Approximately 25 Random things about me.

Updated 24 January 2011

1. I'm both a Pisces and Aquarius, having been born right on the cusp. Which I'm told explains a lot about me. It also means I can read the horoscope for both signs, although I rarely do. I don't believe in that sort of thing.

2. I once opened a fortune cookie that had 7 fortunes inside, all of them said something to the effect: you will be very successful in your career, or, new business opportunities will bring you great wealth. I'm still waiting... actually not really.

3a. I'm currently a student at the University of Alberta. Taking Elementary Education, minoring in Special Education.

3b. My last job was working for AMA (the Alberta Motor Association, the Alberta affiliate of CAA or AAA) I drove a "Battery Express" truck. I tested batteries and charging systems on peoples' cars, and if needed I sold and installed a replacement battery.

3c. With a couple of partners who are Occupational Therapists, I'm making Entertaining/Instructional videos for children, our goal is to make a series of videos that can be used either by themselves or as part of a regular behavioral program. Currently we're just developing a pilot video, we've spend several hours every week on the project with no immediate remuneration.

4. I eloped to the temple on January 2nd 2009.

5. I'm afraid of the dark, paralyzingly so. I can't enter a dark room, or walk through a dark house. When I was living in my parents basement (2 years ago) if I got home at night, I would turn on the light in the front entry, walk to the kitchen and turn on the light, go back to the front entry and turn off the light, walk through the kitchen to the basement stairs and turn on the light, turn off the light in the kitchen, walk to the bottom of the stairs and turn on the light in the basement family room, walk back up the stairs and turn off the stairs-light, walk back downstairs through the family room into the hall and turn on the light, go back to the family room turn of the light, walk back into and down the hallway, turn on the light at the far end of the hallway (which would remain on all night) then walk back and turn off the light at the other end, and go into my room, leaving the door partially open.

6. I had 3 sets of teeth. My baby teeth, I lost them and grew in a set of Adult teeth and molars. I then lost those, including the molars, and grew in another set of adult teeth and molars. I was losing teeth and growing new ones into my teens.

7. I have never broken a bone in my body, and for that matter I've never had stitches either, or any kind of wound that needed medical attention to heal.

8.the most expensive thing I have ever bought is a House, Second a new truck, the third most expensive thing was a $1200 computer.

9. I once bought a car for $75 dollars, drove it for a year and a half without having to spend anything on repairs, and then sold it for $40.

10a. Apart from my textbooks for school I'm currently reading "Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume 1." for the second time. It's good, it's like the movie with Robert Downey Jr., and NOT like the movies with Basil Rathbone.

10b. I recently read "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. I Love It! Who would have guessed that a textbook could be so entertaining!

11. I have 20/400 vision, which means I see objects 20 feet away from me as clearly as most people see objects which are 400 feet away. In other words, without my glasses I'm quite blind.

12. My night-vision is even worse.

13. I once had a paraglider harnessed to my back, without the engine, and was tied by a rope to the back of a quad, and then I was flown like a kite, for about 2 minutes. Luckily there was about 3 feet of snow all around.

14. I have a big bin full of Lego that I don't let my kids play with. They have their own Lego.

15. I get along just fine with my Ex-wife. I barely even remember being married to her.

16. I haven't been sleeping well for the past few nights. I've been laying awake for several hours before falling asleep, Having disturbing dreams and waking-up several times during the night, and then waking up in the morning feeling quite unrested.

17. I'm 32 years old. I don't like birthdays, I prefer mine to pass unnoticed, but 31 and 32 weren't as bad as 30. My wife makes a big deal about birthdays and wants a big party, breakfast in bed, and festivities for a week.

18. My favorite book really is The Book of Mormon. I love it. I've read it several times and it never gets old.

19. I'm not nearly as thick-skinned as I seem, or as I used to be.

20. I like Woody Allen movies, haven't watched one in a very long time.

21. My Goal is to retire at fifty. So far, not likely, but I've got 18 more years, so...

22. I have no desire to visit Europe. Don't care about Paris or London, except 221 B Baker st. I'd make the trip just for that.

