Category Archives: Canada

Bienvenue, and better luck this time?

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As someone once said, the fin is coming early this siècle. Or do they just do this every 200 or so years automatically?

For the first time since 1817, U.S. Coast Guard vessels on the Great Lakes are being outfitted with weapons – machine-guns capable of firing 600 bullets a minute. The Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817 allowed each country to station four vessels, each equipped with an 18-pound cannon, to safeguard the Great Lakes. A spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, Petty Officer William Colclough, said they will be stored below decks on the coast guard’s 11 Great Lakes cutters and will be mounted only when needed.

They really do need help in those schools. Eleven, four, different. But who’s counting? How long till they pull a Grenada in Wasaga Beach?

“Certainly the Great Lakes [have] not had any military vessels stationed on [them] since – gosh, really since the advent of that treaty.”

1812

Quiz Fun with Ann Coulter

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You know her; she’s the shrill, brittle Republican chick. No, not that one; you’re thinking of Mary Matalin. The other shrill, brittle Republican chick; the deep-fried blonde, bleached to a middle-aged semblence of desirability, fake & bake tanned to leathery perfection, starved to the point of Brancusi-like cuddliness. If she fell against a table she wouldn’t bruise; she’d chip. THAT one. If you’re Canadian, you may recall the time she so ably represented the US education system by maintaining, against even our polite CBC moderator’s spoken objections, that the Canadian military fought alongside the Americans in Vietnam. Vietnam, Korea, I guess they all look alike, right?

The Ann Coulter Quiz from Esquire, via Minor Tweaks via Gawker.

The Ann Coulter Quiz
From a feature in April’s Esquire in which semi-famous women give men romantic advice:

Coulter Rwanda

“Ann Coulter: When we’re telling you about our day, pretend there’s going to be a quiz later.”

1. For breakfast, did I have …

a.) eggs and toast
b.) strawberry yogurt
c.) an English muffin
d.) the still-beating heart of a newborn lamb washed down with the bitter tears of the world’s poor

2. Did I research my next column by …

a.) considering others’ opinions before reaching my own
b.) engaging in civil discussion with a friend
c.) meditating on what really matters
d.) recycling the same jingoistic nonsense, but inserting different racially offensive epithets and new historical inaccuracies

3.) How did I spend the rest of my day?

a.) Apologizing profusely for making our nation’s discourse less reasoned and more hateful
b.) Scolding myself mercilessly for appealing to the comfortable prejudices of the least-thoughtful among us
c.) Searching my soul for some lonely glimmer of humanity
d.) none of the above

True Patriot Acts

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Patriot Acts

Chilling Effects: London Tube has no sensa uma, despite really pun-ready name

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London TubeSorry about the ugly link. Firefox is, apparently, not as user-friendly as IE and SPARE ME your dork lectures. Had them already, when I complained about my bike being inconvenient to ride. “Oh, that’s just because you don’t have an A-47.6665DoRKTastic helmet and you insist on wearing regular clothes, rather than buying a whole bike-specific, dorktastic outfit that makes you look like a beefy extra from a 50’s sci-fi movie, and why do you insist on wearing a backpack? Everyone knows you have to use panniers and then when you get to the destination you take the panniers off because otherwise they’d be stolen and presumably you pull your backpack out of them and put them into the backpack and hit a public washroom to change out of your alien reentry costume before going to your meeting…hey, wait! I wasn’t finished! There’s more…

Okay, nevermind. Got IE back, and we, the raincoaster administrative staff, are purtifying our links apace! See, purty link right’cheer to Silly Maps of London Tube

In any case, ignore my bitter, ex-cyclist rantings and click on the link, where you will NOT be able to see a funny, fan-created anagrammatic map of the London Underground. And why can you not see it? Because the Tube Authority (wasn’t that in some Margaret Atwood book?) has decreed it violated copyright. Lest we fergit, Toronto did the same damn thing; apparently, brains are in short supply in the transit industry.

Ceremonial Aspects

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Now, it is not every day, nor even many days, that one attends a wedding remarkable both for the open bar and the actual bride-on-groom physical violence during the ceremony.

But it was Saturday.

I really have to get out to more weddings.

Honeymoon

So the ceremony was going well. Going normally. The bride and groom wanted it to be a bit different, and it was, a bit, what with the ceremony being outside in the heart of March in Canada, no less, but it wasn’t, like, nudist or anything. As Miss Manners has said so eloquently, a nudist wedding is one where everyone can see who the best man is.

So, only normally different.
There was the heart. A raku heart, which each of the guests was to hold for a moment and pray over. But that wasn’t the weird part. I mean, putting crappy fruitcake under your pillow to give you hallucinogenic dreams???? So the raku heart is supposed to be weird and that’s supposed to be normal? Riiiiiiiiiight.

So they were saying their vows. And he said his very nicely, although everyone could tell he was nervous because his Anglo-Aussie accent was asserting itself. And then she said hers.

“I, so-and-so, take you, whatchername, to be my husband.”

SMACK!

Right across the face, from left to right, a good old-fashioned Bond Girl smack.

Couldn’t help myself. I said, “Is that an Okanagan tradition?”

Okay, so there’s a back story involving a mosquito and spousal solicitiveness…I don’t buy it for a second. I saw the groom’s face, and it quite clearly said,

“Sweetie, couldn’t you save it for the honeymoon?”