Every year in French Guiana the Paul Henri Gérard International Memorial for Short Story [Mémorial International du conte Paul Henri Gérard] gathers storytellers from around the world to entertain and delight audiences through the spoken word. This year, the memorial event will take place from November 3 to 6, 2009, at various venues in Cayenne, Sinnamary, Awala-Yalimapo, St. Laurent du Maroni, and Mana, French Guiana.

This year the theme is “Le Rire! Arts de la Parole” [Laughter!: Arts of the Word]. Storytellers, poets, comedians, and slammers from Cameroon, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Surinam will come together for performances in different locations. The memorial will feature performers Bostik, DJMSO, Spoity Boys, and Dédé St. Prix, among others.

For article (in French), see http://guyane.no-scoop.com/news/2009-11-03-memorial-paul-henri-gerard/

For more on individual performers, see http://zigzagprod.fr/spip.php?rubrique1

My sister Vanessa aka Issa

Another breakfast adventure with John and Peewee plus one. My sister Issa joined us for breakfast at Ayala Techno Hub and ate at FlapJacks.

Since I have been known to eat heavy breakfast, John and I ordered something to share.

Filipino slammer (P495 + 10% SC). The Filipino Slammer is all an average Pinoy likes, garlic fried rice, meat and eggs. It consists of garlic fried rice, beef tapa, chicken tocino and Vigan longganisa and two eggs cooked the way you want them. They ran out of Vigan longganisa so we opted for corned beef. Since slammers at Flapjacks mean it is good for sharing and they didn’t disappoint, the Filipino slammer is good for 2-3 persons. The garlic fried rice is good, the oil used is infused with atsuete that gives the golden color. John said the serving of the rice is not enough for the 3 different ulam so we ordered extra rice (P35 + 10%SC). The beef tapa has a sweet sour taste that I’m not used to but John liked them. I liked the chicken tocino, sweet tender fillet of chicken and it doesn’t have the burnt sugar aftertaste. The corned beef was forgettable.

My sister loves bacon and boy what surprise she got!

Bacon Overload Temptation (P395 +10%SC). A two egg omelet filled with TONS of bacon and mushroom served with buttered toast and hash brown. Upon seeing her order, she said she has fulfilled her calorie intake for the day! It was really huge, good to feed two people. Bacon filling is sauteed in olive oil with the button mushrooms. Truly Bacon overload!

FlapJacks at the Ayala Techno Hub let kids eat free during the weekends. Peewee was served with Kid Pancake treat (FREE!). Three kid-size pancakes topped with whipped butter and served with chocolate chips, mini marshmallows and rainbow colored sprinkles as toppings. Peewee loved them! And he had an order to eat them. First eating the toppings then the pancake.They also serve free flowing coffee during the weekends to compliment your meal.

Overall, FlapJacks is a good place for breakfast. They have a good selection of breakfast for heavy eaters and light eaters as well. But be prepared to shell out more than you spend for Pancake House. Next time, we’ll try to have lunch or dinner there and post here asap.

Have you tried Flapjacks? Tell me more about them.
P.S. Kids eat free gig is only good for children below 10 years old and limited to 2 kids in a group.

Go Issa! Shed off the bacon by chasing Peewee around!

]]> http://partyindaville.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/parties-for-saturday-061309/ Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:39:00 +0000 Charlie Hustle http://partyindaville.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/parties-for-saturday-061309/ http://partyindaville.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/r-u-the-life-of-the-party/ Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:11:00 +0000 Charlie Hustle http://partyindaville.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/r-u-the-life-of-the-party/ http://rocksoft.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/1994-pogs-slammers-and-swedish-pop-music/ Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:13:50 +0000 Enrique Enfuego http://rocksoft.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/1994-pogs-slammers-and-swedish-pop-music/

Skulls were really in that year.

I’ve heard it referred to as the Year of Skulls, 8-balls and Yin-Yangs, but I like to think of it as the year we got to answer the question, What is the Ace of Base? (Watching that makes me feel weird)

Back to Pogs, or slammers in this case…

Ah yes, it was the 90’s indeed.

