I always said I have my Twitter profile for things that wouldn’t make sense to blog about–those little thirty-second snipets of random that seem to come out of nowhere and you’ve forgotten before your blogging platform of choice is up and ready to accept them. You know the ones. Random observations you’ve made, short little comments on events, things it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to go into any amount of detail and would therefore sort of waste a blog post for what you could probably do in less than 140 characters elsewhere. Like, say, Twitter. Problem is, at least today, I’ve been having random thoughts that, if posted on Twitter when I’ve finally had a chance to actually glance in its general direction, would probably make very little sense with the exception of to perhaps a small handful of people. So, in substitution, here are thoughts that didn’t make it into my Twitter stream today, in no particular order, but in list format. Because lists are cool.

• OC Transpo’s losing money. Again. Wasn’t that 2-month strike and its eventual resolution supposed to prevent that?
• Reasons not to call 911: your sister won’t share the computer with you. Don’t laugh; it happened.
• Related: Calling 911 to request a taxi? Really? Is that even legal?
• Hey look. Two years later and Ottawa still hasn’t sorted out its transit-related contractual problems. I love my city. Really.
• The one time I’m not home to pick up a ticket, and an Ottawa area resident picks up a Lotto Max Jackpot. I tell ya, it’s fixed.
• This is August 25th. The NHL preseason starts September 21st. There are too many days in between. Just sayin’.
• Who wants vodka? Who can aford it? Cool. Bring me some.

When folks think of Canadian music, their first thoughts are Nickleback, or Celine Dion, possibly even occasionally Bare Naked Ladies–though not so much as I’d like to see. When I mention Great Big Sea, anyone who hasn’t spent some time in eastern Canada looks at me like I’ve got 2 heads and 3 eyes. Perhaps surprisingly, though, this group has more of the traditional Canadian than any of the other bands I’ve mentioned–if by traditional Canadian you’re speaking in terms of reflecting some of our actual history and/or heritage.

I touched on this back when the olympics kicked off in Vancouver, and included an example for the curious. And, while folk/fiddle music has a certain place in the Ottawa valley, it actually extends a lot farther out than that–all the way to the east coast, which spawned this group. They draw on that folk history, along with a touch of local to the area influence, and borrow a few things from the Irish and British cultures that seem to have come with most of the folks who settle out there. And, because I’d never turn down an excuse to introduce people to it, have an example of which I speak in the form of an originally British song they’ve since redone–and quite well, too. But first, read this. Then, watch this video.

The month is just over half over, and already things have gone and decided breaking is the thing to do. It started last week, with the near breaking of my plans to return home this past weekend–plans that were changed for other reasons, which will be elabourated on once the appropriate people have been properly hunted, nailed to the nearest wall, and my time and effort in aranging things is appropriately compensated–in blood, if necessary.

Then, earlier this week, the old blogging stomping grounds of LiveJournal, where I still occasionally show up mostly because I’ve yet to convert all the cool people away from it to much more fun things, decided it would be fun to break my LJ RSS hack. More specificly, one of their upgrades apparently broke their own authentication mechanism. That only ended up being fixed an hour ago–and not, laughably enough, before several people who were experiencing similar problems re: their RSS feeds had decided to bring it up quite blatantly in the dev community–I should really consider watching that community, now that I think about it.

Last night capped off the reason for renaming the month of August to the month of Broken. We needed to get laundry done. As in, like, ASAFP. Which turned out to be at just about midnight last night–hey, we never claimed to keep a normal schedule. That was around the exact same time we figured out that hey, this building’s supposed to have two working washers and two working dryers. This building has one of each. And the broken ones are broken in such a way that by the time we figure out they’re broken, we’ve wasted a dollar in each. Those are, to my knowledge anyway, still broken–we’re presently air-drying the affected articles of clothing. Sadly, my name isn’t on the lease here so I don’t get to personally scream in some poor maintenance bastard’s ear about it, but Jess will undoubtedly take amazing amounts of pleasure in doing exactly that just as soon as she can find 30 seconds to breathe.

Well into the third week of August, and we’ve already had plenty of things go breaky smash on a technical and non-technical front–an average of one per week at this rate. I’m officially renaming the month of August to the month of Broken. Now, to go whip something real quick up to make it official on this here website.

