O Anthropos

James Bond is a crier.  The former apex of man-cool has capitulated.

Even the Vatican is on board, but this comes as little surprise.

Seventies Bond was well-established.  In 1971 I was a few thousand beers away existence but I would like to think the world was sane then. Still, thousands of empties, stubby brown bottles later, recycled a thousand times over by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, God knows I've probably drank from the same glass reconstituted glass as my father.

I suppose if my family remains in the general area of repeated reproduction, my great-grandchildren, assuming they've the discerning palette of their provaus augusti (moi), will drink beer from the same recycled receptacles.

What a legacy. A queer assumption of beer consumption.

In the early seventies, my father had probably just learned to drive and was selling mickeys of rye for a small profit to his high-school friends between math and shop class.  Nepean entrepreneur.  He and my mother were high-school sweethearts.  Captain of the football team and the head cheerleader, says the math book with inscribed hearts, that gathers dust in my basement.

That same year, Charlton Heston starred in "The Omega Man".  Clearly my father never saw it.

It was a remake of the 1964 film "The Last Man on Earth" starring Vincent Price.  Forty years later, Will Smith would star in a remake called "I Am Legend".

Admittedly there is some crying in that version.  Tough guy crying, but eye-leaky nonetheless.

The word 'Omega' incidentally, in addition to being the last and 24th letter of the Greek alphabet, literally means the "Great O".  Heston, before he became rifle-weilding pariah of the apologist social-justice-warrior movement was the "Big C."   Baritoned, chiseled with a mouthful of teeth.

Heston was Ben-Hur and Moses, for Christ's sake.  He stood up to an army of speaking apes once.  Shirtless, bearded and wearing a loincloth, he represented what is now considered to be an archaic example of manliness.

If Hemingway were alive today, he would be internet-shamed for his love of hunting.  Journalists would speculate why his mother dressed him in girls clothing.  Experts would hail-mary transgender theories.   The only thing Hemingway's burger recipe is missing is a tiger claw and rusty nails.

Heston is a relic today.  His legacy been cherry-picked by a lazy liberal media. Often overlooked, Heston was a civil rights advocate long before it was fashionable, and LONG after it went out of fashion.  He was the bell-bottomed, frilly-shirt, perm-sporting voice of the US Constitution.

His death in 2008 was undoubtedly a relief for today's thought-police, who mistook his NRA affiliation for right-wing fanaticism.   He was, at least in his prime, an articulate, suave, critical thinker.

Here is Charlton with some of his contemporaries discussing civil rights in America.

In the film "Omega Man", Heston does not soften. He loses hope, he becomes frustrated. Between showering the black-cloaked-undead with bullets,  he finds time to cook and have chess games with mannequins.

He's just a doctor dammit, just looking for a cure.

After a long, drawn out story of loneliness and survival, peppered with more sub-machine gun fire, we discover that Heston really isn't the Omega Man after all.  The movie ends when a truck pulls up filled with uninfected, cherub faced survivors.  A handsome young fella emerges.  Heston gives him a large vile of blood containing the cure.  He dies, Heston's character, bloody, in a christ-like slump hanging off a fountain.

Judeo-xtian chop.

Zero tears.

The last-man-on-earth narrative is a misnomer.  We simply can't imagine a world where we're totally isolated and alone. In practically every film ever made on the the subject the protagonist is never and can never be the last survivor.  Extinction is not an option.  The human condition, as absurd as it is, must be shared with other humans.

All last-man films require the hero to pirouette through the motions of solitude.  Collecting supplies.  Making fire. Talking to himself.  Blah blah. It's the original two-way mirror. Who didn't weep when Tom Hanks had to abandon his bloodied soccer ball confidante?  We wait though, as hopeful and desperate to find another living soul with which to talk to.

I'm going on a hike.


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The Swear Jar

..is a bottomless pit.

Pony Express

The first horseman of the apocalypse usually rides into town on a white steed.

The embodiment of righteousness. Deliverer of the good word...and bad news.

A biblical postal worker, if I may overstretch an analogy, as usual.

