Me, Myself and I

So, lots of languages have both polite and familiar words for you. Because you’re special, cold, or unfamiliar, and I’m just being polite, playing it safe, I don’t presume. But at work, myself has gone viral as the polite way of saying me. As in, “Give the form to myself when it’s complete.” Because myself puts everyone on notice that it’s special? More special than those who fumble their way through the form? It’s impossible to explain to the myselvers that me would suffice. They get this special, cold, and unfamiliar look on theirselves faces. Like something’s wrong with me.

Image: last.fm

What, child, is this?

At some point near the end of her marriage, my mother again started going to church, our Christmases became a little less secular, and it fell upon me—at a mere nine years old—to assemble our family’s first nativity scene. The crèche I built out of Lego, of course; Joseph was the Olympic judo figurine I’d got from a box of Cheerios; and Mary was swiped from my sister’s set of Russian nesting dolls. The greatest abomination, however, was saved for the baby Jesus, where I pulled the hair off a tiny troll and wrapped him in swaddling clothes.

Photo based on a dim memory and the necklaces sold by Hannah Nuttall.

Our Atheist-Agnostic German-Canadian Christmas

Our parents were in a mixed marriage: our father an atheist and our mother agnostic. Fortunately, both believed in stories and neither could forgo German Christmas cookie traditions. These joint enthusiasms meant that Christmas got the go-ahead. We’d be shooed out of the house while Mama put the finishing touches on the tree (real), lighting candles (real), and hanging strands of German angelhair (limp and silvery). Our presents were being delivered by German Engeln, entities of secular fantasy unrelated to Canadians’ Jesus. Meanwhile, we’d hunker in the Volkwagen with Papa, turning on the emergency blinkers to scare away the Grinch.

How Great Thou Art

French Canadians will tell you that while you can put up your Christmas nativity scene any time during Advent you never include the L’Enfant Jesu until Christmas Eve. My mémé had a plaster Baby Jesus that was chubby and white with blonde hair and a diaper. The thing was the size of a large toddler and so old that it probably was suckled by the Roman she-wolf. But after midnight mass and until Epiphany this Colossus dominated my grandmother’s fibreboard mantle, dwarfing the tiny manger and imposing its Godzilla-like reign of terror among the cowering wise men and frightened donkeys.

Photo by Riccardo De Luca

AYRE-240

Nola and I are walking to school, and I’m trying to get her to read the words spelled out on the license plates of the cars parked along the way.
     Understand, most of the plates here in Toronto begin with an A or a B and are prone to a strange insufficiency of vowels; and so, although there aren’t likely many words to be found, the perfect parent is forever alert to a Learning Opportunity.
     “A–Y–R–E,” asks Nola. “What’s that?”
     “It’s what you put in your TYRES!”
     . . .
     I swear, I’m wasting my best material on a six-year-old.

Believe it or not, you can read more stories about license plates here and here. I picked the photos for this story from the extensive collection of Jerry Wood.

 

The Illuminating Power of Football

We played two-hand touch on the street. Someone on defence counted Mississippis while the quarterback narrated his own exploits for imaginary viewers at home. We were always the Roughriders, the quarterback was always Ron Lancaster. “Lancaster, dropping back to pass... Here comes the rush! Lancaster scrambles, rolls out, here’s the throw... Complete! What a catch! George Reed at the curb, caught immediately and smacked into a Buick – but he’s okay, folks, he’s getting up! It’s just a bruise!” The receiver was always George Reed, who was black, and no one in Saskatchewan was black, but he was one of us.

Image:   CFL

The Slow Storm

“Slowflakes,” said Jakie, soft but clear, pointing out the window from his high chair. His mother smiled, but he was right. Slow flurried overnight and all next morning. The news came on late and said the roads were full of slow, cars trickling along at four miles an hour. Schools were closed because children would never reach them on time. Instead, Jakie’s sisters built a slowman in the front yard, pondering each handful, tenderly gnawing clumps of slow off their mittens. Their mother asked them why the slowman had no eyes. “They’re shut cuz he’s sleepy,” they said, and yawned.

Image: SireneTzukiDark.

To the People: Another Apology

I apologize for finding his apologies tedious, disingenuous, and meaningless.
I apologize for his lies, excuses and false denials.
I apologize for his do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do “leadership”.
I apologize for his claim he had nothing more to hide.
I apologize for his hypocrisy.
I apologize for him clinging to office like a limpet mine.
I apologize for thinking he’s only sorry he got caught.
I apologize for all these apologies, but as the man himself has said, “the past is the past and we must move forward... I know I have let you down and I can’t do anything else but apologize.”


