Pig Of The Day: Larry Nassar

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein story, more and more women are coming out to show that this is a society-wide problem, not just something that is found on Hollywood casting couches, Parliament Hill backrooms, and in Fox News offices.

We already knew that 100 women were suing Larry Nassar, the former USA Women Gymnastics and Olympics team doctor, but today, two-time medalist McKayla Maroney came out publicly to say that Nassar began molesting her when she was 13 and repeatedly abused her until she retired.

According to the Buzzfeed article, "lawsuits allege that Nassar sexually abused athletes as young as nine years old, and most of his alleged victims were under 18 years of age."

Not all perverts are criminals, and not all sexual criminals are pedophiles, but those who are put their dirty stamp over so many lives that it should be taken into consideration when evaluating and handing punishment for their crimes.

In Nassar's case, it's hundreds of women, their close relatives and friends, their spouses and their kids - hundreds more - who are affected by and dealing with the trauma that one man's actions, spread over three decades, was allowed to keep making.

On the one hand, I believe in giving second chances for first-time offenders and he hadn't been found guilty and thus hadn't had to "learn his lesson" yet, but on the other, his number of victims is higher than that of military rape squads.

If society were to start over from scratch, this case would be Exhibit A in the argument for prison for life with no parole. As far as our current reality goes, I'm not certain in which State he'll be tried nor under which circumstances/accusations, but hopefully he gets the maximum time and least favorable living conditions in which to serve it when found guilty.

He's the Pig of the Day, and McKayla Maroney is the Hero of the Day.

Sochi On Tinder

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how athletes in Sochi had the technological advantage of Tinder to hook and and have athletic sex amongst themselves and use up the 100,000 condoms provided to them on-site.

Well, technology works both ways, and when you mix it up with bad reporting, social media, blogging and the general lack of privacy inherent to our times, what you get is a webpage whose sole reason for existing is to expose the athletes who have used the app, Sochi On Tinder.

Not just that, but it is still being updated today, 4 days after the closing ceremonies, which leads me to believe the Sochi Games were just the beginning of the intrusion into these athletes' lives.

Upon first glance, I was surprised to find that the men were far more likely to take their clothes off and display their goods in their introductory pictures than the ladies, especially considering that 'friending' someone on Tinder is pretty much the equivalent of buying them a drink a decade ago...

There were some disturbing ones, i.e. all of those who show their wedding pictures in their profile pics:

Either AZ Central's 12 News traffic reporter Emma Jade will have some explaining to do when her husband realizes what she likes to do when she's half a world away (she also went to the Beijing, Vancouver and London Games), or she's that good of a reporter, always willing to go under covers for the hard-hitting stories. Pulitzer Prize, anyone?

(See what I did there? I criticized a website for going too far, then did some investigative journalism myself and pushed the envelope a little further, but mine was less voyeuristic and more sleezeball/who-cares-how-many-lives-I-destroy-as-long-as-I-get-to-The-Truth, no-conscience journalism. Pulitzer Prize, anyone?)

(See what I did there? I made the same joke as in the previous paragraph.)

NSFW: Olympic Sex, Sochi Edition

Who knew The Onion could be so accurate not only in their parodies but also reporting non-fiction?


Olympic Village Tour: See Where The Athletes Live, Train And Fuck Each Other

Of course, not only are Olympians receiving 100,000 condoms  for their two weeks - as usual - this time around, there's also a phone app designed to make matchmaking even more efficient, Tinder. So much so that some athletes, like Jamie Anderson, have had to uninstall it so they could concentrate on their events and win medals.

One thing's for sure, every athlete's spouse who stayed behind at home is probably wondering exactly how much sex is going on... and also secretly hoping never to find out.

Sochi, Day One

I guess we know, now...

It was the opening ceremonies at the Sochi Olympic and, perhaps because of Russia's anti-gay-propaganda law, the top-right ring of the Olympic logo refused to come out, by fear of getting arrested and/or beaten.

Karma or terrorism/activism?

Oh, Sochi

If Russia doesn't break you, it will break itself around you.

Apparently, international journalists aren't impressed with the accommodations so far, a day before the Games begin...

Some journalists arriving in Sochi are describing appalling conditions in the housing there, where only six of nine media hotels are ready for guests. Hotels are still under construction. Water, if it’s running, isn’t drinkable. One German photographer told the AP over the weekend that his hotel still had stray dogs and construction workers wandering in and out of rooms.

