(HT, embarrassingly enough, to Blogging Baby)
Thank you, Health Canada, for keeping us safe:
Health Canada warns consumers not to use unauthorized intravenous health products due to potential health risks (2006 October 13)
Hmm. Grey-market IV stuff — yeah, that sounds good! and also:
Health Canada reminds caregivers that constant supervision is needed while bathing infants (2006 October 12)
Keep an eye on babies in baths? Gee. What could happen?
Under the Employment Standards Act, 2000, if you are an employee who
- installs or maintains swimming pools
- grows mushrooms
- breeds and boards horses
you are not entitled to statutory holiday pay.
Maddy was given a teeny-tiny china tea set by Honorary-Grandma E. as an early birthday present, so we’ve been having pretend-tea several times a day.
The good thing about pretend tea is that it doesn’t matter if you spill it. Plus, slurping spilled pretend tea out of the tiny saucer lets one make rude slurpy noises but without the mess.
Elizabeth May, current leader of the Green Party of Canada, is running in the London North Centre by-election today in an attempt to be the first Green Party parliamentarian in Canada. In her honour, here’s a bit of Flanders and Swann:
Misalliance
The fragrant Honeysuckle spirals clockwise to the sun
and many other creepers do the same
But some climb anticlockwise,
the Bindweed does for one,
or Convovulus, to give her proper name.
Rooted on either side a door
one of each species grew
and raced up to the window ledge above
Each corkscrewed to the lintel in the only way it knew
where they stopped, touched tendrils, smiled
and fell in love.
Said the right-handed Honeysuckle to the left handed Bindweed
‘oh let us get married if our parents don’t mind we’d
be loving and inseparable, inextricably entwined we’d
live happily ever after’ said the Honeysuckle to the Bindweed.
To the Honeysuckle’s parents it came as a shock,
the Bindweeds, they cried, ‘are inferior stock,
They’re uncultivated, of breeding bereft
We twine to the right and they twine to the left’.
Said the anticlockwise Bindweed to the clockwise Honeysuckle;
‘We’d better start saving
Many a mickle mac’s a muckle
Then run away on a honeymoon and hope that out luck’ll
take a turn for the better’, said the Bindweed to the Honeysuckle.
A bee who was passing exclaimed to them then;
‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again
Consider your offshoots, if offshoots there be,
They’ll never receive any blessing from me’.
Poor little sucker, how will it learn
When it is climbing, which way to turn,
Right, Left, what a disgrace
Our it may go straight up and fall flat on its face.
Said the right-hand thread Honeysuckle to the left-hand thread Bindweed
‘It seems that against us all fate has combined
Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling Columbine
thou art lost and gone forever
We shall never intertwine’.
Together they found them, the very next day
They had pulled up their roots and just shrivelled away
Deprived of that freedom for which we must fight
To veer to the left or to veer to the right.
Pitchfork interviews Tom Waits
Pitchfork: Do you have a favorite sound
Tom Waits: Bacon. In a frying pan. If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.
The opening bits of Jack Johnson’s cute kid song “Upside down” and the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” are distractingly similar.
Me: Don’t touch that please, it’s very breakable. It’s just for looking.
Five seconds later I turn around and the item in question is in Maddy’s hands.
Me: What did I say?! JUST FOR LOOKING!
Maddy (annoyed): I AM just looking! I’m looking with my hands!
….what I should invest in, at least according to the Toronto Star, is designer handbags.
They’re ugly, but who cares? It’s so simple. You don’t even have to worry about diversification. You could be like Jacqueline Szeto-Meiers,
an investment banker by day and owner of the website goneshopping.ca by night. She owns 38 bags by Louis Vuitton — possibly the most iconic label ever — and will have them till the day she dies. Then, her daughter Rachel, who’s now a toddler, will inherit them.
Shoot, if investment bankers are into handbags, surely it’s the right path for us all.
There’s even the possibility of excitement: you could even be a sort of handbag day-trader, risking it all on something new!
There are exceptions to the brand rule, notes Szeto-Meiers. Fondling a metallic bag by the New York-based designer Rafe, she notes that she’d never heard of him, but that doesn’t mean his bag is a bad investment.
“It’s like buying a penny stock. You can have the ability to identify something that’s up and coming.”
Bizarre. Who are these people? And how on earth does one manage to keep 38 stupidly expensive handbags out of reach of a toddler? “No, darling! Don’t empty your milk in mummy’s bag, it’s your inheritance!
(MUBAR covers the creepy aspirational lifestyle issue)
D did a wonderful pumpkin as always. Maddy chose the design. Boo!