Mille Bornes n the sno

  It's the shit!  Best card game ever.  Tipsy snowball fights on the way back, through the backlanes/urinals of NDG, classic.

Oot and aboot in Brooklyn

Oot

Sweet

Yuppie play area

Yuppies

Some other band

Luff lady, not at all impressed by yours truly

Quiet Loudly

  Another lifetime ago, a month, the gang went down to Brooklyn to hang out with Humdinger, after getting tipsy at an Irish pub near ground zero.  I fell in love with a beer called Narragansett.  Love!  We checked out this CD launch in a basement club - CD!?.  The band doing the launching was called Luff, and they were ok, but kinda sounded like a rehash of the droning 90's girlband thing.
  The band that opened for them, Quiet Loudly, was fucking awesome.  A dizzy mess of Wurlitzer heroics and falsetto.  Dance and I looked at each other after their set was done and we both felt like we'd seen one of 'those' shows, like seeing The Beatles at the Cavern Club or something.  They were dynamic and clever, and you'll hear about them in 2012.  I got a terrible video of them.
  The third band was also a droning, walls of distortion-type band, and I was too drunk to care about them at that point.  Sweet sweet Narragansett.  Oh, the bar upstairs had a bacci-ball play area for yuppies.  Do people still say 'yuppie'?  We ended up bar-hopping after the show, and I remember trying to talk to the hot and tattooed guitarist lady from Luff at some other bar.  After I sauntered over and spoke my piece, she glared at me as crickets chirped and tumbleweeds drifted by.  I held up my finger as if I had remembered something, or was about to shout 'Eureka!', then turned around and walked away.  Later, some kid tripped me on purpose, and I questioned him about it.

Steve Turner - Summertime

Steve Turner is a filthy wizard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_7ECcAyGhs

Grafeets

Stunning yet pricey

Godart

Whimsical

Somewhat neat

Kinda cool

Old school

Witty

Fucking ugly and rude

Equally ugly, and equally rude

Hey, let's make our neighbourhood look like crap!  Yeah, let's!

The worst

  My hood, NDG (No Damn Good), is shitty with graffiti.  God, I sound like an old man.  But it's true.  You roll off the highway onto Sherbrooke street, and all you see is shitty graffiti.  I don't actually mind 'cool' graffiti - stuff that is artistic, and done somewhere that isn't on someone's house or business, which is the norm in NDG.  The 15 year-old private school kids putting shit-squiggles all over is bogus.  Whatevs.
  The first pic is a pretty impressive piece recently completed down the street.  It's called 'Our Lady of Grace'.  I'm not sure if it was 27,000$ impressive, but I guess that's what giant murals go for these days.  The other pics amused me, and the last four are shit.  So there you go, if you're gonna do graffiti, make sure I like it.

Squirrel-henge

Squirrels of the corn

  Another henge!  These fat and dopey squirrels were going to town on some newly fallen leaves, and they creeped me out.  They were standing in a henge formation, all dazed out.  A henge!  A henge!  A henge made of rodents!
  In other newses, I'm giving serious thought to starting another blog, solely devoted to birds, leaving this one to deal with pictures of food, signs I find amusing, and self-centred rants.

Post-birding eats

  We ended up in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu in another attempt to find the Greylag Goose, unsuccessfully.  I always find the South Shore and thereabouts to be a depressing, ominous place.  Miserable-looking people stand hunched at bus stops in the middle of nowhere.  Anyways, we ate a very late breakfast at this redonkulous egg place, a real rib-sticker meal.  I don't feel like I'll ever hungry again.  There was most definitely enough food on each plate to feed the average Asian family for a few days.  I'm the 1%!  I'm the 1%!

The cemetary itself

  The Mount Royal Cemetary is a decent place to wander around, I zoned out a few times on all the old school graves and whatnot.  I'm tired.

Squire-els

Ahhh, sweet sweet grave water

The Darth Vader of squirrels

I have a green face

I can't help it, it's already been done

Please go away

This one squirrel had a green face, and I was like 'Yo!  You gots a green face!', and it was all 'Nooooo!'

Birds, others

Barred Owl, booyeah!

Black-capped Chickadee

Brown Creeper, creeping

American Crow, suicide?

Downy Woodpecker

Hermit Thrush

House Finch, female (and White-Breasted Nuthatch ass)

House Finch, male

Northern Cardinal

Northern Goshawk

Northern Goshawk, almost

Northern Flicker, almost

Northern Mockingbird (we thought it was the Solitaire at first)

Red-tailed Hawk

  Here are a few pics of some of the other birds we met along the way.  The Barred Owl was exciting, it was in a park, and it looked all sleepy and grumpy, like me.  There were plenty of owl-snack sized-squirrels nearby, all fat, happy, and delicious.