Image:  CBC

A Failed Photograph of the Night Sky

It began at 3 a.m. as another failed experiment. She wrote her shopping list on the back in hard lead pencil, sighed, and shoved it into the pocket of her tweed skirt. That day, she handled more invoices for the Milliken account, stubbed her toe on the filing cabinet, and – it must be confessed – nodded off into an inchoate dream, in which tidy rows of figures became gentle, supple shadows. That evening, when she took out the list, she saw a few lines had appeared on it from nowhere, suggestive of a figure. Over the years, she watched her emerge.

Image: Edgar Degas, Danseuse ajustant sa bretelle.

but can you touch

                                                      a praying mantis?
       can you smell rain or snakes or cancer?
       can you see russia from alaska?
       could you hear music as it’s playing on the moon?
       could you see mars last night or tuesday
            or taste spinach in a smoothie?
       should you feel guilty killing zombies?
       would you feel
                                       getting shot
                                                                in the head?
       oh: you. should you now be inclined to censure,
       you who touch your chest on bench press,
       you who hear from your ex-boyfriend everyday
                                      (that’s a lot)
       i suggest that you drink heavily
       i suggest that you tread lightly
       i suggest you let a praying mantis pray.

Image: Mantis.

Dans l’estomac de la Loire

The river swallowed
her, turned
her into a bolus, slid
her into a slow stomach in
 the middle of pre-primeval Nantes.

    And waited.

      Time churned, silts settled,
       her tender toes now tap twenty
        thousand leagues beneath
        the Jules Verne Museum beneath
        a dancing salon named
         Sea of
          Dreams.
            Her serpent twines
              expectant near her cunt – ou,
                       disons-nous, near the école élémentaire
                                    named after Gustave Roch, scholar
                                        of surfaces topological until he
                                          died untimely in the coils
                                           of tuberculosis . . .
                                           Her nipple
                                          perks the Palais
                                          des Sports de  Beaulieu,
                                            where Real Madrid played
                                                PAOK Thessaloniki
                                                    in a beautiful ’92
                                                       Eurocup
                                                        game.

Image: le jardin, by Max Ernst. For other stories it inspired,
see Magpie Tales.

Sparks

Passing through the smokers out behind the Dufferin Mall, I caught the scent of that old round table lighter in my grandmother’s apartment, or maybe the Zippo my dad let me play with because he never did get around to refilling the thing . . . a whiff of the fuel, the smell of flint against steel, and the chime of metal on metal when you snapped it shut. Except that this one belonged to a younger man, who had taken a pass on those disposable plastic jobs for something more substantial, flipping it open just out of the corner of my eye.

Image from Found Walls.

Backache, Scotch and Chickpeas (Breakfast with the Linguists)

My breakfast of Backache, Scotch and Chickpeas is, according to Richard Lanham, a paratactic list like Veni, vidi, vici, i.e., a list that makes the reader do the work of figuring out how its elements connect. Deborah Tannen would point out how the three elements run parallel in containing k sounds and in being two-syllable nouns, “and” being the linguistic equivalent of Hamburger Helper. Roy Peter Clark tells us that once a list runs to more than three elements, it starts feeling endless, whereas trinities – like Carrie-Anne Moss’s adorably fucked-up little sweaters in The Matrix – do the trick. Slainte!

Heavy Horses

Until last night my exposure to Prog-Rock was limited to enforced snippets of Rick Wakeman and weedy, gravitas-rich Pink Floyd liner notes. Then Sherry and I went to the Jethro Tull concert. She was fabulous; attuned to every trill and tempo change like a true Ian Anderson aficionado. Thirty minutes in I realized why I preferred a post-Gabriel Genesis, an epiphany exacerbated by the demographics of the average Tull fan. This is where Comic-Book Guys go to die and given the arduous ascent to Massey Hall’s upper balcony, I was amazed that these whiskered mastodons had the energy to air-flute.


Image: Popular Mechanics (1952)

Taken from the Spine

bloodletting & miraculous cures
behind the scenes at the museum
alone of all her sex
paris was a woman
loitering with intent
to kill a mockingbird –
the door into summer.

salt fish girl
salt fish girl,
interpreter of maladies,
when fox is a thousand
always
never let me go.

fugitive pieces
tender buttons leaving earth
eight cousins, tender is the night
the children of men voyage in the
dark green shadows, white whale, ammonite
a mouthful of air taken at the flood
tales from the thousand and one nights
the book of small fugitive pieces
charms for the easy life.

