So Why Can't I Get a Job as an Online Reporter??

From the annals (or possibly the anals) of “I couldn’t make this up if I tried” comes this article discovered by alert reader and undercover operative Agent Toque McToque:

Teen Allegedly Sexually Assaulted Police
by QMI Agency

An Ontario man is facing several charges after a 13-year-old girl told a nurse she had been sexually assaulted by a man twice her age, police say. The girl went to a medical facility in Wallaceburg, Ont., located 120 km southwest of London, on Tuesday and told a nurse she had been sexually assaulted May 9. The nurse contacted police. Police said the girl told them she had been a man online last summer, when she was 12. They had conversations on Facebook, YouTube and MSN Messenger before deciding to meet. They met in a secluded area of the town and had "a sexual encounter," police said. They met two more times in the following weeks. On May 9, they talked on Facebook before meeting in person again. The girl told officers the man forced her into a sexual encounter that day, police said. A 26-year-old Wallaceburg man has been charged with four counts of sexual assault, four counts of sexual interference, and four counts of an indecent act.

This article raises so many questions: Is the educational system in Canada really just as bad as ours? Who is QMI Agency and why isn’t his/her writing more widely read? How can Wallaceburg, Ontario be 120 km SW of London, which everyone knows is in England? (Just kidding, Toque! But I still think Vancouver would be a better relocation option, if exponentially more expensive.) But of course the single most puzzling question is this: when exactly did the teen sexually assault the police, back when she was a man online last summer?

Famous Hat

True Adventure: Border Crossing!

One summer my best friend and I drove up to Montreal.  We had heard that getting back into the United States could be a real hassle, so we had updated our passports.  Nobody had ever said that getting into Canada might pose a problem, however!  This is my warning to all of you who want to visit Canada:  do not smuggle anything that has any tangential relationship to a gun into the country.

At the border, the friendly Canadian border guards made us get out of the car, then they went through everything in the car.  They searched and searched, but we were more annoyed than worried, since we had no illegal drugs on us.  Still, they searched and searched and searched.  Finally, one of the women came over and coldly asked us where the gun was.

"What gun?" we asked.

"We found the gun lock in the trunk of your car," she replied.  "We know you have a gun."

"Gun lock??"  Best Friend and I looked at each other in shock.  So far as we knew, neither of us owned a gun, so why would we have such an item in the car?  Truthfully, I didn't even know what a gun lock looked like, and apparently neither did Best Friend, since she turned out to be the source of the trouble.  After a moment of thought, she asked the border guard,

"Are you talking about the funny bike lock?"  She had suddenly remembered going to the grand opening of the new Campin' N Shootin' Superstore (not its real name) in her town, where they had given her a free object that resembled a cable bike lock, only very small.  Thinking that it was a bike lock, she had tossed it into the trunk of her car and promptly forgotten about it.  This would not have been so strange, except that when we retrieved the gun lock in question, under the watchful eye of the border guard, it was on a piece of cardboard that clearly had a picture of a gun on it.  Now my best friend is not a blonde like I am, and she doesn't usually pull off such air-headed maneuvers, but in this case all three of us (including the border guard) realized she had been perhaps not the most observant person ever.  At that, the border guard gave up in disgust and let us through.  It seems people from our state often forget guns in their cars when crossing the border, and each fool is worth $500 in fines to the Canadian government.  (We were not crossing at the border with our own state, but near the Thousand Islands region of New York, which is absolutely gorgeous.)

Oddly enough, getting back into the ol' US did not prove to be a problem.  We crossed at the highway that goes straight down to New York City, since Long Island (or, as they call it, Lawn Guiland) was our next destination.  Somehow in this area of the world they know three things about people from our state:  we like to hunt and tend to carry guns around, we wear giant dairy products on our heads, and we are all HUGE fans of our professional football team (let's call them the Butchers).  So the border crossing guard (who was a man) looked at our drivers' licenses more than our passports, then he asked,

"You girls Butcher Backers?"

"Oh, yeah!" we replied.  And he let us through without another glance.  We did run into a blockade on the highway a few miles down the road and wondered if there were TWO border crossings, but the police just glanced into our car and waved us through.  (I did not yet own Erin Caitlyn O'Honda at that point, and my first car Sydney was being held together with duct tape, so we drove my friend's car, also a Honda Accord.  The color is San Marino Red, so she calls him Dan, of course, although she is NOT a Dolphins fan.)  We didn't even have to tell them which team we rooted for or anything.

So a word to the wise:  when going to Canada, empty your car of anything you might have gotten at the Campin' N Shootin' Superstore if you are not 100% certain it applies ONLY to campin'.

Famous Hat