Funnier then werds

My left ear lobe is swollen, about two months had it pierced now. Could it be infected?

I'm not sure, but your first sentence might also be infected. It looks mighty sick. It at least has a fever. It may even be delirious.

From Urban Dictionary:

T Dot

A uneducated person's way of saying Toronto, often used by young, white, suburban, middle-class men who mix ebonics into everyday vocabulary because they want to:

(a) act like they are from the ghetto
(b) act like they are black
(c) think they are real gangsters because they commit petty crimes and think they can intimidate people by talking like that but often get beaten down by the real gangsters when found using such vocabulary

I iz from da T dot yo....I jus snatched yo mama's purse cause eyez needz my crack yo!

Ripped from the headlines

ASPEN, Colo. - A Pomeranian has been kicked out of a Colorado resort town after getting in trouble for biting and other bad behaviour.

Municipal Judge Brooke Peterson told the dog's owner, Melinda Goldrich, that if the dog is seen again in Aspen, it will be rounded up by animal control officers and put to death. Goldrich was in court Wednesday on a charge of keeping a vicious dog.

An Aspen fitness club employee told The Aspen Times that the Pomeranian, named Gizmo, bit her in August while it was tied to a fence. The dog served 10 days in an animal shelter.

Goldrich had been under a court order to not leave Gizmo unattended after the dog bit another person in February. She also was cited in 2006 for the animal's bad behaviour.

Here's a picture of the vicious animal:

The wheels of justice

Recently, I noticed a deposit made into my RRSP (401-K for American readers) account. There was a notation that this was the proceeds of the class-action law suit against Nortel Networks. For those of you not familiar with the case, senior executives at the (former) behemoth communications company conspired to perpetrate accounting fraud that resulted in perhaps millions of investors losing almost one third of a trillion dollars. Criminal charges against those principles are still in the courts.

Hundreds of thousands of people, myself included, had their life savings wiped out. Right now, you might be thinking "Good for you--you got your money back". Let me give you a clue as to how much of my money I actually got back--I did not break out the champagne when I saw the amount of the deposit. In fact, I'm not sure that it could buy a bottle of Dom Perignon. I chuckled--it was so laughable. I lost almost $400,000 and a successful law suit netted me $199. That's right. There's no missing zeros--one hundred and ninety nine dollars. What I would really like to know is how many tens of millions of dollars the lawyers got for getting me my $199.

The kicker to all this is how much more money lawyers stand to make by defending the thieves and cheats behind all this misery. I'd be willing to bet my $199 that most if not all the guilty will get off with a slap on the wrist if not outright. It's no wonder that things never change. There is no justice.

No birds were harmed during the making of this blog post

Yesterday, I made one of my regular visits to Woodbine raceway, but my visit was anything but regular. I had saved a few slices of old bread to feed to the birds which are always in great abundance on the grounds. There's everything from sparrows to seagulls to Canada geese.

As I exited my car, I immediately spotted a seagull close by. I threw a piece of bread toward him, he let out a squawk and flew away from me for a second, then quickly turned back when he realized what it was I had thrown, snapped it up and took flight. He did so because another seagull had been watching the events unfold from about 25 yards away and was chasing him in no time flat. The pursuer squawked all the while he was in hot pursuit.

I guess the commotion roused a few other gulls from even farther away and as they approached, I threw them another piece of bread. The "lucky" bird who was quick enough to get it was mobbed by the other birds trying to get a piece of the action. I threw another morsel and the scene repeated itself. All the while these birds were making a racket.

As I continued throwing bread, the volume of birds and the volume of their squawking kept rising. Soon they were walking, squawking and flying all around me. I quickened my bread-throwing in an effort to finish it and get the hell out of there. I felt certain that at any moment, Alfred Hitchcock would appear and call off the birds. My last thought as I ran to escape was that at any second I would surely get bombarded by some big, wet, green excrement.

Somehow, I managed to avoid such a disaster. As I neared the entrance, I reflected how different this experience was from the other times I had brought bread there. Rarely had any birds even noticed me and if they did, it was usually a single sparrow who reaped the benefit of my generosity, sometimes under the watchful eye of a black squirrel. It was always a very peaceful scene. From now on, I think I'll just dump all my bread and run. I'm really not looking for any kind of "payment" for it.