Election follow-up

As it turns out, my mom didn't win the vacant provincial parliamentary seat in Toronto-Danforth. NDP candidate Peter Tabuns squeaked out a narrow victory over former anchorman and star Liberal candidate Ben Chin. The seat was vacated when longtime incumbent and deputy NDP leader Marilyn Churley left to unsuccessfully run for a seat in the federal parliament. (Well, she actually left to successfully run for a seat in the federal parliament; she didn't lose on purpose.)

Here's something I didn't know about my former MP, courtesy of her Wikipedia entry:

After the 2003 Ontario election, when the NDP lost official party status in the Legislature, Churley threatened to legally change her surname to Churley-NDP so that the Speaker would be forced to say NDP when recognizing her in the House. (A non-official party loses the right to have its members addressed in the Legislature as members of the party.) A compromise was later reached which made this change unnecessary, and the party regained official status when Andrea Horwath won a 2004 by-election.

You know who else did something like that? Professional wrestler The Ultimate Warrior.

In 1993, Jim Hellwig had his name legally changed to Warrior in order to retain the legal rights to use the name outside of the WWF. The one-word name appears on all legal documents pertaining to Warrior, and his children carry the Warrior name as their legal surname. The ultimatewarrior.com domain is registered to "Mister Warrior."

The Ultimate Warrior has also turned his thoughts to the political area in recent years. However, he's considerably more right-wing than Churley. Also, unlike Churley, he's a complete freaking lunatic with a messianic complex. My favorite example of why the serial comma is necessary is the hypothetical book dedication "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." The idea is that a comma between the second and third items is necessary to emphasize that this is a list of three items, not an example of an appositive. Unfortunately, one reason that Warrior is such a notoriously incoherent writer may be that this example fails to make any impression on him because he actually believes his parents are Ayn Rand and God.

Update: Shame on me for not including this link to a YouTube video of the Ultimate Warrior's infamous public speaking appearance at the University of Connecticut right around this time last year, which I actually watched the night before making this post. This is the one where he gets into a screaming match with the audience and shouts "queering don't make the world work." It's a lively discussion, to say the least, although I was sort of hoping for a chair-throwing fracas like when the neo-Nazis used to visit The Morton Downey Jr. Show.

Speaking of which, you know what the Ultimate Warrior has in common with Morton Downey Jr. besides their controversial right-wing politics?¹ Both appeared at Wrestlemania V, right around this time in 1989.² I imagine the two of them probably had a lot to talk about backstage.³

1. Credit will not be awarded for the answer that there were two Morton Downeys and two Ultimate Warriors.
2. Both of them came out on the losing end there too. Warrior was pinned for the Intercontinental title to "Ravishing" Rick Rude thanks to interference by Bobby "The Brain" Heenan, while "Rowdy" Roddy Piper responded to having smoke blown in his face during his Piper's Pit interview with "The Big Mouth" by putting out the latter's cigarette with a fire extinguisher.
3. I mean, besides their shared determination to give themselves cancer—Downey via cigarettes and Warrior via anabolic steroids. Downey was more successful in this, meeting his ultimate end in 2001.

A special day

Today was a special day for two reasons. First, Kimberly Ann Leizert was born on this day in 1949. Happy 47th, Mom!

The other thing was that I walked over to Westwood Middle School after work. "Is this where I sign up to get extra math help?" I asked.

"No, this is where you vote in the provincial by-election," they said.

"Oh, good," I said. "I need to do that too."

Once I got behind the voter screen, though, I realized that neither of the two leading candidates had made much of an impression on me. In fact, I'd accidentally left each one hanging when he tried to shake my hand outside the subway station when I was going to work last week.

So, in the end, I cast my vote for a candidate who has made a great impression on me, and one I knew I could trust. I voted for my mom. Happy spoiled ballot, Mom!

The girl with the blonde hair meets the man in the green suit

Hands-down, the most gullible person I've ever known was my high-school friend Annemarie, who may be singlehandedly responsible for the boom in "ditzy blonde" jokes during the '90s. We worked together at the grocery store near the school, and every day, she'd start work before me, and every day, I'd sneak up behind her and startle her while she was bent over the deli displays, arranging cheese. And although I deadpanned my way into having her believe all kinds of outrageous whoppers, it's a time when my friend Barry duped her that I remember best.

