Talented footballer and man of exquisite taste

Having finished my errands and translation and done all the Internet banking a man of my sensitivities could handle, I looked at the long list of chores I had written out yesterday evening and let out a large "Bollocks". That was, you will understand, an exclamation, not a physical movement. I had, you see, forgotten to do the thing I had meant to do at the end of last week, that was to take The Book over to my good friend and fellow blipper spandcy,

For not only is he an excellent footballer and an all-round good guy, spandcy is also a man of impeccable taste: he ordered the Beast, and it had been sent via me with several other copies to lessen the risk of courier companies losing it. The theory is that if there are fewer parcels, the chances of FedEx losing them will be commensurately reduced. And so it transpired. Instead, the book ended up in the black hole that is my front room, where it stayed until this morning.

What a pleasure it is to get out and talk to human beings. How had I forgotten that? It was brilliant to see spandcy - both the SP and the CY parts - and I was invited for coffee and a catch up. It was a jolt out of the low-level funk I had been in for the past 2 weeks and I reminder that there are things and people in Ottawa that I would miss enormously were I to decamp to warmer climes.

In other news, Teletubby Doug came on board with the siege comments. He's the provincial Conservative leader who has said nothing for the past two weeks. Until today. (In fairness, he had been snowmobiling in cottage country over the weekend, and one cannot expect ones provincial Premier to be working a 24 hours in a single week.) Anyway, he gave an excellent speech today, invoking a State of Emergency and essentially telling those who have taken the City and the Windsor bridge hostage that they will pay the price for their fuckwittedness. He was forceful, on message (mostly), and sounded for the very first time in the past two years like someone who was a leader. I was quite shocked.

Of course, this means he has thrown his hat into the Tory leadership race as well. While he hasn't got the same hairline as Himmler just yet, Poilievre is well on the way to cornering the dipstick fascist corner, so Ford has gone for the "rule of law" voters. That leaves moderates, francophones and perverts (the last interim leader Rona Ambrose spent much of her tenure in tight leather clothes - who said Canada was boring?) The race is on - and the country waits with bated breath.