As I waited for my bus at Millgate the other day, I started to wonder if there's a hierarchy of bus drivers. In my world, here's how it works:
The best bus drivers get to drive the LRT (how cool would that be???!!!) - this is reserved for those extra-special people - or maybe a birthday treat.
Or maybe the best ones get to drive the hybrid bus on loan from BC.
The second step down gets to drive the bendy-busses like the #9. Just because they get to be extra-awesome around corners.
Then comes the regular busses - not for over- or under-achievers - just achievers.
If you show up late for work, you have to drive one of the old-school busses - not as much fun, but still OK.
If you have a pretty bad record at the bus garage, then you're demoted to the little busses - not really a bus, but not really a van. These are the second class citizens in the bus world.
In honour of March Madness, I'd like to talk about a little bracket-busting of my own.
When I was little, our family used to take long road-trip vacations in our van, towing a trailer. Since my dad was a teacher, he had two months off in the summer, so we could take our time and drive to California or Florida. These trips were generally 6-8 hour days spent in the van, puncuated with quick stops at tourist attractions and KOAs. And, to get off topic, there's nothing like pulling up to a KOA when you're little and seeing both a swimming pool AND an arcade - HEAVEN!
ANYWAY, we had the full-sized dodge van - none of these puny little mini-vans for our family. In the 80s, long before the advent of car seats, baby helmets and the like, we were allowed to be out of our seats and lying down on the giant carpeted floor space between the middle seats and the back of the van. I think that my dad carpeted this himself - so it was an awesomly comfortable shag from time to time (depending on the van, and on what was cheap at the carpet store I guess).
One of my favourite passtimes whist relegated to the back of the van was to have smash-up derbies with my Hot Wheels cars. I usually had about 16-20 cars with me. The rules are pretty easy - take two cars, one in each hand - point them at eachother, then smash them together. If one car remains on its wheels while the other turns over, that car wins. The cars faced off in a best of 3 match.
So, off I would go, setting up the initial bracket for my derby championship. The cars would face off, and half would be eliminated. This would continue until there was one car left. The champion, you say? Not even close!
That would only waste about half an hour. When you're driving through Montana, you need to kill a lot more time than that. The winning car would be put aside, and the remaining cars would then face off in a renewed bracket. The losing finalist from the previous round would get a bye to future smash-up rounds. It was all very complicated.
Eventually, I'd be down to 2 cars left that hadn't managed to win. These were generally the ugly Motorhome, the Bubble Gunner (both pictured below), or the tractor part of a semi that had lost its trailer. This one lost all the time because it was so light and top-heavy. Also, I didn't like it all that much.
There were actually two motorhomes, but one of them had all the paint chipped off, so I repainted it in red - the tires, windows, body, etc and called it he Devil Mobile. It fared a lot better - it must have been heavier due to all that extra paint - because I'm not really all that good at being light with a paintbrush. Especially with my sausage fingers.
Back to the competition... it would go on and on for hours, until there was one definite winner - the champion of champions. It was usually this awesome Ferrari Key Car. I think it was a combination of the car's wedge shape and the fact that I always wanted it to win. I think that I would press down on the car really hard in an effort to get that wedge-shaped hood under the wheels of the other cars. In the 80s, the Ferrari Testarossa was the ultimate in coolness, especially if you like Magnum PI. My dad still has the car at his house - I should maybe steal it and re-enact the derby championship.
Of course, if my kids tried to do that, I'm sure that I would yell at them to keep the noise down and go do something else.
On two different occasions yesterday, I saw a stranded, lonely shoe left by the side of the road. Then I thought about the many times in the past where I've seen stranded shoes forlornly discarded at the side of the road.
Which got me wondering - how does one go about losing just one shoe? Granted, half of the shoes you see on the road can be accounted for: somebody throws them away because they already lost the first one.
But how does one go about losing just one shoe? Are you in such a hurry that as your walking and your shoe falls off, that you just don't have the time to go back and get it and put it on again? Did it fall out of your gym bag? If so, how do you not notice the weight difference? (p.s., you don't often see light-weight expensive sneakers lying around).
Did the mother shoe have too many shoe puppies and you had to toss one away, tied in a bag and thrown into the river. (author's note: I have never gotten rid of excess puppies this way).
Did you fall asleep while riding shotgun, with your foot out the window, and the driver of the car played a funny trick on you?
If you don't live in Edmonton, or if you do, and have been living the hermit lifestyle for the past month, let me catch you up:
About a month ago, billboards went up all around Edmonton with what looked like the Sprite bottle bubbles in the background and the word WHEN? printed in giant letters.
Then, after a few weeks, all the billboards were replaced with the word SOON. I could hardly contain my enthusiasm.
Then, the big reveal yesterday at 1:02 - the launch of a new radio station in Edmonton called Now! Here are reasons why I already don't like this station:
1) Stupid ad campaign. I hate the build-up / reveal style of ads. Whatever marketing genius thought these up should be tied to a chair and forced to watch endless loops of "Where's the Beef" ads.
2) The name. Seriously? Now! (note the exclamation mark). What kind of name is that? Also, why do they need to shout the name of the station?
3) The morning show. Now, granted, I haven't heard the morning show yet, but the hosts are named Mars and Crash. Is the first lession in DJ school 101 about how you have to pick a zany name? "Here's our morning hosts, Jiffy Pop and Quicky Lube". Stupid.
4) The song selection - "guitar-driven rock songs from artists that write their own songs" - sounds promising. First artist listed? Nickleback. Enough said. Actually, not enough said - this looks like the worst parts of The Bear, Capital FM and K-Rock all mixed together.
