The Family (Or most of them)

The Family (Or most of them)
The Family

September 6, 2008

Elections are nothing but bullshit erections



As if all of the world and especially Canada wasn't captivated by the American election in November and that whole circus, now our doofus prime minister is going to call his own election for Oct. 14.

Along with basically the entire human race on the planet, I've railed against Bush forever.

He's a dink of the highest degree, and he knows it, the world knows it, and I bet there's never been so many parodies of a political leader in all of recorded history. He deserves much worse, but it will never happen.

The ultra-right religious establishment and the military complex that he exclusively served for the past eight years will never allow him to face the absolute derision he and his administration deserve.

War on Terror? RIGHT! Texas should refuse him re-entry. But that won't occur.

He will just disappear into history as another total idiot Americans elected who completely fucked up the world and made America out to be much worse than it really is, a nation that standouts like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King made great.

Anyway, now we're faced with either Obama or McCain. If the Americans elect yet another frickin' Reflublican in McCain, then they deserve everything they get. And the world will have to pay the price.

But over here in a tiny corner of the planet, despite its geographic enormity, lies another democracy. Of course, we're the mouse to the U.S. elephant on our southern doorstep. We're Canada.

And I apologize for us in advance. Because I have always held that we are, politically, much smarter than Americans. And I don't mean that as an insult to individual Americans.

But we are much less influenced by stupid religion power bases and private interests.

We have usually been liberals at heart and our greatest accomplishments, I would argue, have occurred when we have elected Liberal governments. That's when we have most resisted being the U.S. puppets that we have become.

That's when we have truly been a nation, a people, of substantiveness.

We are that no more.

Our peevish, polished and prima donna prime minister, Stephen Harper, was a whipping boy of a right-wing, Alberta-hatched political group called the Reform party, which dissipated because Canadians wouldn't accept its extreme views.

He went off and led a private right-wing think tank organization and then, somehow, managed to meld into a damaged and defeated Progressive Conservative party of Canada, which has been around since Day 1.

He won the leadership of that historic party, which has always been the counter-movement from the liberal party, similar to the Reflublicans and the Democrats in the U.S.

And then, because the Liberals here had been through their own scandals and because they elected a French-Canadian leader whose main issue is the environment, the Conservatives under Harper won a minority government.

Of course, it has not worked. Harper's government, without the support of the majority of Canadians in Parliament or among the voting public, has been rendered impotent. But they brought that on themselves.

Harper is, at best, plastic. He's like the teflon frying pan we all buy, coated with some exterior chemical that's supposed to protect the product.

But it wears down after a while, of course, and when you heat it up, eventually the true value of the product is put to the test. He and his government are shallow. They're shallow, they're unpopular, people can see through his lack of depth.

A recent poll suggested Canadians don't want our troops to be fighting in Afghanistan. We want our troops around the world to be peacekeepers, to be helping people overcome the tragedies that war and conflict bring.

Not Harper and his cronies. He wants us to be some sort of mini-Americans or something, trying to change the world and repair irreparable situations. We don't want that. He does. He is worse than Bush.

Bush is simply stupid, obviously coloured by the religious right and his unmistakeable interest in helping the oil barons earn more and more and more.

Harper isn't as stupid, but he follows the stupid like an automaton, so that would have to make him MORE stupid. As a Canadian, I'm embarrassed and shamed by our political choices out there right now.

My god, I'm caught in a trap, as Elvis would say.

It will be a wasted vote, but I'm thinking the socially left, the New Democrats. They've never had power in our country. But I'm sick of this liberal-conservative crap. There's got to be another alternative.

Where's the Rhino Party?

September 4, 2008

Chris's Chicanery in Chicagoland

And so, safely ensconced back at home in the OTHER Windy City, we wrap up our trip to the Chicago area with this little travelogue.

Amazingly, I actually was able to navigate Chicago's incredibly complex freeway system and make my way to Joliet, almost an hour's drive southwest.

That's where I checked into this fancy-schmanzy hotel.

Those 3.5 people who were involved in the tedious comments section of my previous post will know that I described a separate room that featured a fireplace and an extremely large soaking tub with jets in it.

This is it.





I suspect that, for whatever reason, they put me in the honeymoon suite. Unfortunately, I had no honey with me in that room to be sweet with. If I had, however, the bed pictured below would have sufficed.



The room, which I stayed in for five days, was great. The hotel was clean. This was all in stark contrast to my next stop -- Gary, Ind. -- but I'll get to that in a bit.









As I joked in the comments section of the last post, what a coincidence, but I stumbled across one of my many business interests, which was right across the street from my hotel.
You can see these pictures are over-exposed. Go suck an egg.





Thankfully, there was a McDonald's very close by. There was a steady stream of baseball players and yours truly making regular stops there. I discovered their premier line of salads and munched on them often.




