Dreamed that Son Three and me were driving a Land Rover at some seaside resort – on the water. It did okay for a while, but then eventually sunk. Scarlett Johansson comforted us, on terra firma, as we watched the recovery effort. I told her that driving on the water was explicitly okayed in the driver’s manual.
It was a ridiculous dream, of course. Me, driving a Land Rover? Don’t make me laugh.
Share your own dreams in comments, Canada. Did Scarlett pop by?
Gave the PS4 to Son Two at his birthday get-together last night. Also in attendance: Sons One and Three, Daughter, Son Two’s BFF.
It was a big, big hit. Many thanks to all of you who helped me find it.
Get ready to be hearing that line quite a bit in the next couple years. This Harper appointee has just put the Conservatives in mortal peril. In two sentences.
Oh, and here’s what he deserves.
For years, I have had two devices – a Blackberry and an iPhone.
I was always a Blackberry guy, right from their first pager-style model (that beauty up above). I loved it because I could write on it. I write about 1,000 words every day, so it was just what the doctor ordered.
I got the iPhone because I stepped on my old Motorola at an SFH gig. I wanted something that was a good phone, and that had iTunes. So I got the iPhone, very reluctantly (Apple people always seemed like religious fanatics to me). But the camera and camcorder impressed me, so I kept it.
I kept the Blackberry too, however. It had a keyboard, the iPhone didn’t. Typing on an iPhone is a joke.
For the past year, I’ve had the Blackberry Q10 or Z10 or whatever it is. I hated it. It was awful. It’s biggest problem, I think, was that it was a Blackberry that was trying to be an iPhone.
Yesterday, I got rid of it. Traded it in for an old Blackberry 9900, on which I’m writing this post.
My iPhone? It’s a 5, but I refuse to get the 5S or 5C or whatever. They, like the Blackberry 10 series, offer nothing that I (and perhaps you) really need.
They keep changing these devices to pick our pockets. Not for any other reason, I think.
Am I right? Am I wrong? Comment away. And tell us what device you’re using to do so!
And, yes, that says “W. Kinsella/P. Schenk” as the songwriters – on a Palma Violets record!
Justin Trudeau won’t agree to an interview.
With Sun News, that is.
He dismisses queries from Sun Media reporters on the Hill, even super nice guys like David Akin. He routinely dismisses questions from Sun Media reporters.
And, last week, we asked him if he’d do one of those friendly year-end interviews with a Liberal-friendly audience — that is, Yours Truly — but he dismissed the idea.
Now, we may be the biggest newspaper chain in the country, with an audience in many of the places where the Liberal leader needs to be heard. We may be able to get to every other Liberal leader you can think of, including my former boss, Jean Chretien. But Justin Trudeau isn’t interested in talking to Sun News.
On the one hand, it’s easy to understand why.
Some Sun News folks have been completely over the top about Trudeau, calling him names and whatnot. If he feels that he sometimes doesn’t get a fair shake from Sun News, he’s entitled.
On the other hand, it strikes Yours Truly as a pretty dumb media strategy. For example, Rob Ford famously stopped talking to the Toronto Star because it published a story about his conduct as a football coach. Didn’t exactly work out for Mayor Crackhead, did it? Nope.
Since Justin Trudeau has decided not to ever speak to Sun News, we are left to imagining what a Justin Trudeau interview would be like.
If I’d been given the opportunity, this is the one thing I wanted to speak to him about — him, and how he speaks.
In a year-end interview he gave to The Canadian Press, Trudeau was asked about his verbal missteps — saying he admired China’s “dictatorship,” saying the Boston Marathon bombers felt “completely excluded” from society, and so on. He gave an answer that fascinated Yours Truly: He acknowledged his mistakes. And he said, in effect, get ready for more flubs.
“Even though every now and then I give a little extra fodder to my opponents to try and go after me, ultimately I’m right in trusting Canadians, that they will understand that my focus is entirely on trying to serve them in the best and the realest way that I possibly can.”
(Nota bene: “Realest” is not a word, although Tupac Shakur used it. It means being truthful.)
This answer was clever, in two ways.
One, it’s a candid and honest admission by Justin Trudeau about one of Justin Trudeau’s shortcomings, for which he deserves credit. Or, two, it’s a bit of pre-conditioning — some inoculation — against future verbal gaffes. Which is astute, and for which he also deserves credit.
Either way, there’s no downside — and a fair amount of upside — to saying such a thing. He wins either way.
But here’s the problem. Here’s the question I would have asked him, had he given me the chance: “Given that your opponents, on the right and left, clearly want to depict you as lacking judgment and lacking experience — given that they want to persuade voters that you’re a rakishly handsome man-child — isn’t it simply a better idea to, you know, stop making verbal gaffes?”
That’s the question I would’ve asked Justin Trudeau, if he had agreed to an interview. So perhaps no one is going to ask him that in year-end interviews.
Canadian voters, however, one day will.
And voters are not so easily dismissed.
I have long called McDonald’s Corporate Death Burger (h/t MDC). I also refer to a Big Mac as a “Stomach Bomb.” The first libel action against me (at age sixteen, I won) came from McD’s. So I generally avoid the place like the plague.
However, sometimes you have no choice. Such was the case on the weekend, when I needed to quickly feed Son One and Son Two something.
The illustration below was spotted by one of my sharp-eyed sons. It looked very much to us that McDonald’s has embraced the punk ethos.
The little figure on the side of the cup is sporting a mohawk! Punk subculture is spreading!
The view in our living room.
