XFactor

Have you heard Carly Rose yet? You will. If you don't you ain't got ears.

If we are the end, then the machines, so beautiful more beautiful than us - what of them?

An old man beaten who fought for freedom, this is unbelievable unconditionally unforgivable! Let's trump hope with grit. Men who speak well can't govern. Elections are a sham. I'd rather have us pick them like Celebrity Apprentice. Judge who is worthy, America, as if you have a choice. Too many handlers between the people and the man.

Unfinished thoughts are welcome; you can finish them how you like. We don't need another writer, flaming out futilility. I as an outsider have the ability to think. Stuck here in the clink. Driven to drink. Too drunk to drive. Too alive to survive. Too true to open mouth. Too blue to let it out. True blue, you are the glue. What is why? Where is the how? When will be Forever.

Ludicrous Canadiana Interpretation of Now For Plan A by The Tragically Hip

[Go buy it now!]

My song by song analysis shows some overlooked connections between the meaning of the Tragically Hip's latest album, Now For Plan A, and this great land we call North of America.

1. At Transformation: This is a rock-hard stage-melter that will put clicks on iPhones, but undulating deeper this an opaque stab at the Western Canadian shale gas fracking industry, which transforms water into money via bad-smelling gas by-products.
2. Man Machine Poem: How did Margaret Atwood's long-distance book-signing quill change literature and the Internet as we know it? Listen to this multi-vocalic screamer and absorb.
3. Lookahead: The fact Sarah Harmer sings on this one means it's about the Niagara Escarpment, a large landmass one can't easily look-ahead of, lest it escarp' your eyes out!
4. We Want to Be It: The Hip have won many Juno awards, yet have never hosted the Junos. A blood-hearted romp that teases political scion Ben Mulroney about his amazing hair, as Ben 'dripped' with promise but never achieve gubernatorial transcendence.
5. Streets Ahead: A song about love, not between a man and a woman, but a man and his dogsled team. The dog team - can he keep it together? Iditarod-know that!
6. Now for Plan A: Since the Avro Arrow was scrapped, there have been many plans, including the current F-35 debacle, to harness the future of our skies via superior aerial war machines. Sarah Harmer returns us to our pre-Diefenbaker roots with an ode to the Arrow. Nothing short of everything will be enough to revive this long-dead Icon of aerospace. If this song were McDonald's it wouldn't be an 'all beef patty', it would be an 'All-Dief Plan A'
7. Modern Spirit: A sinuous ear-trip along Halifax's Blowers Street, this song reminds us that the full-bodied nourishment of the stately Donair sandwich can only be appreciated with more 'modern' condiments, including the 'spirits' or harsh liqueurs once imported by the 1700s' rum trade into Dartmouth harbour. An apoplectic tromp l'oreille.
8. About The Map: As the eruption of Nunavut's existence redrew the Canadian mapscape, a cartographer reminds his curious child about what lies 'beyond the maps' of the frozen north: a lush canticle that gets to the truth about pemmican, Northern values, and the pernicious igloo stereotypes that retard progress among our north folk.
9. Take Forever: As singer Gord Downie flies among the skies to tour the West, he has a nervous breakdown and realizes that only Calgary's mayor, Naheed Nenshi, will grant him clearance to land. A song about a province turned away from its 'forever' values of Ralph Klein-conservatism to a swaggering stage-strut driven by good loud music that only Eastern boys like the Hip can hustle up. 'Take' that to your Stampede and lasso it.
10. Done and Done: Inspired by the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots, this is also a song about the Hip's quest to secure better digital copyright laws for us all, as well as a stab in the face of Tony Clement's gazebo-building megalomania masked in the soft strains of a 50-year-old Bill Derlago fan's plea to finally get his way on the hockey rink.
11. Goodnight Attawapiskat: The Hip go to Northern Ontario and build a canoe out of birch, just as Tom Thomson did. What erupted was an amazing outdoor all-night BBQ perfectly described in this emotive palette-cleanser.

