The PM on YouTube

Beforehand, the Toronto Star described it as the PM going viral. Maybe because it was as painful as herpes?

The morning after, Canuck media were still aTwitter (heh...) over a guy, rigidly fiberglass of hair and manner, churning out pre-scripted blahblah in response to cherry-picked citizen questions on YouTube.

So, what was the real rationale? Ummm, lessee, most of us use YouTube to upload any lame crap we feel like. Oh, wait...!

That cell phone law

I held out some hope last fall when Ontario enacted a law banning drivers from using handheld cell phones.

Huh. Didn't make a damn bit of difference. Drivers still yak - and endanger lives - openly.

The observant among you may note the statute exempts police. I'm left to ponder why, since the law came in, every cop who drives past suddenly has a handset glued to their ear. How much back-channel chatter do they need? And why? I digress.

I've filed tonsa anecdotal evidence in my doggy rounds through Ottawa's mean streets. I hafta say, it proves to me that cell phone addicts make the streets meaner. Drivers, walkers, it doesn't matter - I've been mowed down by both, and my once-fine bushy tail is a stomped shadow of its former self.

People on phones do not see their surroundings when they look inward to channel the other end of the line. I have not figured out the mechanism by which drivers think they should continue to (ab)use phones when research suggests strongly that they're so gosh darn bad at it, but the conviction seems universal. Salient signs are a thousand-yard stare and a deep obliviosity to surroundings. So much obliviosity that pedestrian offenders' glazed eyes do not even flicker as they lurch against other sidewalk citizens.

I suspect the only reason everybody thinks they can drive and talk on a cell at the same time is because the very act makes them so heedless that they never register the carnage in their wakes. Recently, f'rinstance, some nit in a high-buck Teutonic conveyance was so other-focussed that he nearly splattered me across a red-lit crosswalk. The shock on his face after he screeched to a hasty halt was compounded when I planted my muddy paws on his window sill, stuck my pointy snout in, and conversationally suggested he turn off his fucking phone so as to forestall another near-murder at the next traffic signal.

Sadly, he was not so shocked that he couldn't whine back a shaky riposte. Along the lines of, "Oh yeah? Fuck you, too!" But we both knew it was the lamest of bids to save his red-lit face...

Send in the Clowns

Every time that I notice this mannequin, I am startled for a second.

But, despite her clownish hair and her maniacal smile, she has excellent fashion sense.

Yummy Bunny

Dear Coyote,

I took this picture just for you.

Amitié, Woodsy

They were promoting Alice in Wonderland

A Taliban bobsled team?

The Independent Observer and me wuz debriefing the other night, after the Games That Must Not be Named©®™, when one of us started asking dumb, semimythical questions about a suspiciously illogical link between sporting performance and national pride.

I'm not saying our Prime Minister ascribes to this dubious philosophy. But only because it seems kind of obvious already from the quality of his recent public electioneering ummm, pronouncements on the topic. That and his disturbing recent penchant for athlete-glomming photo-ops. I digress.

Anyway, some people seemed to place an awful lot of emphasis on a warlike beating of chests and thumping of rivals' noses into the snow. Almost as if they saw the games as a must-win-at-all-costs surrogate for military endeavour. Kinda like, say, certain failed former East European SSRs now known to have indulged in the odd steroidal binge during the Cold War.

But maybe this kinda stuff ain't much of a skate from the original Olympic ideal (Oops. Damn! Named 'em...). I mean, very early games may well have been set up to give warring Greek city-states a more wholesome outlet for their rivalries than, ummm, epic bloodshed.

So it occurred to us that maybe we could institute world peace if we just invited everybody to the games. Why couldn't everybody just get along? Maybe the Taliban are just cranky because they never get invited to play! And wouldn't it be cool to see a Taliban bobsled team instead of a Taliban insurgency?

Especially the part where they plant improvised trackside bombs to blow up rival bobsleds...