Category Archives: Canada

Black humour

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Che Black

from Rick Mercer‘s blog, and to which I cannot at the moment add anything (because when you turn the television off these Ontarians‘ ears become incredibly sensitive and they cannot abide typing of any nature whatsoever, not that I’m fucking bitter, of which more later).

When I saw the headline in the newspaper I swear to God I heard angels sing. “Conrad Black wants Canadian Citizenship back”. Cue the trumpets – it just doesn’t get much better than this.

Seeing that headline made me so excited I couldn’t even read the bloody thing. I picked up the paper and brought it home like it was a box of chocolates. I didn’t even glance at the first sentence until everything was perfect. The coffee was brewed, my feet were up the pillow behind my neck was just so. This was a moment to be savoured.

And it was a great moment.  As I read that story I don’t think I ever felt more Canadian, because I knew that for the first time in perhaps our nation’s entire history, everyone in Canada was on the same page. Every man woman and child in this nation was united and together. We were gloating as one.

Amen, brother. Amen.

tv wars 3.0

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TELEVISION!!!!! I SAID TELEVISION!!!!!! ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION????? 

The television on the main floor is so loud that I’ve fled to the basement and am checking blogs I don’t even like, just to waste time because I cannot sleep with that racket going. This would at least kill time quietly, except the only other person awake in the house is, apparently, feeling lonely, and has come downstairs to keep me company, handing photos over my shoulder, humming in my ear, occasionally announcing the shameful deaths of small children in various spots around the world, and, yes,

LEAVING THE TELEVISION GOING FULL BLAST IN THE OTHER ROOM.

I may kill someone soon.

television (star) wars 2.0

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So the other day I wander into the living room.Wow, CSI: Miami must be on!

Dan is lying on the sofa, watching CSI: Miami.

I wander downstairs.

My sister is lying on the sofa, watching CSI: Miami.

I do not understand these people.

(television) star wars

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Nifty Keeno! Television will change our world forever!Is there something in the Ontario water that causes this? Is it that the radio sucks so badly? Is it Cheeveresque or O’Neillian fear of the family tensions that play themselves out more confrontationally in conversation than in silence?

Why does everyone in Ontario enter their house, remove their shoes and, before even taking off their jacket, turn on the television?

And what is the last thing they do every night? Read a bedtime story to their children? Hit the singles chatroooms? Enjoy a snifter of brandy and a wide-ranging discussion of the physical substance of the various ranks of angels? No.

They turn off the tv.

If there was something we used in Vancouver this much, we’d just have it on a timer or a motion detector, although given the propensity of people to become motionless in front of a television, perhaps that wouldn’t work. Yeah, they could use some of these morning shows to immobilize the enemy, particularly now that the Geneva Conventions are considered unconventional for Americans.

Timer, timer is better. On at 7am, off at midnight.

I have a couple of friends who came from the West but who now live in Ontario, and they, too, have succumbed to this bizzare and disturbing fetishistic behaviour. This, plus the fact that I haven’t the slightest hint of it and my gene pool basically sloshes up and down the Ottawa Valley for the last three hundred years like water in a bowl, is what convinces me it’s something environmental.

And you can bet it’s not the quality of the broadcasts. After two days, that possibility has been thoroughly ruled out.

Now, maybe it’s something in the air of BC, but we out there have a marked tendency to passive-aggressiveness of an almost pathalogical order. Would we ever tell you off? No, perish the thought. Would we see you every day for drinks after work and brunch on Sunday and tell everyone in our running group how much we hate you?

You bet. Much more polite.

So I have developed a unique coping system for visits from Ontarians. You always try to make the place nice for your guests and show off the many ways your town is different from where they live, so that they go home with the definite sense of having actually left home in the first place.

So the first thing I do is I hide the remote.

Hummerers call Hummerhaters “retarded”

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 SUV vs SUV

Yeah, that’s going to make the PR top ten list for sure. via Fark.

When Sonnie Martin recently broke down in Calgary in her Hummer H2, she said she was met with a string of horns, fingers, obscenities and rude comments.

“On that day, I was embarrassed to be a Calgarian,” she wrote to the Calgary Herald.

However, the letters in reply weren’t sympathetic.

“She drives one of the most potent, aggressive and ostentatious symbols of conspicuous consumption possible,” wrote one person…

Evidence of the seething hatred for the vehicle can be found at the Sierra Club’s hummerdinger.com or at FUH2.com, a Web site with 3,636 photos of people giving Hummers and their drivers the middle finger.

and, of course, at Ihumpedyourhummer.com, one of my personal faves. And what was the Hummercommunity’s response to this pervasive anti-Hummer sentiment?

“For people to point at the Hummer and say, ‘Bad, bad, bad,’ that’s retarded,” says Andy Drever, who sells between 18 and 25 Hummers a month at Shaw GMC, the only licensed Hummer dealer in southern Alberta.

Yep: don’t hate them because they drive Hummers. Hate them because they’re assholes.