Esoteric Insults Revisited

You masticating Marmaduke, fraught with impotent friction-making malarkey, all sparks and spithammers, lacking any lust for levity! You drink the pigeon's gall and call it a tasty grilled-cheese sandwich. Lend me a time machine so I can smite your ancestors; meanwhile I'll blacken your every nanonotion across the wide Web's comment boards. O crabcake-eating micelicker, lighten your dungarees from their present shade of brown, O bepampered poopulouse! Scram from my boardwalk, you lurching orangutan, lest I unleash a quiver of quartz-quilled moronocide to shatter every non-sense in your ululating husk. O big flamboyant monk in a monastery of Melvins, I shudder at your puissant horsebuggery and general lack of concern for what even a dying vulture has the basic sense to blush at. I could calculate the sum total of your ignorance but my abacus is spent for zeros, you null-set and non-existent irrational number! Leave this wasted realm and surrender your sideways scupperheadedness!

(See original Highfalootin' Insults)

A neat little almost sentence

Ever dwelled, we wooden walkers, we warm bell men, we loud tent men, we proud pigpen ten, then sent to Sendlak with no sendbacks, mac truck and bent backs, lent to scrap, sold as a mat in a maze with a rat in a cage buying all the bars back. 

Better alive!

Oh my grandma said something strange to me a in dream. She said, 'Do not knot the donut hole.' Which thing, a string cannot make, what is round and baked. Ever we sit and stare and wonder why those sitting and staring do not care. Where is the first man to crack? He is there sitting quietly at the back. Have some sympathy for the soldiers in Syria. Firing rounds into the sky out of spite, proving all the great thing about a society run by men, for the sanctity of the state, a conspiracy across international lines, you know one country won't mess with another's mojo rising. Right and wrong has ceded to power and vacuum -- which I guess becomes the more urgent paradigm faced with your own annihilation and the disappearance of your birthright which used to be the afterlife? 

Second Floor Ryerson Library

Potent pizza is a perfect pestilence possibility. I was screwing a large caboose into an onion bun and it occurred to me, shall I shallot a scarecrow? Shall I shimmy with slimy murk into a bodum of unfair frothery? Things are piglet-worthy and mucusmaking. 

If ever a cylindrical cullulent pigeon did unman a masked mysterioso then surely sixteen succubi could collect an unemployment cheque from a red-faced postman. If a college degree meant anarchy then the streets of Quebec would be swept with sweaty pit stains and colander-cudgelling jesuvants. If a jesuit, I mean, did quaggle and fleck then surely his hysteria about the biscuit was just another knottleneck? Poor pissed pachyderms, prancing without the ability to jump, large elephantine fairy queens dusting rhythm guitars like so many Ron Wood replacements uttering magic passwords in the basement of the Rivoli, lacking hot heat, lacking fresh feet, drying wet wit with looks of loathing and curled lips, eating too many tofu tacos in an underwear commercial's catering van restroom.

Can I quell a Cosbyfest? Could Theo ever drive a bus? We waste what we waver, we waive all rights to disenslavement that is emancipation if we neglect the ballot box out of jade frustration. I was warm to the world but cooked like a log, blackened charcoal in my nether zones and soggy from the bog. If a klepto took my tethering hooks--how will I climb a mountain? I shake like Evgeni Malkin, he of fame, of mispronounceable name. Twagger your digits like a disapproving simpleton sloshing about in tens and twenties from hours vending Bingo cards at the bingo place on St. Clair, where chain smokers don't care and lives wind down like the west wind, and a win is a win and a loss means it's time for a smokebreak.

Have a cup of ice-cold gelato. It's after 1pm; I'm drowning on my tip toes in Arizona heat, killing strangers with stares and oozing blackheads from my feet. We ooze proud, we yodel ever loud, we will publish or perish or perhaps both at once, going on vacation for 72 months. Can I call you in the morrow? I need a ride to the Scarborough Zoo, my driver has the flu. He was not reliable like you.

Hamish Macbain trolled for hours in the wild, eating dried skins from the tree whose name no one has written, taken tidbits of misfits and missed facts and complaints and loaded them all onto a server in a closet in a hallway of an office in the suburbs of the capital city of a minor province in a confederacy of future lands locked down under empire struggling for solvency due to solar flares interfering with economic growth models fashioned by 19th century professors amid the dust of a chalkboard.

