What is this wonderchicken business all about?
In the winter of 1992 (I think), Rick and I had just finished the Mumbles Walk. This is the pub crawl along a seaside stretch of watering holes in Wales, near Swansea, that apparently used to be a regular night out for Dylan Thomas. I'd like to say we were appropriately reverant, but we were just shambolically pissed, basically.
At some point, we stumbled by a phone booth that looked out over the mud flats and dejected-looking rowboats that had been stranded by the outgoing tide, and decided it was a simply great time to give our buddy Derek, back in Vancouver, a collect call. When the operator asked for a name to give for the call (this was back in the last century, before this stuff was automated), the name "Stavros The Wonder Chicken" just bubbled to the top of my brain, with no precedent whatsoever. The operator balked, but we begged, and when we overheard her telling James, his roommate, that she had a collect call from "Stavros the Wonder Chicken", we laughed like the drunken poets we were.
A few minutes after his roommate James accepted the call, we found out that Derek had returned to his hometown because he'd found out that day that his father had died.
We went back to drinking.
Rick died in 2002 from injuries received in the bombing of the Sari Nightclub in Bali, Indonesia. The story of what happened, in reverse chronological order, from my perspective and that of his family and the many friends who gathered here for news was the sole focus of my site from the time I discovered he'd been injured until he died in St Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. I miss him still, terribly. Some small good came out of those terrible few weeks for those of us he left behind, and that's one of the reasons that I still believe in weblogging, and that I have continued to keep this site up, much as there have been times that I wanted to shutter it.
So who are you?
Most everything you might care to know about me, and a lot of things you probably don't, you can learn by reading the Me|dia and Reminiscences categories in my archives.
A chronological view of the archives is also available, as is a weighted cloud of all the categories I've use for posts on this site since 2001.
I'm not Korean, but I live in Korea, and you can get a glimpse of what that's like by having a look at the Korea-Related archive or heading over to have a look at my newer site dedicated to all things Korean, OutsideInKorea.
I've long been fond of the drink, as you can guess from the name of the site, but the phrase 'empty bottle' isn't meant in an entirely straightforward way. Parse that out however you will.
I have a tendency to go all pop-eyed and ranty, use foul language and adult concepts, and occasionally annoy the piss out of people. I am, however, all about the belly laugh, not the sucker punch.
Peace, love and vegetable rights. Man.