Unless you’ve been under a rock all afternoon, you’re probably aware already that former US Senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash in Alaska at 86 years. Now, being that I live in the great white north, beyond the whole “series of tubes” quotation, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about this US Senator. According to some, he was apparently quite the moron. Well, sir, you very well might have been an idiot. But you’ve provided years of hillarity among my particular geek circles with that one quote. For that, you’re awesome. And because it still makes me snort, here’s the infamous monologue in video format. Yes, brought to you by that very same series of tubes.

So I’ve been on the US side of the border for nearly two weeks now, and busy as all get out for most of it. Part of the busy was spending the majority of this past friday evening at the Rochester public market. We were planning to check that out anyway, Jess and I, since she’d only been there maybe once before me, and of course I hadn’t been there yet. So i cruised by where she was getting off work, picked her and Kyle–who conveniently also hadn’t been there yet–up, met Heather over there and we crashed it for a few hours. And in doing so, were treated to a free performance by Donna the Buffalo. Apparently, both Kyle and Heather have heard/seen this group live before, which left both Jess and I to experience it for the first time. Hell of an experience, really.

From right around the first or second song, I had a feeling it’d be a pretty damn near wicked awesome performance. Of course, anyone who can perform “Ring of Fire” and not completely kill it deserves at least a shot at not making me cringe. I didn’t cringe. Instead, I find myself rather unsurprisingly in the category of those who highly approve. I don’t think any of my partners in crime were entirely all that surprised by it either–I’m looking at you, Heather.

They only played for an hour and a half, give or take–a lot less time than I thought they’d get, but apparently the organizers decided to do the headliner thing first. Still, it was long enough for me to decide when I do return to the cooler side, I’m gonna have me some downloading. Because I don’t have some downloading right now, have a video instead. Not Friday’s performance, but a performance. I approve by this. And if you find yourself not approving, evaluate your musical tastes. Right now. Enough said.

Calling the last week or so busy would probably be an insult to busy weeks everywhere, but in a lot of ways, that’s exactly what it was. After the assessment of doom, I took it easy the rest of monday and did absolutely nothing. I needed the relaxation for the rest of the week. Tuesday night was pretty much the start of insanity. Small, relatively contained, but insanity.

Somehow, my nephew managed to be 10 months old without my knowing it. Which means if there’s something he could possibly get his hands on, he’s probably already done so. On tuesday, I went to give the mother a hand with minding him plus the two dogs. Fortunately for both of us, when I got there he was in bed and sleeping. Not fortunately for either one of us, by 7:00 the next morning he was up and ready to go, no questions asked. And go he did–all over the place whether we wanted to chase him there or not. We took him in to see the grandparents, and he was no less energetic when we got him there. This continued pretty much all day, with the exception of maybe an hour in the afternoon when we managed to actually convince him that it wasn’t, in fact, dangerous to his health to actually spend some time immobile for a few minutes. Right up until I think it might have been 9:00 or so, it was pretty nearly non-stop. We even took him for a short walk that afternoon–mostly because we could use the break, and then he’d pretty much just go where we pushed him. By the time we finally got him down for the night, we were more than ready to fall into bed shortly behind him. And, well, we did. And got just enough sleep that the 6:30 wake-up call he’d had in mind for thursday wasn’t quite as painful as I expected. As you could probably guess, most of thursday was spent–yep, doing the exact same thing. And taking turns trying to convince him to go down for a nap so we could get things done around the house that needed to get done–that to do list tends to get pretty long when the majority of your attention’s focused on one very adoreable, but very exhausting, kid. Of course, that didn’t actually end up happening; although between the two of us I think we might have managed to scratch one or two things off that list. Kevin dropped in to kidnap him back at about noonish or so, which gave us just enough time to try clearing off the rest of that list before we hit the floor from simple lack of energy. I don’t even remember most of what happened the rest of thursday beyond the usual routine, which is almost a safe bet for any day that isn’t overly filled with chaos. Of course, the couple days I just managed to survive meant I was pretty much a zombie for most of friday. I slept like the dead thursday night, and was the walking dead pretty well up until friday night.

While I was in recovery, and probably while I was less than conscious, Meka was doing her thing for the karaoke world championships. She’d made it to the state finals as of friday, and was competing there saturday night. My origional intent was to watch the event online, but technical difficulties–for once, not on my end–quickly put the breaks on that notion. I would learn later on that night that I ended up missing an awesome performance, giving her second place and a spot at the regional competition in August.

Yesterday was more time of the familial variety, with a meetup for breakfast then another run into the grandparents’ to kill a couple hours. Then it was back to taking it relatively easy for the evening.