On Twitter

Can we cross media? An experiment: www.twitter.com/cupcakemanto

Palm Beach Calisthenics

1. Why not smucker your pucks and drop your digits? It's a little after ten and I'm slewshing anew. Big Bill Boggins bought a racecar. Left out to throw out music from the ashtray, slapped on plastic and masked Michaelmas mournings. Ovid drew a nice noose from a sluice caboose, yelling half an hour an hour near the suburbs of Toulouse, "Crack my gills, smack windowsills - I'm yellow and fed on fear, I've eleven of your twelve-year-olds, they're German and they're kind." I don't swear like I used to but otherwise I'm fine. 
2. Gob left the Earth and tried to jump, I never knew he didn't have an elephant and I was killing peanuts to the potions to the best of the rest, the leftout cassocks, the rousted mass monks, the fifty-four five-fruit trays filled with kiwis, the wired rests the diacritical extrapolations and the Federation of the Jest. 
3. Oh Meg, you could drum! So easy to hum. I don't know what love is. In Piazza Grande lies the bum. 
4. We worked too hard. We were tired. I lived too long, didn't leave myself to future generations, I consumed all I had, I was afraid of leaving, stretched out the living, didn't invest in centuries of infrastructure, took civilization-building as someone else's problem, couldn't make the connection between watching reality tv and ignoring reality.
5. Left to devices, the bridge ices, smoker vices, rice dries, pies fly, sighs cry, eyes die.
6. Clogged to the cuffs, I considered all the stuff I had. I let out the hallway. Filled with dust. I must mop, I can't stop. Sheer smiles are worth the admission, left out on sidewalk with a hat and poor nutrition. Contrite and bleeding, walking up and around all about with yellow, moments of mild meanness mixed with patience, stayed up all night working on your science project, the baking soda volcano, year of the ash, Anno domino, pompeii exploded in seventy-nine, trapped in time 20000 loose living Romans coughing on their rapidly crashing property values, priceless tourism snapshots to be vandalized and voyeured like Snooki's blog. 

What we've been doing

Remember when words mattered, image matter of factly worldwide, mouths open wide at a picture, yesterday's news could get ditched and forgotten, and feelings and fantasies weren't verboten. Mugged as I was, drawn to black arts, loaded onto slaveships, that cruel heart of dartboards, overboard with big lungs so your brain survive 4 minutes without air, the longer I live without you, the more I guess I care. Silence is an investment, see? 75 days with no coronary artery. No, it's serious, business school, not a party.

We get what's given in - that's 1-to-1, win-win, just timelines, giggling frauleins, make sure you make mine, bring a tray of cherry pie; if my boss thanked me with a two-person screening of Casablanca I guess I'd also cry. There's no point of view, just a field of vision, and in the ocean, there's you. She waved her wand, outpoured a tall blonde, short roast, if you smile they sit and empty wallets: it happens on both coasts. Sit for a day, measure magic - it's tough to sell tickets; vinegar, whine, so tragic.

Melt goals, make a saint. Wash facepaint, lead as marshmallow man, nice guy, big fan. 'Thanks for being you' said he on his stool - give so much, tough to love that much - the whole school he built from scratch and such. And we wait, procrastinate. We bronze our heroes far too late. But sorry, gotta run, got a mani-pedi-facial date.

Load up on likes! I got an app that let's me bike in my pyjamas; I can play a game where I samurai bananas, that's why I'm under the stairs - hide me from the red bandanas. We're releasing 4 new genders next month, no wonder we get a trillion dollar valuation, all that love from the S&P, we're the most heavily weighted factor in the ethersphere, all it took was a flat screen separating us, connecting us, proving there's a market niche out there for the unedited burps of sub-humanoid xx312322-ab-489-cupafree. 

Paste this into your search bar

Stop wondering why you're not number one. Start feeling the bottom of the sun. The things you think you deserve, you didn't create the earth, you didn't build your car from scratch, you couldn't start a fire without a match, so many generations came and went so you could own a couch, I didn't know it was an evolutionary trait, you know, the adaptability of the slouch.

Make me more like screen-mediated teen idols, make my mind like guinea pigs tossed into a snakepit of marketing gurus, make my taste portable like a digital tongue, sell my preferences to Google and say it's good right in front of the UN.