Unfortunately, there are three more fellas behind this pony-apocalypse-express, each with their own brand of end-of-days parting gifts.

Mail in Canada was once delivered by ponies. If you happened to live north of the treeline, birthday cards came by dogsled. Today, with every modern technology at its disposal, the Canadian national letter carrier cannot perform its singular task.

The end is nigh.

It would prefer you do it yourself.   At least some of the way.  Naturally, charging you a little more for the privilege and leaning evermore on their already over-worked employees.

Exploitative price increases, spectacular cost savings (half a billion) through layoffs and axing door-to-door, while posting tidy profits, this crown corporation has fooled us all.

The Canadian stamp does not even have the courtesy of letting you know its worth.  The cost has been removed from its design for some time now.  A seemingly innocuous omission of a number has allowed its price to be discreetly and ridiculously inflated.

A single Canadian stamp now costs one dollar.  Canada Post ended its 2014 year having sold an extra 194 million of them.  Somehow they need my help?

For one dollar your piece of mail will not reach its destination.  It will come close though. For one dollar, your nana will get her birthday card from metal box a short walk from her home.  She may walk it back in the rain. Maybe on ice.  Unless she lives in Vancouver.  Then, definitely rain.  Out west, they're having a problem with theft, so she may not get anything at all.  Poor little old lady.

Best to just text her.

Community mailboxes are springing up everywhere across the country. They are installed in a few short hours, in the light of day, with almost no resistance.   Everyone is at work.  Generating tax dollars.

Fret not, lovers of longhand paper travel, there is a small faction of folk who are trying to "save" Canada Post.  Sigh.

Until last week, the proposed space for my postal grab-bag was a flower garden, planted by my neighbourly non-conformists who fought hard to save door-to-door.  A nice try.  Now the personal information of my entire block is stored in one location, available to anyone with a screwdriver and a crowbar.  When the temperature dips and the sun begins to set at 5pm, there will invariably be a crush of headlights surrounding this area, engines idling daily.

Very environmental.

Thankfully, some Canadians aren't the passive lay-down-and-take-it types.  One Charlottetownian has gone so far as to park a trailer on his future site for these metallic monstrosities.  His front lawn spared.  For now.

Of course, everything assumes that Canada Post delivers items of a personal nature.  Since May, I have been collecting in my mailbox anything not addressed to me.  On the first anniversary of this postal bilge collection experiment, I plan to return-to-sender every piece, one by one, using the very company that delivered it to me.

If Canada Post wants to waste my time at my expense, I can happily double their efforts by not affixing postage, returning junk mail.  Repeatedly.

I had thought about a deluge of December Dear Santa letters, but Canada Post uses volunteers for this "charitable" effort.  Even Santa's replies will delivered to the community mailbox.  More lies parents will need to tell to keep the dream alive.

This Hallowe'en I might use my communal mailbox for an effective way to disperse goodies.  Think of the time saved.  Think of the children.

I certainly don't mind walking the two-hundred feet for a pizza flyer. Frankly, the more opportunity for caloric burn, the better.   Though if I'm to do some of their work, I expect to share in their profits.

Clip-clop.

A Lovely Pile of Kokosnöts.

Something is rotten in the state of Sweden.  It's not the meatballs.

Well, kinda.

In 2011, IKEA made 1.2 billion Euros (1.8b Canadian) selling food.

Yes, the leviathan home-outfitter offers some artery-clogging fare at some cut-throat prices.  I'm a fan of cheap eats.  A one-dollar breakfast and seventy-five cent hotdog are really the flagship fly-tape that gets you in and keeps you shopping.  

If a white van (with no windows) pulls up, offers you candy, do you go for a ride?  Of course!  To the IKEA Jeeves! How else will you get your Trysil into your dorm?

Ottawa's IKEA is the largest in Canada. It is almost 400,000 square feet and if you're lucky, you can make it from entrance to exit in 15 minutes.   That's 1.3 kms walking at an average pace, not stopping to correct your mult-directional shopping cart, getting caught behind the walking dead, or being fooled by the directional signage deviously inspired by M.C. Escher .  