This morning, I got my hands on the audio portion of Meka’s performances. And, with her permission, once she makes them available in video form on Youtube, they’ll make their way here. Now, I go chase after a couple dogs while the mother unit makes her way to work. She had a job interview this morning–glad one of us still gets those, so I’ve been over here since about 10:30. And will probably still be here at about 9:30 tonight. It’s gonna be a long ass day.

Busy or not, this week’s been surprisingly educational. A small sampling of things I learned, in list format. Because, really, who doesn’t like lists?

• Just because the kid’s not walking yet does not, in fact, mean he’s easy to catch.
• Or slow down.
• Or stop.
• Or keep track of if you’re not right behind him.
• When they decide they are not going down for a nap, you are not putting them there.
• Nor are you going to trick them into going for one. Don’t even try it.
• This includes playing with him even while he’s within an inch of falling asleep. He knows.
• This also includes his grandma sneaking off to the kitchen while his uncle plays with him even though he’s an inch from falling asleep. Again, he knows.
• This also includes his grandma sneaking off to the kitchen after he’s already asleep. I still can’t wrap my head around how, but he knows.
• I am apparently not the only one with a periodically screwed up sleep schedule. By the way, kid? This whole 6:30 thing is not healthy.
• The face kids that age make when you let them sample your coke? Awesome. Sorry, no video–I didn’t have my cell phone handy right then.
• Discovered by the nephew at breakfast: your food is good, but someone else’s food is always better.
• Yes, a 10-month-old can, in fact, get on top of your end table if he wants to bad enough.
• Or pull something off it.
• Or pull out the end table’s drawer if you aren’t presently leaning against it.
• Rules are meant to be broken. And gates that block off stairs to prevent infant head trauma are meant to be opened.
• Related: The fact you’ve just wedged the afore mentioned gate against the wall so you’d practically need a sledgehammer to remove it? That’s not discouragement. That’s a challenge.
• The second worst possible thing you could ever do is say no. The worst possible thing is mean it.
• Of course, he’ll probably do it anyway.
• Twice, just because you said no.
• And once more just for spite, I swear.
• 10 months old is not too young to start messing with people’s heads. Either that or this kid’s wickedly gifted.
• If and when I ever get around to having one, I’m investing in a goddamn leash. At least.

We felt this while out investing in things of a grocery related nature. Apparently, the center of the earthquake was about 50 KM northeast of Ottawa–in other words, right in between Ottawa and Pembroke. We didn’t feel a whole lot–kind of like the mall we were in just sort of twitched a little. Windows were rattling, but nothing went flying or anything. We very nearly considered just getting the hell out of the mall. We were surrounded by glass, with concrete cielings, so if it was anything more major than that, the parking lot would have been a hundred times safer.

There’s a rumor floating around that it was felt as far down as Detroit, and into New England. Toronto’s supposedly had several evacuations as a result–as has Ottawa, according to the linked article. Twitter’s alive with speculation of at least one aftershock, but if there are any, they didn’t reach us up here.

We survived the earthquake intact and relatively as sane as we were before. The most exciting part was convincing some of the folks around us that yes, you did, in fact, just witness an earthquake. Spending three years on Vancouver Island has its advantages. Who says you never find anything exciting while running a simple arrand?

Or, as an alternate title, why I should consider sleep rather than caffeine to get me through the night. I’m noticing, though it may just be a horrible coincidince, that the more spam comments I pick up over here, the more likely I am to actually attract something vaguely resembling legitimate trafic to the blog. As a case study, I looked at a sampling of statistics gathered so far–specificly, today’s to this point. And, assuming most spammers still prefer to use methods that don’t actually involve anything sophisticated–like, say, javascript–in their work, I discovered that to this point, I’ve picked up 4 trash comments and 3 actual, legitimate, supposedly non-spammy visitors. Likewise, over the course of the last we’ll say two weeks, I’ve amassed a total of 245 spam comments. Over the course of the past month or so, Google’s tracked about 200 actual, supposedly legitimate folks coming to the blog via one method or another–mostly via direct visits right now.

Now, I’m hardly the kind of blogger that’d attract massive amounts of visitors, so this is probably not a very accurate or telling sampling, but this is what happens when I’m randomly curious. If gaging spam rates was all it took to tell how much attention your blog was getting from people in general, this would be just way too easy.

But, because I started this thing on random curiosity, I’m going to extend my curiosity to others. If you maintain a blog that allows you to track trafic in some way, shape or form, I’m wondering if you’ve noticed a similar increase in spam comments relative to actual legitimate trafic that hasn’t yet tripped the spam trigger. Or, has the level of spam comments tended to differ from the increase in trafic? If you’re up for it, toss a general opinion on this–based on experience or not, your choice–in the comments. Inquiring minds want to know.

