Asbestosis

Thanks to health and safety regulations, the House of Commons maintenance department sends out mass emails every time they are doing asbestos related work on the hill so we can all be paranoid about it. This wouldn't be interesting in and of itself, except for the fact that I get about three of these asbestos emails every day. That's a ton of asbestos related work done every day, which makes me wonder how much asbestos is in this place? We've known the perils of asbestos for years, and if we've been ripping it out three times a day for a decade or more now, the only logical explination is that Canada's seat of government was constructed out of solid asbestos. Makes sense; the place burns down once you'd want to keep it from happening again. Hence all the stone and, of course, incredible amounts of asbestos.

I think my lungs hurt.

The Breakfast of Champions

It's 10am and I'm already working on my first coke of the day. I wish this felt wrong.

I'd like to officially downgrade the status of my health from "questionable" to "rapidly declining."

Update: Monday, 10:13AM
To my left sits a coke. To my right, a coffee. I didn't even want the coke, but I escorted our demographics guy down to Sparks for a bagel, and once I was in the cafe and saw the cooler, I was sucked in again.

I expect to die sometime next month with no regrets whatsoever.

Killer Queen

My roommate got tickets tickets to a musical tonight. It's a show I'd actually like to see, but he is not going to take me. Going to a musical with a guy: Pretty Gay. Going to Queen - It's Kinda Magic: A Tribute to Freddie Mercury with a guy: Extremely Gay. I support his decision to take a female.

So, how about that Kim Jong Il? He's just nutty for nukes, isn't he? Some people think that North Korea being in the "nuclear club" to be some kind of cause for alarm. Really, not so much. Sure Kim Jong Il is a wacky little bastard, but he wouldn't have survived all these years as a dictator if he didn't know how to play his cards right. The problem for poor Kimmy is that he doesn't have many cards. Being in North Korea kind of sucks. One of the few cards he has at his disposal is his reputation as a wacky bastard with a militarized state at his disposal. When North Korea wants to extort more food and aid from the pacific nations, all they have to do is act wackier and more dangerous than they have in the past, and the united powers will shovel stuff their way to keep things copacetic for everyone.

The problem with this strategy is that you need to do something even nuttier every time to get a reaction. When military manuvers stopped being scary, KJI got on the nuclear bandwagon. First he was going to start a nuclear program, so they started up some aid and he stopped it. Then he said he didn't really stop it so we gave them more aid. Then he said, "fuck you, I'm still going to do it." We were starting to get cheesed off. Sensing our ire, he staged a nuclear test, which was at best a crappy bomb and at worst a hoax.

This is where miscalculation starts. He was hoping for a "Woah, he's really serious now!" but instead he got a, "Kim, we're tired of your shit." Now the rhetoric factory is in full swing in an attempt to head off sanction talks. Sanctions are an "act of war" now. It doesn't matter. Nobody is listening anymore. All that a nuclear test did was prove to everyone that North Korea, if left alone, will only become a larger problem as time goes on. One thing is for sure, there won't be an increase of aid as a response to this one. If Kim wants to get any more play from the nuclear card, he's going to have to blow somebody up.

The only card left that he can bank on is the millions of starving North Koreans card. Things in North Korea are shitty as is. If he starts a shooting war with someone, all at once thirty million North Koreans will say "fuck this noise, I'm out" and there will be a mass-exodus for China and South Korea. Neither of those countries can handle this. War with North Korea, not a big problem. Dealing with the refugees, big problem. That's what's causing all the debate now: how to slap Kim on the wrist without flooding the borders with starving North Koreans.

As an aside, a recent poll indicated that 33% of those surveyed think that Canada should have nuclear weapons. Yeah. Great plan. We don't have people protesting enough crap as is, so lets get some nukes. Who would we ever fire them at? People who want to nuke us? Who wants to nuke Canada? The United States is right there if you can nuke us, you can nuke them, and chances are those shooting nukes dislike them way more than us. The only reason someone would attack us is if we were perceived as a threat by doing somthing like, oh, I don't know... having nuclear weapons.

