Holy Hiatus: Winter Edition

Oh my Gad, I completely forgot the world was ending on the 21st, and here I've been buying Christmas presents like a sucker. PAJ is taking a holiday break too. Right now the website is Sauced on Nog, so any spelling errors are it's fault and not mine.

Look for new episodes in the second week of January. I know it seems like a long time, but it might take me a while to figure out where I am after New Years.

Wishes of a Happy Everything from PAJ, hurrah!

Shoe Polish Sales See Christmas Surge in Netherlands

The generally dismal sales of shoe polish in the western world got a boost earlier this month as the holiday season saw it's usual amount of Dutch revellers dressing up in blackface. “Aside from the Netherlands, blackface hasn't been seen anywhere but the 60's, and Big Shoepolish is ecstatic,” resident International Business expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder said early Thursday. “With the 'Not for use on Skin' disclaimer the industry absolves itself of any indiscretion and doesn't have to worry about racially charged class action lawsuits cutting into their profits. It's a huge boon to their industry.” The windfall comes at an especially lucky time, as Big Shoepolish, the umbrella term for the giants of the shoe polish industry, has been on the decline ever since the creation of children's advocacy groups, which sought to shelter and educate the world's supply of street corner shine-boys. Financial experts are confident about Big Shoepolish's stock performance this quarter. “It would be a good idea to pick up some shoe-polish stock.” Goose-Shredder said, “Would be, if it weren't such a bad idea the other 11 months of the year.”

The use of blackface in Dutch Christmas traditions has it's origins in the middle ages, when Sinterklaas chartered a steamship over from Spain and brought some black slaves to help deliver sweets and presents to the children of Holland. The black slaves were necessary for balance because without something terrible on an equal magnitude karma would implode at the invention of Christmas. Through the centuries the tradition of Netherlanders dressing up like Sinterklaas and passing out presents while other white people in blackface clowned around has continued with both private and public displays happening every year. The black slaves, known collectively as Zwarte Piet, have had a few consistent character guidelines. He has to speak Dutch like the 3 stooges, be sneaky and generally be the most dignity sapping caricature possible.

International Folklorist Ovaltine Goose-Shredder has been archiving the Dutch tradition for years, “The tide has been steadily turning against Zwarte Piet, but because many Dutchees see outrage at Zwarte Piet in a 'war on Christmas' sense, the end of it will likely be where they put the 'Here's where Racism Died' plaque.” Experts agree that the tradition says a lot about how the Dutch feel about race and that they're probably not sorry for starting the North American slave trade. Ovaltine Goose-Shredder thinks that if they can't agree to stop dressing up in blackface, their Christmas celebrations should be changed to reflect their attitudes. “Sinterklaas should ride around in a sleigh with a confederate flag licence plate and punch children in the eye instead of giving them candy.” he says, “That's the Christmas the Dutch deserve.”

Florida Based Entrepreneur Provides Sound Argument Against For-Profit Health Care

Manitoba and Newfoundland are the first two provinces in Canada to send cease and desist letters to clinics advertising thermal imaging scans for the detection of breast cancer, because the scans don't work. In Ontario, the service is offered in chiropractic and naturopathic clinics and claims to be a non-invasive diagnostic test that can detect a tumour in a boob before a mammogram can. The test has raised some issues in the United States, with the Food and Drug Administration sending a letter of warning to the Florida based company Meditherm for advertising it's Med2000 thermal imaging camera as a breast cancer diagnostic tool. Peter Leando, president of Meditherm, said of the warning, "I think [the FDA's issue with] the wording was related to 'accurate,' and something else. And we just changed the words so that it wouldn't be likely to mislead anybody into thinking that it was accurate in the detection of breast cancer." This perfectly frank and logical statement was said by someone who is still trying to sell women on thermographic scans for the detection of breast cancer.

Meditherm first applied to the FDA for a licence to sell their thermal imaging cameras as a breast cancer diagnostic tool in November of 2000 and were denied. They were told at the time that they could only market the Med2000 as a machine for taking a thermal image of the human body, nothing more, and that they couldn't claim it detected breast cancer because it didn't. This did not stop them from advertising the Med2000 as a breast cancer screening diagnostic tool. Resident expert on Medical Equipment Ovaltine Goose-Shredder explained the reasoning behind Meditherm's decision to go ahead with their plan despite being told not to by the FDA, saying “As any Geiger Counter will show you, Peter Leando's headstrongness is off the charts. Beyond that, humans are very much afraid of cancer, so a device that gives no factually useful results will still be bought by consumers when the company that markets it asserts that it can detect breast cancer 10 years before a mammogram can. It's incredible how trusting people are when they're misled into believing a device has the medical community's stamp of approval.”

The FDA has since sent out a warning to citizens that thermographic scans are not an effective alternative to a mammogram, and Health Canada has said that it is an unproven technique that has not yet been licenced. Despite this, women in most provinces can still go to clinics, pay $200 and start freaking out about a diagnosis that most likely is a false positive. When asked how they could allow Canadians to utilize a medical diagnostic tool that is unproven at best and completely unreliable in the opinion of many medical professionals, a representative from Health Canada explained that they could only make decisions based on the information available at the time, saying “We didn't know it wasn't snake oil.”

Citizen Danny was stopped by Piss Awesome Journalism Thursday outside the Covent Garden Market and expressed his outrage at what he perceives to be an evil cash grab by slimy hucksters. “Holy shit! They try so hard to talk their way around saying anything specific about thermography, their Q&A pages are a masters course in evasive language! And if you look up the source the Sunleite Integrative Health Centre cites to prove thermal imaging is a valid test for breast cancer it leads to the International Academy of Clinical Thermology, an organization that has to put a disclaimer on their website to make sure everyone knows that “The information found on this web site, and in the IACT educational courses, are only the expressed opinions of IACT.” They have no facts. Zero fucking facts and they're trying to convince you they care about your health. Evil motherfuckers!”

Black Friday: Disambiguation

James Betty is too busy making mad cashish this week so Wikipedia is going to sub in for an article. Implication: Good journalism makes him zero money. Also, when Wikipedia loses the pedia and does an op ed, it gets really judgmental and snarky, right? [Ed.]

Tomorrow is the busiest shopping day of the year, which means people get kind of shovey while perusing. Because of this, human media companies have dubbed it Black Friday, because it's such a dark day, and totally on par with the other Black Friday's throughout history.

London, England: 1910 – A Black Friday happened when police used batons to subdue a crowd of women who were protesting their inability to vote. It was a PR disaster for the police and the elected officials who stalled the suffrage bill, but it was large in people's memory when women in England gained the right to vote in 1918. Pretty important, right? Kohls is having a sale on vacuums to celebrate.

Victoria, Australia: 1939 – Australia was having an exceptional drought that year and over one million acres burned in one of the most spectacular fires recorded by humans. 71 people lost their lives, entire towns were wiped off the map and an uncountable amount of livestock was killed. Why not buy a nice floral print bedding set for your bed, oh wait, it's on fire. Luckily Home Depot sells everything you need to rebuild a shattered life, but the hardest decision made there tomorrow will be whether to get the washing machine with a window in it. Black Friday indeed.

Tehran, Iran: 1978 – A whole fucking massacre happened. Iranian citizens gathered to protest the Shah's rule and the Iranian military opened fire on the crowd. Over 600 people were killed.

Black Friday is a pretty strong moniker and brings strong connotations. To attach it to shopping shows a serious lack of both judgement and reverence on the part of human media companies. They're seriously over-blowing the importance of this static nonsense. It makes Buy Nothing Day seem like a great idea out of spite alone.

Rich People Pissed about Obama Re-Election; Accuse Elmo of Sexual Misconduct

The captains of industry who own the media conglomerates that have bombarded us with election coverage for the last year and a half are allegedly lashing out at us in spite for re-electing Barack Obama to his second term in office over the wealthy classes' lizard-in-a-human-suit Mitt Romney. One CEO let the plan slip in a post-election press conference, saying, “If you're going to use an election to ruin our day, we're going to use our news organizations to ruin yours. I can't believe what an asshole you people are, you people being everyone outside my country club.”