Only could such a time in history really pump up little kids with names like these…

Pogs instilled gambling into a child’s list of activities at a very young age. Unfortunately, the fad came and went fast as the music of our favorite Swedish pop band.

Enfuego.

If I had known this was going to be a collectors’ item, I wouldn’t have owned fools in the schoolyard in 4th grade, copping Pogs left and right with my prized O.J. slammer.

Oh, Orenthal James, how much did I love slamming your face against the asphalt in pursuit of Pog domination. Those were the days.

Honestly though, how much does a picture like this trip you out? People reminisce HARD about Pogs these days.

Remember the different types of slammers? We had the classic shitty plastic 8 ball. The skullface. The ripper (sick). But O.J. was my go-to dogg.

Too bad his ass got sacked…

Eventually.

Enfuego.

Meet Bboy Zee.

Quite possibly one of the greatest standardized test takers we have ever met. Zee met us at nerd camp way back when pogs were hitting the elementary school scene. (Remember slammers? No? That’s unfortunate.)

Over 13 years later, here he is – making a name for himself in the bboy scene up in Boston while dancing with his current crew Bulletproof Theory.

You’d be rather hard pressed to find anyone who takes the culture more seriously than Zee. He has actually applied for a government grant that would allow him to travel all around China whlie documenting and interviewing the scene over in the Far East. Talk about taking it back to the roots.

Zee was kind enough to make a video for You Should Know This By Now. Check it out. You might learn a thing or two.

Or fifteen.

Song in video: Weird Fishes/Arpeggi by Radiohead

You should know this by now.

The comments on my most recent Facebook status indicate that many people are interested in a POGS revival.  We need to start it back up.  Unfortunately, all the people that want to participate are in Florida.  Was it not a big deal in New York in the 90s?  And if not, I am making it my personal duty to make it happen now!

Earlier today I was thinking about the games we played in school when we were younger. I can picture a group of kids sitting by the small yellow lockers where the 4th and 5th graders kept their books – playing pogs. It’s really no wonder the game was eventually banned from schools. Packs of kids swarming around a circle, sitting on hard carpet while they rile each other up. What was the harm? A bunch of 3rd grade gamblers? C’mon.

What I remember about the short-lived craze was just how accessible it was to find pogs in mass amounts. If you walked into a Walgreens, the bins that hold DVDs and movie theater style candy today, were once filled to the brim with small circular pieces of cardboard – and no cutesy animal, symbol, popular public figure, or cartoon was spared. You could find the most random pog there was – a green cartoon bunny holding a magical carrot and feeding it to Spice Girl would not be too far-fetched.

And then there were “slammers.” Slammers were crucial if you were collecting pogs for sport. If you played the game “for keeps” and traded pogs with your friends however intensely you handled it, the type of slammer you had was key. I, unfortunately, had the crappiest slammers in the world. I’m not even sure if they were made out of real metal or just painted silver to make me think they were. But they did NOT slam well. A joke. I knew kids who had slammers that sent pogs flying into oblivion. Perhaps this explains why I ended up with so few pogs at the end of my run. I knew this one kid who lived in my neighborhood and kept all of his pogs in neon green and blue pog containers. He had hundreds. It wasn’t fair.

It’s kind of humorous to think about all of the pitiful side games that followed after pogs were banned. “Pencils.” Who had that bright idea? I guess they figured the school couldn’t ban pencils, now could they? Boys would break off their fingers to play that game in the aisles of their seats, and I never, ever understood the point to it. I suppose if pogs were to for whatever awful reason make a comeback, I think I speak for a generation when I say there’s one very necessary accessory that would have to come back with it….

Slap bracelets. I can see Michael Ian Black having a few words about that.

Greetings readers!

My fiance and I attended the finals for this year’s Rust Belt Poetry Slam last night. We decided to go to last night’s finals bout because a) there was an open mic right before the slam (I read “Be” at the open mic), and b) we wanted to see what the finals would be like, never having attended a poetry slam of this notoriety and magnitude.

