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The title of this note was personally given to me by Al Pacino. Yes. That Al Pacino. Al Pacino was doing a meet and greet at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa tonight and I got to get my picture taken with him. Here it is: I had like 15 seconds with Mr. Pacino and I wanted to ask him to give me a title. I couldn't though because then I would have had to explain the concept of this blog and that would have taken more than 15 seconds so instead I just seized on an opportunity. Mr. Pacino had told the audience that he was working with my favourite playwright, David Mamet, on developing a new play. I was determined to get the title of that play and use it for my title. "What's the name of the play?" I asked as security prepared to haul me away. "China Doll," he said. They are the last words Al Pacino will likely ever say directly to me. And so this note is called China Doll. - When I Google "China Doll", not one link on the first page ...

The first thing I ever remember wanting to be was a game show host. My first role model was Bob Barker. I believe I have said this before. Other things I wanted to be: - A priest - A detective - A hockey player - An astronaut - A jockey When I was eight, I declared that I wanted to be all of these things at the same time. I was applauded for my tenacity. Quite properly so. People should be allowed to be unrepentant idealists for the first decades of their lives. Certainly by the time you're in high school, you should know whether or not you have a chance of playing in the NHL. My Grade 7 teacher once said that if you're not playing Triple A hockey when you're 13, you should probably give up on that dream. - My high school girlfriend did not like that I did magic and she refused to watch me perform. She thought I liked magic because it allowed me the temporal illusion of escaping reality. "You need to grow up," she said. "This magic thing is for bab...

Before he died, my best friend declared that all teenagers are nerds. It struck me as one of the truest things I've ever heard anyone say. If you're in high school, you're a nerd. Doesn't matter if you don't need glasses, your face is zit free, you look like you stepped off the cover of Cosmo and you think Star Trek is boring. If you're too young to vote but you're too old for Barney, then congratulations. You, my friend, could be the mayor of Nerdsville. - I started being a nerd when I was 12. I have not stopped being one since. I say this as someone who does not have pimples and hates Star Trek and hasn't played Dungeons & Dragons since the seventh grade. It was 1985 when my classmates brought my nerdhood to my attention. This was an era when "nerd" was strictly a pejorative term. It is true that in the denouement of Revenge of the Nerds, the two main characters - both nerds - say that they are proud to be considered ne...

I cheer for the Cleveland Indians because my dad cheers for the Cleveland Indians. I say this as someone who does not really care for baseball. Now and then, I'll check out the MLB website to see how the Tribe is doing. They are usually not doing well. My dad could tell you why. I couldn't. - I watched two world series with my dad. Once when the Indians lost to the Florida Marlins in seven games, another time when they lost to the Atlanta Braves. I dubbed that series "The Amnesty Bowl." - To my knowledge, there are four American professional sports teams that, according to certain First Nations groups, are destroying the dignity of the American Indian. Those teams are the Kansas City Chiefs, the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves and, yes folks, the Cleveland Indians. The Cleveland Indians logo looks like this: That logo used to appear on the players helmets. It was replaced recently in favour of a red stylized C. The grinning Indian hea...

She looks after our son while I am at work. She feeds him and changes him and plays with him and she does the laundry and does her best to keep the house clean. She thinks I don't notice. I do. I just don't say anything. The fault lies with me. - When my son is at my house, she calls to check up on him. "How's my baby doing?" she asks and I always tell her that he is doing well. Then she asks what he's doing and I tell her he's sleeping or he's playing with a deck of cards or he's looking out the window and screaming baby language. - We call our son "B-man." I started calling him that before he was born, when the ultrasound showed us he was a boy. His mom had settled on a name, which started with B, and from there I went with B-man. Now everyone calls him that and it will probably be a nickname that stays with him for life. - She gets excited when B-Man reaches a new milestone, no matter how trivial. When he learns the concept ...

In 1997, I was sitting behind the wheel of my Pontiac T-1000 when a guy in a semi hit me head on. I didn't blame the guy. The sun was shining in his eyes and the roads were very icy. I was not injured but my car required thousands of dollars in repair work, which the semi driver paid for out of pocket. One of my biggest faults is I tend to get chummy with people I probably shouldn't be chummy with - including people who just hit me with their vehicles. But that's exactly what I did with the semi driver, who was a guy in his late 50s named Lorne. Talk about conspiracy theories? This guy subscribed to 'em all. During our telephone conversations – which were supposed to be about how quickly he would give me money so I could repair my car – he shared the following gems with me: - AIDS was created in an American laboratory to "cure the faggot problem." - Almost every election in the United States and "her puppet nation to the north, Canada" w...

