On Justin Bieber and Fruit Loops

One day, Canada is going to look back on history and apologize for Justin Bieber.
Just like they did with Bryan Adams.






Fruit Loops taste uncomfortably similar to crunchy cardboard that has been shellacked with citric acid and painted with melted sugar, and though I know this, I could still very happily eat an entire box. Whoever first thought of making tiny, edible Play-Doh donuts was a mad, mad genius.


 

On Pandering, Part 2

Today I am going to pander to some of the other growing readership circles I've somehow cultivated of late. Here are some personal shout-outs and notes for all of you wonderful readers!

Pakistan: Guys, I know I talk about particle physics a lot. I still can't help you with your nuclear program. And besides, India gets me four times as many hits as you, so I think you're barking up the wrong tree for secrets. Still, I like you guys and I'm thankful for your perusal, so here's a diagram I found for a rocket-propelled chainsaw launcher.

Mexico: I love what you guys are doing with narcotics trafficking. Your catapults and complex tunnels are impressive. I know it's entirely legal in my state, but I was wondering if you guys could get me a deal on salvia. A couple friends are interested and I just want to know if drug dealers could give me a better price than online retailers. I can wait for you to get back to me with a letter retrieved from inside a drug mule or something. Thanks!

Brazil: Thank you for Carnival, thongs and buxom transsexuals indistinguishable from the biological thing. I am told these are your three largest exports and so this is what I thank you for. I would also like to personally thank you for screwing up a perfectly good continental linguistic system by still using Portuguese, that isn't in any way tremendously annoying for people with OCD.

Canada: … I have nothing bad to say about Canada.

Saudi Arabians still reading since yesterday: … I have nothing bad to say about you either. You are good sports. Please don't read yesterday's post, I like being alive.

The Guy Who Keeps Clicking My Page After Searching For Porn: Seriously, dude, "Elizabeth Banks Nude" and "sexy old woman's asses photos" are not valid search terms for this site, and the last one isn't even grammatically accurate. And while we're on the subject, whoever searched "is there christians that play neopets" [sic] is even more horrifyingly undereducated than you are. (And for the record: No, no good Christian should ever play Neopets.)


Since, I have no way to really end this, I'm going to just add this one little group:

To People Finding My Blog Through Non-English Search Terms;

I love you. I see a search in Russian and two in Arabic and I just thought everyone else should know what you are looking for. You are not terrorists or crazed vodka mafioso. You are everyday people, just like us.

два попа с битами - "Two priests with the bits." That might be the greatest Walk Into A Bar joke ever, but now I'll never know. I commend you on your sense of humor.

اسس بيوتي - "Foundations of Beauty." Either you mistook me for a Western makeup artist or you were enraptured by the grace and elegant lines of my HTML. In either case, I thank you.

اليزابيث بانكس - "Elizabeth Banks." … We are the same, you and I. Our differences are not so great.

On Family Day

I hope everyone secured their new mattresses yesterday. That's what I believe President's Day was designed for. Bedroom furniture and not having to give kids or office workers two different days off close together.

And to our Canadian friends who just celebrated Family Day, I would like to say this:

Fuck you, buddies.

I wanted to read the new Dinosaur Comics today and you know what I found? This past Friday's strip.

What the hell, Canada? The 'Merican webcomics didn't take the day off, why should you? Our day was made for combining the inconveniently convergent birthdays of our nation's two greatest presidents. That's a reason to take a half day. What's Family Day celebrating? Family? Do you really need a day to celebrate being stuck together until the younger people are self-sufficient enough to leave and let the old ones go insane?

Face it, Canada, you just realized it would be too sad to admit it's not worth doing business on a day when real Americans have taken off work.

O' Canada or: The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, Pt. 5

I would put on a Shatner mask and bang Avril Lavigne like a sea green bartender from outer space. I would mount her like the Canadian police. I would nail her like Jesus on the cross.


Now the end of our tale takes quite a bit of explaining to make any sense at all. Firstly, we were drunk. That would normally do it, but there is something sinister about Montreal which I have not said: eighty-five percent of Canadian bums are punks. Now I don’t mean this to say they are bad people. They probably are, but that’s beside the point. Fifteen percent of Canadian bums are homeless beggars, who–according to one who followed us for several blocks inquiring as to the financial situations of New York City beggars–are all bi-lingual and earn upwards of $200 per day squeegeeing car windows. These people are amazing.

