Category: General

Kurrgan, Brian, Edge

Adventures in Wrestling – Me and Edge

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Back in the late 90’s, I was “TSN.ca’s Darkside” who wrote “Tales from the Darkside” for the second most popular section on TSN.ca…which at the time was tsn.ca/wrestling. I built that bad boy from the ground up, and wrote a ton of awesome articles.

There was a time where I could write something and get a million views in a month. Those were heady, heady days.

Two of my favourite wrestlers, Edge and Christian, have a podcast now – E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness, every week they ask for reader letters, and since I’ve got some fun Edge and Christian stories, I thought I’d send one in.

This is that email. Continue Reading

Cursed: Black Swan - A Fixer Novel

Cursed: Black Swan – A Review

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I have followed Ryan McFadden’s writing career since it was in its embryonic stage. It’s no secret we’ve been besties since high school, we’ve been in each other’s wedding parties, and we’re each other’s “go to” when we need a good swift kick in the ass (metaphorically or physically).

The novel that has become Cursed: Black Swan – A Fixer Novel is about 20 years in the making. I read the first version of it when it was called Nathaniel, before it was put back into a drawer for a decade. I’ve read everything as Ryan has evolved as a writer, he became an Aurora award winner for his part in the anthology Women of the Apocalypse, he won again with The Puzzle Box, and he got more accolades for his shared world concept “The 10th Circle Project”. Continue Reading

My butter chicken recipe

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Butter Chicken is one of my favourite Indian dishes, but it’s one I’ve always been afraid to try to make on my own. When I started reading about the ingredients though, I started to see that it should be fairly easy to make.

I think the best butter chicken comes from chicken cooked in a Tandoori oven (that’s my favourite way I ever had it prepared at a little diner up by TSN in Agincourt), so I added .

This is probably not the “right way” but it’s the way I prepared it tonight, and it was a big hit. Continue Reading

Fab’s Mom’s Spaghetti Sauce

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This is my take on the way that my buddy Fab told me his mom makes spaghetti sauce.  It’s not exact, because his tale had a lot of “she throws in a bunch of sausage and bacon, and about 50 other types of meat.”  Not being of Italian descent myself, my body is not genetically built to convert all of those things into energy and instead stores it in my “troublesome t-zone”, aka “my gut”.

So this version is designed not to kill me.  It’s also designed to be thrown together quickly, and then I just “set it, and forget it”.

Ingredients:

  • 1 Can Diced Tomatoes
  • 2 Cans Tomato Paste
  • 2 tbsp Brown Sugar
  • 2 tbsp Italian Seasoning (or you can just season with Oregano, Onion salt, garlic powder and bay leaf)
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 whole onion
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 1 small roast beef (inside round is good)
  • Salt and Pepper to tastse

Combine Diced Tomatoes, Tomato Paste, brown sugar and 1tbsp of italian seasoning in the crock pot.

Heat olive oil, add onion and garlic and brown (which means you only flip once, otherwise you’re poaching them) in oil.

Remove onions and garlic from oil and combine in crock pot.

Rub meat with 1tbsp Italian Seasoning, and salt
Brown meat in remaining oil to sear in juices.

Put meat in crock pot. Turn crock pot to hi until it boils, then reduce to low, and leave simmering for 4 hours.

At the end of the 4 hours, remove the string from the roast, and then stir the sauce.  The meat will begin to dissolve into kind of a stringy sort of meat by-product.

When we ate carbs (which unfortunately are the enemy), we found this goes really well with a rigatoni since the sauce kind of creeps in the spirals and gets all delicious!

Now that we’re anti-carbites, we eat it with Spaghetti Squash.  It’s terribly delicious.

The Personality of Cities

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I’m in Baltimore at RailsConf right now, and wandering around the downtown I’ve been struck by the character of the city, and how it compares to other cities.

Baltimore seems to be a beautiful city with an undercurrent of poverty. We’ve seen a lot of homeless in the downtown core, and I’ve sensed just a menacing feeling. The further you get from the water, the less polished the city gets.

Chicago was an absolutely gorgeous city, but just outside of downtown you have areas of profound poverty. The downtown seems like a fat banker polishing his pocket watch and puffing on a stogie.

