Do you remember the very first email address you ever had? You know, the one you’re too embarrassed to share with anyone? In my skateboarding and doing stupid things era aka high school, I had this vision of creating a production company called Softwood Productions. This production company would film all the things our crew would do and get famous like the Jackass guys. If you were a young teenage/20 something in the 2000’s then I’m sure you can relate to this - because either you were a guy who also wanted to be on Jackass or you were one of the girls who looked at me like I was an idiot.

With this production company I’d need an email address so what better username to use than “Softwood” and what better platform to use than Hotmail? Hotmail was hot for quite a number of years. But at that point in time the only places this Softwood email was being used was on eBay and MSN messenger. Sadly no businesses emailed me. I know, shocking isn’t it?

Eventually I grew up enough to realize I couldn’t use Softwood as an email address on my resume in the real world. So I created another Hotmail that used my actual name. I remember giving this email to someone at work one year and they thought I was joking.

“Who uses Hotmail anymore? Don’t you have a Gmail?”

It was at that point that I realized Hotmail wasn’t cool anymore. And I also realized that not only could you get judged by the stupid username you made up in high school, but you could also be judged by your email domain. Who knew?

Fun fact: I still use Hotmail and may always do so until Microsoft decides they don’t want teenagers creating stupid email addresses on their servers.

This week's issue is a 5 minute read:

💰️ Van Wilder the business mogul

🛖 This is why you should play in the mud

🎑 A positive outcome from a Ticketmaster dispute

The unsuspecting-ness of Ryan Reynolds

Since when do we see a Canadian who isn’t on Dragon’s Den become a well known business mogul? If Ryan Reynolds wasn’t on your radar as a budding star of major Hollywood films then perhaps he’s caught your attention with these numbers: $610M, $1.35B, and $2.5M. The first two are the size of the exits he had with Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile and the third one is the amount he paid alongside Rob McElhenny for Wrexham FC, a bottom of the barrel Welsh football team.

It’s not uncommon to hear about celebrities partnering with brands. However, to take equity stakes in a few and hit a couple home runs the way Ryan has within the past couple of years is on par with the Jay-Z’s of the world. With Wrexham FC we’re already starting to see glimmers of yet another Reynolds bet turning into something bigger as they recently won their league title this past weekend, bumping them up to the next division in English football, with the ultimate goal of being promoted into the Premier League.

For those of us in the audience not familiar with how soccer works in the UK - there’s basically a million leagues and if you’re a really good team you get promoted to the very best league ($$$) and if you suck you stay in the lowest of the lows leagues where there is no money.

Reynolds is also in discussions around potentially purchasing the Ottawa Senators. Why the Vancouver native would be interested in the Senators is beyond me but one thing is for certain, whatever Reynolds has put his hand on lately has turned to gold.

No but seriously, does anyone really care about the Ottawa Senators?

Houses made of mud

What? Did you think I had some catchy title for this section? Houses made of mud, that’s what they are. And they’ve gone viral on YouTube. Videos of these mysterious creations started going viral earlier in the pandemic. But who are these people building them and where are they from?

Cambodia. These magical mud structures were built by villagers from the outskirts of Siem Reap, a major city in Cambodia. The brainchild of all of this was a guy named Tann Moly. He found 13 villagers and offered to pay them daily wages which worked out to about $5 USD/day and gave them a free lunch. In return these guys dug up the jungle and built out structures and buildings, often times with a pool.

Wow - I just re-read the above paragraph to myself - it sounds like I made that all up…but I swear it’s true!

No clue why all of these buildings had to have a pool but if you go through their Youtube channel, you’ll see all the pools. With the channel blowing up, a bunch of other mud creation channels have since popped up, also building wild houses…and also building pools. Maybe it’s only a matter of time until builders in North America start to dig up our forests and put up a bunch of buildings - oh wait nevermind, that happens all the time.

Thank Pearl Jam for Coachella

In 1993 Pearl Jam refused to play a show in LA because of service charge disputes with Ticketmaster. Yup, Ticketmaster has been gauging people for over THREE DECADES. As a result, they moved their show to the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California to avoid Ticketmaster and their evil ways. A few years later, after proving the Empire Polo Club was suitable for a festival, Coachella was born.

Last weekend Coachella wrapped up weekend #2, which saw the reuniting of Blink-182 taking over for Frank Ocean, who apparently injured himself riding a bike and backed out of the second weekend headlining the show.

Also, I’ve read so much about Frank Ocean’s weekend #1 performance being miserable considering it had been years since anyone had heard from him, let alone seen him perform. So, there’s that conspiracy as to why he didn’t play the second weekend as well.

There seems to be a captivating headline from Coachella every year so I leave you with some moments from previous years:

Tupac Hologram

Truthfully, this is how I found out that Coachella was actually a thing in the first place. I hadn’t even heard of the festival until everyone went nuts over Tupac performing as a hologram on stage.

Daft Punk Pyramid

In 2006 Daft Punk performed on an LED pyramid to approximately 40,000 people in a tent that was supposed to hold only 10,000. One can only imagine the outcome of this.

Kanye West (2011)

Man, who doesn’t miss the old Kanye. Even Kanye misses the old Kanye. Five months after My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came out, Kanye was on stage at Coachella performing hit after hit after hit.

Madonna 💋 Drake

You be the judge - did Drake like it or…?

And I used to think coming home from the Warped Tour blowing dirt out of my nose was a big deal… 🙃