An ethical quandry

I feel kind of like a whore right now. I'm not sure if I should. See, there's a great pizza place in town, which makes the best pizza I've ever had, second only to Wild Bill's in Nipawin, which is in itself a bizare situation but for other reasons - long story short, porno in the bathrooms is not mutually exclusive to making pizza that borders on the sublime. Back to the point however, this securely #2 pizza place is great - reasonable prices, good ingredients, always 2 for 1, and they let you use coupons even if you don't actually have them - they just take you at your word. It's really everything I could want in a pizza place except for the fact that the guy who owns it it was once charged with sexual assault by a good friend of mine.

To be fair, it was more like indecent assault; we're definitely not talking "A Time To Kill" here, but the dilemma stands. Is patronizing his pizza establishment a betrayal of my friend? When does society forgive one his sins and allow you to patronize his pizza establishment guilt free? Does delicious pizza traverse the boundaries of morality and become something that every one of us can get behind? I've been meditating on this for weeks now, and the only conclusion that I can come to is that I'm weak. Maybe it would be different if I could stomach Dominos, Pizza Hut, or Panago, or if I knew the number for Homer's or Verns, who are also supposed to be good. Can't Wild Bill's just deliver to Saskatoon? I'll wait that long if that's what it takes to eat delicious pizza without crying.

A Superbowl Post about Eli Manning

So in a few hours I'll be hunkering down to watch the Superbowl and cheer on the New York Giants. I know that there's some people out there who want the Pats to get their perfect season, and I know that there's some people that hate the Pats and want anyone to beat them, but there's one and only one reason I'm pulling for the Giants - Eli Manning needs this.

Here's the skinny - Eli Manning is the brother of Peyton Manning. Both are first-string NFL quarterbacks. Peyton won the Superbowl last year, Eli has the chance to win it this year. Peyton Manning is considered by some to be the best quarterback in the history of the sport. Eli, not so much. Eli doesn't get much respect.

If Eli Manning was in any other family he'd be considered a champ. Let's be fair here, he's an NFL quarterback. He's among the elite in his sport. There's hundreds of thousands of people who try to get into shoes like his every year and fail miserably. If he had anyone else as a brother he'd be considered awesome. Instead, everyone that ever talks about him or sees him is always going to be thinking "How come I got the crappy Manning?" It doesn't matter that Eli is on his own a respectable athelete, he's not Peyton, so he sucks.

So that's why he needs this. Peyton can go on to win every Superbowl for the rest of his career, pass a million yards, and have a twenty foot tall statue of him built outside the football hall of fame, and that's fine. At the end of the day at least Eli can say "I beat the best team that professional football has ever produced." That's one thing that Peyton will never be able to say and perhaps the only reason anyone will ever actually be interested in talking to Eli Manning.

Go to hell, Rob

I'm leaving the spelling mistake in there. It's the only way that I have left to hurt you.

Proofreading

If anyone caught the fact that an infinitely more tallented blogger quoted me a week or so back, you probably also caught the fact that he immortalized one of my typos that history will now be able to judge me for. I can fix typos on my own blog, but once they go to another blog, they're out of my hands. The elaborate illusion of writing tallent that I've been cultivating all these years is going to come crashing down on me because of this. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday it's going to come back to haunt me.

I am of course assuming that in three hundred years there will be a specialized field of internet archaeology that will dig through ancient servers unearthing blogs of days gone by, and this blog will be first and foremost among them after they've pried it from my long-dead hands (unless I live my dream of transplanting my brain into robot so I may live eternal encased in cold, unfeeling, unforgiving steel and wreak mayhem upon those who still dwell in flesh - but I digress). I'm sure that these historoblogologists will consider me to be a visionary, a genius years ahead of my time, and the great tragedy of my life will be that I died in obscurity centuries before my brilliance was understood (excluding that whole cyborg plan, of course). My work will be put in hardcover books and made mandatory reading for schoolchildren. I'll be enshrined beside Socrates, Plato, and the other great fathers of modern discourse. Statues of me will be built of bronze. Then of course they'll read Rob's blog and realize that I made typographical errors and that I was nothing more than a talentless, self-serving hack with poor keyboarding skills. I'll be cursed as a fraud my books will be burned and my statues torn down. I'll be cut out of the history books except for a brief footnote stating that I lived without note and died alone which was more than I deserved.

