lovehatethings

1. The flag kicks serious ass. You know how the most effective logos and branding can be done with two simple contrasting colours, well the Canadian flag is it. For those of you who don't know the left and right red fields on the flag represent the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans while the eleven point Maple Leaf has one point for each of the ten provinces and the remaining for the northern territories. As cool as it is, it still comes a close second to the awesomeness that was the logo of the NHL's Hartford Whalers.
2. Hockey. Okay all you haters, I know you may find the game boring or hard to follow, but in as much as 80% of the world mythologizes soccer and 19 of the remaining 20% worships football, baseball and basketball... or even Nascar, in Canada we bleed hockey. I love to watch it, but if I can't watch it, I'm just happy to know it's being played. It's part of the national identity and if you don't get, we don't care.
3. We don't care. Yeah sure, we care about some things, but for the most part we're a laid back people. Foreigners often call us polite, but really we're just making fun of you behind your backs so we don't hurt your feelings... I suppose that's more tactful than polite. Let's call it diplomatic because it's not smart to piss people off when we don't have disproportionally huge armed forces.
4. We don't have disproportionately huge armed forces. I've never been a "fan" of any army... especially not a fan in a way that would entail putting on a replica jersey and getting in the game, but I respect that the prime role of the Canadian soldiers have generally been peacekeepers in recent years and that those in the service generally get thrown into a shitstorm without proper backup, funding, and respect. While we have a proud military tradition in this country, our government really needs to reconsider risking young lives just to satisfy global expectations.
5. Global expectations aren't too high. Sure you may think that's a bad thing, but it allows us to self-pace and largely concern ourselves with internal matters, like the national hockey and curling programs, exporting stand-up comedians, making Hinterland nature shorts, and advancing the latest R&D techniques to develop the most cost effective coffee and donut combo in world.
6. The best coffee/donut combo in the world. Tim Horton's and it's competitors serve the most cost-effective, value for money, coffee and donut combos in the world. Most of this is due to the fact that the small coffee is small and the large coffee is large and even though Southern Ontario has the largest Italian population outside of Italy we still haven't allowed the elitist Starbucks to overrun our homegrown donut houses with crazy sizes like Grande and Venti. What's up Starbucks, do you think you're in a Puccini opera or something?
7. Multiculturalism. You can have your melting pot for your chicken soup/nacho cheese/fondue gruel. I'll take them on separate plates and bowls forming a great mosaic across the dinner table that spans from Newfoundland to British Columbia, with lobster from the Maritimes, poutine from Quebec, maple syrup from Ontario, bread from the prarie wheat fields, beef from Alberta and smoked salmon from BC. Sure, it sounds like a crazy mix, but at least I can pick and choose instead of melting it up.
8. Crazy mixes. This one deserves its very own reason. I quote from the source of all things - Wikipedia: "A Bloody Caesar, after the similar Bloody Mary, is a cocktail popular mainly in Canada. It typically contains vodka, clamato (a blend of tomato juice and clam broth), Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, and is served on the rocks in a large,celery salt-rimmed glass, and typically garnished with a stalk of celery and wedge of lime." I did warn you.
9. We warn people when we're coming. Why do you think we wear the Canadian flag on everything we wear while travelling? We want you to know our laid-backedness is on its way to charming your country's existence. Sure we may wear tuques and flop on your chesterfield for a bit and drop in "eh" a whole bunch of times for your amusement, but that's just so you'll feel at ease with us and give us your beer while watching Meatballs and Strange Brew.
10. Strange Brews. We'll drink you under the table. Set up a mickey, a twenty-sixer, a forty pounder, and a palette of two-fours and we're ready to go to town... well, take a cab to town anyway. After all, no use hitting a poor defenseless moose while drinking and driving.
11. Driving. Although getting around Southern Ontario can be agonizing at times, driving across Canada is awesome and I would do every year if I could. From Pacific to rivers to Rockies to foothills to prairies to forests to Great Lakes to plateaus to bays to Atlantic and up to the Great White North, you will never see greater diversity or meet nicer people.
12. People. In 2004, the people of Canda voted Tommy Douglas as the Greatest Canadian ever. You may ask who Tommy Douglas was. He "was a Scottish-born Baptist minister who became a prominent Canadian social democratic politician. As leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) from 1942 and the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, he led the first socialist government in North America and..." still waiting for the greatest part? He introduced universal public healthcare to Canada.

