Canada -- a ripe plum ready for the taking. And the plum was probably imported from Florida, which will make it all the easier. It's not like it hasn't been considered before -- Michael Moore's one stab at a fictional film (unless you count his documentaries) -- was "Canadian Bacon," in which President Alan Alda takes on Canada. The mere convenience of it is enough to justify it -- a regiment in Detroit could blitz Toronto from 9 to 5 and still go home to watch the CNN highlights with the kids every night.

There are plenty of reasons to invade your passive-aggressive northern neighbor. (Or "neighbour," as we spitefully choose to spell it. Doesn't that just piss you off?) But never mind -- thanks to the lessons learned in Iraq, reasons are no longer necessary. The Bush administration's labored justifications for the Iraq invasion, served up as convincingly as a chocolate-smeared 6-year-old's explanation of where the cookies went, proved to be utterly irrelevant. Most Americans, it turned out, were only too happy to kick some non-American ass and didn't really require an explanation. As a prelude to the invasion of Canada, Bush could merely produce satellite photos proving conclusively that American troops are bored. Good enough for most.

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It was, to say the least, a bit of a diplomatic faux pas. In the Canadian Parliament, opposition politicians screamed for the head of Ducros, Chretien's director of communications. Ducros paid the price for her indiscreet comment Tuesday when Chretien accepted her resignation. (She had offered to resign last week, but the prime minister initially refused to accept her resignation.) Before Ducros departed, a Canadian news organization ran a poll, asking the public what Ducros' fate should be.

The winning suggestion: Give the woman a promotion.

No, these are not good days for the president's international image. Bush may bask in warm approval ratings back home, but Canadians seem to view him with a mixture of fear and contempt, a German government official compared his foreign policy to Hitler's, while European political cartoonists almost uniformly portray him as various species of monkey. And those are his allies.

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You can't ignore the ads anymore. They have their own Web site. Ever since director Ridley Scott's 1984 Macintosh spot, the commercials have been a major part of the annual Super Bowl show -- a telecast that draws approximately 800 million viewers worldwide. (One survey claims that 16 percent of viewers tune in only for the commercials, and 58 percent pay more attention to the ads than to the game.) Even as endless player interviews and game prognosticators droned on through the week, particular ads were generating their own pre-telecast hype. This year's advertisers included surprise newcomers -- the White House -- and surprising dropouts, like EDS, whose "Herding Cats" and "Running With the Squirrels" ads were previous Super Bowl standouts.

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Now, in the fall of 2001, is that OK? Is it cool to lie awake wishing painful strains on every pinstriped groin? At this dark moment when we stand shoulder to shoulder with all the residents of Gotham, can we pause a moment to curse the Bronx Bombers and all their works? Hell yes. I hate those Bronx bastards.

I know -- sports don't matter anymore. Sept. 11 put everything in perspective. Empty athletic contests mean nothing in the big scheme of yada yada. Why then do my teeth grind like tectonic plates as I watch Paul expletive O'Neill circle the bases like a prize spaniel prancing around a dog ring? Why does my Yankee loathing run so deep?

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For 15 years, spanning the eras from Journey to Destiny's Child, Janet Jackson has frequently provided the best reason to turn on the radio -- although, admittedly, the case for opening a good book is usually a lot stronger. Top 40 has always been more or less a sausage factory. Between the occasional bursts of true genius that change the prevailing flavor of pop, journeyman producers and performers rush in to fill the gaps with sawdust imitations of the real joy. Much of pop history has consisted of marking time until the next big thing.

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Anyone familiar with Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha" will know the Ichiriki, a place few Japanese and even fewer foreigners have ever seen. (The Ichiriki's mistress contends that Golden has never stepped through its doorway.) Much of the action in his pre- and postwar tale of Japan takes place at this doyenne of Kyoto geisha establishments, located in the ancient city's Gion district.

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Then Kaori fields another call, this one from a concerned friend. "Don't stay out there too late," she says. "North Koreans will abduct you." She's absolutely serious.

