I’m a sap!

I don’t know why I’m wasting everybody’s time writing this, but it just felt like it had to be written. I feel like a complete wimp. I also feel a bit selfish, when people have more important things to think about, like oh, say, who’s going to be our new Prime Minister, and here I am babbling about this. I don’t know why this even makes me sad, but it does.

I’m looking through the pile of mail that I brought in from my mailbox, and my my, do I ever have a lot of junkmail. Amid the campaign crap, ads for a burglar alarm, mastercard applications and other complete garb, I get to an envelope that reads, “Humaine Society.” I open it, and what is inside is a reminder to renew my dog’s tags because it’s that time…and it makes me feel sad all over again.

For those who don’t know, this year, I got a guide dog, and then promptly had to retire her due to illness. When it happened, although it hurt like hell to send her back, I didn’t think I’d be hit too hard by losing her. After all, I’d only had her for 7 weeks. Then I realized how much a part of my life she’d become.
At first, it was hard to walk anywhere without feeling sad. Then it got easier and I thought I was done. Then the questions about “where is your dog?”/”what happened to your dog?” etc. were hard to answer, but then they got easier to take. Then came the dreams. Every night, I’d dream that she was with me and we were walking somewhere. Then I’d dream about random details about her. Those have finally stopped, and I thought I was done. Why, then, does an innocent letter reminding me to get new tags feel like the saddest piece of mail to receive ever?

Now do you understand why I feel like an overly emotional nitwit?

All I Know Is That I Don’t Know Nothin’

Sometimes I really hate democracy. Well ok, not democracy itself, but the responsibilities that come along with the rights that it affords all of us.

I’ve never been someone who could head out to my local polling station each election day and absentmindedly mark an X for a candidate who’s name I don’t recognize and who supports God knows what. So that being the case, I do my best to keep myself informed. I watch, listen to and read the news on a daily basis. I try to watch leadership and local candidates debates when I can. I talk to people around me and bounce what I’m hearing and the way I’m hearing it off of them so that maybe I can get a different perspective on the issues. In short, I do everything I can possibly do to make sure that come election day, I have all of the tools I could possibly need to make what I hope will be the right choice for me and for my country.

But there are times, like right now for example, when I stop and wonder if all the things I do to educate myself and the time it takes to do them really mean anything. Let me explain.

Up until Monday night, I was a decided voter. In spite of all of the so-called scandals and aledged corruption, I was voting Liberal, no doubt about it. Then I watched the debate and instead of making things crystal clear, it confused me. Paul Martin, as much as I like and generally agree with him and as smart as he is, didn’t impress me. Stephen Harper,who I could never vote for knowing what I know about what a Conservative government would mean and has meant in my lifetime, looked like an eloquent and somewhat honest guy and truth be told, even though he didn’t win my support based on governments of the past, he definitely won the debate in my eyes and in the eyes of a lot of other people. Jack Layton has some good ideas, at least I’m pretty sure he does. Now if he’d only stop with the “third alternative” stuff and tell me what they are, maybe I wouldn’t even have to write this. But between all of the cheapshots and rhetoric and general sidestepping of questions, I came away thinking what am I going to do? How can I possibly choose any of these people to be the face of my nation? Things got so bad that the one thought that’s stuck with me since that night is man, if Gilles Duceppe wasn’t a separatist and if he was the leader of a real, honest to goodness national political party rather than one that gets far more attention than it deserves for looking out for the interests of a select niche group of people, he’d be a pretty good choice right about now.

The local debate I listened to on the radio earlier today hasn’t been much help either. I’m not the biggest fan of our local Liberal MP Brenda Chamberlain, but she made a good case for herself. Phil Allt of the NDP made sense on a lot of the issues, but when somebody comes at you with hard numbers like our Liberal did, it’s pretty hard to dispute that. The only things that stuck with me about PC candidate Brent Barr are that he knows a lot of people, that he’s dumb enough to give out his home telephone number on his campaign literature and invite potentially crazy people into his home for coffee parties every second Saturday, and that no matter how genuine he may seem, he can’t help but take unnecessary shots at the other parties. If it wasn’t so early in the morning, I would have considered playing the do a shot every time he said “corrupt Liberal government” drinking game. As for our Green and Communist candidates Mike Nagy and Scott Gilbert, both had some ok ideas, but when it comes right down to it, Jim Harris [the leader of the Greens] is a goof who never really says anything of substance whenever he’s given the chance, and I honestly couldn’t tell you who’s in charge of the Communists without looking it up.

