February 26, 2010, Yellow Dog Simcoe Grey

I try to avoid politics on this page, if only because it's such a blessed relief from all the politics I have to read about and absorb day-to-day. But I can't avoid comment on the behaviour of our MP.

In case you missed it, MP Helena Guergis has apologised for what she calls an 'emotional' outburst on a trip through the airport at Charlottetown February 19th, when she arrived late for a flight and became abusive with Air Canada Jazz staff members, security personnel and apparently anyone within earshot.

Now, I'm no politician, (nor a diplomat, as my family often reminds me), but if my husband were currently negotiating a plea bargain on cocaine posession and drunk driving charges, I'm pretty sure I'd be extra nice to everyone around me until the case was settled.

Furthermore, if I had been demoted within the federal cabinet during the last shuffle, I'd try to be extra nice to everyone around, in the hope of at least keeping the 56-thousand in extra salary that comes with the cabinet post, junior though it is.

Also, if the aforementioned husband were the only tory in all of Alberta to lose his seat in the last election, I'd be extra careful of my temper, just in case the people of Simcoe-Grey got any ideas.

But that's just me.

(Yellow Dog Democrat is a term applied to a US voter who can be counted on to cast their vote for a democrat regardless of whose name is on the ballot. It comes from the elections following the Civil War, when some southern states were said to be willing to vote for a yellow dog as long as it wasn't a Republican, like Abraham Lincoln. Simcoe Grey has voted conservative since Confederation, with the short exception of the years during the Conservative/Alliance split in the 1990s. It could be safely described as a yellow dog riding, if Canada had such a thing.)

February 25, 2010- Too much hockey on the brain

I have a great idea for a novel, and if you're a writer, you can have it, no royalties needed or pesky fights later after you make your millions. I'm simply too lazy to actually write it, but it's brilliant, brilliant, I tell you.

Here you go: Davinci Code, but for hockey.

Your hero chases down the biggest secret in hockey history, which is that all games in the NHL and even the olympics are secretly fixed by a cabal of owners and players. The goal of the fixing of the games to maximize profits, of course.

It would be plausible because really, how else would we end up with poetry on ice last night against the Russians and doggy doo on ice against the US the very same week? All part of the plan to increase viewership, and therefore revenue.

The plot would also explain how the Toronto Maple Leafs, most profitable franchise in all of hockeydom, not winning since, what, 1941 or something? (I know it's 1967, just taking a little poetic licence there, relax!)

You'd have to flesh out the details, like how the players are initiated into the deception, the good ones anyway, rotten players would not have to be part of the plan, they're just filler on the ice.
A few of them will have to die, too, to keep the action going. Some could even be poisoned on the ice, overdosed on whatever untraceable drug I figure the Canadian team was given in the USA game. You wouldn't have to make too much fuss about the ones you kill off though- they'd be like the expendable crew member introduced just in time to become a member of an 'away team' on Star Trek. Didn't you always know that guy was going to be killed by the alien life form?

You'd also have plenty of opportunity to bring in real-life bad guys and expand on their possible role in the plot. Harold Ballard as loveable but really just a confused child at heart, a pawn of maniac genius Tiger Williams, and maybe Lanny MacDonald in a huge battle with zombies... totally up to you. (maybe not so much with the zombies....)

Oh, this is genius, and you will be rolling in dough! By the way, I think Ryan Reynolds should play the investigator when your novel gets optioned into a Hollywood blockbuster; he would be smart like Tom Hanks in 'Davinci', but sexier, and of course, Canadian so you know he'd be convincing as he talks about 'the best game you can name'.

February 22, 2010 Hockey Heartbreak

I didn't watch the second or third periods of the Canada/US men's hockey embarrassment. Not only was it past my bedtime, I knew what was coming, and it wasn't pretty.

I boycott the Leafs over their general terribleness (no cup in my whole life!!!) and the team's behaviour during the expansion to Hamilton discussions this summer, but I was so looking forward to the Olympic tournament in Vancouver. Even so, my 'spidey senses' have been telling me things weren't going to go well in the big game against the US. Consider it karma, schadenfreude or whatever the latest trendy term is for payback from the universe when you're a big loud obnoxious moron due for a comeuppance - which we Canadians have become when it comes to hockey.

Every pre-game newscast featured red-shirted men, women and kids shouting about Canadian hockey supremacy. Bars right across the country were filled with drunken red-shirted men women and kids screaming about Canadian hockey supremacy. Add the commercials about 'this is our game they're playing' and oh, were we due for a big helping of whupa$$ served with a side order of shutupalready.

And as for you, Martin Brodeur: get in your net and stay there, and stop showing off!!!

February 13, 2010- Open Sesame!

Seriously? KD Lang? Really? Was Every Other Singer from Canada busy? The Hip? Alanis? Avril? Michael? The Arrogant Worms, for heaven's sake?

