Les Bonnes Choses

Today's comment comes as I wait for the transfer of my mp3 collection from one honkin' external hard disk to a much trimmer model (albeit with less capacity). After that's done, I'll be copying Season 1 of the HBO series Rome to my hard disk, in case I feel like watching it while I'm on the plane. Because I'm leaving for Italy, you see, and Rome is in Italy, and I gotta keep up on my current events. Who's the current caesar, anyways?

This evening, while Rebecca was off at Amabile rehearsal, I was trying to assuage a very unhappy Jude, who is presently fighting a cold that has settled in his chest, leaving him with a cough and runny nose. So he didn't nap well today, and it showed. Some time after 9 he started to fade, so I took him downstairs to the basement where it is much cooler, and I could watch some of the TV programming for which we pay an obscene amount per month (the topic of a future rant). I saw another ad in the interminable series of Charmin ads featuring animated bears wiping their asses in the forest. Am I the only one that has actually stopped to consider the content of these damn commercials? Does nobody else find this even the littlest bit disgusting? Ass-wiping isn't cute, even if it's animated. And you can bet your ass that wiping a bear's ass is even less cute, if I can assume for a minute that the mess that a bear would make is at least an order of magnitude more disgusting than that made by, say a house cat like Ron, who was plenty disgusting in his own right (two words: muffin bum). In my quest to find a suitable picture for this entry, I was pleased to find that I'm not alone in my revulsion. Google charmin bear and you will find multiple blog entries on the topic.

This one is a quickie: I am eating lunch, as I am wont to do, and realized I hadn't yet opened my little Dole tetra pak. For some reason, the people at Tetra Pak feel the need to fasten the cello-wrapped straw to the outside of the box using Liquid Nails^®, or some other brand of construction adhesive. Although I appreciate their concern that I might lose my straw, I invariably end up bending the straw all to hell in the process of detaching it from the box. So I end up with a straw with a hole in it making it somewhat less effective, and much noisier as it now sucks up a bunch of air.

Sandra Pupatello (pronounced poop-a-tell'-o), Ontario's trade minister who has recently gotten into a bit of controversy over the timing of her visit to China, has a most unfortunate name. Naturally, we use it as an adjective to describe Jude's diapers...



...as in "I think Jude smells a little pupatello. Better change him."

I am not a mature parent. But I'm good at sticking with the theme of politics.

At the end of the day, as I was packing up to go pick up Pokey, Rebecca told me that there was a Canada Revenue Agency envelope waiting for me. Those with any sort of memory will recall that I've been in a bit of a tussle with CRA over an egregious error that resulted in them incorrectly calculating my income and arriving at an outstanding tax bill of nearly $3000. As we are now approaching the end of this year's tax season, you might imagine that I haven't been too eager to start my 2007 return until this dispute has been resolved, so I have been looking forward to receiving this envelope for some while now. I am happy to report that the re-re-reassessment has resulted in the reversal of my standing as a debtor to CRA, and, in fact, netted me an additional $40 deposited into my account.

Now, this isn't the first time this has happened. One year, as a result of a question I asked when speaking to a CRA agent about that year's reassessment, it was discovered that CRA had, for no particularly good reason, disallowed my tuition credit from the previous year (the wording on their reassessment notice left me unclear about what they were on about). The resulting correction returned a few hundred dollars to me. The moral of the story: CRA should stop reassessing me, because it seems to end up with them owing me money. Don't fool yourself, however, into thinking that I should look forward to these exercises in bureaucracy. The $40 I got back wasn't even close to worth the aggravation it caused.

Epilogue: A notice was attached that reminded me that the amount returned to me included $7 in interest which I must declare next year on my return. It is entirely possible that this marks the beginning of next year's story.

This week, Hasbro bought the rights to Trivial Pursuit, and announced that they would be taking the game in a number of new directions. What does this mean for my many friends and family members (including my wife) who are big fans of the board game genre, but do not consider themselves to be nerds? Let me tell you about the new directions Hasbro (and its subsidiaries) have taken some other games:

• They acquired Magic: the Gathering, the granddaddy of collectible card games. Some might even call it "gibberish"


• They acquired Dungeons and Dragons from TSR (or maybe just ate the whole company). Among other things, they made a collectible miniatures game out of it.


• They took the WWII strategy board game Axis and Allies, and turned that into a collectible miniatures game.


• Hasbro has always owned the Transformers brand (at least, in North America), but yes, it's a collectible card game.

My dear friends, don't be surprised if you find yourself in the not-so-distant future among the (literally) unwashed nerd masses, in some stinky comic book store buying booster packs of Trivial Pursuit questions. I hope they save the Canadian geography questions for the junk rare cards.