On Notice!

8. Shreddies. After years of eating Shreddies with a veritable shrug, I've just had enough. I've never really liked them. Why do I keep feeling obligated to eat them every once in a while when they're in the cupboard? I'm not married to Shreddies. I exchanged no vows. I can sleep around with....er, eat all the different breakfast cereal I want to.

7. Angelina Jolie. All of these kids and she can't even adopt ONE Korean boy and name him Annyong?

6. Old celebrities. We're in need of a current go-to celebrity for elderly jokes. Since George Burns (finally) died years ago, nobody has really stepped in to take his title. The Rolling Stones are sort of de facto, but they only appear old -- I think Charlie Watts is the eldest at 66, ancient for a rock star, but not really all that ancient overall. I'm talking about someone in their early 90's, minimum.

5. Rogers Cable. As it turns out, my Rogers sports package doesn't contain every March Madness game, as I had been led to believe. It does, however, have exclusive coverage of the NIT tournament.

4. Bad first dates. This is also related to Rogers, oddly enough. A friend of mine recently told me about a first date she was on with a guy she didn't know all that well. At some point early on in the date, she was having trouble with her phone, and she made some innocuous comment like 'Oh, this lousy Rogers service.' The guy responds with, in what I was told was dead seriousness, "I hope Ted Rogers dies of AIDS." The guy spends the next few minutes ranting about his bad experiences with Rogers. The date went downhill from there.

3. March Madness upsets. What a lame first round. The highest seeds that got knocked out were a pair of #6s (albeit a fairly high-profile #6 seed in Duke). Usually there's at least a few of the big names taken down early. This screws not just fans, who like to root for the underdogs, but also me, who took a number of upsets in my pool. My chance of winning my NCAA pool is already stone dead.

2. St. Patrick's Day. This is a great holiday for relative non-drinker. Just great. Lots of other holidays (Canada Day, New Year's, Beer Day) are about drinking, but at least are ostensibly about something else. Not St. Paddy's Day. If you don't get plastered on green beer, you get looked at like you have three heads. What do I care about celebrating Ireland's lack of snakes? That's like, Venezuela celebrating a lack of polar bears. I think my St. Patrick's day will involve throwing on a U2 record, and that's it.

1. Gustavo Chacin. Boy, this was a joy to read about. The Blue Jays' rotation this year is going to be held together with spit and dreams, and the prohibitive #3 starter goes and gets busted for a DUI. I love how people keep saying "Oh, the Jays' big problem is their four and five starters." Their number two is A.J. Burnett and their number three is Gustavo Chacin! That isn't exactly consistency. Can Roy Halladay get a cyborg arm built and start 70 games a year like Old Hoss Radbourn? I may be peeved because Chacin's actions impact me. I was covering an event at a public school last spring when Reed Johnson went to speak in an assembly. I was standing to the side taking notes, when this little six-year-old comes up to me and asks, "Are you Gustavo Chacin?" Sigh. Of all the Jays to be mistaken for...