In order to ruin all our days, it was reported Tuesday that Kevin Clash, voice and puppeteer to the furry red Elmo Muppet that we all love, had a sexual relationship with what at the time was an underage boy in the state of New York. These allegations, which were made anonymously by the person who said them, were recanted by whoever the next day, leading many to suspect that the whole thing was orchestrated by FOX News to make the whole world feel bad, because they feel bad. Even though none of the allegations have been proven, resident celebrity gossip expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder says that Elmo has a stink on him now, and it probably won't go away. “No one lives down sexual misconduct. Late Night comedians are still making their livings off President Clinton.”

FOX's maybe plan to cause everyone mental dress is designed to last for a long time. The allegations against Clash were brought to the attention of the production company that makes Sesame Street in the summer of 2011, and the organization conducted several independent and in-house investigations, none of which could substantiate the claim. Despite this, we will never hear the end of Elmo-the-paedophile jokes, and are quite possibly witnessing the birth of an immortal comedy bit. “Because of the connotations that come along with working on Sesame Street, we will never hear the end of this. The bit writes itself, and hack comedians banking on limp shock value will be spouting it for decades.” explains Goose-Shredder. “Meanwhile, the end of everything shocking was buried with GG Allin. Any attempt to be shocking really seems pathetic in comparison. You would have to rape someone on stage to top that guy. It's pretty much the only thing he didn't do.”

The attempt at worldwide mental duress is a two pronged attack, as it not only subjects the planet to incessant, terrible jokes, but each mention of Elmo's sexual misconduct will remind us that even the perceived innocence of the world is only that, a veil masking a destruction of the pure and good hearts that-did they ever exist? Fuck. There's the question. Was this planet ever good at all?

Despite humanity facing an eternity of existential trauma, everyone is still upbeat about not being subjected to four years of a Romney White House. Seriously, the guy doesn't know what not having money is. He's never lifted a box in his life. He doesn't know what it's like to be a person on this earth. He would have been a terrible leader. A Romney was dodged, but the other shoe dropped really quickly. We lost Elmo. Always a catch in this God damned universe.

GASP Begins Active Resistance with a Press Confrence

Swedish resistance fighter Axel Hjalmar, head of Google is Actually Slaughtering People [GASP], is putting together what he hopes will be a grassroots resistance campaign to effectively end “the tyranny of the Google.” Early Thursday Hjalmar called a press conference to announce GASP's need for participants to actively resist the monolithic corporation. “They are so massive, the reach of what we are trying to destroy is undeniable. They are like a worm. If you cut it in half you just have two smaller worms that keep doing their worm things, even though they're only half worms. This is Google. Their reach is such that small efforts on our part prove to only be minor hindrances, minor hindrances that are easily sidestepped by another arm of the corporation.” This is why Hjalmar is now calling for a worldwide campaign against Google. “Google must be struck by a network of people that can match point for point, stride for stride, the global reach of the corporation. Only when struck along enough points can the monstrosity that Google has become be brought down.”

Hjalmar's efforts to rally the world hinge on him convincing enough people that Google is actually a threat, as it is difficult to find fault with much of the way the company does business. According to Hjalmar, the fact that Google exists on the level that it does is cause enough for resistance. “Anything that size is a threat, but if you would like me to be more specific, I shall. Google has created the capacity to track a person's every move through a physical world they have recorded every inch of. They know about a person's every purchase and can put it together on a scale to make a picture of a world-wide economy. Google has every thought that runs across a person's mind and into their phone. For Google to use their technology against people, it's a turn of a peg, it's simply a choice and they would be unstoppable. Particularly if a world government commandeered their technology and infrastructure, or even colluded with them. The world would become terrifying very quickly if Google made a different choice, and already it has begun.”

The beginning of the switch from Google being the happy-go-lucky-buddy-buddy-hug-friend of corporations to something more sinister and bad for humanity has been investigated by Hjalmar while he was on an Antarctic skiing expedition. During Hjalmar's fourth month sojourn on the frozen continent he gathered information on Google's Secret Antarctic Base, a facility located in the international zone to make major advancements in the field of market research that would be illegal or inefficient in populated areas of the world. Hjalmar says that Google is indeed cloning people “against their will” after their DNA was scanned and sent to Google servers via a blood sugar testing app on their smart-phones. The clones are then made to walk through a mock grocery store 10 000 times to see what products a specific person gravitates towards. Once they have this data Google will begin targeting specific people with advertisements on their smart-phones for products the person's clone went for most often, meaning advertisers can now target products that a person isn't even conscious of wanting. And then the clones are released and shot.

Antarctica is the only place on earth, that isn't a boat, where this sort of research could take place, since there is so much red tape concerning human cloning in the first world countries and the more outlawish states would require tens of millions in bribes to operate in. Also, shooting people that you created is illegal everywhere with laws.

Google says that the people who are being cloned are not being cloned against their will, since allowing themselves to be cloned is a clause in Google's standard licence agreement everyone has to accept before using their products. “Most of the internet using world are willing participants in our latest marketing study.” a representative of Google said in an e-mail exclusive to Piss-Awesome Journalism, which is odd because they gave the quote before the article had even been published, but knew exactly what to say, leading to speculation that they are reading my word processor? Terrifying.

Anyone who wants to join the fully democratic resistance collective known as GASP can begin associating loosely with other like-minded individuals and disrupting Google's activities, says GASP leader Axel Hjalmar. “Really, anything that can be done to chip away at their monolithic presence on our earth, the better.” Hjalmar said Thursday. “Google is beyond viral, they are the infrastructure. Pictures of cats go viral on the internet. Google is the internet. They can tell those cats to shut up if they want, shut up to death, or how do you say in English, go away. Go away, cats. Transmission over.”

Canadian Money Slowly Turning into Lottery Tickets

The exploding popularity of the lottery pool that has most of the country gambling on Preacher Firestone's six month hellstorm sermon has now tied an estimated 3/5ths of the money in circulation in Canada to lottery tickets. The gambling pool, which initially would see the person who picked the day on which Firestone would get tired and go home winning the money has shifted to determine the day and time he will die, since that is the only logical conclusion to a person staying awake and talking for six months without eating, drinking or cutting his nails. “He's going to poke himself in the eye with a fingernail, and that's an easy infection.” resident expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder has warned. “From there it's a short trip to a brain infection, because the germs hop a ride to the brain on the things we see, and then police will gun him down when the rage fits start. I have money on it happening November 22, around 3pm.” Devotee's of Firestone have tried several times to cut his fingernails for him, but he hasn't allowed his hands to be still long enough for anyone to do so. This has led to several devotees being dragged away for stabbing at him with nail clippers, which experts are also saying is a potential way he could die, so TSA was right to throw out your grooming kit.

While Firestone has become a phenomenon in the academic world for defying so much of what we know about how humans stay alive, his biggest impact has been an economic one. With so much of so many people's money tied up in lottery tickets, Canadian's have begun to put off making big ticket purchases, tanking the housing and automotive markets. Both have taken big hits in the last quarter with projections for the coming quarter expected to fall even lower. “We can't sell our houses!” spokesman for the Local Reality Board Sinead Bruce-Lee said. “Someone needs to drop an anvil on Firestone so we can get on with our lives! He's distracting the Canadian people from their duty to keep this country going! What will happen when we don't have money to pay our bus drivers and farmers and babysitters? This country will collapse!”

The lottery has taken off because of the perceived immediacy of Firestone's demise, and has spurred thousands of Canadian's to begin lining up at lottery retailers to buy tickets for every minute that becomes available. The purchasing of tickets is regulated by provisions tracked through in an omnibus budget bill, and stipulates that one person can buy only one ticket for a one minute block that is selected sequentially by a super-computer that allocates minutes in an advancing two week block, causing a round the clock circulation of people surviving off Mountain Dew and fake hot dogs while constantly moving to the back of the line for their chance to be the one person out of all the lottery retailers across Canada to get in at the right second and claim the ticket for that minute. Thankfully everyone is so tired from the marathon ordeal that no one involved has any energy to spend on violence, so the insane country-wide lottery orgy has so far proceeded in an orderly and easy fashion as it eats all of Canada's money.

Firestone has been asked to comment on the effect he is having on Canada and the world at large. If we had to guess, we're pretty sure that his response has something to do with Google being the omnipotent energy that all living beings will join with to live a blissful existence in everlasting electric joy, but the sentence he spoke was too long for a human to sit through, or even comprehend on any realistic level, and the batteries in the recorder died before anything resembling a period came between any of the words, so no one knows actually what he thinks about any of this.