These are going to be a fun read over the course of two weeks...

When Olympians Become Escorts

I started writing this piece in December, and somehow it got shelved until now, lost in the shuffle of drafts, Life, work, music, and a health scare. But it's the type of story that makes the news worth reading, that awesome books and shitty made-for-TV movies are made of: an Olympian athlete who even ran for the gold medal, rich, beautiful, part-time motivational speaker and full-time mother led a secret life for a full year in which she was a high-class escort, servicing men for $600 an hour in New York, Las Vegas, Chicago and Houston.

Not because she was in deep financial trouble - she did it by choice. For fun.

“Well, after my first date, I was hooked, and have been doing my best to visit Las Vegas as often as my schedule allows (I run my own business in my real world life).”

From the article:

(Suzy) Favor Hamilton described the escort business as “exciting,” an illicit midlife diversion from her routine existence, one in which she operates a successful Madison, Wisconsin real estate brokerage with her husband, delivers motivational speeches, and does promotional work for various businesses and groups, including Disney’s running series and Wisconsin’s Potato & Vegetable Growers Association. She said that only her husband Mark, 44, was aware of her escort work, but that, “He tried, he tried to get me to stop. He wasn’t supportive of this at all.”

While most clients knew her by the name ''Kelly'', she admitted her true identity to some of them:

 Favor Hamilton answered that as a world-class athlete she was conditioned to believe she was invincible, and that doubts and concerns were counterproductive thoughts. During a subsequent conversation she brought up Tiger Woods’s tumultuous fall, saying that, “I mean, he’s the biggest athlete ever. He obviously thought he could never get caught.”

 As a runner, you may have seen her look like this:

As an escort, though, her profile page had her looking like this:

I guess she had a thing for stretching. And spreading her legs - no pun intended.

Customers who were interested could schedule a ''date'' right on her webpage:

Hard to imagine after seeing this that her collegiate career at the University of Wisconsin was so dominating (she is the most decorated female athlete in NCAA track and field history) that the Big Ten Conference’s female athlete of the year award was named after her. Although Americans are so prude, that could change sooner than we think.

She has appeared in national ads for Reebok, Clairol, Oakley, and Pert Plus and released a swimsuit calendar.

Here is an ad she did for Nike:



Sex and Life intertwine. It's a discussion worth having as a society, opening our boundaries and minds, broadening our horizons and definitions. It's funny that in another story I haven't published yet, I explore sexuality in the Olympic Village. I'll try to have it done with soon, as a kind of follow-up to this one. Apparently, the place/neighbourhood where athletes reside during the Games end up being orgies - just like the Greeks intended. Hot, healthy people in their physical prime, drunk from victory or from defeat, locked in a ghetto and knowing whatever happens there has to stay there because once they leave, they go back to their 'normal' lives in their respective countries, and may never see each other again anyway, leading to some taking full advantage of the situation. And possibly creating habits and patterns and a sense of entitlement and egotistical satisfaction they get hooked on. But I digress, that story's for another day.

Olympic Allergies

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Everybody is A Fucking Nazi

It has existed as far back as I can remember: the late 70s, the 80s, the 90s...

Every single time someone who is prone to exaggeration disagrees with someone, it's what they resort to. 'That Person' is Hitler; his supporters (or staff) are Nazis.

In 2003, in his Quest For World Domination, I mean the War On Terror, George W. Bush invaded his second country in 18 months - a country of impure, coloured, backwards, retarded, living-in-caves-and-having-sex-with-animals people, according to his press releases.

His opponents compared him to Hitler. Of course.

Then Hurricane Katrina happened, and people hated him so much that, for some inexplicable reason, he went from the worst human of all time to, just, racist - or, as Kanye West put it, he doesn't like black people.

