i AM aware of my hypocrisy.

For months now I have been annoyed with this new 'technology' called Twitter. On the surface, I hate everything about twitter. I'm told that it will bring much in the future, but as to what that much consist of, I cannot understand.

Much like blogs and facebook, it was explained to me that this was the future and I'd be left behind and that I was a luddite and that it was a new technology... that there was no limit to the communication possibilities.

Well, I did not believe this. I did not believe it about blogs and I did not believe it about facebook. However, you will now see that after long ignoring this blog thing of mine, I have added a new feature to it. It is my twitter account.

The thing is I don't believe the hype. I don't believe it anymore than the blog that I am posting this on. I don't like the word blog, facebook or (sigh here) twitter. Now it is 'tweet', before it was 'blog' or 'facebook'. At least facebook is still underlined in red when I spell check, but we already have words for these things. Other than being able to be ignored by more people than merely roommates, a blog is just a journal. Facebook is just your yearbook permanently being signed by old friends.... a never ending class yearbook. Tweet is the sound birds make. What you really mean to say is sentence.

The blog hasn't really changed my life in any profound way, other than to be an excuse as to why I don't have a proper website of my own creation. I don't worry about it. I certainly don't post everyday, and I have not received the promised book deals and fame and so forth. It does give me the added benefit of having a soapbox to stand on without the danger of public humiliation. Like everything else on the internet... it is virtual and thus harmless.

I have also not received anything from facebook. I have found some long lost buddies, but other than accepting my friendship, we have no real friendship now. Facebook did provide me with a headache in the form of a now former friend who hired me, underpaid me, and then decided to yell at me. We are not facebook friends anymore. I would hardly call that progress.

So now we get to the crux; Twitter. The Tweet.

See, first off, it isn't a new 'technology'. It is a new program. To me technology isn't merely some code, it is a real thing, like the wheel, the plane, the lighter, the computer... not something not real that is already on the computer, but now looks pretty and everyone is doing it.

And somehow typing short 140 character bits of trivial fodder that is running through my brain is going to change the world or magically make me money? I'm about to prove how it won't... at all. Just watch how pointless the whole exercise is as you sign up to follow me and I let you know what little I can contribute to your day by knowing even less important things about me than that which I bring up in my blog.

By the way, I only have a twitter account because I wanted free software that makes your voice sound like a squirrel and you could only get it if you had a twitter account.

See? I'm a whore just like everyone else. But can you blame me? It's a squirrel voice.

gimme a decent bagel already.

When I wrote this blogpost, I had no idea how much I would miss a good bagel.

I thought that I had merely become a snob, that it was all in my head and that surely Vancouver would provide a bagel as perfect and beautiful as those on offer in Montréal.

I am sad to report that I stand defeated in my quest to find a truly perfect bagel in Vancouver.

My last attempt was yesterday. i tried Solly's bagels which was on our route home from getting a coffee and some special beans. They came up short.

First of all, you cannot call yourself a bagel shop and then run out of sesame bagels. Sesame bagels are the only bagels for me and many others and should never ever run out. If it's getting close to the bottom of the bin, start bakin' kids, cause that is what a bagel shop should be doing.

I can understand running out of something pointless and silly like a pizza bagel or a cinnamon bagel. Those are for kids in both the real and figurative sense (yuppies with the fancy sports/hybrid cars outside, I'm looking at you!). But no sesame and to follow that up, no multigrain or even plain?

Secondly, I haven't smelt or seen any evidence of wood burning going on at Solly's or the other bagel shop closer to Kitsilano. I could be very wrong. You guys could be hiding anything back behind the wall that separates me from precious baked goods.

But that brings me around to my third point. The best bagel makers of the land don't have seating for folks to enjoy themselves at. Coffee and bagels are both too specialized for you to do well at both... and you don't. And I want to see you toiling to make the bagels. At both Fairmont and St.Viateur, you can watch the presumably underpaid staff, largely immigrants, sweat in front of open, wood burning ovens, rolling each precious bagel. There is no mystery. And these hard workers don't put down their long wodden peels at 5 pm. No sir. Fairmont and St.Viateur work around the clock, all year long. This is impressive in a neighbourhood full of Hassidic jews that take every Friday sundown to Saturday sundown off.

At 4 am, I could muster up the strength to make my way through the frozen sidewalks and fully expect to be back in 10 minutes with as many bagels as I might want at 4am.

My last complaint, this time, is the price. I don't know who you are fooling, but I have never spent 15 bucks on a bagel outing that didn't include lox in Montréal town. Is western wheat that much pricier? If it tasted more like a Montréal bagel, as you so proudly advertise, then I might not mind so much. But as it stands, it is only somewhat better than what Tim Horton's can do. Shame.

Oh Vancouver, why can't you figure this one out. I don't know if you have strange labour laws preventing bagel makers to work through the night, or haul firewood to the back of the oven, but it has got to stop (or start, perhaps). Surely there is nothing that difficult in the recipe. Come on. Gimme a taste of Montréal. Try better.

i don't know.

When a conversation starts with "I don't usually tell people this, but I did wet the bed as an adult once." it's gonna be a good time.