Miss Peaches

Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away,” as performed by Miss Piggy.

Hey, third YouTube post in a row. Go me!

A nation of empty stubbies salutes you

Teenage Head – “Teenage Beer Drinkin’ Party”

When I was 12, I wanted a red suit just like Frankie Venom’s.

Lip-Synching Orange

When I first saw this as a kid, it scared the crap out of me. Then it became one of my favourites.

$50

Is what it cost today to fill my car, a 2003 Corolla. In the big scheme of things, it doesn’t seem like much, a extra $10 here or there. My car has a 40 litre tank and its gas mileage is quite good. I also have slightly less than average driving habits. I’ve owned my car for six years and have yet to surpass the 100K mark on the odometre. Besides, one of the reasons we moved from Nun’s Island (aside from hating that sterile, snooty place) was to shorten my commute to work. It takes 20 minutes by car, or 45 minutes if I walk to the bus station at the Dorval Circle where I can catch an employee shuttle to the office. And everyday, the missus takes the bus to work. In a way, we sort of anticipated rising fuel costs and adjusted the lifestyle accordingly.

All of this, of course, would be great if the only thing I was paying extra for was a little bit of gas. But it’s not. The price of oil affects everything in our lives and I worry about how this is going to play out during this current recession.

In a way, however, I’m glad oil has hit the prices it has. Mind you, I’m not smugly predicting, or wishing for, secular Armageddon here but it seems to me that, if nothing else, it will teach people to be more like our relatives who lived through the Great Depression. When we talk about reducing our carbon footprint, my grandmother would have just said, “stop being so wasteful.” She used to save the aluminium foil on the tops of TV dinners, “just in case.”

If people don’t want to change their lifestyles one bit for environmental reasons, and our current government trying to please their friends in the petroleum industry, then maybe a massive hit to the wallet will be what it takes. If you can’t appeal to people’s community-mindedness, you often have better luck with their greed.

It took a gas crisis in the 1970′s to introduce cars with better gas mileage and more public transit. I think the price of oil (and the peak of its supply which may have already happened) is turning out to be a bigger crisis. Maybe this is what we need to move away from a car-centred culture and toward healthier societies.

Or we could be all screwed and there’s nothing to be done but I prefer to think positively.

Alligator Pie

I’m told that when a fetus is in its 18th week or so, it can hear sounds from the outside world. For that reason, parents are encouraged to speak to their future children to get them adjusted to their voices. This book tells me that, as a dad, I should try to talk to the baby at the same time every day so that it settles into a routine.

Mind you, the book’s author also recounts the time that, as children, he and his family went to Central Park, stripped down, and body-painted each other. The book does have a lot of useful information but once in a while, it comes through that the author is kind of a new age yuppie twit.

Still, I thought it might be a good idea to talk to the baby once in a while before it’s born. The problem is, I don’t really know what to say.

So I decided that I’d read to it. My current bedside book is The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 but that might be a bit heavy. Also, the baby may not want to come out after finding out what kind of world we live in.

I decided, instead, on poetry. I went through the few books of verse that I have and decided that the Victorian poets were never really my thing seeing as they’re exceedingly dull. That’s when I decided that I’d read the same book of poems that I loved as a child: Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee.

As she is a foreigner and therefore not blessed with the knowledge of Canadian children’s literature from the early 1970′s, the Baby Mama was unfamiliar with the work. It offers up mostly nonsense rhymes for the toddler set and makes numerous references to Canada in general, but Toronto in particular. In one poem, Honest Ed’s gets a shout-out, for instance.

As a kid, I never owned my own copy but spent one summer repeatedly signing it out of the local library. Hopefully the baby will like it too, and not think its dad is weird.