Fair (and
balanced) weather

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

Well, the slight nip in the air around this time lets us know that the end of summer is indeed nigh, which can only mean one thing—the hippies will soon leave us alone! I will admit that I am no anthropologist sitting on a stack of stats, and have never thumbed through a farmer’s almanac, but I know one thing: when Jack Frost starts a’ nippin’, the hippies will get a’ trippin’ and finally begin their eight months of hibernation.

For some reason, cold weather is like kryptonite to these stinky super zeroes, who migrate to their natural habitat, either up north or bumming it out in Honduras. Unfortunately, last year, thanks to serious rapid climate changes stemming from El Niño, everything went topsy-turvy, with the natural order getting all fucked up as an odd Indian summer set in during our normally frigid months. Due to these unusual mild temperatures, the hippies quickly became confused and just wouldn’t burrow into their holes in September, continuing their flowery frolics in Montreal and tacking three more months of patchouli, Bob Marley and hackey sack onto our calendar year.

Environmental activists seized on the odd temperatures to let us know that, as the threat of global warming increases, these unseasonable temperatures threaten to become commonplace. If global warming translates to three more months of hippies, then I’m building a compost heap in my closet tout de suite, but sadly, Gore and Suzuki’s war on the warm is just so tepid that we all might as well learn how to make bongs out of fruit for the next couple of winters.

Gore’s Live Earth concert in July almost had me running in the streets, firmly pressing nozzles down on two aerosol cans pointed skyward. I felt like the Exxon Valdez tanker had crashed again, but instead of spilling oil out of its ruptured hull, it was just spewing a steady stream of raw sewage out of my television and into my crystal clear blue waters. If Gore’s plan of getting rid of hippies, um, I mean global warming, is to provide a soap box to these celebrity dunces, we all might as well leave our ski jackets in moth balls permanently, bang on a talking drum and learn to “lively up ourselves” while dancing with our hands.

Okay, here’s my contribution to how we can really nip this global warming thingy in the bud, and, once again, ship those pesky hippies off to the Laurentians for the winter. Have you seen those billboards and metro ads featuring Suzuki holding those energy-saving halogen bulbs telling us to “flick off”? A rather randy play on words there, ’Zuk, but here’s an idea that will have people switching from plastic to paper in no time: In light of the correlation between energy consumption’s effect on global warming and extended hippie migrations, what if the billboard was just a picture of Suzuki with a big shit-eating grin that simply states: “Every time you flick off a light, a hippie dies.” It’s so perfect, how could it not work? The only people who would be bummed are the folks at Hydro Québec, as the entire province would be sleeping peacefully under an Earth-friendly and hippie-free blanket of darkness with nothing but the stars above blinking down on us.

Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite
Jonathan.cummins@gmail.com