I would like the Pro-Life anti-abortion lobbyists to address the issue of depleted uranium in Iraq. Now. Please.

I think I might write to them and ask them what their stance is.

Read this.

Owen Phillips, you make me salivate.

Lord is Montreal ever expensive. Especially on the current exchange rate of 80 cents americain to the Canadian dollar. It's just as well the place makes you feel like you were in Paris or you might start to get somewhat annoyed with the prices.



Note to the Montreal W - nice lobby bar dearies but the fake telephones with the wheel dialing do not make orange label Veuve Cliquot taste 175 dollars Canadian a bottle. Or maybe, that's what you were charging me for the strawberries. Whatever.

Thank goodness then for the kindness of friends with swank places who are out of town. Cash was freed up which enabled the heavy duty wodge to be used for eating out. I found myself being increasingly disappointed by what I gradually realised was the government monopoly of wine importing by the SAQ into Quebec. Stores and restaurants alike offered a disappointing choice of overpriced wines from mainly France (48%) and Italy (26%). SAQ (and not SAC, although, mind you, I wouldn't put this past him as he is determined to CRUSH us is he not and this may be his most genius move yet, hitting me where it really hurts) is the sole legal importer and controller of all wines sold in Quebec and collects federal and provincial taxes on all alcoholic products adding a nice little mark up for itself in the process. All this goes to make for a very dull selection.

It wasn't until the last day, the I actually found a wine list that got me going and that was at L'Express on St Denis, where they privately import wines, although they have to use SAQ, for their own purposes. In fact 90% of their list is private. Goes a long way to show you how the bureaucratic bores have shit taste. As an FYI, the US is the fifth largest importer into Quebec with a stunningly miniscule 3% market share and that's with the ease of transportation compared to Europe.

I was wondering, as always, whether Bad Things Max could shed any light on this for me.

Tales of New York

The City that never sleeps - hardly surprising given that one is never more than 2 feet away from rats fucking. Thanks for that little gem of information, Robert Sullivan – that is just TMI. But enough, for now anyway, of stories of vermin, because what I want to tell you about is how New York has transformed ME. A tale that is all about me and a bit about New York; because if there’s one thing you can’t deny, it’s that living here changes you forever. Any preconceived ideas you may have had about your career, personal net worth, marriage, pubic hair, spying on the couple shagging across the street; they all just go flying out the window. The longer you stay here, trapped in your miniscule apartment and surrounded by crusty students with larger disposable incomes than you, you realize that you are fucked. You are far too bitter to ever move back to a more sedate lifestyle and you wouldn’t have the wardrobe for it any more anyway.


There’s a painting I’d like to use to illustrate my point by Edvard Munch called “Woman in Three Stages”.











In it all three women are being watched be a creepy looking pervert in a forest which just goes to show that whilst Women may have three different stages to their lives, Man has only the one – that of the fuckwit in bush. There was actually a lovely Munch quote on the internet about this painting. He said, “Woman in her many-sidedness is a mystery to man. Woman at one and the same time is a saint, a whore and an unhappy person abandoned.” So it’s the usual Virgin/Whore/Spinster analogy claptrap.

But New York, being the fast city that it is, I have often gone through the entire Munch triptych in a rainy Tuesday afternoon.

Anyway in spite his relatively simplistic attitude to my fair sex I have always been a big fan of Munch, “The Scream”, for example, is a frighteningly accurate representation of my morning bathroom routine.

So I’d like to use these three stages as set out by Munch to detail the various cycles of my life in New York: The Virgin transitioning to the Whore with a nice little segue into the Spinster, or the Spinst as the hip amongst us like to be referred to.


So, the Virgin. I was a virgin when I first moved to New York. No, seriously. I was innocent, wide-eyed, chain-smoking and of a relatively pleasant disposition. I had a serious drinking problem and was tanned from three years in the Caribbean although at that time I was blissfully ignorant of the skin damage this would cause me. But New York to me was amazing. There were people here. Lots of them. There were shops! Curacao had only one you see. The Benetton. I still can’t look at a lemon polo shirt and not feel sick.

