Skinny Dipping

Good Lord!  There was a bigger stampede that time than when I said to have a drink with me.  You people should be ashamed of yourselves….or party-proud.  Sadly, for you, I’ve led you astray again.  What I’m doing is dipping into recent newspaper stories, to give you the skinny, about a few of the things the local newspaper has seen fit to print recently.  Interesting?  Maybe.  Amusing?  Perhaps.  Entertaining?  I hope so!

First of all, does anyone know how the term “The Skinny” came into being?  If you don’t, don’t feel badly.  Not even Wikipedia can come up with a solid answer.  I don’t like the term.  Personally, I feel it’s too affectatious.  It’s used, fortunately sparingly, everywhere English is spoken, but it seems to be mostly a New York City piece of slang.  Montreal can hate Toronto, but I think we can all hate NYC!  It seems to be a newspaper term that started when some editor wanted to “get down to the skin” of a story.

A local woman has given birth to triplets.  That in itself is a one in ten thousand occurrence.  These three are all identical, which makes it literally, a one in a million.  Her doctor asked her which fertility specialist they’d gone to.  That confused the couple, since these three were naturally conceived.  They have a four-year-old son at home, and just brought home three more boys….and already she wants to try again, because she wants a girl.  She’ll end up with a baseball team, and no cheerleader.  Apparently she named the boys Blake, Lucas and Timothy, because the husband said that, with three chances, he still didn’t get to use his favorite name, Silas.

KayJai blogged about getting ready to withstand Hurricane Leslie, at her home in Newfoundland.  We’ve had a picture in the local paper, of a car, up to the top of its wheel-wells in water.  Seawater or fresh, that’s not going to do it a lot of good.  There was also a picture of a man in St. Johns, who had a three-foot thick tree split and fall on his house.  The ironic part was that Hurricane Leslie brought the tree down on this man’s house on Leslie Street.

Over in the next small city, a female preacher from the Church Of Holier Than Thou, felt that marriages at City Hall should be performed by more than just a clerk.  She went to the council and offered her services as City Pastor, essentially creating her own second, paid, part-time job.  But her particular sect would not allow her to marry same-sex couples, so she fobbed those off onto another preacher she knew, who could and would.

Gay and lesbian couples complained about discrimination, and getting second-tier service.  A court has decided that whoever does the job, needs to perform the entire job, so her fill-in has been appointed.  She “feels let-down”, and, of course, one of her church members has already had an op/ed letter printed, claiming she was discriminated against.  I see no discrimination against her, only her church against gays.  She wasn’t forced to marry gay couples.  She wasn’t forced to remain on the job, against her morals.  The city council had to choose between a city official who would do half a job, and one who would do the complete function.  I know which one I’d choose.  How about you?

A Nova Scotia folksinger has released an album entitled No More Pennies, which is all about the disappearance of the Canadian penny, now that the Mint is no longer stamping them out.  As part of the cover art, he had several images of Canadian pennies.  The Canadian Mint sent him an official cease-and-desist letter, saying that all image rights to all Canadian money belong to the mint.  If he were to sell more than 2,000 album copies, he would be subject to a $1200 royalty fee.  Several days later, after the public outrage died down a bit, and the Ritalin kicked in, the bureaucrats offered him a one-time exemption.  Take ‘er an’ run, me boy!

My wife said recently that my letters to the editor have died back a bit since I’ve taken up blogging.  I had another letter printed recently.  After our local by-election a man had a letter printed, in which he complained about getting an automated phone call, touting one of the candidates, at five to midnight, long after he’d gone to bed.  What particularly irked him, was that he does not live within the riding boundary.

The election committee apologised and blamed the service provider for both the timing and location.  Another man actually took the time and effort to send in a letter pointing out that the victim is now a member of the “connected” generation.  If he didn’t want to be wakened at night, he should “just turn the phone off.”  I submitted a letter which suggested that Mr. Sympathy could provide his own phone number.  That way, if Victim’s mother died of a heart attack, or his wife was involved in a traffic accident, or his son was pulled over after a late party for DUI, and needed bail and a drive home, Sympathy could take a message, and run over to the house and deliver it.

Some people can afford to be disconnected; others can’t.  Some people need it.  For a while, years ago, the local transit company had 888 numbers assigned to every stop in town.  If you called the stop number, the automated system would give you the expected times of arrival for the next two buses.  My daughter’s then-current boyfriend got sick of his drunken buddies calling him up in the middle of the night.  He paid for phone service which included call-forwarding.  Before he went to bed, he would set the system to call one of the bus-stops, or the answering machine at one of the local funeral homes.

1. H.E. ELLIS says:

September 4, 2012 at 7:44 pm (Edit)

Hello Archon and his league of illustrious Canadian-types. I’ve just gotten word that next week there will be a new blog that has to do with Canada. Here’s more info:

http://speaker7.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/canadica-is-coming/

Pass the word along to Kayjai and Harem.

By this method I have been a good boy and done that.  I also include SightsNBytes and all the other readers who would get a kick out of reading about Canadian/American comparisons and contrasts.  It can be reached directly at www.canadica.wordpress.com