The two of them were looking out the window during a physics class when Annemarie noticed a man walking by below. "Why is that man wearing a green suit?" she wondered.

Barry turned to her with a serious look on his face. "You mean you don't know? It's because he has cancer," he said in a solemn voice.

"Oh my god! Really?" Annemarie asked.

Barry nodded. "The green suit protects him from the sun's rays so his cancer doesn't get any worse."

"Oh my god!" Annemarie said.

Barry never bothered setting her straight. A few months after that, my dad got cancer, and although it was a serious matter, when I gave the news to Annemarie, I did get a small amount of private amusement by slipping in the detail that he'd had to buy a new green suit as part of his treatment.

Peter Lynn: World's Greatest Deadpan

The inability of bodybuilders to read notwithstanding, my company is releasing a book. Every time I think the project is finished off, it pops up again. This morning, the intern who I fooled with my "World's Greatest Dad" trophy stopped by while I was giving it my third proofread. Seeing I was busy, she left. Later, after I'd finished, she came back.

"What happened to the book you were working on?" she asked.

I shook my head. "I scrapped it. It was too much work. I cancelled the project."

"Really?"

"Screw it. It’s not worth it. We’re not doing it."

"You can do that?"

"No."

"I hate you."

Note to potential suicide bombers

At first, becoming a martyr for Islam and being rewarded with 72 virgins when you go to Paradise seems like a pretty good deal. But if you're there for eternity, you're simply going to burn through all those virgins way too quickly, and then what are you going to do?

True, the 72-virgin thing is probably just a guarantee rather than a hard cap. After that, you're probably free to score any leftover virgins that happen to be in Paradise. But it seems like those would be long since deflowered by all the guys who were already in Paradise before you even got there. So instead, you're all just sitting around, waiting for new blood, and any virgin headed to Paradise can look forward to having 1500 years' worth of Muslim men ready to pounce on her the second she gets there. It's like a bad singles bar, except with harp music instead of techno.

Long story short, it's probably better to stay on Earth, where you can have as many virgins as you want, so long as you really apply yourself.

A sad man talking to his fat cat

A poster in the comments thread of today's Comics Curmudgeon entry links to the even-more confounding Spanish-language version of today's Garfield strip:



This would be the best Garfield comic I have seen in a long time if I hadn't recently seen a thread at Truth and Beauty Bombs showing how, if one simply deletes Garfield's dialogue, it is, in one poster's word's, "just a sad man talking to his fat cat." I can't improve upon this excellent entry at Websnark in terms of discussion, but you should really read the whole thread yourself. Meanwhile, let me present my three five bathetic favourites:

The worst part? I missed The Daily Show.

Last night I fell asleep around 10:00 p.m., and when I woke up in a haze later, I was so convinced that I had only nodded off and that it couldn't possibly be 12:25 a.m. that I actually reset the clock back by two hours.

I figured it out after a while, but I'm probably going to use this as my excuse next time I'm late for work. It's kind of like calling in sick with diarrhea: It's embarrassing enough to admit that it seems like it must be true.

A dead cat in a bag

It's hard to flirt effectively while holding a dead cat in a bag. I've tried.

I was in my second year at Queen's University that fall, living in a house that was just a block off campus. As all but the very most attractive of us all do at some point or another, I found myself waiting by the phone one night for a offhandedly promised call that wasn't going to come. Eventually midnight rolled around and I gave up and got out of the house for a walk because I was pissed off, a little with the girl, but mostly with myself. I wandered around campus for a while, down by the lake, and eventually back to my house.

Right in front of my house, I saw a cab stopped in the street and two girls blubbering hysterically over a kitten that it had hit and killed. I was the perfect guy to step up in this kind of situation: I was already in such a foul mood that it couldn't get any worse. I looked at the kitten, muttered that I'd get a bag, and went inside. I came out with a green garbage bag and picked up the kitten. Its bowels released and emptied themselves in a stream onto the asphalt. I put it in the bag, tied the handles off, and tried to figure out what the hell you do with a dead cat in a bag.