New Findings Suggest Italians Prefer Justice over Science

Italian courts have sentenced a group of Italian scientists from the Italian Risk Assessment Bureau to six years in Italian prison for not telling Italian people to be worried about something that statistically wasn't going to happen, leading experts to conclude that Italian people will continue to serve their idea of justice even if it is at odds with reasoning and logical faculties. Local expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder is ambivalent about the verdict. “This is an alternately great and horrible day for science, horrible because this perversion of justice is making me sick, but great because watching the Italian people bypass the logic humans use to guide decision making so they could satisfy their revenge drive could potentially point to the missing link.” he said Thursday. “The scientific community has had their theories about the Italian's place in the evolutionary ladder, and we've been waiting for them to make this kind of unevolved decision for a while.”

The specific perversion of justice, Goose-Shredder points out, is that the probability of a massive earthquake shaking Italy is exactly as high now as it was when those scientists were asked to convene for a short while and waste their time discussing tremors, as the earth has an estimated 3900 tremors a day. “Tremors are not a predictor of greater seismic activity. If scientists put any stock in tremors there would be 3900 earthquake warnings a day. Stack that against the average number of earthquakes measuring above 6.0 on the richter scale per day, like the one that hit Italy in 2009 and caused 309 deaths, and tremors would predict large earthquakes exactly 1.2% of the time. Out of 100. That's a horrible score, and something that is right only 1% of the time should be ignored. That's called science.”

Despite the reputation dashing verdict, the news has piqued the international interest in a country that barely even crosses the minds of people eating pizza and put Italy on the forefront of daily conversations. “I feel like I have a real understanding of them now,” citizen Danny said late Thursday outside Piero's, “Watching them playing the class bully because they think their amateur hindsight is more valid than an expert's foresight really makes Italy make sense. No kidding these people have fascism in their history, sided with the Nazi's and elected Berlusconi. ”

While most of the world is shaking their head at the decision, the head of the Catholic church is not. In a statement made early Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI praised the court's decision, saying “Fuck yeah ya went biblical on poindexter maFUCK.” He then turned his back on the crowd to begin slapping a mural of Copernicus being burned at the stake and screamed “We don't need no water” several times. At this point his hat fell off because everyone who has figured out that a hat with a high centre of gravity needs an anchor point at the bottom gets accused of sciencery and chased out of the Vatican. Witnesses say that he has the whitest hair of any human ever, and that people should start throwing water balloons full of purple hair dye at him because damn, that would be hilarious. Just imagine him walking up to the Queen with purple hair. She would, like, gasp at the impropriety. At least 15 people said exactly that after the Pope's hat fell off.

Phoning it in: Imagination as the Ultimate Evil

I've been mixing Nyqil and scotch again. I would call my cold remedy a “Sweet Dream” if it didn't induce waves of nightmares where your legs don't work and Grandma has a knife. It's an attrition remedy, something that stirs up all the evil viruses in you and pushes them out your skin. That's where those nightmares come from, all the evil swirling, so even Grandma in her wool sweater, the one place where the world always feels soft and shapeless and bearable turns over and it's just as out-to-get-you as any other midnight mugging in a Staples parking lot. You wake up soaked in sweat feeling like you've been dragged across asphalt and you have to get up for an hour so your bed dries out and you don't catch your death, but that's the evil leaving you. It's why you feel so fantastic, so Sound of Music-ey when you get over an illness. All the evil has been sweated out and you can run amongst the other humans to throw all the beautiful ideas together, and it feels like harmony as you walk down the crisp autumn streets. It feels so good to be doing something. This will edge out into the usual ambivalence by about 2pm on your first “cured” day, once you remember what life looks like, but getting over a cold rules, is what I'm saying. Feeling good feels good.

I'm blaming this one on kids. It's the kid's fault. There was a family function this weekend with a bunch of sub-4-year-olds running around. I drank some of the imaginary tea, which turned out to be a very real cup of rhinovirus. The kids don't go to school yet, so I don't know how the cesspool of germs they cart around is so potent, so beyond anything my adult body has encountered. As we age, it's not as if were exposed to fewer contagions, what with public transit, workplaces, bars etc. We still get into situations where we're packed together breathing a lot of other people's air and touching the same doorknobs. We just have the immunity for contagions, so we get sick less often as we age. So how do the bugs children have seem to be stronger? Why can't I fight them? How is it that an adult's defences are useless against a pint sized attack?

Is it the childlike creativity? Is it the imaginary tea? Is this the trap? The play, the interaction as the place where the bugs are introduced. Part of being an adult means being allowed your own personal space. It starts at the point where you become too heavy to pick up, so your parents can't sweep you up in their arms whenever they like. That's the beginning of personal space. As we learn that we can actually have our own space our growth in size means the tantrums we throw to enforce that personal space start ramping up into dangerous territory. We stop getting our toys out of a shared chest and start getting our personal controller that only we touch for the duration of the mario-kart session, and obviously video-games mark the end of a shared, imaginative play. The point where play becomes rote, more a matter of re-spawn than re-imagining, and we all become wirelessly connected, sharing the experience but none of the germs.

Imagination is the means through which germs infect us, or rather, it manifests in kids who lack the perceived boundaries we grow as adults and spreads through their willingness to play without them. In childhood, play gives us a reason to ignore the barriers that the learned personal space creates later on, and leads to all the diseases that adults blame on children after-the-fact. Since we can't just crush their little dreams by not drinking the imaginary tea, adults play along, and end up getting the sniffles because of it. Imagine that. A world without sickness is a world without imaginings.

I don't know why we allow this imagination thing, because it turns out it's bad for adults as well. There was a study published this week linking creativity and mental illness, and here's another saying that writers as a group had incidents of mental illness in numbers 20x the general population. Imagination, coming back around to make us ill. Who knew that allowing a person's creativity to chase down it's own ideas would cause an anxiety disorder when it dreams up every possible scenario that could kill a human in every situation that person finds themselves in. Among other things that are bad, like schizophrenia causing the strange, outlying thoughts that can inspire originality in art. I've always thought that creativity was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, certain neurons misfiring and accidentally creating the ah-ha! moments that people call imagining. It's bad for us, people, and we have to get rid of it. For the sake of our tonsils and our sanity. This means no more mapping DNA structure, no new movies and no new ice cream flavours. Bacon Avacado will be the last innovation to come out of Baskin Robbins. We're shutting down this creativity thing for good.

Wait, I'm also remembering that I washed the dishes after cake, which means I touched every utensil. The boundary might have broke right there and caused the sickness. Never mind the boycott. Continue your imaginings. It's not bad for you. Just never do anything nice for anyone ever again, because it might make you sick.

Watford Auto Fire Rages into Fourth Week

A fire started by a celebratory cannon-shot is stretching into it's fourth week of existence behind the Watford Arena with the local volunteer fire brigade powerless to combat the blaze. “With all the gasoline and plastics cars just burn too hot, there's no use putting water on it.” Fire-Chief Mikey said yesterday. “And the town residents just keep crashing more cars into it. We lost count at well over one hundred. That was Monday. Last week.”

The townspeople of Watford have been spent the past month crashing cars into the fire and claiming the insurance, trading up for nicer and nicer vehicles. “I'm stopping when I get a Bentley,” One townsperson who refused to give his name said. “I'm slowly building up equity in my car. I started with an '89 Taurus, and earlier today I crashed a two year old G6, with General Motors paying an extra eight months of 'therapy' to cover the carnage!” The anonymous man then skipped away yelling, “Keep rollin' rollin' rollin'!”

Avoiding arrest for willfully plowing a car into a fire is a difficult manoeuvre for the Watfordians. They can't be seen making the car crash, so they start from over a kilometer away with the car pointed at the fire and wedge the gas pedal down with a chunk of wood. If the car hits the fire all evidence of the fraud is burned up, so there is no reasonable means for the insurance company to refuse payout and no crime that the police can accurately charge. By saying that the accelerator got stuck down and that they were lucky to bail out before they died the citizens can also milk a payment from the auto company for lingering mental duress. The auto companies can afford to settle with a few thousand for counseling because they were given tens of billions in taxpayer money not that long ago. “It's called trickle down economics, bitches get paid!” is a common phrase yelled by participants in the fraud, along with the chorus from the 2000 Limp Bizkit classic “Rollin'”. Just imagine about fifty people grabbing their crotches and pretend-steering-a-car-off-a-cliff around a pile of burned out steel shells. Jesus.

