Peter MacKay...

...Never a man to back away from a Challenger...

Hero worship

Autumn overtakes us coyotes with all the wit and subtlety of a drunken buncha city cowboys shooting varmints from the box of a careening half-ton. So, it seems, do the ripening fruits of the Cons' comfortable federal majority.

In the flush of their win (A flush that'll rattle through Canada's sclerotic political plumbing until something inevitably breaks... I digress), they've wasted no time ticking off citizens who didn't vote for 'em and items on their long-deferred bucket list: dusting and re-hanging old queen portraits at Foreign Affairs (Minister John Baird is apparently a fan of queens. We have no information if he's a fan of foreign affairs. The evidence is murky. And I've just digressed a second time in one paragraph.) Pushing an overreaching bill to throw money the country doesn't have at crime that doesn't exist. Hiring $90,000-a-day consultants to tell them how to save money. (Now they admit they don't actually know how...?) And oh, hey, doing their level best to rehabilitate John Diefenbaker.

F'rinstance by renaming icebreakers and public buildings, most lately Ottawa's old city hall, now a satellite office of Foreign Affairs, which for decades has lived up the block in the blasphemously-named Pearson building. For the kids who haven't blown us off for Twitter yet, Pearson was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a diplomat as well as a liberal PM. Diefenbaker's diplomatic coups seem to have been confined to alternately boring and pissing off John F. Kennedy.

Yet vast mittsful of latter day ReformaTories have declared John Diefenbaker their personal hero. I suspect because they were in utero or in diapers in his heyday, so have no personal experience of the jowly old coot. They do not recall why his own embarrassed party belatedly kidney-punched him, kicking and screaming, into extended care.

Certain six-thousand-year-old coyotes were around. And we can tell you. He was a mean-spirited partisan, a quivering, glittering-eyed paranoid whose idea of a really great joke was to verbally acid-wash non-conservatives. His grip on reality was sweaty and tenuous. Many of his policies were logical looneytunes. Long after his best-by, he soldiered on in Parliament, resurrecting petty gripes best left in history's dustbin and hallucinating happier endings for himself.

Oh, ummm, wait... Sigh.

I'm the kind of guy who makes Google poems

* I'm the kind of guy who thinks fotos made by fotografers might want to mean something.

* I'm the kind of guy who can say in 100 words what most say in twelve. By choice.

* I'm the kind of guy who likes to ask a lot of people questions for reviews and do my own research before I buy something so I know that I'm getting a quality product.

* I'm the kind of guy that knows the names of the store clerks where I stop and get my daily morning Diet Coke; I'm the kind of guy who will let you in front of me in traffic or in line at the store

* The itching is horrible, but I'm the kind of guy who doesn't seek medical treatment right away. It's not a macho thing.

* Look, I'm the kind of guy who loves to ridicule blatant Monster Hunter rip-offs.

* You have to remember, I'm the kind of guy who has to look that up.

* I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?

* I'm the kind of guy who strongly believes in doing what you're passionate about to make money.

* I'm the kind of guy who just goes out and tries to catch as much as I can every day and make as much money as I can in every event, and then I sit back and see how that hand plays out.

* I'm the kind of guy who visits a gallery or museum and can't understand the people who see things in art. I just see it as art.

* I would tell you to just stop reading and listen to it, but I'm the kind of guy who likes to keep that sort of thing to myself..

* I'm the kind of guy who likes to take responsibility and I like the pressure.

* Like I said before, I'm the kind of guy who goes about my business and not try to think
about things like that or things that are out of my control too much.

* I'm the kind of guy who says things sometimes just to make myself laugh, but she would just catch me making jokes for me.

* I'm the kind of guy who does a lot of self-expression on my laptop

* I'm the kind of guy who takes pictures of himself.

* I'm the kind of guy who's constantly trying to improve myself by reading up on whatever I can.

* I'm the kind of guy who likes to have my hands in the nitty-gritty and keeping stealthy until having things really, really ready, but I recently reached the point where I realized that I needed to flip the coin and get out of the office

* I'm the kind of guy who… Will wake up to kill a mosquito in the middle of the night, but won't wake up and open the door for someone ringing the doorbell in the morning.

* I'm the kind of guy who fixes stuff only when it stops working, or when its broken.

* On the other hand, I'm the kind of guy who changes my devices every year

[source]

Phoning it in

For about six-odd millenia, human behaviour has more or less baffled us semimythical coyotes.

It is September. A neoconservative prime minister has his, ummm, fully transparent mitts, fully wrapped around the sooty levers of federal power, manipulatin' dog-knows-what with 'em. Summer's green leaves are beginning to turn colour. And perhaps most foreboding of all, our medicinal dark chocolate stash is damn near empty. We are necessarily forced toward the philosophical. You know -- cogitatin' on the big unanswerable questions.

Take the ever-thinner smartphone. Now so impossibly thin that it cannot spoil the drape of that summerweight silk Italian suit or Chanel shift that every smartphone owner wears. Because you can afford to own those, even after you sign your soul over to Satan, who administers all of the more serious phone data plans. I digress. Oopsy.

Nude, the latest devices would dance comfortably beneath a ten millimetre high limbo bar. Ummm, so, basically, so thin and delicate that many of the fone phashionistas (at least the ones on the Route 14 bus...) feel an urgent need to wrap their statusy, ever-so-svelte electronic fetishes in even fetishier stretchy rubber slipcases. Roots' f'rinstance, clocks in at three millimetres.

Since most of these elegant devices apparently now barely power themselves through an average working day before collapsing in an anorexic puddle of melted lithium ions somewhere just slightly south of your early afternoon Starbux break, would not that extra three millimetres you're gonna add to the thing anyway not be better dedicated to, say, battery space? Just askin'.

And I've also been lately pondering: why lately am I so attracted to the comfort of hot soup? And if I and my similarly disgraceful friends make off to a Chinatown eatery to demolish huge bowls of soup, are we guilty of wonton destruction?

Just askin' the big questions... it's what us coyotes do right now.

(Flickr image by Quosquos, licensed under Creative Commons)

Probably only coincidence

Inquiring coyotes can't help noticing how carefully all the government news releases, media stories and pundits have been pussyfooting around the suspicious confluence of today's two great television events: the fact that August 31, 2011 is the, ummm, drop-dead date stamped upon not only the Great Digitul Switchover, but CTV News anchor Lloyd Robertson's retirement from the 'lectronical firmament.



Both huge! Both televisiony! Has nobody but me connected the two? Even though they hover blatantly in front of us like giant hi-def bats, everybody is carefully pretending they aren't in the room.



(In related news, coyotes are mourning the loss of analog rabbit ears. Digital ones are practically inedible. I digress. Ahem.)



Anyway, it's probably nothing for torch-carrying global villagers across the nation to worry about. However. An ever more parchment-complexioned Lloyd has been calling late night TV bingo for so unnaturally long that even people that don't believe in the undead, openly call him "Count Floyd" to his face now.



So those of us attuned to the semimythical realms, while not feeling certain about this one (Call it a theory. Like economics. I digress again.) suspect pretty strongly that vampires, whom everyone knows cannot be seen in mirrors, may also be incapable of manifesting themselves on digital TV. So, perfect time to retire.



Ummm. Probably only coincidence. But I'm just sayin'...