...And now for something completely different: The Rants of a University Student (#43)

What the hell is with this weather? In the past week I’ve seen hailstorms, torrential rain on sunny days, green sheet lightening and some crazy-ass fog. It’s ridiculous. But don’t worry. For all of you who blame the irregular weather patterns on Global Warming, have no fear, our savior is here. Yes, the Tories have decided not to put up with these Global Warming shenanigans any more, and have pledged to slash green-house gas emissions by 45-65% ...by the year 2050! 2050? Great! By then I’ll only be... well, dead. Morons. Someone needs to tell these people to get their shit together.

For those of you who don’t read The Guardian on a daily basis for it’s wealth of information on the local deaths and riveting tutorials on Contract Bridge, the paper has over-hauled their old design. But don’t worry, their proud tradition of printing dumb-ass stories and making themselves look like complete idiots continues. On October 13th, for example, there was a front-page story about the new high-tech PEI Licenses. Accompanying it in front-page, full colour 5x7 detail was a teenage girl holding up her shiny new license, complete with her name, her address, birthday, height, everything. Brilliant. What Privacy Act? It’s a wonder those geniuses over at The Guardian aren’t awarded a few more Pulitzer Prizes every now and then.

You know what pisses me off? (“Yes, Ryan, we know, we know. A lot of things piss you off.” Shut up.) It pisses me off that people don’t go out anymore. And sure, maybe I just got a little too attached to the Wednesday night Peake’s phenomenon this past summer, but nowadays, no one seems to want to go out. At all. Ever. And they all have stupid excuses. “Oh, I have a test next Tuesday.” “Ok... You know this is Friday right?” Now schoolwork aside, what pisses me off even more, are the people who figure they can’t go out or do schoolwork or anything because they have to watch a damn TV show. They have this dumb-ass idea that they have to be on the couch, at the same time every week, and they adjust their schedule accordingly. This is ridiculous. Watching some TV now and then never killed anyone, but putting your whole damn life on hold so that you can watch some stupid fictional life of some moron living their fictional life and interacting with other morons is bullshit. Tape it, rip it off the internet for frig’s sake, maybe even miss an episode. It’ll be on a friggin DVD in a few months anyway. Heaven forbid you try and live your own life once in a while.

Global National reported last week that the Tim Horton’s that will be opening in Afghanistan to bring a taste of home to Canadian soldiers is going to cost Canadians four million dollars. In the article they stated that operating the franchise coffee shop will cost an additional two to five million a year. Who cares how much it costs? The merits of any war being fought in the region now aside, we have sent thousands of young men and women across the world to fight a war. We will almost certainly watch some of them come back in flag-draped coffins, and Global thinks we should be pissed that they’re getting some coffee? Who gives a shit? It’s only $4 million. Down the street they’re spending 4.5 million to put in a few traffic lights at the Peter Pan corner. Build the soldiers a damn Disney Land for all I care, they do a job that most of us don’t have the balls to do, let them drink as much damn coffee as they want. They deserve it infinitely times more than some bureaucrat or dumb ass news anchor. Yes, I was referring to you Kevin Newman. Jackass.

There was a huge uproar last week when the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Peter MacKay allegedly called Liberal MP Belinda Stronach “a dog.” A little history here for those of you who don’t know; Belinda and Peter used to be a couple, in the romantic sense, back when Ms. Stronach had just broken onto the political scene as a member of the Conservatives. In 2004 she dumped MacKay by, get this, joining the Liberals, and she kind of neglected to tell MacKay this was all going down until about an hour or two before news of her desertion was made public. More recently, Stronach has been accused of being involved in an affair with former Toronto Maple Leafs enforcer Tie Domi, which, in turn, led to the break-up of his marriage. Now if any other woman was caught doing shit like this, MacKay may have called her any number of names; a dog, a home-wrecker, a skank-dragon. He could have said Fuddle Duddle for all we know. Does it really matter? Well the critics think so. They’ve been throwing conniption fits from here to Vancouver, screaming “this is an insult to all women everywhere.” Why? He didn’t call ‘every woman everywhere’ a dog. He just called Belinda a dog. Get a life. And sure, maybe Parliament is not the best place for this type of insult to be thrown about (not like they aren’t every other day anyway), but seriously, we’ve all seen break-ups worse than this in High School. You know, someone screws up, a few names get thrown around, maybe MacKay and Domi have a little tussle in the playground, and everyone goes home scarred for life. People need to stop pretending like this is some huge travesty that is beyond the means of comprehensibility. We’ve all been through shit like this. It’s just another story about a pretty girl and a guy with a broken heart. One journalist recognized Belinda for what she is and called her a bitch. As a result, he was ripped to shreds by other members of the media who said he should never get another job anywhere ever again. Overkill much? Here’s a couple quotes in reaction to his comments: “I find it shocking that people would use him now that he has displayed such horrible language around women.” Around women? What is this? 1877? “What he has done is absolutely unforgivable. It hurts women everywhere, and there is no place for that kind of language and that kind of attitude in our society today.” Screw off. Listen, she’s a rich drama queen, she dumped a boyfriend without telling him, deserted her whole political party in exchange for a patronage cabinet post, broke up a marriage, and says that her being accused of adultery is an impediment to other women who want to run for political office. Belinda IS a bitch. Chrétien was a bastard. I’m an asshole. Get over it.

Have a good one!