In my Virgin phase I loved all the lights and the noise – in my first few weeks I even liked Time Square and shopped at Bloomingdales. But only once and only for towels so that doesn’t really count. I latched quickly onto trader boy when someone told me he was loaded up the wazoo and the two of us went on together to experience a summer full of magical cab rides, glibly gazing at the constant stream of flashing lights. We loved up in the back seat, my face buried in his crotch thinking I was really living the New York dream. And being the Virgin and unwise the ways of New York I missed all the glaringly obvious facts:


So what if this guy is only 5’71/2 I thought, everyone in New York is teeny weeny sort of. And so what if he still has an online dating profile that doesn’t mean anything. He’s just too busy at work to take it down. And when he cries when he tells me he loves me it’s because he really loves me right? And just because he lists his interests as astrology and shopping doesn’t mean he’s not one of the most hard core heterosexuals I’ve ever met. AND so what if he shaves his balls - all his friends do, apparently. Straight men shave their balls in New York, Clare, just get over it. Just concentrate on those lovely flashing lights and the dollar signs.

Obviously though I was as high as a kite. The one good thing about trader boy was his supply of pharmaceutical grade cocaine. Bless him. He was always very long cocaine. He had a cocaine glut right there in his sock drawer that I was wont to delve into with my friends on the odd occasion he was out of town and I managed to sneak into his apartment.

Innocence, however, is there to be lost and so after discovering his string of infidelities in an unfortunate incident, well it was for him anyway since I’m sure that screaming “IT WAS THE MAGIC FINGERS” into a phone headset on a trading floor can hardly have done his credibility much good, although this is New York after all so who knows? Email was hacked (HIS) and life was never the same for me again. We broke up just as I got fired from one of the cushiest jobs on the planet. No more monopoly money for me to fling around willy-nilly and no more of anyone else’s. I handed back the corporate AMEX and thought, from now on: Fuck loyalty.


And so I stepped into the stage of the Whore. Pounding the streets looking for employment and relishing the meat market that is the New York dating scene, because (1), a girl’s got to eat; and (2) action is always action.

Munch, apparently wanted to paint a whore with a “seductive and provocative gaze of such irresistible attraction that it guarantees the eternity of the human race”. Other wise known, of course, as “The Look of Come Fuck Me”. You know that look I’m talking about, it’s the one you practice in the mirror every morning. It’s great pull out at the bar and at job interviews. If you are a lawyer like me you may also want to practice “The Look of I Am Going to Fuck You”, which is useful in litigation and Wills and Testaments alike. Munch portrays the whore practicing the yoga mountain pose or the shivanandashukkamukka hukka as it’s know in Hari Krishna speak and in which I am fluent. New York ladies in the Whore stage are big yoga fanatics- there’s only one good reason to ever want to put your knees behind your ears.

The Whore will generally also have a little pot belly due to the drinking and general carousing which is not to be confused with pregnancy. Because no pregnancies are allowed here, my dears. It’s forbidden and written into State law, right next to the clause that charges an extra two fucking per cent to live here. You can’t afford babies either financially or in the hipster stakes. So just get over it. Hey we’ve all wept about being childless in Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and we’ve all moved on. Haven’t we?


It is very important whilst in the Whore phase to be a smart whore. Prostitution should always involve some form of payment, preferably cash, to YOU. Dating as many people as you can eat hot dinners is great if you can actually discriminate amongst the caliber of the John. Something which I was clearly unable to do. When he says you can’t come to his apartment because he has a phobia about having guests there, it’s because he’s actually living with someone and has been for years. Like 5 of them. A guy who changes his sheets three times a week has been having sex with someone else in them. Someone who smells bad doesn’t shower regularly. Someone who steals your small change is not going to stop there. Get it? Well I didn’t. Not the easy way anyway.

But there is something to be gained from this phase of life in New York - and that is that there is a profit to be made which would have been beyond the Virgin. It’s a time to grift. And it’s also a time to learn. This is when you realize that broken hearts will mend thanks to a simple welding technique known to the initiated as drinking to forget. This is also when you will learn that guilt is a thirty second emotion.

