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There are many kinds of cream. There's shaving cream and there's whipped cream. It is not a good idea to mix these things up. At best you will have a lousy shave. At worst you will poison yourself next time you eat a sundae. I wonder how many kinds of cream I have in my house. I have some foot cream and I have some shaving cream. I don't have sour cream because sour cream is bad (the bag of sour cream and onion potato chips I have in my cubboard don't count.) Recently, I spoke about getting shaved in a barber shop and how the shaving cream there smelled like grapes. It was also hot, like they kept the shaving cream in a microwave. The best kind of shaving cream is the little white cake. You take a shaving brush and then you wet it and you rub it on the white cake and you get shaving cream off of it and then you smear it on your face and then you shave. - My dad's favourite cream is the stuff that's found in Boston Cream Pie (which actually is a...

I never met anyone named Anna Stesia or Anastasia. I met a few Annas though. I have a friend named Anna who lives in Michigan and who likes bananas. Two of my girlfriends have had Ann as a middle name. When I was in Calgary, I worked with a girl named Anna and she was Irish and she had black hair and blue eyes and really bad teeth and a nice bum. I took her sister to a Prince concert. Probably the most famous Anne (or Anna) in Canada is Anne of Green Gables, who was created by a novelist named Lucy Maude Montgomery on Prince Edward Island. Anne of Green Gables is so famous that she is even featured on Prince Edward Island's license plates. I think she is the only fictional character in history to be featured on a license plate. You know... Anne of Green Gables looks familiar, doesn't she? Here's why. Stupid Dave Thomas ripped off Prince Edward Island, turned our fictional heroine into a shill for selling square hamburgers. Anne of Green Gables needs a spanking...

I like to take my 18-month old son to work with me. Much of my job is spent on the road and, for the most part, I am happy to have him along. I say this not just because I enjoy spending time with my son, I say it because I want my son to understand the importance of work. I want him to see me working hard and I want him to wonder why I work so hard because I want him to understand that the money daddy makes is directly tied to how hard he works. I want him to know that if you want to get somewhere in life, you have to work for it. There are no shortcuts. - Sometime around my son's 10th birthday, I will sit him down and tell him that there are two sorts of work he can offer the world. (This conversation will proceed the earlier conversations we have where I will teach him that he is not entitled to anything and that he owes the world something, not vice-versa.) The two sorts of work are specialized labour and unspecialized labour. Unspecialized labour is som...

I've always been confused about where uptown is? How does uptown differ from downtown? When I lived in Calgary, we lived near the southend. Downtown was north of us and that confused me. Shouldn't that be uptown? Especially since uptown and downtown seemed to be synonyms. When I think about downtown, I think about a city's core where a whole lot of restaurants and shops and nightclubs are packed into a concentrated area. You don't see that in the suburbs. You only see it downtown (or uptown.) - When I was a kid, I had a game called Electronic Detective. Here is a picture of it: In Electronic Detective, you had to solve a murder and one of the questions you could ask a witness was "Did the murdered go uptown, midtown, or downtown?" This solidified, in my mind, that uptown and downtown were two different things. - To me, uptown sounds like a place where you'll find gay bars or poodle grooming salons or restaurants that serve quiche. You...

There’s a woman in Albuquerque namedDeborah Grey who works at Dunkin Donuts. She’s 28 years old and herearly prettiness is morphing into the onset of middle age. Sheremembers a time when her long blonde hair would bounce like it doeson television commercials advertising conditioner. Ever since she wasa little girl, she wanted to be an actress. In high school, shealways got the lead in the school play, even scoring the coveted roleof Sandy in the Grade 12 production of Grease. Her friends and familytold her she was a natural talent, that one day she’d be aHollywood star and win an Oscar. She went to theatre school,graduated with honours, got rave reviews for the productions shestarred in. She thought she was a sure thing. She wasn’t. Auditioned for all the big name theatrecompanies. Never got a callback. Tried to get an agent in L.A. Nobites there either. The best she’s done is scored a few roles insome community theatre productions. Didn’t pay a thing. Her mostrecent ...

