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.
Morning, Possums! I wasn’t sure we were going to cover this particular briefing, because we did get poked yesterday and we weren’t sure how we’d be feeling (this is the Vice-Regelian “we” you understand) today. But we are good, other than feeling like we’ve been sleeping in a pair of too-tight goggles and somewhat creaky in the joints but then, it’s a glimpse of the inevitable gimpy future for which we should be grateful, I suppose.
In related news, I am also feeling relatively invulnerable from an invisible and ubiquitous deadly enemy, but then if you know anything about the fights I get into online you’ll know this is basically just standard operating procedure.
Let’s get right into it, shall we? We are still doing our Completely Arbitrary Mystery Nomenclature Theme, and so far we’ve featured:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau provides an update in Ottawa on the federal government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic. He is joined by Procurement Minister Anita Anand.
I’m not the dainty type, Possums. You know that by now. My motto is “49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees attitude,” with “Hard to kill” hot on its heels. I have been called a cross between Dorothy Parker and Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. All to say that you wouldn’t expect me to be the type to own a tutu, let alone two. Or more.
Yes, more.
And I’m still waiting on yet another one to come in, been waiting for four and a half years now, but the pressure is somewhat off, given what I discovered in the closet.
You can find the most amazing things in closets, from sexual identity to Narnia. What I found was tutus. Well, and also a bag of bloody human teeth but more on that later.
The worst Morning After The Day Before of my life.
Flashback to my Accident: I fell down the stairs and landed on my head, nearly bleeding out and giving myself a head injury that would have cost most people their lives, and put an end to my cybersecurity journalism covering hacktivism. Being unable to earn a living, and saddled with a very expensive course of physical therapy, I created a fundraiser, and raised more than expected, so I was able to pay The Sister back for a lot of the help she’d given me over the years, buying glasses, getting my dentistry taken care of (still have a bag of my own decayed fangs upstairs, no idea why I was keeping it in my sock drawer. Now I’m keeping it in the box where my nail polish resides, much more logical), and so on.
As part of the fundraiser, I offered to put a tutu on and pose with a shoe on my head. The problem, Possums, was that I did not own a tutu. A friend volunteered to make me one, but life got in the way as it tends to do, and that tutu is still somewhere in the ether.
It appears that at some point I lost patience (moi? unthinkable!) and ordered a tutu from somewhere else in the ether, and it appears equally that at some point it arrived. And it’s been hanging in the back of my closet for the intervening four years. Who knew?
I do remember when my friend Cathy came for a visit from Vancouver I ordered an extra-special tutu just for the dinner. I was still pretty brain-damaged so I spent much of the dinner staring idly into space, but at least between that and my tissue silk batwing top in baby pink, I looked damn good doing it.
Here is the extra-special tutu:
Of course I got it in my trademark grey.
The other one from the back of the closet is just a plain long skirt with a few layers of tulle on top. In, yes, grey.
The third is only a virtual tutu, but if I recall (which is always a question) it was going to be turquoise or a grey-blue. I was feeling festive that day.
Anyhoodle, clearly I have a photoshoot that I owe you once I decide which shoe to use. Might use the infamous Bus Boots which I wore for seven straight days on the Greyhound, from Victoria to Ottawa. The boot on the head thing is its own kind of chic, as our Grand Vizier Vermine Supreme can attest.
In related Eventually Getting To The Point news, I needed a tutu this morning. For why, you ask? I refer you back to the title. I was in for a poking. And oh, baby, you know how bad I wanted it! A good skirt is a major advantage when you’re looking to get poked, as is a top that shows some skin. No skin, no poke.
Good evening, Possums. We’re a little late with today’s briefing, because as you and I and everyone in this general hemisphere of the Earth knows, our day couldn’t start until the verdict came down in the Derek Chauvin trial for the murder of George Floyd.
Here’s hoping they put him in with the general prison population. That should go well for him.
Not to be dark but if I was this guy and I knew what prison was probably gonna be like for me as the man who burned down America……… I'd just go ahead and bash my brains in against the bars. 24 hour suicide watch.
It’s fun watching people like Tim “Blue Lives Matter And Also I Wear A Beanie Because I’m Bald” Pool realize their ship is sinking, and start swimming.
Better for some of us than for others; like this person, who has a plan, and an awesome and inspirational one at that. This is how you motivate people! This! This is true leadership!
My kid can draw you a few sets of flames whenever you’re ready to decide
Also she says “no offense mommy I’m glad I was born but probably I want this instead of kids too”
A man who does not have a plan, let alone one of awesomeness or inspirationalitivity, is Doug Ford, Officially Still Premier Of The Province Of Ontario.
Tick.
Tock.
Doug Ford’s Kabinet of Kuriosities
He had a plan. Not sure where he got it. Probably cobbled it together from Roger Stone and Steve Bannon’s old cocktail napkin doodles, which would explain its coherence. He announced it last Friday, and it was promptly thrown back in his face by that cadre of Antifa agitators, the Ontario Provincial Police.
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:
raincoaster 