I believe in angels. Most atheists believe in angels too. If you don't believe in angels then you deny the existence of the post office. The word angel means messenger. Can ya see my wings? - I am writing a book about an angel. I decided the book should also have an archangel and I chose to make Raphael the archangel and that is because Raphael is not mentioned in the Bible but he IS mentioned in the Appocrypha and so I don't think I will get struck by lightning for turning a celestial being into a quasi-fictional character. I would not be able to sleep if I was putting words in the mouths of Uriah, Michael, or Gabriel. - I actually have a book called A Dictionary of Angels. Here is a picture of it: I have just opened my copy of A Dictionary of Angels and I have made a serendipitous discovery. I was using a ticket stub for a bookmark and the stub was from the University of Calgary Drama Department's production of the Bacchae by Euripides, which I went to see o...

DENNY'S HAS SOURDOUGH BREAD! I have know this for a long time but it became amazingly important last week when I took our newspaper's co-op student to Denny's for   lunch. The reason for this was that our co-op student was leaving us and we wanted to tell the co-op student that we appreciated all the hard work that the co-op student did for us. The co-op student ordered lunch and asked for brown toast. I ordered chicken fried steak with grits and tomato slices and sourdough toast. As soon as the co-op student discovered that sourdough was available, the co-op student asked to change bread selection. The server agreed. Sourdough probably isn't good for you. Here is how to figure out if food is bad for you. Simply ask yourself if it tastes good. If it tastes good, it is bad for you. God hates us and he wants us to be sick and fat and die. White bread tastes better than brown bread, which tastes like dirt. The co-op student, who is 18, ate the sourdou...

I'm not sure what would be worse – sitting through the apocalypse or sitting through some of the truly horrendous cartoons that haunted Generation X children on Saturday mornings. I'm not what sure what the programming directors at the big three networks were smoking back in the early 80s, but they seemed to have this mindset that anything that was trendy benefited from – nay demanded - a half-hour cartoon. Some of these decisions were understandable. Home video games were in their genesis and arcades were still the rage, so it made sense to have cartoons dedicated to Pac Man, Dragon's Lair and a whole bunch of other games like Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Q-bert represented in the all-encompassing Saturday Supercade. But why, for the life of me, would they make a cartoon about Monchichis, Rubik's Cube, and – God save the Queen – Gummy bears? Monchichis and Rubik's Cube I can vaguely understand (kind of like the same way I can vaguely understand why s...

I've gotten used to needles. I have allergies, see? Every year around this time, my nose turns into a snot factory. This is because my nose and trees are mortal enemies. The trees emit pollen and my nose resents this. I wish I could convince my nose to just buy a chainsaw instead of produce copious amounts of lung butter, but my nose doesn't listen. Why should it? It doesn't have ears. By the way, you might think that 'lung butter' is a gross term, but let me assure you that it's snot. - It's not just my nose that bugs me either. In fact, the runny nose is a picnic compared to what my eyes go through. My eyes get as dry as the nose gets wet. They turn red, they itch, they give me all sorts of pain. I sometimes get prescription eyedrops and often my eyes are so red that they sting when the drops go inside. And I haven't even mentioned the dry mouth, the coughing, and the occasional rash. Hay fever! Man, I love it. - I remember ...

I was at the karaoke bar with Dez and Chris and we was onstage singin You Lost That Lovin Feelin and that's when the woman in black with the blue monkeys waslked into the room. Guess she'd a been about 40. Long black hair, black fur coat, black leather pants that gleamed under the bar lights. One monkey on each shoulder and both of them blue like Smurfs. Lady sits down at the table closest to the stage and orders a Velvet Hammer. Starts smoking a cigarette that she holds in one of them big long cigarette holder things. She's watching us and I may be wrong about this but I was thinking she seemed most interested in me. We finish the song and there's a spattering of applause and we go back to our table so this short Japanese man can start singing My Way. I start sucking back my beer when I see one of the blue monkeys is on the table. He's holding a card and on it is written 'Nice song. Come buy me a drink.' My friends are cheering me on as I go. L...

My note-a-day project is almost halfway done. I notice that an extraordinary number of these notes deal with my teenaged years. I guess that means that's the time when I was happiest or it's when I underwent the most psychological trauma. Maybe both. I read somewhere that life peaks at about age 25, then it goes downhill and then we're suddenly happy again when we turn 70. I am not 70. Won't get there for another 30 years. So now I guess I'll just mull over my adolescence some more. - My friend, Jeff Belcher, gave me Happy days as a title. I'm not sure if he wants me to write about my personal happy days or if he wants me to write about Happy Days, the 1970s sit-com about life in the 1950s. I always thought that, in the 90s, it would be fun to make a sit-com about a TV crew in the 1970s trying to make a sit-com about life in the 50s. That's right. I'm nostalgic for nostalgia. - Happy Days was supposed to revolve around Richie Cun...

