Tim Hortons Is Not The Canadian Starbucks

The title for today's posting is compliments of a joke from the Wayne Brady show on Friday at Casino Rama, which I attended with Vivian. It is a skit that harkens back to the American Whose Line Is It Anyways days, when the audience designs a scenario, setting, and has Wayne and his castmates have multiples takes each based on different movie genres. For this performance one of the co-comedians was to come into Tim Hortons and convince Wayne, who was working there, that he needed ass lip-o-suction. Except there was one problem: Wayne and his coterie were all Americans and had no clue what Tim Hortons was. One member of the audience--to the chagrin of the rest of the (Canadian) audience--voluntarily shouted out that it was "the Canadian Starbucks." You can imagine the bombardment of boos that erupted from this hall of caffeinated Canadians.

In other news I'm re-reading Chaucer's House of Fame again. This time around it's starting to make sense especially after I consulted a book called Understanding Chaucer, which helped me grasp the basic 'habits' of Chaucer as a writer (e.g. how he builds up nuances and digressions in the first half of each poem that hint at the main idea but waits until the last half to present it in the flesh). Perhaps this means that down the road I can read his masterpiece Troylus and Criseyda and it'll make sense.

For the upcoming week I have to read Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan as well, though it's on hiatus until I finish Chaucer. While I'm only 30 pages in to the book I am looking forward to picking it back up tomorrow.

There isn't much else to report. I worked a short 5 hour shift today that involved returning a whole mess of magazines--a (super) cartful to be precise--as well as a bit of administrative paperwork and newspaper returns. On occasion I had to be a Tiresias and offer cryptic prophecies about the tidings of magazines, not to mention customer holds and inquiries. If I have to be Tiresias again tomorrow it looks as though it'll be in Euripides' Bacchae; with all the fun--the bacchanal, cross-dressing, and bloodshed--bowdlerized for the consumer public.