Before the citizens started getting their aim dialed in several cars missed the fire and plowed into the concrete facade of the arena. The broken concrete building, strewn auto parts, scattered glass and roaring fire has some residents hoping that a tornado hits the town. “We know tornadoes don't really 'clean' but it might spread out the debris in a helpful manner.” president of the Watford Optimist Club Dave Greene said Thursday, “Like when my eight year old doesn't want to finish his baked beans, so he spreads them around his plate so it looks like there's less. We could go for that right now, but our town is the plate and the beans are car parts and fire.”

Insurance companies are looking for any possible reason to not pay out any money, and have hired the husband of local outragee Sandra to take their case to court. The question to be resolved now is whether the Watford Parsley Festival committee, an organization who's 2011 budget was $43, could be at fault for starting the blaze by firing the cannon that blew up the car, which would mean an organization with no money in the bank could owe hundreds of thousands to the insurance companies, with the money possibly coming straight out of the homes and businesses of local citizens. A now sober Ovaltine Goose-Shredder has volunteered to argue in court on behalf of the town. “Really, anything I can do to fuck up that guys day, I will, your honour.” Goose-Shredder said of Sandra's husband at the Thursday court-date. He then argued that the start of the fire was an act of God. “According to the preacher Firestone, God is in everything, including cannonballs. The guy has been talking for six months straight and on August 21st he specifically said God is in cannonballs.” The Judge found no reason to dispute this, and qualified the ruling by saying that he didn't necessarily buy the God thing but he "really hate[s] insurance companies. Gavel. Gavel. Gavel."

This is good news for the residents of Watford, as they will get to keep all the money that has been paid out and presumably continue to take advantage of the legal loophole a trunk-full of exploding grain alcohol has opened up. Dirtbag Terry has claimed twelve cars so far. “My buddy has an auto wrecking yard, I bought six cars from him this week, but they keep getting burned up.” he said Thursday evening. “Damnedest thing.” When asked what he might do with the money. Dirtbag Terry said that he was going to invest in lottery tickets. “I could buy a lot of Mexico with that talking preacher man lotto. It's at about $8 billion right now.”

Environmental experts are hopeful that the residents of Watford will collect enough money to stop crashing cars into fire within the coming weeks and the blaze comes under control, as incidents of asthma amongst Watford children have raised 4500% since black smoke began choking the town. Any hope that some hard hitting journalism could bring an end to the fire was dashed when I showed up, since Piss-Awesome Journalism has little to do with facts and isn't taken seriously by anyone.

Live(?) Blogging Not Watching the American Presidental Debate

9:00 – I turned on the TV and Mitt Romney was talking right at me. Apparently shifting off foreign oil dependency and having a North American centric energy policy will create 4 million new jobs. I didn't know it took 4 million people to flood an arctic environmental sanctuary with oil. I could do it with just under 1000. There's my bid. Your move, America.

9:02 – You see what politics does to me? I just low-balled America's bid to kill Puffins. I just assumed they would do the worst. Granted, that's kind of their track record, but I don't want to live like this. I don't want to make plans to ruin things more efficiently than America could. I want to forget what a bad person I am, and how fucked this planet is. I'm changing channels, stamped it, no erasies.

9:05 – Matthew Perry has a new show! Chandler was always my favourite. I can already feel the existential dread melting off me. It was really nice of NBC to let Global run a new episode of Go On, even though NBC is showing the debate. Letting another network scoop them with their own show. No wonder they fired Dan Harmon.

9:23 – Holy pathos! This is actually a good show. It's funny, it's got some heart. Dead wife is kind of an easy premise, but you have to start somewhere so I'm always more forgiving at the start of a season. I even gave 2 Broke Girls like 6 whole weeks to get their shit together before ignoring it completely. They were like 3 years late on the cupcake boutique thing and Whitney Cummings is involved. There was no way that could ever be a good show and I still put some time in. I'm so patient! How 'bout me, world?

9:30 – A show about men's questionable parenting skills? Click.

9:31 – Had to cross the debate on a few channels (old time cable, kids). The economy. Ugh, right?

9:34 – Twilight? That guy wolfed out and it doubled his body mass? Where did that even come from? Are they just full of air? How are they creating extra body mass out of nothing? That's not how the world works. You can't make something out of nothing. Next.

9:44 – A TVO documentary about an organic sheep farming family? Sure.

9:47 – Some really pretty shots of people staring at the horizon, but organic farming is exactly as boring as you'd think.

9:52 – Potassium deficient soil. Ugh, right? I'm setting my hopes on 10 o'clock.

10:05 – May have hit paydirt with this farming thing. A girl was talking about how she gave up hoping that there wouldn't be any man made environmental catastrophes, that she couldn't stand to watch the world destroy itself anymore so she moved out to the country to grow her own food. It resonated with the hour-ago me. I'm sick of seeing a world that frequently resembles a hell. I'm sick of listening to some slick proto-human standing up and telling me that they're going to fix something about the way humans interact and make it better for everyone once they have all the power. I'm jaded. I can't see a politician standing up to fix something without assuming they're going to destroy something else. I don't trust. I made fun of how boring it was, but at least the organic farming life is simple and somewhat cut off from all the nonsense that is giving the rest of us psychic brain tumours. I'm not saying I want to move away and farm. Our cities are fascinating places where a lot of people do interesting things and I wouldn't want to be cut off from that. Just don't be surprised if I walk away when you start talking politics.

10:12 – Late night pizza snack? Don't mind if I do.

10:50 – Homemade pizza snack took just as long as I'd hoped. We're mired in analysis now. I always love hearing talking points a second time from someone of dubious pedigree. Like that time I went out to a certified dog breeder to get a golden retriever and had a guy that runs a chop-shop repeat everything he said. It's the cold pizza of listening to things, and people who don't like hot pizza are fucked and need to get off this planet.

11:25 – Just read this back. There is no escaping the debate. The psychic toll was still extracted from my skull. The politicians have our souls. Mercy. Mercy please.

Canada Just Happy Iran Noticed

In a rare manoeuvre that experts are calling “a double take-sies back-sies” Canada has severed diplomatic ties with Iran, while Iran has called Canada stupid and seriously, why would you ever want to go there and also they're assholes.

Earlier this week Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister told Piss-Awesome Journalism to “Tell that Iran that we're not talking to them.” and someone else with some time to waste ran with the story, enabling another all too common instance of Canada behaving like a smug feline that pisses in your shoe and hopes you notice before it slinks away, but if you don't notice well-then-that-just-proves-the-point-now-doesn't-it. Luckily for Canada's ego, Iran acknowledged Canada's little stunt. On Wednesday, the Iran Foreign Ministry issued a travel advisory for the citizen they let travel to the Great Satan by mistake. According to the Iranian Foreign Ministry there is a fear that Iranian citizens in Canada might be targeted because we're afraid of their awesomeness or something.

What is already being described as a diplomatic row was escalated Wednesday during Iranian President Mahmaoud Adminijihappab's speech to the United Nations General Assembly. In a laid back, free-formed speech Adminijaab expanded on his Foreign Ministry's points, saying “Have you ever seen Saskatoon? It's more depressing than Iraq, because at least you know why Iraq sucks. Iraq got bombed to shit. Iraq has a reason. Saskatoon just sucks. I mean the whole city smells like wasted potential, like rotten cookie dough. It's just embarrassing.” Admittajabb then ran over his allotted time when he picked up the mic and started doing some improvised crowd work. “Hey Poland's here, Poland's in the crowd. You know what I like about Poland? Cheap whores. Heyo! But seriously, Poland is full of whores and the righteous will burn them for it.” It was at this point that the delegations from USA, Canada and a few European Union members walked out of the UN General Assembly hall in protest. “The guy has had years to put together a solid twenty minutes, and here he is making up nonsense and wasting everyone's time.” a delegate from the USA said, “Every year he seems less like an evil mastermind and more like someone who wants to be an evil mastermind. It's about time for him to pack it in.”

