Usual Albert question on a saturday... are we doing anything tonight? Don't worry next week I know what I'll be doing at this time...

A Tale of Two Couplands:

There's a rumor going around the Internet that Douglas Coupland collects meteorites. Nobody knows how it began, least of all Coupland. But the story started to circulate shortly after his first novel, Generation X, became an On the Road for the '90s. Every effort he's made to set the record straight has been ignored by his many fan sites. So he recently decided to purchase a few choice specimens.

I'm visiting with Coupland at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, to discuss his novel JPod, coming out in May, when I notice a meteorite the size of a grapefruit resting on a table beside a whale vertebra. In a voice raspy from drinking late into the night before, he informs me that the meteorite was found in Argentina, and that it's very rare. He cradles the rock in his hand. "We should all be so lucky to have people throw such good ideas our way," he says.

Collecting meteorites isn't the only concept Coupland has cribbed from the Web gossip about him in the past couple of years. "There's this whole meta-Doug out there who's no longer connected to me or even cares about me anymore," he says.

So for JPod, he created a character called Douglas Coupland, based on his online doppelgänger: a one-dimensional egotist with cold eyes resembling "wells filled with drowned toddlers." This Coupland first intrudes on the action when the narrator - Ethan Jarlewski, a game designer working for a lightly fictionalized Electronic Arts - meets him on a plane to China. Coupland is ostensibly writing an article for Wired on "designer prisoner-of-conscience labor," but he's secretly developing a gadget and, not incidentally, looking to poach programmers from Electronic Arts.

When Coupland started writing JPod, a 21st-century sibling to his 1995 novel, Microserfs, he didn't anticipate any of this. "It really shocked me to appear in the story," he confesses as he leads me to the dining room for lunch.

But now Coupland seems to delight in stalking his meta-Doug in fiction and mimicking him in life.

i fucking love this city

also, just to give you a little perspective:
Mike Grier (blackie) is tied with Joe Thorton in points with 8
cheechoo is full of shit. it's all marleau. once he shuts down, it's a walk

GOING INSANE AT WORK! HALF THE FLOOR HAS ALREADY LEFT, I'M STILL HERE AND I'M GOING INSANE!!!

WHAT THE HELL IS WITH PEOPLE ASKING IF WE HAVE PH PAPER TO TESTE TEH PH OF THEIR URINE!!!! EWWWWW

oh and watching hockey at pub 1905 for those intersted again

HOLY SHIT. I've been checking out all the shit on the wii since E3. I can't fuckin WAIT. But I think the most exciting thing I've seen thusfar is Ubisoft's RED STEEL. Check out this sweet lovin:




OMIGAWD IT'S BEAUTIFUL.

The sweet thing about living on your own is leaving the house at 12:30 am, driving to 7-11 to get an orange creamsicle slurpee (seriously, they had that flavour!), a pack of super nibs, and then hitting the McDonald's drive-thru to pick up a jr. McChicken and a double cheeseburger. Then you come home and write about it on the internet as you eat it. Try doing that shit when your parents are trying to sleep. Ain't gonna happen. Not at my parents crib anyway.

FUCK... friday MAY 12th is what the last post should've read. Now that I've thoroughly confused all of you...

by tomorrow, I mean Friday May 11th. Just in case you were confused.

TOMORROW:

The City Streets (CD-EP release)
The Marshall Islands (CD release)
The Last Deal
Red Hot Daggers

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
DOORS AT 8.