The Noto Peninsula is one spooky piece of turf -- Japan's Alien Central, in at least three different ways. For one, China's people smugglers, known as snakeheads, have made the Noto a favorite dumping ground, loosing a tide of desperate illegals onto its remote ocean beaches.

And hysterical friends aside, residents of the Noto do indeed cast worried looks to the sea as twilight falls -- the fishing boats plying the waters off this northern spit are not always what they seem. Just over the empty horizon lies North Korea. Like visitors from a hostile galaxy, spy boats from this planet's most isolated society bristle with bogus trawling gear as they electronically probe the Noto -- a region North Koreans (unlike most Japanese) consider highly significant. Japanese news programs have reported cases of Noto residents snatched from local beaches after stumbling upon paranoid North Korean operatives. These particular alien abductions are very real.

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Wink at the cheerleader or the varsity quarterback, and it's usually the mascot in the squirrel costume who winks back. Vancouver lusts after the likes of Paul Newman and Gwyneth Paltrow. So who falls in love with us? Michael Moriarty.

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Dreams about celebrities not only seem tawdry but are often perplexing (I like the Beatles), suitable only for drowsy teenagers drifting off on bunk beds while copies of Seventeen magazine slip to the floor. But I do it all the time, and it's not as if I can help it. The famous simply show up and assume various roles, including frequently my own.

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Taking in the size, speed and trajectory of the attacker, my brain scrolled rapidly through the category of "Spiders found in houses and apartments." No match found. As I called up the next category, "Spiders found in Borneo," two alarms became five. I screamed -- twice, I'm afraid -- and jumped into the bathtub. The monster rolled to a stop beneath a little table and sat motionless beside the baseboard. It was the biggest spider I'd ever seen outside of the Discovery Channel.

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There are definitely drawbacks to holding the Olympics in Oz, among them starting the Summer Games roughly two weeks after the end of the Australian winter. Then, too, there is the possibility of athletes testing positive for the venom of the Sydney funnel web spider or the giant brown snake. Luckily the tests are self-administering and basically involve awaiting the onset of rigor mortis.

Yes, in the Lethal Olympics, the competitors from Down Under take gold every time. Of the three mascots, it's Syd you need to watch out for -- male platypuses have poison spurs. The island continent boasts the deadliest spider and the deadliest snake (the aforementioned twosome), as well as rejected mascot candidate the blue-ringed octopus. And don't count out that wiry lightweight, the box jellyfish; gram for gram, it's the single most poisonous creature on the planet. Not to suggest that all Australian animals are poisonous. Great white sharks carry no venom whatsoever. Ditto the hammerhead.

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That must be when the piano landed on him. The official cause of death was said to be heart failure, which is possible too -- bad things happen when you forget to stop and take a breath. Certainly, we can rule out cancer of the tongue.

Good thing Lahoud knew shorthand. Whatever it was that finally silenced the Middle East strongman, at least they didn't strike up the band before he got through the big soliloquy. Not everyone is so lucky when the curtain drops. Contrast Assad's stirring valedictory address with Tallulah Bankhead's final words in 1968. "Codeine," she reportedly muttered. "Bourbon."

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We were born too late for all the comforting certainties -- old-fashioned values, death from syphilis, searing fusillades of brimstone. Once there were no situational ethics, and forget about moral relativism. Cuss on a Sunday and, presto, you were a Grade A roaster on a subterranean spit, with the deli manager on permanent break.

But such cruelty could never survive in a soft-sell age. The gradual phasing-out of a retributive afterlife model gained official approval when even the venerable Church of England gave the devil a pink slip. The church's revised theological interpretation, first unveiled several years ago, mothballed the pitchforks and doused the lake of fire. Hell, said the archbishops, is merely a state of nonbeing -- a never-ending flight delay in a timeless Des Moines. (Odd when you consider that the official head of the Church of England is Queen Elizabeth II, who might at least preserve a little scorpion-stuffed corner of purgatory for pesky daughters-in-law.)

