THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT LIKE EVERY OTHER NIGHT

It's currently really cold outside where I live. To my Fijian fans, you probably imagine my Toronto life to be shrouded in ice and snow, but that's not the case. You ever been to Cleveland? It's like that -- four seasons, and a baseball team. Normally I'd have no problem hiding away in my warm cave and wearing layer upon layer of micro fleece, building enough heat to bake a potato in my pocket, but I feel guilty. You see recently I watched a CBC documentary that tried to tell me we Canadians are losing our fondness for winter. It showed images of whiny urban Canadians wrapped up and fleeing to our underground shopping malls. They then contrasted this with Russians taking bikini dips in frozen rivers and Swiss flaneurs sipping $300 hot chocolate surrounded by the most beautiful mountains this side of JRR Tolkien's imagination.

I think that Canadians still love winter but those of us who live in cities have the right to complain. If I had ponds, rivers and mountains (the holy trinity of winter scenes) in my backyard I'd be out there with a St. Bernard, an easel and some cross country skis (the holy trinity of winter gear). The documentary made no mention of salt and brown snow, the unnatural remnants of an urban winter. When I was walking to work today I thought to myself, "the road is so salty right now that if a giant came to town he'd eat the road as chips". How are we supposed to enjoy this season with dark thoughts such as those? And brown snow? Shit doesn't even exist in the picturesque, rural areas of our world and yet it makes up 90% of our urban piles.

I knew this guy from Hawaii who had never experienced winter, and the first time it snowed I invited him out to eat some flakes and pee in some drifts, but we were too late, it had already turned brown. He said to me "it looks like our volcanoes" then when my back was turned he tried some of the brown stuff, contracted a type flu that made his toes bleed and was picking pebbles out of his chompers for two weeks. I asked him if Hawaiian furnaces run on lava and he said, "we have no need for furnaces", I blushed, then he said "our air conditioners run on flapping birds" and I answered "yippeeeee!".

The Importance of Your Own Body During the Chilly Ones

Having lived in a home that does not heat up well, I know all about the relationship between our bodies and God's body (weather). This most important factor is core temperature, or the body's ability to accept and retain warmth. Before I go on, is this a myth or are you going to stop reading because it's a scientific fact? I remember Kramer talking about it on Seinfeld when he fell asleep in a hot tub. That show is not real so I'm skeptical. Anyway, after I play hockey (indoors, safe environment) my inner furnace is burning. It's like that part in Back to the Future 3 when Doc puts those super logs in the steam train. When I return home to my ice palace, my wife is surrounded by furs hot stones while I'm able to sit around nude with flaccid nips and a Popsicle.

Anyway, the winter is fine by me even though it dries me up like a grape in Chad, and I spend most of it wishing I could gain weight for once. Join me next weekend at the Snow Flake Jamboree where I'll be running a hot cider booth. Here's a little secret -- I'm not even serving cider but rather some muddy water steeped in sour candy. 9 out of 10 husbands can't tell the difference.

THIRD WORLD NAP

If you watch TV you've probably seen commercials for a website called Lumosity.com that promises to make you smarter by having you play simple little games. The only problem? You probably have to pay for it. In the good old days you could make yourself smarter in more natural ways. My grandfather didn't go to school after grade 2 and he managed to provide for his family and run a successful business that had something to do with asbestos. How did he do it? By trying to talk to dogs all day, chewing tobacco and counting dames at the bus depot. Since you're on your computer all day I figure you don't have time for dog conversations and dame countin' so I've created a series of little problems to help you get the best out of your brain FOR FREE.

*Answer Key Below*

Guess the Math

Math is the language of the universe so if you don't know it and you get abducted by aliens, you won't be able to tell them to relax, nor will you be able to order the food you want while on board.

1) If an "8" looks like an infinity snake, then what does "63" look like?

2) I'm thinking of a number between 6 and 95. It rhymes with Nifty Poo.

3) Solve for x where x = 46 + Your Birthday - The Distance Between Your Favourite Cat's Eyes

Pick the Right Shape

As babies, shapes are the first thing we learn besides how to be cute!

4) What shape would you use to burn a CD?

5) Who invented the square?

6) Which one is the gay triangle - obtuse triangle or right triangle?

7) If a man were to trade seven rectangles for a handful of rhombi, how many circles would he have to add to make it a fair deal?


Logic Quiz

We need logic so we don't make bad decisions. Before I learned logic I would bring a TV and VCR into the movie theatre and try to set it up because I didn't know what the heck was going on.

8) Darryl and Cindy are driving to New York City from Hamilton, Ontario. If they stop for gas 6 times and eat 4 Filet 'O Fish combos each along the way, how long did it take them to get there and why doesn't Cindy ever wear dresses?

9) To be or not be? Be, but don't not be unless you are in which case do but don't not are in case you aren't. Who am I?

10) You wake up and you're trapped under some ice on Lake Little Noose. You search frantically for a hole in the the ice and just before you run out of air your mom wakes you up and you realize it was all just a dream. Then your mom says there's some Cow Bread for breakfast. What is cow bread?

Cool Down

By now your brain should be shimmering with kinetic energy and that stuff they add to Gatorade to make it  a powerful drink.  

Answer Key 

1) A fat old bear and a witch hugging
2) Fifty Roo
3) x = Your dream man
4) Prism
5) Joseph, the famous dad
6) They're both pretty wild
7) I forget
8) It took them about 12 hours and Cindy doesn't feel feminine even though Darryl is a really great and supportive boyfriend
9) Rob Thomas
10) Meatloaf of course!