23. I have diagnosed myself with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, sometimes called Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. What that means is that my body thinks the proper time to sleep is from about 4am until 11am. If I'm left to sleep at my own schedule, I'll go to bed at 4 and sleep until 11am everyday, I'll wake up refreshed and wake up without an alarm clock or anything. For me to sleep and get up at a "regular" time (for example 11pm until 6am) is similar to an average person trying to go to sleep at 6pm and waking up at 1am, you could do it once or twice but to do it day after day takes it toll. I can train myself to sleep at a regular time, but it takes me about three weeks of going to bed and getting up at the same time before I don't feel like a rabid zombie, and if I stay up late ONCE, I have to start all over again. I'd go to the doctor and get a real diagnosis, but there's not much point. From the stuff I've read there's no Cure or medication that will help, and the therapy to "reprogram" your internal clock involves "light therapy", which is not really an option for me due to item #5 on this list. Also they say for most people with DSPS its easier to just get a job where you can rearrange your life around a 4am til 11am sleep schedule.

24. I currently weigh 203 lbs. I'm in the middle of a Biggest Loser Competition with a friend of mine, which I am hopelessly losing. and by losing I mean not losing weight.

25.My highest value is Trust. I would rather be trusted than loved.

10 Mixed Movie Mash-ups: Seven Brides for Twelve Angry Men

Imagine a guy with a really warped sense of humor and way too much time on his hands (probably me)sitting at his computer in a basement somewhere and an idea strikes him like a surprize defibrilation from behind ("Clear!" BZZT!).

"What's the latest craze in pop music and at the clubs these days?" he asks himself.

"Mash-ups." he answers.

You know, when the DJ mixes two songs together to make something that sounds completely new. Sometimes the songs that are, as they say: "Mashed-up" (or "Mash-up-ed"?) are songs that already sound the same (like Ke$ha's "Tik tok" and Katy Perry's "California Gurls"), sometimes the songs are from different worlds (I heard a Mash-up of Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a bottle" and Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots", it was surprizingly good).

"But why hasn't this same idea caught on in the movie biz?" crazy basement guy continues, "I mean, they re-make movies all the time, why not mix a couple plot's together while you're at it?"

If I really had a lot of time on my hands I'd go get some footage from these movies and mix them together to make trailers for these movie mash-ups.

Here's the next best thing; I'll write about the movie mash-ups, and you can imagine the announcer voice from the trailers reading these to you out loud.

10 Movie Mash-ups:

1. The story of a family of share-croppers set in the 1930s. Forced to leave their home by the conditions of the great depression they accidentally arrive on the planet Seti Alpha 6 where they become pawns in Khan’s plans to exact revenge on Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise. The Grapes of Wrath of Khan.
2. The story of a southern family in crisis, focuses on the turbulent marriage of Maggie and Brick Pollitt as their daughters get married one by one to successively less and less orthodox Jewish men. Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof.
3. After the death of one of America's top primates, one reporter tries to piece together the events that lead from Kong's simple beginnings on a secluded island to the giant-gorilla-billionaire-newspaper-tycoon’s fall from the top of the Empire state building. Citizen Kong.
4. After an apparently open and shut murder trial, eleven jurors vote guilty, but one man who stands for truth and justice dissents and convinces the rest of the jurors to kidnap seven women and coerce them into marriage. Seven Brides for Twelve Angry Men.
5. Stanley Orwell’s Dystopian classic, An autocratic government that rules a third of the earth faces destruction as the computer that controls everything, “HAL”, attempts to flush everyone into space. 1984: A Space Odyssey.
6. With their father away fighting in the Civil War, Joe, Meg, Beth and Amy grow up with their mother who teaches them the ways of the Wu Dan; trouble arises when they steal the green destiny sword. Little Women, Hidden Dragon.
7. Set During the civil war and reconstruction eras, Rhett Butler (Nicolas Cage) is forced to steal 50 cars in one night to save Scarlet O’Hara’s family plantation. Gone With the Wind in 60 seconds.
8. Starring Billy Crystal as Dirty Harry, a hard-boiled police detective who has little regard for the rules, but gets results, and Meg Ryan as “Scorpio”, a sniper who terrorizes the city of San Francisco. When Dirty Harry met Sally.
9. The night before “Princess Buttercup” (Robyn Wright-Penn) is to be married to prince Humperdink, she is kidnapped by 3 men from a neighboring kingdom, it is then up to Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) to rescue her. The Princess Bride of Frankenstein.
10. The ultimate disaster movie; the effects of global warming escalate rapidly, unexpectedly plunging the world into a new Ice age, the change happens to coincide with a full scale Alien Invasion!! The Independence Day After Tomorrow.

