Don't call your teddy bear Mohammed

Nothing in my mind cements a country in the "back-ass" section of my little black book than crap like this. A teacher lets the kids in her classroom name a teddy bear after a religious figure, and she gets jailed, fired and deported. Apparently she just missed getting the 40 lashes on top of that.

Someone on my facebook list put this in the spot where it asks for religious preference:

"Religion kills people."

That's about right. It also makes them frickin' crazy.

Also, for the ladies, try not to get gang raped by 7 guys in Saudi Arabia because it will be your fault and you'll get 90 lashes and 6 months in jail, Oh, and they'll increase it to 200 lashes when you appeal. A system of religious courts. What a grand frickin' idea that is. Oh and by the way, thank you for all those 911 terrorists you sent over a few years back...

When are we going to invent some new form of vehicular fuel so we can say to that part of the world "Bye bye, we'll call you if we need any sand..."

Pulling a drunk out of a car with Stephen Seagal

I saw a guy at my local grocery store the other day. I recognized him as some drunk guy with other various medical conditions I pulled out of his car about 8 years ago.

It had been Thanksgiving weekend and I was on my way to my parent's house in Blackburn when we came across a line of cars in front of the Fire Station off the Innes road bypass. After waiting a bit , one by one the three cars in front of us passed a car that was stationary in the middle of the road. When we pulled up behind it, my wife was driving I decided to get out of the car and see if the guy was having trouble. He sure was! His front driver side fender was digging into the rubber of his tire because he had obviously hit something and he was also drunk as a skunk! He was having trouble driving his car forward in neutral so I reached in and took his keys (he batted my hands away once so I shoved him back in his seat and took them out anyway). I remember looking for a medic alert bracelet and he didn't have one. I turned back to my wife and made the "drunky drunky" sign and looked back inside the guy's car.

On the passenger seat was about $200 in loonies. The whole seat was full of them. I had no idea what they were for, if the guy was on his way to a casino or what. On the floor on the passenger and driver's side were some bottles of Vermouth (whatever that is, I'm no connoisseur), some open and some closed which I took to be the cause of his drunkenness. I was wondering how the hell I was gonna get him out of his car and over to the fire station. He was a pretty big fat guy, with a huge gut and track-pants (the outfit that says, "I've let myself go, but at least I'm comfortable!"). That was when I saw Stephen Seagal.

Ok, it wasn't Stephen Seagal, it was a guy in a 300ZX who just looked like Stephen Seagal, you know, black leather jacket, black jeans, pony-tail and general "I can kick your ass" look etc. He came over and asked me if I needed any help and I said "Yeah! He's drunk, let's bring him over to the firemen across the street." So Stephen and I hauled him out of his car and each taking an arm, half-carried him over to the fire station. That's when the drunk guy spoke. He said in a slurry voice "Call my wife".. I looked over at Steve and he seemed quite concerned that this guy was going to hurl all over his pony tail so he was being quick about it and carrying the guy by the arm like you would a small child with a leaking diaper.

We got the guy to the side entrance to the apparatus floor of the fire station and I tried to get him to sit down but he refused and just stood all there all shaky leaning up against the wall, ready to fall at any moment. I was kinda pissed at him for being drunk and driving in my general vicinity so I tried to make him sit down but he resisted. Short of taking him out at the knees, he wasn't going to sit down. "Screw it!" I thought. You'll fall down soon enough on your own. I rang the bell and soon the firemen were out, they called the cops and an ambulance and we went and moved the guy's car. When I got back the firemen had gotten the guy a chair but he still wasn't sitting down! He wasn't drunk dammit! He was gonna stand there and show us how sober he was!

He finally fell when the ambulance arrived. Right on his face before anyone could stop him (like everyone didn't see that one coming). One of the officers said the "I've fallen and I can't get up" line and we laughed (sure it wasn't nice, but neither is driving while intoxicated). As the Paramedics ran over and helped him one of the police officers expertly removed the fallen guy's wallet from his back pocket using only his foot. It was pretty impressive. I guess he has a lot of experience in that department.

At that point I thanked Stephen Seagal and his supermodel girlfriend and my wife and I left. A day later I got a call from the officer in charge and he said they were not pursuing the case because the guy was a diabetic and he had apparently been in some sort of diabetic state that resembles drunkenness.

"Uhh.. " I said "But, he had no medic alert bracelet, his car was all smashed up, he had 3 or 4 bottles of booze in his car some of them opened, he reeked of alcohol, he couldn't walk or stand up or even talk and we won't even mentioned the 200 loonies in the passenger seat.." He was pretty nice about it and said it wasn't his decision, that it probably merited further investigation, but the powers that be had decided that it was a weak case not worth pursuing. They were letting the guy go.