We came in early – about 6:10 – because we wanted to make sure we got a good seat and that I could get on the open mic list. We purchased tickets ahead of time for the finals (go us!) so we just sat down, hung out, and watched everything kinda come together. The open mic started at 7:00. I along with several others read before the indie slam portion of finals, which started around 8 PM.

The whole thing was awesome, both the indie competition and the team finals. I heard people with some skill of words and some serious energy in that room. Images stick out in my mind of personal pain, obstacles, rejection, anger, community. I hope that someday I will be half the performance poet that these men and women are.

To be honest, the details of last night are still a swirling mess in my mind, so I’m having difficulty sorting things out. Some things I liked:

• Alvin Lau, who performed “Full Moon” and “For The Breakdancers”;
• Another poet answered the teacher who once told her that she couldn’t write;
• There was an unbelievable team piece done by the Cleveland slammers;
• A poet named WonderDave, who slammed about what we are to believe is “Sexy” from the media mogul minds of advertising;
• “The Gospel of the Matrix”, performed by Scott Woods of Writer’s Block Poetry;
• ALL of the poems performed by Dave of Columbus Black Pearl;
• Spike’s piece about riots, team rivalries, and Woody Hayes (“this is Jesus, and this is Woody Hayes”);
• Purity’s poem about a young, homeless, pregnant woman looking for answers (“Who Is God?”)
• A poem from Donielle of Writer’s Block about pimpin’ Girl Scout cookies (absolutely hilarious); and
• A poem in the form of an open letter to Muslim convenience store owners.

There of course were a LOT more poems performed last night, and I apologise if I’ve garbled anything. I have to admit that I left the room vibrating inside from all the energy flying around during the slam. This was the best damn thing I’ve ever seen. In fact, I did not hear one bad poem the entire night. That vibrating energy inside me inspired me to write five more poems last night and this morning – two of them are going up on the blog after this post.

And…my fiance and I together were asked to be one of the judges for the team finals. I’ve never judged a slam before. Awesome! We had so much fun. And we found out how interesting a judge’s job is – YOU will get booed quicker than the poet if the crowd doesn’t think your score is high enough for a poet’s performance. But I must emphasize the fun aspect of the slam – the poems are what matter, not the points.

Believe me folks…we WILL be back for more. We are poetry slam addicts. And I got enough inspiration for at least another week of writing. So…I will not do an experiment this week – I will just write in my normal style and see what happens. But I promise, more poetic form experiments will be forthcoming.

Thanks for reading,

Nicole

I have been musing over old memories in the past couple of months. Does anyone remember the rubbish old expage sites everyone had around the year 2000? Oh how i loved them. And hated geocities. It was a kind of rivalry for the young computer geek generation. We all signed eachothers guestbooks with comments running along the lines of ‘gr8 site, love the layout. Visit my site and dont forget to sign the guestbook! PS: Wanna do a link exchange?’ And the best sites had the highest number of hits and the most link exchanges. Guestbook entries were gold. I know this all sounds very wierd to most people, but does anyone remember?

Wow i probably was the saddest teenager.

I came across a printout of an old website i did when i was 15. It was from e-lusions.com (my first domain!) and was a div layout over a mystical image with fairies and stuff on it. I can honestly say it was better than any website i can do now. I’ll have to post the image here one day.

Its funny how if you stop doing a hobby it takes a long time to get back into it. Fine Art which i did at college would be difficult to get back into. Does anyone else get that? Or perhaps its something to do with learning when you’re young?

Speaking of past times, does anyone remember Pogs and Slammers?! Or Power rangers, or Saved by the Bell? Or the old Goosebumps books – I remember them being amazing, until i went on holiday last summer and found one at the old cottage we were staying at. I read it in about an hour, it was rubbish. Say Cheese and Die or something, i cant remember.

I’m only 20, i’m sure when i’m 40 i’ll be talking about the old Nintendo Wii’s, I’m a celebrity and Harry Potter books.