the bear suit category and no further improvement was required.
As it happens, though, there isn’t a huge market for bear-proof suits, and since a guy’s got to eat, Mr. Hurtubise has been trying to interest the military in a modified version of his body armour. According to an article I saw in the
Hamilton Spectator,
his new suit is called the Trojan. It’s described as a “practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs.” In the picture accompanying the story, the Trojan doesn’t
look
very lightweight, but there are other great features that come with it: a knife, a pepper-spray gun, emergency morphine and salt, a laser pointer, a solar-powered fresh-air system and a detachable transponder that can be swallowed “… in case of trouble.” And all this could be yours—or the Canadian Armed Forces’—for the bargain-basement price of two thousand dollars a pop.
This is where the bad news comes in. The Canadian military aren’t in a rush, apparently, to phone in their orders for the Trojan suit—maybe because Mr. Hurtubise doesn’t seem to have a regular phone line. He does have other inventions to peddle, though—like the spray-on Fire Paste that would prevent anything coated in it from burning up. He says it costs next to nothing to make and it’s biodegradable. That sounds pretty good, no?
EIGHT
There’ll Always Be an England
… and a radio
I f the Bear Suit Man’s clothes weigh a little more than normal, Stephen Gough’s weigh less. In fact, he feels that any clothes at all would be an unnecessary encumbrance when he’s running cross-country: a birthday suit, rather than a bear suit, is more his style. Mark McKelvey, on the other hand, doesn’t feel dressed unless he’s wearing a fridge, which is what he sported on a 160-kilometre trek from Liverpool to Mount Snowdon in Wales back in 2003.
Gough and McKelvey belong to the species
Eccentricus britannicus.
Most of the eccentrics who turn up on
As It Happens
are British, and that’s because the British Isles possess by far the greatest number of odd people per capita in the world. We don’t know why; maybe it’s their diet. You know the sort of people I mean: people who roll cheeses and eat nettles, people who shelter hedgehogs and hate hedges, people who play bagpipes and people who hurl haggis … people who see haggis as an
aphrodisiac.
Once, when I was speaking to a group about how our show gets put together, I described the story meeting we had each morning, where everyone was invited to bring ideas about what to put on the air that night. I told them that the senior producer would run through a list of categories: Lead Story, National, International, Science, Entertainment, Dead Blues Musicians and so on—at which pointa woman in the audience put up her hand and asked, “When do you do your Crazy People from England?”
The answer, of course, was: whenever we could. Before I started hosting the show, my all-time favourite guest was the English bloke who had a stuffed fish—a marlin—mounted on the roof of his house, and although its presence had spawned a pretty intense campaign on the part of local councillors and some of his neighbours to get the thing removed, he was not at all inclined to give way. In fact, the more they went after him, the more stuff he acquired for display on his property, up to and including, if I’m not mistaken, a Sherman tank.
A man’s home is his castle, he told
As It Happens,
and how he chose to decorate it was his own affair entirely.
The King of Redonda didn’t have a castle as such, but he did rule over a small island near Antigua in the Caribbean. We talked to King Robert the First—actually, to the Pretender to the Throne, as he then was—just as he was preparing to sail over from Antigua and plant his flag. He told us that the island, populated chiefly by rats and boobies (tropical birds), had been named by Columbus and established as a kingdom
As it happens, though, there isn’t a huge market for bear-proof suits, and since a guy’s got to eat, Mr. Hurtubise has been trying to interest the military in a modified version of his body armour. According to an article I saw in the
Hamilton Spectator,
his new suit is called the Trojan. It’s described as a “practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs.” In the picture accompanying the story, the Trojan doesn’t
look
very lightweight, but there are other great features that come with it: a knife, a pepper-spray gun, emergency morphine and salt, a laser pointer, a solar-powered fresh-air system and a detachable transponder that can be swallowed “… in case of trouble.” And all this could be yours—or the Canadian Armed Forces’—for the bargain-basement price of two thousand dollars a pop.
This is where the bad news comes in. The Canadian military aren’t in a rush, apparently, to phone in their orders for the Trojan suit—maybe because Mr. Hurtubise doesn’t seem to have a regular phone line. He does have other inventions to peddle, though—like the spray-on Fire Paste that would prevent anything coated in it from burning up. He says it costs next to nothing to make and it’s biodegradable. That sounds pretty good, no?
EIGHT
There’ll Always Be an England
… and a radio
I f the Bear Suit Man’s clothes weigh a little more than normal, Stephen Gough’s weigh less. In fact, he feels that any clothes at all would be an unnecessary encumbrance when he’s running cross-country: a birthday suit, rather than a bear suit, is more his style. Mark McKelvey, on the other hand, doesn’t feel dressed unless he’s wearing a fridge, which is what he sported on a 160-kilometre trek from Liverpool to Mount Snowdon in Wales back in 2003.
Gough and McKelvey belong to the species
Eccentricus britannicus.
Most of the eccentrics who turn up on
As It Happens
are British, and that’s because the British Isles possess by far the greatest number of odd people per capita in the world. We don’t know why; maybe it’s their diet. You know the sort of people I mean: people who roll cheeses and eat nettles, people who shelter hedgehogs and hate hedges, people who play bagpipes and people who hurl haggis … people who see haggis as an
aphrodisiac.
Once, when I was speaking to a group about how our show gets put together, I described the story meeting we had each morning, where everyone was invited to bring ideas about what to put on the air that night. I told them that the senior producer would run through a list of categories: Lead Story, National, International, Science, Entertainment, Dead Blues Musicians and so on—at which pointa woman in the audience put up her hand and asked, “When do you do your Crazy People from England?”
The answer, of course, was: whenever we could. Before I started hosting the show, my all-time favourite guest was the English bloke who had a stuffed fish—a marlin—mounted on the roof of his house, and although its presence had spawned a pretty intense campaign on the part of local councillors and some of his neighbours to get the thing removed, he was not at all inclined to give way. In fact, the more they went after him, the more stuff he acquired for display on his property, up to and including, if I’m not mistaken, a Sherman tank.
A man’s home is his castle, he told
As It Happens,
and how he chose to decorate it was his own affair entirely.
The King of Redonda didn’t have a castle as such, but he did rule over a small island near Antigua in the Caribbean. We talked to King Robert the First—actually, to the Pretender to the Throne, as he then was—just as he was preparing to sail over from Antigua and plant his flag. He told us that the island, populated chiefly by rats and boobies (tropical birds), had been named by Columbus and established as a kingdom
Similar Books
