Elyse Sewell came perilously close to becoming America’s Next Top Model Cycle One Super Fantastica! But Adrianne won instead and is now on the Surreal Life while Elyse continues to model and fill her livejournal with humourous, acidic reportage. And photos.
Pour example, today she has pope socks.
1. There are ducks.
In the pool of water that decorates the building on the northwest corner of Thurlow and Melville Streets. There are two big ducks and many little ducks. Oh! The ducks.
2. It is raining.
Don’t drive so fast. You will slip and crash.
3. You can brush your tongue with your toothbrush.
It’s true: the toothbrush works for teeth or tongue. Or grout, or toenails, or the inside of your nose if you are so inclined. Last night I saw a commercial for the Colgate 360, a whole mouth solution! It features a toothbrush for brushing and a bumpy “tongue cleaner” (read: textured other side of the toothbrush) for scrubbing your tongue. Colgate asserts that “…its unique design is clinically proven to clean the teeth and tongue – a prime source of odor-causing bacteria.” Unique design nothing. Hell, you could get away with using a ballpoint pen, a piece of driftwood or a package of cigarettes (I’m thinking scraping, here) to clean your teeth and tongue and that would be both better than nothing and a unique tool.
At the dawn of time we began using toothbrushes for our teeth, because they work well – they are small (for mouths) and brushy (for teeth) and cheap (depending) and then one day in evolutionary history we made the crazy leap to brushing our tongues because, hey, they were right there in our mouths, growing bacteria and bad smells. So thanks, Colgate, but I refuse to consider that bumpy plastic could scrub my tongue better than bristles. Bristles that are, coincientally, right there on the toothbrush that I am already using.
I have been wishing upon my daily star that civilization’s great minds are working on solutions for my oral hygiene needs. At last: proof!
PS: A testimonial from the website:
“WOW – it felt wonderful to brush with the 360°™ toothbrush. I felt as if I was getting a massage on the inside of my mouth as the textured backside touched the inside of my cheeks.”
This morning, jaunting to work, jaunty jaunty. Looked left. Hissed at 24-hours paper guy. Looked right. Growled at Metro paper girl. Ignored Dose hustler because the Dose hustlers ignore me. I’m out of their demographic. Paper box catches eye:
“Jail the Johns: Police going after the men who buy sex from the desperate prostitutes on the Downtown Eastside.” (The Province, natch.)
Head explodes from Province-induced aneyurism. (did I spell it wrong again? I don’t care.)
There should be an ibuprofen for the effect of seeing headlines like this. My brain can’t take it. It’s un-processible. It’s catastrophically painful.
I would have had to touch the Province to read the article and the Province is germy. But I found it online and had a knee-jerk, gut-wrench, brain-assplode reaction to the following quotation:
Sgt. Matt Kelly (Vancouver Police Vice Squad) says, “…johns in the Downtown Eastside are being targeted because the prostitutes there are generally selling sex just to survive, and are in more wretched straits than street prostitutes elsewhere. Prostitutes in the Downtown Eastside are mostly drug addicted and use the money to buy drugs and to feed themselves and their children.”
(The first thing I wondered was if the police department will be compensating the women for lost pay. The second thing I wondered about was the meaning of the phrase “just to survive.” )
1. This will not make the streets safer (the true “predators” they reference in the article won’t give a rat’s ass if the police are there).
2. This will not make the women safer (for one thing they will have to travel out of their own neighbourhoods to make money. for another the police will be too busy busting johns to pay attention to safety at the other end of the alley).
3. This will not make prostitution go away; (duh) it will make it more difficult. It’s hard enough! If you want women to be safe (yes? is this what we’re after?) do something intelligent like a red light district. De-criminalize prostitution. Fund more safe houses.
4. Fuckers.
Whose genius idea is it to take away the only means of income possessed by these women? Are you aware, mysterious decision person, that though they share a word, the phrases “desperate housewives” and “desperate prostitutes” have nothing in common?
Does anyone really think that if the women in the downtown eastside weren’t hooking they would throw up their hands, say “oh well, at least I gave it a shot” and turn to some other occupation, nurse or legal secretary, perhaps? They’re desperate for a reason, people, they’re desperate because it’s their LAST FUCKING RESORT. Remember when you tried to clean up the downtown east side by arresting drug dealers? Yeah, those drug dealers didn’t go back to school and get MBAs. They didn’t buy “What Colour is My Parachute?” They went to different neighbourhoods and continued dealing drugs.
I’m not saying drug dealers can’t do other things and I’m not saying women who sell their bodies can’t do other things. I’m saying that taking away their means of survival will not help them do other things. I think more measures should exist so that more people are able to become stronger, build confidence in themselves, build lives for themselves, dig themselves out of poverty and addiction. Pay more attention to those measures, put more money where it’s needed, how about asking the women what they want?
Ah but I assumed too much. It’s the business association we’re mollifying, not the people actually in danger.
Where is my remote control so I can turn the stupid people off?
Well. When I started th’cheeseblog, it was about cheese. And I had three categories: cheese, not cheese and sort of cheese. Only the “cheese” was spelled f-r-o-m-a-g-e because I was being cute. Har. I’ve noticed over these past months that most of my posts don’t fit in any of those categories. Except for the “not cheese” one and can one really define one’s category by what it is not?
If nothing is about cheese, then how can something be about not-cheese?
I’ve changed the categories to better reflect my topics of conversation. To go back and re-categorize 400 posts makes me squirmy so I’m not going to do that. But from now on, look forward to more appropriate categorization. I know you will look forward to this. It might be better than Christmas for you, who knows. The posts about shoes, for example, will be filed under “shoes.” This should satisfy my need to organize and my need to talk about shoes at what seems like an unnaturally heightened volume, all the time. SHOES! See?
I would like to introduce you to my unnamed talisman dragon dude.
I bought him in Mexico, half an hour before our bus took us to the airport to come home. While Saint Aardvark read Gravity’s Rainbow and scratched his sunburn, I went looking for something pretty to buy with the last of my pesos. I should have bought eight bottles of water, but alas, hindsight, etc. I really wanted a unique, affordable piece of Mexican silver. But after a few days, all the silver jewelry had started to look the same, in the way all the silver jewelry in the stalls on Granville St. looks the same; all peace sign pendants and dolphin rings and hoop earrings. Come to think, even the vendors in Mexico bore a resemblance to those in Vancouver. Anyway, at the last gift shop I had not yet explored, across the street from the hotel and next door to the farmacia I was disappointed to find the familiar mirrored wall of silver jewelry, including Harley Davidson pinky rings, an immediate turn-off. But my eye was caught by a display shelf in the middle of the store chock full of little wooden painted creatures. Most of them were real animals; dogs, catts, pinnipeds. There was even a duck. But the talisman dragon dude was so whimsical and bright and bored out of his tree there, in Mexico, on a gift store shelf, collecting dust. So I took him home.
Damn, now I need a “painted creatures” category.
For pictures of Mexico that we took, travel to saint aardvark’s site. Before you go BEFORE YOU GO!!! know that we have no shame. You might not have known that.
OK. Go.