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Here's a likely candidate -- years from now it will be widely circulated that the word "crummy" derives from the work of cartoonist Robert Crumb, a world-class malcontent of the late 20th century. Crumb surveyed the urban landscape of his era and pronounced his verdict: Everything sucks big time, including humanity and, most especially, Robert Crumb. "At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else," Crumb once said. Coming from the author of "Self-Loathing Comics," you can take that to the bank.

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A month earlier, there had been another
World Series -- the Triple-A version.
The minor league championship differed
from its more famous parent in a number
of ways. It was held in a neutral site
-- in fact, probably the most neutral
site in America, Las Vegas, where fan
loyalties await the publishing of the
morning line.

The underdog Vancouver Canadians took
the series, defeating the Oklahoma
Redhawks. Although the team celebrated
in traditional jumping-jack fashion,
they did so in front of nearly empty
stands. But the real difference between
Triple-A and the Show became evident the
next day -- unlike the victorious Yanks,
the Canadians did not return home in
triumph. They didn't return to Vancouver
at all, nor have they since. This spring
the defending Triple-A champs are
congregating in Sacramento, Calif., as
the newly renamed River Cats. For the
now-defunct Vancouver Canadians, victory
was truly final.

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The absolute best movie, best liner notes, most admirable and accomplished young woman -- apparently there is no such thing as an unquantifiable virtue. Vancouver recently hosted the Aboriginal Achievement Awards, at which a man was honored for negotiating a native-land claim (although best treaty was not an actual category). The relentless procession of awards is frequently derided as pointless, ridiculous, even ludicrous. All of which is probably true.

But also irrelevant. Awards ceremonies, so often cursed by bad Celine Dion renditions -- or, even worse, Celine Dion -- are nonetheless inherently compelling. The love of horse races and big blue ribbons must surely be in our DNA.

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And before I had time to process that
remarkable statement, there it
was. Not much doubt about it either. As
Donald Fagen sang, "How about a kiss for
your cousin Dupree," it was as if a
magic phonograph needle had somehow
discovered some new grooves on an old
copy of "Gaucho." That 1980 album had
looked to be Steely Dan's swan song,
although Fagen and collaborator Walter
Becker had always been coy about
possible new projects and had even
staged a reunion tour. Now, the DJ
informed me (in what must have been a
welcome break from introducing "Misty
Mountain Hop" for the gazillionth time)
that the Dan was back with a new CD,
"Two Against Nature."

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Still, not having a clue is no picnic. As a complete fashion dunce, I'm frequently at a loss, and, like a foreigner in Paraguay, dependent on the kindness of sisters. I simply lack any instinct for what's current and can only base my personal shopping on memorization and what worked last time. As any blind person could tell you, that only works until somebody rearranges the furniture -- and in fashion, that tends to happen a lot.

I never trusted fashion. Random, arbitrary, senseless, constantly contradicting itself -- if something looks good one year, why should it be a joke the next? Such nonsense was not for me. As a child my only fashion hero was Roy Rogers, and, had I been left to my own devices, so he would have remained.

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The poignant coda of the Pooh books suggested that, long after we children grow up to become indifferent adults, our childhood fantasy worlds live on in some lonely forest glade, patiently awaiting our return.

Hearing Don Martin's name again (in the usual unfortunate circumstances that cause long-forgotten names to reappear) was like awakening from a dream. How did I manage to so thoroughly and completely forget the man whose comic sensibilities ruled my grade school world?

Not every '60s kid discarded Martin cartoons, and Mad in general, with their lunchboxes and GI Joes (not every '60s kid discarded their lunchboxes and GI Joes either, which is why some are now wealthy and some cursing Mom for cleaning their rooms). But for every reader who stayed loyal, many more dropped William M. Gaines' impish publication and reinvented themselves as sophisticated '70s National Lampoon readers. A lot of what filled the pages of Mad was better off forgotten. But in our rush to grow up, we unfairly tossed Don Martin out with the bath water.

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