Thursday 29 November 2012

Working in Ottawa Today --Used Ford for sale


Good morning folks,

I will be working in Ottawa today.

Two events of note in the last few days.    The Grey Cup... Yay Toronto.  And Mayor Ford.

First we'll look at the Grey Cup.  In a strange misread of their market, the execs at the CFL must have momentarily forgot that it is primarily middle aged beer drinking Cheetos! munching men that watch the Grey Cup or any CFL for that matter.  The execs however must have thought that their audience was comprised largely of 12 year old girls.

Enter..  Justin Bieber.  With a physique and attitude that just begs to be crammed into a locker near study hall --please don't misread this as an advocation of teenage bullying, I just call 'em as I seez 'em-- J-Biebs took the stage after a quick tune by Gordon Lightfoot to be met with puzzled WTF looks from fans gazing at the ol'Jumbotron and then boos.

Except of course from the 12 year old girls that were in the bleachers that had pleaded with their dads to take them to see the Grey Cup, and likely whined during the rest of the game, "Can we go home now?"  Yeah, I'm sure a great way to spend $500 a piece.

The execs said that they wanted to expand their audience base into the pre-teen all girl market which has been largely ignored by the CFL, the NFL, the old AFL, and the NCAA.

-----

And then there's Ford.  Sigh.  Sorry folks, I know that my pages continue to be splattered with the foibles of Mayor Rob F.F. Ford and I may or may not have promised to look to other sources of page inspiration, but come on, he just keeps giving me topics.

So .. taken down by his own stubbornness and arrogance.  There are many Ford supporters out there that have a very narrow view of the events and complain that he was ousted over $3k.  But no.  His lawyer even tried to argue that it was only $3k.

The reality was, it was someone else's $3k.  And Ford used City of Toronto letterhead to coerce the cash from the rightful owners for Ford's high school football team, his charity, something that he uses to bolster his image.

City staff told him he should not do it.  He ignored them.  The city's integrity commissioner told him he had to pay the money back.  He ignored him.  He asked Ford 6 times if it had been repaid.  He ignored him.  If it was only $3k then why didn't he simply repay it?

Then city council took up the commissioner's issuer and that's when Ford voted to not pay the money back.  And that is a conflict of interest.

So anyone want to buy a used Ford?  The lease was terminated early, but has surprisingly high miles, the body needs work, it tends to backfire, and it pulls to the right.


Have a good day.  

Friday 23 November 2012

Working in Ottawa today --Man up


Good morning folks,

As previously predicted by yesterday's email, I am working in Ottawa today.

Just a quick follow up to the spray-on fidelity drug, oxytocin.  Seems there was a follow up study on the effects of oxytocin on team sports published in Scientific World Journal.  According to the report, it plays a considerable role in establishing trust and communications on team sport teammates.  So when you watch the Args and Stampeders play on Sunday and you see the squads in a huddle, remember they may just need to cuddle.

Have a good day, Man up. 

Thursday 22 November 2012

Working in Montréal today --No Donkeys

Good morning folks,  I will be working in Montréal today and the fabled land of Ooo-TAW-wa tomorrow.  Yes, a bit early for the email, caught the 7:30 out of YYZ.

Do you know who the Master of Hohenfurth is?  That's okay, it is an obscure reference to the more broadly known Master of Vyšši :)  This guy, who's actual name we have not a clue.. was an active painter in the 1300s.  He painted a number of Christ centric works, Nativity, Annunciation, Adoration, Resurrection, who whole gamut.

If one views the Cycle de la vie de Jésus one will observe a donkey, cow, some goats, oxen, what may be a pack of dogs and oddly.. what I think is an armadillo.  Also surrounding the baby Jesus is a number of persons presumably a mixture of wise and not so wisemen and possibly some traveling buskers.

Now this and other depictions of the nativity are based on the written accounts of Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the insignificant?) a monk from the mid 500s that brought us the birth date of Christ and a revised calendar.

But get this.. In what has been a recurring theme in my weekly emails, he made a MISCALCULATION in the dates.  According to Pope Benedict, in a recently published book -Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, the actual date of birth was not December 25 (Thanks for clearing that up there Pontiff, we already suspected as much) and the year was earlier, perhaps as many as 7 years earlier!

