Searches that led people to my blog yesterday:
curling porn, "And with strange aeons death may die, " viggo mortensen porn, cocaine corner, wendy messner cbc, hooker story, red corvette middle age
Supah. So somewhere out there are several people with unslaked curling fetishes, some random Cthulhu cultists, and many, many sexually deprived, desperate middle-aged keyboard jockeys.
But…Wendy Messner????? Now THAT is kinky.
Behold, my gym:
No, it's not a Milla Jovovitch movie. It's what I did today, for the first time in at least six months; I laced up my skates, swore vigorously at the leaden and lumpy sky, and hit the Seawall, fortunately only metaphorically. I did, in fact, return to Lost Lagoon.
I am absolutely fucking hysterically giddy and a half to report that now, after two years of developer-based interference, you can finally skate all the way from the Main Street Viaduct to Stanley Park continuously, without any stupid detours for construction or stairs or elevators, or trying to sneak through the bridgeway from the Seabus because, face it, they have cameras and loudspeakers and they live to make you look like an ass for trying to sneak through that goddam bridgeway that your own tax dollars paid for in the first place.
Here's the secret: You skate along under Canada Place, as usual. Keep going. At a certain point, the roadway bends to the left sharply to go up to connect somehow with Burrard and there's a parkade on the right just at that corner. Go into the parkade and out the back end of it; you'll be right by the seaplane dock. The seaplane dock place has a beautiful, freshly-paved walk/skate/bikeway that connects, within a few dozen feet, with the Seawall. Voilà! 
Don't say I never did nuthin' for ya! This is the only place on the whole of the World Wide Web you'll find that super-seecrud seekrit.
Every time I get out and get some exercise I feel like such a twat for all the hours I wasted sitting on my butt on my really quite uncomfortable office chair, thinking gee, I really should go out and get some exercise. I mean, not only is it doing my caboosage some good, but today while out doing what is essentially a personal-development chore, I saw two Great Blue Herons, a Bald Eagle, innumerable ravens, a Cooper's Hawk, four or five kinds of ducks, a seal, and a wolf.
AND I WAS DOWNTOWN!
I can’t believe I went to the hottest restaurant in New Westminster and they had two televisions hanging from the ceiling, playing curling. I don’t think I live in the same country as the rest of these people do; this is a cultural divide that cannot be bridged. It’s all very well for me to lord it over Americans and the English, yammering on about PC and Relativism and Pierre Trudeau, but there is, let’s face it, no multicultural initiative that can allow the curling fans and the I-suppose-they-call-us-mundanes to coexist. Hence Newfoundland; it’s a 21st Century sort of reservation/theme park for curlers.
When I get back to Vancouver, I’m sneaking into Delilah’s and not leaving until they throw me out and given how their clientele normally behaves (to say nothing of the staff) I may be there for the rest of my life, sustaining myself on smoked oysters, olives, lime wedges, and vodka-infused apricots. That’s all the food groups, right?
In any case, after several years on the Downtown EastSide, if there is nothing else I know, I do know how to give Canada what it wants:
Last week it was all about feminine hygiene; this week, it’s all about curling and cowichan sweaters. By putting the two of these singularly-unbeatable elements together in one mighty blog post, I have apparently trounced all 102 of my other posts and generated a media monster of Frankensteinian proportions. No other post even comes close to the day-after-day, unassailable popularity of the post about bloody curling!
Did you even know that they closed the schools in Newfoundland when the curling final was on, so the kids could stay home and watch? Geez, I think that’s a bit optimistic. I mean, have you been to Newfoundland? I’m not sure they all have electricity, let alone cable. Hell, I’m not sure they all have opposable thumbs. Cartier described it as, “The land God gave to Cain,” and I don’t think he’s given it back, either. Ever met a Newfie? We should all take note of the fact that the definitive Newfie song was written over a bajillion and a half years ago by a 15-year-old cabin boy and they’ve come up with nothing better since.
They were so thrilled to have a celebrity describe their godforsaken rock, they turned the quote into a folk song. Remember what Tom Lehrer said about folk songs? “The reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.” Makes hella sense, eh?
Long before the white man came
To haul the shining cod
When the wild and stately caribou
Traversed the snow-clad sod
The native man he walked these hills
And he fished the silvery lakes
Content with what the land would yield
Not one bit more would takeBut soon the word it was put out
To every country
For to find a northern passage from
The sea to the shining sea
And the first to come were trappers
Then the men of God who preached
That they would return in hundredfold
An equal share to eachFor years the men of Newfoundland
Those fishermen so poor
Sent down each year in springtime for
To fish on the Labrador
But soon the fish they were all gone
With the fur it was the same
And the native suffered silently
In the land God gave to CainThe years went by, and as time passed
The companies moved in
For ore, and wood, and the hydro power
The struggle it did begin
And the working men on both sides
Tried to live their lives the same
And the native suffered silently
In the land God gave to CainBut now it’s for the future
Both sides do shed a tear
For the old ways they are passing like
The caribou and hare
And now they all are wondering
If it was all in vain
And the native suffers silently
In the land God gave to Cain
raincoaster 