Porter Airlines and rockstars

I have always wanted to be a rockstar. So I was excited when I arrived on level 3 of the YOW parking garage and discovered that Porter Airlines, who I would be flying with, would be treating me like a rockstar.

I hoped this rockstar treatment would start in their lounge before I boarded, but the lounge is permanently closed.

On board the flight, an hour later, they gave me a complimentary beverage and my choice of a little packet of salted almonds, potato chips, or short-bread cookies. I suppose if I was a rockstar, I'd have taken one of each. But I only took some almonds.

I can't say I left the flight feeling like a rockstar. But I did fly way up high in the air, and that was pretty cool.

Happy Quirky Alone Day...

...a Valentine's greeting from...

Newsflash: Con campaign (finally) concedes Harper not perfect. Grudgingly.

Very grudgingly. They still cling, though, against a great deal of strong evidence, to their quaint illusion that their Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Guy is some kinda economic genius. And also to that wobbly alternate-reality bubble, inside which they're not wrong, all the rest of us are. . .

The Kool Aid in there must be getting awful warm and yucky by now...

Maybe not what they meant by "Tory attack ad". . .

Isabella Street Bloblaws is Back

We can confirm that Mayor Jim Watson did indeed show up to cut the ribbon. As if you had to ask.

The Isabella Street branch of a national grocery chain styled under the corporate identity of something very much like "Bloblaws", felicitously located past the Queensway overpass at the south end of Elgin Street, has returned with its walls kicked out and gussied up, and its consumer mojo intact, after being MIA for the past four months.

We can confirm, as eyewitnesses, that Mayor Jim Watson indeed showed up to cut the ribbon, ahead of a lineup that ran out to Metcalfe Street - and beyond.  And that our much-maligned tail got stomped again, in the frenzied crowd of shoppers stocking up on re-opening specials.

We can also confirm that they still sell the really very good President's Choice tomatillo salsa verde, unreasonably beloved of coyotes everywhere, for a regular price of $2.99 for a 430 mL jar.

This is greatly welcome, since the nearest alternate purveyor of said comestible,  Hartman's YIG, jacked the stuff up to a off-the-peg insane, ummm, slightly unreasonable, price of about double that, sometime shortly after PC added a near imperceptible soupçon of lime juice to the recipe, and a quasi-swanky-lookin' black background to the paper label pasted to the outside of the jar. So, obviously worth it.

We wish Hartman's luck with that.  Us coyotes will happily revert to shopping elsewhere, further south and slightly east.

The New Super Size -- a Love Note to Fast Food

Us coyotes were scuttling down a back alley this morning when the geospatial sensory flow (okay, the smell of hot grease...) prompted memories of the last time we hit a Mickey D's.

Good times!

Chucking limp fries at the Dwarf, making rude blooping noises in the pop with our straws, and dancing to the beat of the hapless counterperson's rotebot drone. You know, the one who asks each customer who's already ordered fries -- because asking "Dooya wan' frieswiddat? would be redundant, but The Corporation demands that its serfs squeeze out ever more profit from that order -- "Can I soopersize datforya?"

You know if s/he doesn't say it, the poor shnook is going to get docked either brownie points in that fast-track Management Training Program with the great polyester uniform, or, worse, some of their minimum wage. The Corp demands loyalty. Although sadly, Morgan Spurlock's famously surreal little opus has kind of satirized that particular tagline into perdition.

For reasons best known to my amydogdala, I wondered how to help Big Fast Food. I mean, look at it. It's obviously going broke. It needs a new "super". But what will that be? Like, what's bigger 'n super?

I guess you could ask, "Can I Mega Size that for you?" But mega is so last-century. Everything is mega already. So not that. Then I started to wonder what the meta-analysis on this would reveal. This blog was, after all, a metablog at one point in the distant, sunny past. The Irregulars specialized in this kind of crap.

The answer struck me the way the bottom wires of electric fences hit certain carelessly wagging tails: "Can I Metasta Size that for you?"

You're welcome, Fast Food Industry... you know where to send the love and royalty cheques. We hear Canada Post isn't interested in delivering mail anymore, so use E-transfers. We're here, waiting for 'em pour in. Much like overdiluted cola syrup.

Who You Gonna Call?

Bed bugs are all the rage these days...

Should I ever need mattress protectors, I know what company to call now. But, I would certainly not want them parked in front of my house.

P.S. Don't forget to mouse over the photo...

Gettin' it? Uh, no

Over a weekend feast of gobbling bird, talk turned to an incessantly played TV commercial for the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis.

You know the one: a man getting ready for work asks his wife a stream of questions: Have you seen my wallet? Have you seen my good shoes?

