I was in Toronto this past weekend celebrating a friend’s 30th birthday, and everytime we would turn on the television or pick up a paper I would see a smattering of articles and photos about Tiger Woods and the low impact, non-critical, car accident he was involved in on Thursday evening.

When I first saw the report on CNN, I watched for a couple minutes, they announced Tiger was not in critical condition, and so I changed the channel to probably something like Mad Men.  No big deal.

Umm.. wrong.

Apparently, its the biggest deal ever.

Apparently, the fate of the world is now resting on the fidelity and personal life of Tiger Woods.

Wait a minute? It doesn’t?!?  Well then why the hell does anybody care about this?

So Tiger Woods was in a car accident? Umm… WHO CARES?!?

So Tiger Woods possibly cheated on his wife… is anyone really surprised? Is this the first spouse to ever be unfaithful?

The media and interest in this subject is completely unbelievable to me. When will people wake up and stop assigning any sort of importance to professional athletes?

THIS article is a perfect example of the idocy and general uselessness of athletes.  Ron Artest admits to drinking Hennessey at  half time during NBA regular season games.  I can’t even decide what’s dumber, the fact that he drank during games, or the fact that he is now admitting it publicly.

The deep fascination with sports and athletes continues to boggle my mind, however Tiger-mania has certainly taken the cake recently.

Tiger Woods is just like everyone else, except he has millions of adoring fans, millions of dollars and a publicist.  The fact that he has to apologize to people for his private actions is appalling.  It doesn’t matter if Tiger Woods is sleeping with a harem of women outside of his marriage, he’s not, and never claimed to be a moral authority.

He’s just a dude that hits a tiny ball, into a tiny hole, over miles and miles of wasted green space.

I find this sort of literature extremely fascinating and with every article I feel I come one step closer to actually disconstructing each one of my own habits (good or bad). 

As I was reading at Starbucks the other day, making my way through yet another wonderful issue of Scientific American Mind, I thought of a brand new study I would love for some research neurologists to undertake.  I am honestly fascinated and painfully confused about how the brain malfunctions at such a high level that it allows someone to go out and actually purchase a HUMMER.

This study would be specifically geared towards people living within the city limits, or even those living in the suburbs, because its these gems that really need their head’s checked.

In case, those of you reading this happen to never have seen a Hummer, here’s a photo.  Yes, its ridiculous.

These vehicles were originally designed and built for the military, but even as far back as 1992 GM began bulding civilian models to sell in the retail market.   Because obviously, if these machines are good enough for the sand dunes in Kuwait, they’re good enough to drop off Sally and Alex at a soccer game in suburban Conneticut. 

I can almost guarantee that this idea came from some idiot son of a PTSD’d Gulf War Veteran who decided to go into marketing instead of enlist in the army.  His way of making daddy proud.

Officially, on the record, I consider anyone that drives a Hummer an automatic Asshole. 

Remember Monopoly, “Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. You’re an asshole.”

NOBODY NEEDS ONE OF THESE VEHICLES. 

The worst is when I used to work on Bay St. in Toronto, Ontario Canada.  

Bay St. is Canada’s Wall Street. It’s a 2×2 street with fairly narrow lanes. It would be an off week if I could leave the office for lunch and not see some yellow Hummer with two wheels parked up on the curb and the owner no where to be found.  My guess was its usually some investment banker/ stock broker who thinks he owns every road in the Province just because he pretends to understand complex Derivatives. 

Be it Bay St. in Toronto or The Avenue of the Americas in New York City, these streets are made for compact to midsized cars, and yet people are driving Hummers within these cities like they’re securing checkpoints in Fallujah.

The people that drive Hummers seem to have such an ever-reaching need for that sensation of “power” that they only feel comfortable in their own skin if they’re driving around in a “mobile bank vault” as mention in an article in Wired.com

The Wired.com article states that not only are Hummer owners enormously arrogant buffoons, but they also receive almost FIVE TIMES more traffic tickets than any other driver. 

 Read that article —> HERE

And why are the Hummers ALWAYS yellow?

I mean, you’re driving a Hummer.  Do you really need to stand out even more?

You’re driving a huge vehicle that looks like it could take out a rhinoceros and that doesn’t make  enough of a statement for you? 

If you’re really THAT starved for attention why don’t you just go ahead and crucify someone and strap them to the roof . Trust me, you’ll be the talk of the town.

