Conversation overheard on the elevator this morning:

Girl #1: Hey! How's it going? How was your weekend?
Girl #2 sighs, rolls eyes: It was the longest subway ride ever this
morning. Some old guy had a heart attack and they had to call EMS, so the entire
subway had to stop and wait for them to show, and then for them to get off
before we got moving again.
Girl #1: Oh my God!
Girl #1: ...
Girl #1: That's a beautiful purse!

Speaking of superpowers, the superhero nation proudly welcomes its newest member into the swelling ranks of fellow do-gooders, joining such prestigious names as The Judger, The Orderer and No-Comment Lad. I present to you:

George Bush, aka The Decider!

Our intrepid hero, speaking on the numerous calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation, had this to say:

"I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld
to remain as the secretary of defense."

We are fortunate indeed that his powers have been harnessed for the good of all mankind.

Teleportation would be one fucking cool super power. I’d be ok with the science of Star Trek method as well, but I don’t really understand how it works. I mean, they have those teleportation pads but I’m not really sure what they’re for; I’ve seen them do site to site transports from one place to another, with nary a pad in sight. And when they beam down to planet surfaces – what’s up with that? There’s no Star Fleet issue pad down there.

But, since I’m pretty sure I’m too old to be playing in radioactive goop, and since I’m about as likely to find myself aboard a space shuttle being bombarded by cosmic rays as I am to be receiving communion in church this Sunday, then I’m probably not going to find myself endowed with the ability to teleport my pee from the bathroom urinal onto somebody’s car door handle.

But really, when it gets down to it, teleportation is just about getting from point A to point B, without really having to worry about the trip in between. This is why man invented catapults. A catapult is more likely to enable travel between the shortest distance between two points. Depending on what’s cluttering up the air in between, you could get to where you’re going in the blink of an eye and it’d be just like teleportation. With today’s technology, you wouldn’t be using catapults though (duh). You’d have cannons. This would be especially useful if the world were overrun with zombies. You could send your kids to school in a bus, and when they get home the driver would load them up in cannons and shoot them up to different windows if you live in an apartment building. The same technology would be used to ‘teleport’ newspapers right into your dining room. Of course, if you left the windows closed for either of these things, the results would be bad.

But at least the newspapers wouldn’t break your windows the way your damn kids would.

I'd read about the bush administration censoring their own climate researchers, effectively muzzling employees and the like from saying anything that might hurt his precious oil interests and powerful lobby groups. From the article:

Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause 'great problems with the department.' In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.'"

And

"We've always had the policy, it just hasn't been enforced," Laborde said. "It's important that the leadership knows something is coming out in the media, because it has a huge impact. The leadership needs to know the tenor or the tone of what we expect to be printed or broadcast."

Right. So now, hot on the heels, we have our very own prime minister who, if there was ever any doubt as to how much more like our border counterpart we will become, obligingly sets our mind at ease with his own Canadian brand of tyranny. From this article:

A spokesperson for Environment Minister Rona Ambrose said Tushingham was ordered to cancel his speech because he didn't follow the proper process of getting permission to speak publicly.

Basically, Mark Tushingham was scheduled to read at the launch of his novel, a work of fiction that predicted "a world where global warming has made parts of the world too hot to live in, prompting a war between Canada and the U.S. over water resources". Before the reading, he received instruction warning him not to attend. This, while Harper quietly cuts fifteen Kyoto programs and slashes budgets aimed at climate change. So much for that federal accountability and transparency act.

Transparent is right - Stephen Harper, I can see right through you. Fucker.

If I keep this up, I’m going to end up in a basement at work armed with a can of bug spray and a red stapler.

I can’t emphasize enough, how much I detest work/social functions. Aside from the obvious disinclination to spend extracurricular hours mixing with people I genuinely dislike, there’s also the notion that you fulfil your career goals by making appearances and kissing the right amount of ass. Sadly enough, doing your job to the best of your ability just wont cut it anymore. So far this year, I’ve missed a golf game, a couple of bowling nights, and numerous occasions to have beer and wings with visiting out of town co-workers. Unfortunately, I’ve come to the realization that I’m not big enough of an asshole, or a proficient enough brown noser, to make it anywhere past that third rung on the corporate ladder. You know that rung – the one sandwiched between idiot business analysts and wonky tape backup devices.

Last night, I missed a town hall meeting. They presented awards and door prizes. They also handed out these things called ‘Ovations’, which are congratulatory prizes that stem from nominations by your managers or your peers. A co-worker of mine – one who, to everyone’s knowledge, is leaving the employ of the company in three months, who works only three days a week, and whose module I had to fly to London, England to install, debug and generally get working at a client site – received an Ovation award. Needless to say, this coworker has never missed a work/social event. This doesn’t change my stance, however. I will not attend one of these things unless it’s a mandated, required attendence kind of thing.

Well. I lie. If somebody plans one of those mystery dinner theatres where you kill somebody by bludgeoning, impalement or dismemberment through high powered turbine engines, and everybody tries to figure out whodunit, I’m so fucking there. I’d plant the murder weapon on somebody, but make put really obvious decoys like a plate of scones with a box of rat poison beside it, and a heavy bookend with dried bits of dirt on the corner to look like … huh, what’s that?

You mean what now isn't real?

The best quote in this story:

"In this case the report was made with the best of intentions and we would not want to discourage people from contacting us with genuine concerns regarding security."

In brief, a phone salesman was hauled off a London-bound plane after he asked his taxi driver to play The Clash's London Calling through the vehicle's stereo. S'funny how neighbours turning in neighbours and children turning in parents back in the 1940's was also considered reporting 'with the best of intentions'.