The man becomes increasingly annoyed, as he appears late and cannot locate any of his things. Finally, he makes his way to the garage to discover his car has a flat tire. His wife sits at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, sporting a quizzical half-smile.

No one at dinner could figure out what was going on in this commercial. Three theories were floated:

(*) One of the side-effects of Cialis is memory loss.
(*) The woman is so tired of being this Cialis-addled man's love slave, she sabotaged all his stuff.
(*) The woman is enjoying her hubby's Cialis-popping ways so much, she never wants him to leave home.

What do you think this ad is about? Or does the company just want us to be confused so random bloggers will ponder all this and inadvertently plug their little yellow pills? Help us out here!

The poll bounce from his NAC gig seemed like a gift... *

...but the Tory brain trust quickly realized that keeping their robotic client's piano forte front and centre in voters' minds was going to be trickier than it had first seemed... **

* You didn't seriously think we were going to let this one go that easily. Did you?

** It did, however, have certain advantages over "Vote Harper And We'll Burn the Blue Sweater Vest" and "Vote Harper Or The Kitten Gets It".

Buy Curious

It is not the first time, that I have been left confused rather than curious about a real estate ad.

5 questions popped into my head as I stared at this ad:

1. Is it a condo for the bi-curious?
2. Is it a condo for nudists?
3. Are those the real-estate agents or models?
4. Is the guy on the left looking down at the woman's coochie or at the guys schlong ?
5. Why isn't there a fifth (person)?

Fish Tale

A few weeks ago, when I expressed my pleasure at Bob's series, nasty loos, he suggested that I photograph the fancy ones.

...mabye you can start a tradition of photog'ing fancy loos...

I have followed his suggestion.

Advertising in a toilet - fancy and clever! And, if you don't like the product being promoted, you can feel doubly satisfied at using the loo.

Buy Me

I took a picture of this ad last August because something about it weirded me out.

Also, notice how:

1. She is not that much taller than he is, but her waist is much higher than his.
2. Her belly button is showing.
3. She looks much younger than him.
4. Her forearm looks like it belongs to a much older woman.
5. Skip to number 6 (this space is reserved for Aggie's "there is no 5th thing").
   
6. She is looking right past him.
7. He is looking right past her.
8. Her eyebrows are plucked in the 70s style.
   
9. He has a visible tan line on his wrist.

If you want to know the subliminal message that I got from this ad that disturbed me, check the labels for this post.

Tea-Shirt Advice

I can't decide which Tea-Shirt by Fourth Dwarf I should order for myself.

What Tea-Shirt would you like to see on me?
	Coming Through
	Woodsy's Web
	Putting Out
	Mad for Tea
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Ottawa's looming graffiti crisis

Lately I've been reading overheated media coverage of Ottawa's graffiti problem. You know, Krylon Invasion, city councillors buying business constituents high pressure washers to zap offending spraybombage - like that. I've been ambivalent. I know a lot of it defaces private property, but we coyotes like certain graffiti. Some of it is really beautiful, and when I see it, it makes me happy. I speak of the true public artists. Taggers? Not so much. May their sooty black aerosol cans explode in their sweaty little mitts. I digress.

Saturday, though, I sprayed a mouthful of my customary breakfast (Piping hot crumpets, cat marmalade, steaming mug of fresh-brewed vitriol) all over my morning Petfinder. Patrick Curran, OC Transpo's business development manager, was floating a trial balloon about selling transit station names to the highest-bidding corporate sponsors. Some city councillors and the usual suspects on the editorial page seemed to like it.

The argument is that Transpo needs the money, and there's no more space for ads on the buses. Seems to me that maybe the city should just fund the service properly. But dreaming up billion dollar tunnels and harebrained 'innovations' is way more fun than making sure the existing bus system works well in the most basic ways.

Mr. Curran rather disingenuously notes that St. Laurent transit station already is named for the attached mall, and argues that opens the door to more of the same. Nice try at historical revisionism to support a thin-end-of-the-wedge propaganda technique, but, ummm, no. The mall is labelled for the rather prominent nearby boulevard that the mall promoters swiped its name from.

Ottawa is a town where, when a boneheaded fuckwit has a idea that shrieks out for rapid trashing, then tries to smoke it past us by self-diagnosing it as 'innovative', a buncha other boneheaded fuckwits will nod sagely and murmur, "Mmmm... innovative!" It's how decisions are made. But non-sequitur-ish corporate sponsorship isn't innovative. It's already been inflicted elsewhere. Yoohoo! Senators Coliseum? Which became the Corel Centre? An asshatted monument to momentary corporate hubris - and sanctioned graffiti, really. Now it's ScotiaBank Place...

Transit is about moving people efficiently. Renaming transit stations - all of which now (very handily) key on nearby geographical features - is not. We already let businesses deface the cityscape by smearing it with their kind of graffiti. We just call them 'logos', 'signs' and 'advertising'. Why let 'em further confuse a bus ride, too?

