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This. Made. Me. Howl.

The Mighty MJD is the best blog you’re not reading, even if you don’t enjoy sports all that much.

Oh, by the way…Habs 2-0 over Atlanta last night. Believe me when I say I didn’t expect them to go 4-1 to start the season. Hope, yes. Believe, no. Habs fans are nothing if not realistic…as opposed to Leafs fans, whose optimism is cute, but a little sad.

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People who hit the wheelchair button are assholes. If you’re actually in a wheelchair, or even if your arms are full, I can understand it. But if you smack the button just because you’re a lazy, that makes you an asshole.

People who throw their cigarette butts on the ground are assholes. Find an ashtray. Or better yet, give that shit up. You do know that no one smokes anymore except rednecks and poseurs, right? Outside of that, you’re an asshole.

People who steal chocolate from a box that’s clearly marked “children’s school fundraiser, please leave $3” are assholes. If you steal from a little kid’s public school, I’m embarassed to even work in the same fucking building as you. Asshole.

Full circle

About a year and half a go, at the 2004 Hot Docs festival, we watched a documentary called Control Room, an interesting documentary about Al Jazeera, the US attitude toward it and, broadly, journalism in the Iraq war. It went on to have a pretty wide release and got some attention.

One of the more interesting personalities — an American officer named Rushing — became increasingly frustrated with defending the military’s position on the war, and it was visible during the documentary. I heard later that he’d resigned from the USMC, and I read today that he’s gone to work for…wait for it…Al Jazeera.

Fox News, of course, was quick to attach the word traitor to the guy. Idiots.

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Well, it couldn’t last forever. The Canadiens ran into a Senators team that I think will win the cup. Too bad they couldn’t win their home opener though.

Toronto weather forecast: rain until Sunday. Guh. Could be worse though; we could be in the Maritimes, where they’re seeing rainfall records broken. Hopefully this rain coming toward us for the next week won’t reach them, and the ground will harden up soon enough to spread straw before frost hits. Yup, I’m a farmer’s son…

Ummm…no such luck, it seems.

One step forward…

Yeesh…I just start to catch up with my movie watching and my magazine reading (merci, long weekend) and I realize that my musical inbox is piling up with albums I need to check out. Namely:

  • gentlemen regdarby & joan
  • foo fightersin your honor (argh…this one’s been here since Christ was a cowboy)
  • various artiststhis bird has flown
  • grandaddyexcerpts from the diary of todd zilla
  • broken social scenebroken social scene
  • matt pond paseveral arrows later
  • deerhoofthe runners four

And this doesn’t even count the dozens of random MP3s that make their way into my ‘_downloads’ folder.

The new Metric and Death Cab discs are in there too, but I just skipped the review and ordered those. I knew I would anyway.

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I drink a lot of diet pepsi. A LOT of diet pepsi. Probably 3 a day. If that strikes you as bad, consider that I used to drink 4 or 5 a day, and it was real Pepsi. Nowadays I can’t even drink the real stuff — too sweet — but I get the occasional comment from someone about how the Aspartame’s going to give me cancer. This makes me want to smack them.

Snopes has lots of background on this, but I think the FDA sums it up nicely:

To date, FDA has not determined any consistent pattern of symptoms that can be attributed to the use of aspartame, nor is the agency aware of any recent studies that clearly show safety problems.

Or MIT:

Even daily large doses of the high-intensity sweetener aspartame, also known as NutraSweet, had no adverse effect on study subjects’ health and well-being, a visiting scientist at MIT reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last week.

“We conclude that aspartame is safe for the general population,” said Paul A. Spiers, visiting scientist in the Clinical Research Center (CRC).

Leave me and my dp be. Haters.