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• Harper Fellates a Nation…no surprise it wasn’t his own. (old piece 2006)
• Why Am I Writing About a TV Dog Trainer, AGAIN? Deb, Jennifer and Douglas…This is a special message for you and your cranky cronies.
• Here Kitty-Kitty…….feeding time on Parliament Hill.
• A Time to Die….Kristi’s Letter.
• Congrats! On Completely Missing the Point…
• Sex and Death on the Weekend Part 2 - Is that a mackerel in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
• A Little Sex and Death on the Weekend
• You Have Every Right to Be Offended, You Goddamn Retarded Jesus Lovin’ Queer…
• George Clooney & Brad Pitt’s Ass Pillaged by Marauding Hordes…left feeling dirty and used
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Holy Crapoli I’ve lost weight…

not sure how much but it’s noticable.

It’s been about a month and a half now…..10 k every day…rain or shine.  Clearly, this is important to me because where I live, I’m taking my life in my hands every time I leave the house.  I recently decided to look ahead while walking and resolved to achnowledge people I encountered with a word or nod, or smile…I thought looking down would make me look like a victim.

Well…NEWSFLASH…

Looking up makes me a target.

Yesterday, at 10:30 am…I was chased by a man who had stopped me to ask for rolling papers, which I didn’t have…and progressed rapidly to him wanting to buy me….to him wanting to sell me…..to him …the courtesy now gone…..wanting to pull me into a neaby house, where his “friends” are…

By far the scariest one was a couple of weeks ago…I was out a 3am for my walk and a man on a bicycle said something innocuous like “nice night”…and I agreed….sadly….I agreed.

Look, I don’t subject you to much prattling-on about tv shows. (you can thank me later)

I do some fun stuff about Hollywood and the occasional movie review…

But, I am soooo bummed about Ghost Whisperer tonight!

They killed Jim.

I love Jim. He’s the perfect husband and the ideal man.

I can’t even put my finger on it precisely. A man who is too supportive and loving can be unattractive. I’ve known men that were just so nice I knew I could never have sex with them…The niceness renders them asexual for some reason….Jim was somehow a perfect balance.

Forget the fact that he’s HOT!

….and he is really hot.

I’m not a girl who’s all about the good-looking guys…looks have never moved me.

In fact, not only do I date ugly guys…well, back when I actually dated anybody…

But, I’m also not one to crush on celebrities….especially not the handsome ones. You couldn’t pay me to do Brad Pitt or George Clooney…not because I don’t like them, I really do. (angelina is an entirely different story) I think celecbrity crushes are demeaning…I refuse to get all worked up over someone I see on TV…I’ll appreciate that which deserves to be appreciated….(David Duchovny) and I’m not saying I hate George Clooney….it’s just…..you know….I had an assistant once who would rather stay home with her cats and watch George Clooney movies than live her life and it was kind of pathetic.

 

 

 

- 1,000 Strangers
- 1,000 Mysterious Envelopes

I’ve started a new project this week….distributing 1000 envelopes to 1000 strangers. What’s inside? …Wouldn’t you like to know!

Like the people who will find them, no two envelopes will be exactly alike…

These are NOT Random Acts of Kindness….
There’s NOTHING RANDOM ABOUT IT!

Sorry, I can’t tell you more than that!

In physics, there is something known as the “observer effect”.
It holds that the act of observation will change the phenomenon being observed….

If I tell you all about my Stranger Project or about my intentions behind doing it, I alter the project itself. 

It’s an exercise in unlimited potential and endless opportunities.

Each envelope is a reminder that miracles are not only possible…they are ordinary!

Don’t be surprised by MIRACLES….expect them….know they are as certain as the sunrise.

Did you receive an envelope?

Email me and share your experience! jules@canadawry.com

Want to support the 1000 Strangers Project?
Click the “Donate” Button above.

Want to support me?

 Buy my book on Amazon

  I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It seems that parents are using the Safe Haven Law in Nebraska to abandon their teenagers at local hospitals….and in fact….they are even crossing state lines to do it. 