My Walk to Work

I have a Walk to Work now. This has me tickled pink. I'm seriously giddy about it. That should be an indication about how much I like my job so far. In any event, every morning as I walk through my local crackhead park, there are about a dozen old Chinese folks doing tai chi. I have to walk right by them every day, and there's always a little voice in the back of my head that encourages me, strongly, to join in. "go on," it says, "do some tai chi. You know you want to. It's for your health." That voice has a point to make, but there is a much louder voice saying, "Don't be that guy." The "guy" in question is the one white kid that thinks he's Asian. No matter how sincerely you may love Tai Chi, being the lone slice of white-bread in a multi-grain loaf isn't cool no matter how you stack it. The white folks will think you're lame and the Asians will think that you're really lame. Being "that guy" is like proclaiming loudly, "Why yes it has been years since I've had sex. How did you know?"

I have enough things in my life that discourage the ladies - a videogame addiction, cooking with garlic, love of action movies, bitch-wrists, two blogs, a coca-cola fixation, a warped sense of humour, irregular shaving habits, lack of confidence, lack of backbone, lack of income, my love of Japanes speed-metal, my love of Scandanavian punk-metal, a bad haircut, professional wrestling, a tragically nerdy life history, a serious jones for political philosophy, a pathological hatred for Karl Marx, a pathological hatred for Fred Durst, puritanical views on grammar, puritanical views on kung-fu movies, puritanical views on website coding, excessive usage of poly-sylabic words like puritanical, the fact that I code websites, the fact that I watch cartoons, my lust for science, my fascination with (but not practice of) complex theoretical math, snoring - I don't need Tai Chi on top of that.

While my prospects with the fairer sex seem grim, the professional world is being kind to me. Work has been great, and I was excited about coming in this morning. I like my job. I'm also writing this post from work, which says something about my current workload. Life is good.

The Nine to Five

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to get up early, put on a suit and tie, and go to work. I will go to an office. I will work eight hours. I will have discussions over the water cooler. There will be meetings. I will be given projects and objectives. Tonight I am going to bed a carefree ex-student that is fighting the system and sticking it to the man. Tomorrow when I get up I will not only be a salary man, I will be the man that I've been sticking it to for so long.

Tomorrow I will be middle aged. I'm going to start pricing out minivans, suburban homes, and 1.5 children.

So in my last hours of free thought before I give up the ghost to the inevitable downward spiral of full-time, white-collar work, what's on my mind? Christmas. Christmas is on my mind and it is making me angry. I was in the mall this week, and The Bay is already setting up their Christmas display. In the last week of September they are setting up their christmas display. Does this not seem wrong to anyone else? We're not even through thanksgiving and we're on to Christmas. Thanksgiving is just being glossed over, because we need to devote three solid months to Christmas. The only way that Thanksgiving can hope to survive is to rebrand itself as "Pre-Christmas." The chance for all the truly ridiculous Noeliphiles to have a dry-run of the holiday season.

Before we go any further, yes, I'm aware that "holiday season" now carries a negative connotation. Apparently the "holiday season" is indicative of the perceived "War on Christmas." Well let me ask you this: when Christmas now dominates a quarter of the year, what else is it if not an entire bloody season? We should just rename winter "christmas." If there's snow on the ground, it's Christmas. That's what we're headed to you sick bastards. If there's a War on Christmas, then I'm enlisting. Sign me right the fuck up. Some people say that the War on Christmas is a bunch of Godless Scroogeheads that want to "take the Christ out of Christmas" or whatever other pithy line the Christian Mafia is going to brand their "victimization" as this year, but me, I just want to take the Christmas out of September.

Christmas, I'm calling you out. This is a declaration of War. I will not rest until Christmas has been pushed back where it belongs: To December. The end of December. You get twelve days of Christmas and that is it. That carol is silly (I mean really. Twelve lords leaping? Where are you going to get twelve members of the British upper house on Christmas-Eve that still have the legs left to leap? And a partridge in a pear tree? What good is that to me? How the heck am I going to get it down from there? Unless it's one of those weird tacky foam birds that you idolotrous tree-worshipers seem to love so much.) but it had it right. Back in the day they kept Christmas within respectable boundaries. We need a return to that old wisdom.

So as far as I'm concerned, Thanksgiving is the next holiday I need to concern myself with. Then Halloween. Then in November I take a break from holidays because there's nothing coming up until December. You dig? Good.

Fight the Power!! Vive la Revolution!!