As the summer quietly succumbs to the inevitable autumn winds, there’s no lack of absurdity I can write about: ‘Will this be a hellish winter with loads of windchill?’, ‘What are the fall fashions for back to school, and what’s the pejorative term for people who wear them?’ or ‘How many different ways can you prepare the metric ton of apples you picked for a fifth year in a row knowing last year you let 85% of them rot?’ Instead of taking the easy out (like the clever folk that read the ‘filler’ segments on the 6 o’clock news), I thought I’d venture into territory that I...

The first post in this series hopefully managed to describe my foray into the bizarre/bazaar world of Kijiji. The idyllic dream of easily selling your goods to complete strangers is often tempered by the cold, harsh reality, which is not unlike getting smacked in the face with a trout. You really do meet some scoundrels, scamps, mooks and numerous others who I’ve yet to find definitions for in my Merriam-Webster’s Guide to Sounding Antiquated. That being said, I don’t want to discourage anyone from selling their New Kids on the Block-branded jammie-jams through one of these services, but I do want to prepare you for the...

This should come as no surprise to those who know me: I don’t tan. Instead, I tend to burst into flames after a few unprotected moments in the bare sun. When I was much younger, I used to dream of being one of those lucky souls who could strut around at the beach wearing nothing but his Vuarnet swim trunks and a sly smile. The stark reality is that I’ve always required a good lathering in some ungodly SPF (15 in the 80s, 30 in the 90s and 23,000 currently). This hit home when I took my first ‘grown up’ vacation to Mexico back in the 2000. Like a little boy at Christmas, I was up before common sense and decided to take...

I don’t watch much TV anymore. I cut the cord, drop-kicked the digital, tae bo’d the telly… I think you get the picture (cheap pun intended). There were a lot of mitigating factors – bad shows, high cable prices, an addiction to my Easy-Bake oven, and above all, the FRAds (or Freakin’ Ridiculous Advertisements). You may substitute your own PG-13 language for the ‘FR’ in FRAds, but essentially it’s the same thing: those awful TV adverts that are like ordering a full lobotomy with a ‘Biggie’ size side of trepanning. They’re ubiquitous and even the massive corporations have...

I’m sure you’ve heard (or dare I say, ‘used’) Kijiji before. For those visiting this blog from another country, or maybe even visiting the internet for the first time (welcome! you’ll never dream again…), Kijiji is a buy and sell website owned by eBay that allows you to sell your crap to your neighbours, often requiring a PhD in haggling. In the past, my parents and grandparents would get rid of junk by turning to church bazaars, flea markets, garage sales or just leaving the crap on their front lawn unattended. Now with the new digital age, we have to do things differently under the mask of being...

I’ve completely bought into the fear mongering from identity theft. I honestly think that the fear of getting hit by a car, being stalked by a clown or even the fear of dying with mismatched socks hasn’t eclipse the dread that someone might co-op my identity and blow through thousands of dollars at the snack bar of a gas station. It’s gotten so bad, that I’ve neglected common sense and have started hoarding anything with even a glimmer of personal information on it. That includes Post-It notes from colleagues (“Do I want the identity thief to know what I wanted on my ham sub?”), Green P parking tickets...