Fan-atical Devotion

Why do we hate sports teams from other cities with such passion?  Subjectively it should be clear that the athletes on a team in a given city are, on average at least, no smarter, better or more dedicated than another.  So why do people feel such extreme emotions about their local franchise?  Using my own experiences as an example, let's take a closer look.

I'll begin with some CFL Football clubs.  Of course the sexual preference of the Stampeders' quarterback is highly questionable but in this day and age people are learning to be more accepting of alternate lifestyles so that shouldn't matter.  Nor should the fact that a large percentage of the Saskatchewan Roughrider players have been caught in compromising situations with barnyard animals, giving the term "wide receiver" a whole new meaning.  I mean their personal choices do raise some moral alarms, and i guess it explains that funny way they walk, but activities outside the game shouldn't affect their playing ability.  And then there's the coach of the Toronto Argonauts, Ed Ippus-Rex, who killed his father and unknowingly married his mother, had her bear his children and, when he ultimately found out the truth, gouged out his own eyes, but that's more tragic than anything else.  Yet respectable people despise all of these teams.  And it's not just in football.

In the NHL, the Calgary Flames instituted a mandatory "Date Your Cousin" rule which, though frowned upon by the league, surprisingly falls inside the terms of the collective bargaining agreement.  One of their former players, Theo Fleury, was furious when the announcement was made, not because he was opposed, but because he had in fact made its instatement a personal crusade of his all throughout the 1980's and '90's but the rule was never put in place during his *cough* illustrious career.  He made a rather pathetic attempt at a comeback in order to partake but having never learned to skate finally caught up with him as Calgary Flames hockey has come a long way since his time in the league.  The Vancouver Canucks, in a clear case of bullying, were forced by some of the larger teams to draft twin sisters in the '99 Entry Draft and the franchise's record, not to mention their masculine pride, has suffered to this day because of it.  Maybe these negative feelings are starting to make sense after all.  Let's check out another sport and see if the trend continues, tennis.

The Williams "sisters" are two of the most decorated *female tennis players of the last decade, not to mention a huge success story for the sexual reassignment industry.  Using groundbreaking stem-cell research, scientists were able to combine the grace and speed of a horse with the face and temperament of a hippopotamus.  One would think such a story would only inspire people but children run away and grown men have been known to scream at their approach.  Now what about in baseball?

Just kidding, baseball isn't a sport.

Well after careful research it seems clear that the hatred one feels toward opposing sports teams is not only entirely justified, but something that needs to be encouraged for the good of the human race.  We smart people need to go forth and multiply and I mean NOW because you know they are, even if their babies are half man/half sheep!  So unless you're fine with the country being overrun with inbred, child-eating, gopher-abusing troglodytes, get to the baby-makin'.


*The word female is intended only in the loosest manner due to the lack of a proper term.

Offending People at an Appropriate Rate

This whole blog thing is a work in progress.  I think I've figured out that if you treat your blog like an online diary then two types of people are going to read it, really creepy ones and your mother.  So with that knowledge in hand I figure one has to either write about something specific, like an issue or hobby, or about something controversial.

It's way easier to be controversial than focused so here we go, let's try politics.  I guess I'm left-leaning since I'm pro-choice and I think higher education should be entirely subsidized but I also hate hippies and the environment.  A left/right, two-party system is retarded anyways.  Just because someone is in favour of public healthcare doesn't mean they also think collective farming is the "only way to fix this country."
George Bush was a moron, but at least everyone knew and accepted that.  There are so many other bigger, more dangerous, morons behind the scenes in both the American and Canadian political systems.

Okay now let's try something specific and completely unrelated to politics.  I've been reading a ton about "passive income" lately.  It's everybody's goal right?  Money that you get paid without doing any extra work.  There are many types of passive income, some of which have been around for a long time (RRSP's or stocks and bonds) and some that are a whole lot newer.  If you've seen the Facebook movie or heard about all the new 20-something billionaires out there then you know the internet is the next gold rush.  I've decided to do an experiment, one that has obvious benefits to me if it works, and so I'm going to try a number of passive income methods and post my results.  For this purpose I've purchased a domain name and we'll see how the whole thing goes (besides the domain I'm going to aim for methods that don't require an initial investment other than time).  I'm going into this with minimal to non-existent knowledge of html or java so it should be interesting.

