Category: Humor

I Call Bullshit — Time Travel!

time travel

I don’t believe in Time Travel.  And I don’t give a rat’s ass what Einstein, Carl Sagan and Dr. Who have to say about it!

Time travel is the unicorn of our human experience: everybody’s heard of it and can describe it in vivid detail, but there’s not one shred of tangible evidence to prove it actually exists.  Yeah, yeah, yeah! Theories of Quantum Physics, or mechanics, or some other mumbo-jumbo say it could happen, but … my mother said if I skipped stones down the alley, I’d put somebody’s eye out.  Yeah, right!  Besides, most of the folks spouting these theories are basement dwellers who spend tons of time watching The Space Channel but haven’t quite got around to finishing Junior College.

If – IF? – time travel does exist, then I have a few questions — and none of them has anything to do with Flux Capacitors.

1 — How come we’re not up to our elbows in antique dealers?  There should be an army of futuristic entrepreneurs — marching around, buying everything from rotary phones to can openers in our time, taking them back home and cashing in.

2 — Why didn’t somebody go back to Germany, 1933 and zap Adolf Hitler?  Okay, some place in the future, a bunch of guys are sitting around a bar, having a few adult beverages and putting on the brag.  I simply can’t believe that, in all the years of future history, not one of them — ever – will stand up and say, “Hey, hold my beer … I’m gonna go prevent World War II!”

3 — How come every person who claims to be a time traveler – isn’t?  We live in a world where, if you stumble on a curb, it’s upload to Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube — in seconds!  It beggars disbelief that somebody wandering around, looking like an extra from Star Trek, would go unnoticed.

4 – How come future gamblers aren’t winning every lottery, Keno game and sports bet on the planet?  I’m pretty sure criminals in the future would think of this.  Biff did.

But I’ve saved the best for last:

5 – Why aren’t historical events overflowing with time-travelling tourists?  I have a friend who would love to have seen the premiere of Hamlet – and she’s not the only one.  Imagine what kind of an audience you’d get for the Gettysburg Address, the Signing of the Magna Carta, or Columbus’ first foot in the New World?  And it’s not a one off: it’s time travel!  People could go every week – generation after generation!  Logically, there should be a couple of million people hanging out watching Da Vinci paint Mona — or waiting in line to witness the Wright brothers “slip the surly bonds of earth” at Kitty Hawk.

 

Canada Day — Eh (2018)

canada

Sunday, July 1st is Canada Day.  (On the map, we’re that big pink bit on top of the United States.)  Living next door to America is a blessing and a curse.  On the one hand, we can wander around the world, spouting all kinds of pie-in-the-sky nonsense because we’re pretty secure under the American military and economic umbrella.  On the other hand, nobody pays much attention to Canada because we are permanently stuck in that shadow.  As a result, a lot of people around the world have some serious misconceptions about Canada – what we do and how we live.  So in honour of Canada Day, here are a few myths about my country that need to be straightened out.

We all live in igloos. – Not really, but given the outrageous house prices (Vancouver’s average is $1.1 million) it’s becoming a viable option.

We all say “eh.” — Actually, like “aloha,” we only do it for the tourists.

We don’t lock our doors. — Michael Moore said we didn’t in one of his “documentaries” and the world thought that was cool — although Canadians laughed themselves stupid.  “Hey, Mikey!  You jackass!  Just because we’re not Americans, that doesn’t mean we’re idiots.”

Nous parlons tous francais. – No, nous ne parlons pas tous francais.  The fact is, only about 20% of Canadians speak French.  The rest of us try to get by on the French we learned in school — with various hilarious results.

Our police wear bright red uniforms and ride horses. — Yeah, right!  And Dutch people all wear wooden shoes!

We don’t have guns. – Actually, Canadians have a lot of guns (3 for every 10 people in the country.) We just don’t whip them out every time we have a social disagreement.

Canadians are obsessed with hockey. – Just because the entire country shuts down when Canada plays for Olympic Gold, that doesn’t mean we’re obsessed!

We say “sorry” all the time. — Sorry, we don’t.

You can legally grow and smoke marijuana in Canada. – Nobody really knows, but we do it anyway.

Canadian dollars are called “loonies.” – This is true, but we only do it to make the pompous asses at the IMF sound silly.

And finally:

Canada is always cold.  — Canadian winters are no joke, but it’s really only mind-numbing, soul-eating, kill-me-now cold for part of the year.  The second week of August is usually quite balmy.

———

So Happy Canada Day — when Canadians all over the country forget their differences and remember the only thing we all have in common – we love to make fun of Americans.

Summer News

newspaper

In these last couple of days before the summer sun bakes us all into human pudding and the news media runs off and hides on their annual two-month vacation, there is still news – and most of it is pretty cool.

1 — The women of Saudi Arabia can drive.  The last bastion of motor vehicle misogyny has fallen, and the women of King Salman’s private sandbox can legally drive cars!  Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia actually is a giant sandbox and, aside from dropping their burkas off at the drycleaners, there’s really no place for the girls to go.  (Sand Dune #68 isn’t that big an attraction.)  Still, I imagine going through the drive-thru at Wendy’s is a big deal to someone who’s spent most of her life hanging out in a harem.

2 — That Canadian guy Jordan Peterson is suing Sir Wilfred Laurier University.  Apparently he’s pissed off because a couple of their “open-minded” academics compared him to Adolf Hitler.  Peterson’s contention is that Hitler ordered the murder of six million Jews; whereas all he (Peterson) did was say the gender neutral pronoun “ze” was bullshit and that is not strictly a crime against humanity.  Meanwhile, the university maintains that politically-correct fascists always compare people who disagree with them to Hitler, and Peterson should quit being such an over-sensitive Alt-right snowflake.  (Man! I wish Judge Judy could get hold of this one!)

3 — The super-duper poster boy for gender equality, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, just got hit with the hypocrite stick.  Apparently, before Mr. Trudeau got in touch with his feminine side (and a pile of female votes) he spent some time touching a female reporter who wasn’t too happy about his little game of grab-ass — and said so.  Trudeau’s actual response was, “I’m sorry.  If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward.”  Interesting distinction on who is available for groping.  However, don’t expect this awkward incident to storm through Twitter any time soon; we all know that social media is very careful about who they tar and feather. (I’m looking at you, Bill Clinton!)

But on the other hand:

4 — The cultural cleansing of America continues.  Laura Ingalls Wilder, the woman who wrote Little House on the Prairie, has been dumped by the US Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC.)  According to that illustrious body, Wilder’s books contain “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments.”  Wow!  It must have come as a hell of a shock to those nitwits that something published in 1932 didn’t reflect the values of the 21st century!

My chief worry about this is that, at some point in the not-so-distant future, all the books published before 1980 are going to be gathered up and given the Fahrenheit 451 treatment – including, ironically, Fahrenheit 451.