President Obama,
You should not smoke when you are president! There are simple reasons. Because you will die by smoking, and then you will not be president! But I want you to be.
Your No. 1 fan,
David Lopez, age 7
Los Angeles
———-
This, and other child letters to Obama, are posted over on McSweeney’s.
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Happy New Year everyone from all of us here at The Next Chapter, and that includes our experts who, after their amazingly accurate predictions for last November, have been on vacation for the last little while.
But they are back, and as enthusiastic as ever about their predictions for the New Year. These are some of the predictions they have shared so far.
- The Pittsburgh Steelers will win the Superbowl over the Atlanta Falcons, after crushing Miami and narrowly beating Tennessee in the post-season. Our experts would like to add that, by September, because they had been so crushed and morally defeated by Pittsburgh, the Miami Dolphins will have given up their right to play in the NFL and will have sold the team to West Palm Beach where they will be renamed the Palm Beach Porpoises. Team jerseys are not a popular sell with the kids.
- The Academy Award for Best Picture goes to… The Love Guru? It is later reported that not a single member of the Academy had ever seen an Austin Powers movie and had lauded The Love Guru as “fresh” and “original”.
- Barack Obama 12-Month calendars will outsell Fireman calendars in December.
- People will buy eleven times the number of electric cars in 2009 than they did in 2008 for inner city use. Many cities will add “rev lanes” to their roads so that drivers can push their car backwards several hundred metres before quickly jumping in as the car shoots forward.
- Green will continue to be the new black as everything from grocery bags to Tim Hortons cups to candy bar wrappers will be affected by the new national “landfill tax”, which will help support important green initiatives like the creation of government pamphlets discussing the need for green initiatives.
- A major disaster will occur somewhere in the world between June 3rd and November 17th and the news media will report on it. There will be some survivors and some non-survivors. A blog will link to a news story about it with a comment about how “tragic” this event was.
- Pictures of breastfeeding will be banned from all sites on the mainstream Internet due to “indecency”. This includes sites that properly educate and instruct new mothers on how to breastfeed. Those educational sites will now only be available on .xxx domains.
- Gay pet marriage will make the news in the U.S. this year, and it will be banned in all States except, for some reason, Missouri. Canada will continue to allow gay pets to be married and those pets will continue to enjoy all the same benefits as heterosexual pet marriages.
- The biggest movie of the year will be Piranha 3-D, set for release on July 24th. Our experts stand by this prediction more than any other.
- George W. Bush will be disappointed when no library or monument is named after him once his presidency is over. He will get some small satisfaction, however, when all Burger King locations in Texas briefly feature the Bushburger with Fries Combo on their menu. The combo features a small, regular Hamburger, with pickles, mayo and relish, but it’s really the side order of fries that is the main feature as they come in the largest size ever sold by the franchise and overshadow the burger completely on the tray. The combo will later be renamed the “Fries Combo with Bushburger”, and that is how it will be remembered by future generations of Burger King patrons.
- For at least the month of January, and perhaps part of February, everyone will be feeling the effects of the leap second and will feel slightly out of synch with the world. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.
That’s it - we hope everyone had an excellent New Year’s Eve and that you’re as excited for 2009 as we are!
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This has been in my head all week - classic.
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It starts with “Thou Shalt Not List Every Movie, TV Show, Band and Book You Have Ever Heard Of In Your Profile” and gets funnier from there.
The Ten Commandments of Facebook
So far as yet I haven’t broken any of these, but I’m hoping some friends of mine read this… a nice, passive-aggressive way of me letting them know how they might be appearing to others…
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Strange, but that’s how I’ve been feeling lately. Have not written anything in weeks, have not picked up the guitar, the PVR is full of shows I have yet to watch and the Wii sits there, forgotten, sad, lonely…
Instead I’ve been attending work functions, playing on work sports teams (go Dodgeballers - second place finish!) and taking advantage of my new remote access to catch up on the work I just don’t have time to do when I’m at, you know, work.
November and December have been just insane, and it doesn’t look to lighten up any in the new year either.
I feel like I need a day where the world forgets I exist; a cold, stormy day, perfect for staying in, watching movies, reestablishing that dent on the couch. That’s all I really want for Christmas this year.
And if we could somehow make that day stretch on for, like, 84 hours, that would be good too.
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We are sitting outside around the dinner table in a tent-like structure in Douz, gateway to the Sahara. There are 18 of us, including our tour guide and our driver, and dinner is actually, surprisingly, very similar to lunch. There is cous cous, because there is always cous cous, and there is soup and there is the hottest pepper I have ever put in my mouth, which means I do not actually taste any of the rest of the dinner.
Tunisian wine has generally been really good, so we are disappointed when we try tonight’s brand. The label looks homemade.
We are not here for the food, however; we are here for the dinner in the Sahara, the bedouin experience and the music.
As we sit and eat several performers come right into the middle of the table and play and dance for us.
And one by one they get us to come up and dance with them, which we all do.
The gentleman in the photo directly above, the one in the middle, approaches me and gets me to come up and dance with him.