The website address is www.seantroversy.com and it's at best a work in progress right now but it's active.

Current passive income total: Negative $18.98 due to purchase of domain name.

It can only get better from here.  Below are a couple of books I've found on this topic.

How to Make a Fortune on the Internet: A Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Create a Massive - and Passive - Income for Life
The Power of Passive Income (Don't Work For Money, Make Money Work For You)
Multiple Streams of Income: How to Generate a Lifetime of Unlimited Wealth!
Making $40,000 Per Month In Extra Income: A Step-By-Step Guide In Building Wealth Through 
Various Income Streams

Moving Forward

We are moving into our new house this weekend.  In today's volatile and tremulous economy I can't think of a better course of action than going several hundred thousand dollars into debt, sorry, further debt, but it's happening.  In the last ten years I've lived above people who lodged noise complaints against me while I was out of town, gone to war with a condo board, had towels stolen from shared laundry rooms and my door mat grabbed and pulled right under my door never to be seen or heard from again.  I checked the mail for a ransom note for weeks but nothing ever came.  Admittedly I've gotten a measure of revenge.  Leaving a fully decorated Christmas tree in a stair well, doing my best to earn that noise complaint posthumously, and never, EVER cleaning after moving out.  It's always been my opinion that the damage deposit is a down payment on the cleaning service that is inevitably going to be brought in anyways.

I won't miss feet banging on the ceiling, music pounding from below, weird smells in the hallways or fighting for a parking spot every   single    day.  No more roommates moving in and out, rent cheques needing to be written or received, other people's dishes and other people's spoiled food.  No more late nights spent thinking up ways to passive aggressively get someone to hang the toilet paper facing the right way.  Finally I won't have to sneak into anyone's bedroom and sit by the head of their bed, thinking how easily I could remedy that "never empties the dishwasher" problem permanently.  No I'm not looking forward with glee to driveway shoveling,  lawn maintenance or property taxes, but at least it will be my lawn, my driveway and my property. Plus I stay out of prison.



So the packing is almost finished and in a couple of days  I'm going to call on my friends, exhausted though they may be from the 4 other moves in the last couple years, and I'll bribe them with the usual pizza and beer for some heavy lifting.  They say a friend will help you move, and a true friend will help you move a body.  They might be calling one another to dispose of mine if this location doesn't stick.

The beginning of the end

Making the jump from witty Facebook comments that only your friends see to a medium the whole internet gets to experience is a little unsettling.  I'm fairly confident none of my friends will sue me for defamation of character.  And I'm all about defaming people.

Take the English for starters, they started a war over their right to sell drugs to Chinese addicts, haven't had a single culinary success in their thousand year history, and they steadfastly refuse to obey any sort of dental hygiene regimen.  That being said, i'm sure English people have many redeeming qualities I'm not aware of, I only lived there for a year after all.  I promise to dig deep over the coming weeks and months in an attempt to find something positive to say about the dirty English and their inbred royal family.

But back to me, how do you begin your first broadcast to the viewing public.  Obviously I need to be cutting edge cool, hilariously offensive(see above), and heartwarmingly touching.  Or I could start with a complete rant about something I hate a couple times a month.  Hell I could just make a list of the things that I hate, that's enough to fill up several posts.  But no, while I promise let my strong feelings on sensitive subjects be known more often than I should, I want to first speak about something with a little more substance.

Zombies.  While it is widely accepted that zombies do not exist, one has to admit the possibility of their existence at some later point or in some other reality.  If you put any stock in the theory of infinite parallel universes then I can GUARANTEE you that your mom is a zombie in several of them.  For that matter in a truly infinite multiverse your zombie mom is dating Hitler.  So if we accept that zombies could exist in theory, the natural next step is to panic.  Go pillage a hardware store and light some cars on fire.  I'll wait.

Seriously though, I love zombies, I might even take their side when it all goes down.