A Tale of Surreptitious Theft...

Last night I was on my way to the Hockey game (yes the capital H was intentional) and I was sitting on the bus waiting to go to the arena. As I was waiting for the bus to leave I notice an unattended shopping bag on one of the seats at the bus terminal.

There were dozens of people that walked by and glanced at the bag casually but kept on walking to their destinations. Then I see a woman in her 40s walk towards the bag, looking around to see if anyone is watching her. She casually takes a seat next to the bag, lights a cigarette, and just sits there glancing inside the bag and trying to act non-nonchalant.

She notices me looking at her from inside the bus. She gets uncomfortable but she does move from her seat. I tried to get a picture but the glare off the bus window prevented me from getting anything usable. As she sat there, her facial expressions went from happiness at finding free loot, to fear of getting caught... she clearly looked torn about the whole thing. She kept looking at me as if it was some kind of show-down.

Finally the bus left and I was off to the game, I didn't see if she took the bag as the bus left, so I won't make any assumption. It was just funny watching someone trying to be so casual while at the same time being so nervous. I'm hoping she took the bag to lost and found or that the actual owner of the bag returned, but I doubt it because in this day and age it seems that even we adults are willing to apply the old "finders keepers" rule.

Muchacho Enfermo

Conspiracies everywhere!

I was having coffee with my financial adviser this afternoon and for some reason we got on the topic of conspiracy theories... From the truly far stretching to the not so hard to believe, it’s truly amazing how most of us are more than willing to accept that the governments cover things up and plan things behind our backs considering how inept governments seem to be in every other aspects of their jobs.

The funny thing is that most of us, in one way or another, have witnessed things with our own eyes that make us think that there has to be someone behind the scenes pulling the strings. Recently my life has been nothing but conspiracy after conspiracy... each one crazier than the next. I see conspiracies everywhere... I was talking to an accountant yesterday and she went on at length about how the current financial crisis is directly related to the 9/11 attacks. I’ll try to make a brief summary of what she was saying:
1-The Taliban wanted to crush the economic might of the US.
2-They rammed the towers
3-While the stock market was briefly affected directly after 9/11 we are now feeling the aftermath of the ensuing war in Iraq that just keeps draining money out of the treasury.
4-The Taliban achieved their goal; the US is now in recession... Their plan wasn’t to kill 5000 people in one day; it was to kill the economy over time and the US took the bait.

As insane as it sounds it might make sense if you’re drunk enough and looking at things in a specific way.

All that to say that everything can make sense if you spin it right... I can probably come up with a theory that links the success of Jean Chretien to the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of China as super power to the price fluctuation of bananas in the Dominican Republic if I tried hard enough... And if any of you were drunk enough you just might believe me.

I’m not saying that all of these theories are wrong, what I’m saying is that some of them are really far fetched and some of them are actually credible... For more on the subject I recommend renting Conspiracy Theory starring Mel Gibson (he wears a tin foil hat in the movie... I swear!)

If anyone wants to comment, why not list your favourite conspiracy theory?

Muchacho Enfermo