Unless of course I succeeded in this whole cyborg venture, in which case I'll be hailed as the great and terrible machine-lord of all the earth.

[Edit]
Ok, so apparently Rob fixed the typo for me sometime between when I first saw it and when I wrote this post, and that has seriously fucked this whole adventure up. My post really doesn't make any sense anymore.

God damn you, Rob! Did you even think for a second that I wanted to weave an elaborate fantasy detailing my post-humous rise and fall from fame based on your posting of one of my typos? No, you didn't, because you're an inconsiderate asshole. I had cyborgs in there, man! Cyborgs! You know I don't write about cyborgs unless I'm writing from the heart.

Dear Readers, if you have learned anything from this it's that you should always proofread your work. It prevents you from concocting elaborate stories centering around typographical errors only to have your asshole friends correct you out of courtesy and totally fuck up your blog post. Also, if you're going to blog about a typo, you should check that it hasn't been fixed before you get into a serious cyborg rant.

It should be pretty obvious at this point that I don't proofread for shit. I don't even use a spell checker. Sometimes I don't even read what I've written to make sure it's not crap. If I did, you wouldn't have had the privilege to read that cyborg rant a few paragraphs back.

Merry Ukranian Christmas!

I'll warn you in advance, I'm pretty drunk right now.

I just got back from Jolan's where we were celebrating Ukranian Christmas. Celebrating Ukranian Christmas consists of doing at least two of three things. The first is eating borstch, the second is eating perogies. If you want to be really traditional you can do the third, which is get drunk. This year, we opted for all three.

It's kind of hard to not drink at Jolan's house. You see, Jolan is my alcohol mom, or if you're in a hurry, my alcomom. My real mom will not rest if I do not have food in my hands. She has even gone so far as to requisition for me food when I have told her in very clear terms that I do not want to eat anything. My alcomom, conversely, will not rest unless I have a drink in my hands. I've developed the habit of drinking large amounts of water both before and after hanging out with Jolan in order to stave off the inevitable hangover that I know her strict policies will inflict on me.

Ukranian Christmas is a fun holiday for me because it's one of the few days of the year, if not the only day of the year, where I can revel in percution. Just listen. I'm a white, middle class, protestant male of average height and weight. Well, barely average weight, and those who know me will be amazed that I admit to that much, but I digress. The point is that in almost every way possible I belong to the majority, and thus have little to no ethnic, religious, or sexual pride. I can't be proud to be white, that's racism. I can't be proud to be raised in the Christian tradition because that makes me a bigot. I can't be proud to be male because that makes me a mysogonist. I can't be proud to be of average weight because that makes me a jerk.

Why does it make me a jerk? I can eat fast-food five meals a week and not gain any weight. Try not to hate me now.

Ukranian Christmas, however, is a different story. It's a holiday for Ukranians only. It's a day where we eat our weird and delicious Ukranian cuisine and delight in how much our ethnicity has been screwed over by communists.* We get to have a second mini-Christmas that all you folks who follow the so-called "correct" calendar don't have the opportunity to partake in.

So a merry Ukranian Christmas to one and all. If you're Ukranian, revel in your heritage of eating sour cabbage and sour cream, and having your landscape irradiated by Soviet technology gone awry. If you're not Ukranian, lie about it and eat our delicious sour food. Nobody will stop you. If you don't consider sour cream to be a viable condiment for all manners of food in all meals, then fuck you, you're not welcome here.


* When you're a white protestant male, you have the dubious distinction of being responsible for the majority of all wrongs perpetrated on the people of the world throughout the course of recorded history. The Crusades? White Christian Males. Colonialism? White Christian Males. Republicans? White Christian Males. Our only saving graces are Communism and Nazi-ism. No matter what we as a cultural/ethnic/religious group have done, at least we're not Communists or Nazis. The only things that me, a Jew, a gypsy, and a black guy have in common is that communistis and Nazis didn't like us very much and we like Guitar Hero. Being Ukranian makes me fit in with a wider percecution group and everyone loves Guitar Hero. Everyone.

SKI!

