In the Year 2010

As we look back on the year that was one of us, a seer, a visionary, a traveler on the currents of Time looks into the future; these are the truths he brings back.

Sports

On the field of grid iron
The Young Stallion revolts
And takes the triumph
(The Super Bowl goes to the Colts)

On a field of diamond
Victory comes to the city
Where Brotherly Love abounds
And where now the Doc is found.

Where contest comes to the court,
There where war with ball is done,
The final victory shall come
Where the Phoenix rises, in the land of the sun.

Where contest comes on field of ice
A Capital steeped in vice
Shall bring the cleansing victory home
Sticks raised high from Texas to Gnome.

Politics

Some will change, some will stay the same,
But though some change all will stay the same;
Those who seek power should not be given it,
Those who profess the way of truth are  not livin' it.
In the frozen north, the head still rests uneasy
Despite the lack of crown; one and all are sleazy.
In the land to the south the Chosen one still Lacks
And all around lie upon lie still stacks.
In the world ar large they come and go
Their lies as ageless as the works of Michelangelo.

The World

The date will alter
While humanity stagnates;
Great is our frailty.

The sun burns hotter
Our souls reach ever higher
All our days will change.

A Truer Word Was Never Spoken

Some Rapper, some where
Will tell us to raise our hands
Like we do not care.

Done Deal, Done Right

Cast ye, if ye will, yer mind back to a time not long past, a time less than two weeks ago, when I posted on the Internet my dissatisfaction with Rogers Communication. This is a follow up story: is it the story of a Christmas Miracle? Well maybe… life itself is a miracle.

Is it the story of small town boy makes big in the big city? No. Is it the story of how, after a 6/10ths of a decade I was able to quit the job that even now sucks my soul dry because I had won the lottery? No.

Is it the story of an attempt to make right a situation which seemed wrong? Yes. Yes it is.

For those of you who are too lazy to go back and read the previous post here’s a short summation: my wife called Rogers to see if we could get upgraded to an Iphone: we were quoted a ridiculously high price that was 3x higher than what Joe Blow walking in off the street could have gotten. Why, we asked ourselves (and the Internet), could someone who hadn’t been with the company get a better deal than someone who’d been with them for 13 years?

About a week ago, my wife, who’d also posted a short blog venting her disappointment with Rogers, received an email from Mary at Rogers. Mary’s job, it seems, is to patrol the Internet looking for just such posts/blogs as ours. Within a couple of days of our blogging, Mary had emailed my wife and said someone from Rogers would be in touch.

I was sceptical myself – it was the holidays after all, and the best of intentions can often get lost along the way. But sure enough, yesterday Owen from Roger’s head office called and left a message. After a very short game of telephone tag, my wife talked with Owen this morning.

He asked about our experience and then gave us the i-phones that we had been wanting at the same low price as Mary Lunchpail and Joe Lunchbox could receive – and we did not need to finish our current plan. All we had to do was to commit to the same 3 year plan that we’d already been on and would had to have signed up for no matter where we went. We also got a pretty sweet monthly plan as well.

A large corporation is kind of like a hydra – it has several heads and often for everyone one head that says one thing another will tell you something else (each person has their own interpretation of company policy, despite the fact that its a policy). But with this many headed, hydra we were obviously referred to one of those heads that was able to think for itself and make the connection that a higher monthly plan payment equals a higher revenue; not to mention that a customer has left equals no revenue whatsoever.

In an ideal world we would have gotten what we wanted right off the start without quibbling; but in my mind, because they acknowledged our complaint and then sought to redress it, Rogers has redeemed itself.

Thank you for listening Rogers.

The Darker Side of Sodor

Dear Solitary Reader,

I’ve got this week off of work (woohoo!) and right now I’m having some quality time with the boy; by quality time I mean I’m on the computer and he’s on the floor playing trains and watching Thomas the Tank Engine.

Normally I’m a fan of Thomas, but I just made a bit of connection and now I’m a little weirded out by everyone’s favourite tank engine and the world in which he lives/rules.

In this particular episode an engine by the name of Fearless Freddie is trying to organize a party for his friend Colin, who just happens to be a crane, and in the process is screwing things up royally. Freddie is ordering humans around all over the place and they obey his every whim as if he were the very voice of reason. This is not an isolated incident; all over the island of Sodor trains are ordering around their human counterparts.

