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Pickles and mozzarella

munch munch munch munch munch munch munch....gulpSince my TV returned to me, I’ve been thinking about how much the box affects my diet. I’m a snacking kind of guy. I can’t watch TV without sneaking over to the cupboard, and while I’m sneakily searching for something to fill that little second supper corner, I wonder why I’m sneaking at all when I don’t have a roommate. Well the tree in the corner often gives me a bit of a guilt-trip when I eat too many Miss Vickie’s potato chips, but I can never disguise the crinkle of plastic followed by that distinctive potato chip munch-munch-munch-gulp.

The potato chips are an easy choice when I have them, but more often than not, I sneakily arrive at the cupboard to find nothing that one would define as a classic snack food. That’s when one must become a creative snacker.

What should I snack on tonight? Peanut butter and celery? Cream cheese and celery? Cheese melts? Leftover penguin? Miso soup? Instant oatmeal? A boiled potato? Um… I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here. And I’ve had several bad experiences with those barrel-scrapings. The tree in the corner insists that I should avoid ingesting anything that I have to scrape off another object, but it takes several attempts for me to learn from my mistakes.

Aha. Pickles and cheese. There’s something magical about the combination of cheese and pickles. In particular, real mozzarella and kosher dills. Mmmmmmmmm. And a great thing about the pickles and cheese snack is that, unlike Miss Vickie’s, the crunching won’t drown out the dialogue on TV.

What’s that? Oh.

The tree in the corner says I should get a life. F— off, tree.

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Vancouver

It’s grey out. Very grey. Wet. Cold.

Why can’t it snow? I’d love to see some of the white stuff falling from the sky and piling up into little drifts on the ground. Then people would emerge from their homes and workplaces to wonder at how the streets have transformed from wet to winter. And the snow plow driver would run to the city’s only plow and get to work, carving a passage through the streets’ thick blanket. And—

Hell, I think it’s going to rain again tonight. Vancouver never gets any good snow.



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When (penguin) searches go terribly wrong

I seem to be one of the Internet’s foremost experts on penguins, according to the search engines. Here are some of the penguin-related search requests I’ve had:

  • naked penguins
  • phobias penguins
  • photos of chubby penguins
  • lear about penguins
  • roast penguin recipe
  • penguins insanity
  • funky penguins
  • penguin belly ring

At least there were fewer requests this month for pictures of naked people.

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48% of remaining BC forest to be destroyed for cash

Admittedly, that might be an alarmist headline, but that was my first impression when I read this article on Canada.com: B.C.’s forests open for business: minister. Stan Hagan, who holds the Orwellian title of “Minister of Sustainable Resources Management”, announced today that almost half of British Columbia’s remaining forests are now designated for commercial interests. This means logging and mining, primarily — two of the most destructive of industries.

With this decision, the provincial government is launching a massive attack on the environment. Conservation no longer fits into government plans, as Hagan stated that “to create parks it will have to come out of the working forest and there will have to be justification for it”. Well I’m thrilled that we now have safeguards to prevent people from protecting an irreplacable part of the earth’s ecosystem. Now we have to come up with bloody good reason why the forests shouldn’t be destroyed.

If you care at all about the world’s rainforests, even if you don’t live in BC, send an e-mail to Stan Hagan, BC Minister of Sustainable Resources Management, and tell him what you think of his anti-environmentalist legislation.

Here are some facts and figures about BC rainforest.