Wait! Now, go back to the beginning and touch each line in turn. And, if you like this sort of poetic puzzle, make sure to check out For 20 weightings.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Fortune Spy

In 1806, Jane Taylor didn’t have Google Translate to help her write “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Finnish, Armenian, and Hindi translations would have let her daub it with wistfulness: Twinkle, twinkle, little star, I wonder how you are doing.
     Adding Gujarati, Maltese, and more, she’d have had MI-5’s first coded message: Sparkle, twinkle, little star, somebody doesn’t know the enemy’s paying. You are a Solitaire in the heaven across the world.
     Or, the world’s first fortune cookies: Star hotels are a little festive for this. Put your trust in enemy ships being constructed. In a specialized world, enjoy fresh air.

Images: Margaret Tarrant, Daily Mail, Unravel a Gift.  

Sorry, Margaret Atwood

So, Margaret Atwood has joined other Canadian feminists in calling for the anthem to be edited back to its original. I like Margaret (and feminism), but I have to disagree with her. The line in question reads “true patriot love in all thy sons command.” They want it to read “in all of us command.” But being commanded to feel true patriot love is a bit much. Feelings can’t be commanded, and I’m not big on the whole patriot love concept either. Sorry, Margaret, but I’d rather just stick with an anthem that sticks that one to the sons.

Image: Canada's Walk of Fame.

Being in love with a bear

It’s awkward being in love with a bear 

First off, what can you say to the parents? 

You can say, “He’s dedicated to work 

’Cause, Dad, bearhood is no song and dance 

No beer, no skittles, no coffee breaks

Eating offal from seals takes real stamina.” 

You can say, “Daddy, at least he’s white and 

Remember what you said about Angelo 

Yes you did too say that and I was so 

Ashamed I wouldn’t visit you for months and –”

Yes, such arguments divert the parents 

But truth told, being in love has got to be 

Awkward, standing hair on end. 

Image: Catrin Welz-Stein.

HEY! (The already-outdated kimchi taco chant)

HEY! is the new hi rooibos the new chai

gluten is the new egg yolk fake’s the newest fur

kimchi the new taco and gambling new tobacco

for hipsters the new yuppies labradoodles their new puppies

sigh for rhinos the new dodos clap for katniss the new frodo

winning hunger like a new board game but HEY!

HEY! it’s the new hi syria’s in the news why
war is lame the new retarded like wispy bangs the new cross-
     parted
HEY! they’re the next hi and netflix the new sky’s
got ben the latest batman wearing cheetah: the new black. HEY!

Image: Steamy Kitchen.

The Falls

At the age of four, Sarabeth Harcourt let her best toy, a squeaky dog named Benji, slip over the railing to Niagara Falls. The experience transformed her. She became so listless, her mother sometimes turned the lights off in a room, not realizing Sarabeth was there. At 16, Sarabeth continued to sit in the dark, indifferent even to a toothache. Her mother took her to the dentist nonetheless. There, Sarabeth saw a pale, freckly boy emerge from the dentist’s room. “The nitrous will wear off soon, Benji,” the dentist reassured him. “Okay,” the boy squeaked. Sarabeth fell tumultuously in love.

Image: OLX.

Getting Sick in the Dark Ages

The Dark Ages were a strange and earthy time for sickness. You could suffer from “dew-worm” (ringworm). Your sudden pain could be from elf-shot. Your cure could come from sheep dung or stale urine.
     Should a time machine ever thrust you back, here are 10 words from Old English Leechdoms (ca 1150) that might be good to know:
     tarse – penis
     lant – stale urine
     fast – constipated
     attery – venomous
     share – pubic region
     clock – a stomach sound
     sigalder – charm or incantation
     to fnast – to pant, or breathe fire
     gound – foul matter secreted by the eye
     treddle – sheep poop (this word evolved toward “turdyll”).

Image: Terra Vim.
Definitions: OED Online.

