Quick drive-by blog post to say that two and a half days after getting the AZ jab, all of a sudden I noticed that the tap water didn’t taste very good.
It tasted, in fact, like licking rocks. Not that one has ever done that, you understand. But you know what I’m talking about.
Ottawa tap water used to smell like hard boiled eggs because of all the sulfur in it, but these days they’ve figured out how to get rid of that while leaving in a lot of the native minerals (this land is all dolomite and limestone and bits of granite imported on long-melted glaciers during the last Ice Age).
For roughly a year The Roommate has had a Brita water filter, which he regards as a Covid safety measure; this doesn’t remove bacteria, let alone viruses, but it does remove minerals including calcium and fluoride. Once he started using it, he was hooked on the taste, and frankly even the dog preferred the Brita water. If you give him tap water now he just looks at you and sighs, like you’re particularly stupid and he pities you.
I couldn’t tell the difference. Literally. Could. Not. Tell.
Today I got myself a glass of water from the tap, and almost spat it out. It tasted like licking rocks. So did the Sodastream water in the fridge I’d made from tap water (I’m actively trying to get more fluoride). The Brita water? Tasted like nothing, so no change there.
I haven’t had anything to eat since noticing the change, but if breakfast is particularly savoury tomorrow I will be sure to let you know.
As I said elsewhere, we are hyper-aware of our bodies right now, looking for symptoms and so on, so it’s quite possible this is all psychosomatic, but either something is going on in my water supply, or something is going on in my brain, or something is going on in my body.
Good afternoon, Possums, and welcome back to another episode of the Justin Trudeau Power Hour Although This Time A Scant Eleven Minutes and Forty-Nine Seconds. Yes, it was a Covid briefing from the PM, but on a Sunday, a radical departure from the relentless Tuesday/Friday schedule we’ve come to expect.
And no-one was as surprised, Possums, as Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
In an unexpected yet somewhat foreshadowed move…
[aforesaid foreshadowing goes here]
This afternoon, in response to rapidly rising numbers of COVID-19 cases across Ontario, I reached out to Premiers @FureyAndrew, @DennyKing, and @IainTRankin. We spoke about how we can work together to help Ontarians get through this third wave. pic.twitter.com/QtGHHW8Nh1
See which premier is not mentioned there? The premier of Ontario.
On Sunday, Justin Trudeau made an elegant end run around the floridly hapless and rapidly disintegrating premier of Ontario, Doug “Buck-A-Beer” Ford, and announced that the federal government, along with several provinces, is stepping in and providing direct support to Covid-hit communities in Ontario without bothering to wait for the province to request help.
We’re all praying for an election these days.
This neatly avoids invoking the Emergencies Act, which gives the federal government sweeping powers to act within a province’s borders without regard to that provincial government. Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, famously invoked the War Measures Act, which itself would be fingered by a paternity test on the Emergencies Act. Diagram that sentence out if it helps.
The Kennedys. The Bushes. The Trudeaus. The Windsor-Mountbattens. Yes, the Trumps. Even the Fords. And the War Measures Act and the Emergencies Act. All politics is intergenerational these days. And it always was a little incestuous. Just ask the Borgias.
His dad Fidel Castro was pretty strong to be fair. I dont like him but definitely not weak
.. you might expect that logically – but 'the Valise' presumes that exchange happens while or after the danger passes .. like picking up a cat by the scuff, rather than waiting for the swimmer to stop struggling .. #DaddlyArts#JustinTrudeauhttps://t.co/UrhEsPM4cL
Anyhoodle, as astute observers pointed out pretty quickly, it was clever of Trudeau The Younger to make his move on a Sunday, as Dougie always heads up to Fordlandia-on-the-Lake (which is what we imagine he calls his cottage in Muskoka) on the weekends.
Muskoka is too a real word, spellcheck.
Which, under his own lockdown rules, he’s not supposed to visit except for emergencies or maintenance. Unless he went even farther afield, which we do not entirely rule out. It would be so totally Doug Ford to get arrested in a Walmart parking lot in PEI for breaking quarantine while vacationing against Covid guidelines.
So, yeah, Canada’s most populous province is facing the uncontrolled spread of deadly variants of a deadly plague, with the mortality rate of hospitalized cases up 38% in one week THIRTY-EIGHT PERCENT IN ONE WEEK. And the premier faffs off to grill some burgers and down a few pops by the lake, earning his administration the touching nickname of “Murder clowns.”
So, without the formality or even necessity of invoking the jackbooted Emergency Act (in what is unquestionably exactly the kind of emergency it was meant to handle) Trudeau just stepped into the void and got shit done on Doug’s day off.
