If you live in Toronto, you will know that the weather has been balls hot for the past several week. I am not complaining, however. Last summer was an abomination. I felt like our city was auditioning as a filming location for Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”. “Sunlight? We don’t have any sunlight. And we have a film studio and tax breaks!!!”

Anyway, given that it is summer, I decided to bust out the khaki summer suit that I purchased last year. Unfortunately, I have lost a significant amount of weight over the past year. It’s amazing what full-blown AIDS will do to you. Don’t let anyone tell you that unprotected anal is a bad thing. Those haters are just jealous fatties. I tried the suit on and it was hard to believe it once fit me. I could fit someone else in it along with me (perhaps for anal — worth noting!). I might as well have been wearing a barrel. So that idea was scrapped.

I still wanted to wear a khaki suit, so I reached to the back of the closet to pull out a khaki suit from a few years back when I wasn’t comically obese. I tried on the pants first. Perfect! They fit like a glove, reinforcing what a fucking fat-ass I had become over the past few years. I had a good cry and then reached for a shirt. The only shirt I had was the one I had worn the day before. It was kind of stinky and crushed, but all my other shirts were either dirty, at the dry-cleaners or at work. I had no choice but to wear yesterday’s shirt. Well, at least I would be able to put the suit jacket on top of it. I reached into the closet to pull it out. I tried it on and looked in the mirror. Were you aware that there has been a dramatic shift in suit jacket styling over the past few years? I was vaguely aware that most of my current jackets were two button while my old ones were three buttons. I was not aware that the only wearable khaki jacket I had made me look like I was at the podium in the NBA draft in 2003.

Good times. So if anyone saw a pasty white guy dressed like a southern black preacher on the TTC last week, that was me. Say hi next time!

* Yes, a choice line from The Game’s “Put You On The Game”. We roll West Coast here at the F.C.L.

I was out for dinner last night with Mrs. Butter Chicken. She wanted to go for sushi. I absolutely hate sushi, so I only agreed to go for sushi if she paid for the meal. That’s the kind of gentleman I am. It’s a wonder I wasn’t fighting off the ladies when I was single. Anyway, we went to the sushi restaurant just around the corner from our house. She order some plate full of throwaways from P.J.’s Pet World on rice while I went with the chicken teriyaki. Before the meal came we were blessed with not one but two bowls of soup that taste like they cleaned a diabetic’s wound in it, and salad that consists iceberg lettuce and a strip of carrot doused in Kikkoman sauce. I can’t believe I don’t like Japanese food. So exotic! I’ve seen “The Pacific” and I won’t forgive them for WWII and I won’t forgive them for the deception they have perpetrated on the world’s diners. Anyway, my teriyaki came first. My wife told me to start eating as “my meal is probably coming soon.” Rather than succumbing to any inate sense of chivalry, I proceeded to wolf down my entire meal in about five minutes. Still no sushi. When it finally came, I was completely done and had nothing to do but watch my wife eat sushi. I am convinced that people eat sushi simply because they get to use little sticks, eat wasabi, and dip their food in little bowls of soya sauce. It’s like an Asian version of a child’s tea party. So tiny! So precise! So ritualised! Ritualised, like the Rape of Nanking! I REMEMBER PELELIU, MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Sorry. That just comes out. As I was watching my wife eat, I notice the tiny pile of pickled ginger at the corner of her plate next to the glob of wasabi. Pickled ginger is weird-looking. It doesn’t even look like ginger. It looks like this:

I stared at the ginger. I couldn’t really describe what it reminded me of. It looked like something. I thought about it for awhile. Then it came to me.

“Foreskins. Baby foreskins.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The pickled ginger looks like a pile of baby foreskins. They probably have someone doing a bris in the back.”
“….Really? You couldn’t have kept that to yourself?”

On the plus side, I think I have permanently gotten out of any trips to the sushi restaurant in the immediate future. Score! Indian food again! On the down side, I really can’t give my wife a good explanation as to why anything on earth would remind me of a pile of baby foreskins. All in all, I’ll consider it a wash.

Several years ago I read an edition of Vice Magazine that contained a fashion “DOs & DON’Ts” section about something called “Les Tam-Tams” in Montreal. You can find the article here. What is “Les Tam-Tams”? Vice described it like this:

1970 was a great time for Quebec. Hippie culture was at its peak, and in October, the French separatists became so powerful they put the entire country into a state of emergency. Even though the instability of that era eventually bankrupted the province, there’s still a bunch of fucking idiots who go to the mountain every Sunday and celebrate it. It’s called “Les Tam Tams” and it is a strange combination of the early hippies, the Middle Ages, extreme climbing, and the circus.