The Meta Contest

Hello Readers, following a suggestion from the graceful blogger Zoom, the Elgin Street Irregulars are having a contest.

The Prize:

1. You get to put a posting on our blog! Your writing will be read by dozens of readers; it might get picked up by OttawaStart; and anyone googling "Elgin Street" in the following week, might just read it!
2. We'll put a link to your blog in the sidebar! Along with text and images recognizing your accomplishment!
3. The Chair will put a video in the sidebar as an obscure reference to something on your blog sometime in the next few months so that we all have to keep reading you so we can understand it.

What You Have to Do:

1. Suggest another contest we can have in the next few weeks in the comments to this post.
2. Enter by 7:00pm Eastern Daylight Time (Ottawa time) on Thursday, 27 September 2007
3. Make a suggestion that will be adopted by consensus at an Emergency Meeting of the ESIs, or if consensus cannot be reached, by winning a plurality in a reader poll.
   

Coach's Corner: At least the ratings don't sag, eh?

OK, Coyotedog, ya want dysfunction? Here’s somethin' you can really sink them molars into. Now I wanna talk about droopy members. Nah, nah -- not the slackers on the Buffalo defence. I'm talkin' about the decline and fall of the national pastime. That's right. It's playoff time, the season when real men rise to the challenge. And once in a while that means a little high-stick action. Yeah, that's right. You know what I'm sayin'. But them refs, they're callin' everything now. So no swingin' your lumber on the ice. And lemme tell ya, we could use a little more wood in the air. Yeah, you heard me. Now this ain't a problem for me. No siree. One stiff breeze from a passing Zamboni and she’s harder than a Volchenkov slapshot. But take a look at them ads they're showin' on the games now. Can we roll the ... huh? Do we have ... OK, now look at these flabby guys standin' round the barbecue talkin' about their little blue pills. Pathetic! And all the other ads are for brewskis and SUVs. So we got a nation of plastered guys flaccidly tooling around in their big honkin' cars. But we're not alone out there. Let's put some numbers up on the big board. Yeah, I done my research. Hugh betcha. Now according to this, one in nine guys in the Unexcited States of America can't salute the flag. Nope. That's cuz all the real men -- 'cept maybe Chris Chelios, gotta love him -- are over in Iraq, tryin'a-find Osama. And when you, uh, fully extend the numbers, holy Toledo, you get six million Italians and 20 million Brazilians who make like frightened turtles. No wonder them Brazilians can't play hockey. Cuz, ya know -- what, we’re outta ...? Looks like we're finishing a little prematurely – no, I don’ mean … aw fer -- jeez Louise! --

Delusions of reindeer

Up-front disclaimer: I like Christmas. As a coyote with a walk-on part in another pantheon myself, I also fully approve of, and support, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Hanukkah, Sun Dances, Nirvana Day and Ukrainian Christmas. In fact, any open and joyous celebrations of the cosmic oom that haven't been co-opted by politicos or retailers.

Politicizing of religion, or vice versa, is a weighty topic for another time and place. What I'm on about here is Christmas Muzak. Trite and overdone, I know, but anything to help keep the Short Guy's butt from dragging, what with all his unassisted effort posting over the past week. Especially considering the size of his butt, and how close it is to the ground, already. I digress.

In a store last week, I noted with alarm that consumer traffic was way up, its awareness of its surroundings was way down, and supplies of the really good cheap bittersweet chocolate were non-existent. All while I tried to avoid gettin' my tail stomped. Not pretty. But the capper was the shitty 'seasonal' muzak, all crap when it was issued, and completely unimproved by age. Or overplaying. I mean, in this setting, if there's gonna be any pained yowling goin' on, it should be mine.

The Petfinder recently published an article stating that retail surveys show that piping in unending seasonal music beginning in October or so, boosts sales. Gotta love those surveyors.

My trite objection: Retailers never play the better hymns or carols. There's good seasonal pop, too, but nooooo. Might remind people of the true nature of of the holiday, blah blah blah and they don't want that. They go instead for the scummy dregs of recent popular Christmas music, played by the scummy dregs of cover bands, knowing full well that the jackhammer effects of The Little Drummer Boy, Holly Jolly Christmas, Rockin' round the Christmas Tree and, dog help us, any random track from the Boney M. Christmas Album, ad nausæum, puree customers' brains to the point where they'll buy anything. It is useless to resist. Ka-Chinggggg!

Okay, I'll make one (trite) exception. Snoopy's Christmas by the Royal Guardsmen, 'cuz it's about a dog. And the harmonies are terrific. Now, excuse me. I need to go bite a retail surveyor. Or a retailer.