5) The frequency. 102.3. That's WAAAY too close to Sonic 102.9. Considering that Sonic's tower is a piddly little thing in Nisku (right by that awesome Flaman treadmill guy) - the Now! broadcast takes over that entire 102-ish frequency range. Which makes it near impossible to find Sonic on my clock radio, which uses an old-school analog dial for tuning.
Don't get me started on how much point #5 upsets me. For years, I've woken up to the hilarious ramblings of Garner Andrews on Sonic. Or, 3 out of 5 days a week, a song by Metric. What an awesome way to start the day! Now that Now! has taken over my clock radio's ability to find Sonic, I had to tune it to the Bear. I do NOT want to wake up to AC/DC. Also, Paul Brown and the other Paul Brown (Yukon Jack) (oh yeah, and the ditzy woman - seriously, why hire a hot chick for radio?) are complete morons, and make me want to throw my radio and smash it when I hear them. Not a good way to start the day in a good mood.
In previous years, I was happy with Canada's performance at the Olympics, especially compared to powerhouse countries like Russia and the US.
But this year, I'm just not happy with personal bests and our perennial 4th place finish. I think it's because of the whole "Own the Podium" initiative that we've been hearing about for 4 years.
I want Canada to win a gold in every sport, even if they don't have athletes competing in it.
I blame the Canadian Olympic committee for ruining the Olympics for me. I used to be happy to see Canada finish just outside the medals - but they built it up so much that we'd win everything that anything else is just a disappointment.
I love the Olympics - especially the winter Olympics (or, Olympic Winter Games) because Canada actually has a chance to win something. (more on that later).
Anyway, here's my take on the opening ceremonies in Vancouver - my own colour commentary, if you will.
First off - the light show was amazing - especially the orcas swimming along and spouting water - they almost looked real.
Boo-urns to Nelly Furtado and Brian Adams for lip-synching. Seriously? But then again, they showed Miss Furtado singing after the medal ceremony one night and it sounded TERRIBLE. So maybe lip-synching wasn't that bad of a thing after all. But really - she's not a chubby person, but her dress also looked TERRIBLE on her. Ditto on her dance moves. Also, what's the deal with all these Olympic songs having to be really sucky easy rock songs. I'm sure the Hip could have done something better. Heck, even the Bare Naked Ladies could have come up with something better than the drum-banging anthem.
Moving on.
Sarah M was divine. k d lang (notice the case) was amazing. A couple of comments on kd: 1) From Emily: "Why does that man keep pulling the microphone wire?" Kathryn's answer: "Well, first off, that's a girl". 2) Song choice? Not sure what the song had to do with the Olympics (or Canada for that matter). Still, (s)he did an awesome job.
Then I got to thinking - what do people from other countries learn about Canada from these ceremonies?
A) The prairies are boring, and Peter Pan lives there. Then, when the prairies aren't boring, there are lightning storms and blizzards. Also, in this section, could they have gotten a more stupid-looking close-up than they did of Patrick Chan's face?
B) If you live on the east coast, you wear leather with kilts, have your hair in a mohawk, play the fiddle and make deals with the devil.
C) VANOC doesn't care about French People. (don't get me started on this)
D) Our Governor General likes to sleep
Also, what was with that opera singer's hair? She looked like a muppet. Also, her singing was great for the first 10 seconds - then it went on for too long - and all at the same level of intensity. Also also, the token Quebecois singer (and p.s., who calls themsevles by only one name?) was something I could have done without.
I did enjoy the return of Brian Williams and his outragedness. I think he started on a tirade about the Russian drug cheats. I really hope that there's a controversy in these Olympics that he can go on rants about.
I'm not going to talk about the failed hydraulics (though, I wonder if Bombardier had anything to do with them) - but I will comment that it was LAME LAME LAME that #99 had to get in a truck and drive for 20 minutes to light another cauldron. Overall, the cauldron lighting was completely anti-climactic. And why wasn't there any security keeping the rowdies away from the truck?
Speaking of the flame's truck ride - my favourite part of the ceremonies was watching dude crouched down behind Gretzky poking the torch up and lighting another one for him, and then hearing Brian Williams go on and on about how special that torch must be since it hasn't gone out yet. I'm sure Lloyd (pronounced L-Loyd) was kicking him under the desk.
And on to the games themselves. Really, the only thing I want to say is that I wonder how long it will be until they drive a proper zamboni in to the Richmond Oval to replace the crappy environmentally friendly one. It must be enviro-friendly because it never works, so it never spits out greenhouse gasses.
Now, on to CTV. I am not really enjoying CTVs coverage. Especially the daytime coverage. It's all too ETalk Daily-ish for me. I also abhor their website - it's too cluttered, too slow, and too terrible to use. But what I really miss from the CBC is the Olympic anthem - so I've included it here. Feel free to click on it at every commercial break so you can pretend you're watching CBC.
Over the Christmas break, we had a party at our house for all the former Tropical Breeze dancers and their significant others. At one point, the conversation got on to the movie Food Inc., and how gross it is where our food comes from, and then a fun discussion (read argument) about vegetarians vs. how good meat tastes.
But I digress...
The subject came up about the old McDonald's styrofoam clamshell containers, which precipitated a moment of me feeling old, and here's why:
One of the guys that was there asked "McDonald's used to use styrofoam?"
Boo-urns to the younger generation for not knowing this!
And as a special P.S. to this post - do you remember the first time you graduated from Happy Meals to ordering and eating your first Big Mac? What an awesome coming-of-age ritual that is!