So what’s a guy to do? I’m not going to not vote, that’s out of the question. But when every choice you have has at least 1 thing about it that’s somewhat hard to overlook and when the guy who turns in the best performance come debate time is against just about everything you stand for, how do you vote and feel good about it knowing that the events of the next 4 years [or possibly less if we end up with another minority] are at least in part on your head? Sometimes I really hate democracy…

This Makes Sense in Whose World?

The other day when I heard about the huge suicide bombing that killed over 100 people on the news, it got me to thinking. What could possibly be going through the mind of the suicide bomber before he detonates his big pack of explosives? Think about it. He’s standing there in this crowd, knowing full well what is going to happen because he’s going to be the one causing it. Not only that, when the big bang happens, he’s going to be right in the centre, and bits of him are going to join the rest of the propelled projectiles.

First of all, he’s going to be the cause of lots of death and injury. So, has the brainwashing actually managed to erase his conscience completely or make him feel like all this loss of life is actually justified? Then, there’s that whole self-preservation instinct that I thought was inherent in all human beings. I mean a few people committing suicide is sad, but it’s relatively rare and carried out by very desperate people who feel there is no other way. Compare that to the number of people that religious leaders in the middle-east can convince to blow themselves and others up just so they can go to heaven and somehow please Allah. And they know this…because? Have they somehow done it and come back? And if they have, why are they back here? Maybe this heaven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And if they’re not feeding you that line of bullshit, then their first line of bullshit about pleasing Allah through bombings requires a large investment of blind faith. If someone told me tomorrow that I’d go to heaven, and all I’d have to do to get there is kill myself and take as many people with me as I can, I’d have no choice but to say, “Are you nuts?” Even if I somehow believed them and was prepared to do it, I would think that at the last second, some part of me would say, “Wait wait wait. Hold the pony! What are you doing?” But that never seems to happen over there. I don’t know about you, but I have not heard about one suicide bomber unstrapping his bomb and running away. I think that would make news, don’t you? But it never happens. What kind of mind-control is going on that makes all these people carry this stuff through to the end? If there was a way to read thoughts, I’d love to capture the last things running through these people’s minds. Maybe then, I’d understand why it happens.

The Top 10

Here it is, the final countdown plug. I hope at least some of you enjoyed the list, Roland and the rest of us put a fair bit of work into putting it together and from what I hear, it’s done pretty well for the site, so thanks for checking it out.

If you’ve been following the list or even if you haven’t been, you can find out who our top 10 were right here.

Thank You!

It is a beautiful day. Sure it’s cold enough to make your ears tingle, but it is a beautiful day for Steve and I. Here’s why. I checked the mail and was given a mission from what was revealed inside my mailbox. Something in there needed to be taken to the bank and put in our bank accounts. Do you know what that is, boys and girls? It is our first ever check from google ads. Yea! To all of you who have clicked, you rock! Those clicks turned into real money. If you like what we’re doing, feel free to keep up the clickage. We do appreciate it.

On a side note, after today, I have to wonder if my bank keeps its employees chained to their desks with only access to the banks’s servers, if that. This is what the lady said when she handed me back the little stub thing that remains when you get cheques from businesses, governments, etc. “Ok, ma’am, here’s your cheque from..uh..goggle.” She actually didn’t know what google was. For fuck sakes, google has become a verb! How could she not know what google was? I mean, I could understand her going, “goggle..er, oops, google.” But she didn’t. She just said, goggle. Wow, I guess bank tellers have seen everything..or maybe nothing. You be the judge.

In any case, this day rocks, and thanks for making it rock.

Something Worse than Hold Music

Yep, I’ve found it. Something more annoying than those wonderful muzac things ya hear while waiting on hold to talk to someone at Bell or Rogers tech support because your phone/internet is fried to the tenth power. Whoever the hell designed this needs to be sentenced to listening to ten years of his own invention.

On my friend’s cell phone, there is something called ring tunes. It’s supposed to be this thing where instead of hearing, ring ring, you get to listen to music while you wait for them to fumble around in their purse, flip open the phone, etc. My friend is usually really quick at doing this, so I never noticed what happens if the purse-fumbling takes too long. But today I had the displeasure of experiencing it.

This is usually how it goes. I phone her up, and this voice says, enjoy ring tunes while you wait for your call to be connected. Then Cryptonite from Three Doors down comes on, I start to groove to it, and then she picks up the phone. But today, I called it, got the voice and the song, but she didn’t pick up the phone. I start to wonder if I’ll get the whole song, and what will happen if for some reason I let it ring for the whole song’s length. Just as the song sings, “I left my body lying somewhere in the sands of time”, it is rudely interrupted by…by…the voice! It says, “enjoy ring tunes while your call is being connected.” Wasn’t that what I was doing before your prissy ass came to babble in my ear? And it starts again. And at the exact same point in the song, perky the ring tune chick comes along to butcher the song all over again. And we could repeat this infinite loop-style, but we won’t. I don’t want to induce the same rage in all the readers that I felt whhile listening to this crap.

