Just Another Manic Monday

Well Good Day to you All

I was away all weekend and had no access to the internet. I checked out the site and despite there being very little action on the main page, there was all kinds of entertainment on the comment boards. To that end, though, I must say….

Shut Up! Ok. This is the internet. There are no police. Steve and I have some say here and can block people from using the comment boards but as of right now I have no desire to do so. I got a few e-mails this weekend from people whining about being bashed on the comment board. Come ON! This is the internet. If you’re actually shallow enough to worry about what a bunch of people you’ve never met, and never will meet are saying about you than you should probably stop using the internet all together. Don’t come crying to me or Steve if someone makes fun of you on the comment board. First of all it makes you look like an intellectually smashed asshole. And secondly I don’t want to read something after my great weekend away that looks like it was written by a 9 year old after the big kids wouldn’t let him play Wall Ball with them. Have some fucking self-respect… failing that don’t comment anymore.

Like I said. Steve and I have some pull and the only way I’m gonna block someone from using the comment board is if they’re getting too carried away on one of us! HA! And we’ve already had a few of those and I haven’t blocked them cuz quite frankly, it makes for good reading and neither of us spend a hole lot of time at night in bed crying over the fact that someone thinks I might be gay. Kudos to them for their detective work.

So to be done with this. If you’re skin is so thin and your ego is so weak that some stranger online who doesn’t like you is enough to send your entire world in to chaos just stop coming here or commenting. No one is going to go on this site and say “Let’s not make fun of —-” for you because that’s stupid. And no one is going to block anyone cuz they made fun of you. Also dumb. So suck it up or move on cuz it ain’t gonna change. Free speech unless that speech hurts MY feelings. Then we’ll re-evaluate.

Moving on I’d just like to say how unbelievably cold it is in Thunder Bay in Jaunary. Holey shit. I thought I was beginning to wonder if my testacles would ever come out of my stomach. I felt like a new born. I don’t blame though. I was trying to hide too. I’m sure it’s usually much colder up there as most were walking around in sweaters but for a Toronto guy like me, that was just about enough.

Also… shit there are a lot of ugly people up there. NOT ALL if there are any T-Bay folk reading and you believer yourself to be attractive. But the majority of people were just…. I dunno. To the T-Bay folk I mentioned a moment ago, though. Consider your surroundings. If you believer yourself to be attractive… are you attractive or are you attractive in relates to the people around you cuz that would be different. I hope I’ve made someone think.

The more I think about it. I WAS staying in a hotel… maybe most Thunder Bay people are very attractive and I say all ugly Toronto people in my hotel. I’ve hurt my own feelings.

Saw the Leafs Skills competition last night. Who knew? Nathan Parrott proved himself to be the fastest skater and the hardest shooter on the team. (he was the only one to break 100mph at 100.3). I wonder if his contract is up for renewal at the end of the year.

I’m not sure if Steve will have the Notes From The Tone Deaf up today but you should go and see. If not, there’s still all kinds of great stuff to see on Salty Ham Music and really any of the other Salty Sections as well. Go take a look around.

Well maybe I’ll check back in later. Until then. Keep bashing and quit whining.

Later

What Month Is It Anyway?

Just a small thing that’s kind of got me wondering. Why is it that the ads on the main page of the site here are Christmas oriented now? I’m not even sure that we had Christmas ads at Christmas time, but now, in the middle of fucking January, there they are. I guess if nothing else you know where to go if you need Christmas sheet music for next year. And look at that, you can compare prices on Christmas jewelry at over 40000 stores! Who has that kind of time? Maybe I should shut up though seeing as I’ve already obviously got the time to think about it. I’ll go now and hang my head in shame.

Helpin’ You Out Some More (especially you Karine!)

Well I heard about these on the radio this morning and thought I’d throw them out there for you guys. I figured some of you might have a use for these links (…yes i’m looking at you Karine) so here they are.

First, the one I like better, BoredAtWork.com. It’s got some pretty entertaining stuff over there.

Also give a look to IShouldBeWorking.com. Same kind of idea. Just a place to kill time.

So, if you enjoy wasting time when you should be working and kind of liked Bored.com
“coughkarinecough” then you’ll probably like these too. I’ll put them up on the Links board when I get a second as well.

Enjoy.

Unfair Yankee Bashing???

Good Monday Morning to you All
Well I apologize for my absense and inability to defend myself on the comment boards over the last few days. I was out of town at a training camp preparing for a tournament. I can barely move my legs today. It’s a great feeling, let me tell ya. Let’s get to why I posted this.