Trudeau’s cottage, I will remind you, is nicer than Doug’s, but unless someone at Harrington Lake created an elaborate mockup of his Ottawa office for the purposes of filming this, Justin Trudeau stayed home in Ottawa this weekend. Seymour told us.
In case you’re wondering why Trudeau doesn’t want to use the Emergency Act, it’s because doing so will make him look like The Fascist Jackboot Of Big Government and enable both the nominally-leftist NDP and the increasingly-MAGA Conservatives to paint him as evil and cost him popular support. Meanwhile the worse the pandemic is in their own areas of responsibility, the more deaths they can blame on Ottawa. Yes, it really is that cynical.
And there’s an election coming and I say (like the return of King Arthur) the sooner the better.
Where were we, other than rambling at the tail end of a 34-hour-long workday? Oh right, about to give you your video and bingo cards. Let’s play, Possums!
First of all, we are still naming these Briefing Bingos after an unspecified and thus mysterious, arbitrarily-chosen convention which nobody has guessed yet. So far we have had:
Good morning, possums, and welcome to the latest in our Completely Arbitrarily Named Briefing Bingos. There is a unifying concept, if a completely arbitrary one because everything is meaningless and nothing matters anymore, and also because the post needs a title in order to go live, but the title has to be chosen before the briefing happens because time is linear, but nobody has guessed it so far. The concept, not the nature of Time.
Your guesses can go in the comment section for a chance to win fabulous, completely imaginary prizes. Nobody has even attempted this yet, but we’re getting to the point where there’s no excuse. Gonna get pretty obvious soon. Much like whether or not we’re getting an election this year.
It’s not easy being green
We’ll plant 2 billion trees over the next ten years. That’s it. That’s the tweet.
Here’s our video, starting fifteen minutes late today so you get to mark your “Starts more than ten minutes late” square right off the bat. 557 people watching right now. By 2pm that’s gotten up to 1500, but Fridays are always lower than Tuesdays for some reason. It’s not like people are off to the cottage on Fridays these days.
Yes, it’s vulgar, our nomenclative choice today, but this is Populism! What do you expect? It’s all Buck A Beer and Aspirational Asses and Trendy Body Modifications and the like. Besides, with this particularly well-chosen camera angle from the Liberal Convention, how could we NOT use it? Yoga works. Never let it be said that the Liberal Party of Canada does not know how to give The People what they want.
You can’t tell me that shot is about the delegates.
Optics, people. It’s a Whole Thing.
Anyhoodle, now that we’ve introduced our arbitrary framing device, let us get to the actual briefing and see if it’s Doug Ford who gets spanked today.
Here’s our video, with only 287 watching at the start, but 4,000 more an hour later. We here at raincoaster HQ take full credit, of course.
On Parliament Hill, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discusses the federal government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic. He is joined by Dominic LeBlanc (minister of intergovernmental affairs), Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, and Dr. Howard Njoo, deputy chief public health officer.Continue reading →
Spring, possums. Sprung, it hath. Yesterday Buddy the Dog and I saw no fewer than a dozen robins on our perambulations, which are somewhat abbreviated now that Buddy’s an elderdog and has got The Rheumatiz bad in the hippal region. I, you understand, am ageless and impervious and my Tylenol consumption is purely for recreational purposes, of course.
Anyway, here we are with yet another in our popular series of Mystery Nomenclature Theme briefings. To date we’ve had: Robin, Snooky, Muddy (how did we luck into a featured image like that? Luck was with us that day), Grumpy, Sparky, Heavy Metal, and Happy. A Happy Covid Briefing Bingo. Yes, possums, I almost didn’t believe it myself. That was a big vaccine news day. As is today, ah, but that would be telling! You must read on to get to the good stuff, including my favourite tie. And lots and lots of red and white.
American Robin by Christina Rollo
Here is the Trudeau And Co Power Hour broadcast from CPAC. Youtube suggested I watch the CBC version, but as you know, possums, I’m working on my French and CBC has those sweet federal dollars to hire someone to talk over the French bits and tell you basically exactly what was just said in English, but again and run through the translationifier for extra word salad goodness, so anyway, here’s our video:
On Parliament Hill, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discusses the federal government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic. He also comments on the death of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. The prime minister is joined virtually by federal ministers Patty Hajdu (health), Anita Anand (public services and procurement), and Dominic LeBlanc (intergovernmental affairs), as well as Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, and Dr. Howard Njoo, deputy chief public health officer.
And our cards, and I guess if we’re gonna be doing these until September I can go ahead and create a new card after all. Thought we’d seen the last of these, but apparently not.
raincoaster 