"Pasty," cheery symbol of the Egyptian revolution?

“I think the old expression is: ‘They’re not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one.’” – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper commenting on the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek.

I’m not surprised the apt and eloquent toothpaste analogy popped immediately into our PM’s mind as he watched events unfold in Cairo’s Tahrir Square: the phrase has long been used to describe the successful overthrow of tyrants and corrupt and oppressive regimes (at least, tyrants overthrown since the invention of modern toothpaste packaged in a collapsible tube).

In it are echoes of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mr. Gorbachev, let the toothpaste out of this tube;” not to mention JFK’s famous declaration of solidarity with Western Germany, “Ich bin ein Zahnpastatube.”

I, for one, would not be surprised if the 18 days of peaceful protest that led to the overthrow of Mubarek become known, thanks to our PM, as the “Toothpaste Revolution” (although I think the phrase has already been trademarked by Procter & Gamble.)

For Canadians, Mr. Harper’s comments served to illustrate our ongoing relevance on the international stage, our clear grasp of the nuances of Middle Eastern politics and our longstanding concern for dental hygiene.

Mr. Prime Minister, I think the old expression is, “WTF?”

The idea is that a team of ‘experts’ – a psychologist, a couple of personal trainers, a dietitian, a medical doctor – descend on Taylor, where 60% of the population is “overweight or obese” to help the town’s 1,400 residents lose weight. If you, like me, did the math immediately, you’d realize that would require each person to lose less than two pounds. I admit to wondering why it would take 12 episodes to do that. There’s a moment in the first episode when they put ‘the town’ on a truck scale to come up with its total weight. I did that math too and concluded that if everyone in Taylor was on the scale, they weighed on average 20 pounds each. I told a friend about this, suggesting that would only work if Taylor were populated by gnomes. He suggested toddlers, and admitted that if there were a show about a town of toddlers on the Alaska highway trying to lose weight, he’d watch it.

Although the whole town is not actually participating, and the townsfolk who are have obviously been carefully chosen and their stories are being told in that little ‘give me a bunch of raw footage and I’ll find you some drama’ way reality shows have, I still find myself watching. (This could be because I only have four television channels and my other options at 9 on Monday nights are NCIS: Los Angeles and Two and a Half Men.)

I watched it for an hour last night, even though most of the main characters had managed to lose only a pound or two since last week’s episode and the high points were: one woman’s parents come to visit and watch her finish an endurance test, a guy who’d had blood clots in his head gets the green light from his doctor to go to the gym and a woman with three kids decides she can work out at home when she can’t get to the gym.

I’m putting myself to sleep just recounting it. But I’ve watched three episodes now and I have enough invested that I want to see how it all turns out. It’s part of a massive national campaign by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to make Canadians fit. (Echoes of my childhood when the government ran ads that said 65-year-old Swedes were more fit than 35-year-old Canadians, a fact that still smarts.) Is it working? Well, it was minus 26 with wind chill here last night, so I made myself a cup of hot chocolate, curled up on the couch and watched other people exercising for an hour. It felt pretty good.

I can’t get over how Canadian Canada is.

I turn on the radio and hear Bryan Adams discussing his new unplugged album (released a mere 30 years after MTV started the whole unplugged fad – maybe it’s taken him this long to find the electrical outlet).

I go to the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony at the local casino (for my sins) and the winning tree in the decorating contest is covered in Canadian flags and a ‘Support Our Troops’ sign.

My alarm goes off and I hear someone singing a song about famed Detroit Red Wings goalie Terry Sawchuk. (Think about that – somebody actually came up with rhymes for ‘Sawchuk.’)

People put maple syrup on everything – fish, chicken, salad. People eat like Quebecois lumberjacks.

Elsewhere, the lead singer of the Barenaked Ladies is confessing to a history of depression and Don Cherry is endorsing right wing political candidates.

But it’s not just the Canadian-ness, its the familiarity of it all that amazes me. In a way, Canada is like the long-running British soap opera we’re apparently all nuts about – Coronation Street. You can tune out for 15 years and still recognize most of the characters when you tune back in.