A Real Doctor

“Huh,” said the technician and left, which wasn’t exactly how Maggie thought pre-natal ultrasounds worked.
     After half an hour, an intern stepped in, nodding hello furtively. He looked about 16 and shifted the ultrasound wand around like he was learning to drive stick. “Huh," he said.
     “Isn’t my baby okay?” Maggie asked.
     “Baby?” said the intern, wearily. “That’s an island inside you.”
      Thankfully what looked like a real doctor arrived just then. “Diagnosis?” she asked, calm and crisp.
     “Island," said the intern, uncertainly adding, “The bridge looks manmade."
     “Huh,” said the real doctor. “I’d say archipelago.”
     Maggie began to scream.

Image (and additional stories inspired by it): Magpie Tales. 

Orchard Kiss

Marianne had been having another spell where she could not stop talking about what life would have been like in the city. She was laying on the chesterfield with her eyes jammed shut, but her body like a bird in a shallow grave, and Clyde no longer knew what a man could say. He remembered their first kiss, years back. They’d heard a train whistling, past the orchard, and Marianne broke off the kissing to say how romantic it’d be, being on a train, going somewhere. Maybe he should’ve thought clearer back then, but her hair had smelled like quinces.

Image: The Garden of Eating.

The Terminal Bouquet

Dialling Yolanda’s number made his hands jitter but this time, she hadn’t hung up. He told her he’d changed – he’d started listening, started being there for people. He’d pick her up at the airport, he promised, her and her newborn baby, leave work early, borrow a carseat, anything for an old friend.
     He bought her roses, the same pink as when they’d started dating. In case she’d think he was pushing his luck, he laid them atop of the stroller, saying, “Pink for your baby girl!”
     “I told you I named him Sebastian,” Yolanda hissed, flinging the bouquet down.

Image: Ron Thompson, who first caught this bouquet here.

Barcelona Bouquet, Part V

Last call at my gate.
      Eyes closed, concentrating, I heard the click of heels on marble. She’d returned! Wearing a short skirt, she knelt carefully to gather the bouquet in, straightened, and spotted the fallen petals...
      No – he’d come back. He stopped over the flowers, glanced round (everyone looked away), and stooped to pick them up. Then he examined them closely, his expression unreadable. Unseen beneath his feet the petals turned to pulp...
      No. It was the gate attendant. I boarded, leaving the case unsolved and worse – uncategorized. So which one was it: crime of passion, or the lack thereof?

Photo by Ron Thompson at Barcelona Airport, August 2013
See how it began here.

Barcelona Bouquet, Part IV

They called my flight, but I made no move to board: the mystery wasn’t solved.
      Callously abandoned? Why drop the bouquet there? Dump it in a trash bin, there’d be no questions then. Besides, it had landed with some force – witness the two detached petals splayed like corpses on the cold-slab floor. The physical evidence connoted passion, not indifference. Was there a phone call, a letter opened, a penny finally dropping from some comment made in passing?
      The flowers were pink, not red. It could still be a case of careless haste. 
      My stakeout continued, though time was running out.

Photo by Ron Thompson at Barcelona Airport, August 2013
See how it began here.  See the conclusion here.

Oh Yeah! It was (sorta) like Lightning!

Sweet’s Ballroom Blitz is playing. As part of the grade eight end of school party, Christine, Carolyn, Cheryl and myself performed an interpretive dance to that tune. We wore cut offs, white T-shirts and tinfoil lightening bolts and were backed up by boys dressed in full KISS drag. Mike could inhale butane from a lighter so he got to be Gene Simmons, and bless him, stayed in character by shouting sexually charged remarks about our behinds. This was 1976 and I was thirteen, so any complement, however boorish, worked. In that moment, I was truly a Fox on the Run.
Photo: Cheryl Dowhan Metcalfe

Barcelona Bouquet, Part III

Someone brought them through security. They were screened and cleared. No threat, those stalks, those thorns, those thin-skinned petals.
      The two protagonists weren’t there in the departures area. They couldn’t be. Who would bring pink roses through security and then present them? That happened when they said goodbye. The recipient smiled and placed the bouquet in a bin and collected it on the other side. Then, did they wave? Blow kisses? What could the giver see?
      The recipient proceeded to the gate, bouquet in hand.
      There, it was dropped or tossed away.
      Again, I looked around, this time for callousness.

Photo by Ron Thompson at Barcelona Airport, August 2013
See how it began here.  The next instalment is here

Barcelona Bouquet, Part II

They were limp, but not yet wilted. Had I been five minutes earlier I might have caught the scene.
     It struck me suddenly that they might still be present.  
     I glanced around with keen new interest. There: those two, canoodling in the lounge? Or the couple in the coffee shop, huddled over their phones, ignoring each other? No, neither pair was right, not for the bouquet’s colour:  not for pink, for sweet thoughts, gentle emotions, hope, happiness, affection; for innocent love not yet erupted.
     The flowers were carefully chosen. How did they get there? How did it come to this?

