I quite enjoyed the movie Mean Girls. I didn’t see the Lindsay Lohan/Rachel McAdams hit for years, because I assumed it was some stupid teen comedy, but when I finally saw it a couple of years ago I liked it. I particularly enjoyed its insight into the social mechanics of teenaged girls. They plot, they scheme and they maneuver in a way that makes you say “It’s, like, Machiavellian.”

As it turns out, those behaviours never go away, as a great woman of my acquaintance just learned. She’s an independent and dynamic 88-year-old Scots woman who recently underwent some surgery, and has spent several weeks in a long-term care facility as she recuperates. It was felt that she needed to be near 24-hour care, and while she normally lives on a beautiful farm in central Ontario, she agreed to take the time she needed. We call her Mums.

On her first day, she was told there were two seatings for dinner. She picked the early seating. When she entered the dining room, using her walker (a temporary post-surgery requirement), a woman spotted her and pruned up. This busybody marched over to Mums, waggled a finger, and said: “You’re new!”

“Aye, that’s right,” said Mums, who has the finest Scottish accent you’ll ever hear, and looks 25 years younger than she is — in other words, just a little bit younger than the way Lindsay Lohan looks now.

“New people don’t get to come to the early seating,” Busybody said. “That’s for people who’ve been here a long time!”

“Well, I’m here and I’m hungry,” said Mums with a sniff. Mums’s sniffs have been known to make grown men cry. This one time, she sniffed as a police officer wrote her a speeding ticket; later, he quit the force and became a florist. Anyway, Busybody shook with anger as Mums ignored her and found her seat.

• (We’ve all known people like Busybody. Whether teenaged girls or older women, they’re a type of bully specializing in social stigma, rather than physical force. They want things their way, they have to be in charge, and they are very, very hard on newcomers.)

Before too long, Busybody joined Mums at her table, sitting beside her. “You can’t leave your walker beside the table,” said Busybody, her nose in the air. “You have to leave it over by the door. That’s the way it’s done.”

Mums turned and surveyed the 40-odd feet to the door, then turned back to Busybody. “If I leave my walker there,” she said, “I’ll never get back to the table!” Busybody huffed and hemmed and hawed, unable to counter this bit of obvious logic.

A while later, during the meal, Busybody suddenly stood up, reached over, and grabbed Mums’s purse from her lap. Mums’s hand shot out, and her iron grip locked onto Busybody’s wrist.

“Just what do ye think ye’re doin?” she asked.

“I’m just going to put your purse on your walker for you,” Busybody stammered.

Mums’s keen eyes locked onto Busybody’s, her gaze like a drill, and she delivered the line that has made her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren stand up and take notice for decades: “That’s enough o’ yere nonsense!”

Busybody sat down and shut up. That night, Mums made arrangements to take her meals in her spacious and lavish private rooms. On Sunday, she heads back to the farm, where she’ll be dancing and laughing and probably forgetting all about the little old lady who tried to bully her.

Some bullies never grow out of it. But it’s always fun to see them brought down a peg.

Men don’t read. Not if they don’t have to. Magazines are okay, as long as there’s a truck, a soldier or a bikini on the cover. And repair manuals are all right, as long as it’s a last resort.

But books? Not a good idea. As an acquaintance (who was in the process of joining a biker gang) once asked me, “Why are you reading that? Who told you to?”

This was a hard thing for me to change. I like books. I like reading. Hell, I’ve written tons of them, some of which have been published, just with someone else’s name on them, because I didn’t want to admit to writing books. Yeah, that’s what it was.

Roaming packs of extremely macho teenagers have been known to slap the Chuck Kloostermans out of hipsters’ hands at cafes and ripped the Vonneguts out of books carried by non-showering college boys, just for spite. Bring a Dan Brown to your softball game to read between innings? You might as well join the ladies’ slo-pitch league.

I do offer a solution.

Go to the nearest used book store. You probably know where it is, and it’s okay to say so here, but don’t tell the guys when someone asks where to pick up some cheap Berenstain Bears for his new girlfriend’s kid. Anyway, buy a bunch of those men’s series books: The Executioner, The Destroyer, The Terminator (not the Arnold one, the earlier one), Able Team, Stony Man, The Persuader, etc. Take them home. Remove the covers. Trust me, you aren’t doing any harm to our literary culture and history. Glue those covers on the book you actually want to read. And you’re good to go.

• “Whatcha got?”
• “The new Mack Bolan. He kills forty guys, then lands a Russian MiG at the Washington Monument and tells the hot blonde woman to get him a sandwich.”
• “Cool …”
• “You wanna read it next?”
• “Fuck, no.”

You can get away with this. Other guys will not understand, but will accept, your love of gruesome action fiction. And they’ll never know you’ve got The Kite Runner in there.