I was eating supper at Don Cherry’s Restaurant when my waitress told me she wanted to cut my hair. “Why’s that?” I ask. “It’s so thick,” she said,running a hand through it. “Will you let me cut it sometime?” “Sure,” I said. “But do you know how to cut hair?” She handed me a business card for the salon where she worked. Her name was Wendy. The next week, I went to Wendy’s salon for a haircut. On Wendy’s workstation was a little placardthat said this: Behind all of the notions of what is right and what is wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. I always hated that. - If I could change that placard, I’d replace meet with kill. Yeah, I know murder is wrong but that’s only good in the place where there are notions of right and wrong. In this field, anything goes and since we’re all beautiful happy twentysomethings, this particular blend of godless anarchy will be a perfect non-violent utopia. Right? Puh-leeze. - Wendy worked at Don Cherry’s with a girl I went...

I think Calgary used to have a stripclub called Erotic City. I can’t be sure. I think I can be excusedfor not being familiar with the names of any city’s peeler bars. Idon’t like ‘em. I used to have a friend who was always trying todrag me to Erotic City – he was convinced that one of the strippersthere had a crush on him – and I eventually had to tell him to finda new friend. I don’t know how many times I’vebeen in strip clubs but I suspect I could count them on one hand.Full disclosure: my friends took me to one for my 18 th birthday and I got way too drunk there and I have never been thatdrunk since and I never want to be that drunk again. Another time Iwent was so that my friend could introduce me to the stripper hethought had a crush on him. I hated it. I sat down at the bar and Idrank a 7-Up and I looked to my right and I saw a girl in the privateshow room spread her legs five times for some ugly middle-aged dudein a blue and white suit. When she was done, the guy...

Believe it or not, there actually was a girl in a raspberry beret. I saw her in an arcade/restaurant in Drumheller. She was drinking ginger ale and playing pinball. She wore black cowboy boots, blue jeans, a black T-shirt and a blue jeanjacket. Long blonde hair, blue eyes, and that famous raspberry beret. I think her name was Brandi but it might have been Brenda. - I was sort of involved with a church youth group at the time. One of the girls in the group warned me to stay away from Brandi/Brenda. “She’s a slut,” she said. “She went to Germany on a school trip last summer and they could have made a movie about it. Brandi does Berlin.” The girl told me that Brandi/Brenda was a walking STD factory. I had no idea what to believe. - There was a girl in my high school who had a reputation for being easy. She gave me her phone number once and I spent about five hours one Saturday night talking to her on the phone. “Everyone says I’m easy,” she said. “They’re wron...

Read a story the other day about howwomen prefer pictures of men who look like they make a lot of money.Picture number one shows a handsome model dressed in rags. Picturetwo shows the same model in a three-piece suit. Ladies will go forthe latter. Is it greed or is it security? TheBible might tell us the former and evolution might tell us thelatter. But if you want to be secure, maybe you have to bite off abit more than you can chew right now. Isn’t that what the wholeinvestment market is all about? When the Hebrews fled Egypt, God sentmanna from heaven. The Hebrews were instructed to collect only asmuch as they needed for one day. They didn’t listen. They collectedmore, thinking they’d spread the wealth over the next week. Woke upthe next morning to rotting manna. I think God enjoys asking people to goagainst their very nature. - Memo to ladies: I can’t take theplace of your man. That’s doubly true if you love the dude. Don’tmatter if he’s present, absent, dead,...

I am on my sixth car now. It is red2013 Hyundai Elantra GT. I hit a deer with it last month and, even asI type this, my insurance company is surveying the damage and tryingto determine if it would be cheaper to fix it or simply buy me a newcar. When I first took ownership of thatcar, the first song I listed to was Prince & the Revolution’sLet’s Go Crazy. It’s been the same with every car I ever owned. Ibought my first car when I was 20 – a 1981 Mazda GLC. I paid $1,350for it. I bought it from a guy named Trevor who lived about 10 blocksaway from my family. That car had a tapedeck and I slid my cassetteof the Purple Rain soundtrack into it so I could hear Let’s gocrazy. It seemed apropos. In North America,having your own set of wheels is tantamount to freedom. I’ve had acar for more than half my life now and when you take it away from me,I pretty much feel like you cut my legs off. Sure I can walk to thegrocery store or to work, but I sure can’t walk to the moviethe...