Photo by Ron Thompson at Barcelona Airport, August 2013
See how it began here.    See what happens next here.

Ode to Mary Jo

“Wild and wooly” the term used by surfers when expressing oceanic conditions.
     For me it is the state of affairs when I see your hair, a lush black mane peppered with streaks of gray going white. Convoluted at the root, springing haphazardly aware of its surrounding at all times, reflecting the architect that you are. I often wonder how long it actually is since the coiled nature tightly taut never seems to grow. Its origins thicken, striking a buoyancy that parrots your walk. A subterranean layer peeking out, projecting a weathervane-like form predicting inclement conditions days before the storm lands.

Photo: Cec Lepage

Barcelona Bouquet, I

If they could only talk, what sad tale would they tell?
     Not quite red, nor white: what did their giver intend? And where they lay, upon the concourse floor:  what did that signify? Apology rejected? Love’s hopeful gesture spurned? Or bon voyage, a last call from the gate, and hands too full . . .
     People milled, waiting for flights to Moscow, Majorca, Toronto, Istanbul, paying no note yet keeping a respectful distance. Even those rushing for gates treated those forsaken flowers like a sidewalk crack. Something had just happened and they’d seen it. I looked around but no one met my eye.

Photo by Ron Thompson at Barcelona Airport, August 2013
See how the story continues here.

Portrait of a Marriage, I

“It’s more gravel than grass, just as I remember it,” said Mrs Seabolt as the Seabolts wandered disconsolately along a hot little street alongside the Jardin de Luxembourg.
     Mr Seabolt could not bring himself to agree. It was a matter of principle to him that to bring one’s wife to Paris on one’s tenth anniversary called for no apology. Further, he positively liked the Jardin. Even more than its broad vistas, he liked its modest gravels. He admired the industry with which the children sailed their boats upon its pond, though he knew better than to call attention to it.

Image: S.M. Tunli.

Big Fat Fun with the Metric System

Some American politicians are arguing that sending “Fat Letters” home to the parents of obese children could be harmful. Sweet Jesus. I can tell you that being a Grade Three Dumpling was no psychological chicken pock but rather the mental version of Quint’s leg. I still remember when Miss Hogue decided it would be a pedagogic wheeze to have us step on a scale in front of the class, read out our weight and convert it from pounds to kilograms. Mortified in my elastic-waisted crimplene, I prayed Zimbo would tire of the front-row commentary before we got to the “L”s.

Photo from The Globe and Mail

Thou Shall Not Jeg

This long weekend I will be streamlining my closet. Scarves, shoes, bags, clothes – all to be assessed and sorted. Like Moses I’ll be parting the sea into Keeps and Peeps, casting out the oversized Goth-Pirates, the Maya Angelos, the ghetto Kate Lanphears. I’ve always blamed my enabling seamstress mother for my costume dressing; her nimble fingers churning out miles of handkerchief hems during my Stevie Nicks phase, and later, yellow plaid pants and shoulder pads when I was all about the Talking Heads. But as July was rather revelatory, I must now take responsibility for my own sartorial poutine.

Photo taken from Femmepirical Evidence.

Corn Queen

This week I worked on the Kettle Point reserve and stayed overnight in Sarnia. Since I’m directionally-challenged, finding my hotel became an Escheresque exercise of tootling, asking for help, doubling back and asking again. Yet, I didn’t mind because I was almost home. Lambton County isn’t much different from Tecumseh, and I’d forgotten what it all smelled like: The cornfields, the humidity, the freshly-cut grass. When Kathy and I sold Peaches and Cream from the back of her mom’s truck down on Manning Road we charged a buck a dozen. Thirty-five years later it goes for $5. Still a deal.

Image from tecumseh.ca

Mrs. Gorse’s Golden Years

Mrs. Elizabeth Gorse’s years passed with Free Church orderliness, and what was once a dutiful if uninteresting character paste hardened into a Liberty-printed chrysalis of self-satisfaction, with room for only the occasional incredulous Daily Mail snort and maniacal bouts of gardening and laundry. Still, she developed these rhythms honestly over time, and before domestic chores prevailed, any twinge of Six-Form loneliness was cured by intense doses of field hockey and Pitman shorthand. Elizabeth was never, ever fun. In fact, once back in Mrs. Bagshot’s primary school her classmates attributed an awkward splosh of her milk ration to a missing humerus.

