How Lucky Am I!!??

Seriously, I have the greatest friends ever. I am ecstatic to announce that Bob Loblaw will not be visiting the violin string factory anytime soon!

Last night Colin and I went to the Bovine under the pretense that it would be a Hostage Life listening party (their album just came out for free online, go download it at www.juiceboxdotcom.com)/goodbye to the Flatliners because they are going on a million year tour/ a Little Millionaires show. Once we got there however we were informed that it was actually a "save Tabi and Colin's fucked up cat" benefit organized by the wonderful Eric Gaudet and carried out by all of our amazing friends. Colin and I were in total shock by the out pour of love and support from friends, all we could think is "how on earth did we get this lucky!?".

Our friends organized and worked their butts off to show us how much they love us and put some sunshine back in our lives and I honestly can not explain how grateful and lucky we feel that we are surrounded by so many, genuinely good people (ha, suck it "god"!)






Thanks to everyone who came out to support and special thanks to:
Eric Gaudet (Master of ceremonies)
Genevieve Murphy (Mistress of ceremonies)
Zoë Papageorgiou (Queen of cupcakes)
Yvonne Moir (crafty fox)
The Litter Millionaires and The Feliners
The Bovine and all it's employee's
Andy/Kai/Wooder/Adam Cook and anyone else I forgot who pitched in to help out working door, selling raffle tickets, whatever, you are awesome and you all just saved a little, dumb kitties life.

P.S.
The first thing Bob Loblaw did when we got home was take a huge piss on the couch...

Poor Bastard

Mr.Bob Loblaw is a fucking nut, we found out recently that he suffers from

"Feline Hyperesthesia Syndrome"
Some signs of FHS are skin-rolling, tail-twitch; biting or fussing with the tail or tail tip; sudden mood swings; staring into space; sudden "frenzied" or "psycho-kitty" behavior; nervousness; dilated pupils; chasing tail; dashing around madly for no apparent reason; and unprovoked yowling. Sometimes, the cat bites at her tail so furiously she injures it. In extreme cases, tails have had to be amputated because of the damage inflicted by the cat.

Guess who shows all of the above signs and is an extreme case....



So we set up his surgery (that costs about $800) because even though he's fucking crazy we love him to death. Unfortunately, 2 days before his surgery we got a call from the vet. His tests were in and he had liver and kidney problems so he couldn't mastestisize the anesthetic. To top it all off his blood work came back with a skyrocketing 28 sugar level (a high normal is 8) So he is also diabetic, this requires 2 needles of insulin a day. That's right, 60 disposable needles a month in his tiny body (which didn't seem that tiny until I thought about poking it 60 times in 30 days)

All in all it's making us even poorer than before (that's AFTER we already quit smoking) and tensions are running high in the Lichtirani household. Staying indoors for almost a month with no one but each other and a very needy/often annoying cat that wakes you up screaming in the middle of the night because it's crazy enough to bite it's tail off = easy snapping couple.

Goddamn life, cut us some slack...

THE SIMPSONS...Trivia...

So, Colin was a last minute addition to the game when one of our contestants was a no show. I achieved my main goal, win the first round and make it into the finals (and also kick Colin's ass so bad I almost lapped him in points!)As you can see from the above photo he came in second and got some Duff beer (the prize he would have most wanted anyway)and I came in first and got the sailboat painting I wanted oh so bad!!



Sadly in the final round I came in 2nd, losing by 1 fuckign point eats it, especially when there were 2 different, insanely easy questions that I buzzed in on time for but then totally blanked. It was stuff I knew, stuff I that I consider common knowledge! But when your on stage with a time limit the pressure gets to you...Goddamn.










I have the best friends ever, they came out to support me and they made the cutest signs ever. My entourage definitely brought the party, everyone else was jealously looking out into the audience wishing their friends were that cool and liked them that much! Thanks guys, I had such a fun fucking night!

The Runway Lights

Bang It Out is dead! Long live Bang It Out!



So, we did the most rockstar thing ever and broke up after our first show. All is well though, The Runway Lights (Yvo, Misty, Katt, Monica, and Me) are in full swing! We already wrote an entire song (back ups and all) and we tweaked the song Yvo wrote (tentatively titled Jawbreaker) Things are going well and it's nice to be in a band where everyone is always eager to practice and has a lot of time to put in.