I start to do a few little moves, swishy stuff, trying to follow his lead, when he suddenly grabs my arms and places them stiffly at my side. He then walks to the other side of the dance area and faces me, arms at his side.
So of course you know what I’m thinking…
Dance off.
The Arabian music is flowing through the air and, when faced with a dance off, I do the only dance I know how to do.
I do the robot.
I kill it. It is perhaps the best robot I have ever done. Nothing as insanely good as this of course, but still, a pretty damn good robot.
We laugh and we do this weird “how low can you go” thing and we hop up and down and meet in the middle of the dance floor. Fun stuff, innocent stuff, good times.
Apart from the two bands pictured there is also a belly dancer and another guy who, for lack of any real information on him, I call “the owner’s son”. He is slightly cross eyed and goofy looking with thick glasses, dressed differently from the others and it is abundantly clear that everyone else is merely tolerating his presence, as if their jobs depend on it.
Where the others innocently try to get us to clap along he forcefully claps in our faces and seems angry when we do not comply. Not a nice guy.
His dancing is okay but, completely to show him up, one of the drummers in the first band does an amazing routine with his drum that blows him out of the water. Still, the owner’s son does not mind. He looks happy to just have friends.
He tries too hard to be liked, running away between performances and coming back with a cape, showing off his cape to us as if we had never seen a cape before. Awkward situation.
But back to the belly dancer.
There are attractive belly dancers and there are belly dancers that are not attractive. This one leant a little more towards the latter. If I shorten her name from “Belly Dancer” to simply “Belly”, you might get my point. She is sweet though and gets people up dancing throughout the evening. Being the youngest person in our tour group I am, apparently, being saved for last.
Belly gets me up towards the end of the evening and there seems to be a collective “finally” vibe that goes up in the group. It’s my turn to dance and entertain and, it is important to note, this is all happening the night after I went up on stage at our hotel and pushed a sword into a fakir’s stomach, a story I have yet to tell.
The group is looking forward to me dancing with Belly and she senses this and doesn’t want to disappoint. We dance and she brings my hands in and makes me hold onto her namesake and she comes in close to me and starts to take off my sweater.
Um, no.
Not neccessarily in this order:
1) It is cold and we are outside in the desert at night.
2) I have a girlfriend.
3) People are still eating.
4) We just met.
I politely decline her subtle offer to strip me down and laugh and turn to walk away and I come face to face with the owner’s son who, dorky as he might be, is thick, stocky, and bigger than me. He shakes his head and turns me back around to face the belly dancer. Creepy, a little rude and there is no other escape.
I am wearing a t-shirt underneath so, going along with the whoops and hollers from my group, I decide to let her take my sweater off.
We continue to dance and it isn’t long before she is trying to take off my t-shirt.
With the owner’s son still behind me and the group loving every awkward minute of this, I consent and I am suddenly topless, arms around Belly, dancing in the desert.
There is a picture.
There is a picture of this exact scene, with the owner’s son standing behind me and everything, and me looking directly into the camera. This picture was mailed to me by one of my traveling companions and, fortunately, was not taken with a digital camera.
Oh sure, I could scan it but… um, I don’t want to.
This thing is never seeing the light of the internet.
But wait, there’s more.
After a few more minutes of awkward dancing where I prove exactly how tall and white I am she steps away from the floor and I think everything is over.
It’s not.
She comes back with a blindfold.
“All right, thanks everybody… great evening, had a lot of fun but really I must be going now… don’t forget to tip young Belly here…”
And there is the owner’s son, halting my retreat yet again, pushing me (a little too eagerly and forcefully I might add) back onto the dance area.
I concede and resign myself to playing this whole thing through to the bitter end. I start to play it up for the group and she puts the blindfold on me and I try to peek but Belly reprimands me with a waving finger.
Then she starts playing with my nipples.
I stand there and start to scratch my head pensively, as if I cannot figure out exactly what is going on while she continues to play with my nipples. The group is loving it. Her fingers start roaming up and down my chest and stomach and I stand there, frowning, hands on my hips, not wanting to even pretend I am enjoying myself, which turns out to be a good thing…
Because when she takes the blindfold off from behind me I see the owner’s son tickling my nipple.
There is applause and I am finally, finally allowed to sit back down at the table.
“That was a joke, right?” I say to the lady next to me. “It was her all along and he just came in at the last minute, right?”
There are tears in her eyes she is laughing so hard.
“No Lee, I’m afraid not.”
I am a sucker and have fallen for what feels like the oldest trick in the book; but everyone had such a good time watching, I don’t completely mind being the centre of attention and the jokes the evening inspires throughout the rest of the trip at my expense, well, makes the whole thing worthwhile.
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Filed under: Travelogue
Having a look back at some of our expert October predictions, we once again admit that not all the predictions were entirely correct. In fact, really, none of them were.
However, our experts do point to this news story that says Sarah Palin was one of the top costumes for Hallowe’en this year, and since that did factor into one of their predictions, we’ve decided to give them a stay of execution and give them a chance at November.
