Tradition

My annual search for the worst Christmas wrapping paper I can find hasn't gone particularly well this year, mainly due to my lack of time to search for some. (Working 10+ hours every day leading up to Christmas probably has something to do with that.) The dollar store at Danforth and Broadview turned up a contender tonight though: silver foil Santa paper, on which a somewhat disturbingly infantized Santa is cross-country skiing using candy canes for skis.

Pros:

- Santa was apparently hit by the global recession too and could no longer afford the upkeep on reindeer, forcing him instead to get around on edible skis
- it's really crappy foil, and impossible to cut straight because the edge frays as soon as you cut it
- I'm hoping the sack on his back contains a sniper rifle instead of toys, indicating that Santa is an avid biathlon aficionado
- it's made in Indonesia. Nothing says Christmas like Indonesia.

Cons:

- it's reasonably pretty
- it's got a cheerful-looking Santa on it


All in all it's not bad for a first effort, but I'm hoping I luck into something worse/better later this week. Nothing's gonna top that green and silver cosmonaut paper I found one year up on St. Clair though.

Wait For It... Wait For It...

So with the plans to close Guantanamo proceeding apace and a facility found to house those who the government deems unreleasable, how long until:

a) some wingnut blogger claims that the weekend jailbreak in the Philippines was just a trial run for a similar attempt to storm whatever American jail we move Gitmo prisoners to?; and

b) some idiot in Congress repeats that claim in a desperate, pathetic display of NIMBY-ism?

Or has a) happened already, and I just missed it?

Caple Goes Rogue

It would be nice if the hypocritical shite Caple points out in regards to Tiger Woods coverage were only true of sports journalism, and not the whole wretched profession.

It would also be nice if I had Tiger Woods' bank account.

Win

The busker this morning at Union Station was dressed like Bob Crachit wearing his Sunday best (complete with dilapidated stovetop hat), and playing Greensleeves on his harp.

Yes, harp. And not as in 'harmonica'.

I Want One

If and when I am a homeowner, I may just get Werner Sobek to design it for me.

This is a better pic of one of his Triple Zero homes. Not to date myself as an old Claremont X-Men fan, but that'd probably be as close as I'll ever get to living in Forge's swanky all-glass-and-hologram-projectors pad.

Onward Christian Soldiers

The DC Archdiocese has declared that if Washington is going to become a new Sodom and legalize same-sex marriage, they're going to cease performing all charitable activities within the city.

The excuse is that the law would require them to extend same-sex benefits to employees.

"If the city requires this, we can't do it," Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. "The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem."

I'm sure there will be a big rush of church employees looking to get hitched with their same-sex partners once the law passes...

If politics have become more important to the archdiocese than charity, then they're in the wrong business.

OK, I Admit It

I welled up a bit watching this.



No matter what else you have to say about Sully, his continued show of solidarity for the kids in Iran fighting to take their country back has been amazing.

Oh Noes!

ACORN has infiltrated the judicial system!

Insert usual snark here. Frankly I'm bored with the whole thing. If the best the wingnuts can do for a boogeyman is ACORN, they deserve political death.

This Is a Fun Game

Let's try to think of worse safe words than 'green balloons':

Antidisestablishmentarianism

Paraskavedekatriaphilia

Semantic antics

Andrei Kirilenko (shout-out to all my peeps in Utah with that one)

The Raptors Wake Up

I said at the beginning of the season that it might not be until December that the Raptors started gelling as a team, what with the roster upheaval and all.

It looks like gelling time has arrived. After winning a tough road game in overtime last night in Washington, they are currently running the Bulls out of their own building. One sequence in particular stood out for me: the Raps reeled off four consecutive possessions, collecting offensive rebounds off three straight misses before Calderon buried a three to pretty much end the game with two quarters to go.

If you've been watching the Raps for a while you know how mind-bogglingly weird that sequence is. They're the team, historically, giving up all those offensive boards, not the team ripping them down.

They were up by 20 at the half, then extended that to 30+ in the third quarter (which had been their let-down quarter in the first two months, especially after a big first half -- the Denver game was probably the most egregious example.) It got so bad that on the last possession of the third quarter, Jarret Jack let the clock wind down by tucking the ball under his arm, leaning over and re-tying his shoelace.

In the annals of awesome dick moves in sporting events, that has to rank way up there.

After looking like total crap last week, the Raps are suddenly not just looking like a playoff team, they're looking like a dangerous one. They've hit bottom (coughAtlantacough), plunged through the crucible and come together as a team in the fire.

The Raps (Antoine Wright excepted... he still looked like his head wasn't in the game tonight) have figured out how they need to play to win basketball games. Now, they just have to keep doing it.

One more thing: Bryan Colangelo has done a great job building the roster not just for this year, but for next. If Bosh stays, great -- they've got five guys who can score in the starting lineup and some good plug-n-play pieces off the bench, and a roster that can play defense just well enough when they need to. If Bosh walks though, they can just find a defensive load to play center and block some shots, move Bargnani to the four and still have a dangerous offense with a better defense. Either way, it should be a solid team.