So what was the connection that weirded me out? Well if you take away some letters from the word Sodor and add some more and then shift them around a bit you get this word: Kitten. Oh wait, sorry wrong letters there… lets start over… from Sodor if you take out the S, add an M and a strategically placed R you get Mordor. And as we all know, that’s where the Shadow’s Lie.

If you’ve seen Thomas, Solitary Reader, and are over the age of five, you’ve probably also wondered why the humans on the island of Sodor obey the trains, who have the intellect of your average three year old; I believe I have discovered the reason: Thomas and his eight friends are the Ringwraiths from the Lord of the Rings.

The parallels are there for those who have the eye to see them (use two eyes, as often as you can spare them).

Sir Topham Hatt, the one “human” whom everyone seems to obey is actually Sauron, the Dark Lord. After his defeat by the newly forged Armies of the West and the destruction of the Ring of Power, Sauron was not in fact ended, he was merely diminished; no longer able to even inhabit that heavy armour, he took the form of a portly gentlemen and found an island to recuperate his strength.

He also realized that whereas everyone looks at the picture to the left and sees evil incarnate; the picture on the right conveys the image of only a bumbling fool and therefore is not to be feared; there were advantages to this new form.

But what of the Nine you ask? The Ringwraiths, what happened to them?

In the opening song for Thomas & Friends, eight trains are mentioned. Thomas, Edward, Henry, Gordon, James, Percy, Toby and Emily. That’s Eight Trains. In the canonical piece Thomas & The Great Discovery Thomas encounters a new train whose name is Stanley. In the closing lyrical piece Stanley is inserted into that opening song making for a song of 9 trains.

Nine Trains. Nine Ringwraiths. To quote Filmore from Cars: “I’m not the only one seeing this right?”

Thomas as the number one train on Sir Sauron Hatt’s railway is obviously the Witch King of Angmarr.

Percy, James, Gordon, Henry, Edward, Emily, Toby and Stanley. All Ringwraiths.

When you think of it, it makes even more sense. The Nazgul started out on horseback and then moved into the aeronautical form of travel, becoming the winged wraiths. These evil beings are very obviously early adopters, and probably saw the advantages of train transports; Thinking it the wave of the future. Really, its only the fact that trains need track that saved us.

And this explains why the humans on Sodor obey the trains; they’re afraid not to…

Oh, and one final comparison:

Sir Percival

=

Mouth of Sauron

One track to rule them; one track to find them
One track to bring them all in the darkness bind them
On the Island of Sodor, where the railway lies...

Sincerely,

Me

A Shark’s Tale

Dear Solitary Reader,

So I’m just on the ol’Interweb surfin’ for news and I see that the Heene family, born under an ill star as they were, have suffered another blow to their hopes of becoming a reality TV mainstay. Balloon Dad gets 90 days in jail, Balloon Mom gets 20 days in jail and the Balloon Children… well they are sentenced to the rest of their life with the Balloon Parents so they’re being punished enough.

While the father is obviously a colossal douchebag, and the mother appears to be a mail order bride, this whole sequence of events could not have transpired without one thing: the media.

There is something in all of us that cannot help but look at the bad things. Homer made us laugh at ourselves when he summed up our general reaction by saying “It’s funny because it didn’t happen to me.” It even has a name of sorts: bad car accident syndrome. When you see something bad happen you want to keep watching to see how it turns out; and if anyone’s dead, so you can be thankful its not you.

The media has glommed on to this fact and are attempting to spoon feed us badness in all its forms on their 24/7 news channels. Every time a tornado in the Gulf of Mexico gets downgraded to a tropical storm you can see the disappointment on the face of every reporter at a CNN desk. Every time the US government releases some stat saying that the economy isn’t doing so well that same reporter lights up like a Christmas tree.

H1N1 was a hot topic for a while, but people weren’t dying as frequently as they should have been so there was a couple of slow news casts there for a while until they were lucky enough that Tiger let the cat out of the bag (and oh so much else!) and the sharks had some new chum to feed on. News corporations can’t legally make up news (that’s not saying they don’t) but they can take a story and report on it so often and from so many angles that it seems a lot more important than it actually is.