I'm sitting in my uncle's restaurant in Jamaica and my cousin sits to my left, and Tash to my right. We're winding down a dinner where I lost count of the number of dishes somewhere around twelve. My cousin, a returning resident who's been living back in Jamaica for around three years now, is enlightening Tash and I on the perils and pitfalls of moving back. I decline to point out that Tash and I did move back, sometime in 2002, for a year and we know all about what living in Jamaica is like. Jason recently told me that if you live in Jamaica long enough, hang out with the right people, you're going to end up with a big bag of I-Told-You-Sos to hand out to people. He was right, as my cousin drones on about how tough it is down there before abruptly changing gears.

"Hey, when was the last time you went up to Blue Mountain."

Still on the topic of Jamaica, I assume she means the Blue Mountain from which we harvest
our world famous coffee.

"Um. Fifteen years or so."

Tash, without any cue from myself: "I've never been up there before. How is
it?"

"Wow, you should go up there now, they've really built it up into a tourist
town."

"Really? That's amazing!"

"Yeah, hubby went up there to play golf a few years ago, fell in love with
the place and we ended up buying some property."

"Get out, that's really cool!"

"It's really good, you own it, but you can rent it out to other people when
you're not up there. It's busy during the ski season but the summer, you have to
find other people who want a touristy vacation of some kind."

At this point, I'm clueing in. Somebody bought a timeshare.

"Ski!?" I ask incredulously. "They ski? Up there? I didn't know that. It
snows up there?"

"Yeah! They're famous for their skiing up there."

Me, skeptical. "What? Wow, that's absolutely hilarious." I have a mental
image of hordes of Jamaicans slaloming down a ski hill with reflective goggles
and BillaBong wear. Somehow, it's not jiving with reality. Shaking my head, I
reply, "I had no idea."

Right. I'm pretty sure by now that she's not talking about Blue Mountain Jamaica. She's talking about this Blue Mountain. I've been up to Collingwood before. I've skiied there, and caught Stabilo in an outdoor concert. However, I continue to feign incredulity that Blue Mountain Collingwood is a tourist destination, and that they have skiing(!) and snow(!) there because I'm not that interested in the conversation. That, and my cousin seems genuinely pleased to be letting me in on something that she knows and I don't. I'm perfectly content to have my cousin think I have no life outside of the balmy 27 degrees thermostat temperature in my apartment, and that I don't know anything about how Canadians spend their winters even though I've lived here for twelve years.

After a few minutes, she gets pulled away by her two kids and Tash and I exchange glances. She'd realized that my cousin had bought a timeshare in Ontario as well, and not some spectacular vacation home in the lush mountains amidst the real estate of one of Jamaica's best export commodity. I sit back and marvel at our indifference and, when Dennis sits down beside me to talk about how smart PJ Patterson is "Because he has IQ", I wordlessly get up and walk away because, Jesus - If I don't care that people think I'm surprised at snow falling in Canada, I sure as hell don't care that people think I'm incapable of carrying on a conversation with the human Brick Wall.

I spent most of yesterday splitting time between spooling yarn and trying to figure out who that comic book character is - the one who's bouncy and agile, wears tights, colourful, red and yellow with some fluffy stuff around his neck, or lining his shirt. It was a Spiderman villain, or maybe he wasn't a villain at all. Maybe he was a hero? DC or Marvel? There's that one guy, Kraven, but he's not colourful or prancy, but I remember this guy's name maybe started with 'C'. Could it be Craven? After much searching, and variations of google keywords, I came up empty.

Until I consulted my brother, who is an archive of comic book knowledge.

Behold, I present to you, The Creeper:



So why was I wasting away a sunny Sunday afternoon digging up this guy's indentity? Well, on Saturday evening I was in the company of a five and a three year old watching the program Doodlebops. One of the characters had - at the time, I felt - a striking similarity to aforementioned comic book character. Maybe not so much now, but you be the judge:

You've all played the game when you were kids, right? Study the photo to find the things that look out of place, or find Waldo in his prison stripes, or check out the side by side pictures and figure out if this guy's nose is missing, or if his right hand is up in one scenario while his left is up in the other.

So, some context. Naomi Campbell was recently arrested for felony assault of her housekeeper, where she allegedly chucked a phone or a blackberry or something at this person. The following clip shows her being escorted out of the precinct after being taken to a Manhattan police station. Play the game and make a few notes to yourself while you watch this video:

Clip here. Not porn, sorry.

So, here's what I got:

• Special armcuffs were used to bring her in because she has no hands.


• Naomi Campbell was not given special treatment to dress herself up, as she is wearing a baseball cap to cover up a bad hair day.


• The camera used to take this clip must have a filter on it, as Naomi is wearing sunglasses and it does not look like a very sunny day.


• Naomi must be chewing bubbilicious gum, as no other gum has flavour long enough to last you through a police booking.

God. I'm good. I should be a reporter. I don't even need to show up to cover the stories, and ask the important questions, like, "What are you wearing? Over the shoulder!", because I can fill out my article from a five second clip on the internet.

Seriously though, what good is the justice system when applied to psychotic, egomaniac supermodels when everybody, and I mean everybody - down to the unseen voices screaming out for fashion advice, the dude in the blue shirt leaning up on the building, the attentive, considerate police officers and the beaming, unconcerned Naomi - knows that the whole thing is a joke?

Somewhere, in another dimension, this video ends with The Incredible Hulk throwing a phonebooth full of fashion reporters at Naomi Campbell.