I really liked that description, but it wasn’t really helpful. What really happens at Les Tam-Tams? Well, I recently had the opportunity to visit Montreal and take in Les Tam-Tams in all of its pachouli-scented, jester-hat wearing glory. Quite frankly, Vice nailed it. It was a beautiful day in the park on a Sunday afternoon. Wine. Picnics. Ultimate frisbee. Being fagbaited by a couple of squeegee kids and not realizing it until you were about fifty feet away. Oh, and a bongo-inspired techno dance party featuring some of the most fucked up social misfits I have ever seen. If it wasn’t for the Twilight premier on the weekend, Les Tam-Tams would be the oddest collection of sad human beings assembled in the world over the last 48 hours. I unfortunately didn’t have my camera, but this youtube snag pretty well captures Les Tam-Tams in all of its shirtless, shame-free, head-poundingly loud, footloose and fancy free glory. Allons-y, ostie!

Sadly, we weren’t able to witness any LARP action. Who knew the LARP/”folks who burn police cars in Toronto” spheres were so intermingled?

* I am pretty sure that sentence is misconjugated. Je m’excuse.

I stepped into a bar near my house on Sunday to watch the tail-end of the Brazil-Ivory Coast World Cup match. The bar was about half-full, with some of the people watching the game and the others just there for drinks. I took a seat, looked up at one of the screens, and this happened:

All of a sudden, some guy at the back of the bar yells out, “That’s why this game is for faggots.” Everyone — absolutely everyone — in the bar cheered.

Homophobic, yes, but sadly true. As long as our national pastime allows for (and perhaps encourages) the repeated face-punching of divers and fakers, it’s going to be very difficult for soccer to truly be respected in this country. I enjoy the World Cup, but when I’m watching player after player fall down like they’ve been shot after the slightest (or no) contact, I can’t help but be reminded of this:

[Commemorate this moment with a t-shirt, folks. Buy it here.]

….can be a secret no longer. The secret? Making dioramas of old GI Joe figures in erotic positions. The fact that I was considering buying a ticket to this.

That’s right. Limp Bizkit — live at the Molson Amphitheatre. It would just be me and a couple of thousand recent parolees and guys that will have to leave the concert to make their overnight shelf-stocking jobs at Loblaws. In other words, I am a complete meat-head. Or is that meth-head? Given my musical inclinations, likely both.

Opening for them? Ice Cube.

Yes, The (Pejorative Term for African Americans) You Love To Hate. I love Ice Cube, especially the stuff from his “Dabbling With the Nation of Islam” years. I am not much of a masochist, but I just can’t get enough of being called a white devil for fifteen songs in a row. It kills me to see what he has become. I watched the entire length of “Are We There Yet?” anxiously awaiting him to shoot the rest of the cast. No dice. Fucking sell-out. I wrote all that Louis Farrakhan poetry for nothing.

Too bad the show was cancelled. I worked on my dance routine for “Rollin’” for about five weeks straight. I had this move where it looked like I was driving a car, you know, like I was “rollin’”. Fred would have loved it.

So they have started putting up the security fences for the G20 summit in downtown Toronto. You know Toronto, don’t you? The financial capital of our country. No sense in having moving traffic or free passage there. Pfffftt. I learned about the erection of these security fences last night as I was stuck in traffic for an extra 20 minutes or so as construction crews brought the roads around the Convention Centre to a standstill. I was less than pleased.

Despite my selfish anger at being late getting home, the fences are a pretty exciting addition to Hogtown’s landscape. People are fearing the worst because they can only begin to imagine what sort of previous chaos at other G20 summits resulted in the plan to put these fences up. The alarmism is palpable, particularly among office workers who apparently think that they will have to engage in Molotov cocktail-tossing wars in order to make their 8:00 AM meetings on time. This was before the fences were even put up. Add these barriers and you’ve got widespread panic. Me? I am ever the optimist. You see fences as an ominious barricade that will keep the angry anarchist mobs at bay. Me? I see fences and think of this:

That’s right. We are all gettin’ laid, German rock chick-style. Facepaint is optional. Druids are mandatory. Apparently a panther will be involved. See you next weekend in Toronto!