Happy Canada Day to all Canadians, wherever you are!

Below is my summer "bucket list" - i.e. things to do before summer kicks the bucket.

• Think of a better name for this list than "bucket list"
• Get back to Las Vegas and find a way to break the bank and come home with enough money to fund a winter trip to Vegas.
• Spend ample time deciding whether I should get an iPhone.
• Reassure myself that my decision to not buy a BluRay DVD player is completely justified because the cost is still too high for its own good, and even though I own a couple hundred DVDs, I never watch them.
• Try to regain the same blogging output that I had last summer when lovehatethings first started. (Two weeks until the first anniversary!)
• Try to encourage more of friends that Twitter is about way too much more than lifestreaming for them to use that as an excuse to stay away.
• Catch up on the latest seasons of Weeds, Burn Notice, Ashes to Ashes, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and True Blood.
• Go to see some late night movies... I wish they started at midnight - 10:30 is too early for this night owl.
• Get on the ball and reserve a night for my 3rd annual Backyard Film Festival.
• Book a gig so that my gracious friends who keep asking me to play are kept happy for another six months.
• Find a cheap source of watermelons. Those things are like crack in the summer; gotta have my fix.
• Play some poker with friends and at the closest casino.
• Try at least five local restaurants I've never checked out.
• Do at least one day of buying rush tickets for Stratford and checking out a couple of plays.
• Find things that really piss me off... it helps the podcast rants so much.
• Start to write the Great American novel and then give up in a violent fit having drowned myself in a sea of bourbon.
• Start to read Finnegan's Wake... and then give up in a violent fit having drowned myself in a sea of bourbon.
• Do annual summer viewings of Dazed and Confused, Almost Famous, Big Fish, a Kevin Smith marathon, and, if the moment moves me, a John Hughes marathon.
• And last, but not least, read the books that have been gathering dust on the shelves for far too long.

Okay... I know it's hard to believe, but the blue and green spirals in the picture above are actually the same color. I had to "eyedrop" them in a graphics program to believe it myself, but it's true. If you can't see the similarity at all, try looking at the very outskirts of the "blue" spiral and with less noise around it, you can start to see the blue look more green.

I don't know if it was the Phish concerts I went to last weekend, but the psychedelics are really getting me going this week.

Considering the new face (or non-face) of the modern orator, how to piss people off at bars, and my "trip" phollowing phish to Wisconsin via the Mars Cheese Castle.

Yes you may think I'm at the butt end of a telephone game experiment and purple monkey dishwasher has already been done. You wouldn't think that the 3 words: Mars, Cheese, and Castle could go together.

When I think Mars, I tend to think of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Marvin the Martian, or a delectable nougaty chocolate confection suitable for frying by Scots.

When I think of Cheese, I tend to think of pizza, sense of humor, and boxes of Cheez-its (which I think used to be called Cheez Nips when I was growing up, but maybe someone complained about racial intonations).

When I think of Castles, I tend to think of chess, Harold and Kumar, and Nathan Fillion.

What I don't do is think of the three words together, yet driving at a snail's pace o'er the construction-laden interstates approaching Milwaukee, Wisconsin yesterday, I saw what I saw (and my friend Steve can back me up) and that was a larger than life sign which read MARS CHEESE CASTLE.

Now, of course, I was intrigued, but not enough to stop the car from our 5mph pace and find an exit ramp... perhaps I was thinking of the unlimited possibilities of the concept of a Mars Cheese Castle with Marvin the Martian as sole proprietor echoing the best lines of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch when I got pulled over in Waterford, Wisconsin at 1am for speeding.

I got caught doing 20mph over the speed while travelling at 45mph... you do the math folks. That means the speed limit was 25mph. I was passed by a turtle and a snail out for a late night stroll when I got back on the road again.

The cop was actually very nice. He gave me a warning but told me my Windstar's license plate had come back with a citation on a Crown Victoria. I thought I had the plates new when I first leased a van nine years ago. If I had to guess however, I'd like to think the previous owner of my plates got caught storming the Mars Cheese Castle which was ably-protected by the Swiss Guard.

I would also like to think that if one got caught by the guards, they would throw you in the Mars Cheese Castle dungeon with limburger carpets. The only way you could get out was to eat the only thing that wasn't made of cheese - headcheese.