Alpharants

A. I think athletes should get the gold medal for finishing fourth. Think of the strategy involved. What would happen in figure skating?

B. I think Wiebo Ludwig should have lit the Olympic flame in Vancouver.

C. I have a friend who has been married and divorced so often that his lawyer suggested next time he forego getting married and just buy her a house.

D. How did Paul McCartney wind up with Heather Mills? Maybe it was more Beatle destiny like George dying of cancer and John getting shot in the back.

E. During the cold war, espionage agencies used sensory deprivation to brainwash enemy agents. Canada locked people in a room and played Anne Murray until they cracked.

F. I’m not surprised that Tiger crashed his SUV. Driving accuracy was always his Achilles heel.

G. Life expectancy in Canada is up to 80.4 years. Before you get all excited, you have to look back at what it was when you were born. In 1971 it was 72 years. In my case it was 67.2 which is just around a very short corner. Damn statistics.

H. I think Steven Harper looks like a mortician. Or his client.

I. Death is something that happens to other people. Until it happens to you. Then you become other people.

J. The concept of ‘Death warmed over’ has always bothered me. I mean, who would DO something like that?

K. I’m going to get one of those vanity plates that seem to say something. Mine will be ER8W1UC (which means nothing that I know of) just to watch other drivers try to figure it out.

L. Of all the euphemisms for death, ‘passed’ is one of the more intriguing. You get the sense of someone going by in a hurry or giving up their turn in Bridge. Wouldn’t it be totally ambiguous if Joe Namath passed?

M. I don’t want to will my body to Science because I know the kind of sick humour that med students have. Besides, what if I wind up in the Physics or Chemistry department by accident? It’d be, “Someone get me a HUGE frickin’ Erlenmeyer Flask.”

N. My grandmother, in her early nineties, came to Canada to live with my mother. One day she confided in me that this was a strange country because the sun traveled backwards through the sky. I asked her what made her think that. She said that, in Austria, when she looked out her kitchen window in the morning, the sun was coming up. When she looked out my mother’s kitchen window she could only see the sun when it was going down. I explained that her kitchen window faced east and my mother’s kitchen window faced west. She said, no, when she walked in from her back door, the kitchen was on the left and her bedroom was on the right, just as it was now in Canada. I said, yes, but imagine that your house has been turned around. She said, the kitchen is still on the right. I said, you’re right – the sun does come up on the wrong side here.