But I and you likely don't care, although it may have an effect of subsequent calculations of exactly when the end of the 13th B'ak'tun will occur.  But more importantly, he asserts that there were no oxen.

No oxen?!

Nope.  And no other animals either. Not even that donkey with the look on his face that he has seen what cannot be unseen.

If this was your anchor, the building block of your faith, the foothold of your doctrine, the leash to your dogma, the tenets of your faith.. yeah.. sorry for bringing it up, hope I have not spoiled your Christmas plans.

Have a good day, blame the Pagans.

Thursday 15 November 2012

Working in Ottawa today --Creepy things


Good morning folks,

I will be working in Ottawa today.

How about a new column segment, Things that sound Romantic, but are down right Creepy?

I was listening to the TV the other evening (yes I rarely watch TV, but I like to listen to it -especially when I am knocking off work at home.  Provides a passage of time indicator, and makes it feel like I am getting some rec time in too), and on the TV some news anchor from Atlanta (I could tell from her accent) was explaining that there was a new wonder drug, a fidelity drug, a keep your husbands from straying drug..

Oxytocin in a spray bottle.

Odd I thought.  Oxytocin is derived from the Greek word Tokos, quick birth.  Not only does it aid in uterine contractions during the aforementioned quick birth, but is also passed to the baby during birth and aids in the pair bonding.  It also facilitates breast feeding.  It is also present in the brains of persons in love, and spikes after having sex.  Yay.

Now then..  A recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience shows that when men in a committed relationship are given oxytocin they stay a farther distance away from unknown, attractive women.  They did not bother testing the effect on such men to unknown, unattractive women, or that unknown woman with the real bitchy attitude, even though she was kinda hot.

Sorry, lost my train of thought there.  So just so we understand, the natural way that a woman can induce an elevated level of oxytocin in her man's brain is to have sex with him, and the desired behaviour modification is to stop the same man from wandering around having sex with unknown, attractive women...  Why doesn't the gal just have sex with him?

Oh.. the staying farther away part of the study, and not mentioned by the Atlanta broad (kind of attractive, but a little too right wing for me) is that the men stayed an average of 2 inches further away.  2 inches? Barely even worth noting, damn, even Sr. Alice used to say we had to dance a foot apart to leave room for the Holy Ghost.

Other methods of keeping your man from straying.. frontal lobotomies, chemical castrations, sending hate emails to the other gal (thought I missed the whole thing about General Petreius love quadrangle didn't you?).  So will women run out and buy the spray bottle and spray it in the face of their sleeping husbands?  Yeah, just a bit too creepy for me.

Have a good day.  Live better chemically.

Thursday 8 November 2012

Working in Montréal today --The Monkey Cage


Good morning folks,

I am working in Montréal today.

I was going to lead off with some blathering about the U.S. election and even had a fairly decent quote to get us going.. Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage --H R Mencken.

I even thought about running with a scathing indictment of the News Media, that bull crap that they feed us under the guise as news when it is merely rating grabbing hyped up headlines..  Even started writing my lead-in .. That bitch Sandy didn't last long enough, the election in the U.S. is over, the only hope for CNN is that the meandering 500 mile border between Turkey and Syria erupts into WAR!

But then it hit me.

This U.S. election was really an assault on a Canadian Industry that we all hold dear.  This was an attack on the B.C. pot growers!

Yes, my friends, the B.C. pot industry is worth around 8 billion dollars to the Canadian economy, and two U.S. states while in the process of voting in Obama for a second term, specifically Washington and Colorado, two of B.C.'s closest pot smoking neighbors, have voted to legalize the bud sprouting leafy recreational plant, which according to Prof. Werner Antweiler, B.C.'s Saunder School of Business, will result in a significant market of B.C. pot go up in smoke.. Nipping B.C.'s profits in the bud?

That's right, defying Federal law they have voted to allow the bud, the cheeba, chronic, dagga, dak, dank, dope, doobage, draw, dro, electric puha, frodis, ganja, grass, green, hash, hay, herb, indo, instaga, kind bud/killer bud, kind, leaf, Mary Jane, nugget, nug, pot, reefer, schwag, sensi, skunk, sticky-icky-icky, tea, tree, wacky tobacky, weed.. You pickin' up what I'm dropping here?