Here’s what we can expect this month, from our expert fingertips to your eyes:
- Barack Obama will be elected the 44th President of The United States of America.
- Chinese-Americans will be skeptical of their new president as the number 4 is bad luck in the Chinese culture. They are also forced to defend themselves against accusations of racism whenever they say their new president’s name.
- On November 10th, “Obama Bucks” will be introduced in most national department stores, entertainment venues and restaurant chains. This discounted “American Dollar” will become so popular that by the time Obama is sworn in it will have replaced American currency. “Obama Bucks” will have a picture of Barack Obama on one side and, on the other side, another picture of Barack Obama, earning the currency the nickname “Barack Backs”.
- Joe the Plumber will start taking correspondence courses towards finishing his University Degree. Looking to lose his now famous moniker he will proactively launch his new website, joethehumanresourcemanager.com.
- Quantum of Solace, already receiving negative reviews overseas, will live up to its overthought name and will portray James Bond as a man too real to be any fun watching. Audiences will demand their Obama Bucks back in droves.
- “Body Break, The Movie” will be developed and distributed by Sony Pictures. Will Smith will be cast as Hal Johnson and Sandra Bullock will portray Joanne McLeod. Bill Cosby will be the voice of their time traveling canine companion, Muttsy. An advance trailer has been made available online:
Our experts have a good feeling about this month - we’ll check back in December to see how they’ve done!
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“All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.” - Carl Sagan
The pages are yellow and I can’t help wondering if they had ever even been white. It cost £2.50 in the U.K., in 1985, and $4.95 in Canada. It was “recommended” to sell for $7.95 in Australia. An American price is not listed.
It is the same size and shape as the book with the same title I read in grade ten. The cover art is the same as well.
The corner on page 122 has a line where it has been folded, which is strange to me; page 122 is on the left-hand side and whenever I fold a page corner down to mark it I always do so on the right.
“SELF-RELIANT LEARNING PROGRAM” is stamped in blank ink across the top of the book, across the breadth of its pages. I know nothing more about this program.
It smells like old-book which, while you wouldn’t make millions bottling and selling it, is not altogether unpleasant.
I got it from a book swap, picked it up out of curiosity, out of a sudden half-remembrance of high school essays. I don’t know who put it on the table, who read it before me, or who read it before them. As I curled up with it last night I had the briefest thought that I was about to sleep with every person this book has ever slept with, and I found that thought strangely comforting.
A banana had gone bad in my school bag. I was nine, I was in grade four and I was only several months into my term at a new school. Everything in my bag smelled like banana. Everything. I had to get a new bag.
Charlotte’s Web smelled like banana mixed with old-book, which was not as offensive an odour as one might first assume. I imagined it’s what monkey libraries must smell like. If anyone in West End Toronto has read a copy of Charlotte’s Web that smelled vaguely like bananas, that was me.
The first real book I wrote was in Grade 3. It had a laminated cover and was spiral bound and when I changed schools I brought it to Mrs. Dodds, the school librarian. She was so impressed she made it a part of the school library. There was a pocket on the back cover and an honest-to-goodness card in the pocket for students to sign the book out. I loved going to the library after school every other week or so, holding my book in my hands, looking to see if anyone had signed it out. Few people ever did, but every name on that list widened my smile just that much more. Actually, given this correlation, I’m glad more people hadn’t signed it out as the resulting grin might have caused permanent damage to my cheeks.
And it’ll happen one day, we’ll blink our eyes or twitch an index finger and the latest Stephen King novel will find its way onto the tablet we’re holding in our hands. It’s the tablet we bought at Radio Hut for $49.95 and accidentally dropped on our uncle’s back porch that time last summer, remember that? That’s where that scratch on the corner came from.
Oh, and look there, on the back at the bottom. See those tiny little pieces of paper stuck there? We never were very good at removing price tags, were we?
The tablet will have stories all its own to be sure, perhaps as many as any book, but they’ll only ever be our own stories.
Books connect us in a way that is physical and real and, perhaps most importantly, in a way we have no real degree of control over; the connections are chaotic.
I’m sleeping with every person my book has ever slept with.
Books touch random people at random moments in their random lives, but there’s always a constant, isn’t there?
Forget about the story inside for a moment and think how we—often enough for me to generalize, I believe—treat our books with respect. With the exception of the odd banana accident, we treat our books well, don’t we? Even if the content within has disappointed us, or angered us, or fueled whatever emotion of ours we secretly loathe, the book survives and is given to the library for a book drive or to a young niece or nephew who don’t know enough about tripe yet to recognize it in literary form. Our respect for the form usually outweighs any lack of it for the content, doesn’t it? Or am I wrong?
And it’ll happen one day, we all know it. The tablets are coming. Cutting down trees is hard work. If our ancestors could have relied on a picture of a log cabin to keep them safe from the elements they would have.
But we will lose something in that transformation, something very valuable. Sure we’re coming up with new ways every day to connect with people around the globe, but for me, and I hope for whomever currently has that copy of Charlotte’s Web, nothing will ever beat a book.
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