International relations experts have sighed heavily and turned away from their lunches to speak on the now full fledged and totally real diplomatic row. “It was a pragmatic decision on Canada's part,” Ovaltine Goose-Shredder said Thursday, “Canada barely has any economic relations with Iran because of the economic sanctions and Canada wouldn't be taking the lead in any diplomatic talks. It will be the United States or an International Regulatory Body that gets to sit down at the grown-ups table. Canada decided to stop paying someone to sit in a room and twiddle their thumbs and then made a big show about leaving. And some goon took the bait. This is two countries enabling each others worst habits. Canada gets to pretend they matter and Iran gets to play the victim. Now let me get back to my chicken salad.” Goose-Shredder then spent the rest of the interview complaining about the chopped olives in his sandwich, because honestly, who does that?

Probably the biggest revelation of the day came when Canada's Immigration Minister admitted that there has been a systematic, legislated framework for mistreating Iranian citizens within Canada for decades. “I'm surprised it took them this long to catch on,” he said Thursday, “We lead Iranians straight through customs and into a snake pit. Well, that or they get a choice to fight a moose. If they win we let them go back to Iran. If they lose they get snake pitted. I don't know why this is news to anyone, the fights are broadcast late nights on CTV. Ultimate Moose Fights is the highest rated anything, ever.” The Right-Honourable Minister then elaborated on exactly why this diplomatic row started in the first place, saying “People just don't think Canada is capable of behaving badly. I mean, no one even remembers that whole Afgan torture thing! It's about time Canada changed it's mild-mannered image. We're going to start pissing people off. This means that from now on Prime Minister Harper will wear a leather jacket and swing a bike chain at international gatherings, so watch out, Cambodia.” The Immigration Minister then dropped the mic and walked away from the podium yelling, “Yeah, who's got the balls now?”

Experts agree, still not Canada.

Season Opener at the Watford Parsley Festival

As summer winds down, once the beaches around Grand Bend have turned into a biohazard unfit for human recreation but somehow not unfit for human consumption, the rural citizens of Southern Ontario turn their focus inland to celebrate the things that grew there like tomatoes, livestock and monster trucks. Mostly known for being unnecessary, The Watford Parsley Festival is an event where everything from weather to good ideas to public hygiene starts a long downhill slide, making it widely regarded for firing the resounding cannon-shot which marks the line between Summer and Fall. Pushing aside the terrible implications for humanity, Watford does exist, and it promised a ride, a band and food, so Piss-Awesome Journalism was on hand to be awash in the revery, y'all.

Set on a field behind the Watford town arena, the festival kicked off on Thursday evening with the parsley bake off, an annual tradition wherein coloured ribbons are awarded for the most creative and delicious use of parsley. One woman baked her parsley, which gave it a nice crispness. One woman deep-fried a bunch of parsley. The resulting dish was ashy and soaked in oil and possibly made a bunch of people vomit, but given that a great many things about Watford are vomit inducing we'll never know for sure. The winner of the parsley bake off was an out-of-towner who asked that her name be redacted because she doesn't want anyone to know she was in Watford, since Watford based discrimination is totally fair game in Canada and will be for a long time, so she could lose her job. The woman braised the parsley for hours with cherry wood, which gave the dried parsley a smoky flavour. It was enough to give her 1^st place and was pretty much the only nice thing that happened all weekend.

After everyone got parsley stuck in their teeth it was time for a Lynard Skynnard tribute band that I can't print name of without feeling really bad for Black people. The band came out and played Sweet Home Alabama eight times before leaving the stage due to explosion. Just in front of the stage was Piss-Awesome Journalism's resident expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder with his arm around the recently released from prison Dirtbag Terry. Both were carrying mason jars half full of clear liquid. When asked how he was enjoying the festival, Goose-Shredder yelled, “This guy found me some moonshine!” and began listing facts about parsley that could only come out of a broken brain. “Hey guy! Hey!! Listen. Parsley is NOT poor man's oregano. Parsley is important shit. Parsley was used as a fuel stabilizer for the shuttle program. Parsley makes bears sneeze to death. Parsley set the world record for high jump in 1976.” Goose-Shredder then stumbled back a few steps and turned his attention to his cell phone, saying, “Here, but I'm gonna get serious about my job though now. I'm going to get some real facts, Betty. I'm gonna tell my wife how serious about my job I'm gonna get.” Upon hearing this, a good friend thought it would be best if Goose-Shredder 'lost' his moonshine, which Dirtbag Terry was holding. While Goose-Shredder was re-learning how to send a text message, Dirtbag Terry threw a half-full jar at one of his friends on stage and was quickly escorted into a ditch by Constable McBrady O'Riley, who was moonlighting as security for the festival. Const. O'Riley used his police skills to find out exactly which car the bootleggers were selling out of so he could extort a percentage of their profits. Goose-Shredder didn't notice Dirtbag Terry had disappeared once his attention returned to the fairgrounds, nor did he recall that he had been in possession of some 180 proof grain alcohol only minutes before. He might not be an expert on anything anymore, since he soaked his brain in poison, and everyone at Piss-Awesome Journalism hopes for no long-term damage.

In the middle of the band's eighth encore of Sweet Home Alabama a firework display was set off to put a cap on the first night of the Watford Parsley Festival. After three green explosions and a smattering of sarcastic applause the cannon that symbolizes the line between our idyllic Summers and humanity's inevitable downfall was fired. It went off with a great bang that caused at least three heart attacks and a massive fireball when the projectile struck a car full of grain alcohol in the parking lot. The fireball destroyed eight cars worth an estimated $650 and garnered a round of applause from everyone getting an insurance payout, which people in Watford call a “Job”.

The Parsley Festival continues through the weekend, with hayrides for the kids, a pancake breakfast on Saturday and the closing barbecue on Sunday. For directions, just follow the line of black smoke coming off the car fire which more Watfordians are committing insurance fraud every day. Apparently Goose-Shredder received a reply to his text message, which means it hit a random citizen. If you received a text message from Goose-Shredder Thursday night, just ignore it, and it's not sexual harassment because he thought you were his wife.

A Letter to the Editor From the Editor

Incidentally, the cops are showing up because of you. When we called for an ambulance and said that someone had set someone else's face on fire, they insisted on sending a cruiser too, to protect the ambulance. I don't want to tell you how to react to this information, because I don't know who you are and I don't care what happens to you. I don't think you crashed my party, although advertising the party as an “acid-punch freakout” led to a lot of people I don't know sneaking into my house. Little did they know that acid-punch freakout meant brawling with balloons full of hydrochloric acid taped to our knuckles, so at least they got what they deserved. People with glasses got the worst of it. When the fists hit their face, the balloons split open on the frames, so they all ended up pretty mangled. I don't want to say that they lost the acid-punch freakout party, because everyone has chemical burns, but they definitely got the worst of it.

So I don't think you're the kind of person to sneak into my house once you heard that a bitchin party was going to happen here. I just think whoever brought you doesn't want to own up to knowing you right now, because only a legitimately crazy person would think that spraying a tube of hemorrhoid cream onto a face covered with hydrochloric acid would end in anything other than a ball of flames. I guess it was the smartest thing to pull out of the medicine cabinet, but apparently it only puts out one kind of burning, and reacts violently with hydrochloric acid. And by the way, you owe me a tube of hemorrhoid cream. You can keep that one, because I would love to see the look on the face of the cop that searches your pockets. But I won't see that, because I'm not going to jail.

Seriously now, everyone will think you're crazy if you try and tell them what went down here. “How would they attach balloons to their knuckles?” they'll say, then laugh in your face and call you crazy. No one will figure out we used tape. And there are enough meth-lab explosions around here to explain away all the people with glasses showing up in the emergency room with chemically burned faces, so we're covered on that angle too.

Now I'm no lawyer, if you want to split hairs technically I'm a janitor, but don't tell anyone where you were or what you were doing when this happened. They'll give you the right to remain silent, I suggest you take full advantage. At some point during the interrogation an officer will come through the door pretending to be your friend. This is a lie. There are no friends in prison. Any of the ex-cons here will tell you that.