The other eighty-five percent are literally punks. They have stepped out of 1985 and into the streets of Montreal. They are garbed in military surplus and black leather, and the most popular accessory is the steel chain. They have large boots and spikes, and ugly girlfriends and unnaturally colored hair. Some kids lived together on the street with their dog. We gave a couple bucks to another kid outside a bar at two in the afternoon because his beggar’s request was, “Hey, can I get two bucks for beer?” He was honest. True punks are crazy, but they’re also brutally honest. If you’ve never seen the movie SLC Punk, watch it, and extrapolate that into Montreal.

Now these people remain on the streets after dark, as they live there. We, on the other hand, were drunken, foreign buffoons, appointing the least drunk of us the responsibility of deciding whether or not there were cars on the road we were about to walk into. The first thing I noticed was a group of teenaged punks huddled outside a closed Mega-Plex with their several canine companions, while one member of their groups was attempting to underhand a shrub-sized Christmas tree up onto the cinema’s lighted sign. Remember, this was late May.

About a block and a half later, Jay, the most punkish and most outrageously violent of our group was stumbling between my stumblings and Mike’s stumblings, and barring his System of a Down t-shirt, generally looking not very punkish or violentish. It was at this time that we passed a small group of punk-bums on the street. They walked between us, and in passing one threw up his leg back and sideways, kicking Jay’s leg and missing his crotch by about two inches. With a steel-toed boot.

Jay apologized, citing that he did not wish to start anything and that he was just drunk.

About three seconds later he rescinded this when he realized that he’d just been kicked by a lousy bum.

We spent a few minutes trying to keep Jay calm and explain that there were three distinct groups of punker-bums eyeing us at that moment, and that meant about fifteen people who would not be very happy with a trio of rabble-rousing tourists. The only thing that finally placate him was our friend Mike replying, "Jay, no, it's fine. He's a bum. He doesn't have a home."

Jay calmed down, laughed, and then proceeded to mock the bum, shouting, "Yeah! That's right. You're a bum! You don't have a house! I'm gonna go sleep in a nice warm hotel bed! You don't have a home!"

About half a block later Jay fell off his high road and punch a stucco wall erected in front of a renovated bodega. Two minutes later he asked us why his hand hurt and added, “Oh, shit! Why am I bleeding? Haha.”

He asked this all again three minutes after that.

And fifteen minutes later back at the hotel when we wrapped his hand in a washcloth from the bathroom dipped in the cooler’s ice water.

He asked again as we went to sleep, and every time we had to tell him, “Jay, you got kicked by a bum.”


This is an apt metaphor for how tourism works. It’s one thing to gripe about the incompetent tech support over in New Delhi, but imagine how this attitude changes when you are walking the streets of New Delhi late at night and your drunken frat buddy decides to go cow-tipping. This is why tourism will always be a novelty: People like cultural diversity, but they never want to feel out of their own element. Tourist centers spring up to offer all the comforts of Home in the middle of Somewhere Else. Businesses start catering to foreigners and not the indigenous peoples, and, ultimately, you get a whole punch of very angry locals who could quite easily teach French in American public schools, but are completely willing to live on the street for nothing if it means they can kick tourists unless they’re handed two bucks for beer.

O' Canada or: The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, Pt. 4

Yeah, Elisha Cuthbert is Canadian. Who knew?


Ultimately in this chronicle, we must come to the reason that all underage kids visit Canada: Beer. Let me just say now that it was entirely known by all of our parents why we wanted to go to Canada. It was the same reason they went in 1978.

Beer.

We brought with us an empty cooler and duffel bag just so we could buy ice and keep beer in the room. Needless to say, or first outing with the car was to find any store that would sell beer to kids with another country’s driver’s license at 6PM on a Sunday. We found a little bodega after getting horribly lost, and handed a middle-aged Pakistani couple about $35 for cups and four six-packs of Molsen’s and something called “Fruity Tornado Twist malt beverage.” We ended up sitting in the room playing asshole and pre-gaming until about nine, when we decided to move out.

After wandering the streets, passing large men in suits offering “girlsgirlsgirls” like some ridiculous seventies exploitation film, we walked down the most terrifying street I have ever seen and entered a windowless bar. Jay got a round of Heineken at the bar, while Kessel and I established our claim to a game of cutthroat at the pool table up front. Midway through ordering our second round Jay was asked if he was looking for “a good time” and groped by a remarkably unattractive woman better suited to working the docks for sailors on shore leave, and we decided to head out.

That was when we came across the least Canadian oasis imaginable: McClean’s. We’d found an Irish pub. Immediately we walked in, and as my compatriots meandered up to the bar, I stumbled downstairs into the cleanest bar bathroom I have ever seen, and gleefully listened to the talking vacation adverts hanging above the facilities. When I came upstairs we ordered a couple rounds of Irish Car Bombs¹ from an incredibly attractive, Mid-Western American bartender.