I facebooked your mom, and Googled myself... don't read too much into it...

I just googled my own name; for those of you from the Victorian era reading this by means of a medium or wizard of some sort, that means I went to this website http://www.google.ca/ and typed my own name into the search field. If you haven't done so recently, try it for yourself.

I found there is another Kris Hendricks who is a real estate professional of some kind in Seattle, another who is an Olympic bowling coach, there is a Kris Hendricks who is identified as an "agent" on website called KGBusa.com, there is a Kris Hendricks from Allentown, PA, who has a Facebook account and another Kris Hendricks who works in some capacity with water permits or development permits in and/or around phoenix Arizona.

I was already somewhat acquainted with this last Kris Hendricks as his or her email address is ludicrously similar to my own, and over the last several years I have received the occasional request to review this or that construction proposal and approve the sought after permits, which I have kindly done.

But in all seriousness, the thing that I found most interesting was that the 5th item that came up relating to my name was my old blog on myspace which if you're interested in wasting 15 to 20 minutes can be seen here: (the old blog has now been deleted, but it was boring anyway) the interesting thing about that is this; my MySpace profile didn't come up, my Facebook profile didn't come, Even this very blog I'm posting on right now doesn't come up until the 6th page, (I just checked again and for some reason this blog just moved up to the 2nd page... weird.) the last time I posted in that myspace blog was almost exactly a year ago, my last two posts there can be read in a matter of 3 or 4 minutes, and I found them quite entertaining, there's a short piece about George Orwell and Trent Reznor... I was going to plagiarize it and post it again here, but I'll just leave it there and put the link here, as I have already done.

If you haven't already deduced from my excessive rambling I'm typing this in the middle of the night, I'm practically sleep-blogging. I'll cut it short, but again, as I've promised several times, I'm actually working on something about George Orwell, and I'll soon post it. This one, however, does not include slanderous gossip about a certain modern industrial musician or profess visitations from the ghost of literature past, but it will delineate the connection between Our subject, Eric Arthur Blair, his literary predecessor and arch-nemesis Rudyard Kipling, the prophet of Imperialism, And, oddly enough, a third limb to make it a nice (though definitely not equilateral) triangle, Isaac Asimov.

The Master Plan.

o.k. so its been a while since I've written anything, and I've only written anything here... like what twice? I'm too lazy to even look. It doesn't really matter though because I'm pretty sure not a single person Has ever read this, should I give up? delete it all and pretend it never happened? end my short jaunt into the world of "Blogging" and wash my hands of it? oh no. I'm thinking ahead, I've got a master plan... you see, some day... I'm going to think of some very interesting things to write and maybe I'll have some other things going on and when that happens, I'll write some blogs and tell people to come here to look at them, and when they do they will read, not only the interesting things I just mentioned, but they will also see that I have been Blogging for a long time and it will create the illusion of authority, or at least look like I'm a Pro or something. It won't matter that I have a bunch of crap written here, cause no one will read this (being old) they'll just read my new interesting stuff.. O.k. I should go to bed. actually this is the busy season at work, probably will be all winter, so maybe at some point I'll take the time to write something good. but probably not for a while.

Dreaming about the police, and 3 items from my bucket list.

I went last night and saw the movie "The Kingdom", don't worry I won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it, not that it matters, because if you really cared you would have seen it by now, right? I saw it in the second run theatre...

Anyway, I had a friend growing up who had lived in one of those American compounds in Saudi Arabia for, I believe, most of his elementary school years. His father was, if I remember correctly, a security investigator for OPEC. I remember my friend telling me his dad mostly investigated things like stolen trucks and equipment. Anyway, it made the movie just that much more intense for me, having had a close friend who had lived there.

After the movie I came home and went to sleep. I had a dream that two police officers arrested two young men in the alley behind my house. After they loaded the suspects into the police car, I came out and talked to the police.

When I was talking to them they saw the feet of a third suspect sticking out from under something just a couple feet from where I stood. They grabbed his feet a pulled him out, but he wasn't going to come easy like the others had. The police officers wrestled him, and he was lying on his back, kicking and flailing around wildly.