A crotchety old man discovers that his father, long believed lost in the Arctic, has been found frozen in a glacier and is still alive … and hasn’t aged. Now the two of them — and the third generation, a posh young businessman — must learn to adjust to their changed reality.

There’s a bit of high-concept science fiction there, but this was a sitcom, so the whole idea was played for broad, hard-earned laughs. The show was The Second Hundred Years — Dad is 100 years old, but looks 30, get it? — and aired in 1967. It struggled from day 1, and didn’t do well, which you will understand if you start watching it.

I can see how it could have worked. Arthur O’Connell mugs to the camera on a regular basis, something that can be annoying but works for him somehow. And Monte Markham — a familiar face, a well-known character actor — does pretty well playing both the old prospector and the young slickster. But the idea of it is just so stupid, and you can see the actors wondering what they’re doing. For this kind of silliness to work, the cast has to buy into it, and that wasn’t happening here.

But you have to admit — it’s a neat idea, and would do well to be revisited at some point.

Sarah’s on her book tour, hawking Going Rogue in bookstores across the U.S. She’s getting a lot of attention for her memoir, which was apparently written in an afternoon, by a 21-year-old ghostwriter who’d never met her, while drinking Corona and watching SpongeBob out of the corner of his eye. Well, that’s what I heard.

Among the highlights of the reaction to her book was the Associated Press’s decision to dedicate a team of 11 reporters to the book, picking apart its “facts” and finding mistakes, alterations or historical revisions that prove to opponents that Sarah Palin has no business in politics, no business being a public figure, and no business sticking her nose into Canadian issues.

Wait, let me back up: Sarah was signing books the other day in Columbus, Ohio, when she encountered a Canadian TV journalist. Marg Delahunty had travelled south to quiz Palin — who has hinted at running for president in 2012, possibly with Glenn Beck — but was manhandled away from the signing table and ushered outside by beefy security guards. It turns out Sarah doesn’t answer questions.

The question, as Delahunty reported later: “We told her we’re from Canada, and we’re just looking for a few words of encouragement for the Canadian conservatives who have worked so tirelessly to destroy the socialized medicare that we have.”

Delahunty stuck around, and when she and her crew spotted Palin outside, they went after her.

“Hey, remember us, we’re the Canadians! We came all the way here from Canada!” Delahunty calls in the footage, which aired Tuesday night. “When we asked you that question, we didn’t hear your answer.”

Palin stopped and shared this nugget with Canadian TV watchers: “Canada needs to dismantle its public health-care system and allow private enterprise to get involved and turn a profit.”

Okay, so Sarah favours privatized health care. That’s no surprise. And I am one of those Canadians who treasures our public system, but I also see its flaws, so I would not be averse to exploring change. I’m not going to get into a health-care debate here. I just would rather Sarah Palin kept her nose out of Canadian affairs. We have enough uninformed, stupid conservative politicians of our own to deal with; we don’t need her.

Even if she can see Canada from her house.

When her interview aired Tuesday night on CBC Television’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Delahunty mused aloud, wondering why Palin doesn’t answer questions at her book signings. Here’s why: She isn’t very bright. If you need an example, just consider that she allowed herself to be interviewed by Marg Delahunty, who looks like this:

She’s a comedian, Canada’s Mary Walsh, a bit of a national treasure to some. She’s been playing the super-conservative pundit Delahunty character for a long, long time, dressing up in a version of the Xena, Warrior Princess costume to ambush our public figures with ridiculous questions. Everyone in Canada is in on the joke, and it’s always funny to watch Marg corner the prime minister at some gala and spar with him, the silly questions generating equally silly answers.

I can’t show you the Palin footage, but here’s Marg congratulating our Prime Minister Stephen Harper on winning an election:

Anybody who thinks Steve is a bit of a stiff should watch that clip.

While Marg wore a slightly less ridiculous version of her armour to talk to Sarah Palin, it should have been obvious to everyone around her that this is some sort of comedy … but Sarah didn’t clue in. This isn’t the first time a Canadian has tricked Palin, and I’ll bet you it won’t be the last.

Now you know why they keep her away from reporters.

Are you reading this? Wow, it still works.

Maybe I should start selling ad space here based on my ability to attract many, many readers to empty content with just a few key (and salacious) words. That would free me up to finish my series exploring the ethics of transferring prisoners to governments we know will torture them for information. Writing that would take me weeks, and six people would read it. This took three minutes to write. You can probably tell.

I blame the Internet.

I saw this guy in a Santa Claus parade this weekend. It sums up my humbuggy holiday spirits just fine. Also, we haven’t had any snow, and it feels more like September than the end of November.

Meanwhile, the stupid guy across the road from us has become the only person on our rural stretch to put up Christmas lights. He just moved in, and he’s kind of an asshole (he’s the one who tossed the dead skunk in my yard this summer). The worst part? His entire house is lit up with blue lights. It looks like that night the Smurfs got fucked up on E at a rave and pulled a train on Smurfette.

