It's been a quiet few days here on Walden's mountain.

I never actually read that book.  

I've been playing tourist.  It's actually making me wonder how long you have to live somewhere before you stop playing tourist.  I think I've passed that point.  Today I went to see Toronto's sculpture garden.  Most disappointing piece of crap ever.  It's a single changing outdoor art installation.  Why is modern art so stupid?  There's a rant there for another day.  It's my own fault, really.  Had I gotten my day started a bit earlier I would have found out about the renaissance fair taking place at Casa Loma while there was still time to go to it.  I think allowing my lazy lifestyle to set back in was probably a mistake.  

Time is absolutely rocketing by.  I only have a little over a moth left before heading back home.  I booked myself a week in New York starting on Friday.  Hopefully it'll give me something to write about.  Hopefully I'll do a better job playing tourist there than I have here.  Hopefully I'll meet a little blonde with an aversion to pants.  I'm not optimistic on any of those fronts, but I think it's important to cling to a little delusion now and again.  

I've gotten very disconnected from the news lately.  It bothers me a bit because I always took pride in being overly informed.  The irony is, even though I'm barely paying attention to what's going on in the world these days I'm still more informed than half of the people I know.  I think I've just burnt out a bit on all the bad news.  Coup in a foreign country, the CIA is probably involved, but are swearing they aren't.  The ousted leader and the new government each swear they're on the side of the people.  Neither is likely to be telling the truth.  War in Afghanistan is almost 8 years old.  The situation on the ground is actually somehow getting worse.  US declares they've pulled out of Iraq and turned over military control to the Iraqis, they haven't.  The Chinese government is beating up a minority group for reasons that are nebulous at best.  Derpy derpy derpy doo.  I think I'm just going to take the summer off from world affairs and hope that World War III doesn't break out until at least September.


If anyone knows where I can find that aforementioned blonde, please let me know.

 Canada Day has been a holiday I've never gotten that involved in.  I've never really had it as a holiday because for the most part I've been in school, and it's a holiday that falls outside of term.  Even on the couple of occasions it has given me a day off I haven't really gotten in to any party.  The bottom line is, it worries me.  It's at times like these I'm glad my remaining readership is utterly miniscule.  I don't really have to worry about a backlash from a post like this.  That said, I might as well stop dancing around the issue.  I am in no way a patriot.  I love the fact that I live in Canada, I derive great pleasure from the benefits of citizenship, but I find the very concept of patriotism frightening.  Whenever I bring this up, people ask, "Why? What's wrong with being a patriot?"  Truthfully, the answer is, nothing.  However, patriotism bothers me because it's a much shorter and slipperier distance to nationalism than people like to think.  As a species, we are still hardwired with a tribal mentality.  This causes us to define almost everything in terms of "Us" and "Them."  This is what makes it possible to get so into a sports game.  People identify with one side, this becomes the "Us" and therefore the team's victory or loss, becomes the crowd's victory or loss.  This is the impetus behind racism, to a lesser extent sexism, and it is certainly the force responsible for nationalism.  This is why patriotism has always irked me.  It's a link to a biological past that has no real use in a modern context.  We cannot hope to move forward as a species unless we somehow get beyond genetic behavioural programming that has had no real use in the past million years.  I'm digressing a little bit.  Here's my problem:  Patriotism and Nationalism are easily corrupted by those who would unjustly wield power.  This happens very easily, and tends to be used to the very detriment of the nation that patriots claim to love.  For example, it has recently been argued that not enough Canadian history is taught in public schools.  This is a sentiment that I utterly disagree with.  First of all, a great deal of Canadian history is taught.  I came through high school hearing the name Louis Riel more than any reasonable person should have to.  Secondly, the school day is full.  What is it that's expected to be cut so kids can learn more about the plains of Abraham.  To be blunt, most global history has a far greater bearing on the world's current state than Canadian history does.  This kind of idiotic jingoism sells, though.  Any politician of any part of the political spectrum can win points by encouraging that his constituents be better citizens.  Let's be as Canadian as we possibly can.  Let's drink maple syrup, sing O Canada thrice daily, and cry whenever we see a flag being mistreated.  Let's ignore the growing homeless population, the staggering child poverty rate, and the condition of many First Nations reservations which could never be realistically described as anything other than obscene.  Men cannot live on bread and circuses, but nations manage the job quite well.  

