What's this Two Lip Fest, anyway?

I don't get it. Why hold a Two Lip Fest? Makes no sense to celebrate something so ordinary. Doesn't everybody have a pair?

Or is it supposed to be about the kissing...? Like in those old country songs, where there's always a line about "pressing your two lips close to mine..."?

Top SeKrit Public Announcement

Pandora and coyote are pleased to announce that they are ramping up an Ultra Cosmic Top SeKrit Project, final results of which will be released in due time. It will be highly secret and scientific, involving ummm, really science-y secret things.

Do not try to find out what we're up to, or you will face consequences. B-a-a-a-a-d ones.

Pandora's sprightly dimples camouflage extensive international training in the dark arts of elocution instruction, which have equipped her with an infinite number of ruthlessly exotic ways to stun, torture, maim and/or kill those who would try to subvert our purpose.

Coyote’s semi-mythical snout camouflages an extensive set of real pointy chompers, and he owns cookbooks full of exotic cat recipes that would make a Tartar blanch. Oh. And millennia of experience have made him kinda sneaky about the bite-and-run thing.

If, in the course of your daily rounds you accidentally spot us doing Ultra Cosmic Top SeKrit Stuff, look away. Leave quickly. Go someplace else. Hide. Tell no one. If you do tell someone -- or worse yet, if you actually try to follow us or question us on this matter, we absolutely cannot be held responsible for what accidentally happens to you. But it will be b-a-a-a-a-d... and we'll really enjoy doing it.

Thank you. You may now commence floating the usual wild and groundless speculations.

Ottawa's looming graffiti crisis

Lately I've been reading overheated media coverage of Ottawa's graffiti problem. You know, Krylon Invasion, city councillors buying business constituents high pressure washers to zap offending spraybombage - like that. I've been ambivalent. I know a lot of it defaces private property, but we coyotes like certain graffiti. Some of it is really beautiful, and when I see it, it makes me happy. I speak of the true public artists. Taggers? Not so much. May their sooty black aerosol cans explode in their sweaty little mitts. I digress.

Saturday, though, I sprayed a mouthful of my customary breakfast (Piping hot crumpets, cat marmalade, steaming mug of fresh-brewed vitriol) all over my morning Petfinder. Patrick Curran, OC Transpo's business development manager, was floating a trial balloon about selling transit station names to the highest-bidding corporate sponsors. Some city councillors and the usual suspects on the editorial page seemed to like it.

The argument is that Transpo needs the money, and there's no more space for ads on the buses. Seems to me that maybe the city should just fund the service properly. But dreaming up billion dollar tunnels and harebrained 'innovations' is way more fun than making sure the existing bus system works well in the most basic ways.

Mr. Curran rather disingenuously notes that St. Laurent transit station already is named for the attached mall, and argues that opens the door to more of the same. Nice try at historical revisionism to support a thin-end-of-the-wedge propaganda technique, but, ummm, no. The mall is labelled for the rather prominent nearby boulevard that the mall promoters swiped its name from.

Ottawa is a town where, when a boneheaded fuckwit has a idea that shrieks out for rapid trashing, then tries to smoke it past us by self-diagnosing it as 'innovative', a buncha other boneheaded fuckwits will nod sagely and murmur, "Mmmm... innovative!" It's how decisions are made. But non-sequitur-ish corporate sponsorship isn't innovative. It's already been inflicted elsewhere. Yoohoo! Senators Coliseum? Which became the Corel Centre? An asshatted monument to momentary corporate hubris - and sanctioned graffiti, really. Now it's ScotiaBank Place...

Transit is about moving people efficiently. Renaming transit stations - all of which now (very handily) key on nearby geographical features - is not. We already let businesses deface the cityscape by smearing it with their kind of graffiti. We just call them 'logos', 'signs' and 'advertising'. Why let 'em further confuse a bus ride, too?

The Dark Underside of Blogging

Black and blue and squirrelly all over

I had a doctor's appointment over the lunch hour last week and, afterwards, decided to pop home for a moment.

I was distressed to find a rather large black squirrel lying quite dead in the middle of my winding driveway, just a few paces from the moat that surrounds the observatory.

Did I forget to pay the Italian taxes on ESI's global headquarters? I wondered. Is this how the good fathers of Tuscany remind Canadian residents their payments are overdue?

I fork over a lot of property taxes in this country, too.

Now is the chance, I thought, for the City of Ottawa to make up for its lacklustre, sporadic and altogether uninspired snow-removal efforts on my Centretown street.

After all, the squirrel, though on my driveway, was actually on city property, which extends several metres inward from the curb. And you can't be too careful, right? West Squirrel Virus may be running amok, infecting the downtown core.

I dialled 311 and after a little push-button menu-manoeuvring was duly assured a city roads crew would come pick up my ex-rodent friend. It was dark when I got home, so I didn't notice till the next day that someone, likely a neighbour, had simply moved the squirrel slightly to the right, atop a small stone ledge that borders my driveway.

Another call to the city. Yes, at this point I could have bagged the fluffy-tailed critter (sorry, Coyote) myself. But it was the principle of the thing. Again I was told the squirrel would be gone by day's end. No such luck.

Day Three: yet another call, and another promise. But as of suppertime Friday, my open-air squirrel cemetery was still thriving. Call four: I was told a supervisor would phone me shortly to advise when the road crew would arrive. An hour passed. Still nothing.

Finally, I walked outside with a plastic bag, grabbed a shovel and scooped the poor animal inside, then disposed of him as nobly as I could under the circumstances. Death is never pretty. And the whole thing made me a little sad.

I called the city for the fifth time. Don't bother coming, I said. It didn't seem right to make the squirrel, or me, wait any longer.

Photo: Squirrel, not exactly as illustrated.