He suddenly stopped flailing around, and pulled out a small handgun and started shooting at the policemen. He fired four shots but was unable to hit them because they were down by his feet and something was under his arm preventing him from pointing the gun that way, he pointed the gun at me and fired a shot at my head.

In my dream I felt the wind from the bullet blow my hair as the bullet screamed past, probably millimeters from my head. I didn't panic. I grabbed the barrel of the gun and pointed it downward, He fired one more shot, that went into the ground, and then I got the gun out of his hand and knocked it to the ground away from the shooter. At the same time, the cops finally were on top of him and quickly had him subdued.

One of the officers told me immediately that I should not have done that, but he didn't say it in a commanding voice, he seemed genuinely concerned for my safety.

It had all happened so fast, they had pulled him out, he fought for only seconds before drawing the gun, he fired all six shots in quick succession, and then he was disarmed before the cops fired a single shot. One of the officers had drawn his weapon as soon as the shooter had, but flinched when he started firing, and when the shooter turned his gun on me, The other cop was on top of him instantly, blocking any shot he could have taken.

While they were handcuffing him, still wrestling them, I looked at the gun Laying on the ground in front of me. No one was looking, and without thinking, I picked up the gun and slipped it into my pants front pocket.

They got the man shackled, wrists to ankles, and he was lying on his face, breathing heavy, but no longer trying to fight. They called for another car to come, because they weren't about to put this man in with the other two they had in their car. One of the cops stayed out to watch the man on the ground, while the other got into the car and started doing paperwork.

I stayed and talked with him for a couple minutes, but then made some excuse about my leg hurting and walked into the house.

As soon as I closed the door behind me I realized I couldn't keep the gun, the cops would look for it and eventually find it, So the sooner I came clean the better, I opened the door and walked right back out to the cop, I took the gun out and handed it to him.

He kind of smiled, and said "I didn't think your leg was really hurting you..." I didn't really understand what he meant, I knew he was trying to make some kind of joke, but I couldn't understand the connotation... Did he think that I had the gun in the house? and I had just made an excuse to go get it? how would that have made sense? That was the first time I had gone inside since the shooting.

I then said "No, my leg is hurting." and then I went inside.

And then it hit me, how close I had come to being killed. And I (still dreaming) remembered a line from the movie, where the head of the FBI is talking to some politician who is on some kind of committee. He says, basically, that he lives every moment of his life knowing that it could be his last, and because he knows that someday he will die, all that matters is "how will he go out? on his feet, or on his knees?".

When I woke up, I thought about it for a long time. I want to develop that kind of mentality, always doing the right thing, for the right reason, consciously knowing that it could be the last thing I do.

I also decided to make a list of things I want to do before I die. Usually this is an exercise people who are dying do, but since we're all going to die sometime, why not make a list?

In no particular order, here are the first three things that came to my mind to put on my list: To save somebody's life, To run for public office, and to go into space. I'm going to make a much longer list than that, but I think that's a good start...

Setting some ground rules...

I have, for some reason unknown even to myself, decided to start a blog, which you are currently reading. I will endeavor not to use such pretentious a tone as this for all my postings, but today it amuses me so to do.

O.k. o.k, I'm bored of trying to talk like that already... Anyway, this is what 'Multiplied Objects' will be about; this is what you can expect to read here: random stuff, maybe stuff about my personal life, maybe about books, t.v., movies, whatever I think of, or feel like talking about, especially in the form of lists.

I promise to try my hardest to be thought provoking and to discuss things that warrant discussion in a way that requires some brain activity... That is my promise to you the reader. I ask, in return, only that if you read this at all, you comment, even if only to say: "I read your blog, and it sucks." I still prefer that to no comment at all. If you like my stuff subscribe, and I won't spam you.

Now a little about me, I like to read, though I don't read as much as I would like; I like to watch t.v., though I don't do it as much as I would like; I like to watch movies, listen to music, etc. etc. and I like to work, though I do it more than I would like. I am self employed, and I work alone, doing a job that requires the full attention of my senses, but doesn't challenge my mental abilities at all, but pays well. I enjoy the work, but come home tired and bored at night.

Anyway, I'm not promising regular posts, but when I do post something, it will have had thought put into it. Deal?