Photo: Laundry Line (Hampshire, England)

A Brave Bird

Today on a run I almost stepped on a squat little robin. He hopped out of my way just in time and I stopped to take a look. The first trip from the nest? The first flight? He was still getting the knack of it, and his momma was not happy with the interest I was showing. She screeched and squawked and fluttered past my head, and I got her message. See, she had more than herself to consider; that’s why she stood her ground. That’s courage, not attitude. And I did what all reasonable animals do: I ran away.

Image:  Copyright ©2009 Maria Langer at Flying M Photos

I was Heckled by Anarchists

Sure, people shout at me all the time from their cars as I stubbornly cycle along their roads. I’m used to it, and I’m not too proud to admit that at least some of the time it’s for something I’ve actually done wrong. But then there was the summer the anarchists were in town for their international convention, and as if that weren’t already oxymoronic enough, the group I encountered were crowded into an old gas-guzzler chugging along Harbord when one leaned out of his window with a broad smile and shouted: “Hey, get a load of Mr. Appropriate Technology!”

Illustration by Aesthetic Apparatus.

Potato Protocols for the Aliens’ Arrival

After years of scouring outer space for radio waves or other signs of intelligent life, we’ve found them. The aliens. Lo and behold, they’re on a mineral-rich, Earth-type planet and resemble nothing so much as Yukon Golds. A sack of ambassadors arrives Wednesday at UN headquarters for trade negotiations. Grocery stores and restaurants must remove potato products from their shelves and menus. (Citizens, no stockpiling the Pringles!) Idaho and PEI are to be stricken from maps, replaced respectively with extra Montana and with water. And children, if you’re overheard singing “One potato, two potato,” you just might get skinned alive.

Image: Agustin Berrocal.

The Perfect Storm

The perfect storm will begin late Tuesday afternoon. It will have been predicted perfectly by Ted in Meteorology, a good man, a veteran of the last just war. Ted will give the storm a perfect name, offending no one. Perhaps Heather? Heather will fall as perfectly gently as icing sugar from a sieve, causing no casualties. All Wednesday, cocooning families will play Monopoly perfectly cooperatively, building empires of ecologically-friendly hotels, forcing no one into bankruptcy, leaving no child behind. Thursday morning, on each porch they’ve secretly shovelled, flocks of youth at risk will place a basket of glittery Heather cupcakes.

Illustration by Sweet Tooth Studio.

36-34-33?

Call it vanity sizing if you want, but this morning I went shopping for shorts, and discovered I’ve managed to coerce my girth back down to an indisputable 34 inches . . . with room to spare. Even more exciting, I actually found and fit into one of those elusive 33s which—even though the first wash would likely end up bringing me back down to earth—was, more importantly, simply more than I wanted to pay.

Now, I wonder if I shouldn’t have bought them anyway, if for no other reason than to mount them as a trophy over my bathroom scale.


Read the exciting introduction here. Illustration based on Cocoa Florida’s Saggy Pants Ordinance by way of the Smoking Gun.

Woodland Protocols for Canada Day

It’s July the First, and the Canadian woods resound with the call of the wild. That’s it—that high-pitched scream; the water’s still cold up here.
     Canada Day is when we reconnect with our roots: fishin’ and campin’, laying a fire—and cutting wood. Now don’t let me douse your enthusiasm, Johnny Canuck, but Safety First. Consider the photo at right. See what Hoser’s doing wrong? Right! No safety glasses—and no ear protection! And there’s one other shocking breach of woodland protocol. Do you see? Yes. He’s not wearing gloves.
     Play safe, citizens; and Happy Canada Day, wood-cutters everywhere.

Rob Ford and the Juicy Fabrication

The Star says Saturday at Taste of Toronto a woman threw juice at Mayor Rob Ford. The Mayor denies doing juice with anyone: Ridiculous, a woman he doesn’t know, an event that never existed. The Star says a witness, one Zelda Doyle, says the juice was a slushie. Of course it’d be the Star. At least those maggots aren’t saying there’s an alleged video. But . . . there’s this photo. No biggie. Rob Ford is no juice addict. If he’s in photos with thousands of women, well, he’s the Mayor. And doesn't our Mayor go to umpteen Toronto events? Folks, take Pride.