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Ulysses S. Grant didn’t actually like the name Ulysses, but his middle name was even worse, and U.S. Grant seemed a little too patriotic to him.

In the heat of battle he often became confused whether he was fighting with the blues or the grays. Eventually his aide began loading his guns with powder only, no bullets, to avoid the friendly-fire casualties that were always embarrassing.

He is generally considered the inventor of “celebrity handlers” although he may more accurately considered the reason for their invention.

As I said before, we are all Americans here. The people who live in Idaho mostly don’t think they are American either, and realistically they may be less wrong.

Ghengis Kahn would arrive in a city days ahead of his army, as if he were more tourist than conqueror. It was from this that the terror grew.

That’s a quote form MiguelCervantes, “Life of a Mongol”.

Okay, that is a fake quote, but it gives fair warning that I have no issues about misquoting the dead.

You get what you get

A few months ago, late fall I guess, I was sitting by the pool at work, catching the last of the good sun

It is great to work in hi-tech

Anyway, there was this guy, Mike, from, I’m not sure what department, maybe pre-sales. I’m thinking pre-sales because his family was with him poolside. I’d never met him before. He was wading through the pool slowly, sort of hunched over, staying near the warm water jets.

He started to tell me his story. Beaten up, still faint bruises two weeks later, over some criminal matter, him a bodyguard in his spare time, something about the supreme court.

But then he had to cut it off, begin the slow process of exiting the pool after the kids yelled that they could see their mom getting out of the car with the bags of take-out food.

Really, his stories would have been much more interesting than mine. But people like him (people who do things) don’t usually have the spare time to spend their evenings recounting their adventures in public forums.

The adventures I retell may not be as compelling as his, but on the other hand I am willing to put in the effort to polish and practice my delivery of them.

You get what you get

It was whilst watching pornography with a friend in New York City. Well, not a friend really. I don’t even like her anymore. She bores me now. I was in love with her for awhile though. And while I was in love with her we were friends, nothing more, her decision. A right one I guess.

Not like when she convinced me to put in an offer together on a cottage. She was wrong then.

We didn’t get the cottage. No reason for you to care, although I think it was a big break for her and I.

But that has nothing to do with pornographic movies, well, that’s not strictly true either, let’s not get into that though.

So, anyway, let me just call her a friend. You’ll know what I mean.

Okay, so, it was whilst watching pornography with a friend in a hotel room in NewYork City that it occurred to me that maybe I think too much.

Okay, did you guys get confused with some of the tv coverage of the Atlanta games? I did. I must admit I was quite excited when I thought that pipe bombing must be a new event. I practiced for that one quite a bit when I was a child. I mean I fully understand the penalties they were discussing for killing spectators. But one can’t really blame the sport for that. It just seemed a poor choice of venue. I expect there might even have been more deaths if they had chosen that spot for the javelin or shot-put.

I used to say that I couldn’t remember why we were so into the pipe bomb thing as teenagers. And then I remembered that we had some weird notion that somehow it would get us dates. Not that it did.

Speaking of public school, the first two people who ever beat me up (well, apart from my brothers) were a couple of cousins from the Trottier family on the other side of town. We were all about the same age, around 8. And we had all watched enough television, so it looked like a solid beating but it didn’t really hurt me much. (That’s another thing I like to defend, television. Maybe it’s not as important as post-secondary education, but still.)

Anyway, it occurred to me at the time that if any of their cousins were able to combine this familial elegance at choreographing violence with a natural skating ability they would do very well in theNHL.

Those of you who follow hockey will realize this has turned out to be the case.

I didn’t try to run away from the Trottiers. I am not a fast runner. It is a family trait from generations back. I always figured it was a useful survival trait. When the call to Attack occurred in battle and we Spykers were found at the back of the pack, never managing to make it up to the fighting before all the swordplay and lance work was over, it might have saved us from execution. “But sir, ask anyone, we are renowned as slow runners sir. Maybe we have short legs sir.” And that would probably only happen the first war per generation too. For the second war it might be more. “Well, if you insist sir, I will stay back here and faithfully guard the women and the wine.

Captain Kirk had to be so macho because the Federation was inherently feminine. TheFederation was the original sensitive man. Even in the late sixties the audience wouldn’t have accepted that sensitivity if there wasn’t this tough guy captain to distract them. The Klingons were the old fashioned males. Brutish, but in an attractive way. This was all reflected in the design of the two ships, the Enterprise and the Klingon battle cruiser. But subtly. They always made sure the ships never got too close together in those shows. They kept their distance. All those phasers and stuff, long distance weapons. No real contact. Because if you put those ships together, no matter how. The Enterprise with its engines spread apart behind it. The pointed nature of theKlingon cruiser. It all looks sexual. There’s no doubt.

A couple of years I woke up happy one morning, a half pound lighter than usual, and asked my best friend to marry me. She told me to fuck off, hung up the phone, threw her cat from her chest, and was back to sleep within 17seconds. When she awoke two and a half hours later she had no memory of the phone call.

So I went through my address book, not entirely randomly, phoning other single women friends, until finally Brenda said okay, she’d marry me if I really wanted. We arranged to meet at the food court at 12:30. She agreed to wear white underwear once I conceded that the request was an unfortunate reminder of my sexist traditional upbringing.

We met and shared a poutine with extra cheese (a wedding day being once in a lifetime),talked about kids and breakfast foods and the contrast between flannel and Egyptian cotton sheets and where we would live and how often we would do laundry.And we shared a medium diet coke, one cup, two straws.

But when the plastic seats began to be uncomfortable I had to admit that I didn’t know where city hall was, and although she did she said that it would probably be closed on a Saturday, and even if it had been a weekday she thought that maybe being married at city hall was an anachronism(or even an entirely untrue movie myth) and that our best bet would be to find a judge, but she didn’t know any. I recalled I had known a judge in Saskatoon, not that that helped, and anyway that judge had retired and moved toVancouver, and then I remembered that judge had married my brother and sister-in-law, so Brenda was probably right.

So instead we just wandered around the mall, giggling a lot and making up our own connect the dots game, until the stores closed and I walked her home. We almost kissed at her door and then I skipped off into the night.

Anyway, a buddy of mine, Francis, likes to include mentions of people he dislikes in his emails to friends. He includes their full name, all properly capitalized. So that when the spell checker in his email program comes across this unknown word and inquires of his desired action,Francis can select IGNORE.

And Francis went to university for almost two years.