My family has entirely too much fun on a long weekend. Particularly on a May two-four weekend. It was no different this year. Food, alcohol, music, awesome weather, and time spent in the back yard with an 8-month-old future quarterback or something. My parents put up a swing of sorts for him this summer, so they could have an excuse to keep him outside on days when it’s not overly boiling–personally, I think mom just did it for the purpose of pictures like this one. I approve.

As I hinted at in this post, perhaps aspiring to be just like your 8-month-old grandson may not be the best thing you could possibly do. As promised, the explanation, and the visual evidence. Dad’s looking at taking a course for the operation of heavy equipment, so he can get out of his current–well, now former–job, and into construction or something similar that gives him a little more free time to get things done that he actually needs to do. Mom made some comment about him being able to possibly make foreman shortly after getting this course and such out of the way. The nephew had himself situated on the floor, playing with a few of mom’s dishes–hey, it kept him away from the stove; work with me here. In the process, he decided to adopt this look.

I think he’s on to something here. We snickered about that all evening. Mostly because I’m not entirely sure my dad completely caught onto it. Hell, it took me a few minutes to clue in–and I was standing right there when he did it. Wonder if dad’s rethinking his career choice yet. Sometimes, living here has its occasional good points. Or, at least, amusing ones.

I only a couple years ago learned the American version of smarties is completely different, including made by a different company, from those sold in the rest of the world. for the curious and the lazy, what the Americans call smarties, apparently we up here call rockets. They’re made by Ce De Candy, and are the stuff that’d make most healthy-minded parents have a small heart attack. The real version of smarties, made by Nestle and sold everywhere that isn’t the US, are more similar to M&Ms. If you’re curious on trying the version everyone else knows and loves and are living in the US, you can apparently buy them from Amazon–so says a lawsuit by Ce De Candy for trademark infringement that’s currently attempting to prevent the sale. See? Geek blogs can be educational for non-techy purposes. Now I know why I get strange looks from people south of the border when I tell them those aren’t real smarties.

According to Environment Canada, current humidity level around these parts is 94 percent. No, I didn’t misread–94 freaking percent. As in, the air outside–and at the moment, inside–my apartment is nearly all moisture. If I hadn’t just yesterday set up my AC, I think I’d be cursing mother nature right now. Instead, allow me to simply flip the switch, close my windows, and laugh at mother nature. And then see if maybe I can’t peal the air off me. I swear, if it had substance, that would be required right about now. So uncool.

In unrelated news, at least it’s only 16 degrees c out there right now. 16 humid degrees, but still. Now, about that dehumidifying.

May 25th, also known as what there is left of today, is considered geek pride day. According to Wikipedia, it means:

1. The right to be even geekier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not like football or any other sport.
4. The right to associate with other nerds.
5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
6. The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
7. The right to be out of style.
8. The right to be overweight and near-sighted.
9. The right to show off your geekiness.
10. The right to take over the world.

Would I be considered less of a geek for willfully ignoring at least one of those rights? Although… I do kind of like that last one.

Happy geek pride day, nerds. I call dibs on Washington.

I just got off the phone with a nice young lady who apparently was under the mistaken impression this was not actually my apartment. The conversation went something like this.

Lady: I need to speak to Simon, please.
Me: I’m sorry, who?
Lady: Simon.
Me: I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong number.
Lady: I’m pretty sure Simon lives there.
Me: I’m pretty sure he doesn’t.
Lady: Oh. Well, bye.

Telling me you need to talk to a guy who doesn’t live here, and then telling me he lives here, does not mean he lives here. Just general FYI. And if you call me back again, I’m probably going to suggest you put down the crack pipe. Thank you for not listening. Twice.

There’s an advertisement being floated by my ISP, Teksavvy, that’s made it on to Youtube. Apparently, it’s also being shown on TV in some places–though personally, I hadn’t seen it until today. If it’s indeed an actual ad for the service, it’d be the first one I’ve seen from any company up here that didn’t stink of corporate BS–like, say, filling service level guarantees you just know you’re not gonna get. And it has the added advantage of also being vaguely hillarious. Here it is, for the randomly curious.

I haven’t been keeping up on my usual sources of entertainment this week, primarily on account of having catching up to do in other areas. I kick myself for it now. In list format, because I can, things I could have, and should have, soundly mocked this week. You may feel free to mock one or all of them in the comments on my behalf. I won’t be upset.