On the comment board we’ve had some unfair Yankee bashing. Some by people who claim to know it all, and some from others who have simply been given incorrect information. Let’s take a look. First… original comment.

Seeing that ESPN has been having ad campaigns for hockey, I noticed one of them this week.
‘Made in America…the Original game…the NHL on ESPN’.
As a Canadian, that pisses me off, but I do understand of how it’s not accepted very good down there. They say that ‘original game’ is played indoors in an arena somewhere south. Oh well.
But, point is, the game is ‘original’ as it’s played on any backyard rink.
Nick | 01.17.04 – 4:00 pm |

I must respond.

Well let’s clear this up first. I’m gonna correct Nick. While I’m usually the first to jump on a bandwagon to bash American arrogance, it’s not fair this time. I don’t know how many of you have seen the ad and how mahy are just taking Nick’s word for it but he is relaying the information improperly.

The ad’s concerning “the original” and “An American Tradition” are put on ESPN/ABC’s joint broadcasts as they were the first American Network(s) to pick up the NHL and run with it as a regular deal and take it seriously making weekly game nights and things like that. Since then, FOX and some other networks have picked it up and done bits with it but nothing like ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC have done. (I group them together because they have partnered and do symulcasts).

The ad’s are based on ABC/ESPN being the original Americans to pick up the game… not on the game itself being American.

It’s not a big deal. I just want to make sure that we’re bashing them for the right reason. ESPN hasn’t claimed the game to be their own, simply the tradition of broadcasting it seriously and full-heartedly in the USA to be theirs. They’ve pushed hockey hard when many wouldn’t and I don’t have a problem at all with these ads and the claims they make…. mainly because they’re completely true.

A Little Late

Just wanted to let all of my loyal fan know that the music column is going to be a little late this week. I’m hoping to have it up by sometime on Wednesday at the latest but you just never know with these things. Maybe it’ll be Thursday, maybe it’ll be tomorrow, but it is coming. And just in case anybody is curious, loyal fan wasn’t a typo.

Now if you’re wondering what you can do in the meantime, I can suggest 2 things.

1. Step away from the computer and do something else, the world is pretty big.

2. Go back and have a look at the Vomit Comet Archives. They go all the way back to the beginning when I had to post under Matt’s name for the first couple of days because he hadn’t set things up so I could have my own name. There’s some pretty good stuff back there, even if I have to say so myself. If nothing else, they’ll make all of the cracks about infighting make sense to the new people.

Have fun, I’ll try to toss something up here later on.

Why Would Anybody Want That?

Today I officially lost my faith in humanity and learned a valuable lesson at the same time. People will steal absolutely anything, no matter how much actual value it happens to have.

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather for the last couple days so being the helpful soul that she is my girlfriend was making the trips up and down the stairs to do my laundry so I didn’t have to. I intended to do it myself but I quickly realized that any time I went either up or down the stairs of the building my head would start spinning and I would pretty much keel over from dizziness. But enough about me and my wining, back to the story.

Now I’m what you might call a veteran on the apartment laundry scene. For the better part of 5 years I’ve been washing my clothing in various apartment settings in an effort to promote cleanliness in my personal life and to set an example for those who don’t always have the same ideals and higenic standards that I try to set forth for myself to live by.

Through all of my victories and struggles one thing has stayed constant, my trusty basket. Bought from a store who’s name escapes me sometime in mid 1999, my laundry basket, affectionately known to all who loved him as My Laundry Basket has remained by my side, proudly carrying my dirty clothes to meet their eventual cleansing and then helping me bring them back to my place of residence with that very same honour and dignity where they would then be nicely folded and returned to their resting places. For 5 years My Laundry Basket and I traveled the stairwells and elevators of Ontario together becoming friends and more than that, brothers in house work. We shared about as much as a man and an inanimate object can share, I mean come on, he saw all my underwear and everything. But my point is that the 2 of us were inseparable, that is until today.

Like I mentioned previously, my trusty girlfriend was on this day charged with the task of accompanying My Laundry Basket on it’s humanitarian mission since I was on the disabled list. This has happened before and all parties had always returned unharmed, proving to me that they could be trusted to work together as a team, which is why I had no reservations about them doing so on this day.

I think it was about 1:41 in the afternoon when the unthinkable happened. The love of my life, having gone to place clothes in the dryer came rushing into our home in an obvious panic.

“Your basket is gone,” she said, “somebody took it.”