In the case of the Heene family, one can’t help but sense an undercurrent of satisfaction in the media that jail time was part of the final result. They seem to point their fingers at Papa Douche Heene and say: ”Look at this man. Look at what he has done to his children in his search for fame!”

But within hours of that first call going out saying that a kid was trapped in a balloon and about ready to plummet to his death the media were there; the boy in the sky was the chum and the sharks were circling below. You can bet at least one reporter on the scene thought something along the lines of: “This will be such a great story if that kid dies!” He or she may have felt bad about having that thought, or maybe not.

While there will always be idiots in every avenue of life, the media provides a venue for them to be idiots on a world stage; and because they’re idiots they don’t know what’s happening to them.

TV/movies equals easy fame; fame sometimes equals riches (at sometimes too high of a price, rest in peace virginal Lindsay Lohan); people with no marketable life skills often use it as a transportation module to make a quick cash grab. The media builds them up up up and then eventually these pariahs of our culture are brought low.

It’s one of the reasons why most of my favourite TV heroes are either muppets or cartoons: He-Man doesn’t sleep around, Astroboy doesn’t do drugs and no one cares about the world of finance in the village of the Smurfs (with the possible exception of Gargamel because I’m pretty sure he’s trying to make all that gold because he lost his retirement savings by investing with AIC).

The Courtship of the Paper Clips

Every morning I open up my desk drawer to put some things in there for the day; a couple of weeks ago I noticed these two solitary paperclips. At first it was nothing, just a “Hey Self, look paper clips, remember those are there if I need them.” The next day, when I opened the drawer again, they were still there, but I noticed this time they were a fraction closer together: “Odd,” I thought but paid no attention to it.

The day after that I opened the drawer to find they were closer even than the day before, and the day after that closer; one day I opened the drawer and they were joined together. Before my eyes, love had blossomed.

What follows is the imagined Courtship of the Paperclips.

“HEY YOU!... WANNA TANGLE?”

Just kidding. Here it is.

DAY TWO

Paperclip One

How will I attract her? In what manner
Might I draw her; see how her silver gleams?
I, who once held paper from the scanner,
Am useless now; I hold only my dreams.
Behold her! She could hold paper by the reams!
I am as a leper who with apathy begs
The gods to allow him one working scheme,
But an inch is as good as a mile to a thing with no legs!

There! She has noticed me, I feel it!
See, she yearns and turns towards me, I see it!
I know not how, I know not why but I rejoice.
Oh Lord of the Office if you have a plan reveal it!
If there is some other form I should take, let me be it!
She is the one for me; I will not regret that choice.

Paperclip Two

There is strength in him though he be old and bent;
Strong years there is left in his frame, he is not spent
If only he could see it;
I would mould him, give him purpose anew
I am only one now, but soon we will be two
His heart is strong, I will free it!

DAY TWO

Paperclip One

Oh what I fool was I to think
Yesterday I soared, today I sink;
She does not love me, she cannot love me.
She is there and I am here
No way to cross this mile I fear
I would pray to the gods, were any above me.

Paperclip Two

His gleam this day is diminished
He thinks his dream of uniting finished;
But I know things, I am not vexed
For once I bound a science text.
And once I bound a true written play
That had this, and this alone to say:
The theme, so clear: Love conquers all
And science taught of momentum’s call

For where a man sees only thorns
A woman sees naught but roses.
Here it comes, my chance is born
The drawer opens and then it closes;
The momentum carries me towards my Forlorn
I take advantage, but its love that tow’s us

DAY THREE

Paperclip One

She is closer this day, I see her clearly
I long for when I may hold her dearly
I see her strategy and today will do the same
Although she is just like others, a clip without name
She is to me my Aphrodite
Beauteous, lever, mighty.
Tomorrow brings us nearer.

Paperclip Two

Distance between us melts away;
Who’d think  to find love in this paper tray?
I who have been in libraries, bags and schools
(All but the bag full of over-thinking fools)
Have read of love you see
But never thought of some for me.
Tomorrow brings us nearer

Day 4 – The Joining

Paperclip One: At last we meet, we can connect
Paperclip Two: The journey long, let us reflect
Paperclip One: I saw you there so strong and free
Paperclip Two: I longed for you and you for me
Paperclip One: You found a way, you made this real
Paperclip Two: You brought life to what I feel
Paperclip One: I feel connected to you now
Paperclip Two: As we joined together somehow
Paperclip One: Now we’re together, our story’s done
Paperclip Two: We are a chain, a chain of one.