Kim Jong Il's son is set to be number one, nepotism yet again, mediocrity throughout the 'Stans, leave your country to a kid who thinks a thermonuclear toy is his birthright. What can the North Koreans do for you? They can put away their blackmail, they can turn tales through their brainwashed wailing, they can dig themselves an economy, they can resign themselves to the worst part of the Old Testament -- you know, all the circumcision and concubine stuff in the less quotable parts of Deuteronomy.

We don't ask what we don't know anymore. Siri doesn't have an answer to the question you don't ask. I could have hired a secretary instead, she'd have worked hard, you know, like everyone else in Saskatchewan. Now she's stuck in Moose Jaw, ll'never know the joy of working for the man, for me, she might have an extra three kids out there, all that space out on the plain.

Have you ever sealed out the air, with a plastic sheet, against a glass wall, on a Monday evening, just to save a few bucks, because YouTube showed you how? That's the kind of universe that's happening right now.

15 lacklustre scintillating pronouncements

1. Cardigans are totally unnecessary.
2. Warm winter wetnaps are useful for three w-words in a row.
3. When we think about the piling on of popular opinion, we may as well soak our heads in a tile bath.
4. Would it not be strange to unlock a locket and see that it was full of shark teeth. That means you were actually in love a shark, or you were a shark dentist (that is, a dentist for sharks). Or your lover got eaten by a shark, and you decided to avenge her. That is the full set of solutions.
5. I was sitting in a restaurant and the waitress came up to me and asked for fifty cents. I said 'are you really a waitress' and she said 'please sir, get into the movie theatre.' I forgot to add, this took place in a movie theatre, and the first part is made up.
6. Nothing exists that does not exist. 
7. That is: Nothing is that isn't
8. Existence exists
9. Farmers farm
10. And yet, words don't always mean what they say?
11. Ok back on track: if you are ever in Toronto I can recommend an excellent sandwich.
12. When I get like this, and I'm NOT in front of a keyboard, there's a lot of lousy dancing.
13. My problem is I can remember almost everything I've ever said. Repetition is the enemy. And yet, the underlying form is not to be touched. Form over content.
14. I could have a niche covering all the people who kill bats for a living, who need cheap Rx pills mailed in five business days or less, who polish saxophones for military marching bands; these are important segments.
15. Ever get frustrated by the keyboard or the mouse? I mean, have we ever blamed QWERTY? What would literature be like if we had the Dvorak keyboard? I know I would probably be a Romanian count.

Jumping jacks

I was wondering: will you let me stay. I have a couple things to say. Can I offer you raisins? They come from northern California. I've never been to California. Can I call you tomorrow? Call me anytime. I'll sign you up for favours if you speak a word my way.

No time.  Sir you are sliding away. I read in his book that he struggled every way, became himself each day. Take pain as part of the package. Don't let the 21st century trick you into numbness. We traded technology for profound dumbness.

I walked with an exchange student, wondering what she saw in my country. From a land of crushing humanity, I'd pay my leg to breathe free. The most honourable people. The devils slip among them. It's a numbers game. We are orders of magnitude  from an agreement. You see the forest, they see a dream. You see empty land, they see a promise. You have a loaf of bread, while they will work for the crumbs. You haven't got a chance against their suffering and their love.

I dare myself to show. I have no need to control this; no desire to know. Every time you sit that same fountain showers cold; I have never checked the plumbing; you were born on a mountain of gold. You have treasures in your toetips. You are young yet to be sold. The day you count backwards from the price you named to frame your game in blameless numbing riskfree bliss is the day your scent went cold.

Competitive advantage

I can only do what I do better than what I shouldn't do because I don't do it as well.

She's only nineteen. Away from me. She's a screamer, a scheme dreamer, talked all kinds of Mr Clean, she had that teenage sheen. I don't mean to be mean. He claps and he claps, made lean by private trainers and the 1% VIP scene.

Television makes me dumb. I don't need a bottle of rum. You're so special - I'm so honoured, I'm so grateful  you're on the show. The only opportunity, you were great, now the hardest decision I've ever made. You won't last long enough to get paid.

I admire your big lungs. I envy your big leaps. There's a certain kind of people who were meant to drive a Jeep. You are young. So bungee jump. I am grey, a withered grump. You need me. I mean, without people like me, who would drink your precious calorie-free Pepsi?