OK, two more things: DeMar DeRozan is going to be friggin' awesome. In a season or two he'll be Vince Carter without the sucky attitude. It's going to be a blast watching him evolve into Air Canada 2.0.

Next Stop: Blackface

I've noticed my repertoire has become very vanilla over the last couple of months. I'm not doing as much Prince (which is usually my go-to non-white guy) for one thing, but even beyond that the Motown and soul experiments seem to have mostly disappeared.

This must change, and not just with me nutting up and trying I Know You Got Soul (gulp) at Hip-Hop Karaoke. There's all kinds of stuff I've been meaning to try at 'regular' karaoke sometime: Use Me, Family Affair, Stand By Me...

This is the month for at least some of those.

Most Ridiculous Scrabble Game Ever

Remember that Facebook Scrabble game where I made the two 90-point plays back-to-back, and typed a word in the chat box (Justice!) and promptly got handed the letters to spell it?

I've now collected four bingos in eight plays: REZONING, JUSTICE, AUNTIES and now LIBERATE. I have 397 points. Off eight words. It's sick.

GUP FTW

The Grand Undead Party meme taken to its logical conclusion:


Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

The New Me

I think I need to say something about my Brainsgiving experience.

First, it was a tremendous show. Ryan Belleville absolutely killed; if you see his name on a bill, kick the walker out from under a grandma to get inside the venue. He's got the chops, the material and the on-stage energy to be absolutely huge. Jillian Thomas also more than earned her three-year merit badge. Pat Thornton spun his usual crazy gold, Statutory Jape were excellent... hell, everyone was good.

Including (so I've been told) me.

Keith and Amanda talked me into closing the show (Pat was the headliner... I got the traditional vaudeville "act who performs while people are leaving the theatre" slot). I went on stage as a lounge singer version of Carl Jung, serenading our brain mascot with a version of Dream Weaver in mixed English/pidgin German (oooo, TraumWeber, I believe you can get me through die nacht, etc etc), which then morphed into 99 Luftballons.

Of course on stage, all the fractured German I'd crammed into my brain fled, and I just garbled out some harsh syllables and hoped no one would notice (or at least, everyone would be polite enough not to call me on it afterwards, which they didn't.) But dammit, it felt good to actually be performing, backed by a real band. Way better than even the thrill of live band karaoke.

More importantly, my own brain has been working better since Saturday night. I'm writing some good stuff, and kicking out some wicked ideas. Last night at "regular" karaoke I tried something batshit crazy (Roundabout by Yes) and it was mostly solid (I bluffed my way through the bridge, but I doubt even Jon Anderson call pull that thing off these days.)

I may even start doing some open mic stand-up, just to see if I can.

Up until now, when it came time to help out with Brainsgiving (or the Eyes show last year, when we did the marathon Nuit Blanche show) I was always reluctant. I was a writer, not a performer (and a lover not a fighter).

Today, I feel like a performer too.

November's Travesties

35 different songs, not including the pseudo-German TraumWeber... err, Dream Weaver/99 Luftballons medley at Brainsgiving:

19th Nervous Breakdown - Rolling Stones
Animal Nitrate - Suede
Battle of Who Could Care Less - Ben Folds Five
Because the Night - Patti Smith Group
Bette Davis Eyes - Kim Carnes
Changes - David Bowie
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da - Police
Deacon Blues - Steely Dan
Doctor My Eyes - Jackson Browne
Don't Think Twice, It's Alright - Bob Dylan
Dragula - Rob Zombie
Five Years - David Bowie
Fuck Her Gently - Tenacious D
High School Confidential - Rough Trade
Hungry Like the Wolf - Duran Duran
In Bloom - Nirvana
Kooks - Davd Bowie
Lawyers, Guns and Money - Warren Zevon
Lean On Me - Bill Withers
Lose Yourself - Eminem
Lucky Man - Verve
Mississippi Queen - Mountain
Not Fade Away - Rolling Stones
Paperback Writer - Beatles
Pulling Mussels From the Shell - Squeeze
Roundabout - Yes
Save It For Later - English Beat
Spread Your Wings - Queen
Sunglasses At Night - Corey Hart
The Letter - Box Tops
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - The Band
Up On Cripple Creek - The Band
Watching the Detectives - Elvis Costello
When Love Comes To Town - U2 w/BB King
You Sexy Thing - Hot Chocolate

Aw, Shucks

Scratch Huckabee's name off the list of "viable" Pub presidential candidates in 2012.

It's too bad. Huck's a right entertaining fella, and he certainly would have livened up the proceedings.

On the other hand, without Huckabee to split the fundie vote, Palin's path to the nomination gets a bit easier...

Gaaah

In the annals of stupid art ideas, this has got to be in the top 10. "Hey, you know what would be awesome? Let's take a great painting created to convey a sense of three dimensions within the confines of two-dimensional space, and use CGI to make it three dimensional!"

If Picasso had wanted anyone to see the backsides of the figures in Guernica, he would have painted them. That was the entire point of Cubism.

