It’s Birthday Week for Hat and Pants! – The Canarican

I am a Proud Canarican …or at least I will be again once President Flubber and His Band of Lost Socks are incarcerated or incinerated (choose one), and Adults are back running our Pants.

To celebrate, I offer up this heavily researched, thoroughly accurate FAQ sheet listing the differences between Our Great Land, and Our Once Great Pants.

Most of the following was originally posted in 2015, when the world was a different place. There was cleaner air, prettier sunsets, better television reception, and more than enough Gummy Bears. All of that changed after the advent of the Man Bun and Robot Bingo Callers. No…wait…that was a dream I had after a night of fish tacos and Metaxa.

Never mind….

Unlike the Man Without a Country, I am a man with TWO countries. The Country of my birth, the United States of America, and the Country I choose to live in and love with all my heart, Canada.

Roxanne Tellier – I Me My Narcissism

Richard Nixon gave a defiant concession speech in 1962 that ended with …. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

The incredible narcissism and entitlement in that statement, coming from a man that was lucky not to have been tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail, sends a frisson up my spine.

Roxanne Tellier – And Then I Wrote

From time to time, people have accused me of ‘hating’ Donald Trump irrationally. But really, there’s nothing irrational about me hating the guy. I admit it, I despise him, and everything he is, has been, and currently represents. So should any free-thinking lover of progress, freedom, individual and civil rights, and most of all – democracy.

Roxanne Tellier – Perspective

I blame social media and reality TV. I blame reality TV because the flood of singing, dancing, housewifing and endurance series that became ubiquitous during the early 2000s were the catalyst for too many narcissists to believe that their big fish in a small local pond anonymity was only an audition and a bunch of ‘likes and shares’ away from stardom. And that belief, that, in the past, would have been knocked out of them by cruel reality, has gone right to our collective heads.

Roxanne Tellier – Society’s Child

Kids really know how to push their parent’s buttons. As a smart-ass teenager in the sixties, I pushed quite a few myself. At one family dinner, while I silently pondered the lyrics to Janis Ian’s song, Society’s Child, I suddenly announced to the table, “I’d marry a black man, if I was in love with him.” 

Roxanne Tellier – Mourning as Minnesota Burns

I’m only half kidding when I say that I’m pretty sure we’ve been living in an alternate reality since 2008, created by firing up the Large Hadron Collider. What else could explain this bizarre branch of a timeline we’re currently experiencing?

Roxanne Tellier – Just A Little Respect

The last Monday of May is when America celebrates Memorial Day, a federal holiday which honours and mourns the military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. Patriots observe both this holiday, and the other day of note, Remembrance Day, to signify their appreciation and respect for past and present members of the military. These are America’s heroes.

This year, however, that holiday coincides with something that only a tiny percent of a percent of Americans, if any, have ever seen before – the sudden death of nearly 100,000 citizens in just two months, by the novel coronavirus known as COVID 19.

North Americans have been spoiled for the last hundred years. Sure, there were two World Wars, and a Great Depression, but few under the age of 50 even remember those days, let alone recognize the impact these events had on people. As peacekeepers, Canada felt even less of the sting of loss.

Roxanne Tellier – Beware of Darkness

It’s a long weekend, and here in my little corner of the city, it’s sunny and warm, with just a gentle breeze ruffling the ferns. My ‘regular customers’ – the little birds, Blue Jays, and squirrels – have already been by for their morning treats and have now gone off to hide from the local felines.

Roxanne Tellier – Your Money or Your Life

“2020 is a unique leap year,” surmised David Wessel, an economic researcher, on Twitter. “It has 29 days in February, 300 days in March and five years in April.”

Oh yes indeed – there’s been five years in April and May might age me another ten. Ain’t nobody having much fun anymore.

Roxanne Tellier – Guns Guns Guns

May 1, 2020:   Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today announced a ban, effectively immediately, on some 1,500 makes and models of military-grade “assault-style” weapons in Canada, including the popular AR-15 rifle and the Ruger Mini-14 used to kill 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique in 1989.