Twitter

I have temporarily moved this blog to twitter @thewineknot. It's essentially the same thing only shorter. Which means that I can spend more time watching TV and eating hot apple pies.

Carpet

There was a time when carpet use got a little out of control.  People had a hunger that only an all-you-can-eat buffet could satisfy.  It was being used everywhere.  I remember asking my grandfather why he carpeted his countertop, only to have him explain how he "had some left over after finishing the roof."  Carpet was automatically used for everything.  There was never a debate about what type of flooring was going to be installed; the only question was what colour would the carpet be?  Despite all of the carpeting that was done, there are a few things that I've never seen carpeted.  I have never seen a carpeted bathtub, although it would have been considered the first no-slip tub.  

This overuse of an item is not just limited to carpet.  I have a cousin who has a small bee farm that produces honey.  He has developed an incredible love for honey and an unending amount of uses for it.  No matter what food is being served, be prepared to be told how good this particular item tastes with a little bit of honey.  From meats to desserts, honey is apparently good on everything.  I think that my cousin has turned into a bear, but I am not going to rule out the possibility that he is still fully human until all of the facts are in.

Luckily, the only thing that I care enough about to lose my mind over is cookies and that job has already been filled by the cookie monster.  This cookie devouring monster would use cookies for rims on his car if he didn't destroy any cookie left in his path first.  Upon closer inspection, the cookie monster also appears to be a victim of the carpet binge, having been covered with a nice blue shag, possibly leftover from my grandpa's deck.  Despite having the title of cookie monster, he doesn't actually eat any cookies, just shoving them into his mouth and crunching them into crumbs which fly all over the place.  My approach is much different, inhaling all of the pieces off my carpeted plate my Grandpa gave me - just like a vacuum would.

Gold Medal

Canada just set a new record for the most gold medals won by a country in the Winter Olympics.  They were tied with the United States and Norway with 13 before the mens hockey finals.  After all twenty hockey players received their medals the total was then rocketed up to 33, smashing the old record.  This number was later brought into debate after a snowboarder requested a chocolate medal, claiming they had an incredible case of the munchies.  If a medal has been consumed for dessert does it still count towards the total medal count?

The controversy continued as certain sports were coming under attack.  Not for the use of steroids but claims that events, such as curling are not physically demanding enough to be worthy of the Olympic Games.  These criticisms were thankfully quieted as 43-year-old Kevin Martin took home the gold medal in men's curling and 43-year-old Anette Norberg won the women's gold medal.

After watching the same speed skaters win medals in the 500m, 1000m, 1500m, 3000m, 5000m, 10000m  and Team Pursuit, the Canadian hockey teams came up with several ideas to win multiple medals.  Early event submissions have been made for the 30-Minute Hockey Game, 3-on-3 Hockey and Big Net Hockey.  If you can't win a medal in another sport, why not just add a small twist to your existing sport?

Fatherly Advice

There's no shortage of people giving out good advice.  You can turn a loss into a win by learning from it or watch how you treat your mother because thats how you'll treat other women.  A new broom sweeps clean or one bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.  Then there's the timeless advice that I was given by father growing up.  My dad had two rules to live by that he constantly reminded us kids through speech and practice.  I should preface this by saying that my dad has a degree in biblical studies and several years of post secondary business training.  His timeless advice that he wont hesitate to tell anybody who comes within earshot of him is "life's a race and always wear a funny hat".

In an effort to make him happy my sister and I would hurry through tasks paying little attention to details all while wearing what we thought were funny hats.  He used to wear one of those hats that have an actual clock on the front with the saying "keeping ahead of time".  Winter is when my dad really shines because when a funny hat is your goal then the world is yours for the taking.  There are raccoon hats, jester hats, santa hats, elf hats and even those novelty ear muffs would fall under the definition of a funny hat.  The more that he could embarrass his kids the better.

