by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

• If only Stockwell Day hadn't shown up to a press conference on a seadoo and in a wetsuit, this election might have pitted four men of the Smoked Meat City on the St. Lawrence against each other. Paul Martin grew up near his family shipping empire, while Jack Layton grew up in Hudson and moved to Toronto for studies and never came back. Gilles Duceppe is the son of Jean Duceppe, a legendary Quebec actor. Meanwhile, Stephen Harper is trying to become the first elected non-Quebec PM since Pearson.

• On the same day that he tongue-lashed journalists for their negative portrayals of the Liberals, the increasingly despised Martinite Quebec lieutenant Jean Lapierre was blasted by the Quebec Press Council for using insulting language on an old radio broadcast.

• Reasons Jack Layton might be annoying: was living in Toronto subsidized housing while earning $120,000 a year with his wife; split with first wife while two children were small; he's from Hudson (land of Larry Smith, Ron Reusch, Jim Duff and Trevor Ferguson) and moved to Toronto; his father served in Mulroney's first cabinet.

Reasons he might not be annoying: has a Ph.D.; tried his best to beat June Rowlands for Toronto mayor in 1991 (opponents keyed in on his red-light-district-favouring platform as a hard sell in municipal politics); fought against security guards' habits of tossing youth out of the Eaton's Centre.

• Stephen Harper has slammed Jack Layton's proposed policy of taxing inheritances of $1-million or more by 40 per cent. But in spite of Harper's portrayal of the tax as irresponsible, most countries - including the U.S. - have an inheritance tax. Canada's was eliminated in 1971 and replaced by capital gains taxes, which has resulted in Canada being described as "a good place to die but a bad place to live." Meanwhile, Duceppe has promised farmers capital gains exemptions for transfers under one-mil, on the highly unlikely eventuality that he leads the next federal government.

• If you're interested in knowing more about the Bloc Québécois (and why on Earth wouldn't you be?) you can check out www.blocquebecois.ca, which doesn't actually have anything to do with the party run by Gilles Duceppe, but is run by some clown who calls himself Yvon Tripper, who advocates something called "Association-Sovereignty," a plan that would involve "amalgamating Quebec with Ontario and then achieving sovereignty for Quebec." Tripper notes that this would be a good way to get rid of Alberta, where "people wear cowboy hats with no sense of irony."

• The actual dot-org Web site for the Bloquistes includes a little videotaped speech by each of the candidates, which has the inexplicable cornball notice, "Forbidden for those over 30 years old" (a disclaimer against physical damage caused by dozing off?). The videos are instructive lessons on how hard it is to improvise a quick biographical speech and we learn that it doesn't take much of a CV to run for the Bloc, whose leader was a longtime hospital orderly. Martine Carrière, 23, the BQ's sacrificial lamb against Pierre Pettigrew in Papineau, just got her BA and works at Jean Coutu, which might be a good place for her to look for a medication to control verbal diarrhoea. The BQ LaSalle candidate, Thierry Larrivée, 32, an enviro-hippie, qualifies for the House of Commons because he has a) lived in Sweden and b) he is a separatist. He talks of the problems heating an apartment he lived in 12 years ago, which appears to have genuinely traumatized him. The BQ's St-Lambert brown-skinned candidate Maka Kotto, who lived in France, doesn't even mention independence. "Why do we get involved in politics?" Shrugs. "Because if we don't worse people than us will."

• When Olivia Chow, former Toronto city councillor and current wife of Jack Layton, was deciding whether to run for the NDP or not, CTV Newsnet's closed captioning of the story ran with this embarrassing typo: "Chow is chinking of running." Chow is of Chinese heritage.

• All references to the separatist pasts of eight different Liberal candidates have been expunged from their Web site bios.