I didn't want to throw it in our kitchen garbage can, obviously, so I headed back to campus, figuring I could toss it in the dumpster I remembered being beside Victoria Hall, my old student residence. When I got to Vic Hall, there was a police cruiser parked outside for some reason. I wondered if there was anything illegal about throwing a dead cat in a dumpster. Dumping a body seems like shady business in general. So I headed in to ask the police officer in the lobby.

It's apparently perfectly legal to throw a dead cat in a dumpster, although I hope this won't prove useful information to you. The cop was naturally curious to know why I had one, though. And so, for that matter, was the cute girl behind the counter at reception. So that's how I found myself in the lobby of my former university residence making small talk with a cute girl while holding a dead cat in a bag and having a sudden odd realization that this was one of life's strange little moments. As I said, it's just not a good flirting situation, so I just headed back outside, tossed the kitten in the dumpster, and went home, trying not to look at the spot on the road where it had been hit as I went inside.

Don't "Douglas C." Me

"All right, mister, what do you think you're doing? You call this a room? This is a pigsty! I want you to straighten up this area now! You are a disgusting slob! Stand up straight, tuck in that shirt, adjust that belt buckle, tie those shoes! Twisted Sister? What is that? Wipe that smile off your face! Do you understand? What is that? A Twisted Sister pin? On your uniform? What kind of a man are you? You're worthless and weak! You do nothing! You are nothing! You sit in here all day and play that sick, repulsive, electric twanger! I carried an M16 and you ... you carry that ... that ... that guitar! Who are you? Where do you come from? Are you listening to me? What do you wanna do with your life?"


I had this whole thing committed to memory when I was a 12-year-old boy. I can't wait to have kids of my own.

Today's lesson

Note to self: Babies are not cats. Holding something jangly just out of reach and pulling it away when they try to grab it will not result in hours of fun as they repeatedly leap to snatch it from you. It will simply make them cry and make you look mean in front of everybody.

From the "Wearing of the Green" Department

Guess whose birthday it is? St. Patrick's, of course. But it's also the birthday of my pal Barry the smooth-talking ladies' man. Here's my birthday gift to him: a novelty T-shirt design for him to wear to the bars to pick up women next year (or this year, if he can whip it together quickly enough. He's on the West Coast, so there's time). You can use it too, if you like. I'm sure neither of us will mind. I'm surely not the first to come up with this idea anyway.

KISS ME
I'M PRETENDING
TO BE IRISH

The pride of the Carrot League

You can make your arguments for Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson, but new sabermetric analysis shows the greatest baseball player never to play in the major leagues was Bugs Bunny.

Bugged by a rug

I saw a toupee today that was so obvious I felt personally insulted. Did he really think I was so stupid I would believe it? If it had been any less subtle, it could have been reclassified as a hat. I should have confronted that guy.

How I realized I'm a bit of a beer snob

Last weekend—and I'm not making this up—a friend of mine got ambushed by her ex-fiancé's ex-wife, who smashed a beer bottle over her head.

My immediate reaction was to ask, "What brand?"

I was so ready to sneer if it had been a Coors Light or something. But she didn't remember, what with the vicious assault and everything.

Ur-bacon

I had a little micronap on the bus this morning, and when I opened my eyes, I saw a sign on the side of a truck for some company called Urbacon. But because I was a little disoriented, I read it as Ur-bacon—as in, the delicious original bacon.

Naturally, I took this as a sign that I should have a BLT when I got to work.

Being vaguely insulting

Here's my favorite new way to be vaguely insulting since I thought of staring into the space between two people's faces as they stand side by side so they don't know quite which one you're looking at and saying, "Huh. You're right. There really is no comparison."

With a sigh, muse to someone, "You know, sometimes I think it would be easier just to be like you." When asked to explain what the hell you mean by this, shake your head in a world-weary way and say, "It just seems like it would be a lot less complicated."

Friday fun

Something to try: Don't tear off today's page from your page-a-day calendar until someone notices it and points out that it's no longer Thursday. When this happens, look surprised and elated. Tear off the page enthusiastically, and say "TGIF!" as though receiving a gift from God.

Dusk-Man returns

I nearly forgot to mention this, but a certain collaboration between your author and one Jay Pinkerton detailing the origin of a particular caped crusader and world's greatest detective has been posted at Cracked.com in a digitally remastered version less likely to attract the notice of DC Comics' attorneys. Click here to see part one of the Dusk-Man origin story.