When life's a race then your day has to start at 5:00AM.  Which when your a teenager those hours are only open for business if you haven't gone to sleep yet.  Having prefaced the advice with my fathers education I feel as though I should conclude with his occupation, which was a grain farmer for over 30 years.  Wearing funny hats and being in a hurry are part of the job description although I must admit that few farmers actually wear the funny hat on purpose.

Gravity

Objectively, time is experienced the same by everybody, yet subjectively there are subtle differences on how it's experienced.  I personally experience time in seconds, hours, days, months and years.  Yet other people see their life only in months.  This particular view of time makes it highly probably that they will always be late for everything.  Now it's not impossible for MONTH-ONLY (or monther) people to be on time, just highly unlikely (get your calculator ready - see uncle calculator if you missed it).

There are 60 minutes in a hour, 1440 minutes in a day and 44640 minutes in a month.  This allows somebody like myself who experiences individual minutes to have 44640 measures of time to 1 measure of time for a "monther".  If you could bet on which type of person would be on time, the odds would be 44640:1, which also happens to be the same odds as the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to win the Grey Cup.

But why is a monther always late and never early?  For the answer, I went to my wife who has a lifetime of experiencing months only.  She finally heard the question a week later and I was eventually given an answer in three weeks.  As it turns out, she has no idea what I'm talking about.

The reason why a monther must always be late and never early is because it's a law, similar to the law of gravity and really bad Winnipeg football teams.

Acronyms

Acronyms are used for the purpose of taking something long and complicated and making it short and incomprehensible.  Somewhere along the line we've confused incomprehensible with cool.  There are new acronyms being made on a daily basis, making life more confusing by the hour.  Sometimes I'm unsure what language these acronym-people are talking so to avoid being left out I'll start spellings words in an attempt to be part of the conversation.  "The W.E.A.T.H.E.R. says that there's a chance of S.N.O.W. tomorrow."

The city of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan has a north side and a south side.  The south side commonly called south hill is generally only seen when a driver makes a wrong turn leaving KFC and gets trapped going southbound on a one way street.  The driver then returns back to the north side of town and purchases a GPS device so such an event won't happen again.  A few years ago, the people of south hill decided that they wanted to get some people over to their side of the city and breathe some life into the businesses business, Family Pizza or FP, on that side of town.

The plan was to have an entire weekend dedicated to the south hill.  Since they live south of the bridge connecting the north and south side of the city it was suggested to call the event "South Of The Bridge Days".  Only two people attended the meeting, real-life BFFs, and this name was quickly agreed upon.  Wanting to make the event sound cool and appeal to a younger demographic, while saving printing costs all at the same time, an acronym was put on a huge banner.  It proudly declared "SOB Days", greeting whoever makes a wrong turn out of KFC.  After receiving a "big crunch combo", I accidently made the wrong turn and was greeted by this "SOB Days" sign.  Expecting to get empty beer bottles thrown at my car or have somebody pick a fight, I decided to quickly turn around and go back to the more civilized north side.  But remembering the Family Pizza, I thought, "Why not see if they have a promotion on for SOB days?"  It turns out that the only business on south hill decided not to participate in the event but there was at least a dozen balloons decorating a street lamp post or so I'm told that there was until some SOB stole them A.L.L.

Names

Names are more contagious than injuries in baseball.  It doesn't matter if it's the name of a store or a person's name.  Once a name is given, expect similarity to follow suit.  If you're hungry for a burger, you could go to Burger King, Burger Flame, Burger Cabin or Burger Fuel.  That actually sounds more like the days of the week to me or more specifically a friday night but the point is that they all just have the name burger followed by a noun.

Then there's the companies that name their business after the street that they are on.  This kind name is the most addictive of them all.  Businesses that find themselves on these kind of streets are given the choice of naming their business after the street or move to a different street.  These streets are very powerful often holding prominent positions within municipal, provincial and federal government.