And so these two paperclips, who were once two but are now one, came together. I had to hide them in the back of the paper tray so that the manager’s wouldn’t see them.

My company frowns upon interoffice romance.

So They Say…

Dear Solitary Reader,

The world of proverbs is an interesting place. It’s difficult to tell what will end up as a proverb and what will be tossed by the way side as nothing more than verbal diarrhoea (such as much of what I say).

For those of us who are of literal mind some of the proverbs in frequent use today don’t make any sense; the following is a small treatise on some of those.

You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat it Too.  This was a favourite saying of my mothers and because I was an antagonistic little bastard, I had fun riling her up about it. “What’s the point of having cake,” past Me would say “if you can’t have it. It will just go bad. And then you have bad cake. Then you’d have to throw it out. And you would have no cake and have not gotten to eat any too.”

“That’s not the point!” Mom would say, “You can’t HAVE your cake and EAT it TOO!’ Logic and my mother were often infrequent acquaintances and when she needed to make her point she went for volume rather than diction. My Mom was awesome, and if you’re reading this from up above Mom, I always knew what the saying meant – I was just being an antagonistic little bastard.

That being said, in this scenario cake is the wrong focal point. What child would understand the concept of having a piece of cake and not touching it? Willpower does not exist to a 7 year old (unless they turn it into an action figure and it becomes a He-man sidekick).

Suggested Amendment: Once you use something it’s gone.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Bee Holder I never got this one. Who would be dumb enough to hold a bee? And if you’re holding a bee you’re not going to be paying attention to any chick that walks by (unless she has an Epi-pen and you’re allergic to the bee you’re holding – in which case why would you be holding a bee anyway? Are you filming a YouTube video? That’s stupid – you could die – put down that bee!?)

Suggested Amendment – No suggestions this one’s just too stupid.

Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater Okay, this seems like common sense and it’s scary that it got repeated enough to become a proverb.

Suggested Amendment: Wait MY BABY!

When you least expect it… expect it. This is more of a threat than a proverb but still it doesn’t make much in the way of sense. If someone said that to me I’d be like: “What you talkin’ bout Willis?”

Because if someone told me to expect it when I least expect it then I’d be walking down the street on a sunny day in Movember and I’d stop, and the guy behind me would bang in to me because I stopped suddenly, but I wouldn’t notice that because I’d be thinking: “Hey, that dude told me to expect it when I’m least expecting it. So now I’m expecting it.” And at that point the assailant would be like: “Ah, damn, he’s expecting it now! Oh well, maybe tomorrow.” Really, if you expect it when you least expect it then you’re no longer least expecting it, so it cancels itself out.

In this pessimistic age perhaps we should be saying: “It will come when you expect it.” Because as Yoda points out: Expectation leads to Hope, Hope leads to Disappointment, Disappointment leads to Anger, Anger leads to Fear and Fear Leads to the Dark Side (he did too, its in the unabridged version of Star Wars).

Suggested Amendment: When you’re not paying attention I’m going to stab you with this fork.

There are plenty of sayings, and plenty of them don’t make sense. Some of them do mind you. Oddly however, one proverb is “Familiarity breeds contempt” and because these proverbs are looked at as clichés, which are overly familiar, no one pays attention to them. So whatever good they might do is lost because no one’s paying attention.

So what I suggest you do is find another way to say the same things these and other proverbs are saying and remember to move when the metal’s glowing (see? That’s Strike While the Iron’s Hot right there).

Sincerely,

Me

The (Tooth) Decaying World of Cereal Box Icons

Way over at the Sanctuary of FGM my bro did something similar to great hilarity.

I was inspired for my take on it while eating Raisin Bran this morning; reminiscing about the time when Raisin Bran actually had raisin’s in it.

Back when I was a lad Saturday morning cartoons were the height of the week; heck now that I’m an adult they compete hand in hand with football on Sunday for the reasons behind my continued existence.

Most  of us growing up in the magical eighties didn’t just have TV heroes in the pantheon of gods that TV fed us – wedged in there right next to He-man, GI Joe and Papa Smurf (shut up) were such figures as Lucky, the Lucky Charms Elf, that rabbit from Trix and Toucan Sam.

