I don’t remember the children’s sobs of suffering and anguish being this intense last year. Perhaps this year’s surrogate Santa is creepier than last year’s? Perhaps the children are gradually cluing in to the fact that their parents are placing them in dire peril for a few moments’ amusement and a $10 five-by-eight?
It’s a real [...]
The Mall’s idea of festive muzak is to play about a dozen different versions of “Santa Baby” recorded by a host of slutty female voices and slutty male voices and emotionless-yet-still-slutty digital vocoders.
Mix in some Bing and a few tracks from the soundtrack from Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown and you’ve got Xmas Shopping Funtimes.
I am [...]
Bored? Bring your easily-startled bull terrier to the Bayfield Greymarketorium and dump him in the velvet-clothed lap of a sweaty, bearded stranger who smells like sad old man and frightened toddlers! The incessant terrified barking will make the children cry and do wonders for the cellphone guy’s headache.
While you’re there, ask the cellphone guy for [...]
For his mind-destroying and nauseating contributions to “contemporary” Christmas music, Paul McCartney has earned a place on my enemies list.
The X-mas decorations went up sometime between Sunday and today. The Bayfield Communal Commerce Pavilion is now home to several constellations of giant reflective balls. Every skylight cutout in the ceiling houses a festive almost-working replica of the Jupiter system.
My heart remains two sizes too small.
I’m sure The Management will take care of that by [...]
It’s been an eventful couple of weeks.
Christmas came and went with its attendant flurry of chaotic consumption and forced family merry-making. The Red Polar Threat left offerings under the family X-mas stick to persuade me not to come after him and make him pay (in blood and pain) for the damage his toy factories have [...]
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Posted 10 January 2007
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Also tagged: all yesterday's parties, charisse, country, drunkenness, friends, furniture, games, gifts, hamilton, megarelli, music, new year's, road trip, sra, stereo, the sherry, toronto, waterloo
The Salvation Army’s bell-ringing assault on my psyche has succeeded after four hours of incessant jangling by the old man at the Corner of Dingy Lane and Chintz Ave. I dug deep in my wrinkled black trousers, pulled out a toonie and tossed it into the Army’s Transparent Charitable Funds Receptacle. I flinched at the [...]
I’m enlisting in the Canadian Armed Forces.
I know my granddad has always hoped I’d join the armed forces and serve my country just like he did, but I’ve never really felt very passionate about military service. I’ve always considered armed conflict undesirable both as a career and as a foreign policy. I could never justify [...]
While Sherry may have a hard time getting into the X-mas spirit, I’m doing fine (now that it’s December) and I may actually start my gift shopping this week. And I have Ben Folds’s “Bizarre Christmas Incident” to thank. It’s a song so festive and joyful it almost undoes the hours of late-nineties electronic remixes [...]
An old man walks up to the kiosk where I’m eating an apple and doing the crossword. “Is there a Bell store in this mall?”
“Nope.” There’s a Dollarama and a Super Discount City and an As Seen On TV! in this mall, but no Bell store. C’est si dommage.
“Whassat?”
“Nope.”
“Is there a Bell store here?”
“There is [...]