Like the seltzer bottle, the squirting boutonnier and the flapping dickie, pies in the face remain funny.  Now a PETA protester has been, herself, pied in the face.  By a guy in a Newfoundland dog costume, which is kinda extra-funny.  I wonder how many people will call this incident “terrorism”, or call for the Newfoundland Dog Guy to be charged with assault…so far…zero.  I’m guessing the final number will be…zero.  Ergo – pie-in-the-face – funny.  Assault? – no.  Terrorism? – idiotic.  Double standard? – absolutely.

    I started the Wii Fit thing yesterday.  Fast forward to the 2:10 mark on this video to watch my icon go from being slim and fit to being fat, then wondering what happened.

     I like Of Montreal.  Solid band.  This is (one of) the weirdest things I have ever seen them do at a show.

     I think the semestered system in schools stinks.  I just spent about nine hours over the weekend re-learning Grade 10 math to help my stepson with his big final exam.  He spent that time re-learning Grade 9 math so he could do the Grade 10 math – it’s so long between math classes that he had forgotten just about everything.

     I think Paul Shirley is not only the worst person alive today, but the worst person I could have conjured up in my imagination.  Donate to Haiti.  And if you see Paul Shirley, kick him.

     I just discovered regular Maclean’s columnist Mark Steyn is the go-to replacement for Rush Limbaugh on his madly offensive radio show.  I think Steyn is finally getting to be what he wants to be – a terrifically obnoxious right-wing loony American.  Put on 140 pounds, Steyn, and you’ll fit right in.

     I think it’s funny Limbaugh had to be replaced by Steyn because he was off judging the Miss America pageant.  Who did they have last year?  Perez Hilton?  Yeah, how did that work out?

     I think the first half of the Super Bowl will be tight and tense and good.  I think the Who at half time will be fantastic.  I am hosting the event at Tail Gators, with my own pregame show starting at 2:00 and going up to game time.  Free pool, some free food, and Bud Girls and a mechanical bull.  That will all be tons o fun.  I think the second half will be decidedly anti-climactic as the Colts put the hammer down.  Maybe I’ll go home early.

     I think everyone should donate to Operation Come Home.  When you do, put “reality campaign” or “Eric” in the message box.  The 24 Hours of Homelessness event is coming up a week from today, and I will once again be freezing my ass off for a day.  There will be a blog I write as I suffer through the cold, be sure to follow along.

     I think Obama’s State Of The Union address missed the point.  If the political spectrum in the States is a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the extreme left wing and 10 being the extreme right wing, Obama is governing at about a 7.  And the Republicans want him to move closer to the “centre”?  Republicans are douchbags, Democrats are sissies and their whole system is screwed. 

     I think it doesn’t matter anyway.  Now that the Supreme Court has decided that corporations can spend as much money as they want advertising for political campaigns, their democracy is irreperably screwed anyway.  Good luck with that.

     I think people should visit this website: http://wreckmma.com/  There is an MMA event at the Robert Guertin arena in April to help a local cop, Brian Dyck, who has been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

     Lastly, I think pies in the face are funny.  To call the pieing of the fisheries minster “terrorism” is, of course, ludicrous and insane.  And those who are getting all bent out of shape, calling it “assault” and calling for some long prison sentence are laughable as well.  They just hate the people who hate the seal hunt.  Had someone pied Elizabeth May, you’d all be laughing your bags off.  So shut up.

     I won last year’s weight-loss challenge by losing 45 pounds in 10 weeks.  It was tough.  I had to work really hard.  And I thought I would gain some of it back, because I didn’t plan to eat like that for the rest of my life.  But I still eat well, and I still excercised over the past year.  I started last year at 265, and went down to 220 by the end of it.  Now, I’m back up to 240.

     I told myself I gained that much weight back because I wanted to win this year’s challenge also.  Take that, office workers!  I can get skinnier faster!  It works by percentage of weight lost – last year I lost 17% of my weight.  To do the same this year I will have to lose about 41 pounds.  That’s gonna be tougher.  It started last Friday, and I have been good since then.  Eating six times a day, small healthy protein filled meals, and I have been doing 10-15 km on the rowing machine each day.  I’ll lose some weight again, which will be fine, but I really think I need something else if I plan to win again!

     About three weeks ago, I said on the radio that the Senators were in really big trouble, what with their injuries, their goalie woes, their sad power play and their inability to win on the road.  I suggested that the best they could hope for was to just hang on in the Eastern Conference, and hopefully they would be only a few points out of a playoff spot when the Olympic break gave them a chance to heal.  Just hang on until the Olympic break!

     I hereby retract those statements.  I am often wrong, but rarely am I this wrong.  Now, I’m thinking that the Olympic break is a bad thing for Ottawa.  Their goalies (except for their starter) are on fire, their scorers have returned and are playing superb hockey, Kovalev seems to have a fire under his ass for the first time all season, and they’ve won seven straight.  Now all the Olympic break can do is cool them off!