1. Mix a shot of half Jameson’s Irish Whiskey and half Bailey’s Irish Cream and drop it into a pint of Guinness Extra Stout draft and chug immediately before it curdles. Tastes like ice-cold Yoohoo.

About midway through the second round she turns to me and says, “Oh, hey, I never checked your ID, did I?”

“Oh. No,” I said. “But I’m kinda used to it. I was always the older one and looked young, but then I grew the goatee and people just started assuming I was so much older.” I was beginning to ramble drunkenly–to a very attractive woman who quite clearly wanted to settle down and calm the tortured rebel within me, but I can be tamed by no one–so I quickly wrapped it up and tried to appear less than absolutely plastered. She never did check my ID, though.

From there we went across the street, after tipping our lovely hostess well of course, to a more trendy club, with bouncers this time. I had drunkenly gotten slightly lost, and went into the bar to find my friends. I did not see them, so I left to use my cell phone, whereby they came out and got me. Walking in the second time I actually got carded. At this point everything gets sort of purple and I don’t remember much beyond us stumbling back to the hotel, repeating over and over that the cops in Canada supposedly can’t arrest you for public drunkenness if you’re trying to walk home or to your hotel.

I must state that there is a dangerous side to touristy amusement parks like Montreal. Our second night was proof enough of that. After a modest pre-gaming session we walked far too far down the highway until we got lost and grabbed a cab to take us to the bigger clubs in town. This would be like the Parent’s Island portion of our perverted Disney getaway. We stood in line for nearly an hour. Jay bought a 40oz and drank it in line until it got confiscated. He later commented on how weak the bouncers looked and remarked, “I could take him,” right before said bouncer high-kicked a rowdy and lecherous patron who refused to leave a girl alone in the face. He put the sole of his boot up this kid’s nose, and we decided to play nice. Once inside, we discovered we were not actually inside. We had entered the pre-club, where we could buy beer and a few different drinks while waiting for the color of our wristbands to be called, and allowed into the actual club.

My God, that club. There was a bar ninety feet across. What was once a coat-check had been turned into a $1 shot station. Beer flowed double-fisted by the pitcher, and the dance floor looked like something Vanilla Ice once played in. Not being big dancers, we headed up to the second floor, which was actually the third-story balcony, overlooking the industrial catwalks and lighting equipment for the dance floor. After the first two pitchers, Jay couldn’t walk, and I followed Mike down for a pitiful attempt at playing wingman. I had to give up when I could no longer point in the direction of gravity, and stumbled back up to join Jay. Kessel joined us shortly, and we all sang along with the crowd of a thousand as “American Pie” blasted out of the speakers. Some random guy came up to us and started singing and hugging and throwing our hands into a circle like some crazed, inspirational hockey coach. This lasted the entire eight and a half minutes of the song.

O' Canada or: The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, Pt. 3

As we unpacked our warmest summer clothes–Canada was cold in May–we monitored the FreMTV video countdown. The top five included an utterly bizarre video called “Tri-Cul” by Les Cowboys Figrantes at number five, about a taxi driver and his pregnant fare going into labor, but every person in the world looks like one of the three band members. Number three or four was titled “Moudit Qu’t’es Belle” by Longue Distance, which utterly rocked. It was the most interesting French-Canadian punk-pop I had ever heard, until I got home and translated the lyrics, only to discover the song was actually French Emo, and included the line, “Curse you for being beautiful, you rock ’n’ roll girl.” Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” was number two. There was also some wacky video I’ve yet to identify which sounded like the girl from Evanescence singing country girl-rock, but it was in French and she wore a tutu in a sepia-colored basement world populated entirely by abused children. How do I know they were beaten? They wore casts and crutches and hid under beds with teddy bears crying, and drew crayon portraits of monsters beating them labeled “Daddy.” This was the number one video for an entire week. Then the new Coldplay album came out.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the same kind of overly-immersed confusion that children from poor Paraguayan villages feel when they finally get that scholarship fund to come study at UCLA. Everything on TV seems very decadent, like it could only make sense if you’d been raised on an I.V. drip of pure pop culture. Never try to understand a culture from its cable programming.

During the daylight hours of our stay we did the usual, touristy things–we got our money changed, visited the Montreal Museum of Modern Art, and basically explored the city waiting for the bars to open. Stepping out onto the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Sainte Denise is like stepping onto the Mason-Dixon Line. Turning right, one can walk downhill into the docks and bay. To the left, one has the option of turning left again onto Rue de Sainte Catharine and visiting the bars, porno-shops, and “touching-approved” strip joints. This is the Main Street of Downtown Montreal. Think Times Square circa 1987.

