The Power of One

It's often underestimated, the power of one spring roll. It can be the straw that broke the camel's back. I was out at a squat stool streetside joint having dinner with an American buddy, Wade, and we were having spring rolls. I didn't worry about the fracture in my squat stool affecting its structural integrity until it was too late. I was putting a springroll in my mouth when the legs of the stool spread out like bambi on an icy lake. I just saw the earth move up really fast and all the Viets around me went into a tizzy, and my ass was on the floor. Even the lady making the springrolls was laughing. Wade laughed the hardest.

How it all started.....

In some respects the origins of Toasted Mechanism can be traced back to this comic. Laughing out loud in our kitchen in Guelph Marcus and I combined stories of our various canoe trip hijinks to produce the legend that is "Adventures in Wilderness". Following countless hours of pencil scratches on scrap paper, the concept of using photoshop to bolster our lack of illustration talent was developed. Fame and notoriety quickly followed it's first publication in the Ontarion student newspaper at the university (at least no angry letters were reported) and the second posting to Facebook has since generated over 130 comments. Talk about sucesss. Despite the goldmine of feedback from social networking sites, we still aren't sure if it's just us that finds this funny....but we're pretty sure there's a dirth of comics in the whole outdoor adventure genre. Maybe this is the start? Ok kids, you're going to want to paddle pretty hard on this one...

The story of Durian

Durian is a disgusting fruit the size of a rugby ball. It smells like vanilla and rotten onions, and you can even get ice cream in Durian flavour called Durian Surprise. Kate was travelling with me for awhile, and we could never contain our disdain for the fact that someone would eat this. Especially on a small public bus (van) that seats 15.

It appears that something has toasted the mechanism. . .

These are the words that came out of Derek Pieper's mouth when we tried to figure out why our toaster oven wouldn't close all the way and was letting in enough oxygen to set all the toaster leavin's (crumbs and straight up continents of burnt bread crusts) on straight up fire. That was setting off our smoke alarm, and that's a problem because people like to toast things in the morning.

We contemplated how many times in history that phrase had been used, and though we couldn't come up with a conclusive number, we decided the phrase was funny regardless, and so here we are, years later, making a blog out of it. One time Derek and I drew some comics, and one of them was of a canoe going off of a waterfall, and somehow this made it into the school newspaper, and somehow this convinced us that we were funny, at least to each other. So to entertain each other, and maybe you by collateral damage, we decided to draw snippets of our lives in comic form and upload them to a common blog. I'm in Viet Nam at the moment avoiding the rest of the world and Derek is at Oxford doing his Master's. Two very different lives that warrant crappy pen and pencil observations of life. When something isn't quite right, check for crumbs, it's likely something has toasted the mechanism.