Speaking of black people, one of them was elected to bring grace and intelligence back to the White House. He came in with the worst deficit of all time, the worst economy, two wars that were quickly going nowhere... and while some people complain he hasn't made enough changes, his opponents seem to rather want to be in yet more wars, have less freedoms, more Patriot Act-like laws, have the rich pay no taxes at all and the poor no services at all. And when they're not adding Hitler moustaches to his pictures, they're taking a happy waive out of context to make him Nazi-ish:

Oh, and Hitlerizing figures isn't only for American politicians - in this column, Texan douchebag/idiot (but not Nazi) Gil Lebreton, who probably doesn't even realize he has French roots and likely thinks the French would still support the Nazis if they were invaded today, says the display at the Olympics reminded him of Berlin, circa 1936, although he is obviously too young to have actually covered those games - he's likely only seen images out of context. Anyhow, he says the Canadian Patriotism - clearly, unlike American Patriotism - is close to Nazi-ism. This despite the fact that our cars don't have Canadian Flags as bumper stickers, convenience stores don't sell flags nor have any on their rooftop or property, that half our stores don't allude to our country...

And, by the way, I'm not one myself - I'm actually quite the opposite, I don't really consider ''Canada'' to be my country. I'm a Montrealer first and foremost, and if I had to choose a country and set its limits, just about where borders are at the moment, I'd be a Quebecer - just not with the leaders we have at the moment. But that's beside the point. And so is the fact that Lebreton is a complete moron.

The point is that no one is fuckin' Adolf Hitler. Hitler went to war with a whole continent, killed millions of humans including a few million Jews, specifically, and he instilled terror among even his own people. Joseph Stalin killed an estimated 60 million of his own people. And no one's a fuckin' Stalin either.

At best, Bush is a fucking retard who was manipulated into being Richard Nixon. At worst, he is George H.W. Bush's son, heir, and the Worst President Of All Time. At worst, Obama is going to fail at being Martin Luther King, and at best he will be Nelson Mandela.

Notice how neither is Hitler.

Same goes for the Vancouver Games: they were a celebration of the things foreigners have come to expect from Canada - beavers, mounties, aboriginals (despite the inability to actually see any on their trips), more than the diversity of the inhabitants, the richness of the natural resources, the fact that they promote discussion rather than conflict in almost every sentence they utter.

Just like if Americans hosted the Olympics showing blatant racism, fat people, terrible beer with little to no alcohol content, celebrated five-patty hamburgers, wars for oil, shopping malls, pollutions and waste of water and food, instead of the ideals that (once) made the U.S. of A. a great country. And even that wouldn't be Nazi-riffic.

Leave Hitler alone. By speaking his name, you're lessening the plight and deaths of millions and soiling their memories.

No one is Hitler. Except Gary Bettman - that short fucking dictator has to be brought down, for the good of All.

Dogs Of War: The Upcoming Canadian Elections

A friend of mine weighed in on the upcoming Canadian elections. His thoughts make sense, eventhough I only half-agree with most of what he says. If you're curious, understand French, and are a member of Facebook (really, who isn't?), feel free to have a look, here.

Me, it just made me want to compare each major party with a breed of dog...

Let me start with the admission that I know precious little about dogs. I love them, well, some of them, anyway. I can differentiate a few breeds, but nowhere does it approach what I know on other topics, like sports, music or film. Or ladies. It’s out of the bag, so to speak, but it changes nothing, and matters not.

You might have heard elections are coming. And I don’t mean the Obama-McCain fiasco-in-the-making, I mean the good-ole tired Canadian Politiks, the four-party system that’s so good at keeping itself in check that it forgot to go forward since 1995.

This time around, the so-called Top Dogs are the Conservatives. Oh, yes: they united the Right and all they got was a minority government. But a minority government that did a lot in repressing women’s rights, stopped contributing to the arts, made Canada look like the U.S.’ lap dog in ways unseen since… ever. Oh, there were times in the 80s, but not to this extent, and especially not with a U.S. government so despised worldwide.

However, in doing so, the Conservatives showed us who they really were. You see, they’d been barking in the shadows of power for years now, first as a distant voice you could barely hear, then growling louder and louder until, united, they became the Official Opposition, where they could bark every day in the press and get their points across against a government that was begging to be euthanized.

All these years, we thought Conservatives were big, mean, rabid Bulldogs. Turns out they were even more dangerous – they were a castrated Chihuahua intent on exacting revenge on the whole world for belittling their manhood. Think ‘Revenge Of the Nerds’, but instead of nerds, take the fuckwads from Columbine High School – bullied momma’s boys whose dads had big guns in the shed and got tired of being pushed around.

So they barked louder than their little bodies could handle, and they cut funding to just about everything they disagree with, passed anti-corruption laws that even they don’t respect and instilled fixed date elections, which the also won’t respect. Oh, and they got us damn near a recession just last quarter.