I went skiing with Brice over the holidays and decided that skiing wasn't dangerous enough already, so I'd spice it up by trying to videotape it. You can see the results here and here. Also worth a note: on the first video, when the camera work gets all shaky off the first of those three jumps, it's because I nearly bit it coming off because I was holding the camera and didn't have my arms for balance on the landing.

Before we went out we realized something shocking - we've been skiing for 20 years this year. I have Twenty Years of experience on slopes. I'm not used to having twenty years of experience in anything. I barely have twenty years of experience in being alive.

I think that spending so many of my formative years skiing has done some permanent damage to my brain. Example - I have an irrational attraction to girls in toques and snow-pants. I am dead serious about this. If they're the kind of snow-pants with the suspenders, more the better. If anyone else has the same problem, let me know.

A bitter rant typed while riding public transport -or- I am riding the motherfucking bus right now

New year's resolution: do more writing. As part of that, I'd like to make my unceremonius return to blogging. New beginnings couldn't be more humble - I am writing this on the bus, and thus it is going to be more bitter and hate filled where it concerns you, the humans.

"Why bitter?" The curious inquire. Bitter because I am on public transport. There are many things that bother me about public transport, and chief among them is the public. If you're new to this blog and me I'll let you know straight out that humans aren't my favourite people. Looking around the bus right now I can see at least five examples of long-term human failure. Yes, I am talking to you, public-display-of-affection guy. - hate to be the one to tell you this but you're way more into your girlfriend than she is into you. You are also three inches shorter and it makes you look silly standing beside her.

Speaking of humanity at its most depressing, have you ever tried to engage a semi-attractive teenage McDonalds employee in casual conversation? It's more futile than trying to jerk off a brick. The brick would also be more responsive. If you deviate even slightly from the standard customer-employee interaction script they totally lock up and try to look as cute as possible while trying desperately to hide the fact that the portion of their brain that governs intermediate-level conversation shut down permenantly in 2002. After a failed attempt to be civilized and engage her intellectually I just gave up and ordered my McNuggets. I have never seen anyone look more relieved.

You would think making a pointed list of human inadequacy like this would bring a guy like me down, but this has been the best part of my day. Earlier in the week Anna accused me of being a snob and an elitist, and in a misguided effort to portray myself as a decent person I protested and said that I was firm but fair, and not, in fact, a monster. I was soon to find that I was living a lie. Being a decent human being is just not working out for me, so I'm going back to being sub-human with everyone else. I feel so good about this I want to sing songs. Terrible, horrible, songs of hate for the asshole bus driver that just left me stranded at the airport even though I was running to catch his bus FUCK.

Note to self: put that last bit in italics during editing to give a sense of urgency and clearly demarcate where we went from planned text to actual natural anger. Otherwise my readers might not know that I typed that last bit while standing in the cold at the bus stop, thinking of ways to murder said bus driver and invent gloves that allow you to type on a blaclberry so you can curse public transit employees while not freezing the fuck out of your fingers.

Note to self: leave the first note to self in the final version. It might be funny. This one too.

Did I mention I was going to the airport on the bus? It's the majority reason that I'm so resentful. I just flew home and for the second time in as many flights they lost my baggage. Normally this wouldn't surprise me because I flew through Toronto and the mutants that Pearson International has grown to handle baggage there are clearly sub-par, even when compared to other mutants. This time, however, the bags didn't even make it to Toronto. They somehow failed to be loaded onto the first flight - a flight from an airport that does not generally staff with mutants. Then I get a call saying that my bag has arrived but they can't deliver it until tomorrow. I can pick it up, but it means taking the bus and going to the Ottawa airport. This is especially traumatizing because of the length of the trip. The Ottawa airport is basically in northern Manitoba. If you have to take the bus there, pack a lunch. The only reason I undertook this quest is because everything in my life that brings me joy (my laptop and my new wii, full stop) are in that bag and my life is an empty void without it. There was an audible gasp of glee when I got my bag short minutes ago. Then the guy at baggage services dropped it. Then he appoplogized, picked it up, and gave it to me. Men have killed for less.

This ordeal would normally push me right over the edge but I've already lost focus and am now hating that bus driver. Tip to my readers - if I am ever angry with you just put me on public transit and I'll forget all about whatever I was mad about. I'll also run home to blog about being angry before I can hurt anyone, so your conscisnce will be safe.