Oh wow, you can totally hear the sirens. There's a lot of them coming. No chance running now, what were you thinking just standing here the whole time I've been talking? Wait! Some advice. The only job they'll give you once you get out of prison will involve pushing a broom around, so don't bust your brain getting a G.E.D or anything like that while you're inside. The good part of your life is pretty much over, is what I'm saying, and I'm really proud of you actually. Taking one for the team like this. I can't believe how lucky I am to have such swell friends, who bring people I don't know around to pin crimes on. Oh wow, there's like 3 cruisers on the lawn. You should lie down with your hands behind your head, they like it when they get to put you on the ground. If you're out in time, you should come to my next party, a Northern Michigan key party! You pick a set of keys out of a bowl, and then your hands are duct taped to the steeri.... okay, I guess you want to hear your rights. Thanks for coming!

A Programming Update from James Betty

Holy hiatus! I'm taking a summer off from nonsense, in hopes that it will be less nonsensical when I return to it in the fall. Also, I would be disappointed in myself if I didn't give my full attention to falling into oceans this summer. Fun fun fun.


Shopping List for Next Season:

45% more plot coherence
Keep OGS levels consistent
Knock off the Cussing: This is a family blog
20% more shenanigans
38% less asinine trash


Over the summer I might just start posting asinine trash. I have a bunch lying around in various documents and folders, so watch out for that. The Piss Awesome Journalism you know and love will resume in September! See ya then!

Love,
James Betty

Holy Shit it's The End! (Of the season)

Oh my God, Brimstone. Legit brimstone! At least legit talk about brimstone. Talk about The End of Everything! With capital E's! That's what 34 year old Ted Firestone is spouting off about in a marathon preaching session currently occurring in an alley behind Jacks in London, Ontario. As many people as can fit into the alley, it only being the width of one car, are jammed together to hear what is probably the most coherent prophesizing of the end of days we've seen this year. The event is being broadcast online, with clips of five to ten minutes at a time of Firestone's rattling auctioneer scripture are being recorded by people in attendance and posted to youtube, each overlapping so that a running manuscript of what is being said can't be put together as Firestone enters the 50th straight hour of his Hellfire sermon.

A theme of the sermon is starting to emerge as journalists tweet from the venue itself and attempt to analyze the videos. Ted Firestone is not affiliated with any church or religious sect. He preaches from atop a dumpster and claims his connection to God is much more personal than anything found in “the doctrine faiths.” Firestone ate a handful of psilocybin mushrooms in his early 20's and thought he saw God. In his own words, “I saw a bright light and his name was Gabriel! He had come from the heavens to impart a feeling within me, to put the Lord within me. Transferred! Inhaled! The Angel showed me with my eyes and my lungs the process whereby the Lord comes into your life! You must breathe Him in and know He is there! For He is here amongst us! We must hurry, for I have seen the horn, and it blares the sound of Google! Google shall unite all humanity in understanding, so we can show God that we are standing together in the wholeness of our humanity! Ready to be received into Heaven! Ready to receive his rapture!”

Ovaltine Goose-Shredder, an expert in both Theology and Getting Fucked on Drugs, is denying that what we are seeing is the beginning of any significant movement. “I don't even have to talk about whether or not Google is the force that will unite humanity for the Second Coming. Firestone took mushrooms and immediately forgot what hallucinogens do to the brain. I suspect the general public will have the same reaction to him. And that he will have the same reaction to himself. People on mushrooms can't concentrate worth shit, is what I'm saying. This will all be forgotten by Saturday.”

But other citizens aren't so quick to dismiss Firestone. Citizen Danny spoke late Wednesday outside the Coveant Garden Market in downtown London as many people from among the established faiths  began taking up collections on street-corners in Firestone's name. “Yeah, everyone will forget about him when he shuts up, but he's been going for 50 hours. He might never stop, and then what?”

Axel Hjalmar was quick to dismiss the preaching as “the ramblings of a mind compromised by drug use.” Hjalmar posted a letter online that was picked up quickly by the major news outlets in which he lambasted Firestone's endorsement of what he called “a dangerous faith in the giant to not destroy you,” and that anyone who would turn their will over to such a monolithic entity “would be granted the imprisonment that they seek.”

Betting pools have sprung up across the country with prizes going to the person who can correctly guess the number of hours that Firestone will last, with side bets being placed on whether the sermon will be stopped by his own heart giving out, his own indifference or police intervention. There are talks of a nationwide pool in the works. One thing is for certain, the world that Firestone is outlining is not necessarily something we want to happen if we're all going to gamble on him. “If you do not accept the Lord, if you do not allow Google to unite you with the rest of humanity and are not raised up to heaven on the day of the rapture, I pity the physical existence you will be left with. Because they have been passed over, because they have been left behind, humanity will degrade in a manner unseen in our recorded history. There shall be strife, there shall be murder, there shall be pointless lusting after resources. The gas stations will be incinerated. It shall be a world of work. You'll have to walk everywhere and the only restaurant left will be Taco Bell. Suicide shall be the foremost pass-time amongst those left behind, for all remaining will realize that they have no reason to remain on Earth. That the point of living has passed them by. That they didn't get a G-Mail account when they had the chance! Trust in Google and we shall be delivered unto the Lord!”

Donald Trump Turns Canada Gay

All was right with the world until last week, when it was revealed that a contestant in the Donald Trump owned Miss Universe Canada pageant had been born a man but underwent sexual reassignment surgery when she was 19. Jenna Talackova was removed from the pageant last week but has since been told that if she is legally confirmed as a woman by the Government of Canada she will be allowed to re-join the competition. The dramatic reveal has sparked discussions around the world concerning the non-inclusion of transgendered people in many legal senses. In other circles the discussion has centred on the ickieness of looking at a woman who used to be a dude.

Local Outragee Sandra was first to sound off on the issue because she yelled the loudest. “My husband would have watched the Miss Universe qualifier and not even known he was gay for tolerating a current woman that was a former man. Our marriage would have been a sham, just like that! And sham marriages lead to murder and teen pregnancy like in the Lifetime movies. Our kids would have tried pot!” she said, adding “Not that he watched it because he knows that if he looks at another woman in a form fitting dress I'll kill him, but if he did, my God the consequences for us all!”

The dramatic revelation has created widespread insecurity amongst younger males, with a majority of them consistently wincing and slapping at their own faces over the past week in a vain attempt to get the image of the Transsexual Beauty Queen out of their heads. Citizen Danny commented on the reactions of his peers early Wednesday on Oxford, “These guys don't even realize that what they like about Jenna is what they objectively like about women, they just get hung up on the 'born with a penis' thing. They can't chill and not freak out because they're not even trying to understand why they might be superficially attracted to a tranny, which is because they like women.” Danny did concede that even though there is logically no reason for men to question their own sexuality for finding someone who used to be a man but now looks like a woman hot, he can understand why they're having a hard time getting past it. “There is a certain point in a man's development when he can't separate finding something beautiful and wanting to fuck it. That's why I got caught fucking a bouquet of roses when I was eighteen. The libido just hasn't calmed down enough yet, so every time the picture of Jenna pops into their head, they still... find her beautiful. When these guys are slapping themselves, they're physically trying to beat their hormones into submission.”

Trump, riding the explosion of controversy his pageants exclusion of transgendered peoples has created, introduced a new reality show that has begun shooting in Canada and will premiere on NBC in the fall. “We film ten guys watching the Miss Universe pageant and getting all icked out.” he said in New York Wednesday, “then it turns into a comedy when they start doing ridiculous things to regain their perceived loss of masculinity. I predict I'll make another hundred million on this one. Ya dont bet against the Trump!”

One of the participants in Trump's new show, a faceless frat-boy, was reached for comment on the steps of the Theta-Delta-Kai house. He was shirtless and pouring beer on his chest when we spoke. “Joh ma gawd, Brosef – BROSEF! It's a disgrace, yo. Canada's hottest bitch could've been a dude. A DUDE! BROSEF!! As if America didn't already think we were fags, man! Hey America! I'll punch my best bro in the face, right now America!” He did punch his buddy in the face, and the rest of the interview was him alternately doing Arsenio-Whoops and barking like a rottweiler until his voice gave out. Out of breath and collapsed on the ground, the faceless frat-boy concluded by saying, “Just tell me you love me America, that you're proud of me America, fatherland... land of like, fathers and stuff,” proving once again that if a person does Arsenio-Whoops for long enough it will ruin them emotionally and manifest their darkest secrets.