Below is a shot of my rental vehicle, which had Texas licence plates. I felt like George W. Bush's buddy for a week.



And to follow up on another matter discussed in the previous post's comments section, where I had noted that a praying mantis had appeared at my work station in the press box, and no one believed me...
Well it loved me so much, it flew all the way to my hotel to be with me.
I call her Priscilla.








After my stay in Joliet, our baseball team opened its playoff series in Gary, Ind., on Tuesday.
We drove directly from Joliet to the ballpark and my team lost Game 1 of the best-of-five series. Priscilla stayed in Joliet.
Below is a picture of the team bus. It's parked out in what is obviously the totally empty parking lot of the casino/hotel complex where we stayed. The parking lot was overrun by grass and weeds.




And this was our hotel...





Ha! Fooled you! I have no idea what that building is -- I suspect a steel mill -- but it was on that site. No, our hotel is below.

And here's the casino, which I didn't visit once...

My hotel room in this dump wasn't nearly as nice as the one in Joliet...

Hell, even I could do a better job wallpapering than these guys...


Our team won the second game in Gary and then the bus drove the 16 hours back to Winnipeg.
I stayed overnight in Gary again and then drove through a torrential rainstorm (remnants of Gustav) back to O'Hare.
And wouldn't you know it, while I was there yet more catastrophe occurred when a plane overshot the runway and flew right into Terminal 1. Amazingly, no one was injured. (Below)
So I had a beer at the Goose Island beer stop and waited for my plane, which was an hour late.

August 26, 2008

A Canadian and America's Pastime

PLAY BALL! (So to speak).


I was, ahem, thrown a curveball in the last week of my vacation when I was told that I would have to travel to the Chicago area to cover our city's baseball team.

I've covered them at times during the season at home, but I've never gone on the road with them. And due to a scheduling snafu, I'll be heading out of town later this week for about a week.

The first destination is Joliet, Ill., a suburb about an hour out of Chicago, where they play their final three games of the regular season.

Then I'll be travelling to Gary, Ind., for the first two games of the playoffs.

So instead of the home confines of home below...

...I'll be covering the team whose logos follow on the road (I'm not writing the team name here because fans could google the name and find this blog post).


I've been to Chicago a few times before to cover Stanley Cup final series. It's a spectacular city. Unfortunately, I won't be there except to land at O'Hare, rent a car and drive west to Joliet, then back east to Gary.



But, such is life. I'd rather be at home, but a road trip is nice every once in a while. It's always good to get out of your comfort zone and your natural environment and open your eyes to something new.


I wonder what kinds of team mascots await in these two cities? Our team's mascot (below) was voted the best in the league. I can only imagine what's in store in these two burgs in the Excited States.


So I'll be around, but I won't be.
I'll be motoring around the U.S. Midwest, covering a team almost entirely made up of Americans who play for a Canadian team in the lowest level of professional baseball.
I hope I hit .500 at least.

August 22, 2008

Spring Cleaning in late August -- Part 2

SUBTITLED: THE BIG SCREW AND THE ELUSIVE LOST NUT

So, when we left you last, I explained that a problem emerged while I cleaned and polished Florence the Fan, thereby eliminating several pounds of dust from my two-bedroom-plus-den apartment.

When I undressed -- I mean, disassembled -- Florence, I had to remove the ring that keeps her front and back covers together.

In an apparent moment of charged, passionate excitement, perhaps like fumbling with a bra fastener in the height of passion, which I have never quite been able to master, I made a mistake.

I lost the nut to the screw below. I looked high and low outside on my patio, but could not find it.
So rather than taking 10 minutes to go to the local hardware store to find my nut, I spent the next hour or so retrieving all of my tool boxes, screw and nut storage cabinets and other sources to find the right replacement nut.
All of these things are located in a gigantic box in my storage room. Living in an apartment, I don't need them, of course. But because of my lack of care in disassembling Flo, I made a horrific boo-boo.
The cabinet above was my first place to look for a nut that could fit the screw. I couldn't find one. I was distraught. The next series of pictures, as you will see, made my search for a nut even more upsetting.






I never did find a nut that fit the screw that came with Flo. However, I did find a longer screw -- a MUCH longer screw -- that was a bit wider and for which I DID find a nut. That picture is below.


So in the picture below, after finally getting Flo back together and lying prone on the floor with me over top of her, I declared victory.


Having done that, I plugged her back in and got her going again by flicking her switch. She was humming like a charm. I realize the pic below is sideways, but get over it. Turn your head to the left 90 degrees.


So here she is in full splendor.


The shot below is in fact an action shot of her blowing at full speed. In fact, she has three speeds, she's quite a fan of mine. And she goes back and forth if I press a button, but she doesn't go up and down.