Ramping Up for the Olympics

The Winter Olympics are coming soon to Sochi, Russia and like all Good Canadians, we are waiting with baited breath.  That is a bald-faced lie of course, we do not give a red-circled damn about the Olympics.

Our man on the Olympic Games, Mason Baveux, has recovered from his recent bout of what he calls the “shakey-jakes” from industrial-grade drinking over the holiday season.  Unfortunately he got bronchitis from his nephew “The Arsehole” who came to visit and Mason had to stand a two week course of codeine-based cough syrup consumption to keep his lungs in his body.  We suspect the combination of Benyln and Blue contributed to the shakey-jakes, but Mason assures us he is in fighting trim to cover the Olympics for us:

Ise been watchin the tube in this here ramp up to the Olys Davey, just so you know and Ise ready to give’er, you know, with them sporty commentatin insights.  Looks like we’re about as ready as we’ll ever be.

We await the opening ceremonies with a mixture of fear and sleeplessness and for Mason’s first missive.

Depths of Winter

It is that time of year here.  Winter is about half done and we have been whacked with another cold snap.  We don’t call it a “Polar Vortex” or other nonsense designed by news departments to hype what is nothing more than the usual stretch of damnably cold weather that hits most of Canada in January.

For our American readers, the last holdouts on the Fahrenheit scale, it is a balmy –0.22 degrees, or –17.9 C.  Of course the sun is out, shining away happily, as we freeze our nubbins, vapour from the bus exhaust leaving contrails in the air.  The car creaks, metal and oil protesting at being used in these temperatures, the shocks and springs grumbling at our abuse.  There is the occasional square tire, where the car has a frozen flat spot that only smoothes out after several kilometers of driving, thumping along, giving the car the gait of a gazelle with one foot mounted in concrete. 

There are the snow banks, piled a dozen feet high from the December blizzards, frozen solid, as unyielding as stone.  Falling on one means deep bruising or a trip to the ER for some plaster to set broken bones, a common occurrence in this season.  The only way to cut the snow banks back is with a rock drill and the careful application of explosives, both things frowned upon by the City, Province and Federal authorities, so we leave the glaciers alone, trying to peer around them, to drive out onto the main streets.

Yet remarkably there are the fanatics, who insist on bicycling to work, even at –25, saying it’s bracing and great exercise in the winter.  The Ottawa Skateway (7 kms long) on what is normally the Rideau Canal waterway, hosts the usual collection who insist on skating the length to work, simultaneously proving their hardiness and madness, their exhalations coating their faces with glistening icicles that thaw miraculously in seconds as soon as they come inside.

Naturally there are the high-school students, jacket open, no hat, no gloves, many in a skirt that would barely cover that which it is supposed to cover, walking from school.  They’re too cool to admit to being frozen half to death and we all did it when we were that age, except now they text to their friends that they’re cold, with stuttering fingers and thumbs tapping out texts that read like a cat trying to use a QWERTY keyboard.

The sensible among us recognize that January here is cold.  We stay inside, near the fire, or wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, sharing bad television with our partners, snuggled together in that curious comfort of watching the Cake Boss in Houston, making sure we don’t think more than is actually necessary.  We hunker down with a book and read in bed, only rising to let the dog out onto the back yard glacier for one last pee before lights out, muttering to ourselves that come spring, that back yard will look like a cesspool of dog excreta with patio furniture and cedar hedges and that lump of ice over there where the barbecue used to be.

The very first vestiges of a new season are upon us however.  It is no longer as black as a well-diggers arse come 4 pm.  You can still see without lights at 5 pm.  You notice the sky lightening up at 0700 as you go into work, it having been dark when you got up, dark when you got to work and dark when you went home at the end of the day, the sun a distant memory of that bright thing up in the sky that seemed to make your eyes hurt when you looked at it.

Nature is hinting, just the merest of whispered hints that this winter will pass, as they have every year and will every year ahead. 

We have to get through it as best we can. 

No Grrrls Allowed at York (Rockin the 70’s groove)

This one crossed our desk earlier in the week.  A male student at York University in Toronto has asked for and received permission to not work with female students, in this story from the Toronto Star.

The deal is, his religious beliefs do not permit him to work with women, study with women, or interact with women.  He applied for an exception and it was granted.

As you know, we’re fairly tolerant of differing belief sets.  As long as you’re not impolite about it, then live and let live.  You’ve got your brand of God that you really like, we’ve got ours, we like our brand, you like yours and have a happy day.   

Trying to be inclusive here, we can see this as tip of the slippery slope.  Let us turn this around and see if the logic fairy will appear.

Conceptually, my particular and peculiar religious beliefs state that I can only work with women with natural intimate hair.  This is because the principal doctrine of my religion is based on a song. It’s a song allegedly penned by Hunter S. Thomson as the ultimate country song.  The title?  Jesus Hated Bald Pussy 

Since HST coined that title, we have adhered to it fervently, in the hopes that we’re never exposed to shaved, waxed, trimmed, dyed, bleached, plucked or sculpted intimate hairs on females of legal age.

Part of the religious orthodoxy is that any female that we work with must prove that they do not currently, have not and do not plan to ever perform any maintenance on their Secret Garden, beyond basic personal hygiene.  In fact, this is so important to our religious beliefs that any female must publically expose said areas to prove same. 

If we do interact, even inadvertently, we will forfeit our right to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, suffering Eternal Damnation, Hellfire and Brimstone.  This is a deeply held belief amongst us. A deeply held, religious, belief.

Assuming we were enrolled at York University, could we demand that the only those students with a, to quote Gwyneth Paltrow, 70’s groove to interact with me as a student.  Would York University demand that any female student in our class be required to visibly prove said 70’s groove?

Before you start writing a hateful email, we’re merely posing this as a question, a theoretical question, to illuminate the logic in York University’s decision. 

As you might tell, the logic fairy did not appear in our test. York University has received an F.

We want to be inclusive, tolerant and accepting of other belief sets, as it is the right thing to do, but there are lines out there that we, as a society, have to draw. No Gurrrls Allowed is one of them.  It has to be drawn with a big-tip Sharpie. 

If that particular student can’t, for deeply held religious beliefs, be near women, then he can find and enroll in an all-male University somewhere on his own dime.  The same would conceptually hold true for those who might ascribe to the Hunter S. Thomson sect: An entire post-secondary institution dedicated to natural hairs.

And it’s just as dumb as No Gurrrls Allowed.