In the day at least, one is better off continuing up Sainte Denise Street. After a few generic municipal businesses, the paved road turns to immaculately maintained cobblestones, and the buildings start looking like London: one-story homes stacked three stories high, and packed like sardines, all of them long since converted into small, private boutiques, hookah bars, and expensive bistros. These are places that spell ‘shop’ with and extra P-E. Classy. In one I was mistaken for a store clerk precisely eighteen minutes after suggesting we bet on whether any of us could resist tourist nature and be mistaken for a “Native Canadianite” in just three days.

Interspersed with these fancy-schmancy locations were some rather ritzy Adult Novelty shoppes¹ and about seventeen million head shops. We entered one and stared at various gravity bongs and hydroponic systems and instruction manuals and secret compartment-possessing soda cans until the owner came over and talked to us. After mistaking a macraméd frisbee for a baret, we spent a good forty minutes discussing the vast disparities between Canadian and American health care systems, and the ineptitude of various world leaders to have been named Bush. This is the section of Montreal that feels like L.A. I highly suggest visiting.

1. At least I think that’s what they were. One’s sign was just a giant anthropomorphic condom, so it was a pretty safe guess.

O' Canada or: The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, Pt. 2

Events like these seem to fall into the category of “You Had to Be There.” Now YHTBT moments are the bane and dread of every writer, reporter, and drunken storyteller the world over, but in the context of Canadian tourism, it’s actually brilliant. You have to be there. Really. Go now. There’s just something about the place that makes it feel like it’s all a U.S.-themed amusement park. Take Disneyland, and mix it with what I imagine New York City must have been like before Giuliani cleared out all the nudie-bars. Now to one side of Donald Duck Avenue is L.A.-Land, and to the other is Mayor Mickey’s New York, except now Mickey is homeless and asking for change to buy his daughter and her dog their meds after losing his job and house.¹

1. I swear aliens were also involved. It was amazing. We gave this homeless guy money twice that weekend, just for his creativity. Unfortunately, Canadian quarters are the same size as their $2 pieces. I knew I’d confuse them in my pocket when handing them to a homeless guy, and sure enough this is what happened. He was very surprised–almost as surprised as I was–and thanked me profusely. Hey, it’s not like I could have asked for change back.


The problem with theme parks is that they’re like light beer or diet soda: the flavor’s just a little off. Aside from outrageously overpriced soft-drinks and confusing maps, I’m sure any biracial Chinese-Norwegian couple would be a little offended at how they’re portrayed in the “Small World” ride. Assuming L.A. is Pepsi and New York is Coke, Montreal is Diet Cherry-Vanilla Dr. Pepper. But every Coke-drinker needs a splash of citrus-scented saccharin to revitalize our tastebuds every once in a while.


Our first stop past the border after such a long drive was to get gas. A station just inside Quebec, offered “Petrol” at just $1.32 per gallon. But not really. It was $1.32 Canadian per liter, which apparently translates as, “pay out your ass expensive,” and despite a quick-conversion table laminated at the front desk, the attendant was not mentally equipped to give Canadian change for American cash. We spent the next forty minutes figuring out that after you travel between countries I-8-35-7-B-whatever becomes Autorut 18, and along the way deciphered new and interesting street signs². We also decided to tell everyone how we’d “hit a buck-fifty” on Canadian highways, because we found kilometers so damned amusing.

2. I still maintain that one actually meant “No Station Wagons.”

We found the hotel with relative ease, considering we were in a different country and all the street signs were in the wrong language. Now the Hotel Sainte Denise is a small establishment. The three of us had originally booked a room for four to five people, and this meant that we got a room with two twin beds and a pull-out sofa. The room also had a full private bath and tickets for comped breakfasts, which included the most bizarre take on cinnamon toast I have ever come across. It was essentially a large, home-made cinnamon roll, cold, cut through the middle and arranged like a sandwich around what I think was some sort of mixture of warmed-over cream cheese and icing, topped with rocks of pure Columbian cinnamon. It came with juice and water from expensive, unlabeled, blue Absolut bottles, which coincidentally also made up the table’s centerpiece.

What really grabbed me about the hotel was the television. The TV itself was of absolutely nothing remarkable. It was a generic, brand-name unit, bought in bulk and stocked in every room of every hotel in the universe. However in Canada, TV is amazing. The first thing we did was find the French-Canadian equivalent to MTV and relax after the long drive up. We watched an animated show about sixteen year olds at their local (French) mall and tried to guess what the show was about³. Soon we were watching The Ashley Simpson Show with French subtitles, still trying to guess what it was about, even though the entire show was in English. Finally, we were treated to an afternoon of Pimp Mon Char, avec Xibit, and it was possibly the funniest thing I have ever seen on television.