You haven't purchased anything, mind.  Fifteen minutes of your life just to get through the bloody store.  Charge your phone.

Five Canadian-sized football fields full of crap that will be in a landfill in no less that 5 years.

Swedish Narnia.  Behemoth bargains.

You're going to need sustenance.  You'll want it cheap.

According to the Toronto Star, IKEA's thrifty breakfast, while filling, isn't too healthy.  My store opens at ten on weekdays.  Not nine, like most businesses.  Ten.   By this time, there is a lineup of construction workers, new-moms, do-it-yourselfers on their day off, and the elderly waiting patiently outside.

Most of these people are usually up by 6am. Offering breakfast at ten even for a dollar isn't a deal.  It's an obvious ploy with a dash of evil.  It's no secret.  We are painfully aware.

The early-birds are famished and by 10am they don't care about sodium, carbs and most definitely do not read the Toronto Star.  When IKEA's doors finally open the race towards powdered-eggs, sausage and hash-browns moves faster than a mob across a Hungarian border patrol.  Oh wait.. I've confused my puns.

Hungary. Hungry.

Moving on.

Greener foods are available, but who's kidding who?   A seventy-five cent pig-missle after a walking through a maze of umlauted furniture is like receiving an Olympic gold medal.   Made from pork.  Furthermore, stress-eating is a perfectly acceptable way of avoiding 'relationship' conversation on the minivan ride home. A buck-fifty avoids putting your foot in it.  Save the domestic for the assembly of your pressed-wood, melamine bookshelf.

I can pretty much endure most all IKEA-isms, knowing what I'm getting into when I pull into the parking lot and sigh heavily.

Except for one thing.

Huh?

It's a piece of something, alright.  The last halm.  Er, straw. 

Care-free capitalism has finally planted its fat bottom down on the consumers sofa for the long haul. Be prepared to really do-it-yourself.  That fat bastard is guilting you into doing their job.  IKEA, my sweet raringar, is asking you to help around the house a little (in the spirit of community) to "keeping prices low".  So get off your häck and help out a little, ok?  

Even the filthiest mall in the most depressive forgotten town in North America has people at the food court to clear the debris, spray some lung-burning cleaning agent on a table and labour back behind that filthy mystery door.    So why not here?

Apparently, our friendly yellow clad employees are so busy they can't spare a moment.  Try and find one when you need one and risk making a wrong turn in the labyrinth.  I dare you. 

In Ottawa, the average salary for an IKEA employee is $12.16/hour.  Before income tax,  full-time employees earn just under a hundred bucks a day.

They seem pretty goddamned happy. 

You're telling me that of the approximately 330 stores worldwide, hiring one extra person a day to clean up plates from old ladies is bank-breaking?   I've done the math.  It's a little over 12 million dollars for 330 employees 365 days a year.  A drop in the knod.

IKEA's revenues for 2014 were 29.29 billion Euros.  That's 44 billion Canadian dollars.   They were up a slight 3.33 billion Euros in profits.   

A mere five billion loonies. 

Tidy.

The gross domestic product of Guyana.

Still, I suppose it's cheaper to produce condescending reminders for each table.

After you've cleaned up and escaped the cat's-cradle, make your way to the self-checkout.

It's a piece of cake.

Whistle-whistleblower

I'm not entirely certain how many muscles it takes to whistle, but it's definitely too many.

The mouth-meat involved in human birdsong is called the 'buccinator' (snort) and the orbicular oris. These muscle groups, guided by some alien and ignorant impulse from the brain, allow the mouth to form the most ridiculous of all human facial positioning, in preparation for the most foolish utterance ever conceived.

The whistle.

It is a facial-expression akin to having a straw removed quickly from your gob or what it looks like blowing into someone's ear (which today might get you punched out by your most intimate relationship).  You know the face.

The sound that comes from this sphinctered oral orifice is so utterly repulsive, it's a wonder the human race has survived at all.  The only other human hole capable of making such awful sounds, is, well...for another blog.

I'm not talking about a getting-your-attention, help-I'm-lost-in-the-forest, fingers-in-your-mouth whistle.

I mean the other one.