While you're at it, if you missed it, you might want to click here to see the adventures of Stupendous Man, the last son of Klipton.

What was I thinking?

Why the hell did I list building a Dyson sphere as one of my objectives for this year in my self-evaluation at work last year? That wasn't a realistic goal.

Page Six

I'm not saying Hilary Duff is horse-faced, but I heard that when she made her last movie, they put some peanut butter in her mouth and dubbed in her lines later.

I don't owe you dick from smack

I lent Jamie Baker three dollars, and he still hasn't paid it back. That was more than fifteen years ago.

We were on some class trip, and he borrowed the money to buy an ice cream cone. I don't know if he forgot about it or was simply a cheapskate, but later on I reminded him of the debt, and he denied it. "I don't owe you dick from smack!" he shouted.

I don't owe you dick from smack.

I was pretty mad about about Jamie welshing on his debt, and I vowed I wouldn't forget it. Sure enough, I haven't. Yet, it's become a surprisingly fond memory with time. Let's face it: It was a pretty funny thing to say. Scott, who was there at the time, has had a few opportunities over the years to fire off the unexpected funny reference by pulling that line out of mothballs. Figuring it would be up his alley, I recently mentioned it to my buddy Chris, from whom I took the phrase "What in the hell in the world?", and he was blown away by its awesomeness. In the last decade and a half, it's safe to say that I've gotten way more than three dollars' worth of entertainment value out of Jamie's phrase.

So let's say it for the record: Jamie, you don't owe me dick from smack. In fact, I might even owe you some change.

The Next Generation

"You know, Star Trek: The Next Generation wasn't the first sequel series to the original. There was also Star Trek: The Animated Series, but it's not considered canonical."

"No? Why not?"

"Probably because it sometimes had stuff from outside the usual Star Trek universe, like Larry Niven's Kzin."

"Whose what?"

"The Kzin. They're a feline warrior race, like the Kilrathi in Wing Commander."

"That awful movie with Freddie Prinze Jr.? What's the name of that sitcom he's in now?"

"Chico and the Man: The Next Generation."

Talk to the animals

I was going through some old e-mail, trying to figure out an easy way to migrate all my old mail from my old Yahoo account to my new one (if you know one, please let me know), and I ran across the following story about my old housemate Salma, who was a Muslim feminist social worker but was surprisingly fun anyway. However, I still don't understand what was going on with her here:

There used to be this commercial for the local racetrack where there was a guy who wished he was "like the guy in the story" (I imagine he meant Dr. Doolittle) so he could talk to the animals. He said he'd tell the horse to "give them the race they'll never forget."

This commercial came on when we were watching TV one night. I asked Salma if she got the same impression that I did from the commercial: Didn't this guy seem a little crooked? Like, if he could talk to the horse, he'd convince it to throw the race of the century and they'd split the payoff?

Looking outraged, she immediately responded, "No way! If there's one thing that's completely disgusting, it's people and animals together. It's perverted and totally unnatural!"

What in the hell in the world? Where did that come from?

I stared at her, dumbfounded. Suddenly, she realized that she'd committed an enormous bestiality-related non-sequitur and possible Freudian slip, and she was mortified.

If The Simpsons were a live action show, the opening sequence might look just like this.

Belated extra doppelgänger

The very day I posted the recent entry listing more of my doppelgängers, someone coincidentally told me about another supposed lookalike. It hardly seems worthwhile to start another new post for the one entry so soon over the last one, so I invite you to click here to return to read of my latest grievous insult.

Bad blurb

Here's the blurb on the cover of The Copywriter's Handbook by Robert W. Bly (not the Iron John guy, it turns out):

"I don't know a single copywriter whose work would not be improved by reading this book. And that includes me." — David Ogilvy.

Doesn't this sound like Ogilvy is saying his work would surely be better if he read this book, although he has not yet actually done so?