Now of course there are still some cereal commercials but it seems like they’re really just phoning it in these days; I swear I saw one commercial were Toucan flew of stage and just before the commercial ended you could hear: “Oh yeah, follow your f**&ng nose.”

So what’s changed? Where are these icons today?

Sugar-Bear: Well contrary to popular, and medical, opinion apparently you can get enough of that sugar crisp because everyone’s favourite pyramid raiding sugar seeking bear has been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. “I’m not that bear any more,” he said in a “tell all” interview with Barbara Walters. “I never even liked the cereal but they made me eat it  take after take after take. That’s why I’ve started a class action law suit against cereal companies… I’m hoping some of the others will join me.”

Sugar Smack Frog: This is one of the sadder tales to come off a cereal box because the Sugar Smack Frog became less about the Sugar and more about the smack. This once proud icon, found gracing TV’s Saturday mornings, was arrested in 2004 on a case of domestic violence and is serving 6 years in a state penitentiary.

Snap, Crackle, Pop: Two words: Suicide Pact.

The Trix Rabbit: Of all the cereal box icons I related most with this one. Year upon year this poor rabbit craved just one taste of Trix and never did get any to my knowledge. This was, of course, a metaphor for my own life at the time as a social outcast. The “trix” represented friendship and I was the rabbit. I, the rabbit, I was different from the others, the mob, the group, the “kids”.  No matter how hard I tried I never could get attain that bowl of friendship. At least there was no shortage of milk though…

Toucan Sam: This bird actually shows up on commercials these days so it’s pretty easy to see what happened to him – he had kids. From the looks of it triplets no less. For a brief time Toucan was the star of a reality TV show modelled on the John & Kate Plus Eight model; this was called Toucan in Tree Plus Three. Toucan, of all the cereal box icons, is perhaps the only one still worth looking up to; because after the tragic death of his wife (who got drunk on vodka one night, forgot how to fly and fell out of her tree) he carried on and is raising his children and still trying to hold down a career in show biz.

The Lucky Charms Elf: I think it’s pretty safe to say that Lucky wasn’t very (lucky that is), or if he was then it was all bad. The sort of life where children chase you around day in and day out trying to get at your Lucky Charms is no life at all; Lucky is now paying for it in a sanatorium in England. His nightly cries of: “Take’em, take me lucky charms, just leave me a loon ye daft basterds!” often wakes up his fellow patients; by day he rocks back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and mutters:

“They’re coming. They’re coming.
I hear their hearts drumming;
Crawling and slipping through malevolent mud
Over field over farms
For my lucky charms
My lucky charms will be covered in blood.”

Let’s pray this one never sees the movie Leprechaun and realizes he has other options.

Honey Nut Cheerios Bee/Count Chocula – Back in the early 90s when the world of cereal box icons was starting to shrink an advertising executive had a great idea. “If the Flintstones and the Jetsons can do a crossover show, why can’t we do the same with our cereal box heroes! This will be big – we can form the Justice League of Breakfast.” He pitched the ideas to the cereal makers and they ate it up like… well cereal.

The first cross over involved everyone’s favourite bee… No it wasn’t Do-Bee.. okay everyone’s 2nd favourite bee from the Honey Nut Cheerios (HNCB) breakfast line teaming up with Count Chocula to fight the evil Waffler (who would try and convince kids to eat waffles which had only 36% of the iron required for a nutritional breakfast as opposed to cereal’s 42%).

The accident was horrible and is spoken of in the same sentences where people speak of the mysterious deaths of Bruce Lee and Willie Nelson. While filming an action sequence HNCB tripped over a wire and went careening into Count Chocula. It turns out that it’s not just a wooden stake through the heart that can kill a vampire (at least not one hired by a cereal company) but the sting of a bee does a pretty good job too; well in that one fell swoop the Count went down for the … count… and the bee endorsed his last box of Cheerios. The word on the street is that both icons were taken down by the Mafia because of huge gambling debts; but we’ll never know.

Stephen King, in his novels that comprise The Dark Tower speaks of a world that has “moved on;” becoming so drastically different from the world it once was that it is almost unrecognizable.

The world of the cereal box icon has “moved on.”