Sulla sua cattiva strada

I was working on the railroad, I was toasted by the fire, like a marshmallow man, sitting on a toothpick. Out and out we shouted, we wanted more motions, less thought. We need another round of whiskey to numb last night's gut rot. Why not sit and swig with us? Why not crash and stay? I know, you could never act that way.

Overboard I fell, overlong we dwelled. I was lifted up in the arms of that strong one, lifted up into his cape, too tired to thank the man, I spent a month harvesting his grapes. When he let me play with his children, when he let me sit at his table, I gained a position, small bit of dignity in the household a go to child when a salesperson dropped in from town. "Please sir sit down and let me pour you green tea." Please sir, I would think to myself, can you tell me what happens in town? I was thirteen and heard of the glass fountains in the main square, covered with lights in spring evenings.

16 things I just gotta tell you

1. There are people out there who have written entire books about lactic acid. And molybdenum. I bet they wish people had more than two eyeballs. Especially now that attention spans are directed centrally by Evan and Biz from Twitter.
2. Baseball players get to work in pajamas. Before you boo me off this blog for a non-innovative thought, remember - this is a sign they find baseball as sleepy as you do. 
3. All this technological innovation, and we still have HR recruiters out there who hire based on 'handshake quality'. Glad I went to university but too bad I failed the course on 'handshake confidence' that is a mark of preparedness for the digital workforce.
4. I eat a lot of refreshing yogurt products and still I don't get silky-smooth skin. What gives, lifestyle ads?
5. Also, I have an appetite for dried figs, but I have never eaten a dried pineapple. Dried citrus doesn't seem to work.
6. When things are going bad, consider the Kurds. They haven't given up. Although, maybe they should.
7. Someone told me I wrote dark humour. I said, "That would strain your eyes," and I apologized. He said "don't take it literally" and I chided him for littering in an alley. He said "no pun intended" and I told him that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
8. Sing after me: "Turn around, bright eyes". Great song. But now stop and consider how creepy EYES TURNING AROUND IN THEIR SOCKETS would actually be. Clearly Bonny Tyler wrote this song for the undead. It's disgusting.
9. When I look at Google Earth and consider the vast expanses of undeveloped land in the New World, I feel that my bid to conquer the Antarctic still has a chance.
10. Weird expression, "drowning in tears." You can't drown in your own tears. Unless you save them for later, and compile a reservoir of tears. But you are more likely to suffocate in your own hair, or fall down a hole while being chased by your dandruff.
11. With amazing advances in prosthesis, an amputee may get an artificial limb and live a mostly normal life. But when my favourite wallet gets stolen, why can't I get an artificial wallet? Hey, that wallet was one of a kind.
12. Public drunkenness is far more tolerable if you are the drunk.
13. Don't be angry if your bus is late. Be angry that the bus has a lousy farebox recovery ratio, and future taxpayers will have to pay a subsidy. Remember that Ayn Rand never took a bus, and built a flying contraption not unlike a helicopter, fashioned out of old bookshelves and a shard from her cold iron heart, all powered by an invisible hand.
14. It's weird that young people think that adding powdered cheese to a bag of baked corn chips is 'the new normal'. Not to mention, if cheese can achieve a form so powdery fine that I could just inhale it, then let's skip the corn chip step, and just charge me monthly per cubic foot of powdered cheese.
15. Calling someone you dislike 'crabby' does almost nothing to improve the odds that they will get tossed alive into a pot of boiling water. You may as well call them 'lobstery'. 'Hey, there's Lobstery Joe!' You could even call them that to their face, and they would be none the wiser. There's an upside to everything.
16. We expect people to cover their mouths when they yawn. We expect people to cover their nose when they sneeze. Can you see where I'm going with this? Why should I be ridiculed for selling a new line of vomit-suppression scarves. Also, why don't people cover their hands when they tickle?

Time to move

Dragged from under a rock, I finally learned to talk. Eaten by the river in his underwear, chalk river radiation or abnormal solar flare. Crow pizza parties for the doughty and the hearty, we're lucky to have roadkill, times are tough, don't be a buzzkill, don't make me get rough. Sign your union card, get your brother Marty too, he's only twenty-one, he can work for thirty or thirty-five years until his back is done.