It's the self-indulgent unnecessary weird neighbour, whose shirt is off in the front-yard as soon as the snow melts.   Yes, that self-obsessed jackass that no-one wants at the thanksgiving table.

There is a book entitled  "A Brief History of Whistling" by John Lucas.  One can only surmise that this 196-paged hardcover was titled as such because Mr. Lucas must have needed a divorce lawyer halfway through its writing.   Brief history indeed.  Hopefully there are thousands of copies left.

There's something about whistling and old men.  A little misandry here fellas, but it's definitely a male issue. You never hear an old lady bent over in her garden whistling for no goddamned reason.  Men are just ignorant, boastful, imbeciles.   They whistle.

The range of sound that comes out of their sometimes hairy puckered pie-holes is impressive. Some can carry a high pitched tune, while others are just whistling idiotic, making noise, creating CO2.

I reckon there can be but two reasons for this persisting phenomenon:

JOY
Whistling is generally associated with good feelings.  Whistle while you work, take your mind off the mundane etc.  Positive, uplifting Disney tripe.  We've been fed that if someone is in a good mood, whistling can express it no better.  Can a person not share with the world (within earshot) his good news, his good mood?  He can't contain himself!  Guess what old man?  Please don't. The world is an ugly place, ugly with you in it and far uglier with your noises.  Some of us are having a bad day.  A hangover is a real thing.  Don't rub it in.  What could you possibly be happy about anyway?  The thought of your wet pursed lips would be better around a cigar or a bottle of vodka.

Maybe whistling makes you appear non-threatening to women-folk (or other men-folk for that matter) in your immediate vicinity.

Excellent.

We will see this as a sign of weakness and attack you with abandon.

ILLNESS
Whistling of course could be a tick. Involuntary even. Even Tourette's Syndrome uses words.
If you've nothing to share and you're whistling, well perhaps there is something wrong with you. Crazy folk talk to themselves at least. English jibber-jabber is my favourite means of information transportation. We have some lovely cuss-words.  We invented the swear-jar. Honestly though, you may have a mental illness and we're too polite to tell you. There are professionals that can cure you of your melodic uncontrollable mouth-flute outbursts.

If you're not lobotomized soon, you may find yourself one day with a fatter lip to mouth-chirp with.




HOPE

Fret not my whistle-whistleblowers.  You're not alone.  Say hello to misophonia.

Just not too close or loudly, mind you.

Misophonia is diagnosed as a rage induced reaction from certain sounds.   Sounds of people eating, clocks ticking, water dripping from a faucet, vacuums, all send people into a state of unbridled violent anger.

Whistling is also in this category.

The deafening sound of unnecessary vanity and self-importance should make everyone punchy, n'est pas? 

Thankfully, whistling isn't catching on these days.  Children learn how to do it out of developmental pride and soon toss it away like all the other plastic crap given to them during their indulgent little upbringings.   Still, a whistle will pop its foolish head now and again, always at the wrong time and place, usually by old men (who are probably perverts anyway) and deserve to be internet-shamed here on a blog that none reads.



THE I-WHISTLE 2000

I'm standing at the checkout line at Walmart.  Don't judge me. They price-match, so if you hate capitalism, then go back to Gorbachev's Russia, pinko.

Nasdrovia.

It's just after the rush hour, six-thirty.  I've chosen a regular line, forsaking the twenty-person-deep express.  There's no way they'll beat me out of here. I'm living on the edge.  I am the smartest man alive.

Trapped between a handsome portly couple ahead with enough junk food to give a small town diabetes and a woman having a one-sided conversation behind, I glance left at the quick moving express, just enough to peripherally see her act out her every reply.  She's wearing earbuds. She's in her mid-twenties. Talking loudly into my neck and gesticulating like she's all alone in her one-bedroom condo (where she probably cries herself to sleep in every night after a bottle of grigio), I'm unwillingly invited into her conversation.

Boy, she's starving.   Yes, Mike IS an idiot.  I couldn't agree MORE, this weekend was AMAZING, she drank so much and I do hope that guy calls her.  And so on.

I am calm.

A ninja.