Las Vegas is the partied out girl in the corner who’s friends should have taken her home two hours ago.

Toronto meanwhile is like your country cousin dressed up in a suit, he looks refined, but he’s down to earth.

London Ontario? It’s a 20 year old kid in his father’s borrowed suit, it doesn’t quite fit him, but he’s really trying to make it fit.

UFC 129, Truly an Epic Show

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Way back in 2005, when I was still living in Toronto, Ryan and I decided we need to go to Vegas to see UFC 54, which was highlighted by Randy Couture vs Chuck Liddell for the light heavyweight championship.

It was the payoff for the televised “The Ultimate Fighter” show which had just debuted on Spike TV. We got to Vegas, watched the weigh ins, and then went to buy tickets at the box office. We paid $50.00 for our tickets to that show, and the 18,000 strong crowd was absolutely electric.

We saw some amazing fights that night including two, that five years later are still highlight material before live events.

When the UFC came to Canada for the GSP vs Serra blow-off, we went, and the show was unbelievable, I’ve never heard a crowd like that.

We went back to Montreal in December for GSP vs Koscheck, and while the show was good, it didn’t rival my first two UFC shows.

The thing that sucked is that as the UFC increased in popularity, the ticket prices have gotten exponentially higher. At the last show in !ontreal, we spent $180 on tickets, for 200 level seats.

I knew I had to go to Toronto, but $100.00 for 500 level seats seemed ridiculous. Still, I am a ridiculous human, so me and six buddies shelled out a hundred bucks each to sit in the bleeders.

It

Was

Awesome!

The crowd was so loud, not quite as loud as 23,000 people witnessing GSP dominate Matt Serra convincingly, but really loud (in fairness I don’t think I’ll ever hear anything as loud as that show).

The fights were amazing. We saw KO’s, distances, and submissions. The two main events were amazing, and the whole show was spectacular from start to finish.

So at the end of the night was it worth $100.00 to be in the building with 55,000 of my fellow UFC fans?

Hells yeah.

Kindle first thoughts

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The 3rd Generation Kindle

The Kindle 3

When the new WiFi Kindles were announced last month, I placed an order for one. I’ve been slowly transitioning from dead tree editions to electronic books for a while now (all but comics, which I’m still buying analogue style for now). Physically owning objects is more of a hassle than it’s worth to be honest, I’d rather have stuff electronically.

All in, it came to $165.56 (exchange, taxes, shipping, and duty).  When it arrived I was amazed by the packaging, and the size of the thing.

Continue Reading

This…is my masterpiece

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How to survive the Zombie Apocalypse

How to survive the Zombie Apocalypse

I love a good April Fools day joke. I was a part of a number of them at TSN (my recurring “Sid Drake” character was continually making appearances in the WWF in the late 90’s), and I’ve pulled a couple of doozies on my own websites over the years (including last year’s), but for this year a bunch of us at work came up with something genius.

It’s a little bit of a tradition in tech.  Google’s been doing April Fool’s day jokes for years.  ThinkGeek’s joke products become so popular that they get made for real (such as last year’s Star Wars Tantaun Sleeping Bag).

I built a little team(Craig, Rahul, Matt, Will and James), and we set out to do something hilarious. We decided to send out a research report on how to survive an infectious outbreak. We knew we’d need executive support to send it to the whole client base, so we shot it, edited it, and I created a fake distribution and landing page…and then showed it to Joel, the CEO. He loved it, bounced it off one other exec, and gave us the green light.

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Our Lady Peace rocks London

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Our Lady Peace in London

Raine Maida of OLP under the spotlight

Last night Char and I went to see Our Lady Peace do their first of two shows here in London. The shows are a pretty cool concept, the first night they play the entire 1997 album Clumsy, and on the second night they play the entire 2000 album Spiritual Machines.

After reading some pretty good reviews of the shows in Toronto at Massey Hall on Friday and Saturday, I was pretty pumped about the show here. Clumsy is one of my favourite albums of the 90’s, and it was released during a pivotal time in my life when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I’ve seen Our Lady Peace twice before. Once at Edgefest (or Lolapalooza), and once in London at the Western Fair.  Both shows were pretty good, but last night’s rocked the house. Continue Reading