After the announcement by Donald Trump, resident legal expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder was optimistic about Jenna's chances of re-joining the pageant. “It has been left to the Government to decide if she is a woman or not, and they said she was a woman on her driver's license years ago. She should have no problem re-joining the pageant.” he said before commenting on the contest rules that caused the problem in the first place. “Setting aside whether or not Jenna believing she was born a woman makes her a true woman, the contest is about finding persons who fit the criteria of womanliness, so anyone that fits those criteria should be allowed to participate, male or female. I don't know why a contest that superficial would bother looking at chromosomes.”

Swedish Guy Forms Underground Resistance to Google

News that Google has been cloning smart-phone users for the purposes of market research and then killing them has met with mixed reviews from the public, with reactions ranging from outright anger to total indifference. “So they know I like pizza, big fucking deal,” Citizen Danny said Wednesday on Richmond, “They're not killing me, just a cardboard cutout of me, which is pretty much all a clone is. It doesn't have any of my memories, it's thoughts and fears are it's own, so it's no skin off my back.” On the other end of the reaction spectrum is Google's Actually Slaughtering People, a group who's website says they are focused on actively destroying Google's new marketing scheme through awareness campaigns and active resistance. The leader and spokesman for GASP is a Swedish national named Axel Hjalmar, who's rabid articles have spread across the internet in recent weeks condemning Google's actions, demanding they cease the cloning program and insisting Google stop their policy of total media silence since announcing the program.

Axel Hjalmar is a hard man to find. In an effort to speak to him one starts with the people sympathetic to his cause and tries to pin him down from there. After weeks of trying to contact him this reporter finally received word that he could meet Hjalmar. To this effect I was blindfolded by a group of his fellow resistance fighters in a port city on the Atlantic coast and taken on a two day car ride, three different helicopters, forty minutes in a rickshaw and finally a short walk down a flight of stairs. When the blindfold came off I was faced with the man - tall, blonde, totally Swedish and standing over a topographical map of Antarctica in a dank and dark steel room with water dripping from the ceiling. Here is the full transcript of my conversation with Axel Hjalmar, leader of the underground resistance to Google's tightening grip on the world:

James Betty: You're a hard man to find, Mr. Hjalmar.

Axel Hjalmar: Yes. I prefer it.

JB: So you don't get many Christmas cards then?

AH: [steely silence]

JB: Sooo... you don't visit your mother often then?

AH: Occasionally I mail her a page from the current Farmer's Almanac. She knows what that means. She knows I am alive. That is all the comfort I can spare.

JB: You run a pretty tight ship.

AH: How do you know this is a boat?

JB: I, uh, don't...know... this is a boat.

AH: Good. That was a test, to see if you know you are on a boat.

JB: We are definitely not on a boat.

AH: Why did you do that?

JB: Do what?

AH: You winked at your tape recorder. Why did you do that?

JB: [stuttering] I was just hitting on it, you know, practicing my game for when I get back on land... where ladies are.

AH: I told you how important security was to us. This is not the awareness I envisioned a journalist creating. You promised discretion in your questioning. It is very difficult to hide from a company that has it's own satellites and cars driving around documenting every inch of the world's public domain. You have no idea the setback you have created for GASP's ultimate operation.

JB: Wait, that sounds important, what is GASP's ultimate operation?

AH: You must leave. You can keep your tape recorder and do what you wish with the contents. GASP has certain free democratic principles that we will not allow ourselves to break, but GASP will be packing up and moving it's entire operation to a new secure location...

JB: [interrupting] One that can't sink?

AH: Yes, one that cannot sink. Now leave. You have already wasted enough of my time.

JB: Okay, if I want to contact you should I...

AH: [interrupting] Leave meddlesome typist!

JB: Right, I'll just...

[sounds of scuffling]

JB: [muffled] You're moving anyways, do I need the bag on my head to leave?

AH: Yes, at the moment we prefer it. I bid you good day, Mr. Betty.

[footsteps]

That didn't go well. No information was gained as to the details of GASP's ultimate plan for ending Google's new marketing scheme, but the bag they put on my head kind of smelled like crayfish. More details to come as they become available.

Slippery the Seal Escapes; Great Lakes Turned into Unprecedented Ecological Disaster

The sea lion exhibit at Storybook Gardens was having a storybook opening with the return of it's star attraction, the re-animated corpse of Slippery the Seal, drawing record crowds until two weeks ago when a curtain was erected around the entire exhibit. The park had initially said the exhibit was closed for renovations, but Ovaltine Goose-Shredder held a press conference early Wednesday and announced that was not the case. “Firstly, I'd just like to apologize to all the humans, and animals too, I guess. Anything with ears really. I'm really sorry about violating the sanctity of death. It won't happen again.” He then went on to announce that the unthinkable had happened. “Slippery the Seal has escaped again, pretty much exactly like he did last time, except he took all his new friends with him.”

The three other sea lions in the enclosure had initially been terrified of the re-animated Slippery. “They stayed up for days just screaming, and you could tell Slippery was put off by that,” Goose-Shredder said, “He exhibited signs of depression. He moped in the corner, he wouldn't eat. Initially he was not happy about being alive again, absolutely.” The saving grace was that eventually the other sea lions would grow tired and stop screaming in terror. “Apparently Slippery bit them on the neck when they fell asleep, and they became something akin to zombies like him. They were totally right to be afraid of him, and I'll definitely think twice about locking a living thing in a pit with a monster in the future.”

The other sea lions being turned into zombies was initially a weight off Goose-Shredder's mind. “I was really worried that Slippery wouldn't be able to re-integrate with his kind. Just imagine if no one ever wanted to hug you again, couldn't do anything besides scream at you, it would be the worst. Like growing up with Vladimir Putin for a father. I was physically ill thinking about the existence I had brought Slippery into. It was so painful seeing my creation completely unloved by his own kind,” he said, pointing to a map of the Great Lakes Watershed completely shaded in red. “Luckily he has lots of friends like him now because this death-limbo thing is totally contagious. Who knew right? So it's no one's fault that the Great Lakes are pretty much completely zombified now...”

According to Goose-Shredder it has taken less than two weeks for all the creatures in the Great Lakes ecosystem to catch the zombie-esque plague. “It exploded exponentially through the ecosystem once the sea lions were introduced...by accident.” Scientists confirm that the creatures now zombified cannot breed, but can't die either, so the entirety of the Great Lakes is now frozen in a stasis that will not change until the earth is destroyed. “Once bitten the creatures will develop a mad bloodlust. You could ask the sea lion trainers about it, but you actually can't do that at all, so I'm going to trail off now and hope no one has any follow-up questions,” Goose-Shredder said, “In an unrelated matter, since we've seen how the bloodlust affects humans anyone caught swimming in the Great Lakes will be shot on sight.”

In an effort to protect all of humanity a crack team of zombie hunters has been deployed in guard towers erected around the perimeter of the Great Lakes, and the watershed has been re-branded the Great Zombified Lakes in an effort to raise awareness of the dangers of entering the water. “It's just a reminder that entering the lakes means forfeiting your life.” Goose-Shredder said.

Since the revelation of Slippery's escape, questions have been raised as to how involved Goose-Shredder was in the seal's flight, with accusations running from turning a blind eye to faulty safety measures to full on opening the gate for the re-animated corpses to waddle through. “I will not entertain any accusations of wrong-doing,” Goose-Shredder said, before adding an apparent non-sequitur, “We really felt that I needed to make some amends, to make some progress with a moral imperative. Sometimes in order to go forward you have to go backward. I learned that in parking lots. It's my hope that I can begin to make amends for violating the sanctity of death, even if the progress can seem counter-intuitive or even downright apocalyptic. The important thing will be that the perceived wrongs can no longer exist, and a new era of freedom can hopefully be corrected by our future Einestiens, because I'm seriously out of ideas on this one.”

Google Terrifies Everyone With New Marketing Plan

Google has launched a new smart-phone app which uses a needle/spectrometer attachment to measure and track a persons blood sugar, a representative of the company said at a press conference early Wednesday. “We're marketing this to everyone, low blood sugar can lead to dizziness, vomiting and fainting spells which can be very dangerous and even fatal while driving. It would be irresponsible for a person not to use it.”