SHE HAD TERMINATOR EYES AND TITANIC LIPS

Movie Review

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The Hobbit takes most of its stuff from a book written by England's own JRR Tolkien, a man who was so dissatisfied with the amount of slime and magic in the stories he grew up with that he decided to make up his own. Rumour has it he once described Sherlock Holmes as "a miserable old cunt who wouldn't know a yo-yo string from a shoelace". For his books he made up a bunch of lies about what our planet is really like, renamed it Middle Earth and filled it with creatures who wouldn't stand a chance against Spiderman. Not all the creatures are bad though, there are some friendly guys too, most notably the Hobbits themselves. They're essentially pint-sized English gentlemen farmers except they don't like sports. They might like darts I guess but that isn't in the movie or the book. 

Gandalf the wizard rolls the dice and chooses Bilbo the Hobbit as the last member of a team of adventurous dwarves on a mission to reclaim the gold and diamonds a dragon once stole from their dads. Why does he choose a little barefoot man instead of a big bruiser who actually owns a sword? Because Gandalf is a smart old guy whom you can't picture being a teenager. Anyway, the team runs into trouble along the way culminating in a battle with some goblins and the finding of the famous ring that Bilbo essentially nicks from a crazy toad.   

What did we learn?

We learn that no matter how small you are, you can do whatever it is your magic ring lets you do. In the case of Bilbo Baggins it makes him invisible, which is probably the number one most desirable ring power a short guy could want. That or a ring that makes his hair tall. I'm kidding. Today I saw one of the tallest guys I've ever seen and to him I wasn't the stretched dream most women under 65 see me as. So it's all about perspective.

Were we amazed?

If you saw Lord of the Rings you probably won't tingle because The Hobbit was made by the same guy, Peter Jackson. He probably used the same computer too but with much needed upgrades -- new keyboard, mouse, sound card etc.

What will be its legacy?

This film will be remembered as the one that came after Lord of the Rings even though it should've come before. It will also be remembered for having been chopped into three whole movies even though there's only one book and it's only like, 300 pages. I don't mind though. Any excuse to get out of the house, know what I mean?

Popcorn or candy?

I'd recommend popcorn for this one. It's salty, buttery crunch makes an ideal companion to Peter Jackson's squishy sweet images and Howard Shore's sour score. 

RAT INFESTED FERRARI

I tried to break 50 posts in 2012 in order to eclipse 2011's dismal total but instead I tied. I don't think there's anything wrong with that because a tie means everyone wins, in this case Present Glenn and Past Glenn. I guess Future Glenn wins too because if Past Glenn and Present Glenn were at each other's throats it could cause Future Glenn to turn into some sort of subterranean-dwelling gator man who sells vintage chocolate bars by night. I think Present Glenn technically wins though because....

...at the beginning of 2012 on of my hands looked like this:

My first major injury. Good thing it was my left hand and not my right foot, or else I would've had to masturbate using a complex system of oils, stretches and my inner thighs. One of my favourite parts of the whole ordeal was when I woke up from surgery. Suddenly I had the eyes of a zebra! Ha, no way. I remember two nurses wheeling me somewhere and they asked how I was doing. I said I needed to throw up so I did. All over myself. I passed out. I awoke in my room without a trace of puke on me. I felt like Frodo Baggins when he woke up in Rivendell, all cleaned up, wounds dressed. After that I found out why people love morphine so much. 

Because of my injury I had to type like this:

The beak of the beast represents my one strong hand, a reliable, hardened weapon I dubbed "The Cheek Pincher". For all you kids out there, it refers to that thing you do to cute kids if they have pudgy cheeks. For the over eighteens it means BUTT.

I guess a strong-willed warrior would've shrugged off this disability and wrote more blogs than ever before, but those warriors probably don't like TV as much as I do.

So when you all that take that into consideration I think I did pretty well. What does 2013 hold? Let's try to figure it out... together! Don't come over though, I meant Internet together. Don't you dare show up to my house.

BIG KEYS

You may not have noticed but keys have gotten smaller and smaller since days of yore when families required a team of oxen to carry their keys around for them. The oxen were tethered to the key sled by a series of chains made from whatever crap you had around the house, hence the term we still use today, "key chain". It actually wasn't even that long ago. Here's Steve Jobs with the key to Apple's first headquarters:

I think the trend will finally reverse itself this year because the old guard of blacksmiths who for years have been pressured by key lobbyists to cease production of large keys have finally started to retire. There's a new generation of young smiths eager to revert to the old ways. Just yesterday I passed by a shop that advertised old fashioned sword balls.


TASTE PICKLE BRINE LIKE WINE

Beer tastings have become as popular as wine tastings opening the door for a new contender and it's this journalist's opinion that pickle brine will be the one. At our New Year's Eve party I arranged for a small tasting and we discovered notes of red currant and meatballs in a Strubb's brine while a Bick's produced an interesting note of air coming out of a balloon on the nose. 

DEATH OF POST-IT NOTE

Mark my words, people are going to start gluing computer screens to everything, everywhere. 

ONE TIME USE TOOTHPASTE AND SUNSCREEN

If we can send a tractor to Mars, I don't think it impossible to invent a one time use toothpaste and sunscreen.Think of all the time you waste brushing your teeth and oiling yourself up when old man sunshine starts screamin'. A one time use formula would give us all more time to mess around with calligraphy.

If you've reached this point in the post and hated everything you've read, here's some past material about the New Year. You'll probably hate it too though because I made it. Get outta here.