The words cut me like a knife. The sense of loss was immediate, so much so that against my better judgment I decided to brave the stairs once again in a heroic bid to rescue My Laundry Basket from who knows what horrible fate. This can’t possibly be happening, I thought as I walked. First of all, who would want a 5-year-old laundry basket, especially one that belonged to a complete stranger? Think about it, who knows what kind of horrors may have sat in the bottom of that thing?

When I reached the laundry room my worst fears were confirmed, the basket was gone. What was once a simple pay to wash laundry room had transformed into an abduction scene right before my very eyes. But as much as the pain of being separated from something that was almost family was eating at me, I had to laugh. I had to laugh at the patheticism of the sad individual who would feel the need to take somebody’s laundry basket rather than just going out and dropping 4 bucks on one of his own like I now have to do thanks to his or her lack of consideration and respect for a fellow tenant.

When the laughter finally subsided I also made a vow to myself, and to my dearly departed friend. If ever I’m down in the depths of our building washing my clothes and I happen to see my old friend sitting there, I’m taking him back. Call it vigilanty justice, call it pettiness, call it what you will, just don’t call it theft. For as the great Sam Roberts says in
the number 2 song of the year,
“It’s alright to get caught stealing back what you’ve lost.”

So goodbye to you my trusted friend, you may be gone, but you will never be forgotten. For though there will be other baskets, you’ll always be my first.

It’s Out Of My Hands

Here’s some cool guest material submitted by our good friend Carin, some time contributor, more frequent commenter. Enjoy, and feel free to send me things too, just make sure they’re quality, because Carin’s stuff when she decides to write is pretty good, as you’re about to see.

It’s out of my hands!

If you are a student in Ontario, and you get money from OSAP, or the Ontario Student Assistance Program, this phrase will sound very, almost oddly, familiar to you. Basically, for those who don’t have to deal with this atrocity, OSAP is a government-run student loan program. You apply, and they run what you tell them through some mystical set of calculations to decide how much help they’re gonna give you. Sounds good? Well in theory, it does, until you realize the government is running this.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the money I receive, whenever they decide I’m poor enough to receive it, which seems to be at random. I swear that, instead of a set of mystical calculations that decide applicants’ fates, it’s a set of chimps that are scared shitless and given pointers. Then whoever they point at in the pile gets money. But that’s not even my biggest problem with OSAP. The government can’t be understood, we just have to face it and deal with it when they are particularly asinine about it.

This is what I have a major problem with. A couple of years ago, the government took an already inefficient system and subjected it to further butchering. Before this point, you applied, then OSAP granted you your loan and you decide which bank was supposed to hold the money. Then, although the government was slow as molasses, it was simple. You knew the bank was separate from the government and the government was separate from the bank. You knew where to go when you had a problem at a certain stage. The government if you felt you didn’t get enough, the bank to find out why it wasn’t in your account. Plus, even though the government was slow, the banks were usually pretty fast, and since multiple banks did this stuff, they split the load so they weren’t so overwhelmed.

Then, up in some government office, a twinkling light went off in someone’s head. This was such an unusual occurrence that much fanfare was made of it. Someone got an idea! They thought, “Let’s get OSAP centralized!” Now what should that mean to you? One place, right? One place to direct all your queries? One place that should have all necessary records and can help you figure out where the error is, right? Well that wasn’t the government’s idea. To make things worse, they called this place the National Student Loan Centre. Now what does that tell you? The same things as I mentioned above about the information being centralized? Or am I crazy? I don’t know which scenario I want more to be true.

Anyway, this is the process you go through now. You apply online, which is enough of a bitch. If you really don’t want to apply online, you can pay them 10 bucks for a paper form, which is getting even harder to do now. Ten bucks? Come on, it’s not that much paper. At the university’s inflated rates for photocopying, it would have to be 100 pages, and there’s no way it is. I wouldn’t even mind applying online if it sped things along, but it takes the same plodding pace as if I filled it out and mailed it.

Then you get a letter from the government saying that either the scared chimp pointed at you and you got money, or the chimp crapped on your application, rendering it unreadable, whatever the case may be. If you’re lucky enough to get pointed at, then you have to go pick up your application papers at your school at the beginning of the year. Now, you’d think, great! You pick them up and off we go. A couple days later, and woohoo, the cash has arrived and you’re all good for the semester. No no no. That only happens in a perfect world. Here’s what happens in this one.

First of all, the people handing out the papers don’t even get that much training from the powers that be. I sort of feel sorry for them, because all they do all day is deal with pissed off student after pissed off student, and have to smile and nod and pretend that everything is going to be fine even though they don’t have a flaming clue because all they’ve been trained to do is, check the social insurance number, find the loan certificate that matches, hand loan certificate to pissed off student, move said student along. Repeat.