Sure, they’re older, grayer, and have had multiple marriages/divorces/sex changes/tragic viaduct accidents in the meantime, but they’re still recognizable.

It’s comforting, I guess.

And vaguely terrifying.

Happy New Year!

Five days in and I’m thinking this year is shaping up pretty well – except for the dead birds and the continued existence of Stuart McLean*, of course. If Stuart McLean had plummeted precipitously and inexplicably from the sky into some Kentucky woman’s front yard I would already be declaring this a banner year, but alas, that’s not how it played out. (Why is it always the innocent who suffer? Those birds never hurt anyone – and they certainly never pinned anyone in a corner and forced him to listen to heartwarming tales of the curmudgeonly Canadians they’ve met in their travels. No sir, if you thought 2011 was going to be the year justice reigned, think again.)

I’m sitting here in my command center, able to monitor both land and marine traffic, also able to keep close tabs on the massive construction project underway across the street (a Pakistani psychiatrist’s “dream home” – I’ll leave the visuals to your imaginations).

We had some serious Christmas rain, which taught me some valuable lessons. For instance, did you know that the bottom floor of a house is typically called the ‘basement’ and when it rains really hard, water can enter it? I know, right? Who KNOWS these things?

And here’s another crazy thing: garbage. You do not, as in Prague, throw everything into (or close by) large street corner recycling bins. You sort things and leave them at the curb in clear plastic bags so the garbage Nazis can refuse to pick them up and leave you nasty, yellow warning notes, saying ‘it’s not plastics day,’ or ‘spaghetti cannot be recycled.’

On the other hand, bus drivers here don’t slam their doors in old ladies’ faces and drive off cackling maniacally. In fact, bus drivers will stop between designated bus stops to pick up old men waving loonies. And if you’ve missed your bus, they will take you on theirs and radio the driver of your bus to arrange a pickup at the next corner. It is intoxicating.

I’ll tell you more of what I’ve learned in future posts, but right now, I need to take a walk down by the water – just because I can.

*Canadian radio personality, host of ‘The Vinyl Cafe,’ ripper-offer of Garrison Keillor -and I mean serious ripping offing, he imitates Keillor’s Minnesotan accent. As one irate CBC listener put it on a message board, ‘There already is one Garrison Keillor — and that’s one too many.’

I had gone to an (underground!) pub to have a meal prior to a movie (not Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, as it happened). I’d finished my food and was finishing my beer when I noticed the distinct, acrid smell of smoke. Not the smoke from the cigarettes being puffed happily all around me, not even the smoke from a grease fire, more like the smoke from, say, a bar that had been accidentally lit up. I looked over at the bar, half expecting to see flames licking the beer taps, but there were no flames in sight and the bar staff looked a little shifty eyed but not at all alarmed. Other customers began to notice the smell. Some made inquiries of waitresses and seemed satisfied with the answers because they ordered more beer.

I decided that no answer could make me happy enough to remain in a bar, some portion of which appeared to be on fire.

I paid my bill and put on my coat and went upstairs to a cafe. I walked in just in time to hear most of Feliz Navidad, which was blasting over the sound system. Fortunately, unlike bar fires, Feliz Navidad is something I can never get enough of. I’m like Steve Buscemi’s character in Fargo when it comes to Jose Feliciano (“You know, Jose Feliciano, ya got no complaints.”)

So I sniffed the air to be sure nothing was burning, sat at the bar with my book, and waited to see what would happen next in this strange land I’d stumbled into. It turned out I’d become completely INVISIBLE! To WAITERS! Everyone else seemed able to see me (I tested this by waving my hand in front of the face of the gentleman next to me. He clearly saw it.) I figured I must have drunk some magic beer. I wondered how long the spell would last, and if there was a way to break it. “What would Alice do?” I asked myself. “What would Tim Burton do?”