My brother used to play little league baseball. My dad was his head coach and the assistant coach was a douchebag I'll call Manny. I was practicing a magic trick when Manny came by the house for a pre-season meeting. Somehow, I wound up showing the trick to my dad and Manny and Manny was a mean sonofabitch. He heckled me constantly, told me the magic was terrible, and then laughed at how crestfallen I must have looked. I guess I was about 13 or 14 - not a kid but not a seasoned performer either. Today I'd make mincemeat out of a douchebag like Manny but when I was 13, it hurt. I told my dad that I didn't like Manny very much and my dad told me he didn't like Manny very much either. And later that year, Manny stole a whole bunch of the little league money and treated himself to a trip to Las Vegas. He was charged and order to all sorts of community service. I wished I could have watched him perform it. Embezzling money from little league. Well, that...

Is it appropriate to show your tattoos in the workplace? That kind of depends, I think. If you work in a day care, you probably don't want someone with skulls and crossbones tattooed all over their bodies to be working there. Might scare the kids. That kind of thing might fly if you're working at a Harley dealership or in a kitchen at an oil rig camp. If you have any of the muppets from Sesame Street tattooed on your forehead, you probably won't get a job doing the weather forecast on the six o'clock news. There's going to be lots of rain - The good news is that tattoos won't really affect your workplace performance. Most tattoo artists won't tattoo faces or hands and these are the only parts of your body that need to be exposed. This is a general rule, of course. If your job is cutting down trees or throwing big chunks of coal at the ground or playing hockey for the Calgary Flames, most people won't see your hands because they will b...

For my 40th birthday, I decided I was going to make a photo diary of the day. I got up really early, drove down to Denny's in Lancaster so I could watch Team Canada play Team USA in the World Junior Hockey Championship Semifinals. Canada lost 5-1. That birthday started yucky. For my 20th birthday, I visited my friend, Cade, in Vancouver. We went for supper somewhere and we were joined by a playwright I admired, who gifted me with a Writers' Guide for that year, 1993. That was a pretty good birthday. When I was 16, my family was supposed to go to Sara's Pyrohy Hut for supper but then my brother missed his bus home from the place where he'd gone skiing and we had to postpone the dinner. That was a crappy birthday. When I was 7, my sister got me the Twin-Pod Cloud Car. That was a pretty good birthday. When I was 18, my friends took me out and I got really drunk and then I tried to break into a real estate office. That was a good birthday but it sucked too. Whe...

When you sign up for Facebook or almost any other site on the Internet, you will inevitably be promised that the site in question will not share your personal information with anyone. But are they telling the truth? When I go on Facebook, I see a list of trending articles I can read. Mostly they are about NHL hockey or magic or Christianity. The fact that these subjects interest me and that Facebook is giving them to me cannot be a coincidence. Articles on manicures, gay bath houses and Russian history somehow never show up on my feed. - I had a friend named John, who is dead now. John refused to sign up for Facebook. He believed it was Satanic - that the government ran it as a means of monitoring and controlling its people through subtle online indoctrination. Perhaps it does indoctrinate us. How many of us now believe that Facebook is an acceptable substitute for living life? - Obviously I think Facebook is a great invention. I use it to post note-a-day and ...

I used to have this book called WHO STOLE FEMINISM, which was written by a lady named Christina Hoff Sommers in 1994. Ms. Sommers, considered herself a feminist but her critics considered her an anti-feminist because she did not agree with them. I do not have the book because I gave it to Hayley, a local high school student who is interested in women's studies. WHO STOLE FEMINISM was written before Hayley was born. The premise of Ms. Sommers' book is that there are two kinds of feminists - good feminists and bad feminists. She gives the bad feminists a name, which is "gender feminist." She said that gender feminists do bad things and/or silly things, like hold seminars and then insist on calling them "ovu-lars." - When I hear the term Femi-Nazi, I immediately think of Rush Limbaugh, who popularized the term on his conservative talk radio show in the 90s. I have never heard Rush Limbaugh speak, but I did see him in a Pizza Hut commercial on...

CJAY 92, one of Calgary's most popular radio stations, used to be known as the city's go-to spot for classic rock. It may still be that way but, like Bob Dylan says, the times they are a' changin. I remember working the late shift one night and having a hankering to hear Prince sing Little Red Corvette (this was an era before IPods and the Internet; when you wanted to hear a song, you either had to buy it at the record store or wait for it to come on the radio.) I called CJAY and the DJ told me that Prince is not considered classic rock. "That's silly," I said. "You play Jimi Hendrix and Lenny Kravitz. One was one of Prince's major influences and the other was majorly influenced by Prince." "Yeah," the DJ said. "But neither one of those guys takes bubble baths." And that is what classic rock is, I guess. Music made by people who would never be caught dead in a bubble bath. - This kind of sucks because I ...

