How things go down, from the perspective of an Italian mastiff

Took the Big Boy to the dog park for a romp today.

Which only happened because the Farm Manager had to come into town to get the elite pet food our pets demand. The impulse for elite pet food does not originate on my side of the family.

When you share every Big Mac or pizza slice or Timmies invention with your best friend, they don't need the ultra-premium pet food anymore.

Anyway, we stocked up on the premium pet food, and then we stopped by the off-leash dog park.

Bruno hasn't seen his dog park pals in weeks, because the FM has been working from home, and her job is my only excuse for driving into town.

The beauty of the occasion was that the FM, our mutual boss, was able to witness first-hand Bruno's interactions with his dog park pals.

Like his complete deference to that miniature poodle half the size of his head.

But he's also thrilled to romp with the other big dogs, like Bandit and Maverick. They race around with bared fangs and constant growls, but they're just kidding.

We stopped by the Food Land on the way home. The FM picked up a few essentials, and also an entirely non-essential box of mini cinnamon buns.

Me and Bruno are polishing them off as I write these words.

Nobody needs to know...

 

"You sh!t in a bag and threw it out the window"

I was sitting in the waiting room at the dentist office the other day. One of the abiding absurdities of the current era is how you can't get a haircut, but you can go to the dentist and have one of the gals spend an hour playing in your saliva while cleaning your teeth.

There's an old guy, masked and socially distanced, sitting across from me. I don't get out much anymore, so I seize any opportunity to strike up a conversation.

Turns out Buddy is a semi-retired trucker, well into his seventies. Still runs a load of rocks out of Wiarton two or three times a week to supplement his OAS and CPP stipends. 

We get to chatting about how far you can go on a tank of gas. He used to drive for an outfit called Quik-as-Air. Their calling card was they could get Toronto mail to Vancouver in the same 36 hours you got when you paid the extra for "air mail."

And they did.

Their Freightliner cab-overs, kitted out with max tankage, could literally run from Toronto to Vancouver without ever stopping.

Not even once.

Not for anything...

I'm taking this in. I get that there's two drivers and you spell off, but... don't you have to take a crap once in awhile?

Nah... you just shit in a bag and throw it out the window.

Correcting vaccine falsehoods (brought to you by Pfizer)

The top ‘o the op-ed page in today’s Globe goes to Timothy Caulfield; Correcting falsehoods isn’t cancel culture.

Mr Caulfield, we are told, is Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta. He has a bee in his bonnet over those gosh-darned anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers like Aaron Rogers, Joe Rogan, and “disgraced American virologist Robert Malone.”

Rogan had the disgraced guy on his show recently. I personally don’t have the attention span to follow a three hour interview, but apparently 11 million others did. That’s a gargantuan number for anything found on American screens, easily eclipsing all cable news platforms combined. Obviously, pandemic scepticism is growing, two full years into this circus.

I like to check out the affiliations of the thought leaders who appear on the op-ed page. I googled "corporate partnerships u of alberta."

Oh, what a surprise! There’s Pfizer! Along with fellow pharma bigs Merck and J & J! Root around a little more on the old googlator and you’ll find the pharma partners are worth tens of millions to the U of A!

Check out this Wikipedia page, List of largest pharmaceutical settlements.

All of U Alberta’s pharma partners are on it!

Pfizer is on it twice!

And that list ends in 2012. Here’s an updated accounting of Pfizers many regulatory challenges since 2000. Over ten billion in fines for their many shenanigans in the past twenty years!

So who are you gonna believe?

An NFL quarterback, or a guy whose employer takes money from Pfizer?

It can take 50 years for the Wheel of Karma to complete one rotation

Ya, it can. Sometimes it can take even longer...

But let's stick to the case in point.

Back in the day, when your female high school students got themselves knocked up, it quite often meant the termination of their academic career. 

Objection 1. There are no "female" students. Gender labels are a tool of the patriarchy. 

Objection 2. Nobody, regardless of gender, gets themselves knocked up. It will require the assistance of at least one other non-gendered person of the other non-gender.

