Promise you won’t tell … ?

Looking to numb my brain for a bit last weekend I turned to the TV and started channel surfing landing, eventually, on Big Bang Theory.  Are you familiar with it?  It’s a terrific show, actually — a sitcom (which I usually don’t like) now in its eighth season.

There are five main characters.  Two geeky physicists, Sheldon and Leonard, who share an apartment … Penny, a waitress, who lives across the hall (who Leonard lusts after, with varying degrees of success) and their two equally geeky friends, Howard (an aerospace engineer) and Raj (an astrophysicist).

Anyway, in the episode I watched, which happened to be a re-run of an old show, Sheldon, who is my favourite character, was angsting because Penny had shared a secret with him and asked,

Whatever happened to love at first sight?

I love reading the Sunday New York Times.  I look forward to it all week.  Sometimes it takes me the better part of the week to get through it all, but I read it from cover to cover.  Every section.  Well that’s not entirely true.  I don’t read the sports section. Occasionally I skim it, but I don’t even do that all the time.

What I never miss, though, are the wedding announcements.  Why, God only knows.  I don’t know any of the brides and grooms.  So why should I give a toss that they’re getting married, where they’re getting married, who their parents are or what any of
them do for a living.

But I do, it seems.

Does this mean I’m a real nosy parker?  A hopeless romantic?  Someone who needs a

(sigh) … those were the days …

Last week, last Wednesday to be precise, Julie over at Sow, Sew, So wrote a blog that really resonated with me; and the next thing I knew I was taking a little trip down memory lane.  She was talking about how she used to be able to stay up late and never seemed to get tired.  Boy oh boy, do I ever get that.

When I was in my twenties, back in Montreal, I don’t think I got four hours sleep a night.  I’d work all day. Then I’d meet a friend at her favourite bar — Tiffany’s on Crescent Street.  It’s gone now, sadly.  It was in a Victorian style house — the bar was on the main floor and there was a terrific restaurant, owned by the same guy — George Durst — upstairs.  At that time he was Montreal’s club king; and he was definitely a very strange guy, okay creepy.  He had two pet cheetahs he would walk on leashes, like a couple of dogs.  They

Guess what folks …

… we’re not in Kansas anymore.  We’ve had a series of wake-up calls recently in Canada, but the same is true pretty much everywhere.  This may come as a nasty, unwelcome surprise to a lot of people out there, but crime, drug and alcohol addiction and bad and even deviant behaviour is not the exclusive territory of the underprivileged and uneducated among us.

Easy and convenient as it’s always been to point fingers at them, while denying, ignoring and doing nothing about what’s going on behind closed doors right in our own backyards.  Yes, my dears, on university campuses, in corporate boardrooms nice, middle class neighbourhoods and luxurious penthouse apartments and sprawling estates.

Just look at our soon to be former mayor, Rob Ford.  There are videos of him drunk, consorting with criminals, buying crack, making offensive racial slurs and comments about women and even threatening to kill people.  He’s got three siblings — two brothers and a sister and each and every one of them has had involvement with drugs.

His brother, Doug, sold hash in the ’80s.  His brother, Randy, not only sold drugs, he was once charged in relation to a drug-related kidnapping.  His sister, Kathy, is an addict, among other things, and Rob Ford was caught yet again on video, while at her house, in her basement, smoking crack with her.  It was after that he finally ended up in rehab; and she’s been