     Enough about that Brett Favre interception.  It’s all I’ve been hearing on sports shows for the past week.  I agree – it was a bad decision, and a poor throw, but it was not that big a deal.  The one he threw in OT against the Giants in the NFC Championship with Green Bay?  That was a big deal.  The one against the Eagles when he was with Green Bay?  A big deal.  This one was not.

     A stupid penalty (coach’s fault) pushed the Vikings back out of field goal range.  They needed ten yards to have a reasonable shot at making a field goal.  Although he had room to run, Favre was playing on one leg, and wouldn’t have made it ten yards.  He forced the throw, but he had to.  Had his receiver made a miraculous catch, they have a chance for the game-winning field goal.  Had the ball fallen incomplete, they’re headed to overtime.  So an interception is the same as an incompletion in that situation.  No fault.

     I must say, however, that I know the NFL was really, really hoping for a Favre-Manning Super Bowl showdown.  That NFC Championship game broke all kinds of ratings records simply because Favre was involved.  My wife was interested in that football game (and took the Vikings loss much harder than I did).  Now, I’m no Vikings fan.  But I do wonder, with the NFL hoping so desperately for Favre to play in the big game, how it ended the way it did.

     Not that I think the officials would have thrown the game and given it to the Vikings.  But I found it amazing that in overtime, they did such a terrific job of throwing it the Saints’ way!  That non-existent pass interference call where the receiver wasn’t even touched.  The “catch” that was clearly not a catch.  The fourth-and-inches where it looked as though the ball was knocked loose and came to rest short of the first down line.  Here you go, Saints.  Not that it really matters.  Whoever won that game was just going to lose to the Colts anyway.

     Also, enough with this bizarre conservative backlash against the people who are upset at Stephen Harper for proroguing Parliament again.  The big argument seems to be “well, Jean Chretien did this more than once, so you can’t bitch”.  Two things to say there – first, Chretien proroguing Parliament because he felt there ought to be a break while Paul Martin took over the leadership of the Liberals is not the same thing as Harper doing it to avoid scrutiny on the torture of detainees.

     Second, you can’t get retroactively upset about something.  The reason people didn’t complain when Chretien prorogued is that it made sense, was not politically motivated, and was a matter of course.  The reason they’re bitching now is that it has happened twice in the past year, both times for self-serving political reasons.  To now start jumping up and down and yelling at Chretien makes no sense.  You weren’t mad then, you aren’t really mad now.

     Actually, one more thing – to complain about Chretien doing the “same thing” would suggest that the only people complaining are Liberal supporters.  Like, their guy did it too.  I think that you will find the people who are complaining are not Liberal supporters, for the most part.  They’re people like me, who believe our country runs better when there are checks on the power of the government.  And people who think that having an opposition is what makes our government work.  And that removing that opposition by shutting down the system is callous and opportunistic, and that it’s cheaply partisan political nonsense, and not a procedural thing at all.

     Okay.  As long as people can stop talking about those two things, I can stop writing overly long posts about politics and football together.

     I don’t know if this really cost $1.5 million.  But it’s awesome.  And judging by the fact that NBC, figuring better safe than sorry, has actually pulled the bit from their official webpage to avoid paying the royalties on the original master recording of “Satisfaction”, it’s plausible.  The Stones have sued people for using their music before (The Verve comes to mind with “Bittersweet Symphony”) and NBC could conceivably be on the hook for a lot.

     Tonight, on Conan’s last show ever as the host of the Tonight Show, his musical guest will be Neil Young.  Which is also awesome.  By the way – a word of advice to all those people planning to PVR the final Tonight Show with Conan – it may not actually start at 11:35 like normal, because of the Haiti benefit that runs before the show starts.  So set your recorders to end maybe an hour later than you otherwise would.  I’m so helpful!

Everyone seems to be up in arms over that last touchdown pass Brett Favre threw in that Vikings beatdown of the Cowboys.  Take that, Dallas.  Me, I have no real problem with that play at all.  What really rubbed salt in the wounds of the defeated Cowboys was probably this:

     Because nothing brings out the garbage in people quite like an exploitable tragedy…here’s Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson:

     And (perhaps) the lowest of the low:

Axl Rose is in a bit of Twitter war with his former Guns N’ Roses bandmate Slash. BW&BK reports that on Wednesday evening Slash tweeted, “Looking into organizing a big fund raiser concert for Haiti.” Axl subsequently replied, “Pretty low n’ selfish usin’ the devastation in Haiti 2 start (false) reunion rumors. R hearts n’ prayers go out to the Haitian people.”  At least one of those guys is a total douchebag.