I love Halloween. I think it’s my favourite non-holiday day of the year. It’s even better than some holidays. Last year I dressed up as a slice of pizza. My mom made it for me when I was like 8 years old or something and it used to cover my whole body but now the bottom of the pizza goes to about my waist. I went to my classes in the pizza costume and even wrote a midterm wearing it; it covered my entire head and I had to look through a rectangular hole to write my exam.

So this year I had to come up with something new and I knew it’d be hard to top the pizza costume because it’s so awesome. I had no good ideas so it looked like I was just going to be a pirate or something (I have several pieces of a pirate costume already for unrelated reasons). I went to Value Village with some friends on Thursday in hopes of putting together a costume. As I wandered around the store I decided to check out the back area with all the weird non-clothing stuff. As I looked around at their electronics section, I found a giant old-school polaroid camera. At that point I knew what I was going to be for Halloween. A Japanese tourist.

I quickly ran around the store collecting other pieces of the puzzle – an 80’s style baseball cap with not only the squarish shape but with the crazy material that seems to change into various colours as you view it from different angles, a Marineland Canada t-shirt, and a Black and Neon Yellow/Pink Las Vegas fanny-pack. In total it came to just over 10 bucks.

I rounded out the costume with a map of the Kitchener-Waterloo region, my backpack, cargo shorts and a pair of fake glasses that I borrowed from one of my roommates.

Even though Halloween isn’t until Monday, the partying started yesterday. Last night I went to two separate keggers. First stop was the Middle of Term engineering kegger which I didn’t bother drinking at, and then I proceeded to Barn X (the X is for eXtreme). Barn X was a kegger in a barn just outside the city. 15 kegs, 10 60’s, 2 floors, dj’d music and hundreds of people. I spent the whole night talking to random people with a thick Japanese accent, usually starting with “HARRO!”(Hello with the accent). It became easier and funnier over the course of the night as I consumed more alcohol.

After an entire night of playing the Japanese tourist character I think I’ve perfected it. I’ll be out in costume and character on Monday when I go to school so that should be fun as well. I’m toying with the idea of making it a recurring character that I might make videos of or something…we’ll see.

All in all, it’s been a great start to this year’s Halloween.

Alright a couple of weeks ago a friend messaged me up and asked if I wanted to participate in the University of Ottawa’s sytle of “The Amazing Race”, organized by the International House. It sounded like an interesting idea, considering I am somewhat a fan of the show, and the endurance challenge was convincing enough to actually get me out of the house, and I did.
So on the day of the race my friend brough our costumes so to say, and we wore it while playing, it turned out that they were Japanese “Happi” coats. Now for all those who don’t know what they are, if you’ve watched MXC (Most eXtreme Challenge) then you’ve probably seen one before. Our’s were a neon green, and we were wearing headbands so it was awesome.
Now you probably are wondering, whats the “of Death” part Tony…huh? Well, the challenge consists of solving clues, riddles, and puzzles/games, and after you’ve solved the clue, riddle, etc. Then you have to make your way to the next station. Each of the stations was a city or a country, either in Canada, or elsewhere. So basically you’ve got a bunch of groups running around the campus finding these locations on the list. Now, I haven’t had a REAL cardio workout since the summer, so being all the awesome I am, I was out of shape, which was terrible. We basically ran for around an hour and a half to two hours straight, with very little resting. We were in first for a good chunk of the competetion, but then we took several wrong turns, forcing us to waste valuable time and energy. By the half of the competetion, I was almost dead, no joke. Like leaning against walls, gasping for air, legs about to fall off, it was the whole nine yards of death and destruction. We ended up coming in 5th place from our favourable 1st, but it didn’t matter, we qualified for the second day, and most importantly, I was still alive.
The second day was better even though my legs were still feeling the burn, and strain from the previous day, we couldn’t wear the Happi coats though becuase it was raining. So this day was a little better on the body, I wasn’t near death, even though I was still panting and gasping for air, it was more favourable for us.
Now we were first for a portion of the race. This day was the PRIZE day, where it didn’t matter what position you got in the last day, because the previous day was the qualifications.
So we were making good time, but then it came to a mathematical question, where the coordinates matched up with the longitude and latitude of a place in South America (we had a map of one)…for me math = death. So made my friend do all the math, and he was having trouble, so we ended up naively following the other groups out to a fake place on our location list, and ended up falling far behind the leaders. We finished the other clues with ease, but unfortunatly we didn’t end up in the top ten, but it didn’t matter.
So because we had the Happi coats the first day, the organizers from the International House asked us to do our cheer, but we didn’t have one. So we decided to rip off the MXC cheer and say “Don’t get Eliminated”. The funny thing was that my friend is asian, and so am I (well duh, are we blind Tony?!) so it fit perfectly for the cheer.
Anyways, it was great fun, and even though I almost collapsed from fatigue, we still kicked ass.

Other Things…

- I just finised my “Mid-Term Week of Death”, where I had a midterm on monday, tuesday, wednesday and thursday, and I studied for 6 days straight. By the last day, I just couldn’t study anymore, but I still think I destroyed the exam that day. I now go into a transition period, which takes me from the “Mid-Term Week of Death” to “Essay month of Destruction”…Joy!

- Smallville is BACK, I am actually the happiest guy in the world, this season has been pretty intense so far, and this season has been better then the last season. This season is going to be amazing, I can’t wait.

- Our good friend Mark Wilson has been playing weekend gig’s at “The Thirsty Scholar”, and even though last nights gig, was overshadowed by some upper twenties rock band, whose lead singer’s hair looked like the guy from the 80’s band “Flock of Seaguls”, it was sad, but it made me happy when he sang some Green Day songs, a Rage Against the Machine song…but besides that, nothing too memorable.
Anyone who is interested should check out Mark play, usually Saturday evenings starting around 10PM. Also check out his website at www.markwilsonmusic.com

- I got out of bed today at 4:30…IN THE AFTERNOON, what a waste.