What’s their opposition, though? Since the inception of Canada, the Liberal Party has been in charge more often than not. So much so that the word ‘liberal’ ceased to apply to them per se, as they were more intent on ‘conserving’ their seats in Parliament at times than changing the world, Lester B. Pearson-style. They needed money and strong friends for that – and we have the Sponsorship scandal to prove that it worked.

A complete makeover was needed, and it’s the only way a thinker like Stéphane Dion could end up in charge. He’s clearly not the strong-arm type that Chrétien or even Martin were, but the party had to show it wasn’t just going to be more of the same. He’s the guy who comes up with a few ideas of his own, and also the one who can reinterpret even smarter people’s ideas (read the NDP, Bloc and Greens) and make them more digestible for the masses. He’s turned the Liberals into German Shepherds – police dogs that work on the side of the law, of the just. Or so he thinks.

Which brings us to the Bloc Québécois. Created on the eve of the last referendum, most Canadians are unaware of what it represents, apart of course from its ultimate goal – the secession and independence of Québec. People have trouble seeing what good it can do in Ottawa other than cashing in some of the Queen’s money while stalling politics, mainly because it’s the discourse the former Liberals used in rejecting their propositions publicly – then taking full credit when passing them as progressive laws themselves in the mid-90s. Stephen Harper also usually dismisses them as a useless party because ‘it will never govern Canada and thus is irrelevant’, and that Blocers can complain all they want about the country and the system, they can never be in charge, so they are screams in the dark. In that manner, the Bloc is basically a Labrador, a seeing-eye dog, smarter than most other breeds, but always forced to maneuver in the dark, leading the blind.

If only people knew that had Gilles Duceppe been a Liberal (and, thus, in charge at some point in his career), his ideas would have made him the most loved and respected Premier in at least 50 years. It would have advanced Canada in worldwide opinion to the level of opinion leader, rather than follower of the wrong. He always defended First Nations, pushed for greener measures, equal pay – and rights – for women, better distribution of Employment Insurance benefits to the workers who had paid for them in the first place… you know, the type of moral issues that makes the United Nations listen to you when you oppose the illegal invasion of a particular country - and elicit action. There’s a reason Quebecers vote for them massively and elect between 35 to 50 people at any time or during any political climate – their record for supporting minorities and equality speaks for itself. Not as morally corrupt as the two bigger parties, the Bloc were actually the ones who broke the Sponsorship scandal.

Which makes the NDP the Golden Retriever. Just like the Labrador, without the threat of secession. But the same leadership qualities, the same brains, the same dedication for working for others and the greater good. The same stance on staying clean, following the right path; you won’t find many closeted homosexuals, pedophiles, thieves, election-riggers and bribed members here (usually the Moral Leaders of the Right end up in those, ironically). And like the Bloc, the same sense of working in the dark, from the sidelines of power, having their best ideas stolen by the Liberals because their visibility in the media is lacking.

There’s now a fifth member who wants its voice heard, the Green Party. It’s just too bad they’re a one-trick pony at this point, especially since the Liberals are now viewed as environmental-friendly, and the Bloc and NDP have been waiving the green flag for over 10 years now. Little poodle wants in on the fun, but can only do the one flip it was taught in the circus. Anyhow, no one votes for the Greens, not really; they send messages to their favourite party, but in a tight race, they get less than 1% of a riding’s votes.

Now, they say surveys are showing the Conservatives in a slight lead, or tied with Liberals. But we all know how it works in Canada: the percentages don’t mean anything, because every single election, one party ends up with a third of the votes but just a handful of elected officials, losing most districts by a slight margin and winning by huge ones, so many votes are lost and really just don’t count.

It’s time the Conservatives taste that medicine, especially in Ontario and Québec. We’re ready for another minority Liberal government, with an almost equal opposition for the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP – leaning enough to the left to restore our place among progressive leaders in the world, but with enough of an emphasis on family and security to feel safer in our homes – or at least in Albertan homes.

If the Conservatives get a majority government, after seeing what they were able to pull off with a, let’s say, cerebral – rather than aggressive – opposition… we’re fucked. Think: no arts, women in cages (or prison, for abortions, same thing, really), over-bearing religion, active participation in world conflicts, tax breaks for the filthy rich, guns in the hands of those who intend on using them… and the Olympics right around the corner. Feels like 1936 all over again, doesn’t it?