Good old Weird Al has a new album coming out in a few weeks and he has released a new track from it on his MySpace page about the RIAA's litigious tendencies. Weird Al hasn't really been one to tackle political issues in his songs, but I guess he got riled up when a record label tried to stop him from releasing a parody of the easy listening tune "You're Beautiful". Weird Al also made headlines a few months ago when he talked openly about how much more money he gets from CD sales than from iTunes downloads, even though it's much cheaper for record companies to distribute music digitally. You can also check out the video here.

Anyway, some of you might be wondering what I've been up to since coming back to Toronto. Well the short answer is not much. I'm currently trying to upgrade the blogging software this site runs on and design a new look for the joint. I probably won't be updating for a while, so in the meantime I guess you'll have to make do with the rest of the Internet.

My elderly parents have a home phone line with two rotary dial phones that they have been using for over 30 years. They have been paying about $10 a month in rental charges on these phones the entire time. By my calculations, that means that they have likely spent about $1750 dollars in rental fees on each of these phones by now, or $3500 total. For decades I've been trying to encourage them to cancel their phone rental and just buy some $20 phones, but they always refused saying that other phones just weren't as good. The old rotary dial phones have become a great conversation piece around the house, and first time visitors are always amazed to see these antiques still in use.


Well anyway, I decided a few days ago that enough was enough and fired off an email to Bell telling them about the thousands of dollars my parents have spent on their phones and asking nicely if they would stop charging them rental fees. To my surprise a few days later Bell actually responded and agreed to finally stop charging the fees! Now my parents can continue to enjoy their chique rotary dial phones, but without paying a premium for them. My parents have also have never owned a cell phone, but perhaps they'll come around if I get them one of these.

If YouTube is having trouble, or you want to save the movie then try this direct download link (Windows Media)


For our last weekend in Aomori Kate and I decided to check out not one, but two wrestling shows! First we saw an All Japan show in the same Hirosaki gym that we witness the infamous bloodbath between Gosaku and Mr. Pogo some time ago. Then we drove to Daisen City in Akita to say farewell to our friends at Michinoku Pro.

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When in Japan, Richard Gere stays at the Dandy House.


I had a couple of days to kill in Tokyo before my flight home, so I did my best to get in as much "wacky Japan" as I could before landing back in "boring Canada".

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From Akihabara

A little while ago I wrote about a bullet train themed pro-wrestler in Japan named Hayate. One reason I did this was because I liked the idea of using both my train and pro-wrestling blog categories for the same post. Well, when I was in Tokyo killing time before heading home I found this Japanese wrestling theme CD which among other things contained Hayate's groovy theme song! Now that I've achieved the train-wrestling-music trifecta all that's left to do is to somehow find a way to combine those three things with McDonald's.


Here are the two tracks that make up Hayate's song:

Preamble (Sounds from the Tohoku Hayate shinkansen train)
The Song



While I'm at it, here's a funny version of Taka Michinoku's theme song for those of you that like your shamisen music laced with obscenities.

This is my last post from Japan. Tomorrow morning I'm off for Tokyo, and then my status of local celebrity will be no more when I return to the mean multicultural streets of Toronto. What will I do now? What will become of Avoidinglife.com? Well, I guess you'll just have to wait and see.