So just to keep things professional, let's call this person Jane Doe.

When Jane dropped out of high school, she short-circuited a lot of options in life. She found herself waiting tables at the local sports bar.

Every Friday a couple of guys from the high school dropped by to chat her up and drink lots of beer. They became comrades in arms. 

Objection 3. She didn't short-circuit anything - the patriarchy did.

Objection 4. Comrades in arms? That used to be called Stockholm Syndrome.

They convinced her she had what it takes to get a job at the very school that had shunned her years before. They even tipped her to a job opening and provided references.  

Objection 5. Typical patriarchal exploitation of desperate single mothers.

Fast forward fifty years or so.

Jane Doe is a forty year veteran school board employee. Thirty-nine years ago she suffered a concussion after being struck in the head by a basketball in a Phys-ed class.

She's been on long-term disability at 90% pay ever since!

Karma gave her the last laugh.

Those tussles with life

I stepped out on the stoop a few minutes ago, for a breath of fresh air, and in the distance I could see tail-lights trying to negotiate the uphill driveway at the farm a quarter mile to the west.

It's winter. The snow packs hard and turns to ice.

Those tail-lights go half-way up the hill... and then they go down again.

Then up... and down.

Somebody can't get up their driveway.

For them, it's a great piss-off, and in all likelihood, ruining their day.

For me, their predicament provides semi-interesting entertainment for a few minutes.

When you stop and think about it, a lot of life's great piss-offs are like that.

You can get all wound up about shit that, when you back away a bit and take in the big picture, isn't such a big deal in the overall scheme of things.

So when you can't get up the driveway of life, just park at the bottom, walk home, and deal with it in the morning.

After a good night's sleep.

Get ready for Donald v Hillary - the rematch

I was checking out some of those disreputable sites, where folks just make shit up. That's in contrast to the legit sites, where highly paid consultants, experts, and expert consultants just make shit up.

So here's what I'm hearing. There's a school of thought out there posits that the most viable candidate for the Dems 2024 is... Hillary!

Go figure!

I would have thought they can wind up the Bernie wind-up toy once again and do better than Hillary, but Bernie's pied piper routine always gave the big donors the willies... as in, what if he's serious about all that socialist talk?

The so-called squaddie radicals have already shown themselves to be unprincipled careerists, but they'd never have a chance against Trump anyway.

Nor would Sleepy Guy and/or his stunned side-kick. What a study in incompetence that loser is!

And Trump seems to be the forgone conclusion as the GOP candidate, which is again, a searing indictment of America's education system and culture at large...

Or at least it would be, if we were talking about democracy.

But we're not; we're talking about Democracy Theatre, which is a completely different kettle of fish.

The producers figure Donald-Hillary is the best bet for max pay-per-view uptake.

They're probably right!

Expert claims 66% higher rate of myocarditis for Moderna vaxx nothing to worry about

You’ve probably seen the CBC story about all those fussy folks walking away from the Moderna vaccine if that’s what’s offered when they go for their booster shot. The narrative managers at CBC have decided to nip that irresponsible bit of effrontery in the bud.

To that end, Julianne Hazlewood interviewed a 70 year old virologist just after the eight o’clock news this morning. He reassured the audience that the Moderna vaccine is so safe and effective that he, an expert, personally requested it by name.

Our expert even brought some stats with him. Of every 100k vaccinations with Pfizer, 1.5 people will develop myocarditis, or swelling of the heart, whereas with Moderna, the number is 2.5, which he assured us is “nothing, only one more person per 100k vaccinations.”

I thought, hold the phone, Mr. Expert. An increase from 1.5 to 2.5 isn’t nothing.

It’s a 66% higher chance of getting myocarditis with your vaccination!

That's hundreds more myocarditis cases when you're vaccinating all of Canada.

But not too worry. According to the expert, myocarditis is no big deal - there’s plenty of safe and effective pharmaceutical products out there to fix up your myocarditis in no time!

Do you ever get the impression that a lot of these "experts" are just glorified vaccine salesmen?