Blinking ferociously, on the inside I am screaming. "Clean up at cash two!  Bring a mop.  There are teeth and phone bits everywhere".   On the outside, pure serenity.   I was taught to compose myself as if it were 1950's England.  Emotionless, conservative politesse, unless addressed directly.  Pleasantries, then move along.

Admittedly, my achillian weakness is public displays of any kind.  Cellphones conversations, whistling (obviously), domestic disputes in the parking lot, open-mouthed kissing, talking loudly if there are more than two people in a room.

Steve Jobs wasn't a genius.  He created a monster.  He's quoted as saying he would never let his kids play with his own technology.  That's like Pablo Escobar not letting his kids snort coke.  Excellent father, but the Oppenheimer of his trade.

Innate trust in the internet and its illusion of privacy has been our undoing.  Paying for a subscription online, having a password,  does not guarantee some teenager in his basement isn't going to hack into a website and divulge that you are a closet Coronation Street fan.   (Frankly, that's nothing to be ashamed of.)   Sent a nude pic by text once?  It's going to kick around forever.  At least it will remind you of your slutty youth and your once wrinkle-free bits.

The smartphone. Misnomer of the twenty-first century. There was a time when if a phone rang, it was in your home.  When it did, a signal triggered a ringer (with moving parts) signifying that someone, anyone was trying to reach you.  In the privacy of your domicile, you were expected to answer and have a confidential chat.

If a phone rang in your office you picked it up. It still remains a delegated place to have a phone conversation.

Today, everyone is painfully aware of when you receive a private message on your impressive portable telephonic device.  Congratulations.  Incessant pings let everyone know around you that someone wants to speak with you. They are sending you private texts. You are giving us privy to their top-secret delivery.    Repeatedly.  You won't notice our irritation because you can't take your eyes of the screen.

Ping.  You respond.  Ping. You respond again (sometimes with pretend typewriter clicking noises).

Ping.   You laugh out loud.  Then type LOL.

Ping.

Ping.

Better still, you can simply take a call and have a full-voiced conversation in the privacy of a packed elevator or subway.

Someone loves you!

At least ten people now hate you.

Ping.

I will conclude my rant with the 'selfie'.   It's the perfect word.  The cute diminutive of "self-portrait", it is the dumbing down of what was at one time a true art form, taken with an actual camera.  Sometimes if you were really talented, with a paintbrush.   If you have over 90 self-portraits you'd better be Rembrandt., otherwise you're just some guy with a smartphone who thinks you are special, or you're completely mental, or variations on this theme.

The very act of taking a selfie today is having everyone watch you, watch yourself taking a picture of yourself, sometimes in real time.

You can occasionally bring the unwilling public into your personal life -  without their consent.

It can even be done in the checkout-line at Walmart.

Ping.

Almost everything is good for you.

In the three months of tolerable Ottawa weather one can put their beer down on a patio table, top it with paper coaster, and in between waxing hockey and politics, walk exactly 5 legal metres away to enjoy the secondhand smoke of a friend's freshly lit cigarette.

Envy us.

The smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of the long retired, Canadian two-dollar bill. Queen Elizabeth II was middle-aged on them. They were copper brown.  They smelled of caramel.  It was replaced with a foolish coin. There's a loon on it. The toonie.   Original.

It's a rarity, the appreciation of cigarette smoke.  Once prescribed to pregnant women by doctors it is now on the endangered list of cool.  It is the portly red-headed child of social functions.  It is the inappropriate drunk uncle at a bbq.

Barely tolerated. 

The statistics have spoken. The science is clear.  Apparently, tobacco is not a replacement for oxygen.

My mother smoked while she was pregnant with me. I have a picture of her somewhere in thick blue eye-shadow, bell-bottomed. A 20-year-old (married at 19) with a do-rag (for you oldsters) on her head and an ash about an inch long.  Her young smile and the white smoke curling upwards between her fingers would have looked cooler without her distended tape-worm midriff. 

Cigarette smoke takes me back to the 80's.  Clorets gum, cheap leather purses and the backseat of a blue Ford LTD my mother bought.  The delicious earthy smell of the first puff of a cigarette as it whirled around the car with the windows open.  Heaven.