I was away at the beach when I found out about the quake. The sand shifted, dunes by the dozen and so it was the same. The roads were all wrecked through, my Bug fell in a pothole, flushed by the tidal wave, just another Tuesday in the Maldives, an underwater Atlantis with downgraded credit rating, a small island paradise with a minor plague of race-baiting, work-hating, subsidy generating, midnight gyrating sugar-daddy-babies, ladies looking for young lambs with rich wool scarves, tarted up trollops with coco scented arms, fixing gyroscopes to throw their silken poison darts.

Mellow my memories, chilled in the fridge, time slows down when you stare at a crib, the orbit doesn't budge, not even an inch. (I miss that veal sandwich at Keele just south of Finch). We got a big dumb leader you just have to see. He can't read. It's obscene; you won't believe what we've elected, I think it's 1933.

What do we do in the face of such ooze? We don't huff the glue. We got to unpack the boxes. We got to tear down the drywalls, save what we can use. We got to live, me and you, and to do we got to move.

Lifestyle micro- tips coming soon to a YouTube channel near you

• Fastest way to fill in a scantron bubble
• Fastest way to put mail inside a mailbox
• How to dodge a stroller on a narrow sidewalk
• Best way to ascend a winding staircase
• How to button up a shirt
• How to hang toilet paper
• Best way to put cream in your coffee
• Fastest way to dry your hands
• How to roll out of bed without injuring yourself
• How hard to push a stapler
• How to unwrap a dry cleaning bag
• Fastest way to draw a stick figure
• Best way to unwrap tape
• Where to put your shoes at a house party
• Least messy way to squash a spider
• Fastest way to light candles on a cake
• The fastest way to remove sand from your sandals
• When to eat lunch at the office
• Which urinal to choose (during a power outage)
• Fastest way to gargle
• How close to wait behind the other person at the ATM
• How to find the exact middle page of a book
• Fastest way to remove flyers from a magazine.
• How to quickly tell if someone has removed the Sports section from the newspaper.
• The best angle to hold your pen
• How to quickly find the right house key

Outside they are handing out free deodorant

Wonder weird in a ketchup beard, dripping with the three Ps and the gravy knees, sang sweet songs to a syllabus-screener, solved a million messages with a bathtub cleaner. Odious men don't try my shoes, never asked long and tried freehand, longhand, scrawled marathons ran in underwear; might I wonder where you hide the booze? Long ago I was promised a peach, so I asked you to marry me on the beach; I wandered in and struck a leech. Which lake was it? Probably Meech. I owe my audience an hour each. My sister-in-law says I should teach.

I'm against laws and all for freedom

Turning tongue-in-cheek into an extreme sport on the comments board re "Per-vote subsidy on chopping block in Flaherty’s June 6 budget":

I'm against the vote subsidy. My tax dollars shouldn't go toward funding political parties I don't agree with.

I'm also against health care for people I don't like. My tax dollars shouldn't go toward my neighbour's lung cancer surgery if he is a smoking jerk.

I'm also against free roads for people who drive dangerously and cause potholes. Why is the taxpayer subsidizing roads? Road use should be measured and each individual driver charged a monthly fee. And if someone really needs a new road that bad, they should take an ad out in the newspaper to explain why it's important, and then maybe people will pitch in and help buy some of the tar or gravel.

I'm also against my tax dollar going toward jets I don't want and that may never be needed to protect my town from invading Russians. If the jets are so important, maybe someone should start a war with Russia, then Canadians will see the need, be convinced, and want to fund the jets. Besides, defence spending doesn't protect all Canadians from being invaded. It only protects the parts of the country that might otherwise appeal to invaders--all the rest of us get along fine. Why should my tax dollars subsidize people who live in parts of the country that are just asking to be invaded? If they didn't want to be invaded they should have moved to Moosonee.

I'm against government forcing me to pay taxes. If the government has a good argument for why taxes need to be collected, because it thinks it might be good for the country, they can try to convince me to donate to the tax fund without picking my pocket.

And don't get me started on laws. I'm against laws. If someone has a reason for why I shouldn't be setting a dog on fire, then maybe that person should write me a letter, explaining why it's wrong to set fire to a dog, and maybe offer to sell me his hose, so I can put out the fire, then THAT makes sense.

Foot Hockey

This is foot hockey. And here are the rules.