I slid off my bar stool and reached for my coat, which seemed to do the trick. A waiter who had been busy leaning against the other end of the bar suddenly made eye contact and came to take my order. I was so relieved. But I ordered two drinks, in case I disappeared again before I’d finished the first.

I think Alice would have approved.

Pictured: My own podium, which I offered to lend the Canadian Olympic team to save them a lot of trouble.

This question of Canadian identity – or as I like to put it, ‘Who are we and what are we doing here?’ – is the first Games-related topic I’d like to discuss.

Who we are is quite easy – we’re 30 million people, most of whom live within two hours of Toronto.

What we are doing, at this particular time, is equally clear – we are attempting to own the podium. Like DUH. That’s because when you own the podium you can, anytime you want, take it and go home. You can imagine the leverage this gives a country.

A few additional thoughts, after just over a week of competition:

1. Rather than abolishing the ‘compulsory dance’ component of the ice dancing competition (which I’m told ice skating officials are considering doing) I think they should, instead, liven it up by permitting the judges to shoot at the skaters’ feet. That is, after all, the tried and true way of compelling people to dance. I suggest each judge should get two surprise shots per routine.

2. “Des plus brillants exploits,” the French slogan of the games, is not a direct translation of “With glowing hearts,” the English slogan (it means “The most brilliant exploits”). Both came, apparently, from a Canadian anthem-based slogan-generator. The ‘slice-of-anthem’ Olympic slogan was also used, you’ll remember, in Salt Lake City (‘The bombs bursting in air’) inspired, no doubt, by Albertville’s stirring, “L’étendard sanglant est levé (The bloody banner is raised!)

3. To avoid embarrassing blowouts like the Canadian womens’ hockey team’s 18-0 defeat of Slovakia, the officials should borrow a few rules from ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.’ At the, I don’t know, let’s say 10-0 mark, the losing team should be allowed to call a friend or ask the audience for help. If they opt for the latter, up to three audience members should be allowed to leap onto the ice and assist the team. I think this would make the playing field more level (although, given the ‘playing field’ is ice, if it’s not level you’re playing on the luge track and a simpler way to improve things would be to get back to the arena).

These are just a few of my thoughts on the Olympics. I am sure I will have more over the final week of competition, and I will be quick to share them with you.

But for now, me and my glowing heart are signing off.

Mysterious to you all, perhaps, but not to me. I happen to know (because it was general knowledge in my junior high school) that Alan Parsons’ project was to get as many hit songs as possible before all the members of the band killed themselves.

Didn’t know that? I’m not surprised. Not everyone was lucky enough to attend a junior high so attuned to the zeitgeist, so plugged in, so hip to the current trends and tendencies as mine was. But that’s the east coast of Canada for you.

That Parsons is still alive (and I’m assuming this to be the case, because the aforementioned pen and ink sketch is advertising an upcoming show) in no way contradicts my premise: the band simply hasn’t reached its quota of hit singles yet.

They also haven’t released an album since 1990, which could help explain the lack of hit singles. My advice to them would be: Buckle down! Back to the drawing board! The world needs more flute and autoharp!

And that’s all I know about the Alan Parson’s Project. Next: Tune in while I explain where “Journey” was going and where “Foreigner” was actually from.

Being polite, I removed my headphones and conversed with him (i.e. listened to him) for the 15 minutes or so our paths converged.

Although we traveled a relatively short distance in actual terms — say, eight blocks? — we traveled far and wide in our conversation. Crazy ex-wives, confused sons,  learning disabilities, pregnant girlfriends, the comparative difficulty of division as opposed to subtraction, you name it, we touched on it. It was like ambulatory psychoanalysis, although he was better qualified as a patient than I was as a doctor (although I have watched most of Season One of “In Treatment,” so I’m not a total neophyte).

At any rate, we eventually reached a point at which our paths diverged, and as I turned to say goodbye (or “I’m afraid our time is up, that will be $150″) he said, “By the way, I know I do this to you all the time, but I never remember – what’s your name?”