Now, the Safe Haven Laws were enacted specifically to keep newborn infants born to teen Moms or others who, not knowing what to do and fearing they might be grounded if their Moms discovered they just squeezed one out on the bathroom floor of the neighbourhood Chevron….from being harmed. It’s a time-limited “no questions asked” arrangement.

However, the law, as written by the Nebraska Legislature, does not specify time or age limits and simply refers to the subject by the generic term “child”….resulting in some obvious and slightly hilarious issues. Less amusing however, is the reality that these teens live with the knowledge that their parents consider them disposable. 

We walk around dazed and confused by the shocking, brazen, violent and cavalier behaviour of our children and young adults. I read the newspapers and wonder how these kids determined in their own minds that stealing, killing, raping or even simply vandalizing someone else’s property was something that could, should or would be done.

“Do not criticize your government when out of the country. Never cease to do so when at home.”
Winston Churchill

 

 

It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of the Conservative platform, but aside from being completely without personality, and the disturbing wardrobe choices….mostly related to his choice of vests…..I have not had huge concerns about Stephen Harper. His government is largley rendered inert by it’s minority status.  I’m even a little encouraged by his recent willingness to assert himself against Bush and defend the NW Passage….

But this very disturbing transcript has made me sit up and take notice….Does anyone who has such disdain for his country deserve to be it’s Prime Minister?  Let me share:

“It may not be true, but it’s legendary that if you’re like all Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most Canadians.”

“First, facts about Canada. Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. “

 

Before I start, I want to THANK everyone who has been buying my book DUMBASS on Amazon.com these last few days. It suddenly sprang up in the sales rankings and has been selling very well, which, you may know, is one of the things I’ve needed to happen to help us out of our current predicament…So this is totally AWESOME and THANKS! 

Well, a funny thing happened a month or so, ago…

It seems that when I invoked the name of Canadian Dog Trainer Brad Pattison, I conjured up the manifest rage of his rabid detractors.

So, despite having other things to do…I am wrapping up editing on one book, writing on the other and doing a daily 10km with weight training to prepare for the Naked Philosopher cover shoot… I’ve allowed myself to get pulled into the muck and mire, once again.

Let’s see if I can put this to bed once-and-for-all……
I’m a big fan of web-stats…some people think it’s creepy…I think it’s fascinating. Lately, my big daily “fun” is checking up on the search terms that bring people to my site. 

 Now, what you DON”T see in this syrupy public relations maneuver…..errrrr….I mean….candid photo of serpentine Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper…is that moments later, he unhinged his jaw and swallowed the poor feline whole.

 I don’t usually do baseless pot shots….but, Harper’s smile is just so creepy here….and the kitten??? Augh! How painfully contrived an effort to make Harper relatable and likable. God….he’s sitting in front of a fireplace, dressed casually….it couldn’t be more cliche if he was eating….errrr…..I mean….KISSING a baby! 

OK….now back to our regularily scheduled program:

Turtle…meet Scorpion…..Scorpion….meet the Turtle….

A Parable for Canadian Voters.

A scorpion wanted to cross a river but he could not swim.

When he saw a turtle, he called loudly to him, “Would you please help me cross the river?”

The turtle answered, “No, you will sting me.”

The scorpion replied, “No, I won’t sting you. If I sting you, both of us will drown and die. I promise not to sting you.”

Dear Kristi,

A man named Alfred Lord Tennyson said,

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”Two days ago…if given the chance….I would have kicked his ass…I was so overwhelmed by the prospect of losing you that I wished we’d never met. That was a monstrous thought and I apologize for ever thinking it.As hard as this is, I went into it with my eyes wide open. I knew you were dying and we didn’t know how long it would be. But I knew that our lives would be the better for having shared them with you…and yours would be better for having known us.  I simply had no idea how much I would grow to love you.

Now that I’ve had a couple days to mourn, knowing that these are the final moments of your life, I want to thank you.  I want to thank you with all of my heart

When I took you in four years ago, we had no idea how long we’d have together and I made you  three promises:

 

We here at Canada Wry, wish to set the record straight.