Also, isn't this cute, Katt made it, she's so excited:




Things are looking up, I really think we'll be playing shows by winter, maybe sooner depending on our progress writing. We still have a lot of song skeletons too so we are at no loss for material.



In other news, this Saturday I will be taking part in a Simpsons gameshow at the Lennox Gallery (at Queen and Ossington)I'm actually really excited but also kind of nervous. I know it seems pathetic but, what if I lose!? I pride myself on extensive, useless knowledge about the Simpsons, I couldn't imagine how bad losing (in front of my friends no less) would feel! I do keep feigning confidence though, I figured as long as I seem like I'm going to win, even if I lose my ego will be alright.

London

And a few of my favorites from London!

Wales

Here's a few photos from Wales!

Amsterdam

So here are some of my favorite pics from amsterdam

Here are some sweet pics from Paris, some of my favorites that I never compiled into a favorite photos list.

I feel they get somewhat lost amongst the other 700 photos I took while in Europe so I thought this was a good place to post a few (prior to this I was unaware that you could post more than one picture per post...)

Knowing really is half the battle...

Godless Morality

I can't speak for everyone but as an atheist (or anti-theist) I can answer my own perspective.

I really have very few absolutes in morality, even killing can sometimes be justified (i.e. food, defense, etc...) same with stealing, lying, etc...

One of the few absolutes I do have are rape, I have never found a just reason for this to occur.

I think a lot of my morality comes from my beliefs that I am an animal and I have a overwhelming responsibility to preserve our species (a very primal and instinctual need) This is why I care about the welfare of minorities and children, why I don't want to hurt other human beings, why I want to preserve our habitat (the earth) and why I don't want to bring our society to chaos (i.e. raping, stealing from, killing people in my society)

It may be hard to understand but even without the bible or other dogmatic book there are many sources to get a good idea of morality. Myths and stories are chocked full of moral messages to humanity, even bible stories aren't bad in and of themselves (ok, some are, King Nebakanezer and Job stand out to me as some of the worst morals in the bible) as long as they are taken as literary myth (which is what they are)

My point is that man made all these things (from Christian God to Zeus) and we have been figuring out our morality since we became capable of abstract reasoning. Abstract reasoning is the only reason we think about morality in the first place, otherwise it wouldn't come up at all. But, if you look at a herd of elephants while they don't have the reasoning or the moral teachings of religion (or any other source) they still take care of their young and sick, grieve for their dead, and work to preserve their community, all this without a bible or a God.

I know this is a bit long winded but my point is that human beings invented God to:

a) Control a vast uneducated majority
b) Remove responsibility from themselves when they do act immorally or aren't strong enough to act independently (i.e. the satan made me do it defense or " turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him" in AA)

There is nothing wrong with a personal relationship with a god you believe in, it can give you strength when you feel you have none, the problem comes with the fact that you if you believe, it's an entire lifestyle.

If you believe you have some sort of greater realization about the creation of the universe and everything in it, including yourself, you can't keep it to yourself.

If you actually believe that your God holds all the answers to life then you will follow anything that claims to be his work because you have to, IT'S GOD. This leads to horrible acts and makes it hard to socially evolve, which is how this comes back to same sex marriage.

Human beings are capable of despicable acts because they feel they are acting on behalf of a higher power and a greater purpose. Instead of learning new things and furthering our intelligence it would seem that religion has haltered our social and moral evolution, it continues to pull us back to medieval thought processes despite the fact that we should be dispelling these ancient ideas based on new knowledge.

My biggest peeve comes from the idea that "we figured it out", religious types are convinced that they know "the purpose to life", that they figured out why we are here and all the secrets to the universe (god made them...) and that they figured it out before we had indoor plumbing! They have the arrogance to point out the fallacies of science, the points where it went wrong and we proved ourselves incorrect. But, the people who reject the idea of an omnipotent, omnipresent god have a better insight into this. We don't know, we'ver never known and while it seems we know less than before we know less and less about more and more, and that's what matters.

There is no shame in humbling in the face of our own ignorance as long as we strive to know more, religion tells us we don't need to do that because it already has the answers, except, it doesn't.

I know this was really long winded and I went on a few digressions but hopefully this explains my position on morality without deity.