From The Ol' Grab Bag

The fun of watching Jeopardy comes when you know an answer that none of the contestants on the show do. You know, when you're sitting on the couch saying to yourself "What a bunch of dummies. They don't know that? Everybody knows that. I can't believe they don't know that. I should be on that show. Geez, what a bunch of maroons."

(What can I say, Jeopardy just brings out the worst in me)

Lately, though, Jeopardy has been no fun because of that Ken Jennings guy. I don't know if you caught any of the shows these past few months, but that guy was really irritating. I mean, he knew everything, and he knew it so fast that you didn't even get a chance to hear the question before he was buzzing in with the answer. And that's why I'm so glad that after winning his 2.5 million dollars, Ken Jennings finally lost! Yeah, so long Ken, can't say it's been fun because I was getting pretty sick of you.

But if you watched the show on Tuesday night, you just had to notice that something seemed a little wrong. I don't want to say the fix was on, but it was a little fishy. He was getting beat to the buzzer and missing questions, and in particular he missed a Daily Double question about the name of the town in France that Patton's Third Army liberated at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. I mean, that's a pretty simple question and I'm sure that most people know the answer, but for some reason the 2.5 million dollar man couldn't come up with it. Even though I've got no solid evidence and I doubt that the producers or anyone on the show was involved, I'd say KJ took a dive.

That's my theory, anyways, and if there was some hanky-panky going on, well, who cares? At least he's off the show and I can get back to hurling insults at the half-wit contestants again.

(No, I'm just kidding)

(No I'm not)


Well, here's one of those nights where I feel like blogging but don't have anything to blog about. That would stop a lesser man, but not I. Let's see, what can I blog on.

Unfortunately I don't do book reviews or I'd talk about this great little mystery I just read, but like I said I don't do book reviews. A lot of blogs do, but not this one. It was pretty good, though, called "The Cabinet of Curiosities " by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It's the second book I've read by those two and I've really liked 'em both.

Oh, I know, I can talk about E-books. For some reason E-books never seemed to catch on and I can't figure out why. They're superior to regular paperbacks in so many ways, but I guess people tend to lean on the old and familiar. However, E-books do have their advantages, with the biggest being that you can read them in the dark (particularly good for mysteries). It's just a different experience reading an book in a dark room with the glow of your PDA casting ominous shadows all around, and I think once you get used to it it's hard to go back to turning on a reading light to read. Too much glare, too much reality intruding on your little imaginary world for my taste.

E-books also allow you to do other neat things like adjust the text size and the background color (I prefer large black text against a light gray background) and they also integrate well with electronic dictionaries so that you can look up unfamiliar words on the fly with just a tap or two of your stylus. Best of all, you don't have to deal with the bulkiness of paperbooks when you have an E-book - everything is stored electronically on your memory card or hard drive.

But E-books never caught on, and though they'll probably never disappear entirely, I doubt that we'll ever as extensive a selection of E-books as we do their paperback brethren. Oh well, it's a good idea that never found an audience.

Anything else I can talk about...hmmm, well Bush just got back from a fence-mending trip to Canada. Not that there' much to say about that but it does raise that age old question that we Americans have to deal with from time to time. Namely,

Does Canada Matter?

The answer, of course, is "hell, no" - Americans don't care about Canada, and I've raised the point before, but not in this blog. So I'll raise it again. I bet if you took a random sample of everyday Americans and asked them "What is the capital of Canada?" probably only 6 in 10 could tell you (It's Ottawa, by the way). If you then asked that same sample of Americans "Who is the Prime Minister of Canada?" I doubt if even 1 in 10 could tell you (give up? It's Paul Martin. Yeah, I never heard of him either). But to go even further, if you asked that same sample of Americans "Where is Canada?" I bet you not a single one of them could even find Canada on a map if it didn't have a little arrow pointing north.

That's just the plain and simple truth.

But I love Canada, sort of. I've visited it many times and even drove the Trans-Canada Highway a couple of times in my younger days. It's a great big beautiful country, and beyond that I can't say very much.

No, I must have some impressions of Canada that I can impart.

Well, let's think. Like I said it's big, temperate in the summer and colder than #&*$ in the winter. Uh, let's see, oh yeah you can drive 110 in Canada, only problem is they're on the metric system up there so 110 isn't nearly as fast as you might think. At least I didn't think so, and I think most Canadians agreed because when I drove through there they were all seemed to be doing 130 or 140. They like to drive fast, I guess, but then it's a big country.

What else, what else...oh yeah, they have mounties in Canada. Unfortunately, they don't wear Dudley Do-Right costumes or anything like that, just regular old uniforms like everyone else. That was kind of disappointing.

They have lots of Tim Horton's in Canada. In fact, you can't drive 10 miles (oops, sorry, I meant kilometers) without running into one. They're kind of like the McDonalds of Canada except they sell donuts instead of burgers. I even tried one once, but, and no offense Canada, I didn't think they lived up to the billing.

You know what's strange about driving across Canada, though. You can be driving along just minding your business when all of a sudden you get east of Ottawa and everything starts turning weird. And by weird, I mean french. Suddenly the stop signs all say "arrete", the street names become "rue this" or "chemin de la that", the bridges become "ponts" and some signs just don't make any sense at all. I never did figure out what that "a droite" or "garde de droite" or whatever it was meant, but it must not have been important.

Anyways, they just start changing things on you without any warning. I always thought it would be more "tourist friendly" if they would provide us language-deprived Americans with little information centers where they could sort of brush up on some of that french we haven't had to use since high school. It would be helpful but instead they just pick you up and throw you in the deep end, so to speak, and there you are left to fend for yourself in some weird foreign country.

Only it's not really a foreign country...it's Canada.

Luckily, if you keep driving east or just detour south back to the States things return to normal after a while, but you need to keep your wits about you at all times when you drive up there, because I tell ya' things can change at any time.

And that's about all I can say about Canada at the moment. I didn't mention the prices but when I was there they were obscene. Especially the gas, and Canadian gas stations are the only ones I've ever visited where they had actual loan officers on the premises to arrange that long term loan you're gonna need to finance your next tank of gas. Something to keep in mind, anyways.

Not much of a blog tonight, huh? Well considering what you paid I guess a media report, a book review and a travelogue are worth the cost of the subscription. Still it's amazing how a person can drone on and on and still have nothing to talk about. Reminds me of a girl I knew in high school, but let's not go there right now.