Then you deal with another set of people across the hall who are solely responsible for processing these papers. It seems the first people are employed by the Ontario government, and these people are employed by the national student loan centre. Again, these people are by no means experts in this stuff, nor are they connected to the system in any permanent way. They’re just sort of given basic training and a few key lines that should get them along. You give them your papers and a voided cheque and they tell you to chill out and allow at least a week for them to process your loan and another few days for the money to actually arrive in your account. I think I feel more sorry for these people, because at this point if the student isn’t annoyed already, they will become so after being told they may have to wait up to two weeks for their money. They will become pissed off very, very quickly.

And this is where the fun really starts. You see, these people don’t arrive on campus until the beginning of each semester, which is coincidentally not far from when your tuition comes due. So, if you arrive on the very first day to get your stuff in and everything goes off without a hitch, then you might get your money before the university wants it. But not everyone can get it done the first day, and there are always bound to be problems with some people’s loans being processed that are nobody’s fault. So you’re told to just whistle a happy tune for two weeks, and you are asked that, if your cheque bounces, “do you have overdraft protection?” Like we should have to pay for the slowness of the system. The university, or OSAP, should be reimbursing us god damn it! We shouldn’t be thrown thousands of dollars in debt with no recourse because of these inefficiencies!

So you wait…and you wait…and you hope…and the fateful day of your tuition coming due comes closer. Can’t you just hear the music from Jaws? Worried, understandably so, you pick up the phone and call the university and ask if they can hold onto your cheque a couple days because your OSAP isn’t in your account. They tell you that they can’t do that, it’s out of their hands, that the cabinet is locked, and that no one has the authorization to open it and take out your cheque. Translation? We’re just too damned lazy to get off our asses and look for your one cheque. We’d rather twiddle our thumbs and sip a double double.

My ass no one has the authorization to open the cabinet. Someone sure does when it’s cashing day. Is he barred from university contact any other day of the year? Then they tell you, “you’ll have to call the OSAP department.” So you do. They tell you, “sorry, it’s out of our hands. If it’s been processed, we don’t know where it is. You’ll have to call the National Student Loan Centre and see what they say.” So you call them and they tell you what day they sent it to your bank, but they have no idea when it will be in your account because after they process it, guess what they’re going to say! Come on! You can do this! If you guessed, it’s out of their hands, again you win a big fat bag of nothing. What? What kind of money-handling is that? If I were to send them some money, they would expect me to know exactly when it would appear on their desk, no ifs, ands, or buts about it! Anyway, during this crazy call, you notice what seems to be an error on your account, so you ask them to verify how much loan money you were given this year. Their response? This too is out of their hands, and that you’re supposed to call some automated OSAP line run by the government of Ontario that you have to pay to call. You! have to pay to not have a chance to talk to any human! You! have to pay to be read some figures over a phone! Ooo, please afford me the privilege. At this point, you’re livid I’m sure. I know I was. If I wasn’t at a public phone, the scene would not have been pretty.

And I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact, I know I’m not. Because the government was in no way ready to be overwhelmed by a problem they created themselves, that is pushing double the amount of students out of high school at once, the university had to actually extend the tuition deadline because they were getting flooded with pleas to hold onto tuition cheques due to lack of OSAP. Isn’t this an absolute farce? Isn’t it ridiculous that, in addition to creating the double cohort problem themselves, they created their own inefficient system by trying lamely to be efficient? Any dumbass can figure out why this system isn’t working. More applications go to less places, staffed by less people to save the government money, so processing time is longer. Why did they have to do that? If it wasn’t broke, which I don’t think it was, why did they have to try and fix it?

The only thing I can figure out is that the government gets money from the processing of these loans. I’ve figured out, through all these struggles, that the only thing that’s centralized is the disbursement of the loans. The scared chimps are still kept very separated from this central place. It’s not like I like the banks having more money, but hell, they were doing
a better job, or at least it seemed that way to me, so why not just give it back to them? The suckiest part of this whole thing is that the powers that be are kept even more well-shielded by poorly-trained workers and puppets up in the student finance department of each university and college. So along with the inefficiency of it all, you can’t get anywhere!

So what’s the best way to end this complicated mess? I guess I hope this makes someone somewhere feel better about what they’re going through, and lets them know they’re not alone. And hey, maybe it’ll save someone a few rounds of governmental ping pong. So to everyone battling this system, good luck dealing with this load of crap, good luck in school, and good luck finding a well-paying job so you can tell OSAP where to stick their loan program and avoid this mess altogether!
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