I have absolutely no one to talk curling with these days, and thus I cannot bitch about how the Kelly Scott rink is doing horribly at this year’s worlds. Norway just stole four points from them. FOUR.

And none of you care because you didn’t even know there was a world championship going on, and wouldn’t watch it even if you did. I hate you all.

Update: SNAP. Canada comes back in 11 to squeak by the Norwegians. Best I’ve seen them play all week.

It occurs to me I’m the only one watching curling because I’m the only derelict human being here. Everyone else has school and jobs and lives.

My favorite thing about the New York article on 9/11 conspiracy theories currently making the rounds on Metafilter? This part:

Does it matter that the pilot for the conspiracy-themed Lone Gunmen (a short-lived Fox knockoff of The X-Files), which aired on March 4, 2001, tells the story of a U.S. government agency’s plot to crash a remote-controlled 727 into the World Trade Center as an excuse to raise the military budget and then blame the attack on a “tin-pot dictator” who was “begging to be smart-bombed”?

Really? Yes, really. What’s most amazing about this isn’t the somewhat eerie similarities between the plot of the pilot (ha ha) episode and what actually happened; what’s most amazing is that despite airing a scant six months before the actual attack, no one seems to remember this part of the episode. I remember the horrible opening of the episode, where the Lone Gunmen rant about the Octium IV; I remember the conversation about Byers’ dad being dead and believing in JFK and Camelot; I remember how apparently the only way to solve the crisis was to talk to some super-hot babe hacker with a penchant for guns. Above all else, I remember thinking how this show was going to suck, hard. But nowhere in that collection of memories do I remember a Plot To Crash Airliners Into the World Trade Center. How the hell did I miss that? And how is it that no one else jumped on this right after the attacks, even while we were finding obscure novels making reference to planes crashing into buildings and boggling at the similarities?

The answer, of course, is that the show was so bad that everyone promptly forgot it existed when it was cancelled. But man, talk about weird.

“They told us they didn’t have good news,” said one man who was at the briefing. “Everybody is stunned and sick to our stomachs. We feel like we’ve been lied to, we’ve been lied to all along … This is probably the most horrible thing that’s ever happened to me in my lifetime.”

Late last evening, the story out of West Virginia was being described as a miracle: 12 workers trapped in Sago Mine survived 41 hours underground, despite high levels of carbom monoxide and the discovery of a body closer to the mine entrance. Early this morning, something unthinkable had happened to that story. A horrible mistake had been made: there weren’t 12 survivors, there were 12 dead.

People cling tightly to stories of hope. In the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center towers, rumours and wild stories surfaced about people who had survived against the odds. One such story that I’ve never forgotten involved a man who managed to walk away from the collapse of one of the towers by surfing on a wave of rubble as the tower came down. It’s the sort of story that, in earlier times, might have become a legend: an ordinary man performing an unthinkable feat in the face of overwhelming horror. It was also the sort of story that couldn’t possibly be true, except that it very well might have been.

But people also remember stories like this one, the exact opposite of the man who fell to earth and lived. It’s almost too perfect in its reversal of fortune, in the way it has stripped an entire community so thoroughly of the belief that they had been spared. Few stories have a final act so cruel and devastating as this, and Tallmansville is doubly stricken for it.

I take back what I said about the legal ramifications of letting kids build a snowman on your lawn. This is a far stupider and sadder discussion. Any thread about Santa that’s titled “Government assisted myth perpetuation” is doomed from the beginning.

I worry that a five-year-old who is so misled as to think Santa is real or death is not real will be unprepared for rational thought later in life.

I worry that someone who believes this is considered capable of rational thought at all.

On another note, obviously the holidays have made me an angry, bitter person. So a cheerful “fuck you” and “get the hell away from me” to all!

The fact that this discussion even exists makes me sad.

Richard Burns, former World Rally champion, died last night after a long battle with a brain tumour. He was 35.

Burns was set to return to the Subaru team in 2004 after a successful stint with Peugeot when he pulled out due to the illness. The combination of Burns and fellow world champion Petter Solberg on the team would’ve been a glorious sight to see. I hadn’t heard much about his condition lately but I’d always assumed he was on the mend. Burns seemed like a great guy, and he was definitely a great driver; he will be sorely missed.