The Chantastic Blog

Sadly, the entire Blogsome site is shutting down next week, which means that The Chantastic Blog will cease to exist here effective immediately.

But fear not, I will continue to rant and rave about random observations at the new home of The Chantastic Blog.

See you there, and thanks for the memories, Blogsome.

Do you remember the greatest video from the Vancouver 2011 Stanley Cup riots? In case you forgot, it would be this epic video of someone knocking out one of the rioters. Well, guess who has their own little gallery on the Vancouver police website? Yep, you guessed it. This guy needs to be caught, if only so that he can identified and forever known as the Vancouver rioter who got knocked the eff out.

From what I understand, Occupy Wall Street demonstrators started a movement against economic inequality. So…they’re advocating for a switch to communism? I’m pretty sure history indicates that doesn’t work very well.

I was walking up Yonge Street at around 10 PM the other night when I came across a cop car pulled up beside an SUV. Since there are only two lanes on each side of Yonge, the cop car and the SUV were blocking an entire side of the road.

I had no clue how long the cop car had been pulled over beside the SUV and no context as to why they pulled the SUV over. All I saw was a cop leaving the cop car to talk to the male SUV driver. The SUV driver said loudly, “I was listening to Shakira”, followed by a laugh. The cop seemed to consider this an acceptable answer and drove off.

What I want to know is the situation in which “I was listening to Shakira” is an appropriate response to a cop.

Despite the experience I had at the Chinese Consulate, something else there absolutely trumped in.

When I first saw them, I was confused. My brain wasn’t able to process what seemed to defy the limits of the human body. And then I saw them head on, and I realized that my eyes weren’t fooling me. Those are his eyebrows. They almost hit me when he walked by.

As previously discussed, I am going on vacation to Hong Kong with small side trips to China that require a visa.

Today, I went to pick up my visa. Let’s count the ways this made me want to shoot myself in the face was fun.

First, the visa office at the Chinese consulate has extremely convenient and flexible hours: Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM - 11:30 AM and 1:30-3:00 PM. It’s like they’re going out of their way to antagonize you. You want to come during your lunch break? Sorry. How about after work? Of course not. Weekend? That’s just silly.

That means everybody is crammed into their four hours of daily operation, leading to scenes like this when I arrived at 1:35 PM.

Fantastic.

Of course, the joy doesn’t end there. Once you actually get into the building, the Chinese consulate decides to prepare you for China by giving you the full third second world experience.

Is there any doubt those windows were actually made in China? Good God. It was like a time warp to 1975 as soon as you walked in. And if you’re wondering what the secret is to make a room feel stuffy and 27 C even with the windows open in November, it’s to jam as many people into a poorly ventilated room as possible.

One of my friends forwarded me an article chronicling Mariah Carey’s career with an added comment of “I would imagine you are all over this!” Of course, I had already read the article, but I’m still shocked.

How has only one person forwarded this article to me?

Every morning when I arrive at my work building, I take the elevator up to the 16th floor. In my elevator, there are buttons for floors 12 through 19, so some people get off before me, and some after me. The elevator buttons light up when pressed so that everyone knows what the scheduled stops are.

And yet some people are completely clueless. Every couple of weeks, I will get into an elevator first and hit the 16 button. A few more people will file in afterwards and hit the button for their respective floors. One of these people will hit the button for one of the higher floors, and then proceed to stand directly in front of the doors even if there’s room to stand elsewhere. When the elevator stops at my floor or one of the other floors, they will just stand there and block the elevator doors. They do not make the awkward attempt that everyone else does to get out of the way of someone leaving. These people are never on the Blackberries, so they can’t even say they are preoccupied. They will just stand there like a total idiot until someone asks them to move, and then act surprised when someone wants to get by.

The entire time this is going on, I have to refrain myself from saying out loud, “Seriously? When you got into the elevator and hit the button for the top floor, it didn’t occur to you that you’d have to move out of the way to let other people leave? And maybe it wasn’t such a brilliant idea to stand directly in every single person’s way? How oblivious to the world are you?!”

I can’t get fired from going postal on someone in the elevator if HR can’t trace it back to me, right?