Announcing the first Bruce Trail Marathon

There's a Wikipedia page gives you the lowdown on folks who have the fastest times end-to-end on the Bruce Trail. What the think tank at Falling Downs is proposing is a flat-out 26 mile race over some of the roughest terrain. How about a Tobermorey to Lions Head ultra-marathon? If we rustle up enough prize money, this could be quite a spectacle. I'll pitch in the first $1000, just to get things off the ground, but it should draw big league sponsorship in no time. The Red Bull Bruce Trail Marathon kinda has a ring to it, no? Then they'll be hiking for millions! That's when you'll see them elbow one another off the cliffs on those "difficult" sections. Ratings will go through the roof!

Juicy Ass

Get your mind out of the gutter. I was talking about Flying Monkey Juicy Ass IPA. That's a beer. Of course, you'd only call a beer "Juicy Ass" if it had nothing to recommend it other than a catchy name. "Hey waiter, give me a Juicy Ass!" See what I mean? I'm surprised they've got Juicy Ass on display at the local Foodland. I can see the inquisitive four year old, at her mother's side in the beer aisle on the weekly grocery shop. "Mommy, do monkey's fly? Does that make their ass juicy?"

Surviving the Bruce Trail

Got home in one piece from our Bruce Trail adventure, which is more than can be said for my shoes. The trail is littered with markers reminding me of the frailty of my elderly digestive tract. There's "Big Dump," "Half-a-Dump,"and, my favorite, "Wish-You-Had-a-Dump-Yesterday." Also, beware of the two-storey outhouses conveniently located about every eight hours along the trail. I played it safe and stuck to the upstairs units. These back-woods loos are notable for lacking two features commonly associated with the modern bathroom - running water and electricity. When is the last time you visited a bathroom that didn't have a sink? Perhaps for budgetary reasons, the folks responsible for the trail haven't got around to fitting their outhouses with bug screens. As a result, hordes of hungry mosquitoes descend on you just when you drop your drawers. If nothing else, this ensures no one lingers in the loo longer than absolutely necessary. Sleeping accomodations along the trail are somewhat spartan. Rest your weary head on a randon piece of driftwood found on the beach, and you're good to go. Thanks to my old pal Tom for organizing this adventure. It's been in the planning stages since we met at the University of Guelph 40 years ago. Now that we're crowding 70, we figured the time was right. After all, like so many things in life, wilderness hikes are mostly wasted on the young. By my calculations, I've now completed about 8% of the Bruce Trail. At that rate, I should have the whole enchilada under my belt sometime in the next 400 years or so. It's good to have goals!

Deathbed confession confirms Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's daddy

Junita Gomez spent her last years in a nursing home on Vancouver Island. Suffering vararious terminal maladies in recent years, she and her family finally made the decision to arrange a medically assisted death, legal in Canada since 2016. Junita had enjoyed a long and satisfying career as a midwife in her home country of Cuba. She moved to Canada in 1971 where she was soon hired by Margaret and Pierre Trudeau as a nanny. On the appointed day, the doctor, the priest, and a few close family members gathered around her in the sun-dappled courtyard of the Paradise View nursing home in Naniamo. After each family member had bade their goodbyes, Junita, weakened and frail, whispered some stunning last words. According to her recollection, Margaret had given birth to Justin not on Christmas day 1971, in Canada, but in Havana Military Hospital almost two months before. Fidel had taken a keen interest in Margaret's prenatal care, for reasons that, at the time, were obvious to all; Margaret was having his baby. Junita was part of the elite medical team who brought Justin into this world. For diplomatic reasons, mother, newborn, and midwife were then whisked to Canada in time for the miraculous Christmas day "birth" of Justin. Seems like a tall tale, but the more you ponder it, the more it explains about what has happened to Canada.

Leader of Free World falls off bike

Better to fall off a Schwinn than a Harley, I guess. But he got right back up! Wasn’t that inspirational? Uncle Sam’s been falling off his bike quite a lot these past few decades. That fact has yet to impact the bellicose rhetoric emanating from the self-appointed boss of the world. The Americans still believe that they are the light on a hill that illuminates the path to freedom, democracy, a partridge in a pear tree, and goodness knows what else for the rest of humanity. The trail of destruction left in the wake of America’s mission to remake the world in its image has been successfully erased by the narrative managers. But how much longer can this go on? The US and her obedient satraps in the collective West have been winning the propaganda war in Ukraine. Unfortunately for them, the actual war on the ground has been going in the opposite direction. PR is about to succumb to reality. That’s not the leader of the Free World… That’s just a senile old man falling off his bike.

Dead duck (and two ducklings) walking

We were approaching the easternmost reaches of Toronto this morning, in a torrential downpour. The 401 is six lanes each way, with a concrete divider in the middle. Traffic was moving pretty good, so I only had a second to notice Mama Duck, walking along the right-side shoulder, make a couple of feints towards the roadway, looking for the right moment to cross twelve lanes of traffic with a concrete divider in the middle. The ducklings were tight behind her. We know how that story ends. Sometimes bad shit happens and there's not a thing you can do about it.

Mexican dance party

The Farm Manager is in charge of booking the hotels for this trip. Her modus operandi is to call ahead to a pet-friendly Comfort Inn in whatever town we're staying in, and ask for their cheapest room. That tends to land us in the itinerant construction worker wing. Tonight there seems to be a Mexican dance party going on a few doors over. I'm waiting for a quartet of guitar-strumming troubadours to show up at the door with some tasteful narco-corridos. The FM is in a foul mood because when she haggled with management about the room rate, they forgot to mention the fifty bucks extra they stuck on the bill for Big-lips Bruno. Guess they got the last laugh. Little do they realize that Bruno leaves at least half a gallon of drool on the floor every time he takes a drink. Looks like the joint has been recently renovated, including new "engineered hardwood" floors. Engineered hardwood is another way of saying fake hardwood. What makes me laugh is at least half the consumer public imagines engineered hardwood is superior to the real thing. The power of marketing! Anyway, the several gallons Bruno will dribble on their fake hardwood shouldn't begin to destroy the floor till we're long gone. Maybe we'll get the last laugh after all.