I think, but I am not sure, that theCalgary Herald used to have two newspapers a day – one in themorning and one in the evening. I have a vague recollection of seeingmy father read the newspaper after he returned home from work. I waspuzzled because I saw him read the paper in the morning. I asked himwhy and he said: “That was the morning paper. This is the eveningpaper.” I am too lazy to Google right now, butI think there was an era when issuing morning papers and eveningpapers was a common practice. Today it’s becoming a common practicenot to issue newspapers at all. Thanks to the advent of the Internet,social media, and 24-hour news networks, people aren’t relying onnewspapers anymore as their primary news source. I have been workingat my present newspaper for 11 years now and I think it would becrazy for me to jump to another paper. With all the layoffs takingplace in the newspaper world, I’d be one of the first to fall underthe ax. The first newspaper I ever work...

The summer that I was 18, I wrote anovel that was loosely based on my experiences in high school. It wascalled The High School Days of Dusk and Horsie and that’s a totallylame title. I should have called it Little Red Corvette because (a)it has an emotional connection to the Prince song and (b) one of thetitular characters owns a red Corvette. A brief plot summary: Horsie (real nameis Stanley) is a freshman in high school and he befriends a juniornamed Dusk. Dusk learns that Horsie’s dad died one year ago andunofficially left him his red Corvette, which Horsie keeps under atarp in the backyard (he is still too young to have a driver’slicense.) At the end of the book, Horsie decides to sell the car sohe can pay his college tuition. The Corvette, of course, is a symbolof his past and as Horsie lets it go, he opens himself up to thepromise of the future. I guess that sounds like a pretty coolpremise even though the story itself is pretty lame. There’ssubplots involvin...

I have a head. My head has eyes, a nose, two ears, and a mouth. It also has hair. One of my ears has an earring in it. When I was in high school, it had acne. I have never seen the back of my head. - I went to college with a guy whose last name was Head. His last name probably still is Head. I didn't talk to him much. He had red hair and lots of freckles (on his head - the head of Head.) Once I was in the student commons and I saw the young Mr. Head eating Chinese food. He was using chopsticks to put the Chinese food in his mouth. Which was on his head. - This is a picture of Murray Head: The head of Murray Head. Murray Head is famous for a song called One Night in Bangkok, which comes from the 1985 musical Chess, which was partially written by the guys from ABBA (this is a bad thing.)* One Night in Bangkok is a bad song because I performed it in Grade 7 for the school's lip sync competition and the stupid idiot running the music turned the volume all t...

When I was in high school, I watched a television preacher say he believed Jesus would come back in his lifetime. The preacher is dead now. - The Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus came back invisibly in 1914 or so. That was a hundred years ago. - When I was in high school, I thought my future would involve me acting in a whole lot of plays (and maybe some movies too.) I thought I would attend the National Theatre School of Canada and that I'd make about $45,000 a year through my acting. Today, I think my future involves me renting a rug doctor and cleaning my carpet. My son just peed on it. - Now that I have a kid, I think my future will involve me chasing the kid around. He will probably do the normal kid things - get into soccer or hockey, do school plays, or need me to pick him up at the 7-Eleven. I don't think I'll see a full out nuclear war in my life. I think I'll see more unemployment as we continue to outsource our jobs to...

I used to want to be famous. Now I don't care if I'm famous. If I become a famous writer, so be it. I'd like it only because it means there's a better chance I'd get to devote myself full time to my craft. All I'm saying is I don't long for fame anymore. When I was very young, I felt insignificant and unpopular. I believed fame would have given me the respect I so achingly craved (and which could have been mine had I just been courteous and genuine.) Yes, and I am reminded of the words of the 1980s new wave group Wall of Voodoo's song Far Side of Crazy: I once hid my lust for stardom like a filthy magazine I stroke the shaft of my guitar to watch you on the screen I become now what I wanted to be all along a psychopathic poet, the devil's bastard son I am waiting for someone to print an anthology of poetry and call it A Psychopathic Poet - I am a shitty poet. There was a time, in college, when I thought of myself as the next Leo...

