with children. This rules.

I'm also thinking of scrounging around the basement for a tennis racket, but that's not high priority. I still have a gym membership afterall. This has all come in a burst of energy after I decided not to waste my body anymore; not to use being small or a homo as an excuse to be inactive. I wasted all of elementary school and high school because of that. Although the excuses were slightly different each time, the core reason was the same and I can't let it control me anymore. I have to be able to say: This is my body, and I'm going to hump whatever I please!

I couldn't figure out if I should title this "A Barrel Full of Clichés" or not. This is simply because I can't figure out of the things are clichéd or not. So here's a list, and you can decide for yourself.

Of the top six female athletes in a high school: all are attractive, four are lesbians, in two couples, and the other two are just as odd but happen to be straight. How about if the Male Star Athlete is also a massive homosexual? What if I, being the new student at school, am the only one that knows and has a huge crush on previously mentioned football/volleyball/track star?

The great thing about my dreams is that they generally give me something I wanted (like crazy super powers), or something that I could have had if I had listened to my father instead of being lazy (like athletics). I think he's gotten over that by now, but I'm not sure I'm ever going to forgive myself. Although asthma did play a role in stopping with the Oakville Track & Field Team, I think more of it came from the facts that I wasn't prepared enough and I didn't like to lose. I used the excuse that I was small, and would always be small, to shirk out of playing Running back for a few football teams. The fact that I toned visibly in a week at the gym just threw that whole theory out the window. And now I have a whole bunch of experiences that I've missed. That's the great thing about dreams though; they give them back to me.

This dream gave back quite a bit. After going to some washroom in the school in the morning to apparently just prep myself for the first day of school at what would seem to be an American High School (the WRONG place for, well, me) I wandered into the 'Boys' washroom that had apparently been hijacked by The Six female athletes. Enter PG13 rated displays of lesbianism. I guess that blew their cover. It's a shame no one had warned me that the bathroom was for the use of The Six, and only The Six. I guess it was a really good thing I was who I was, because I got off the hook really easily, especially after offering to talk about my book for The Girl’s project.

That's right; I said talk about my book. Let that sink for a little bit. As it would turn out, this one particular book was "The World According to Mike: 1,000,000 Estimations." It was essentially a book of a whole bunch of estimations that had been gathered from print and government documents over the last 50 years or so. So it was decided that since I wrote the book, being there for the presentation would get her bonus marks. I couldn't find a reason to disagree, since I apparently didn't have a 1st period class today. The plan was that I would stop at my locker, and then meet her in her class.

It was as I was leaving to get to my locker that I had my first encounter with the Male Star Athlete. I had bumped into him on my way out of the bathroom as he was coming to talk to one of The Six. So doing what I do in dreams, I stood and watched as Guy came up to him and told him that he shouldn't have broken up with Guy's Sister. I wish I could remember the exact dialogue that they exchanged, but I can't. All I remember is the typical interaction in which Guy said they made a good couple, and then Male Star Athlete went from sad to angry as Guy pushed the subject. I would have loved to watch more of the interaction, but Male Star Athlete stormed off and I had to get to The Girl's class for her presentation.

I remember sitting in class with The Girl, who was giving her presentation in a Morgan-esque South African accents. After the third or fourth "according to Mike..." comment, the teacher spoke up and asked "Why is Mike important enough to quote?" to which a large number of the students in the class all lifted up large white books, with the blue font on it's cover proclaiming "The World According to Mike: 1,000,000 Estimations." Man did that feel good.

After her presentation, The Girl was free to show me around the school because her teacher was so impressed with her presentation. That was nice. So I got a quick tour of the school. We saw two others from The Six, appropriately named Carrots & Celery skipping class. As we walked into the Cafeteria (which was really strangely positioned compared to the rest of the school), we stumbled on some sort of Math Geek Battle. It was odd. They were arguing about math, and all sorts of things related to Math Geekery. Boy did I own them. Just in time to go out to the field for gym/practice.

That’s one of the other nice things this dream gave me; a second chance at being physically active. It might have gone a little too far when it put me on the football team, volleyball team, basketball team, and made me a track and field superstar. Just a teensy bit though. Not that I’m going to complain about it. I got to spend most of my time training with Male Star Athlete. This is exactly what they were telling me at this one particular gym class/practice session. And that’s what the dream was: a lot of practicing with Male Star Athlete, a lot of crushing on Male Star Athlete, and the eventual cute G-rated seduction of Male Star Athlete; the kind that leaves you wanting more when you wake up. Upon reviewing this dream that hit me really hard, I noticed one thing that seemed really profound and different about this dream compared to normal dreams, aside from lack of star wars: I totally didn’t get any.