O RLY?

I’m in Belleville today and I did a classic mall run with Arjun and Tony. We did half a lap and we ran into none other than Jordan C, Jason N, Chris B and Dave B. We hung around a bit and talked until we sat down at which point we continued to talk and catch up on each other’s lives. Chris brought up the topic of blind spots that everyone has. No, not the blind spot while you’re driving. A blind spot for your actual eye! Everyone has one…for each eye. So we spent the next 5 minutes playing around looking for ours by closing 1 eye and moving a finger around within our field of view until it disappeared. Once you find it you can even wiggle the finger and you can’t see it wiggling! I found my blind spot at about 7-10 degrees off the center of my view, at about eye level.

To make it easier for you to find your blind spot, check out the handy image below that I made just for you! Close your left eye, stare at either of the + signs on the left side and move your head closer or farther away from the screen until the black circle on the right disappears! You’ll probably find it when your face is just over a foot from the screen. Try it with either the top or bottom set! Same thing.

The reason why I have two sets of the same thing – one with a white background, and one with a blue background – is to show that your brain actually fills in the blind spot with what it thinks should go there. So when it’s surrounded by white, it thinks it’s probably white and similarly when surrounded by blue.

Isn’t that the coolest thing ever? Yeah I thought so. Or maybe I’m just crazy for having had way too much fun staring off in the distance and wiggling a finger for 5 minutes in the middle of a mall.

For the scientific explanation, go here.

Spread the word!

I’ve been reading this blog regularly. It’s called MetaFilter. It’s a blog where anyone can post news items. The owners of the site choose to trust the news posters to be professional, honest, and civil, as posts are rarely deleted or edited. The upshot of a news site like this is that you can get interesting stories like this one.

Also, there’s an interesting site within MetaFilter called AskMetaFilter. People ask a question (and I mean any question) and people who are signed up with the site are able to answer it. I’ve read questions about which computer parts to buy, the proper ways to fight a legal battle, and how to get along better with a new boyfriend.

For more information about MetaFilter, click here.

It’s the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend and I’m all alone in my apartment in Waterloo. Most people have gone back to their hometowns by now but I’m still here because I’m game day staff for Varsity Athletics and there was a football game today. As always, I had a great time and definitely didn’t mind being stuck here “working” because I work with 4 great friends(Mariano, Meghan, Ryan CW and Panjo) and it feels more like hanging out than working anyway.

After the game however, we all went to Ryan’s house and he treated us to a Thanksgiving dinner. Mmmm turkey. Great food, great company, great time.

I don’t think I’ve ever really reflected on what I’m thankful for, and I guess this is a sign of me growing old, but today I took some time to think about it. Rather, I think it’s that the busier I get in life the more it hits me when I have some time to just sit back and relax and enjoy the company of such great friends.

After dinner Ryan gave me some pictures that I’m in that he’s taken over the last few months, and I realized how much my life has changed since May. I’ve met hundreds of new people and have made dozens of great friends in such a short span of time. Not to mention my awesome parents and how they’ve been supportive even when back in June I told them I’d switch out of Computer Engineering.

I’m also thankful for my awesome friends from back home whom I’ll hopefully get to see tomorrow and catch up on each other’s lives.

With that said, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving weekend and take your time to appreciate your friends and family and devour as much turkey as humanly possible.

I recently setup an online gallery to share all the pictures from my whirlwind tour of Europe I went on for two weeks at the end of August.

So if you’re interested at all, feel free to check it out.

I just wanted to share with everyone the fact that today I bought 2 more textbooks. Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (for ANTH 101) and Intermediate Microeconomics (for ECON 201). Exciting. I am very proud of this because this brings my total tally up to 4 textbooks out of the 5 I need. All I have left to add to my collection is a textbook for my Spanish 101 class but they are sold out and have been for a few weeks.

Among other things, today I high-fived a giant anthropomorphic Blackberry and listened to Mike Lazaridis speak about how awesome RIM is and the awesomeness of the University of Waterloo. I fell asleep for parts of his presentation. The only reason I attended was to be in a draw to win 1 of 2 Blackberries which I sadly did not win. A friend of mine won it though. Go figure.

Later this evening, Marc Kielburger is going to be speaking here at UW about…leadership or something. Anyway, moving onto more interesting stories (I simply mentioned Marc as a lead-in), this reminds me of a good friend of mine, Chris, who goes to U of T. He lived in the Trinity residence. Craig Kielburger (The more famous Kielburger, known for starting Free The Children when he was like 12 years old) also lived(or lives, I don’t know if he’s still there) in Trinity residence and if I’m not mistaken, on the same floor. A few years ago Chris told me a story of how one time he walked into the washroom and Craig was standing at a urinal assuming a Superman stance. If you are unfamiliar with the Superman stance, it is when both your hands are fastened to your hips while you pee at a urinal.

I may be making this up, but I also recall Chris telling me how he or a friend of his once “junked” Craig. The term junking has many synonyms but it is best described as the act of forming a fist with a hand and delivering physical pain to a man’s vulnerable area.

With that said, I hope you’re all enjoying the beautifully warm weather this week.

Went out with some friends to go hang out somewhere and drink.
I went to the LCBO to get some alcohol, and upon searching…I couldn’t find any Colt 45, I was really sad, the magnatude of sadness really overshadowed the rest of the evening. Whats funny, is that I’m sad about not getting any Colt 45, and if you have yet to drink Colt 45, then buy ONE can or bottle and try it, then you’ll know what I’m talking about(Note Sarcasm). And as Billy Dee Williams said “It works every time”.