I will celebrate this Canada day with the pride that I live in a country where I have both the right and obligation to disagree with whatever the hell I want about it.

And before anyone writes me complaining I'm a terrible citizen, I've voted in every single election I've been eligible to do so.  Can you say the same?

I enjoy comedic writing.  I enjoy reading it, but mostly I enjoy writing it.  That is what I really wanted this post to be about.  However, I find that my typical brand of humour tends to best lend itself to satire, and I simply don't have anything I feel like taking the piss out of.  So I'm just going to write about how I don't have anything to take the piss out of and see what happens.

Seriously, what are my options for satirical writing at the moment?  Uprising in Iran.  Roughly once a year or so, a major news item comes out of nowhere that I completely dismiss only to find a week later that I was ass backwards wrong, and it's still hanging around.  Iran seems to be this year's.  It's starting to look pretty obvious that the Interior Ministry stole the Iranian election, but what I just can't work out is why.  By all indications if it had been a totally fair election Ahmadinejad still would've won.  Not with nearly as impressive a mandate I'll admit, but it's all a moot point as the Revolutionary Guard and Khameni remain in power regardless of who the President is, so this whole thing seems to be a touch on the insane side.  Look, not the least bit satirical.  There's not a lot I can make fun of here, other than Ahmadinejad's facial hair.  The guy looks like a '70s porn star.

Toronto Garbage strike.  This one bugs me because the temperature is approaching the low 30s and the city is starting to smell.  More than usual, I mean.  Again, though, this isn't really the best forum for jokes.  This is just the reality of trying to renew a contract in the middle of a global economic downturn.  I think that the solution is to offer a shorter term for the contract.  They typically last five or six years, but a one year contract as a show of good faith giving room for a better one if the economy improves.  Funny as all hell, eh?

Alcohol based sanitizers aren't making it to First Nations reserves on the grounds that they might be abused.  I'm really not sure what to do with this one, but making jokes about it is certainly off limits.  The sanitizers were earmarked for reserves that have been utterly devastated by swine flu, which is hitting the aboriginal community particularly hard.  I'm not really sure whose side to be on; many of the badly hit reserves live in such poverty that there is widespread abuse of just about anything it's possible to get high off of.  I'd suggest non-alcoholic sanitizers, but i'm sure those do something just as crazy if ingested.  It occurs to me that both Mexicans and Canadian Natives have two things in common.  They're both getting hit by swine flu way harder than everyone else, and the quality of their drinking water sucks.


My attempt to write something funny has turned into quite the downer.  Impressive how my brain works sometimes.  That's really all I can think of.  Oh, Perez Hilton says he got punched in the face and had his legion of insane followers shut down Toronto's 911 service.  

The man is a git, and a satire of himself, so I could hardly do a better job.

I've been stuck on something of a puzzle.  Yeh, it's cryptic, get over it.  There are some things I have no intention of posting about publicly, and this is one of them.

However, I could be as open or as cryptic as I like, and I don't think it would make this any easier.  

This is probably why I shouldn't blog out of guilt.  God knows it'd be nice if I had the drive to just blog properly like I used to, but that doesn't seem very likely.  


Fuck it, I have no answers, and I'm just not in the mood for this shit.  

Also, some people should really not be asked for advice, but that's more of a lesson for me than anyone else. 

I've been following the shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor a little more closely than is probably healthy.  The bottom line is that I was once the recipient of nuclear medicine, so ever since I found out that the world's supply of medical isotopes was incredibly fragile, my ears have perked up whenever they're mentioned.  (If you're wondering how and when I got juiced with radioactive... juice, that's what the archives are for).  
Now, believe it or not, I'm not actually going to spend this entry talking too much about the Chalk River cock up.  There is plenty of blame to go around.  Considering the fact that the reactor is more than six decades old, I'm happy that nothing worse has come out of this.  Hell, the damn thing produced some of the plutonium that got dropped on Nagasaki, I think it's reached retirement age.  So blame.  We can blame the Liberals for scrapping the proposed MAPLE reactor that was planned to replace Chalk River because it was too expensive, or we can blame the Tories for firing Canada's nuclear watchdog just about one year before the reactor broke.  Idiotic decisions both, so I don't really want to talk about them.  What I do want to talk about is, wait for it, political strategy!  

Half my readers just left.