I'm pretty sure the point of the Olympic opening ceremony was to showcase the country, and in spite of the oopsie at the end, the staging was awesome, with the projections and the big pieces of fabric and the flying people and whatnot, but content-wise? Zoikes.

According to VanOC, we want the world to know we're tattoed, fiddleplaying aboriginals, walking in wheatfields singing mournfully and reciting poetry about how while we might be overly polite, we're fabulous.

hmmm. I'm not sure I get it.

During the technical hiccup just before the flame was lit, I'm pretty sure that was sheer panic on the face of Steve Nash. Wayne Gretzky looked like he somehow thought it was all beneath him. (But I'm biased; I haven't forgiven the hit on Gilmour in '93.)

And then we took him to the waterfront in pickup truck?! Now, that's something I can get behind, because no matter whether you're in the 97 percent of Canadians who are not aboriginal, who have never seen a wheatfield or who have never played a fiddle, haven't we all had some fun in the back of a pickup?

Go Canada!
Curling starts Tuesday.

February 10,2010- Where's the Beef?

Well, so much for my adventures in vegetarianism.

I have 200 pounds of beef in my freezer as of today, courtesy of one of my farmer friends who sells a few animals a year at a ridiculously reasonable price. I'm not planning to eat it all at once, mind you; I still have a big (I mean huge) round roast from the last beastie, bought more than a year ago. Several steaks, too.

Regardless of the big purchase, I believe my reading Eating Animals by Johnathan Safran Foer is going to change my eating habits. Sundays, when my sweetie and I contemplate this week's meals, I have recently slipped at least two non-meat dishes in there. And while there's beef in my freezer, I know the beastie from whom it came was treated well while it was alive, and had a decent, quick death. I know these things because I know both the farmer and the folk who run the abattoir.

Having my -for lack of a better phrase- consciousness raised by Safran Foer's well-construced prose does pose a problem: the hideous lives and miserable deaths of factory-farming mean I'm no longer going to buy chicken from a store. The cheaper it is, the less likely it was raised with anything resembling compassion, and without tons of preemptive antibiotics. Now, Green Curry Chicken can be put together quite nicely without any chicken, as I discovered this week, but chicken soup might be a bit of a challenge. So, I now have to find some local person who raises chickens and will sell them to me, dressed and ready for the oven. I'm not going to be a big nagger if you have me over to dinner, but when given a choice, I'm going to pass on chicken unless I know for sure where it came from. I also think I'm pretty much out of pork, too, for the same reasons.And don't get me started on the seafood...

But I do so love the ribs and smoked shoulders and the homemade soups and the sushi... I'm just going to have to buy my own farm, I guess. And an ocean, clearly...

February 5, 2010- Unhand Me!

Nearly every woman who's spent any time at Vaughn Mills mall can tell the same story- of the man at the kiosk who grabs your hand and buffs one of your fingernails in the hope you'll buy his 'real silk' buffing block. Until it happened, I wouldn't have been able to tell you there was any such thing as a buffing block, much less one with 'real silk' as one of its features.

I can't imagine he has many sales. I didn't even find out the price, I was so freaked out by a guy with such a firm grip holding my hand and rubbing one fingernail until it was hot and shiny, all the while murmuring to me in an Egyptian-sounding accent about the 'real silk' in the product. I walked away in a daze, feeling violated in some vague way, but two days later, boy was that fingernail still shiny.

I have actually contemplated going back to that mall just to buy that buffing block, but I was hoping perhaps Mr. Creepy Hands had a less-creepy cousin, or perhaps a sister. Now, I don't have to, thanks to a little too much time spent at the drug store, looking for something else.

Waaay down at the bottom of a wall of nail-and-skin type accessories, as I contemplated which scrubber would best take off the scales we all seem to grow on our feet in the winter, there it was, in its $6.49 glory: a buffing block, very similar to the one used by Mall Man. Who knew these things existed except in the steely grip of a foreign-sounding stranger?

I snapped it up, and could hardly wait to get home to see whether the drugstore model worked as well as the weird stranger's at the mall.

I'm here to tell you, I am now sporting the shiniest nails I've ever had, hands down.

February 2, 2010- Holding My Tongue

I tend to get myself into a bit of trouble sometimes for the words that fly out of my mouth without any pretence of a thought between their formation and their delivery.

I like to call it a tendency toward frankness. Others call it a troubling lack of tact.

An old flame of mine once bemoaned this trait and I told him, "If only you knew the things I do manage to avoid saying, you'd be so proud of me!" Upon further reflection, I might have rather too many nasty opinions to be allowed into polite society. But come on, you know you also think harsh things periodically, even the sweetest and nicest among you.

Here are two things that popped into my head this week that I did manage (admittedly with some difficulty) to censor:

"Wow, you've really put on weight since the last time I saw you," and

"Please stop giving parenting advice; I've met your kids."

I'm frank, but not stupid.