• What’s the first thing you do if you’ve just been caught in an afair, and your significant other decides to up and leave you? If you’re this chick, you sue the cell company. Because, you know, there’s just no way he would have found out anyway.
• If in doubt, just nuke it. That’s a solution being tossed forward by an apparent expert for stopping the oil spill in the gulf. I’ll have my shrimp with a side order of radiation, please. I always thought “Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” was just a movie quote. Clearly, I don’t get out much.
• Ways not to impress the Afghanistan president, number 54761: call him a weirdo and predict he could trigger a civil war. Yes, even if he did say, supposedly jokingly, he might as well join the dark side. Yes, even if he’s not doing a whole lot better in charge of that country than the dark side. And yes, even if you are–as I think you would be–absolutely and completely 100% in the right. That’s just not cool–especially if you used to work in that country for the UN.
• When even actors are downloading their own movies because it’s more convenient and less annoying than paying for them, you know there’s a problem. Question is, what’s the industry planning to do about it? Answer: probably not much–that would actually require effort.
• And, in the political arena, because I can’t go on a mocking spree without it, we have this wonderful piece of I’m not sure what. Liberal party of Canada leader Michael Ignatieff would just like you to know that, if you didn’t spend all that much time outside of Canada and living as varied a life as he has, you’re not as Canadian as he is. Might I ask, exactly from what planet was he exiled before landing in Ottawa? I didn’t know spending 30+ years in the US and/or the UK–he did both–made anyone more Canadian than the next. Boy have I been set straight.
• And in unrelated news, Montreal won tonight. I thought I told folks to fix the playoffs. They’re still broken.

See what happens when I stay away from news sources? People don’t get mocked. Clearly, we can’t have that.

And it only took an explanation from Brad Paisley to set me straight-ish. Gee, if I only knew 10 years ago what I know now.

Well gee. If I knew back then what I know now, there might have been a slightly different ending to a past relationship or two. Then again, considering the said past relationship or two, maybe not knowing’s a good thing. Either way, relationship complexities explained. Now, back to my simplistic life. Where’d I put the sports section?

I just had the pleasure of being treated to a very unusually unique spam comment. This one was caught just a few minutes ago, posted to an entry I put up here a couple weeks ago. Usually, they’re a little more vague than this. And sometimes, they’re even slightly related to the entry in question. This one? I do believe someone just wanted the attention. Here you go.

lol, 50 Cent is so crazy! I love him.

Now, can someone tell me please what this entry has to do with 50 Cent? Really? Stick to general complements on my blog’s design/theme, guys. They were even making me feel good. Well, okay, so not really.

My open letter to Ontario’s premier has earned me currently the 20th ranked spot in a Google search for ontario government minimum wage. Apparently, the highest position I’ve achieved with this post is 5. Will I get back up there, or is it out for good? I are curious.

In barely related news, Ontario’s government has still yet to get back to me. I’m waiting, Dalton…

Why I should not be awake at this hour: I end up getting sideswiped by amusing things posted to Youtube. Like this from “Who’s Line Is It Anyway”, the UK edition, that was tossed at me on a chat server. By the way, Lea, I still can’t breathe. Here, have a video.

I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was, like, tiny. Not entirely sure exactly how old, but I do remember coming home from school, watching the usual cartoons, then changing the channel to CHRO–this was obviously way way back before things like A Channel and the like–to watch TNG. I caught my fair share of flack for it–”Star Trek? Again? You’re not grown out of that yet?”–but I didn’t really care. Hell, I still don’t. Which is why I have an external hard drive with everything from TNG to Enterprize sitting on it. Well, okay, that, plus I have an interest in commercial free TV.

Still, with all my interest in Star Trek, it never occured to me to do anything beyond watch the shows, play a video game or two, and later–meaning in present day–take up roleplaying in the genre. So I didn’t do the trivia thing until recently.

Now, though, I’ve decided I might as well go about the doing of that. And, in just an hour of doing so, I discover Vulcan does actually exist. No, not the planet, per say. But rather a town in Alberta that was originally founded in 1910, 50 or so years before the concept of Star Trek was even a theory on a piece of scrap paper. And it’s now Canada’s Star Trek capital.

Holidaymakers are being urged to ‘boldy go’ where they’ve never gone before with a visit to the Star Trek Capital of Canada.

The town of Vulcan in Alberta was granted the official title earlier this month and is now being billed as a ‘logical year-round destination for science-fiction enthusiasts and Star Trek fans from across the galaxy’.