The app and needle attachment tests a persons blood sugar and recommends healthy options such as a specific quantity of apples or orange juice to optimize it. In more dangerous cases the app can also immediately call 911 and direct an ambulance to the user using the GPS tracker in every phone. “We really feel like Google is on the cutting edge of lifesaving technology right now,” the rep said, “which is good because so many of you are dying everyday, of really mundane things sometimes, and this app just takes one thing off your mind. This company is just brilliant. You're welcome.”

For the professional on the go it also tracks blood sugar levels across weeks and spots points in a person's daily routine where their blood sugar dips to unhealthy levels. The app then recommends healthy-eating options to prevent abnormalities from occurring in the first place. “For me, the app spotted a consistent dip in my blood sugar right around two o'clock in the afternoon and recommended apple juice as a pick-me-up,” the spokesman said, holding up his phone, “It also noticed that it dipped the most on Fridays, when I would be running around trying to take as much of the workload off the coming Monday and I would only have a cup of coffee all day. Now I've changed my habits for the better. I make sure to take a full lunch on Fridays and not stress so much about what Monday will bring. This app has significantly changed my life for the better.” He then kissed his phone with a lot of tongue and the press conference went on a short hiatus while he settled that out on stage. When we got back about half of the journalists had left, so they missed the last bits of what the Google representative had to say.

“It also just happens to be possible for the app to record the user's DNA profile and upload it to Google servers.” After some awed whistles from the few remaining journalists the representative went on to explain that the company is currently building a database to log all genetic markers that may pre-dispose a person to buying or being attracted to a certain product. “This way Google can now know and market to a persons unconscious desires and tell them about products they don't even know they want.”

Towards this end, at Google's Antarctic Base there is a team of scientists dressed in primary colours cloning people out of their newly formed DNA database for the purposes of market research. “For instance, we could clone you and make you walk through a mock-up of a grocery store ten thousand times, with the end goal being when we detect that the real you is walking through a grocery store thanks to your GPS tracking smartphone, Google can send a targeted message to you knowing that 8,461 times out of 10,000 you lingered on a Delissio Frozen Pizza and suggest you buy it. It's all about knowing what a person is predisposed to do before even they are aware of it, and I think the people who advertise with us will agree that this makes us the world's cutting edge marketing firm.”

The Google rep then went to to allay any fears the public might have about their clone being brought to life in an unpoliced international zone. “Don't worry, when we're done with the market research we kill the clone. That's why we do this in Antarctica.” When asked exactly how they go about killing the clones the rep said “We let them run off and shoot them with rifles, and then they're left to the local wildlife, like God intended.”

The new app is available for download across all smart-phone platforms, while the needle/spectrometer attachment is mailed to the user after purchase. The company has already mailed out over one million free needle/spectrometer attachments and it's associated literature to prospective users but there is a buzz in the streets of a resistance movement growing amongst a segment of the population in regards to the cloning/killing portion of Google's new initiative. More details to come as they become available.

James Betty has the Sickness; Phones it in This Week

I've been sick all week. It looks like this is going to be a Monday to Friday kind of thing, which would be fine if I was getting paid, but phlegm is only trading at about $0.04/oz right now so making a living is difficult. You would have to have a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters smoking two packs a day to turn a profit at those prices. Monkeys are also notorious for ignoring spittoons, so I guess that harvesting method wouldn't work at all, actually. One more get-rich-quick scheme down the drain. Had real promise too.

I totally have an article, actually two, done this week, but I'm having trouble concentrating and just making something up seemed like a way better plan than taking something seriously. Even if what I'm looking at is utter nonsense, proofreading requires an attention to the English language that just doesn't seem appropriate right now. Also I once let a friend mix scotch and cough medicine and she turned out great so I haven't really got anything to lose by running with this. It's all uphill from here.

I've figured out why old people suck. It's daytime television's fault. The medium itself is like late-night television without the cussing and innuendo, but they still try and fill entire hours at a time with whatever wanders by. The difference is that without dick jokes you're left trying to fill time with human interest stories featuring moral plot-lines that border on goonish emotional thuggery. How old people have the energy to sustain the emotional resonance over weeks is beyond me. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they only pick up on two or three different stories and then repeat their morals at every family gathering until the part of their brain that stores it gets too mushy. Goonish emotional thuggery, I'm onto you grandma. I'm calling her out on it when we're at Easter.

The structure of these shows is strange. They're rounded, they roll all over the place. You don't see one side of anything for too long before it's tuned over. Today on Ellen Megan Fox brought up the fact that future humans went back in time and built the pyramids to give us a head start on what triangles look like and she barely got a second to talk about that before Ellen threw to commercial. I'm going to get to the bottom of this, and I don't care if there's a lesbian haircut is at the top. I'm going on a crusade on behalf of pretty people with stupid ideas everywhere. Where's my kaballah bracelet?

I was going to go on a crusade, but I'm pretty sick this week and my bed is really warm. Also the news is really bumming me out this week, so did you know that there is competitive R/C car racing? Why not, right?

Live(?) Coverage of TSN TradeCentre

12:17 - I woke up at noon to find a slow drip of content coming out of a sports network adopting a 24 hour news cycle format to cover the NHL trade deadline. It could work, but it's not the weekend so it's pretty boring. When I turned on my TV they were projecting the player selections/line match-ups for Canada's 2014 Olympic Hockey Team. Premature? Absolutely. Jonathan Toews could be playing for Al-Qaeda by then. Afghanistan could build an arena by then. A producer at TSN could figure out this is a terrible format by then. All maybe's because two years is a long time. On a day when nothing is sure to happen, there will be more to come...

12:28 – Gambling to the rescue! Gambling websites are offering 5:1 odds on James Duthie being crushed by his inability to make TradeCentre entertaining and having a complete mental breakdown live on air. Maybe I was a little too harsh on the format. Live TV kind of rules when you think about it.

12:30 - Twitter is full of smart people huh...

12:47 – The boredom is getting to the on air personalities too. Bob McKenzie and Gord Miller have stripped to the waist and are about to have a bare-knuckle boxing match for the ages. A smart network would turn on their sepia filter right about now.

12:53 – Things are actually happening! Right now the odds are pretty good that I'll be eating my words. Too bad I'm doing this Live(?) on my Word Processor so the TradeCentre bashing can't be changed. Apparently the New York Rangers have traded Sean Avery for Ron Artest. Word is they're trying to add some psychotic-unpredictability down the stretch and ditching their clownishness. Really, Ron Artest has always seemed like more of a hockey player than a hoopster.

1:01 – Jason Spezza has been traded for a go-kart. Ottawa Senators General Manager Brian Murray has said “A go-kart will give the puck away less, and be more fun.” Spezza will be a Kart-Waxer at Little Indy Go-Karts near the Playdium in Mississauga.

1:23 – Mark Crawford is announcing that the Edmonton Oilers went all Air Bud and signed a full on Polar Bear. Crawford thinks this will add some much needed grit to their roster. The signing from the Metro Toronto Zoo is conditional on the bear learning to skate on two legs. Also likes the zoo's adding Taylor Hall to the monkey pen, saying “Hopefully the chimps can keep their fingers out of his head wound.”

2:21 – Brian Murray has got Jason Spezza back from Little Indy Go-Karts for their 4^th and 5^th round picks. Murray is saying, “We need a Kart-Waxer now that we have a go-kart. Who knew? The towel boy told me to go to hell when I told him to do it, so we're glad to have Spezz back. With his familiarity with the organization he should step right into his new position with no difficulty.”

4:41 – Ha, just kidding. I got bored and made all that up. Also I napped for most of the afternoon. If there are fewer commentators at the desks I'll assume something interesting happened and look into it, but actually nothing happened so I can just watch the last twenty minutes and assume I saw everything. Excelsior!

4:54 – They've gone into silent film! The TSN panel went into a black and white silent film mode! It's a triumph of experimental journalism that's got me seriously reconsidering what I'm doing with my life. I'd given up on ever being impressed by the TSN crew, nay, I never even gave them a chance. I never thought I could be surprised by a bunch of people who had no idea what to say for 9 hours, but they slogged through the hours of doldrums to create space for the magic moments of sublime artistic re-invention they ended with, and I'm in tears. I never thought I'd say this, but I may be a hack journalist. I think I have to write a sonnet for James Duthie, or maybe I just owe him that pair of queens I bet against his mental stability.