I ask this one question. What is the point of that? How can I enjoy something that sounds like one of those junk files that you get off kazaa? Give me something to enjoy before you tell me to enjoy it…or better yet, just leave it at ring ring. At least ring ring has an unbroken rhythm, and it is only bröken by, “hello?

Angels We Have Heard on High, Tell Us To Go Out and Buy!

Well Happy New Year, hope the holidays were good, I’m not going to even think that they were restful. After all, whose Christmas holidays are? And as for the title of this post, no no no, I’m not funny enough to come up with that on my own. That was a stolen lyric from Tom Lehrer, and although he wrote that half a century ago, he’s still right. Here’s why.

I’m sitting down to eat and the news comes on. One story is about holiday spending, and how to pay off those holiday bills. Sure, Christmas is a bit expensive, but this was insane. The news reporter was telling people to get a loan to pay off all their bills and then their debt would be consolidated. That makes sense if you have a bunch of credit card debts accumulated over a long period of time or something. But this is *one* Christmas. Are people really spending themselves into this mess over one holiday? Sure it’s a time for giving, but within reason, people!

Then it got even better. The reporter was saying debt-ridden Christmas shoppers could use their houses as collateral! To this reporter, and to the people who might need to use this option I say, “Are you high?” If you’re spending money that you don’t have, to that level, perhaps little Billie doesn’t need 1000 action figures and little Suzy doesn’t need a zillion Malibu Barbie accessories. But ya know what they do need? A home! They’ll cry just as hard watching their parents pack their gifts into boxes and try to find a place to live as they would have if they had to find another place to live and didn’t have those things. But the likelyhood is without those things, they’d still have a home. Those new things aren’t going to make their lives better, in fact what parents are teaching them is that material things matter more than the basics of a stable life, and is that the lesson they really want to teach?

What in hell is wrong with us these days? Why can’t we be happy with what we’ve got? Why do we have to make it seem like we have more than we really do? Have we forgotten what Christmas really means? Christmas is about being with family and friends, finding things to make people happy, and they don’t have to be extravagant, and remembering the best part about us as human beings, our kind side. It’s not about how fast we can drive ourselves into the goddamn poorhouse!

I’m Sleepy

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but it’s the holidays anyway, you should be out celebrating something. The site will still be here in January when the so-called “Christmas vacation” is over. By the way, whoever came up with that term needs to be slapped mightily and repeatedly. It might be time away from the regular grind, but a vacation it most certainly is not. I always thought that the idea behind a vacation was to slow down, relax, and then come back rested and recharged with the ability to put renewed energy into whatever it is that you need to be putting energy into, not running all over the universe in an even more rushed fashion than usual. I’m not trying to slag Christmas or anything, but it seems like very few people actually get to take an honest to goodness vacation this time of year. They just trade in one set of stresses for another one and wind up coming back to everything in January even more tired and angry than they were before they left.

But speaking of Christmas, mine has been great so far. It generally is even though living in a 3-sided family makes things kind of hectic. It’s always nice to get home to see family and friends, and when some of those people have stuff to give you, it’s even better.

But one of the things I was given is still making my head spin. Ok, I suppose it wasn’t technically a Christmas gift, but it was still given to me around Christmas, so I’m counting it. But when it was given to me isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that I am now the proud owner of several packages of frozen SpaghettiOs. Feel free to stop and read that again, or if you don’t feel like going back, I’ll type it out one more time. Frozen SpaghettiOs. It wasn’t a gag gift (at least not in that sense) that somebody put together to be funny, the Campbell Soup Company actually makes and sells these things. How they manage to sell them I’ll never understand, but somehow, they do.

For the benefit of anyone who has never had the misfortune of seeing these things, here’s a quick description for you. They’re SpaghettiOs in a bag, and they’re frozen. That’s about it really. They’re just harmless icy blocks of pasta-like substance in a plastic bag. But what I can’t figure out is who exactly are these for and who came up with the idea and why. Who was the person who sat there staring at an ordinary can of SpaghettiOs and thought to himself, “cans are stupid. Somebody really ought to put these things in a bag. And not only should that person put them in a bag, but he should also freeze them while he’s at it, because SpaghettiOs aren’t quite watery enough as they are, and I have no doubt that the extra moisture that gets into everything when you thaw it out would do nothing but wonders for the flavour and texture”? And who’s buying these things? When has there ever been a situation that would make something that is perfectly fine when canned more convenient when you need to first thaw it out and then spend the next 5 minutes trying to get it open and force pasta circles and sauce through plastic that neither one has any desire to come out of? I just don’t get it. I understand why we have both frozen and canned vegetables, but I just cannot for the life of me get my head around the need for a bag of SpaghettiOs. I’ve never seen fresh ones, so why freeze them? It would be like putting a TV dinner in a can. But maybe I should stop right there before I give somebody another brilliant idea.

