Anybody remember Dan Quayle?
‘Moron’ label earned (Letter to the Editor, page 9)
Sports Illustrated has decorated Canada with the title of “whiners.” Just recently, Bob Novak of CNN called us “whinies.”
Everyone dressed in a suit in Washington, D.C., from Ridge to Ashcroft, has something to disparage Canada. Alas, when one of ours say some off-the-record comment about George W. Bush, all our opposition party members stand up on the stool and perform a circus dance.
George W. Bush’s grammatical gaffes, syntactical shipwrecks, mind-boggling malapropisms and simply dumb comments are well documented. Where do I start?
In Japan, Bush praised a century and a half of friendship between the U.S. and Japan, while it is just about 50 years since the United States air-gifted a couple of atomic bombs to Japan. When the media were peppered with the coup in Pakistan to bring Pervez Musharaff to power, he had no clue, as usual. He also re-invented English grammar by asking “IS our children learning?”
I can go on and on. Only in America, the combination of stupidity and greatness go hand-in-hand. In Canada, it takes a small boy from Shawinigan 50 years of blood, brain and sweat to reach greatness. No wonder we envy the Americans.
—DIRRESH KRISHNA, TORONTO
Sweets to the sweet, and nuts to you!
Nuts affect diabetes (Discoveries, page 24)
Eating peanut butter, too, cuts risk of disease: study
A helping of nuts or peanut butter several times a week appears to lower the risk of developing adult-onset diabetes, at least in women, a study said yesterday.
Nuts are high in unsaturated fat and other nutrients, which may improve glucose and insulin stability, two factors in warding off type 2, or adult-onset, diabetes, the study said.
In the 16-year survey, begun in 1980 of nearly 84,000 women nurses participating in Boston ’s Harvard University study, researchers found consuming a one-ounce serving of nuts five or more times a week resulted in a 27 per cent lower risk of developing diabetes compared to those in the study who rarely or never ate nuts.
[snips]
Nearly 4 per cent of the study participants, or 3,200 women, developed diabetes. There was no suggestion in the report that men would not enjoy the same health benefits from consuming nuts as women.
—Reuters
Speaking of Nuts…
Cage, Presley split after 3 months (Who’s in the News, page 31)
Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage has filed for divorce from his second wife, Lisa Marie Presley, after just three months of marriage.
[snips]
It was the third marriage for Presley, 34, a budding singer who was married to superstar Michael Jackson for less than two years and who previously had two children with musician Danny Keogh.
[It’s not you, honey, it’s me!]
But seriously…
Sandler’s ‘toon Crazy bad
Credit where credit is due: Adam Sandler deserves props for rhyming “loosen my bowel” with “technical foul” in one of the half-dozen songs in his new animated film, Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights. And if you think reading that sentence was weird, imagine having written it.
[WTF is “props”? It has become this year’s catch phrase, and it just plain annoys me. I think I’ll recommend it for banishment by the Unicorn Hunters of Lake Superior State University.]
