Back when there was a Canada Trust — it’s long since been absorbed by TD Bank — their first ATMs were called “Johnnycash” and were endorsed by The Man in Black himself. I’ll admit that I got a Canada Trust account just so I could use these things (hey, I was still a teenager then).
If it seems strange for a bank to advertise ATMs, you have to remember that this was circa 1985, when they were still relatively new (especially outside the US).
Click to see this picture at its glorious full size.
Take a look at these scenes from Monday’s over-the-top Canada-themed episode of the TV series How I Met Your Mother. If you’re Canadian, the only things you really need to know about the show to understand these scenes is:
Pay particular attention to the final interview segment in the Behind the Music parody, where several Canadian celebrities are interviewed. The time when “Robin Sparkles lost it” was such a shocking moment for Canada that every Canadian remembers not only which Tim Horton’s they were in when it happened, but what donut they were eating:
In the final interview segment, Jason Priestley says that when Robin lost it, he was in “Squamish, British Columbia. Crammed a Timbit into a strawberry vanilla [donut] and invented ‘The Priestley’. Should’a been the best day of my life.”
Very soon afterwards, Tim Horton’s announced a miracle:
.@jason_priestley, we loved the idea of ‘The Priestley’ so much, we made a batch. A Timbit IN a donut? Genius. #HIMYM twitter.com/TimHortons/sta…
— Tim Hortons (@TimHortons) February 5, 2013
According to this article, The Priestly was created within 24 hours after the airing of the episode and was the result of the cooperation between Tim Hortons’ quick-thinking marketing department and their R&D department.
(My first thought after reading that was: Tim Hortons has an R&D department? Awesome.)
I look forward to being able to purchase a Priestley at my local Tim Hortons — I live an equal distance between two of them — in the near future. For inspired and tasty comedy, I salute Tim Hortons with a Priestley on a flaming sword!
And now…Let’s Go to the Mall! (I love the “Brian Mulroney” cameo.)
Choice, the latest Lunarbaboon comic, will (as LOLcats say) GIVE YOU A SAD. Click it to see the original:
Apparently Toronto’s due to get by a major snowstorm this Thursday. Unlike the dullsville talking heads at The Weather Network, this guy spells out the situation with the URGENCY it merits:
(And yes, the title of this post is a reference to Cory’s first book.)
J. Todd Kincannon is an attorney in South Carolina who “primarily handles campaign and election cases, constitutional litigation, complex civil litigation, and appeals,” according to his bio page on his firm’s site. “He also enjoys cases that have underlying scientific or technical issues,” it continues, and if you read on, you’ll see that as an undergrad, he triple-majored in chemistry, mathematics and physics and as a lawyer, he enjoys working on “High profile cases, particularly those involving politics” and “the difficult task of finding solutions that work both politically and legally”.
So far, he sounds all right.
The warning signs start with the paragraph that begins “Todd has served as General Counsel and Executive Director of the South Carolina Republican Party…”, and if you do a search on his name, you’ll find that he’s also behind the Twitter Gulag Defense Network. There’s nothing really wrong with the former, and the TGDN’s stated purpose is to help fight the practice of left-leaning people on Twitter flagging conservative tweets as spam, which is fair ball in my books.
Where you’ll find the dickery is on his Twitter feed, especially yesterday:
This Super Bowl sucks more dick than adult Trayvon Martin would have for drug money.
— Todd Kincannon (@ToddKincannon) February 4, 2013
In case you’ve forgotten, here’s the Wikipedia page on the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, which took place nearly a year ago today.
Not satisfied with how low he stooped, he really sells it with this later tweet:
.@dawncatherine I appreciate you! I agree that Trayvon Martin was a dangerous thug who needed to be put down like a rabid dog.
— Todd Kincannon (@ToddKincannon) February 4, 2013
This is an echo of conservative talking points made on sites like Daily Caller and Michelle Malkin’s blog shortly after the story broke, in which they took great pains to paint Trayvon as a thug, or when Geraldo Rivera said referred to the hoodie that Trayvon was wearing as “gangsta clothing”, despite the fact that it ain’t necessarily so.
And after being confronted with “frown power”, he tries a little misdirection:
So here’s what I just learned. Because Trayvon Martin was black, I can’t tell a joke about how he was an admitted drug user. Interesting!
— Todd Kincannon (@ToddKincannon) February 4, 2013
If there’s a Republican strategy to win back the public by being more welcoming to women and minorities, it clearly hasn’t been sent to Kincannon. Of course, all this nasty tweeting may be part of his strategy to get people to forget the accusations of him sending pictures of his penis to women who are not his fiancee. (And oddly enough, it’s a fellow conservative who went after him: the entertaining-because-he’s-insane Brooks Bayne.)
He later appeared in a phone interview with Huffington Post, in which he defends himself and the right to say what’s on one’s mind and be a troll:
And he’s right in that one has the freedom to be an asshole. It just shouldn’t be something to strive for.
The tweets above come straight from Twitter, which means that if Kincannon decides to take them down, you’ll see blank spaces above. In the interest of preserving the historical record, I took screen captures and posted them below:
