Are you coming to the G20 protest, I hear it's gonna be a riot!

Have you heard? There’s a small summit coming up around June 26-27 called the G20, in which the 20 coolest world finance leaders (suck it, #21!) get to convene in the small town of Toronto to complain about other countries, get in a dick-size contest about the strength of their financial systems, and enjoy free snacks. Generally the resources needed for this task – a room capable of fitting 20 people for a day-long conversation – could be met by an average Newfoundland living room, but this being Toronto, the cost of the affair is expected to round up to a nice, even – pinkyfinger in mouth, everyone – one BILLION dollars. Meanwhile, the G8, consisting of the world’s 8 coolest world leaders, will be run almost simultaneously in scenic, mosquito-bitten Muskoka a few hours north of Toronto. There’s a very important reason that these summits couldn’t be merged into one larger event in the same city which would have saved tens of millions of dollars, and that reason is *sentence trails off in a series of mumbles and coughs* Anyways, we’re stuck with dueling boondoggles now – so what’s the story here?

Well, there’s been a flurry of news stories about the G20+G8 (for our purposes, we’ll recall our gradeschool math and call them G28), most of which were ignored by those outside of the 416 area code. We decided we’d provide you with a roundup of all the G28 news you need from the past few weeks, along with the story’s ridiculousness factor and who the big winners are for each story.

#1: This Goddamn fake lake.

You’ve all heard about this big, stupid, fake lake, right? Well, if you haven’t, the Liberals reeeally want to make sure that you have. Coles Notes summary: they wanted a lake in Toronto for the benefit of G8 reporters to give them the outdoorsy feel they’d be missing out on by not actually being in Huntsville with the important people. The only lake in Toronto is Lake Ontario, the cleanliness of which would make British Petroleum blush. So they built an artificial  lake and decorated it with fake trees and fake Muskoka chairs to give the feeling of being in Muskoka. Shockingly, building a fake lake in downtown Toronto was really expensive and unnecessary and dumb. It’s now universally referred to as “the fake lake”, which adds the annoyingness of catchy rhymingness – God help us if people start saying “Fakelake-gate” – but protesters have submitted to the Geographical Names Board that the lake’s actual name be “Harper’s Folly”.

Ridiculousness: 8/10. They built a lake in downtown Toronto with a bunch of shitty props from Bass Pro Shop to make you “feel like you’re right there in Huntsville”. Come the hell on. That’s like how a tacky, suburban Olive Garden makes you “feel like you’re actually in a rustic Italian family’s kitchen.” A few styrofoam boulders and some floating algae nestled in loud, chaotic downtown Toronto won’t trick the international press pool into believing they’re lounging on their dock, sipping a Moosehead in scenic cottage country. If the international community were wondering what Muskoka looked like, they could Google that shit. I doubt these well-travelled international journalists will be breathlessly reporting back to the home office, “Holy shit, I’m in Canada and you know what they’ve got? A lake! Seriously, a Goddamn lake, with water, right here in Canada! There goes our preconceived notions of Canada being a barren, sand-choked desert.”

Winners: Liberals talking points, for having this giant pool of refreshing symbolism crash right into their laps. Also fake lake-building companies, which are probably seeing a huge boom in interest.

#2: The fact that it’s two summits.

… Instead of just one big G28 summit, which would be $400-million cheaper. Instead, we’re flying Obama to Toronto, and then he presumably has to drive north for 4 hours in cottage-country traffic on Highway 400 in his rented Chevy minivan to Deerhurst Resort, towing his motorboat and getting a left-arm window sunburn while threatening to turn this car around if Sasha and Malia don’t stop singing Justin Bieber in the back seat. Meanwhile, a simultaneous summit will be going on in Toronto, a city where people actually live and work and tend to get uptight about road closures and giant security fences and protesters hurling cinder blocks at them. Hey, at least the G20 protesters and World Cup rioters will be able to merge into a single, cohesive rage-party. Sample dialogue: – “Hey man, you wanna help me flip this car?” – “Hell yeah, I’m so pissed off about these capitalist fascist banker pigs!” – “Wait, what the hell are you talking about, I was flipping cars cuz Holland just scored a bullshit goal on Italy!” – “Whatever, let’s just split the difference and hurl some bricks at an ING.” Anyways, holding a last-minute billion-dollar boondoggle conference, with all the other shit going on in this city, when we’ve already dropped cash on the infrastructure for hosting another summit a few hours north, is… well, I’ve lost my thesaurus, so let’s call it dicktarded.

Ridiculousness: 7/10.

Winners: Full-time anarchist protesters who would prefer sucking on tear-gas in downtown Toronto than braving the mosquitoes of northern Ontario. Also, high school economics teachers who need an easy lesson example about fixed costs and economies of scale.

#3: G8 spending got kinda high, and it’s all kinda going to Tony Clement’s riding

Do you own any old pile of shit in Muskoka? Good news! It just got a half-million dollar renovation from the federal government. Costs in Huntsville have skyrocketed, most of which won’t go towards things which will actually be needed for the G8 – like media centres being built that won’t be used, or huge renovations spending on the North Bay Airport when it turns out they’ll be flying into Toronto. This obviously pisses people off. And then there’s the accusations that this had something to do with the G8 being in the riding of  noted Twitter-goblin Tony “Slap Chop” Clement, and how convenient it was that his riding was swimming in millions of dollars of luxuries unrelated to the G8. Tony promptly told people that the cost figures the Liberals were throwing around were mostly made-up, and then told the Liberals to shove it, but the damage was done.

Ridiculousness: 5/10. Pork barrel spending isn’t really that shocking anymore. In fact, building some media centres and airport terminals to spruce up your riding for the G8 summit is borderline sane compared to the art of corruption we’re used to from American politicians, where a congressman can sneak an amendment into a healthcare bill to buy a fleet of gold-plated helicopters for his constituents in Assfart, Arkansas without even flinching. In fact, it’s a good thing we’re doing all of this spending – could you imagine how embarrassed we’d feel if Barack Obama knew that the pool at the Huntsville community club a half-hour away from the summit had cracked tilework?

Winners: The fine people of Muskoka who will enjoy this Conservative stimulus spending on needed infrastructure for years to-… haha, nah, just kidding, no one wins except some contractors.

#4: They’re not talking about abortion.

Liberals, NDPers and other God-hating baby-killing commies want Harper to gently bring up the subject of a more comprehensive funding package for global maternal health at the G8 summit, specifically shma-shmor-tion. Harper won’t have any of that, no siree.

Ridiculousness: 3/10. Not so much ridiculous as… expected?

Winners: Christian fetuses.

#5: The Jays had to move a series to Philadelphia.

I can tell you just zoned out, because you’re a politics wonk and you haven’t read the name of a politician in the last 2 sentences and you care not for this “sports” balderdash of overgrown louts and barrel-chested hooligans trying to direct balls in a variety of directions in order to score points and prove their city’s squad is superior. Well, fuck you, this is my site, and I care about the Jays, and so do a half-dozen other people in the world, so THIS IS A SERIOUS DEAL, ALRIGHT? Since the Rogers Centre couldn’t be more centrally located within Toronto’s security perimeter, they – meaning some shadowy cabal who operate baseball, collectively known as “the man” – decided Toronto would play this “home” series in Philadelphia, robbing Toronto of a chance of seeing returning stud-muffin Roy “Doctor Perfect” Halladay. Actually I’ll just share this comic I made with you, since I made it, and – once again – it’s my siiiite, so I’ll put baseball jokes on it.

Didn’t care for that baseball humour, nope? Alright then! Ridiculousness of 5/10 and Winner:Roy Halladay (10th win of the season).

#6: Waaah, I’m so inconvenienced by it all

Hey everyone look at me, I’m a typical whiny downtown Torontonian and I complain constantly about my life being inconvenienced for a half-week, oh no they’re uprooting trees and the bank’s closed and Mirvish’s theatre productions are all canceled and now I can’t see Mamma Mia or take my dumb fat kids to Montessori because of the traffic jams and I’m sure I’ll see a scary protester from the balcony of my condo and oh my God they put up a security fence I’m going to blog about how Toronto has become Nazi Germany and I’m so darn inconvenienced by this half-week-long thing and SHUTUP SHUTUP SHUTUP

Ridiculousness: 0/10. You live in a big city. Sometimes big events happen in big cities and you have to alter your plans and then a week later they’re done and you can move on. Go blog about funny things your dumb cat did or something all of you yuppy jerkoffs, I’m tired of hearing about how 5 days of traffic jams will ruin your comfortable middle-class life.

Winners: Call-in radio shows in Toronto where morons vent about stuff, also anyone who was being forced into seeing “Mamma Mia” in a week and luckily had all of the Broadway shows in Toronto canceled.

#7: The company that’s putting up the fence in Toronto is called “Mammoth Erections” and there’s signs and trucks everywhere in Toronto that say “Mammoth Erections“.

Ahaha. Now THERE’S newsworthy journalism.

Amazingness: 10/10.

Winners: The childish and easily-amused. Probably you.

Why hello there sweetie, come on in, I just baked a pie! Oh, and told some activists to shut the fuck up.

I looked at the Toronto Star sitting at my doorstop this morning – no, no, I don’t subscribe, they just sort of give it to you sometimes, just to make the people who actually paid money to subscribe feel like tools – and there was quite the interesting headline! In bold, 72-point font usually reserved for “Japs Attack Pearl Harbor”, I was greeted with this headline:

“SHUT THE **** UP”

Had the Star finally snapped, sick of its organic-carrot-buying weaving-through-traffic-on-bicycles readership, and just wanted to scream at the newspaper’s readers in a profane rage? Nope, it was actually a direct quote from a politician. 50 Canadian Tire dollars if you can guess which party they belong to!

Tory Senator Nancy Ruth – who looks exactly like you’d imagine someone named “Nancy Ruth” would look, kind of like Don Rickles with a Mrs. Santa Claus wig – gave this helpful advice to a bunch of abortion-lovers, who’d come to Ottawa to abort some Christian fetuses using their gay marriages and marijuana, or whatever those dern’d Liberals are doing these days.

Actually, it wasn’t even a bunch of hippie protesters harassing a politician, in which case a Shawinigan handshake can be justified. Nancy was speaking to a group of friendly foreign-aid activist ladies who weren’t happy about the government not including access to safe abortions in their plan to aid women in developing countries. Nancy’s advice to these nice ladies who came to speak with her? Shut the fuck up.

Don’t you love when old people swear? It’s so uncomfortable, but awe-inspiring at the same time, when their frail, little-old-lady Golden Girls voices spit out a word like “Fuck”.

Nancy Ruth, you’re officially enshrined in the Tory Shit-Fit Hall Of Fame, where you will join Rahelena Jaffgis and Tequila Blackburn. Congratu-fucking-lations!

[Source: Star]

• > A purse by any other name: The Globe & Fail have continued their Pulitzer-worthy pursuit of Stockwell Day’s manpurse. In the third (!) such article about Doris’ murse, Jane Taber has bravely nailed down this story using Woodward & Bernstein-style investigative reporting. In the first mention, we learn that the Minister does indeed carry a murse, while in the breathless followup we learn just what he carries in his lady-bag: “a few legal documents, passport, wallet, small change purse, business cards and personalized note cards, mints, hand sanitizer, family photo and latest book I am reading.” (Omitted: lipstick, miniature chihuahua). Finally, in the penultimate story which will ultimately get Taber the Pulitzer, we get to see a picture of this stupid thing. JOURNALISM!

• > Prem. Williams’ Open-Heart Club Band: You’ve all heard about Danny Williams getting his heart tuned up in the States, right? And you’ve already twisted this dude’s cardiac problems into a politicized storyline about the state of Canadian healthcare, right? Good! Then we’re done here.

• > He’ll just PVR the curling, it’s better in fast forward: Obama’s not coming to our fancy little Olympics. We will get Diet Obama in the form of Joe Biden, who’ll ride the Amtrak here from Scranton and commit a bunch of Patented Biden Gaffes(tm), like pretending to be interested in luge. Hey, remember those photos that looked like George Bush was doing all this wacky drunk shit at the Olympics, being all sweaty and red-faced and holding up backwards flags and spanking volleyball players? Hah, what was WITH that guy.

• > Girl Power unseen since Sporty Spice: Harper’s new thing, his legacy, his sole and devoted cause as a head of state, is now Plight Of Women Worldwide. What, you didn’t know that? Come on, how could you not think of Harper as synonymous with the issue of women in developing countries, a topic he’s tackled all of never times. Iggy to Harper: “If you love women’s health so much, why don’t you marry it provide support for safe abortions?” Harper spokesman to Iggy: “Huh? What? HEY LOOK OVER THERE.”