In an attempt to stop this, a local business "687 Takeaways" tried to leave their street name out of their address.  However, not fully understanding the exponential law of business names, soon other business started following the trend.  Now there's 587 takeaways, 543 bakery, 843 clock repair and 444 printing.  These numbered businesses are refusing to cooperate with the street-named businesses, which have created a bunch of confused people driving around unable to find anything and even forcing a small group of people to actually cook their own meals eat at home.  Why not vote for an actual person in the upcoming election instead of a street to start solving these problems?  I might but right now my vote is leaning toward a broom or possibly a mop to clean this mess up.

Critic

There are some jobs out there that everybody wants.  A lot of those dream jobs end with the word critic. There's film critic, book critic, art critic,  video game critic and food critic.  This got me thinking, why not become one of these critics?  Then I realized, why would I want to limit myself to criticize just one thing when I would prefer to criticize everything?

Now the title of "critic" alone would be great but as soon as you add a suffix to the end it's just a way of limiting the things that you can complain about.  Think of all things that your opinion would no longer be valid for.  "What do you know about politics, Nick, you're just a food critic?"  I couldn't even watch a football game with my friends anymore.  "Oh look.  Mr. Book Critic thinks he knows about sports now too; it must be nice being a nerdler-know-it-all."  Now in all honesty, I hear those complaints already, just without the term food critic or book critic on the end.  But why should I add fuel to the fire?

I've been told by my wife that the purpose of a critic is to judge the merit of something and not merely criticize it.  However, I feel that the title of "critic" affords one the right to criticize if thats what he or she want to do.  I'm not entirely certain that everything that I'm saying is a criticism either.  Is it my fault that I thought the ice cream was way too cold and that the sky's too blue?

Wood Grain

The idea behind veneer is that you cover up a cheep wood with a thin layer of nicer more expensive wood.  My mom used the veneer philosophy with t-shirts when I was growing.  She would buy cheap multi-packs of plain white shirts then proceed to paint various brand names and logos onto the shirts.  To be fair, my mom has an incredible talent for painting and drawing.  Nobody at school ever knew that the "Guess" shirt I was wearing was actually just a veneer hiding a plain shirt recently purchased from Zellers.

Wood veneers are not new.  They've been around for hundreds of years.   In the '70s, plastics started being produced.  The goal with plastic at the time was to try and make it look like wood .  Soon plastic wood veneers started showing up on everything from televisions to tables.  This happened until the '80s, when somebody realized that not everything had to look like wood and plastic could simply be a solid color.

Eventually something cheaper will replace plastic.  We'll be so accustomed to plastic that we wont be able to simply get rid of it.  To fill the transition period the new product will have to be made to look like plastic.  "That looks exactly like a plastic wood grained veneer, I would have never guessed that it wasn't plastic."   Why not start collecting all of those future plastic antiques now?  I would but I'm in the middle of a law suit from wearing one of the shirts that my mom made me.   Something about copywrite infringement involving a maximum $250,000 fine and up to 7 years in prison.

Offensive Playbook

I never thought that I would say this pre-invention of a time machine "the Saskatchewan Roughriders have just won first place in the western division".  Actually, they tied for first place and then won the game of rock-paper-scissors over Calgary.  Luckily, Calgary has become predictable always picking rock, allowing us to pick up an easy win by simply selecting paper.  Calgary wanted a best 2 out of 3 but rules are rules.

The Roughriders haven't finished in first place since 1976.  Considering that there are only 4 teams in the division thats 6.5 times less than they would have if the league had in 1977 adopted the proposed sharing of victories to encourage cooperation and generosity among the younger and more impressionable fans.  I can see the reasoning for voting against such a proposal at the time but history has proved that decision wrong.

I've gone over some game tape of past roughrider seasons.  My goal was to find out why there have been so few 1st place finishes in the franchise's history.  I'm not a football expert, but I do believe that when your offensive playbook only consists of three plays (run, pass, punt) it makes it very difficult to put together a winning season.  This kind of offense relies heavily on shut-out defense that produces turnovers within field goal range and consistent punt returns for touchdowns.  Why not change up the playbook this Sunday?  Because Calgary always picks rock.