So for all of you sensible people out there, do me a favour please. If you ever hear your friend, child, sibling, cousin, nephew, godson, brother-in-law, spouse, or anyone else you know mention how they’re considering buying a Hummer, sit them down for a moment and have a little chat.

Feel free to slap them around if necessary, and highly recommend that they purchase a vehicle for use in regular society and take the difference in price and invest in some therapy and self-help books.   Because in reality, if you’re driving around in a monster vehicle like a Hummer without having any real need or use for it (farming, raising horses, military exercises, hunting terrorists, etc.) you need to stop worrying about size, and start checking out the rearview mirror, because something in there has gone terribly wrong.

One of those sayings is “Wow, its a small world isn’t it?”

For me its always, always, always the same thing. A friend of mine was in Toronto (a city 35 minutes away by car) or Hamiton (the city in which I live) and they happen to run into some stranger through some extremely predictable series of events and at one point or another it is revealed that they have me in common as a friend. Yippee.

This is all fine and dandy but when this story is ever retold it always ends with, “Wow, its a small world isn’t it?”

Its typically at this point that I am ready to scream.

No! NO ITS NOT A SMALL WORLD!

Its a big world.

A huge world actually, with over six billion people.

You met this person within a thirty minute drive from where I sleep in the same city I was born.

Its a coincidence that happens everyday within every city all over the world. People meet each other. Those people have already met other people, and will likely continue meeting more people.

Chances are, at one point or another you will meet someone who has at one point or another met someone else you have also met.  And the longer you live somewhere the more likely it becomes you will have met a lot of people from that area, who will likely know people you have met from the same area. This process is called “not living in your basement.”

Aaaaaannd breathe.

However,  I may think different in some scenarios:

For example, if you happen to be traveling through the desert in Morocco one day and a sandstorm destroys your means of transportation. You are forced to then walk into the horizon alone surviving for days with only a bottle of water and a snickers bar before you pass out in the sand not sure if you will ever wake up.

Thankfully, you awake in a small cave to the man who has apparently saved your life.  He sees your Molson Canadian t-shirt and volunteers the information that he only saved your life because the one Canadian he met during his only trip into a small Moroccan town was very kind to him and so he wanted to return the favour.  He asked you if you might know this Canadian, and you almost laugh at the request but wish to humour this man’s request.

If this man then tells you, “his name was Michael Cecchin”, I will be the one to say;

“Holy shit, wow, it truly is a small world isn’t it?”

Otherwise, its just a funny little story..

Last night I had myself a date, or more of an outing with a friend from the past.  This is a girl I met over a year ago, and we hadn’t seen one another for a while so we arranged to get together to hang out a bit. Nothing dastardly, go watch a movie, have some drinks, and basically just kill some time together.

Where the plot thickens my friends is that this girl is a serious Christian.  For those of you that know me well, or have been following this blog I know you’re already laughing and looking forward to the rest of this story. God bless you.

Michael Jackson and Pope John Paul

For those in the cheap seats, this is funny because I am a very secular guy. I don’t say there isn’t a God, I basically don’t discuss it. I  just find its a moot point. As for religion, I’m not a fan.  So the fact that this girl and I are friends at all is rather remarkable in its own right, especially since its like she comes to hang out with me just to argue and make snide christ-y comments as if at any moment I’ll break down into tears about how she’s saved me and I’ve seen the light.  I find it kind of funny.  Like when it comes up that I am not drinking for 30 days, she says (all quotes in this article are as accurate as possible yet not verbatim of course), “Is it because you’ve never given up anything for lent so you feel the need to make up for it now?”

This is where I quite correctly respond, “Or maybe I’m just able to make my own decisions instead of taking orders from the church. Besides, I do give up something for lent every year: church.”

Its this back and forth that is quite possibly why I also enjoy hanging out with her. For the sake of this post, and because at one point last night I called her Sister Mary Agnes, let’s call my friend “Mary”.

Mary and I had some time to kill before the movie so we jumped into a restaurant to have a few drinks.  Her with a vodka something and myself with a huge barrel sized mug of soda water and lime.  I guess at restaurants if you don’t drink they want to make it known to everyone around you. Thanks Kelseys.

We start our conversation on the benign and it leads into Michael Jackson, not sure how. It might be because it was on the news, or someone was talking about it, or more possibly, because its all I have spoken about since I heard he died. So as we begin, I mention a few of the songs that I like and how I think Michael Jackson is the last great musical icon I believe we’ll ever see in our lifetime. I continue to stating its too bad in the past ten years he’s been dragged through the mud by the media.