It’s during the New York Year of the Whore that you will land the job you really, really want. It would never occur to the Virgin to lie on her resume, you see, and the Spinster would never be arsed enough to try. When you are the Whore, you are the Whore.

Personally, I quite liked my whore. She and I, we were good mates. But she was exhausting and she never really did get all the presents she was promised and by the end she had realized that it was so much easier to just buy them for herself. On Ebay.


And so to the Spinster which is what you see before you today, ladies and gentlemen. You may initially imagine a spinster to be dejected but then you would be wrong. You would be very wrong. A New York Spinster is by her very nature extremely happy. Like the Spinster portrayed in “Woman in Three Stages” she is dressed in black, the color of all celebratory parties in New York - it is the color which just keeps on giving. Her pale face may appear to resemble death but it’s because she’s spent her bonus on enough microdermabrasion to ensure that she would never risk putting herself in the sun again. She is worldly and is blighted by neither stretch marks nor diapers. Munch’s spinster is skinny and rightly so. The New York Spinster can’t afford to feed herself and known to ask deep questions such as “Is yesterday’s sushi ever today’s?”

The reality jolt that comes from living long enough in New York to be a spinster is not a comfortable one at first. This is when you realize that it’s been a fantastic ride but in the last three years you have spent through your emergency emergency reserves of cash. You have emptied the savings account your grandmother set up for your children, which, as you must remember, are illegal. And what do you have to show for it? Shoes, in their boxes in your dolls house sized apartment. These are your bundles of joy. And you will always have your friends. At least until they find out that you slept with their boyfriends/husbands/editors back in the August 2003 blackout when you were in your Whore phase.

So you see that the Spinster is the ultimate sage. She is wise to life in New York and its copulating vermin. The ex who said he only kissed men to experiment? Gay. The ex whose bathroom products you found intimidating? Gay. The Astrology freak? Gay. The ex who shaved his balls? Mmm. And as for the ex who was ugly? Euw. The New York Spinster will deny that he was ever an ex. She has already eternal sunshine of the spotless minded that one.

Argh the curse of perceptive friends. How is it that one question can throw you so completely off your current course and cause your carefully constructed facade to crumble and reveal the emptiness that you have been protecting?

They are selfish. They refuse to let you live out a long, uninterrupted, delusional life.

The Whirligig of Life

Justice to make you proud.

Scott Peterson

Desert Vampire

Now that's what I call protest.


SEOUL Two Koreans used weed clippers and a knife to lop off fingers on Monday outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to protest at Tokyo's claims on a group of desolate islands that South Korea insists is its territory.

Pop will eat itself

You know I don’t mind so much the paying for access to news: but if it is a paid subscription, loaded up with advertising it should not be. I have noticed recently how the NYT likes to stick adverts between page jumps and this is forgivable since the website is free. But really, if they want to start charging a subscription: no ads. Ads are just rude.

The smoking does piss me off. Like quite a lot actually. She's supposed to be here to CLEAN. As in I am supposed to come home and smell the pine or the lemon. Not the fags, surely. But hey whatever, she is a part of the building mafia and I can't confront, I can only appease.

And then there is the fact that there isn't all that much cleaning that's been going in. There are cobwebs on my lamps that my mother noticed this weekend and lord knows my mother isn't a clean freak. Cleaner claimed that I was too messy in the beginning to enable her to do her job properly and I was treated to a series of notes, from downright rude to now sneeringly patronizing "Oh Maccers, you have been doing so WELL recently with the sty tidying."

It's really that she changes my radio station. EVERY FECKING TIME. To some station that is not NPR and she knows that I am a cretin and have not programmed anything by numbers so that every fortnight I must manually scroll down to 93.9 and it annoys me. A lot.

Still it could be worse. My cleaning lady in Curacao used to have parties at my apartment when I was off island. And she would use my cell phone. That's what I call sweet.