Yugen

Having words for the way you think is essential to the way you think, a theory goes. Take colours, for example. In English, red and pink are traditionally named as different colours, whereas other languages don't necessarily make this distinction, seeing only light red. However, Russian treats light blue (goluboy) as a distinct colour from dark blue (siniy) in a way that English doesn't but that is analogous to our red/pink distinction. The Sapir/Whorf hypothesis would hold that having or lacking these words actually influences your ability to recognize and distinguish the colours themselves.

The book They Have a Word for It takes this as its starting premise. Aiming to write a useful vocabulary book rather than a mere compilation of linguistic oddities, author Howard Rheingold's ambition is to expand the way readers are able to look at the world by giving them the words to talk about it. He perhaps achieves this aim best in his chapter on aesthetics, which leans heavily on Japanese words. There's wabi, the flaw in an object that makes it more beautiful. And sabi, the patina that gives beauty to old objects. And aware, the bittersweet appreciation of transient beauty, such as that of the cherry blossom falling from the branch in autumn.

And then there's yugen, which by its very nature cannot truly be described. Rheingold defines it as "an awareness of the universe that triggers feelings too deep and mysterious for words." It's an extension of aware, he suggests, an ineffable, poignant profoundity of the kind you might feel while sitting meditatively alone on a cliff at sunset, feeling the ephemeral nature of eternity itself.

The Japanese poets evoked yugen in a few words in their haiku. The film Blade Runner captured the feeling in the final words of the dying replicant Roy Batty: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

I had no word for it then, but I felt yugen many years ago at Charleston Lake late one October, long after the end of vacation season, when the only sound echoing over the still water and the rocks of the Canadian Shield at sunset was that of one faraway barking dog. And today as I flipped through Rheingold's book, I remembered another time I felt yugen.

I was back home on a holiday weekend of my first or second year in university. Having nothing better to do, as we rarely did in Brockville, my friends Barry and Tim, Barry's visiting school friend Josh, and I drove out to Devil's Door Road. We only ever did this because we liked the name. There was nothing out there at all. It was just a pitch-dark country road. We would drive out, admire the road sign, get out of the car for a bit, take a leak at the side of the road, and then drive on. There was sometimes also some horseplay, but that was pretty much the ritual.

So we drove out to Devil's Door Road, got out, and took the usual leak at the side of the road. The only light was moonlight. The only sound was the wind in the trees and the splash of urine streaming into gravel.

Then, someone began whistling. It was Josh, the visitor. The lazy, languorous, casual sound hung all by itself in the still, chilly night air, and the rest of us all felt it at once. We stood there, transfixed, goosefleshed, utterly lost in the eerie beauty and purity of its song. No one said a word. We just listened. It was and is still the most beautiful, magical sound I have ever heard. It was a singular perfect moment.

And then Josh finished, zipped up, and the whistling ended. It took the rest of us a long, silent moment to shrug it off. "Holy shit," someone said after a while. And then we got back in the car and drove on.

That, I think, was yugen. And that Josh was one hell of a good whistler.

Killers I have known (the Kitty commemorative post)

I regret to say that Katherine, my oft-mentioned favorite Englishwoman, is dead.

I now hasten to add, with no regret whatsoever, that the above is happily false. The celebrated Muse of Ruddy Ruddy is very much alive, but merely wanted me to make a false report of her demise, being well aware of my love of starting unfounded rumours and having reproached me earlier for doing so when I mentioned that a guy who used to work at my office is now in jail awaiting trial for the beating death of his girlfriend after having been discovered by police wandering naked in the streets nearby.

I wouldn't make that kind of thing up. It's true. And oddly, this would make the second murderer whom I've known personally.

Being that Kitty's response to the previous statement was "?! The mind boggles", it might warrant an explanation. And being that she was delighted enough by the one I gave her to proclaim me the should-be Garrison Keillor of Canada (which I'm still not sure is a compliment, but it's going into my sidebar anyway), permit me to reproduce the story of the first murderer here:

Henry Danninger looked like a real greasy headbanger when he arrived in town with his hair down to his waist. But when you got to know him, he was intelligent and well-spoken. Eventually, he got a haircut and started dressing in preppy shirts. That Henry really cleaned himself up, I thought.

