1. Last month a friend of mine who lives in Vietnam had a role in a Vietnamese movie "about 'Uncle' Ho Chi Minh" called "Sleepless Nights." He played the French Col. Charles Piroth.
His dialogue was supposed to be in French but since he wasn't given enough time to memorize the lines and the movie was going to be dubbed anyway, he was told say anything, just to speak.
According to my friend if you were to see the movie and lip-read the character of French Col. Charles Piroth, you would see the colonel address the French ambassador and commander of French forces and say, "Look at my fucking white suit. I'm the Man from Delmonte, and I say 'yes!' You can't fuck with me. D'accord? Citroen, crayon, blanche, bleu. Une deux trois."
2. When my friend/quasi-brother Sarath was escaping the Khmer Rouge army and running for his life through the jungles of Cambodia at the age of 15, he once used a hand grenade to 'catch' fish in a pond.
3. Steve Earle tipped my girlfriend $300 on an omelet and coffee. This wasn't a mistake, he did it on purpose.
4. My brother is best friends with
Barry Blanchard and presented him with the Bill March Summit of Excellence Award at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.
5. My grandfather drove cattle and worked on a threshing crew with Nashville Songwriters Hall Of Fame inductee, Wilf Carter, aka Montana Slim.
He also built a Model T out of scrap parts when he was teenager and roared around the prairies on an Indian motorcycle like a bad-ass.
6. A friend of mine interviewed Jacques Derrida for a college newspaper in the mid-nineties. He had never read anything by Derrida at the time of the interview.
7. My friend's sister was legally married to another woman this summer right here in Alberta. She is also on the Canadian Olympic wheelchair basketball team.
8. The same friend of mine who used to wear a Rocket From the Crypt ring all the time and was banned from the university campus for graffiting the Business building, is in his second year of study with Prince Charles' National Gallery Trust painting program in London. According to this friend, Prince Charles "seems like an alright guy and is good at looking interested."
He is a great painter.
9. I know a competitive scrabble player who was busted for possession in Nevada and can't compete in the States anymore.
10. A prominent member of Giant Sand fell in love with my ex-roommate and sent her a tape of songs about her, many of which later morphed into tracks on
Chore of Enchantment.
. . . if procrastination were a profession.