Well, sorry for ripping the lads off one more time, but this is my favorite sketch. I want this played at my funeral:

Yud thinc that if this guy drives a skool buss it wuld bee spehlt rite.

And the Alberta Children's Hospital is now taking part! Guess I'm buying locally this year.

Well, Barack Obama won the US presidency last night. The next four (maybe eight) years will be rather interesting. So to any Americans reading this, enjoy Trudeaumania Redux.

But some of the dendrites starting firing last night and I remembered this: back in Bill Clinton's time, Saturday Night Live had a recurring animated bit called "The X-Presidents", as in "X-Men". The gag was is that once an American president leaves office, he gets strange powers and joins a superhero team with the other surviving former presidents and go fight crime and international evil.

So the current X-President roster is Jimmy Carter, George Bush, and Bill Clinton. I wonder what powers George W. Bush will get in January. Maybe he'll be the lame duck member of the team and can talk to fish.

Don't screw this up. You know who has to win.

From my end of things CRA attempting to contact me is didn't happen as I have not received any phone calls or messages. As the deadline for getting CRA this stuff has now long passed as this fax did not come across my desk until now, I tried to call CRA about this.

Firstly, often letters like this do not include a direct phone number where the author can be reached at so you can only call their main 1-800 line. It seems that unless you pick up the phone on the first ring when the government calls you about something, you can never,
NEVER, *EVER* talk directly again to whoever is actually looking at your file. I guess their attitude is: "If you're not waiting by your phone 24/7 for us to call for any reason, then you do not deserve a quick and speedy resolution to whatever problems we create for you."

Plus, I'm starting to think that the "names" that are signed on CRA letters are noms de plumes for whatever department sent it and provide a cloak of anonymity for the actual grub who wrote it.

After a long string of busy signals, I eventually got through to "somebody" at CRA. After going through the usual verification hoops I started explaining the situation, and she abruptly said: "Stop right there. I have to transfer you." (Somebody's sure got a traffic cop complex.)

I then got put through to somebody else at CRA and after going through the verification hoops again I started explaining the situation, and I got the information I needed to start resolving this. Also, he said that they have no phone number on file for my office under our clients' authorizations.

Even though our phone number is on every government tax form we sent out, CRA is telling our clients that they've been trying to call me is a creative way of saying they didn't because they couldn't! Don't they have phone books?

This is exactly why I voted the way I did. Yet another pointless hacking away at the multiple headed hydra that's CRA.

""My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us.""

Once again, The Onion sums it all up. Eight years early.

If the Conservatives ran an ad like this, I'd be sold.

I didn't vote for the Marxist, because that's too wacky even for me.

I didn't vote for the Green, because they're a one-issue party. And besides, I'm no pot-smoking hippie.

I didn't vote for the New Democrat, because, come on. It's the NDP.

I didn't vote for the Liberal, because I've never really agreed with their policies.

I was going to vote for the Conservative, but they announced that as part of their platform they were going to reintroduce their new copyright laws first brought in on Bill C-61, which died when the election was called. That was the deal-breaker for me. Not only would it make so many average Canadians felons for finding new ways to use the digital media that they've already purchased, but then-Minister of Industry Jim Prentice (also my MP) was such a dick when he finally granted an interview with the CBC to talk about it. Granted, Prentice gave the interviewer 10 minutes before a cabinet meeting so he was pressed for time, but he was clearly dodging the issues and was way over his head. Why does the government appoint people who don't understand technology to make the laws that regulate it?

That left really only one choice for me to vote for and preserve my right to bitch about the government. So I voted Libertarian. Me and 344 other people in Calgary Centre-North. Plus, after dealing with just one monolithic branch of the federal government as part of my job for the last five years, I think we could do with less government. Judges, police, national defense, that's it.

Now don't think I'm going full-bore loony with this Libertarian thing. If the Canadian DMCA bill doesn't come back, then the Tories will have me back for the next election in 2010.

And of all people, it's Jon Stewart that sums it all up.

Whenever you authorize somebody to be able to access your tax info with the Canada Revenue Agency, the form states that it's stored in a Personal Information Bank called "CRA/P-PU-005".

Read that over a few times.

The problem was, all my notes say I haven't spoken to her since March, and that was for a totally unrelated income tax issue.

Long story short, turns out I did speak to her in May *2007* and did do these revisions. Not May *2008* that she was alluding to.

Our clients must assume that accountants, like all nonhuman lifeforms, exist outside linear time. We're like the wormhole aliens from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and we can see into the future as easily as we can remember the past. Only we're not worshiped as prophets by the inhabitants of a nearby planet.