While we APPLAUDE your passion and CELEBRATE your enthusiasm, there has been a flurry of recent activity of the email-variety….and it needs to be addressed.

No doubt, you have discovered that “comments” are turned off on this site. It’s a SPAM issue, nothing more.  Don’t be pissed. I’m clearly not silencing you, as I’ve heard from 92 readers so far. That’s a record breaker for us!

It seems your ire is directed at the recent post, “Continue Living Life….This post, (much like myself) is a work in progress”, which opened with a short riff about Canadian TV Dog Trainer Brad Pattison from At the End of My Leash on the Slice Network. 

It was a short throw-away paragraph in a piece that was austensibly about me being stripped back to bare bones by life and needing to identify what I’m holding onto that keeps me “here”. It’s a very personal, self-revelatory piece about a genuine struggle I’m having at this very moment. 

That’s not what YOU read though….

You, my friends….picked up on two rather loosely broached issues and ran with them…(baby…bathwater….bathwater…baby…you two should go ahead and get acquainted)

In what is apparently destined to become a never-ending quest  to finish writing
the sex scene for Craig’s novel, (my clever codename for this Craigslist gig…) I have spent the best part of the last 20 hours conducting research that can only be considered INSPIRED. 

Craig graciously provided the bones (pardon my French) for the scene. It’s up to me to simply make it good.

I have a question….what kind of writer can write a whole novel but must entrust two of the most critical scenes to someone he hired on Craigslist? It seemed like a good idea  for $1/word…but now I think the job is weird and nothing I learned today has changed my mind.

First, I went to an erotic literature website and tried to discern what makes a story sexy versus silly. I’m sorry but, my research was inconclusive. The jury is still out.

I was, however, struck by how many people are “messaging her breasts” …he’s “messaging this”….she’s “messaging that”.
 

I’ve had a revelatory weekend.

It’s a thousand times easier to “do” sex than it is to write it.

I took a commission last week to rewrite two scenes for a novelist from Craigslist.One is a murder scene and I am overwhelmingly pleased with the outcome.  

When I stopped getting hung up on the exposition and let dialogue do the driving
…it just ……aurghhhhh….became f’ckin brilliant.  

Am I allowed to say that about my own stuff?

Probably not, but I’m not coming from a place of ego here….more in a spirit of reverence for the power of language.  This is a ghost writing gig so I’ll never have my name on it either. It’s just exciting to have been through the exercise itself.

When I was writing in those first years after the head injury, I would read something I wrote, especially the jokes…and have to ask my son if I wrote it or was I quoting someone else. I’m always surprised when I’m any good at it.

 

“Special” Interest Groups, namely those ironically involved with Intellectual Disabilities, are up in arms about Ben Stiller’s new movie “Tropic Thunder”.

We don’t need to go there. I’m sure you’ve already heard the noise. They object to a storyline and use of the word “retard” in the film. They are picketing and publicly calling for boycott-like avoidance by the public.

Nobody understands satire anymore….and it makes me very sad. How much ya wanna bet, people are going to miss the point of my title?

Well drawn satire, clearly nothing I’ve ever written, is high art.  (Christopher Buckley is soooo ‘da man in that regard!’)

So once again, inspired by my affection for free and democratic societies, I have a few questions for the malingering hordes of whining pansies who think that they must be soothed, assuaged and protected by their governments and movie studios…..go figure that connection….at least they know where all the power truly rests.

By the by, I’m not limiting myself to the President of the Special Olympics, I’m also talking about Christians who have a fit when someone cracks a joke about Jesus, any and every ethnicity that can’t take a joke and every asshole that wants to outlaw profanity….because, that’s just incredibly fuckin’ retarded.

Madam Taussaud’s Wax Museum is a little slow on the uptake.  To promte the release of Ocean’s 13 on DVD, she (I know the actually “she” has died…don’t get all anal about it)  moved the wax statues of George and Brad to a display where the fans were all too real and could gain access to the eerily lifelike effigies.  Brad Pitt’s bum was destroyed by excessive pinching and George Clooney’s cheeks were covered with lipstick. 