Now what remains to be seen is the U.S. federal gov't take on this.  You see, in the U.S. Constitution in Article 1, Section 8 is a few words..  To regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states and with the gypsies, fortune tellers, casinos, and those guys that sell fake Rolexes at train stations.. and the Indian Tribes.

But it is this clause, aka the Inter-state Commerce Clause that the U.S. justice Department has operated under as they continued to raid, seize, arrest and generally hassle medical marijuana users in California.

The theory goes that if Bob can grow pot in his back yard in Colorado without fear of arrest, then he won't buy it from the illegal growers, causing the illegal grower's price to fall.  Standard supply and demand theory.  And, if that illegal grower was in another state, then the cross state border trade of pot would fall off, or increase, or do something.  But it would not be uniform!

And when you read 1-8 you will see that it is all about uniformity.  Uniformed Postal Service, Naturalization laws, Navy, Coins, Weights and Measures, Bankruptcy laws.. And uniform Commerce.  So in a nutshell.. it remains to be seen how free those in Colorado will actually light up.

 What a buzz kill.

Have a good day, responsible smokers wait till 4:20 :)

Thursday 1 November 2012

Working in Ottawa today -- Dr. Evil revisited

Good morning folks,

I will be working in Ottawa today.

Ahem.  My dear readers,  We need to be afraid.  Very afraid.  Let me explain.  Syria borders Turkey on its north side, Iraq on its east, Israel and Jordan to the south and the Mediterranean sea and Lebanon to the west.  It has close to 200,000 km2 and has around 17 million people.  And..

Syria knows how to make hurricanes. (this statement has much more effect if you whisper it).  Let's try again in a whisper-hushed tone, "Syria knows how to make hurricanes".   Big hurricanes. Super Storms. Storms of the Century. Franken-Storms!  Readers.. Listen carefully, Syria blows.  When I first became aware of this, I had read it on the CNN scroller.  "Syria behind Sandy".

Now when I read this I naturally assumed that some staffer at CNN was trying to communicate that a news report pertaining to Syria was following a news story about Hurricane Sandy.  I laughed a bit out loud and said to Sharlene, "Some guy is sitting on his sofa (we talked about sofas before, they are like couches but have fewer letters) and is yelling to his wife, "Damn it Hellen, get in here, it's those damn Syrians screwing with the weather again!".

But sadly this was not the case of a CNN staffer not having a great command of the English language.. No.

While I did not stick around for the CNN report yesterday AM, I did check late last night.. after I noticed that all the Syrians that I know were all wearing windbreakers with lightning bolt logos on the back.. 

Shamal, do we have a clip to show?  Hmmm.. a clip.. a vid-e-o clip.. no clip?  Sorry, thought we had a clip.

And we're back.

All of the reports that I found can be traced to a Facebook page "syrian.army.news" that states, "Sources confirmed to us that Hurricane Sandy that is slamming the U.S. was set off by highly advanced technologies developed by the heroic Iranian regime that supports the resistance, with coordination of our resistive Syrian regime".

Wow.  Bitchin'.

My friends, I feel that I too should come clean on some of my prior acts. June 15 of last year I made a Lunar Eclipse.  I meant to have it visible in Canada but I miscalculated the gravity well effect of the earth and moon largely because when my friend Bob made the moon, he used the wrong kind of cheese; it was really best to view it from Tanzania, sorry about that.  I will do better on my next eclipse April 25, 2013 I have made sure that you will be able to view here in Canada and as an added treat, I will keep the skies fairly clear.  No need to thank me, it will be my pleasure to do this for my friends.

Reportedly the Sandy's damage was "punishment for whoever dares to attack Syria's (Bashar) al-Assad and threaten peace and stability."  I guess the 69 people killed in the Caribbean were anti al-Assad too?

Hey, if you were smart enough to develop this technology, would you not be smart enough to threaten to use it first, Dr. Evil style?  "I will unleash this powerful hurricane weapon against America, the great Satin, and its godless infidels unless you pay.. One Million Dollars!"

Have a good day, buy kite futures.