don't shoot the pianist
he is doing the best he can

Well, it’s happened again. A working-class man spends a few dollars on a lottery ticket and wins big. With the new-found wealth, his life changes completely. And not for the better.

Three years later, the body of $17-million Florida Lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare has been found buried behind a home belonging to the boyfriend of a woman who befriended Shakespeare not long after he won his prize.

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After Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Gail Shea was pied in the face during a speech earlier this week, I thought to myself: “Wouldn’t it be great if someone gave PETA a taste of their own medicine?”

Well, I’m glad I wasn’t the only person to come up with the idea:

Lavender … started to continue the protest when a van pulled up and a person dressed in a Newfoundland dog costume jumped out, pulled off the head of Lavender’s costume and pushed a cream pie into her face.

Excellent. Now, if someone could just do the same to Pamela Anderson, I’d be thrilled.

It was thirty years ago today, in the midst of the American embassy hostage crisis, that six American diplomats were successfully exfiltrated from Iran. In would become known as the “Canadian caper”, the escapees had been sheltered at the official residences of Canadian ambassador Kenneth Taylor and immigration officer John Sheardown.

The caper was a wonderful piece of cooperation between everybody involved, from the Canadian embassy staff to the Cabinet, which issued its first secret order-in-council since World War II to issue authentic Canadian passports to the American diplomats. The CIA was also involved, although their role in providing a cover story—which involved a fake movie production, of all things—wouldn’t be made public for over a decade after the operation.

It all makes me wonder whether we could pull this off again today. I’m not so sure.

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New skates should be sharpened before being used.

I decided to take my new blades to a public skate at Kingsgate Ice Arena out in Kirkland yesterday afternoon, and figured I’d get there a half hour early so I could get my skates sharpened beforehand. As luck would have it, the arena shop was closed until a half hour before the session ended. The rental office didn’t have hockey skates in my size, so I figured I’d skate around until the shop opened up.

That was probably a bad idea. As much as I enjoy the challenge of attempting to skate on blades that probably couldn’t slice open a block of tofu, it’s a lot more fun when they’re sharp. As it was, I had a very dull inside edge, and—outside edge? What’s an outside edge?

It could have been a lot worse—surprisingly, I managed not to fall once despite having the traction of your average Seattle driver in a snowstorm—but I have to say, skating with a dull edge is a bit like an engine problem limiting a Ferrari to 30kph. Quite frankly, it makes one look like a beginner. I think there were five-year-olds skating circles around me.

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