Anyway, Lisa Raitt.  I'm trying to think of a way to describe her without using the words "rat-faced opportunist," oh well.  I don't particularly want to talk about her either.  She's a greedy, self-involved idiot, and politicians like that are a dime-a-dozen.  What I find interesting about her, however, is that she still has a job.  This is a woman who lost confidential government documents, something that this government seems to do with bizarre regularity, and then a week later was caught referring to cancer patients as though they were a career opportunity.  Neither of which are cardinal sins, but the public at large is calling for this woman's blood, and Stephen Harper has proved again and again that he has no problem throwing his allies to the wolves in order to stay on top.  So why is Lisa Raitt still a Federal Cabinet Minister?  I have come to two conclusions on the subject.  One: she has explicit photographs of the Prime Minister getting his balls tongued by a series of prostitutes.  This possibility doesn't strike me as very likely, Harper would first have to enjoy having fun in order to enjoy a good tea-bagging, but I couldn't discount blackmail altogether.  Two:  Harper has no one else.  We've seen in the past that the PM has difficulty turning his insane clown posse he calls a caucus into an effective Cabinet, and I have a hunch he's run out of elected talking heads who aren't a complete embarrassment to be seen with in public.  Think about it, Harper gave her the National Resources portfolio.  It's real easy to understand the Tories' position on natural resources:  Highest bidder gets whatever he wants.  There, now you too can be Minister of Natural resources for a Conservative government.  This means that Harper can't have had much faith in her to begin with, after all, he gave her a job that he assumed even a house plant wouldn't be able to fuck up.  Oh, if only, Stephen.  

The truly fun part is that if this is the best he's been able to dredge up, the rest of the Caucus must truly be a hooting pack of drooling morons.

Yet somehow, they're still in power.

Isn't democracy fun?

This should be fun.  Here I am on one of the internet's older phenomena in order to rag about one of the newest.  If I'm not careful I'm going to turn into a crazy old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.  Actually, that's rather unlikely.  I'm never going to be able to afford a place that has a lawn.  

Anyway, Twitter.  It fucking sucks.  I have never seen the appeal of this weird little "microblogging" service.  (I also hate the word "microblogging.")  If you've been paying attention around here the past few months, twitter orginally gained my ire, not by it's own merits, but because facebook became insane enough to start parroting everything it does.  Don't get me wrong, I like facebook's main feed, and the ability to post status updates.  They're a cool way to know what your friends are up to, and just generally broadcast how you're feeling.  Now before I'm accused of liking exactly what twitter is, on facebook it's not the be all end all.  On facebook if I see that Tina Tinytits is having a bad day, I can go onto her page and ask her what's up, and while I'm there I can check out photos of her latest breast enlargement surgery.  The point being that facebook uses this kind of status updates in order to foster some kind of human interaction.  With twitter this is all the bloody interaction there is.  

I had an epiphany about twitter recently.  News agencies have been going on for months about how twitter is the new big thing, about how it's so amazing, and about how you can now follow Anderson Cooper's tweets.  Then it hit me; this thing is facebook for the elderly.  This whole god damn fad is just another attempt by the fucking baby boomers to prove that they're still young, hip, and with it.  Message to boomers: You have children in their twenties!  You are no longer cool!  Get the fuck over it!  See, most online boomers have the ability to use email, youtube, and that's pretty much it.  And by use youtube I mean, watch videos on youtube.  Ask them to upload their own movie and they'll have some kind of conniption fit.  The twitter came along, the skills required for using twitter?  None what-so-fucking-ever.  All you need to do is right a sentence or two about how you're feeling, what you had for breakfast, or what position you sodomized your spouse in and you're good to go.   Boomers can handle that, boomers can feel excited about that, and boomers can talk about that, and we all know there is nothing boomers enjoy more than offering themselves up pointless, banal congratulatory comments on any of their most minor of achievements.  So some boomer news executive decided that the fact that he could share information about his 8 foot long tapeworm with his entire staff was newsworthy, and they started talking about it on msnbc.  Yay!  Twitter is no longer an application, it's a phenomenon.  Other, better applications see the, frankly, embarrassing number of people signing up to use twitter, and being creative as they are decide to try doing exactly what they've done.  This is why facebook recently changed to resemble a bonobo's scrotum.  