This is the fourth note where I have to write about cats. *Sighs.* The good news is I can also write about dogs. I love dogs but I don't own one. That's because I live in an apartment and I can barely take care of myself. A dog would be catastrophic. My brother has a dog. The dog's name is Coogee. I think my brother named his dog after a bay in Australia. My parents have a dog named Kipper. They named it after Finnish goaltender Miikka Kiprusoff, whose name I probably spelled wrong. Here are other dogs we had: - Gizmo. Named for the creature in Gremlins. Gizmo was a shih tzu. - Lobo. A St. Bernard. Best dog ever. - Sheltie. A collie. My dad hated him. We also had three dogs named Spanky. Apparently, I insisted on calling each dog Spanky. The first Spanky was a beagle. The second was a golden lab. The third was a dalmatian. They are dead now. So it goes. - As I said, the St. Bernard was the best. But he had a drooling problem. All St. Bernards have drooling problem...

1. As a magician, I jumped into a TV set almost 10 years before David Copperfield did. I designed the routine too. There's a difference, of course. Copperfield's routine didn't suck. (Tagging the people who witnessed it.) 2. I know what happiness sounds like. It is this: "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee." Say that right now. You are smiling. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. 3. I have been writing a novel since December 4 of 1988 and it still hasn't died in my mind. I wonder if it will ever be done. 4. I pioneered the art of "wandering journalism." This started when I was working at a newspaper office in East Central Alberta back in 2000. The office put together three newspapers and I worked on two of them. That meant that I was very busy on Mondays and Tuesdays but Wednesdays saw me sitting at my desk and twiddling my thumbs while the paper's editor and reporter worked on that other paper. I told my editor I felt counter-productive just...

I am afraid of bananas. I don't know why. I just am. I don't like to be in the same room as someone who is eating one. I even hate seeing people eat bananas in movies. I don't like this about myself because bananas are good for you. My hatred of bananas probably stems from my childhood. There was a time when I loved bananas but at one point, something inside me snapped. I haven't eaten a banana in more than 30 years. I won't eat anything with bananas in them and, whenever I contemplate experimenting with a new kind of fruit juice, I always scan the label to see if bananas are listed among the ingredients. My fear of bananas is irrational. Most fear is irrational. - In high school, it was explained to me that every emotion can be traced back to love or fear. "What about hate?" I asked. "Hate stems from fear," was the reply. In the ensuing 30 years, I have discovered this to be true. Racism stems from xenophobia, which is humanity's...

I guess it's been about five years now since I started volunteering my time at Tim Hortons for the annual Camp Day fundraiser. I usually show up around lunch hour and they put me on the drive-thru. When someone comes up to the electric board thingee, I tell them who I am and that I am volunteering my time there and then I ask them what they want. Most of the time they just want coffee. Sometimes they want donuts. Sometimes they want four bowls of chili and three sesame seed bagels - two toasted one plain - one with herb and garlic cream cheese and one with butter and light cream cheese and two bottles of apple juice and one apple fritter. While they say this, I punch their orders into a computer terminal and, magically, they appear on computer monitors throughout the restaurant. Then Tim Hortons staff members go about preparing the meals and/or beverages. Since it is camp day, I always ask the person if they want to donate $2 to "the send a kid to camp day t...

In weighing this question, we must immediately disqualify one very important factor - namely, that the elephant is the symbol of the American Republican Party. The Republicans are usually right and the Democrats are almost always wrong, so it makes sense that the elephant is the superior beast. But for the sake of this essay, let us assume that is not the case. We are to weigh the merits of the elephant and the giraffe and decide which one is superior. The only way I know how to do this is to pit them against each other head-to-head. Here we go: 1. Are you my mom's favourite animal? Giraffes: Yes. Elephants: No. Advantage: Giraffes. 2. Do hunters kill you so they can use part of your body to make billiard balls and piano keys? Giraffes: No. Elephants: Yes. Advantage: Giraffes. 3. Are you stolen out of the wild and forced to perform in circuses? Giraffes: No. Elephants: Yes. Advantage: Giraffes. 4. If there's an apple high up in a tree that you want to eat, can you eat i...

“People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how great their other talents.” One of the best things to teach young people today is how to accept constructive criticism and how to differentiate between good criticism and the bad. A rule of thumb: 99% of comments on youtube can be classified as bad criticism. Sorry, but "your a fag" isn't in the same universe as "I like the flow of this routine but I think your Elmsley Count needs a little work. PM me offsite because I'd be happy to recommend some resources." Before there was youtube there was usenet, which was this massive online group of text discussion groups. My favourite was alt.fiction.original, which was a haven of budding writers. We would post stories and then we'd critique them. For the most part, the criticism was encouraging. There was one dude on there named Alaric and he used to publish weekly newsletters, where he would discuss th...