He was setting up one of those inflatable snow globe bullshit things this afternoon. It makes me wish I had a BB gun.

I didn’t always hate Christmas. In fact, I once had a cutesy Christmas children’s story serialized in a daily newspaper (which you can still read here). Lately, though, I’m just tired of all the fuss and hustle, and I’ll be glad when it’s over.

If J.J. Abrams had decided to pull an even harder reboot on Star Trek, he could have gone the oh-so-trendy zombie route and decided to make the new Captain Kirk a zombie. This would have made for a very different film, of course. In the scene where Spock (Zachary Quinto) tries to throttle him, Kirk’s head would have just fallen off. And all those shots of Kirk running around the shiny Enterprise would have been much longer. In fact, I think the entire two hours, six minutes of the movie would have been taken up with the zombie version of Cadet Fat-Hands shuffling from sickbay to the bridge to tell Captain Pike about “Brainsssssss …”

J.J. could have made Spock a werewolf, too, but that would have just been stupid.

You know what else is stupid? The way people land here at the Weather Station. Here are some real search engine terms used to find this site:

1. topless weather
2. shirley jones topless
3. small penis
4. heman tiger name
5. naughty teachers
6. korean wife
7. what to do if you call you boss a moron
8. spirit gum santa beard stay on
9. pictures of famous actors and their siblings
10. moron porn

(It is not lost on me that I’m just as stupid; I wrote the posts featuring those topics (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) in the first place.)

I also find it bothersome that there are posts on this site that took me a day to compose, and they’ve attracted a measly few dozen hits, but the one about the Killer Power Ranger has readership in the five figures, because of the nature of net search, and because people want trendy scandals and that kind of bullshit. I am, believe it or not, a serious writer, and a professional journalist, and I do put a lot of work into some of these posts. Others I just toss off on a whim, and those seem to be the ones people like.

If you’ve read this far because you want to know more about Zombie Chris Pine, sorry. I just did that to test a theory. If I’d called this Weird Search Terms or Weathereye Whines About His Readers, nobody would have found it. But I know from some friends that people are suckers for zombies, so I kind of tricked you.

H1N1 has worked its wonders on us. As I can’t get the flu shot — due to an egg allergy — I know I’m going to get sick. I live with it. I technicolour-yawned a supposedly rejuvenatory Gatorade across the Shopper’s Drug Mart parking lot a couple of weeks ago. And then I got better.

My daughter is just getting over it. My oldest son got sick today. He’ll be home from school tomorrow. As it turns out, he’s okay with the idea. He’ll trade coughs for movies any time.

No big tragedy. Just this year’s flu.

I’m not making light of it. People are dying. At the current count, about 700 people worldwide have died from H1N1 this year. Seven hundred. That’s 700 lost mothers, fathers, children. It’s horrible.

But it’s no epidemic. Let’s keep things in perspective. For every person who died of H1N1 this week, far more died because of smoking, drunk driving, drugs, bad eating habits, lack of exercise, poor judgment and not looking before crossing the street. And if I, with my compromised heart and lungs, can weather the H1N1 storm, so can you.

Live healthier.

I usually like MSTRKRFT remixes, particular the version of Wolfmother’s Woman. This? Not so much. And yes, it’s an amateur video, and it has its qualities, but the underlying suckness of the whole thing tarnishes the legacy of one of television’s finest comedy series, and the work of some gifted musicians.

P.S.: What am I, drunk? I made all that stuff up, except for the title.

If, like me, you live in a two-vehicle household, you will be called upon frequently to carry out minor car repairs. I have a lot of trouble with installing new windshield wiper blades, because for some reason they make those things more complicated than Meccano. And I used to be able to swap out headlights, but now they build cars specifically to make sure you have to take them to the dealership and pay $100 apiece for new headlights.

(We traded in the Ford Focus last year and nobody ever caught on that one of the headlights was held in with duct tape)

I like changing the oil in our vehicles, though, because it’s a fairly simple process and allows me a couple of hours of “me time.” Let me tell you about my technique:

1. Put on grubby clothes. I used to have one of those mechanic’s coverall suits with “Gerry” on the name tag. I should get another one. The only problem with coveralls, though, is they don’t allow for appropriate handyman-related asscrackery.
2. Carry your toolbox out to the driveway.
3. Lie down on the far side of the vehicle, away from the house. You might want to bring a blanket.
4. Watch the Star Trek DVD on your iPod.
5. Spray WD40 all over your hands so you smell good and stinky. Do not get any on your iPod. They don’t like it.
6. Put tools away.
7. Go inside, spend some time washing your hands, and complain of back pain from the awkward angle you had to work at. Get a neck rub.
8. When everyone’s asleep, drive to the 24-hour oil-change place, pay $17, get your oil changed while you read the free newspaper.

Let me tell you, I grow more chest hair every time I do this.