However, just to finish this rant off on a high note.  Like all incredibly stupid things, twitter is destined to die by its own hands.  Today, twitter's co-founders announced that they were looking into ways to begin charging for their services.  Charge money?  For this crap?  I can send 16 gigabytes of information anywhere in the world, for free, and you think people will give you money in order to tell their friends that they just had a frappucino and a muffin for breakfast?  These guys are admittedly from San Francisco, so there is a respectable chance that there's something in their water supply other than water, but even so this is an idiotic idea.  

I wonder if they'll put out a tweet when their audience abandons them en masse, and the company goes bankrupt.

 I went for a stroll this evening.

It was glorious!!!  My favourite part about summer has always been the late evenings and the warm nights, and this was the best of both.  Bathed in the twilight as I walked down Dundas street I realized that the world smelled delicious.  Then I realized that I was walking past five restaurants that had removed their front windows to celebrate the amazing weather.  Fantastic!  I went through Trinity-Bellwoods park and it was packed.  People were out and about and enjoying themselves on a Thursday night.  There is nothing funnier than seeing a five foot girl in high heels getting dragged along by a dog that outweighs her.  I passed a couple passionately making out in the grass.  A moment later I realized I had no idea if it had been a guy and a girl, or two guys.  Somehow that realization pleased me.

The absolute splendour of the first truly wonderful summer evening somehow makes the long, dark winter entirely worthwhile.

I'm back from Ottawa!  It's a nice city.  Beautiful, a bit dull, but beautiful.  I walked everywhere!!!  Ottawa's hardly a big city, but it was still a fuckload of walking; I'm totally dead on my feet.  

The mistake I made was going on a holiday weekend.  From what I can tell, Ottawa is a tourist town at the best of times, but given that it was Victoria day, it seemed that everyone had decided to drive up to the capital.  Why do Japanese people ask me to take their photo wherever I go?  This has happened to me in six separate cities, in four separate countries, on two separate continents.  Anyway, the big tourist related problem was trying to get in to see parliament.  You can only go inside with a tour group.  Thankfully, these groups are free, unfortunately they can only take a certain number of people due to security reasons.  Now, combine this with government overregulation and things turn into mild headaches.  For example, there are tours led in english, and tours led in french.  To be totally fair there are an equal number of both.  This is utterly pointless because way more people want to take english tours than want to take french tours, and it's utterly self-defeating as all of the tour guides have to be bilingual by law anyway.  Where am I going with this rant?  I had to take the french tour.  While I got more out of it than I expected to, my french is still pretty lousy.  For example, I'm fairly certain that the prime minister doesn't poop in the speaker's chair.  John Baird, maybe, but that's another story.  

Aside from that, I also took a long walk down Rideau canal, tested my counterfeit detecting abilities at the bank of Canada, drank an unhealthy amount of beer in the Byward market, and got hopelessly lost in Gatineau.  

There will be photos to follow, but I think they're going up on my facebook page.

If you aren't on my facebook, sucks to be you. 

 I've been a bad little blogger lately, and I'm sorry, but this isn't me making up for it.

I'm heading to Ottawa for the next couple of days.  If I find myself bored and in a net cafe I may update there, otherwise, probably not til I get back.

I miss blogging daily.

When did I become such a lazy writer?

Hullo hullo, to all four of you who still occasionally read this thing.  I am soooooo far behind schedule on my intention to move my blog to a viable format.  That, however, is beside the point.  

I'm in the USA.  I'm not entirely sure how that happened either.  Oh yeah, there's a young lady here who likes it when I kiss her neck.  Also beside the point.  

I'm now going to take a moment to try and remember what the point is.

Anyway, I'm in the US.  I'm in a state that is abbreviated, CT.  I'm not going to write it out any more than that because I have a better chance of spontaneously growing bat wings than I do of spelling this bloody state correctly without looking it up first.  And we all know that's something I'm unlikely to do.  

It's been raining here.  Alot.  It's actually quite a bit like home only with entirely deciduous trees.  Home also isn't a tiny little liberal arts college.  It's a fun, little school.  However, I'm worried that the students may be attempting to concentrate pretension into a weaponised form.  Admittedly, I'm not entirely sure what the ramifications of this might be.  I can only assume it'll have something to do with a horrific number of poetry slams.  

So far this week I've gone to a gregorian choir chant, a bizarre western amateur dramatics act filled with jewish cowboys, and a taibo drumming concert.  Who knew drums were so cool?

I don't want to say anything more at this juncture as I'm sure the CIA is tracking my movements.

Stay Frosty.