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My piece of shit car was deemed too unsafe to even be tested for the Ontario Drive Clean emissions test, so I couldn’t get my plates renewed. The car’s not worth fixing, so I’m looking for a newer car at the moment. But that’s not what this post is about.

One of my coworkers lives near me, and offered to drive me to and from work until I get a car, which was really nice of her. I had to adjust my schedule, since she starts at 7:30am and I used to start at 8. Today was the first day and it was a bit rough getting up earlier, but that’s not what this post is about either.

So anyway… on our way to work, we stopped by Tim Horton’s to get morning coffee and tea. When we got to the drive through window, the cashier informed us the lady in the car ahead of us paid for our order! That was a pleasant surprise and brought a smile to our faces. My driver (the nice coworker, not a real chauffeur), in turn, paid for the order of whoever was in the car behind us. Hopefully it sparked some sort of chain reaction that continued all day, but I’ll never know how far the giving went.

I have heard of this sort of thing happening before, but never seen it firsthand. I hope the nice lady in front of us had a great day.

The other day I was at the mall just wandering around when I got really thirsty. I happened to be in Zellers at the time, and the only refrigerated bottled water available was Dasani Lemon. It cost $1.37 or something ridiculous for the bottle, and it tasted gross. It is artificially flavoured, and tastes like chemicals, leaving an odd sticky aftertaste. I would not recommend it.

For the past week or so, I’ve been hearing a lot about Adam Zussino, a 13 year old student who was kicked out of school for sporting blue hair. The grade 7 student, along with the rest of his Peewee A hockey team, dyed their hair blue for the playoffs, probably because they are too young to grow playoff beards.

Mario Melchiorre, principal of St. Catherine of Siena school, asked Zussino to leave, stating he was breaking the dress code with his coloured hair. There were reports claiming his blue hair indicated some sort of gang relations, which is simply ridiculous. As we all know, most gangsters dye their hair outrageous colours so they can easily be recognized…

The story caught the attention of Don Cherry, who invited Adam and a few of his teammates out to the Hershey Centre for some photos and autographs. Now that it’s been plastered all over the news, the school and Adam Zussino have come to a “friendly compromise,” but the principal refused to describe what the compromise was.

I’m pretty sure I know what the “compromise” was. They let the kid keep his blue hair, and in return, the principal stops looking like a douche drumming up bad publicity for the school.

I looked up some statistics about births and deaths worldwide.

Each and every day:
363,397 people are born
151,338 people die

Every hour:
15,142 births
6,306 deaths

Every minute:
250 births
100 deaths

This works out to about 4 births per second and almost 2 deaths per second worldwide.

Remember the Friendly Giant? My friend at work and I were having a talk about this last week, so I did a little research on the show. I was very surprised to hear that the show was started in 1953, in Wisconsin. It wasn’t until 1958 that the show made its way up to Canada and started airing on CBC.

The Friendly Giant was played by Bob Homme, who sadly died back in 2000 at the age of 81. I have fond memories of the show, as I’m sure many people do. The show spanned so many generations, that anybody who watched TV as a kid in the last 30 years has to be familiar with it. Remember Rusty the Rooster and Jerome the Giraffe? And then there were the Jazz Cats that sometimes made an appearance. The show would end with the Friendly Giant rearranging his furniture. Such a great show, I tell ya.

In 1984, CBC canceled the show due to budget cuts. I don’t understand how that could be, since the show must have had one of the lowest budgets ever. After all was said and done, there were over 3000 episodes of The Friendly Giant produced.