It had a cassette player.

John Denver.

Both long dead. 

It had a cigarette lighter.

Another dinosaur.

One day, believing it impossible for something to be hot without glowing red, I crossed the rubicon of childhood disbelief into a lesson of pure physics. The lighter popped out.  Faded quickly back to grey.  A circular kiss of hot metal tattooed my little pink thumb.  I can still smell it, the coil of ashy skin making concentric circles against my fingerprint.

I later dared my little brother to test this glow-red-heat theory on the stove-element of our drab two-bedroom highrise. His full hand. My mother actually put margarine on it afterwards.

Margarine.  Then frozen peas.  He never ratted me out, the foolish boy, but I still wonder what two halflings were doing unattended around a hot stove.    Of course, my little brother was recently released from the bosom of the federal penitentiary system at the tender age of 36.   He smokes too. 

The Ford LTD.   It was our first family car since my father left.  Cool-to-the-touch metal seatbelts (that were occasionally employed in 1982), shiny, with the Chevy imprint on the release button.   It meant I didn't have to make the post dinner walk to the corner store with a permission note with that crumpled, brown bill.  She bought her own smokes now.  I remember plastic milk bags in my Cougar boots in the winter.  Ottawa winters. The sun sets before 5.  Decisions on what to do with the remaining change were my biggest life decisions.  Dr. Pepper.  Dill pickle chips.  I would sometimes open the tight red package and inhale deeply to smell the tightly rolled sweetness of twenty-odd tobacco soldiers.




The mob has spoken on cigarettes in the west.  They're not having it.   Shame.

Get on a plane anywhere, and I mean anywhere, and you'll discover that cigarettes endure as a social mainstay.  Latin America, Africa, China.   Every man, woman and child over the age of 12 is smoking cigarettes.  Indoors, outdoors, everywhere.  I've been.  It makes me smile.   Along with coal burning plants, they simply do not care what you think about cigarettes.   We are nations of frou-frou softies.

In my town, I still admire the people who like to smoke.  In light of all the literature, the taboo, the furrowed brows, bylaws, fines, the ones who smoke are truly free.

Just don't do it while pregnant. My mother said it didn't stunt my growth, but I can't drink a pint without racing to the loo every ten.   Bladder the size of a quarter.

In the movies there's a reason why on your deathbed you ask for a cigarette.

Never the bible or whiskey.  No divulgence of sin, or to right a lifetime of misdemeanours, or worse. Tobacco, everytime.   Your friend must light it for you.  It's only civilized after all.

Apocalypse?   It's dart-time.  You take your last draw on that ciggie with an unrivalled fervour and satisfaction.

Maybe the bad guys have taken you out of the plot.  Your number is up. With happy closed eyes, bleeding out onto the hot sand, (or inner-city parking lot) your last smoke is exhaled with the satisfaction akin to the relief of a thanksgiving fart.

It is the last middle-finger of freedom.

They use two-fingers in Britain. There's another name for cigarette there.

Gettin' Hitched.

On long drives I could listen to christian radio for hours. Rhetoric and bombast. Brimstone and hellfire with commercial breaks.  My kind of crazy.  Grown men with deep, smooth voices with soothing music, quoting scripture.

Sunday mornings, after the Coronation Street omnibus, I'll spend some time flipping through faith-based television.  Incredible production values, massive venues, slick hosts, white teeth. The snake-handlers still occupy the local stations in poorer areas (I loves me a good forehead slap to cure spinal injury), but the Joel Osteens (net worth 40 million) and the Joyce Meyers (8 million) cater to the moderate christians with no real affiliation or pointy-hatted leader.   Lots of sweaters, nods, laughter, as the non-demoninational self-appointed preacher sympathizes with the plights of the everyman.  Thirty-five dollars for a ticket to get you sooth-sayed.

These days dating sites like Christian Mingle tout that you can  "Find God's match for you".  No longer will you need to go to church to meet your mate.  For about twenty dollars a month you sign up for god-sanctioned booty-calls from nice christian girls.