Huh. Haven’t posted in ages. I probably haven’t posted because I have been thinking of and working on THE GREATEST IDEA EVER!!!!!!!

Okay, here it goes. Apparently there has been a dispute over the past few years over whether “.xxx” should be chosen as the top level domain name for sexually explicit sites on the internet. I have no idea what the fight is about because I am not a fucking nerd. What are you looking at, nerd? How do you like the nerd website, nerd? Sorry, a defensive force of habit when I don’t understand something. Anyway, I think this whole brouhaha is a complete waste of time. Nobody uses the term “xxx” anymore, at least not in the context of sexually explicit content. For Christ’s sake, it’s a flavour of Vitamin Water. Unless that drink is made by squeezing the bedsheets at a brothel into a small plastic bottle, the fact that ”xxx” is the name of a beverage is reason alone to move past the antiquated, peepshow-based term of “xxx.”

My solution? Get ready….

“.cum”.

Get it? Get it?  

It’s perfect. We all know what it means. Also, if anyone ever catches you on a site with a “.cum” suffix, you could pretend it was an accident and that you were looking for a “.com” site. You know, like www.easycoeds.com instead of www.easycoeds.cum. (BTW - I have no ideas if those links work and I am not testing them). Actually, the whole “easycoeds” thing is not the best example, but you can see where I am going with this.

So there’s my idea. Since I don’t know anything about computers, never mind the registration of top-level domain names, I assume that the way to put this in place is to write the United Nations, the Pope, and Bill Gates. While I am at it, I will let them know my theories on the World Bank and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  I will let you know how this progresses.

I was having one of those really weird, tossing-and-turning sleeps the other night. My wife told me later the next day that I was having incredibly violent and vivid dreams/nightmares and basically terrorized her all night with my constant jimmy legs and random muttering and thrashing. Life with me is a constant pleasure, folks. Anyway, early in the morning, Mrs. Butter Chicken’s alarm clock apparently kept going off. I have no recollection of this, but Mrs. Butter Chicken later told me that she was tired and kept on pressing snooze while I kept on sleeping. However, perhaps she hit the snooze button one too many times for Rip Van Winkle here. My reaction? I suddenly turned over and apparently head-butted my wife. Actually, it’s not “apparently”. I truly head-butted my wife. This woke me up to the extent to which I asked myself, “why does my head hurt? Holy shit, did I just head-butt my wife?” The fact that I committed this violent act was not that disconcerting to me, I guess, as I promptly fell back asleep.

Mrs. Butter Chicken’s reaction? She turned off the alarm clock and got out of bed. She got ready for work and didn’t even remember the incident until I reminded her about it later that evening.

Gentlemen, apparently Ike Turner was on to something. I am a real catch, ladies. If you can say “Oh, this? Ummm, I walked into a door”, you can say “long term relationship with Butter Chicken.”

Weird photo. Ike Turner was Jewish?

Last night I fell asleep on the couch watching TV. I woke up around 3 AM and realized I should probably get to bed. However, I had to take a piss. I zombie-walked to the bathroom in pitch-black darkness and took a leak. However, as I went to leave the bathroom, I made sure to wash my hands. As I climbed into bed, I felt a strange sense of smugness for taking the time to be so hygiene-conscious while being half-asleep at 3 AM.

Granted, I am a complete asshole for feeling self-righteous about it, but was washing my hands weird, or would everyone have done it? I want to know, at least for the purposes of knowing whose hand not to shake first thing in the morning.

Charlie Francis, who was Ben Johnson’s former coach and the apparent instigator of the entire steroids-in-sport scandal that enveloped Canada in the 1980s and gave Dick Pound a reason for existing, died last week at age 61 after a long battle with cancer. The Toronto Star wrote an article about Francis’ passing. They ran a photo with this article. Was it a dignified head shot? A candid action shot from his many years of sprinting and coaching? Or was it this?

When I die, I would like the following elements to be present in my obituary photograph:

•  Awkward (perhaps stroke-induced) facial expression.
• Painfully retro, never-coming-back-in-style Diadora shirt.
• Visibly portruding pot belly.
• Mincing Fosse-esque posture.
• Male camel toe in flamingly homosexual short-shorts.
• A shirtless Ben Johnson giving me what appears to be some serious cut-eye (and perhaps getting prepared to shoot me from behind).

It’s only when that gets published will people be able to say that I died with dignity.