4. This show was later shown briefly on Nickelodeon and more recently on Cartoon Network as 6Teen. It's hilarious.

O' Canada or: The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, Pt. 1

Sometimes I wonder what it'd be like to sleep with a Canadian girl, bed a'rockin' and her screaming, "Ooh, ooh! Fook my coony, eh! Eh! EH! EEEHHH!! Ooooh, yea, eh."


During the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, my cousin got married. This worked out to be a pain in the ass, because my friends Jay and Mike Kesselman and I were planning on driving to Canada from New York the next day, and my cousin lived in Maryland.

After much finagling, my mother and I drove three and a half hours down to Maryland, then realized our formalwear was still sitting on her bed at home and drove three and a half hours back. Then we drove through seven hours worth of traffic back down, arriving at the hotel around a quarter to midnight. The next day we went to the wedding, had a blast, and immediately drove home so I could get up at four the next morning to sit in another car driving seven hours to Montreal. Thanks, Mom.

Now there is a very good reason why all this seemed like a worthwhile idea at the time, and that reason is that Montreal is part of French Canada. Since Quebec keeps failing to secede, it asserts its independence by undermining national standards and keeping its legal drinking age eighteen. This is very important as Jay–I believe he was the youngest–was about eighteen and four days old on the day we trekked on up to the boarder.

Aside from lunch at an A&W restaurant and a bladder-churning wait at the border, nothing much happened for a good long while. Sitting in traffic, blasting “O, Canada” and “Enter Sandman” from the car stereo, we mused over Ontario license palates. Eventually, we realized that none of us spoke French, and no one had bothered remembering to bring a French phrase
book, so we would, for the duration of our stay in Canada, be forced to act like young, stupid American tourists. We accepted this, and with tails between our legs we approached a native of the land. We pulled up to a Range Rover and asked.
“Hey! Hey! What’s your license plate say?”
“What?” The man was understandably confused.
“Your license plate! ‘Je me rappellerai!’ What does it mean??” He starred blankly into space, apparently trying to remember what, if anything, was scrawled across his car’s plates. Conceding that there must have been something written there, he shouted back, embarrassed.
“... I forget!”
“What?” we asked over the din of traffic.
“I forget!” His wife tapped him on the shoulder repeatedly. She whispered. The man flushed, and shouted back, “I’ll remember!”
“What??” we cried in unison.
“‘I’ll remember!’ It means, ‘I WILL REMEMBER!’”

There was a brief moment of silence. Even the Cars got quieter. We all stared blankly at each other, two cars–two nations–sitting together, and then we laughed so hard we had to roll up the windows and drive away from each other.


Come back tomorrow for Part II of the adventure. Return repeatedly to read the rest of it. Return in the middle of next week if you want to skip all this and come back when I post about puns and my shitty day again.

On Canada: A Prelude

Greetings, loyal follower(s)!

I have decided that this week I will be syndicating my awesome, lengthy discussion on Canada, because Canada is like your awesome little brother who's actually pretty cool but you don't want your friends to know you enjoy hanging out with him.

To start off and lead you gently into the sea of "Canada is lame" jokes ahead, I will now present my preliminary report on why Canada is lame.


You know when Canadian Independence Day is?

Me neither. Pretty sure no one else does.

In point of fact, Canada didn't really have a revolution. They didn't even get upset. Canada gained independence from England in 1927 because they asked.

They asked nicely.

And obviously the rest of Britain said, "Uh, yeah, I guess that's alright. I mean, you're Canada. We can trust you." It's like when the A-student asks permission to go camping at her roommate's brother's cabin out in the woods over the holiday weekend at that condemned camp next to the abandoned but fully stocked beer distributor.

It sounds iffy, but hey, she's earned your trust through years of good behavior.

Canada asked to be equal in the British Commonwealth. Technically? Yeah, Canada's still affiliated with England. The idea is that no laws can touch Canada unless Canada agrees to them, but they're probably cool with it.

Robin Williams said Canada was like a loft appartment over a really great party. I can kind of agree. My only real problem with Canada is the weirdest thing: in Canada "Canadian bacon" isn't actually popular. If it's available you have to call it "back bacon." Lame. I'm not putting peameal bacon on my McMuffin. No thank you.


If you've enjoyed parts of this rant and/or Canada in general, go out and download "O Canada" by Five Iron Frenzy. Good stuff.