The fans left satisfied but sadly, the wax celebrities learned the hard way that neither fame nor beauty can make them respect you in the morning….*sniff*

Ladies listen up….

You do us all a great disservice behaving this way. Do you think men are in the north wing feeling up wax statues of Jenna Jameson or Pamela Anderson?….NO! They are not….They buy her vagina replicated in latex and keep it under their pillow and have secret, secret sex with it like normal people.  (I don’t know from ‘wings’ at the museum, never been)

If you continue to carry on like idiots…weeping with outstretched arms behind the rope line outside of their hotels, sending them love poems written in blood and sexually assaulting their wax statues….It’s embarrassing for women everywhere and a little scary for the stars.

I wrote this last year when Harry Potter came out….in light of the recent Bat Movie….it seemed apropos to dust it off again pour vous! Enjoy…  

  

Abracadabra

 BOX OFFICE MAGIC or SMOKE & MIRRORS

With a whopping  $44.8 million, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has broken the all-time record for the biggest single-day box office opening in history, or something like that.

The boy wizard handily trounced the records set by both Pirates of the Caribbean and Spiderman 3 earlier this summer.

I make no quarrel with Potter’s success. I saw the movie. I liked it. This is not a movie review.

I’m thinkin’ there’s something fishy about these big budget, record-breaking  blockbusters …

Has anybody else noticed that almost every movie this year has opened with some kind of previously heretofore unheard of earth-shaking , box office shattering  success?

Transformers currently holds the record for best “Tuesday debut.”

Spiderman 3 is number one for  the “biggest opening weekend”.

But then we start measuring the season, the rating and the days of the week.

Are we still being reasonable, even as we stretch languidly into Biggest PG-13 Non-Sequel Action Movie Opening After a Full Moon While Mercury is in Retrograde-territory?

 

Today my cockles (you know the ones….. ‘of my heart’….not to be confused with my other cockles, like the cockles of my elbow or the cockles of my foot) were seriously warmed by the Jedi Knights of The LA Times fighting their Dark Lord Sam Zell and his editorial killing machine/Galactic Journalism Death Star.

Zell took over the Chicago Tribune, Newsday and the LA Times in 2007, appointed himself CEO and promptly privatized the lot.  Apparently a “strict Zionist”, Zell borrowed a few pages from the Rupert Murdoch playbook, “How to Bully Your Friends & Alienate People” and The X-Files slogan “The Truth is Out There”….”But keep it “out there” because it’s not welcome in here”….and he has used these principles to systemically strip the LA Times of their editorial integrity and general will to live.  

In a delightfully subversive act, some employees unfurled the banner pictured above, on the LA Times parking garage last Friday. You may read a post about the exploit here.  

 

Life isn’t necessarily about the days …or years… or minutes you spend in this world. It’s about what did when you were here.

When someone dies at a young age, everyone is prone to saying “He died too soon”….and I completely understand the sentiment….I really do. 

I cannot even conceive of the pain I would experience if I lost my son…..it’s beyond comprehension. But, we’ve all seen stories about people suffering tremendous injuries and living. (a woman whose husband shot her point blank, through the eye, comes to mind.) Then there are those people who die suddenly, a coincidence or odd twist of fate, they catch a stray bullet or encounter evil in a back alley somewhere…..Maybe an innocuous illness, suddenly turns fatal and they are gone.

It’s not pretty, or easy or fair, but I don’t think it’s entirely random either.

So for reasons that we, mere mortals, cannot begin to comprehend…nobody really dies “too soon.”

Like millions of other people, I was shocked when Heath Ledger died. He wasn’t just another pretty Hollywood face. This man knew his craft, took it seriously and it showed. He proved that and more when he made out with Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain.

 

This week, we lost an icon. Canadian blues guitarist Jeff Healey passed away far too soon at the tender age of 41. 

Jeff Healey was not only a kick-ass blues phenomenon….he was also a hell of a nice guy.

