ʀʏᴀɴ 🇨🇦

Librarian of the Internets.

[Pat Sajak @patsajak]

Now that I’ve been off TV for a while, I thought I could walk anonymously through a mall. It worked at first, but then someone yelled, “Hey, it’s Pat Sajak!” Then I was surrounded by people. “How are you?” “We miss you!” It was a bit of a circus. I’m almost sorry I yelled.

[ʀʏᴀɴ 🇨🇦 @lolswat]

@HamiltonPolice Only open 8a-6p lol…. Bring back the Action team who actually bike the beat.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Cute theory, let's play it out.

A monkey hoards a trillion bananas. The troop, enraged, beats him to death. They gather around the pile to feast at last.

But... oh wait, there is no pile.

It turns out the "bananas" were shares in a banana-launching company the dead monkey founded.

The shares were worth a trillion because he was alive to run it.

Now he is dead and the stock is worth $0.

The retarded monkeys have clubbed their way into a recession.

But it gets worse.

Half the "bananas" were tied up in a rocket that supplies bananas to monkeys on the far mountain who had no bananas at all.

Another chunk was tied up in a little satellite dish that beamed banana coordinates to the troop after a flood took out their trees.

So now they realized they beat to death the only monkey who knew how the dish worked.

So the monkeys sit there.

No bananas.
No rockets.
No coordinates to get more banananas.

Just a dead body and a powerful sense of fairness as they all now became infinitely poorer.

OH

And somewhere a smaller monkey watches the whole thing and quietly decides he will never build anything in front of these animals again.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In America, a warehouse store. A fully roasted chicken costs five dollars, the raw chicken beside it costs seven, and I stood between them like a man between two truths.

Golden. Hot. Seasoned. Spinning in glory under the lights, in a line of its brothers. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents.

I checked the raw birds. Seven dollars. Pale. Cold. You must do everything yourself.

This is not commerce. Commerce does not move backward. Somewhere in this building, mathematics lies defeated.

I asked the man at the counter. "How is the cooked bird cheaper than the raw bird?"

"Been five bucks forever. They keep it that way."

"But the store loses."

"Yep. On purpose."

On purpose. I held my receipt with both hands.

In my land, a lord who lowered the price of rice in a hard winter was remembered for generations. They built him a small shrine. This store does it every day, with chicken, and tells no one.

A woman behind me grew tired of my reverence. "It's just a chicken, sir."

It is not just a chicken. It is a wound the merchant takes on purpose, so that anyone, on any day, with five dollars, eats like a lord. The bird is the message. The price is the vow.

I will confess: I bought two. I did not need two. The second was not hunger. It was gratitude, and it was delicious.

Some prices are not prices. They are promises.

I return every week now. I take one bird. I bow toward the deli, briefly, so as not to alarm the staff. They have begun nodding back.

The vow holds. The bird turns. Five dollars.

Long may it spin.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.

The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.

The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.

Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.

"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.

It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.

"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.

In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.

And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.

You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.

The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.

I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.

Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.

"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.

Discipline is a journey.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Out here, a burger stand. They sold me a drink that cannot be drunk, and they knew, and they sold it anyway, and they were right to.

A milkshake. Listed under DRINKS. Served with a straw — the universal promise that liquid waits within.

The straw lied.

I pulled. Nothing. I pulled harder. The shake did not move. I inspected the straw for blockage. Clear. I pulled with the focus of a man drawing a stubborn bow, felt my own ears adjust, and received nothing.

"It's thick," said the boy at the counter. He had been watching.

"It is SOLID."

"It softens up. Give it a minute."

A waiting period. A drink with a waiting period. In my land, when we want softened dairy on a schedule, we — we do not, actually. We have never attempted this. There is no protocol.

I did not wait. Waiting felt like negotiating, and the shake had started it. I pulled again, both hands steadying the cup, with full intent.

A single molecule of vanilla reached my tongue. Then the line collapsed.

I sat back, breathing. A grown warrior, winded by a beverage.

The boy slid something across the counter without a word.

A spoon.

I stared at it. To accept the spoon is to admit the drink has won. To refuse the spoon is to fight a wall of cream for forty minutes in a public place.

I accepted the spoon. It was the correct decision. The shake, approached as food, is glorious. Approached as a drink, it is a siege.

That which resists the straw is not refusing you. It is asking to be taken seriously.

I order one every week now. The boy hands me the spoon at the register. Before I pay.

He knows. I know. We do not discuss it.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen.

I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify.

In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather.

"Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully.

"Honey, that's what it looks like."

The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it."

I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it.

I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South.

It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent.

"Well?" the waitress asked.

"I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed."

"Everybody does, hon."

Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it.

Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating.

I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden.

It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.

[Jared @funyjared]

@japan_nobunaga @ThreeGreen21 “Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.”

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[Coasters and Brews 🍻 @coastersnbrews]

Vortex at Canada’s Wonderland could possibly be the best 30 second roller coaster experience of one’s life, and to think it turned 35 years old last month! Ride is mental!

[Frank Grimes Jr. @FrankGrimes_Jr]

With car jackings and break and enters at an all time high let's check in with the OPP.....

[Marc Emery @MarcScottEmery]

Ontario Provincial Police no longer can stop car theft, carjacking, extortion, sex trafficking, truck carnage on the highways, massive gold thefts from airports, fraud, shoplifting, looting, but BIG PRESS RELEASE on 2 kids traveling 10 k/h on a empty suburban sidewalk! 😂

[Hg @HeatherGre38011]

🤣🤣🤣drug smuggling home invasion and gun violence at an all time high in Canada. Of course let’s post two kids having fun 🤬🤬

[Michael Bento @MichaelPBento]

Someone loaded $655k worth of 1dte puts that were 2% OTM not 15 minutes before the headlines that dumped the rally broke on the wires. You can't make up this unbelievable level of insider trading.

[Kirk Lubimov @KirkLubimov]

A perfect day in Canada:

6:00 wake up

6:30 have toast with butter that almost melts.

7:00 leave for work earlier for incase another semi driver slammed into something creating traffic.

8:00 swing by Tim Horton's, repeat your order 4 times.

8:30 get to work and immediately start with land acknowledgments chants.

13:00 have ketchup chips for lunch.

13:30 post on Facebook about how Donald Trump ruined Canada. Enjoy the satisfaction of getting likes from boomers and a couple bots. Great success.

15:00 spent an hour at HR after misgendering your genderfluid-4 spirited- furry co-worker who identified as a gay giraffe today.

16:00 it's pay day! Open pay stub feel relieved that over 40% of your income went to taxes knowing it pays for welfare of non-Canadians somewhere.

17:00 finish another good day at work trying to navigate the latest red tape impacting your company.

18:30 nothing much for dinner as groceries are too expensive. You order a $8 kids happy meal and pay $23 for it. Open the wrapper to see a bite taken out. It's ok, you understand.

19:30 watch CBC, feel better you were right about Donal Trump.

21:00 get comfy on the couch for a good sleep as you had to rent your bedroom out to afford rent.

[Jimmy O'Brien @Jomboy_]

Aaron Boone gets ejected defending Aaron Judge after umpires called this a foul ball, a breakdown

[President-Elect Toguro @PresidentToguro]

In America, men display dominance over each other by taking bigger bites of a burger. This is known as burgermogging

[TheDipState @TheDipState]

@anothercohen McDonald’s CEO just killed any remaining childhood nostalgia associated with the “product”

[🇺🇸 The American Culturist 🇺🇸 @MericaCulture]

Sunrise over the Great Bass Pro Pyramid of Memphis, Tennessee.

Eat your heart out, Cairo.