Ok, I’m off to get ready for my New Year’s party now, but before I go, here’s the next part of the
Top 50 Wrestlers Countdown.
Enjoy and I’ll talk to you all soon, most likely once things have a chance to settle down a little. Happy New Year.

Thought Salad, Munch Munch!

Well hello all. I hope everyone’s having or has had a good holiday, and is now full of turkey/desserts/whatever else you might have eaten/drank over the past few days. I had a good holiday, it was pretty cool to see my sister back on this side of the pond since she spent almost 2 years in Korea teaching English. I didn’t have any huge monumental things happen to me, just your usual run of the mill holiday fun, but a bunch of stuff ran through my head, and since the next few days are bound to be chaotic, here’s the pile of stuff that ran through my head. Let’s divide it into the good and the bad, the yea and the boo!

Yea: Getting an Ipod shuffle for Christmas rocks. I think it’s the only mp3 player without a screen on it. So there’s a chance that this bumbling blink might be able to figure it out. That was like woe way over the top from my brother. Also, getting a pile of funky Korean souvenirs rocks. I now know I was born in the year of the sheep.

boo: To all you morons with guns in Toronto, piss off with your random shooting sprees. Seriously, how senseless, thoughtless, and absolutely fucking stupid is it that some armed lunatics in a BMW fired into a random crowd of boxing day shoppers on a busy street? I mean, it’s bad enough that there’s gang violence going on, it’s bad enough that young lives are being wasted over some differences in gang territory or who the hell knows what, it’s bad enough that there are more funerals needed after a shooting at a funeral. But at least those shootings were connected, and maybe there was a reason to explain why those people got shot. I’m not saying it was right that some 50 people died this year in Toronto because of that stuff. But I guess it kind of makes sense. It’s kind of like when someone gets burned after they put their hand on the stove. Well, if they hadn’t put their hand on the stove, they wouldn’t have gotten burned. It doesn’t make it any less painful, but you can understand it happening. But to fire into a crowd of completely innocent bystanders? What in hell is that? That’s like someone turning on the stove and it exploding in their face, except a stove explosion, in most cases, isn’t carried out by people with minds enough to understand that what they’re about to do is bad. IT’s an accident. Someone sticking a gun out their BMW’s window and pulling the trigger is not a fucking accident. It’s a disgusting lack of respect for human life, and it makes me sick.

Yea: well now that I’ve let out I guess the heaviest part of the post, I’m happy to hear that that horrible excuse for a television show “growing Up Gotti” has been canned. God, that show just drove me nuts whenever I watched a bit of it. I think it’s about x-mob-boss John Gotti’s daughter raising her 3 obnoxious teenagers, and being a super bitch about everything to everyone. I mean, to do a whole episode about preventing her son from going to college in Boston just because she doesn’t want him to leave the nest is a waste of TV time. I’m glad the ratings agree with me, and, good riddance, hopefully those boots that are made for walkin’ don’t get slammed in the door on the way out.

Boo: What is with the huge amount of porn spam today?! Is it porn spam day or something? Or maybe it’s Give a Few Grannies Cardiac Arrest Day. Seriously, I opened my spam folder, and just about puked. I usually get a mix of spam trying to sell me cheap software, spam trying to make my absent member bigger, spam selling me cheap drugs of all kinds and mortgage deals, and the scams from Mrs. el googoogoo from the state of walawalablablabla trying to get my banking information so she can make me rich beyond my wildest dreams, and, sprinkled in there, some really nasty gems describing the porn I can have a look at if I just go to their site. They’re not just, well, making vague references to what I can have. You know the ones. There’s usually references to children or animals, and lots of descriptive words like oozing, squirting, dripping, ok I’m going to stop before I lose my lunch.

Well, today, I had nothing in my spam folder but those gems! What is with that? Talk about your Christmas gift.

yea: That’s some awesome not so wintery weather. Hey there, mother nature! If you can hear me, you can just keep doing that for a little while. Any time I can be spared from freezing all extremities off in the bone-chilling cold would be awesome. I know, I’m a giant wimp, and I should just deal with it, after all, this is Canada. But we can all find something we don’t like about where we live, and this is it for me.

Boo: I’ve run out of stuff to say. Unless a miracle happens, I probably won’t get around to writing anything up here until after Newyears. So happy Newyear everyone, and stay safe so you can come back and read more in 2006.