People Collection List (Canajun Verjun)

Ces, who was voting Tuesday for a New York Jew named Kinky, has I see tagged me to write "five things" about myself that are either profane or mundane.

Being a good boy who could never be profane or do anything considered profane, and being entirely mundane (I'm sure Homo Escapeons will readily back this up), I could only come up with this list:

1. By my rough calculations, I have five scars on my body totalling some 13 inches, nine inches of which are the result of three operations on my right knee, which was totally reconstructed at one point.

I blew out the knee while playing Frisbee football on a hill in Turkey. I have a bolt just below my kneecap holding it all together. The football players I cover laugh at me about having uglier knees than they do.

Other scars are on my right wrist from pushing my hand through a window while losing my temper with my mom as a kid, on my lower back when I had a disc removed (another sports injury) and on my left leg when I sunk a drill bit into it.

2. I have an actor uncle named Len Cariou. Google him. You'll probably recognize him. He's been in movies with Jack Nicholson and Alan Alda, has starred on Broadway with Lauren Bacall and Liz Taylor.

Back in the 80s I travelled to New York and spent a day with him and his then-flame, an actress no one knew until she burst onto the scene later that year with a guy named Robin Williams in a movie called The World According to Garp.

Her name is Glenn Close.

3. I have two brothers and three sisters. All three of us boys have a space between our front teeth. None of the three girls do. Go figure.

4. I told the entire planet, as a sports reporter with The Canadian Press wire service in Edmonton, Alberta, that superstar hockey player Wayne Gretzky broke Gordie Howe's career points scoring record the night he did it.

And my name is on that scoresheet because I picked the three stars that night, Gretzky No. 1, obviously.

5. I was 4-foot-11 in Grade 10 but grew six inches that summer, when I simultaneously discovered girls were as much fun as playing sports and collecting insects.

I only grew another four inches after that. :-(