Brannigans Law

If you have not noticed, I am a fan of Marvel Comics. Occasionally I will post a neat picture, or movie review of Marvel fare, and today is one of those occasions.

Above is the cliffhanger image at the end of Marvel's Secret Invasion mini-series second issue that hit the bookshelves on May 7th. It shows the ''not-so-secret-anymore' invasion of an alien race who is trying to conquer Earth.
A bunch of these baddies may look pretty familiar to you as they were 'engineered' as 'super soldiers' with the powers of many of Earth's heroes and villains. Think you can guess who's who?

Also, Nancy and I gathered with a few friends to see Iron Man opening night last Friday. It was great. Robert Downe Jr was so good in it. He played the part perfectly! Likeably- He pulled it off. Play boy - He puled it off. Genius - He pulled it off. Again, I thought he was great!

The perfect casting award goes to the film not for Downey Jr, but instead Jeff Bridges. The baldness plus beard was awesome!



Bridges played Obadiah Stane, a big wig in Stark Corp, Tony Stark's multi-billion dollar business. (It wouldn't be a comic book movie without a multi-billion dollar business would it?)
The action was great, the story was good, and there were a few laughs to boot. It's good enough to make a grown man stop daydreaming about web slinging and wall crawling, and start dreaming about flying around in a mechanized suit of armor. Enjoy the movie folks!

Here at Charlottetown Toyota, we understand that we service some of the finest vehicles on the road. The 09' Lexus RX, the Toyota FJ, Solara, and the one 87 Toyota Camry that is still on the roads in PEI.
With such a high scale line of vehicles coming in and out, we are attune to seeing the occasional celebrity grace the halls of out building. Today was such a day.

Jeff Hutcheson was in today. THE Jeff Hutcheson, from CANADA A.M!

BAM! I'm one degree of separation from that doofus Seamus O'Regan, and no doubt one step closer to the evil Rod Black.

Needless to say, calming myself was not an option today! That's what it's like in the glorious and jet set life of the Toyota Service Advisor!

In all seriousness, Mr. Hutcheson was a first class guy, and extremely pleasant to serve!

April 24th, Snow!!! from Peimike on Vimeo.

Here's a video from this evening...and there is also a story about our old BBQ.

It's the season for new birth, growth and life. None of this interests me all that much :)

What I am interested in is games. I like games. I make games. I play games. At the moment I am developing a board game, a couple of big urban games, and an 'alternate reality game' for my friends and other people alike.

Love it! This time of year, I can't stop my brain from racing from project to project. It's very fun, and it feels like there is a mountain of work to be done! When it is all finished, I'll let you know what is going on and where. It's sure to be fun.

We might see the return of Mafia: Elimination, or even Unfair Advantage. Surely you will see another edition of the Token Hunt, and maybe even a few other new ideas.

Hope this finds you well! Above is a picture of Mikey and I closing a deal in Victoria Park last weekend. It was in the business section of the Guardian last Saturday,

Mike

I have often found myself wondering if I have been revealing enough about myself to you; the loyal reading public; through this loving web log. I then came to the realization that no; no I do not reveal enough of myself to you!
So here are a few videos sharing with you my earliest hours of April the 1st, 2008. You will observe the early morning rituals of yours truly, and practically feel like you were right there with me!
I am impressed with my camera work, especially on the second video...
Take time to spend 5 minutes of your life for the opportunity to share in 5 minutes of mine!

What drove me nuts was that in most of populated North America, spring had sprung and there were flowers, and grass, and leaves, and other signs of spring all around! In PEI though....in PEI we had a nice blanket of snow.
Granted it was gone by early afternoon, but it snowed nonetheless.
This is taking forever to post this first video!!! AAACK!!!
And now, part II:



Finally the guest stars have their time to shine! Mikey and Pekoe are waiting patiently for their breakfast, and for the first time on Brannigans Law, Pekoe can be heard!!!

Part III - The Feeding

A great idea for a comic strip...it's very funny. Link HERE.

The site is described as :
"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb."

It's great! Check out an example below:

My main supply of cupcakes over the past few years has been provided at parties where someone picks up a pack at the Superstore and brings them in. Most of the time I make a full cake instead of dividing it up into cups, so I hadn't had homemade cupcakes in a long time. Although the memory of their tastiness is vague, I am sure that they would have paled in comparison with the glorious cupcakes that Nancy made the other night.
For all of the hard work, it was worth it!

Here is a pic of a friend Troy riding a camel. Hope your trip continues to go well buddy!
I have some videos of the large amount of snow that fell last night as well as my morning routine that I will be posting possibly tonight or tomorrow. Tonight is the last meeting of the group that is watching the "Truth Project" videos. They have been very informative and interesting. I will be purchasing copies so as to run a group similar to the one we are participating in.


Mike

Tonight my wife is doing something 'special' for me. It's something that happens only every few months (when she is in the mood for it), or on special occasions like a birthday or a major holiday... my wife is actually baking.
This is a big deal in the household, as it is very, very rare indeed! In fact; both of our pets look really concerned because the have never really seen Nancy act like this before.


"This is something Mike should be doing..." they are probably thinking in their little furry brains.

There is no doubting the magnitude of this day; it will be noted on the calendar; but it does come with its drawbacks. Due to the infrequent nature of this occurrence, Nancy understandably has some difficulties with the finer points more experienced bakers would take as common knowledge. Now she's not at the level of throwing a whole egg into the mix - shell and all, though she does lack the familiarity when it comes to some of the utensils used in making your basic batch of cupcakes.

These tools of the bakers trade are held in her hand as a scalpel would be in the hands of a freshman med student who is expected to perform an emergency tracheotomy on a choking victim at 20,000 ft in an airliner. In other words, not with the utmost of confidence...

Pushing her fears aside, she plows on. Blending and mixing, cracking and pouring her way to a batch of marble cupcakes, that will be eagerly enjoyed by those daring enough to suppress their most basic survival instincts for the reward of sweet cake and icing!

Upon informing my lovely wife that I am writing this post, on this topic, I was called a 'Dirty rotten punk' and a 'scoundrel'. Now....we were just at Jumbo Video this evening, so she must have seen the movie box for Steve Martin's "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" in the comedy section of the old releases, but I don't remember either of us walking through there....hmmm. Also, it was made very clear that I would be able to avail myself to none of the sweet cakes that she was producing tonight. This may or may not prove to be a mistake on my part...I'll wait and hear how much 'crunching' there is when she samples her own wares...

I'm off to enjoy the aroma of vanilla and chocolate...she just informed me that the new baking pans we bought tonight "Smell funny....like rubber burning..."...I'd really better go!!!

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” - Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” - Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” - Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” - Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” - John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” - Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” - Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” - Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” - Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” - Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” - Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” - Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” - Robert Frost

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” - Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” - Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” - James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” - T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” - Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” - Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” - Pat Conroy

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” - Lao Tzu

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” - Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” - Maya Angelou

38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” - Elizabeth Drew

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” - Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do - especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” - William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” - Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” - Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freya Stark

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” - Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” - Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” - Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” - Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure — self-determined, self-motivated, often risky — forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind — and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” - Mark Jenkins