The BBC reported last week that the Pope condones the smacking of children by parents -  if dignity is maintained.  Regarding the never-ending sex abuse scandal, the robed leader of the self-eunuched brotherhood decrees in the same breath that it was "hard to believe" that men of the church would commit such atrocities to children.  An old virgin draws lines on abuse?  Cute.   The "moderate" pontiff throwing a few hail-marys to see if they'll stick with the cool-kids.

The moderates are enjoying a break from criticism right now.  Extremism, particularly of the islamic persuasion has left most of middle-earth exempt from deconstruction.

I wish I had one one-hundredth of the capacity of Christopher Hitchens.  I joined the party far too late.   I am still catching up, stamping my slushy boots clean of the effects of a childhood of catholic dogma.

YouTube is replete with religious debates featuring inept, ill-equipped believers pitted against Mr. Hitchens.  It is usually ends in a bloodbath, with our atheist-anti-hero holding the scalpel.  He was never left speechless.  No um, uhs, or non-lexical filler to formulate a counter-attack.  Calm, exacting precision in every point he made.

The crown king of atheism passed away in December of 2011.   His epitaphal book "Mortality", maintained his every position to the very end. His accounts of dealing with esophageal cancer are harrowing.  I have poured over all of his published works, sift through his many contributions to Vanity Fair, and through youtube I stream his debates in my home-office, pretending to be productive.

To this day he remains unrivalled by anyone who could challenge his logic with the same temperate manner and massive vocabulary.  By the time Hitchens had finished his soliloquy of reason before a hall of christians (usually peppered with atheist sympathizers and hitch-sycophants), if not turned godless, all would be charmed.  His penchant for alcohol may have aided him pre-debate, but I imagine his addiction to cigarettes may have driven him to finish an opponent all the sooner so to be out the door for another puff.

One would be hard-pressed to say he represented the left, whose atypical modus operandi is to challenge the right-winged 'nutter' of the god-fearing persuasion. Liberals on the whole would scoff at some of his ideas.  It's easy to love Hitchens if you come from academia, live in a gentrified neighbourhood, drive a Prius and believe you're well-read, but you'd be hard-pressed to embrace everything he had to say.

Hitchens (net worth 2 million), could be of some use right now.  He was not a part of any team.  He was not a scientist, though he was often grouped together with reasonists like Dawkins and DeGrasse Tyson.  Today, there are a few who are able to speak or freely without incurring a fatwa, or worse to be made a pariah on state-media for thought-crimes.  Not even his rat-pack of the  atheist roundtable can really make the stark unapologetic claims he could.  "Religion", he believed "poisons everything". Hitchens spoke out on his own, pandering to nothing.  Roguish might have been an apt description for him, if he had not already devised every escape route from every burning house he entered.

As far back as 2005, Christopher Hitchens predicted many of the headlines of the past six months.  Sadly, he is not here for an i-told-you-so, nor to debate, to dissect opinions from the left and right.

The recent demise of Ottawa's Sun News Network this week has left many a western apologist/bleeder cheering.  Their uber-conservative type of journalism was tiresome but entertaining.  I half expected explosions, dancing girls or slide-whistle during an Ezra Levant-rant.  Levant attacked the people liberal Canadians hold dear. Thanks to the SNN, I learned things about David Suzuki I didn't want to know. I discovered there are actual jihadists living in my country.  The Sun had the gumption to invite talented liberal critics onto their show too, like the ever-irritating Warren Kinsella. Kinsella delivered a level-headed eulogy to the death of the right-winged charlatans today that was surprising and refreshing.   Kinsella stated that when journalism disappears "democracy will diminish".  Amen.  He does not shit where he eats.   Leftist mouthpieces need conservative media and vice-versa.

If you piss in your pants, it's only warm but for a moment.

All points of view are to be heard, debated, no matter how crazy. Above all, we're in need of someone who can debate them all.   And they must enjoy cocktails.  

But there hasn't been one since 2011.

If you'll excuse me, I'm in the middle of a another Hitch Youtube marathon.

I'm pretty sure I know how it ends.