Guesswork

One of my hobbies, along with falconry and barking at the mailman, is coining neologisms that don’t catch on (I was this close - holding up thumb and index finger very close together - to coming up with microcelebrity, which I think has a real shot.) My latest concept in that vein is a quicker, […]

Just when I thought cybercrime had become all professional, I get a “you won the lottery” email which proves that the amateurs haven’t left the game yet. No discussion of what fabulous prize I’ve won, no spurious detail to lend authenticity, just a terse “send us your info.” To cap it off […]

This mysterious creature turned up in our kitchen late one night, where we found him eating Rice Krispie squares and reading Harry Potter. Shy at first, he gradually became used to us and now he lives under the basement stairs. We leave him treats of graham crackers and ginger beer, and in return […]

This is what Toronto and apparently much of North America looks like today, as we get snowed under by a massive, festive pre-Christmas storm system. I know it’s inappropriate to relate specific weather events to the bigger picture of global warming, but seriously, we have to blame somebody.

My recycling fodder from Shoppers Drug Mart features some funky technology this week - a portable stereo that plays both cassettes and CDs. Now seeing as nobody has sold cassettes for the last decade or so, I’m assuming that someone doing inventory at Shoppers’ came across a warehouse full […]

A cranky blogger at the Guardian has labelled Bob Dylan ” the biggest sellout the world has ever seen” for his recent shilling of the Cadillac Escalade. The ads feature Bob driving through the desert while mumbling an awkward pitch for the eco-disaster that is the Escalade (14 mpg city!) and his own satellite […]

If you want to see how the English language is evolving, consider this recently received spam for the male enhancement product, MEGADIK:
Dolls always whizgiggled at me and even gentlemans did in the municipal john!
Well, now I sriek at them, because I took M_E GA D IK
for 6 months and now my cock is excessively greater […]

A British company is planning to launch a free men’s magazine with the unlikely name Short List. Rather than alienate their target market right from the get-go, they should consider a title like “Massive” , “Gargantua” , or “Extreme Magnum Power”. A good rule of thumb is that any name which sounds like a […]

Actually it was yesterday, but today is the day everyone gets off work.
Anyway, to be unironic for a second, this is a pretty great place to live, for all kinds of reasons.
A few off the top of my head:
We have four seasons, three oceans, two official languages and one enormous, mostly […]

Phrasing notwithstanding, the sign above doesn’t indicate the door you should use if you want to mix and mingle with the opposite sex. In the gender-apartheid world of Saudi Arabia, “singles” means single men, and the other seating area, completed walled off from this one, is referred to as the “Family Section”.
Men […]

Prohibition in Saudi Arabia is a lot less entertaining than I understand it to have been in 1920’s America - there’s no Eliot Ness, no picturesque hillbilly rumrunners fleeing the cops against a backdrop of banjo chase music, and if there are crazy flapper-habituated speakeasies, no one’s told me about them. However, just because […]

If you read this blog regularly, and that would make you part of a select group indeed, you will probably see a slowdown in posting over the next three weeks. It’s not just a case of the summertime lazies, I’m actually in Saudi Arabia working on some video stuff, mostly corporate. Have been here […]

Ha, gotcha. This is actually a cleverly doctored photo of our elderly dwarf rabbit Kenny, and if he’s excited about Easter, he’s not showing it. He plans to spend the holiday the way he spends most of his days; i.e. sitting in a pile of his own feces waiting to be fed.

This isn´t meant to be a travel blog, but you gotta work with what you got.
I´m in Santiago Chile until Wed, and it´s a beautiful place - weather is sunny and around 28C, which is much nicer than Toronto, and the people are great. I´m at a slight disadvantage communicationally speaking because apparently I […]

photo courtesy dotnm from Torontoist Flickr Pool

Who says that working for world peace can’t be fun? A group of peace activists and sex enthusiasts are redefining the term “multiple orgasm” with the First Annual Winter Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace. On the day of the winter solstice, December 22, 2006, everyone on the planet is being asked to […]