I think it's neat that Orion is mentioned in the Bible. - Orion was a great hunter and he could put the boys on Duck Dynasty to shame. Greek mythology holds that Zeus placed Orion among the constellations. If that's true, Zeus must have thought Orion was a pretty swell dude since his constellation is as easy to find as the big dipper. All you have to do is look for his belt. - When I was kid, I went through an astronomy phase. Mostly I was interested in flying saucers but since I knew I was never going to see any, stargazing came a close second. I had this book that showed all sorts of constellations and there were check boxes beside it that you could tick off once you located them. The big ones, like Orion and the big dipper, were worth 10 points but the smaller ones, like ursa minor, were worth 25. Some nights I would go out to the backyard, lie on the trampoline, and just stare at the night sky for hours. When I was nine, my dad told me there was going to ...

I don't know if I was a shy kid or not. I don't think I'm a shy grownup though. Can't afford to be. I've trained myself to be an extrovert. I guess some people would disagree. When I'm doing a magic show, I'm anything but shy. The people who know me tell me that there's a huge difference between the way I am in everyday life and the way I am when I'm onstage. "It's like you take your personality and multiply it by 10," they say. This rings true to me and it probably rings true to everyone in show business. - A long time ago, I watched a videotape of Bobcat Goldthwaite's 1987 stand-up comedy special Share the Warmth. I don't remember much about it at all (I guess Bobcat's blend of comedy just isn't my thing.) What I do remember is Bobcat's manic performance style - he sounded like a demon-possesed unmedicated schizophrenic. He made his audience laugh for about an hour but as soon as he went backstage, the...

I like things that flow. I like water because all it does is flow. I live near a river and sometimes I'll walk down to it and just watch the water flow. It gives me - in the words of the Eagles - a peaceful easy feeling. The river flows away from the pond that is the town's centrepiece. Bordering part of the pond is a beach. There is a park there too and there's playground equipment, a community centre and even a splash pad for the young kiddies. Here are other things that flow: - Blood - Vomit - Tears - Pee Tears don't flow from my eyes very often, not even when I'm watching the final scene of Terminator 2. By the way, the Terminator movies are the best things James Cameron ever did. Titanic is awful and it's overrated too. If I cut my hand off, blood would flow from the severed stump. Fortunately, I don't bleed very often because I rarely cut myself. The last time I cut myself really bad was in 1999 when I was working at the Real Canadian Supe...

My best friend, Jason, used to have a band called ZBUBUS. I think they played funk-inspired rock or rock-inspired funk. Jason played guitar and sang. His friend, Dean, played base and Larry played drums. The groupies played tambourines. See, Jason was always meeting girls and as a way of keeping in contact with them, he'd ask if they wanted to play tambourine at his next gig. Once he said he had about eight tambourine players onstage with him. This was probably not a good move. - I actually think tambourines are pretty boring instruments. I don't think the Berklee College of Music would accept a student who wanted to specialize in the tambourine. Although tambourines are probably essential components to folk music (or any music festival where long-haired hippies gather to smoke dope and talk about how great the 60s were) it is a relatively easy instrument to play. No one has to practice playing the tambourine just like no one has to practice playing the k...

La is the French word for the. However, it is feminine. In French, nouns are either boys or girls. I don't know why this is. French people are freaky. He is English for a male. When someone says "he is buying turnips" you can be rest assured that the turnip purchaser has a penis. As such, la he is a contradiction. La la la he he he is a triple contradiction. Paradox. - The Dutch philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard loved paradoxes – felt they are intellectual necessities. He agreed with the early Church father Tertullian that Christianity was absurd. Despite this, it was to be embraced, not dismissed. - I don't know a whole lot about Kierkegaard. I remember quoting him to some of my mother's work colleagues and they were super impressed (and super drunk, to boot.) We were talking about television and whether or not it was a force for good or evil. At that point, I quoted Soren's oft-quoted snippet: "Suppose someone invente...