I saw him play many times and in many places….For some inexplicable reason, Jeff would crop up when I was somewhere far from home….feeling alone and disconnected. He and his music, took me back to the good old days….I should say - good old nights….those many-many long nights of great music and good friends….of smokey blues bars, tokin’ up in the back alleys between sets and college pubs with abnormally sticky floors. Those really were the best of times…

I’d say I knew him before he became famous….But he was always an icon…..He just happened to also be incredible warm and accessible. I’ve heard people say otherwise, but, to me…..he was always wonderful.

I suddenly wonder if I ever told him how much it meant to me when I ran into him?….Ottawa when I was 7mos pregnant….Gastown when I was in Film School…It was always completely unexpected and right when I needed it most….I always seemed to be alone and wandering…when *BLAM*….wow, where’s the awesome music coming from??? Holy crap….It’s Jeff Healey….AGAIN! Thank God for him….

 

OK….OK…I get it….I’m supposed to blog more often…..

If it helps at all, I’ve been blogging daily at my private blog…and by ‘private’ I mean no ones sees it but me….and take my word for it….I’m doing some of my best work ever.

I’m using it like a vision board…pictures of the stuff and life I want to create with notes of gratitude written as if it’s already been received into my life. I shit-you-not, I posted my Oscar acceptance speech the other day…That’s for the movie I co-write with George Clooney, based on the bestselling novel I haven’t written yet.

 Don’t roll your eyes at me!…I can see you, ya know…..it’s because he does really good work…the fact that he’s a sex symbol and cultural icon is something I’ll just have to overlook.

Anyway, since I’m about to undertake an enormous life change….a lot of my focus and attention is going into my positive thinking and big dreams blog….Don’t laugh it makes me feel better.

Wondering about the title of this post?…..It’s not that cryptic actually.

We have nothing to drink and I’m smoking some disgusting smokes from my freezer…..It’s making me feel truly gross.

 

WOW!……OK….So…uhhhhhh…..went to see Vantage Point today…..while everyone was getting shot, I literally turned to my son and said, “Me next, please shoot me next”.

My vertigo was the most enjoyable part of the movie….They do still sell Steady Cams correct?..Note to directors: Having every shot franticly vibrating for 98 minutes, does not high action intensity-make….The theatre popcorn should be served up in kitschy Vantage Point barf bags.

A terminally twitchy Dennis Quaid starred as a Secret Service Agent just back to work after getting shot…(the picture above is Quaid grabbing a fellow actor on set and saying, “why is Pete Travers trying to destroy my career…why…why…WHY?”)

I’m not against the idea of fracturing the chronology when telling a story….I often do it myself….It’s an after effect of my brain injury…but it can also be used intentionally as a device…but it has to be done well…and judicously….around the 6th or 7th time the clock in this film ticked back to 12:00…I said out loud…”Awwww Shit Man…Come on….” ….that’s me…in the theatre surrounded by other people….complaining OUT LOUD….

First, this pic was taken recently at an event in Toronto…The lovely lady in the photo is Illusionist Criss Angel…The the other gorgeous one on the right is one of my favorite people in the universe, Susan Boshcoff. I’m posting this photo without her permission. If she asks me to take it down, I will. But, I wanted to share it and I try to live by the ‘easier to ask forgiveness than permission docterine’. (Seriously, doesn’t she look great?…)

The other pic in this series is currently my desktop screensaver…because it annoys my son. You see, he’s a bit jealous…but when I asked him if he was jealous of Criss or Sue, he wasn’t entirely sure….anyway, poking my son with a stick is my responsibility as a parent…and I take it very seriously.

Now, back to our regularily scheduled program…I have a bone to pick with Criss Angel…

 

An Open Letter to Criss Angel

Dear Criss,

As a M.O.M (mother of magician), I admire what you’ve accomplished. Not only are you a phenomenal artist, but you’ve achieved something utterly amazing….You have single-handedly brought magic into popular culture and made it cool…Not since the rainbow-lovin’ Doug Henning donned his first spandex unitard, has magic been so goddamn sexy.

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