The trekky in me is having a very small heart attack. Excuse me for just a minute. Okay, that’s much better. Now, to go see if I can’t bribe someone into taking a vacation.

After a recent thread on Twitter–not one, thankfully, I was involved in–I thought it might be fun to air out a theory of mine. specificly that of one timezone. I don’t see why, beyond the method of keeping track of where the sun’s at at any particular moment. It’s noon, which means you look straight up and you’ll pretty well go blind. It’s 9:00 in the middle of July, so if you hurry to your window you’ll be able to see it setting. While all the while someone in England’s watching it come up.

With businesses going global anyway, and just about everything happening across national and continental borders, it only makes sense to consider the elimination of timezones. Businesses in Canada and the US send their call center jobs to India. Britain sells things to businesses in Mexico. China has arangements to ship things back and forth between several countries–including Canada and the US. And all of those would run much faster, and be a whole lot more eficient, if 9:00 in New York equated to 9:00 in London. Sure, it means some places would be lacking in daylight, but well, we already have that already–see: Alaska.

If we’re gonna make everything global anyway, the world should at least try to keep itself on the same schedule. If it’s midnight in New York, folks won’t be calling their sister/cousin/friend/whatever in California because they might not be ready to call it a night yet. Conversely, I won’t get a call from the east coast at 5:00 in the morning from a family member who happens to be staring at a clock that says 9:00 AM instead, and thusly not be required to later plan to beat them to a fine paste for the unwelcome wake-up. And life would go on just as usual–except maybe not as brightly in some parts of the world. But folks are already dealing with that–see Alaska, as mentioned above. If they can handle it for as long as they do, so can we stronger folks.

There’s really no reason I can think of to keep timezones around, except to keep track of when the sun’s up and where. We move to one timezone, and anyone with any reason to keep contact with folks on a global basis is happy. Also, converting 3:00 PST to anything not remotely asociated with my timezone or GMT is a real pain in the ass. Let’s kill that, like, now.

In short, timezones are evil. If we didn’t have to worry about that, we could concentrate on things that could actually be made much better by removing them. Also: daylight savings? Gone. That can’t hurt anyone. Well, okay, so it maybe wouldn’t hurt me. Then again, it’s my blog–naturally all my ehtories will be me-centric. And sometimes, they even possess an almost normal sense of logic.

You can’t go a week in some circles without hearing some crack or another about the guy always wanting sex, and the girl not being interested. I mean hell, it’s a comedian’s default line, if he’s got nothing else. One wonders sometimes where it is they come up with it–I always thought that was just something randomly tossed out there. Not according to a survey done in the US. Apparently, we guys want it more, have more of an interest in it, and will probably want it longer. Yep, give us sex and give us sports, and our lives will be complete. Remember that the next time your girlfriend says you’re never satisfied. Oh, you were expecting a post on my or Jessica’s sexual preference/interest level? Sorry.

Well, I can’t, anyway. I get emails from Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, to do with everything from the results of the last game to major trading/other such news relating to my team. Yes, even though the said team couldn’t play their way out of a game with a 25 nothing lead lately. Occasionally, those emails contain free stuff. This free thinggy came from Sirius Canada. Ordinarily, I can’t aford to go throwing money away on something I may or may not like, so this was halfway decent timing on their part. So now, I have 2 weeks to play around with it and see if it’s something I might want to contemplate paying for, should I come up with the money to do so. And now, because I’m good like that, so do you. If you’ve wanted to give their online version a try and didn’t want to pay for it, just fill out this form and enter promo code “leafs” if it isn’t already entered for you. Then, they’ll email you a password and you’ll have two weeks to play. So far, I’m undecided. After two weeks, we shall see.

A 67-year-old guy, supposedly receiving old age benefits in Calgary, Alberta, has apparently made an attempt to rob a bank. Armed with, of all things, a fork. Clearly, someone should be talking to our government about maybe increasing how much he’s getting paid from the Canada Pension Plan. He could use the money. So could I, but I’m too lazy to find a bank to hold up. Or a fork to do it with.

Jessica and I got to talking a couple days ago, and we somehow got on the topic of old-ish commercials. Particularly, that early 90′s or so commercial for coffee crisp. Turns out, she’s never seen it. Ever. For my part, I forgot how it went. Fortunately, the internet knows all. So, because I’ll occasionally do the nostalgia thing, and because in its own way, it’s semi-amusing, I give you the 1990′s, in a commercial. Wanna see? Just hit play.