Maybe next, someone can play connect-the-dots with Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

(via Sully, who completely fails to get in his usual Burkean dander over the pointless jazzing up of a painting that needs no help.)

Hondurans Ignore Fake Election in Droves

Al has a picture worth a thousand... whachamacallems...

Weekend Craziness

On Saturday I'll be taking part in the third annual Brainsgiving comedy benefit show in support of St. Michael's Hospital Neurotrauma ICU. I will be playing a dragon, and Carl Jung.

Then on Sunday, Honduras will have a sham election that hopefully won't tear the country in two.

The TTC's Bad PR Clinic Part III

It gets worse.

1) The TTC is continuing their "tokens are sold out" line of bullshit, and have now begun selling paper tickets instead of tokens.

The very same paper tickets they pulled out of circulation last year because they were deemed too easy to counterfeit.

Translation: "We'd rather get ripped off than have our regular customers put some tokens aside in advance of a fare hike."

Oh, by the way, how do I know the supposed token shortage is bullshit? The automated machines still dispense them, although they're now programmed to only sell one at a time.

2) The TTC followed up their useless flyers advising people to move down the southbound platform at Bloor/Yonge by setting up wooden barriers during morning rush hour to try and force people coming off the Bloor/Danforth line to walk fifty feet out of the their way before boarding the train.

Need to run to catch that southbound train before it leaves? The TTC spits in your face. Like to board the train at the back because that's where the exit is at your station? Go fuck yourself, is apparently the TTC's response.

The first morning I saw the barrier, there were 10 TTC employees loitering around it, plus four TTC pseudocops. Maybe after the fare hike, they'll be able to afford six cops!

3) I decided to switch to the tickets for the moment to guard my small stash of tokens. When I gently bitched to the collector about how ridiculous it was, given that tickets are useless at unmanned entrances, she nodded in agreement and told me to make sure the higher-ups in the TTC heard my complaint. Not in order to release the tokens, mind you -- she said it was so the TTC would start manning those entrances.

Yes, additional labour costs which could be used to justify further rate hikes... another brilliant solution to a fabricated problem.

I hope the weather doesn't get too cold this winter. I suddenly have the urge to do a lot of walking.

P-H-O-N-Y

Palin's book can't even cite the rules to Scrabble correctly.

I mean, Jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick, did no one fact-check or edit the thing at all? (Yes, that was rhetorical). How hard would it have been to say, "Everyone took great pride in hoarding the rarer/more valuable/any-goddamn-phrase-you-want-that-means-'worth more points'-without-actually-naming-letters tiles and slapping them down..."

Sheesh.

In a completely unrelated event, the weirdest thing happened to me in Facebook Scrabble. I just started a fifth game with Steve-O from Neutral having just tied the series 2-2, barely squeaking out the fourth game by three points (he had a G left on his rack. You do the math). He had the gall (he won the second game by three points) to bitch about it in chat just as I was set up for a bingo (REZONING, on a double word, 90 points, cha-ching!). I typed "Justice!" into the chat box, played my seven tiles, and received... J-U-S-T-I-C-E on my rack.

Needless to say neither of us were able to duplicate that bit of cosmic weirdness afterwards by typing words into the chat box and then receiving those letters.

Channeling My Inner Sully

OK, let's take it as a given that Sully is right about Levi's cool demeanor in the face of Palin's attacks means he really has something devastating on her, and isn't just a reflection of the sense of invincibility you'd expect from a teenage hockey player.

What the heck could Levi have? It would have to be something tangible; otherwise, it's just a he said/she said situation.

It would have to be something too awful for her devotees to ignore or shrug off; otherwise, it wouldn't be much of a threat to such a talented dissembler as Palin.

And it would have to be something that Levi would have a reason beyond any sympathy for Palin herself to hold back on releasing; otherwise, he'd have let the world know already.

I can think of only one thing off the top of my head that would fit all those criteria, and also tie into Levi's statements that the Palin marriage was a facade: email/text message/photographic proof of Palin making advances towards Levi, and/or of a sexual relationship between the two of them.

Something like that would provide Levi with actual proof, not just hearsay; would kill Palin dead as a political figure; and would be unpleasant at best for Bristol, someone Levi wouldn't want to hurt needlessly.

That theory is, of course, nothing but pure, reckless, unfounded, mean-spirited speculation on my part. But it fits the facts as Sully presents them.

The TTC's Bad PR Clinic Part II

After announcing their upcoming price increase, the TTC immediately started rationing tokens, limiting purchases to five at a time. OK, fine, no big deal, that's just a minor inconvenience.

Yesterday, however, signs started going up on all collector booths saying 'Tokens Sold Out', and they started selling "temporary tickets" instead. This was clearly designed to prevent token hoarding in advance of the upcoming price change.

That'd be a smart move on their part, except for the fact that some subway entrances are only accessible by token or Metropass. So if you don't have a pass, and can't buy tokens, and want to use one of those entrances... the TTC is telling you to go to hell.

Genius!