Newsflash, if you're a diabetic you can get still get loaded, drive drunk, hit stuff and nothing bad will happen to you as long as you don't kill yourself or someone else. Somehow I just know that I ever ever do something stupid and get caught, I'm going to jail while these guys like this one get away with all kinds of stuff. Maybe I'll develop diabetes and have a built-in defence (probably not worth it).

So that's the long story. The short one is that the guy still lives in Orleans and shops at the Yours Independent Grocer off Orleans boulevard and I saw him a few weeks ago! I followed him with my cart in the apple aisle. I wanted to talk to him and do the "Remember me?" bit but I figure it's been too long. He has something else wrong with him besides diabetes. He has that drop foot thing whereby when you walk your foot goes limp and you kind of fall down on it and then take another stride. That's probably why he had trouble walking across the road way back when.

Suffice it to say I feel sorry for his medical state and all, but he was, in my unprofessional opinion, still stinking drunk that day and has no excuse. He could have crashed into a busload of nuns or run over some kid on the sidewalk.

A-hole..

Baby sasquatch

This is some old news that I forgot to post for some reason but back in September a guy caught some images on a Bushnell trail camera in Northwest Pennsylvania and he thinks it's a "baby bigfoot".

WOOHOO! It certainly looks weird. It doesn't look like a skinny bear to me, but it doesn't look much like a baby Saquatch either. Looks like a chimp. Whatever it is, it was a cause of excitement for Bigfoot enthousisasts the world over and much better than the blobsquatch crap we're used to!

I caught a new TV show Tripper turned me onto called MONSTER QUEST (can't wait to see the episode entitled Stalin's Ape Man???) and they ran their Bigfoot ep last week. They featured a Bigfoot incident in ONTARIO of all places, about 200 or 300km from where I live! How cool is that! These guys who rent their cottage to fisherman were having problems with what they thought were bears ransacking their cabin so they used the "dumb animal burgler alarm". A big board with about 100 three inch nails driven through it and placed in front of the door. Well, whatever animal that was ransacking their place stepped on it and left a big bloody Bigfoot footprint, hair and everything. Of course the DNA was crap on it, being left out in the great outdoors and all, but when they traced the outline of the footprint, it was kinda creepy.

Bigfoot in my province? And I thought I had to go out west to see one!

Playdoh and Joe Louis.

My kid ate a Joe Louis the other day (well, most of it) and there were some bits of chocolate that flaked off and hit the table and floor. I picked these up absentmindedly in conversation with my wife and placed them in the plastic Joe Louis wrapper that was still on the table. The youngest was playing with playdoh. After about 5 minutes my brain reminded me that there were scraps of chocolate nearby that had not been eaten (never mind that some of them had been on the floor) and that something should be done about it, so I automatically scooped up the chocolate flakes and ate them rather quickly.
The mouth has an interesting mechanism whereby the throat hole shuts down before you can fully ingest whatever it was that you put in your mouth. It gives the brain a second to taste whatever's in there before it gives it's permission to be fully eaten. Thank god for that because I had just eaten bits of brown playdoh.
When did they start making brown playdoh? I certainly didn't have any when I was a kid unless I got creative and mushed some secondary colors together. If there had been brown playdoh right out of the can I would have spent my younger years making fake piles of crap everywhere.
So I walked to the sink and spit it out hoping to god it was playdoh (it was) because I have a 3 year old who's being toilet trained, and Mr Poo sometimes makes appearances in odd places.

For the record, Play-doh smells great but tastes horrible.

mission impossible for squirrels

I have to build one of these! Thanks to Tripper for passing this one on.

Halloween at the Zartimus household.

A freind of ours came over to help hand out Halloween loot so I was able to stand in front of my house motionless in a 7 foot tall Grim Reaper costume holding a huge scythe while my wife took the kids door to door. I've done this a few times over the years but I've managed never to do it two years in a row, which lulls the neighborhood kids into a sense of complacency. A few years I've even put the Reaper out on a body stand which makes it look like someone is standing there in a costume. But this year it was the real thing.

The suit has a two-way material on the front which allows the wearer to see what's coming up the driveway and if the kid is over 3 and a half feet tall, well that's old enough to freak out! Ya gotta be sneaky though, sometime you have to let one or two go by to establish that false sense of security before scaring the last few. And when I mean scare, it's rarely jumping out and screaming bloody murder, in that get-up you just have to do a turn or lean over at them to get a good scream out of them.

The big kids are my favorite. The kids that are probably a bit to old to be milking the free candy thing but do anyway. If you're old enough to date, then you shouldn't be goin' "TRICK OR TREAT!" although it's better than tossing a brick through my front window just to be funny.

One big kid I recognized as having scared him before through his earlier formative years, but he wasn't sure if it was the fake suit or the real thing. Suprise! I tossed a video cam in the corner and recordred some, although I missed some of the really good ones pausing the thing so as not to waste tape. I posted it on youtube. It's too bad Halloween only comes once a year!