Eidos Interactive (Tomb Raider, Hitman) is setting up shop in Montreal in March.

Comet has taken to licking the couch. Any and every couch. I don’t know why.

I’m thinking about entering her into an audition for a doggie clothing catalog. Because let’s face it, when it comes to Boston Terriers, she’s Evangeline frikkin Lilly.

My friend Dr Wank, a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa, holds as his first maxim of human behavior that People are Stupid.

A lot of the history I’ve been reading confirms this, but this morning, a particularly sad example of it popped up in my feeds:

Radio station holds a contest to see who can drink the most water without peeing, for the grand prize of a Wii.
Yes, the obvious puns are made.
DJs make jokes about previous water intoxication deaths and responsibility waivers as contestant has bad symptoms on air.
People call in to warn about water intoxication risk.
Contest continues.
Contestant dies.

Q.E.D.

I’ve been reading a lot of history recently, and it’s caused me lose pretty much any faith in god I had left. This isn’t a good thing. I believe it’s a more meaningful, less lonely world if there’s something else out there, but I can’t make myself believe in it if I don’t.

At my family Christmas dinner, an aunt asked me how I’d been, and I had the ill-advised impulse to launch into a born-again agnostic rant in response. To my surprise, despite the horrible timing, everyone was quite open to my views.

Douglas Adams says about religion,

“If someone votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. … But on the other hand, if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say ‘I respect that.’”

Well, it seemed that agnosticism had also reached that status of unimpeachable opinion, at least in my family.

Half an hour later, the conversation turned from God to Céline. Bolstered by the previous open discussion (and wine?), I was candid about my views on the diva. Sure, she’s extremely talented and… uh… thin? but I can’t help but be embarrassed as a French Canadian whenever I watch an interview with her, because she comes off as a flake at the best of times, and a complete moron at the worst.

That’s all it took for the golden gates of open debate and mutually respectful exchange to slam shut. Tears shone in my aunt’s angry eyes as she defended the songstress, so vehemently and emotionally that I left the house to wish the neighbors a good yule. As I crossed the cold street and felt the tension dissipate, I made a mental note on future family party etiquette. God touchable, Céline not.