At this point, I’m not even sure I was even speaking to her or just speaking out loud to affirm my love of Michael to the world(this must be my grieving process).  Then its at this point that the conversation takes a turn for the worst.

“I don’t know how anyone could ever possibly idolize a person like Michael Jackson after what he did to those children” and she said a person as if we had just been discussing Ted Bundy or Osama Bin Laden.

At this point I thankfully thought, WWMJD, and decided against pouring my drink on her and I would instead listen to her point on the matter.

Mary’s position was that Michael Jackson erased all of the good will with his music and charity throughout the world because of what he did to those children.  In her mind Michael’s guilt of child molestation was as sure to her as god sitting on a cloud answering everyone’s prayers.  She cited this view because of two factors; Michael had the children sleep in the same bed as him when they stayed over, and because Michael decided to settle the matter out of court.  This was the basis of her entire argument.

My side of the story, is that there was an extensive and inconclusive investigation in which Michael was violated through a strip search and both the ONE boy who claimed molestation/sexual abuse and his father  were questioned.   The child’s father Evan Chandler was at one point quoted as saying, “If I go through with this, I win big-time. There’s no way I lose. I will get everything I want and they will be destroyed forever…Michael’s career will be over”.  Hardly the statement of a concerned parent.

Yet still, all of this is beside the point.   There are many reasons why settling out of court was MJ’s best course of action, but at best there is a 50/50 chance that he was guilty.  And though it was very difficult for me, I did concede that yes, it is possible that Michael was guilty. Personally, I don’t think so, but again, that’s just my opinion.

My final point to Mary was that even if Michael was indeed very guilty of molesting this one child, I still don’t think it comes close to undoing all of the joy, hope, and goodwill he inspired throughout the world.  And all the good he could have done was cut short and pulled down because of one greedy bastard father (who got $200 million by the way), and a blood thirsty media and society more interested in tearing down their idols than getting to the actual truth.

Now at this point, out of nowhere, Mary decided to somehow start comparing Michael Jackson to Jesus.  Seriously. This blew my mind in a “WTF?!?!” sort of way. But once we got back on track, Mary finished off her argument saying that no matter what Michael Jackson had done throughout his career or no matter his own broken life, the fact that he (allegedly) abused this child (“children” to her) he is an evil evil person and she just cannot forgive him.

You really gotta love the black and white opinions of some of these religious people. Never any gray area.  Birth control? Bad. Gays? Evil.  Abortion? Murder! I guess it does make life easier when you don’t have to think critically about anything outside your own argument. I admit, I’m envious.

However, within Mary’s absolute condemning of the evil supposed child molesting Michael Jackson, there was one massive, and equally hilarious flaw in her logic which I was more than happy to point out to her.

I smiled at this realization, and took a nice long sip from my barrel of water before beginning.

I started, “Mary, so you’re saying, that no matter how much good will Michael Jackson has done for the world, just because he, in your eyes, molested these ‘children’, he is evil and it is impossible to look at him as anything but a monster? Its unforgivable?”  I gleefully awaited her obvious response.

“Exactly” she said.

“The only thing that I am now having trouble with, is how you can condemn and shame a man forever who was never proven to be guilty, but you can stand by an organization like the Catholic Church who have, through active choice and deceit, definitely and quite smugly molested and sexually abused young boys for the past century?  Not only is it an absolute hard fact that the priests throughout the Catholic Church have ruined the childhood of THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of children but they have actively covered it up and protected these vile, disgusting men, effectively allowing them to continue.  Michael Jackson allegedly molested one child. The Catholic Church has definitely ruined the lives of thousands of children, and that’s just Ireland”

Here is an article from May 20th about the awful and disgusting report out of Ireland detailing the atrocities the Catholic Church put their students through. Click  HERE to read about it.

In all honesty, I’m not crystal clear on what Mary said after that.  but she somehow missed my entire point regarding her irony of her unconditional love for the catholic church, and then proceeded to claim that since I thought Michael Jackson was still an amazing icon and worthy of idolizing I was in favour of child abuse.

It was like my entire mention of the connection between the catholic church, child abuse and her idolizing of the Pope and catholicism never happened. It was truly amazing.  Now that my friends, along with the fact that Mary and I, managed to watch a movie and still have a nice evening after that discussing was indeed a miracle.

As for Michael Jackson, may he rest in peace, and may the spirit of his music, his memory, and his message of love, acceptance and understanding, continue to inspire all of us.

Goodbye Michael.

Thank you.