I was wrong, I discovered when I read the newspaper one Christmas a few years later. What had happened is that Henry, now living in Ottawa, had had a beef with a housemate who had allegedly stolen his drugs. Henry armed himself with a buck knife and went to a local bar to settle the score. A fight broke out, and a kid named Andrew Moffitt tried to intercede to break it up. Henry wheeled around and stabbed him in the heart, killing him pretty much instantly.

Ironically, both Andrew and Henry went to our high school in Brockville, although it's doubtful they knew each other because Andrew was much younger, only to meet under fatal circumstances in another city. Also ironically, Andrew had had a congenital heart defect that had recently been corrected through surgery, and that Henry really uncorrected by also putting him under the knife.

Anyhow, Henry fled, but called police from a nearby gas station shortly later to turn himself in. He got five years in prison for manslaughter.

Last year I was surprised to pick up the Toronto Sun at the laundromat and flip through it to find a photo of Henry smoking a cigarette outside court, looking into the camera with the sort of surprised scowl you wear when someone takes a photo of you smoking a cigarette outside court.

The article, which referred to him as a drug dealer and "common street punk" as the Sun is wont to do, said he'd been breaking the terms of his parole by sneaking out after curfew to dump buckets of urine and feces all over his neighbor's car for no particular reason. I'm sure there's much more to that story, but I don't know it.

More of my doppelgängers

A few weeks back, I had a look at some celebrities that I've been said to resemble. It could have been worse, all in all. My sister went to that website MyHeritage.com and while she was getting some good results such as Cybill Shepherd, it was also claiming she looked like Robert Loggia or something ridiculous like that. Looking back on it, I forgot a few of my doppelgängers. Here are some others.

If you had to compare me to someone who spends most of his time with his face covered by a hockey goaltender's mask, you could probably do worse than to say I have a face like Robert Esche of the Philadephia Flyers (at right), the stature of Arturs Irbe of the Latvian national team, and, depending on how the workday is going, the temperament of Jason Voorhees of Camp Crystal Lake.

Speaking of the sports world, Scott's wife Marlene thinks I look like TSN anchor James Duthie. I don't have much to say about this. Instead, I'll recap some of Marlene's own celebrity doppelgängers, and provide some pictures (all links are work-safe, honestly):

• Movie star Elizabeth Taylor
• Movie star Vivien Leigh
• Actress Kristina Anapau
• Adult film actress Sabina Black
• Tennis player Rafael Nadal

As you can see, Scott did okay for himself, if you don't count the last one. Or even if you do, really. Rafael Nadal's not a bad-looking dude once you get past the hooting O-face.

A guy asked me this week, "Has anyone ever told you you look like one of the kids on American Idol?" No one had. I asked which one. He couldn't remember. "Just go to the website," he said. "You'll see it right away." I went to the official website that night. I didn't see it at all. The next day, I asked him which one again. "Kevin," he said. I went to the website again. What in the hell in the world?! This little weiner to the right is Kevin Covais, my supposed double. Naturally, I confronted my accuser, red-faced with fury. "He doesn't look like you now," he explained. "He just looks like what you might have looked when you were younger.

I assure you, I did not look like this when I was younger. For one thing, I didn't have a combed-forward Julius Caesar haircut, the unconvincing new style of choice for the prematurely balding. It's the new combover. How can a 16-year-old kid require this? For another, I didn't wear glasses until university. (And let me beat Scott to this: When wearing my giant glasses then, my celebrity doppelgänger was Milton Berle.) But I didn't wear them in high school. SamuraiFrog says his girlfriend Becca says he looks like Brainy Smurf. This is an insightful and correct observation. Hear that? Kevin Covais is not my celebrity doppelgänger. Kevin Covais is Brainy Smurf's celebrity doppelgänger.

I don't remember who said I looked like Anthony Michael Hall. I can't even remember when it was said. But I do remember that someone did say it. Step forward, whoever said I look like Farmer Ted, and know that you're on notice. That said, this is the hair I had when I was in high school. Not like the lid on that Kevin Covais nerd.

Also, when I was looking up pictures of Anthony Michael Hall, I learned that even he doesn't look like Anthony Michael Hall anymore. He now looks like some twisted cross between Jay Mohr and Brett Hull or something.

I do know who said I now "look like a full-sized Verne Troyer" even though he hid behind an anonymous comment.

That is not cool, Tyler. Not cool at all.