Remember back when the global economic protests were all about bongos and camping gear? It seems like only yesterday. Come to think of it, it was.

At this point all the major Occupy-Wall-Street protests have been swept away by police, leaving only a few scattered Show-Up-At-Wall-Street-And-Hang-Around-For-A-Bit-Before-Taking-The-Bus-Home protests in their place. The tents are down, the makeshift libraries and medical centres are gone, and the only people sleeping in parks these days are the old-school breed of economic casualties. Namely homeless meth addicts.

Marginalized by corporate media outlets that never passed up a photo op with the dippiest hippies, reporters couldn’t wait to talk to the next unfocused radical or glam-rock attention-seeker showboat, conveniently skipping over anybody involved in the movement who knew what the fuck they were talking about. “Where’s your leader? What’s your demand!” was all they could think to ask, which kinda misses the point by several hundred miles. The world already has its leaders, and look what a splendid job they’ve done of running the economy off a cliff. As for boiling it all down to a single demand, that’s impossible. The reason this has been such a successful, widespread movement is because the litany of complaints is so long, everyone feels included.

Now that the most obvious evidence of civil discord has been put out of sight, the media mills can’t help but gloat. Some have been terribly rude about it, others can’t quite muster that Rupert Murdock level of vitriol we’ve come to expect in our current age of disinformation. I had a look at the local right-wing shitbag newsrag that comes free in the mail along with the advertising fliers, coupons, and free food samples. It was sitting on the doormat when I came downstairs to look for some real mail. “Sorry, But It’s About Time,” screamed the headline in a civil, apologetic tone that pronounces “about” at the midpoint where “aboot” and “aboat” meet. The picture was of a pair local police officers carrying one of the last occupiers out of the park in a rather gentle fashion. A third officer brought up the rear, carrying the protester’s bag. Respectfully. If there had been a piece of hockey gear in the frame, it would be the single most Canadian front page I’d ever seen. At least under a Conservative party majority.

Cops in other cities didn’t play so nicey-nice, and there are protesters painted pepper-spray orange to prove it. I guess it’s reassuring to know that when the MUC police force trample our basic human rights, they do so politely, with Nerf riot gear. Well, unless you’re a black man who gets all uppity and decides to drive an automobile in broad daylight while recklessly obeying the rules of the road of course. Then they’ll blow your ass away.

Before tent city had its stakes pulled up, I went down for a visit. Occupy Wall Street was Occupy Victoria Square up here. And although I didn’t strike a single beat on a drum, bongo or otherwise, I had a leisurely wander around the site that had roughly two hundred tents by my quick count and bad math. It was all as peaceful and non-violent as advertised, and I knew I was witnessing history. This was the last moment in the coming global turmoil that would play out so civilly. It can only get nastier from here.

With the camps forced out, the powers-that-be think they’ve won. But it was a terrible strategy on their part. They could have just waited for occupiers to get bored and cold and go home. Failing that, they could have waited for the cholera to set in and wipe them out. Either way, the protest problem would have resolved itself, and no one would have had to look like a fascist. But no. There are just too many cops and politicians and pundits who are just dying to slip on the jackboots and see if they make for a perfect Cinderella-fit.

The problems are all still there. The issues are all still there. Things are getting worse, not better. And the movement is now on the move. You got violent with the peaceniks and now you can bet that the next wave of protesters is going to be prepared to step it up. All you did was let everybody know that no matter how peaceful the protest, eventually The Man is going to come down hard with billy clubs and tear gas. Round two will only escalate accordingly, and there will be fewer verses of Kumbaya in the drum circle before things turn ugly.

We hit 7,000,000,000 people today. How’s that for some Halloween horror?

Well it scares the shit out of me. And it’s not just because I’m a misanthrope who doesn’t like the idea of being stuck on the same hunk of space rock with that many assholes. Rather, I’m terrified of the next wave of children that will be showing up at my door every October 31, looking for a handout. It gets worse and worse every year.

My wife bought so much shitty candy this Halloween (shitty so we wouldn’t be tempted to eat it ourselves) I thought we’d never get rid of it all. Normally we get a few hundred kids in our area. This time around we got hit by that many in the first forty minutes. We were cleaned out by a quarter past seven, and the streets were still packed with the sugar-fuelled piranhas. The feeding frenzy was so brief and intense, it hardly seemed worth my ten minutes of effort to butcher an innocent pumpkin into something reasonably jack-o-lanterny.

As always, I made a careful tally of the costumes on parade. My favourite this year was the kid dressed as Don Cherry. At least, I assume he was supposed to be Don Cherry. He was a clown in a hockey jersey so I think I made a fair assumption there. I like to take this annual opportunity to tap into the psyche of today’s youth to see which costumes most commonly appeal their pop-culture ravaged hive mind. In reverse order, here was tonight’s top ten:

10) Cowboy (An oldie but a goodie. Sadly, most of them were of the Sheriff Woody variety.)

9) Robot (Like Apple hasn’t already turned everybody into one of those with all their iShit.)

8) Trailer Trash (At least, I keep telling myself those were costumes.)

7) Darth Vader (Nooooooooooo! You’ll only encourage George to keep reissuing those damn movies.)

6) Various Harry Potter characters (Yes, still. It’s over. Please stop.)

5) Fairy Princess (Disney Inc. scrambles the brains of yet another generation of young girls.)

4) Spider-Man (The web-head blew away the superhero competition. Batman, Iron Man, Thor and Green Lantern only made one appearance each.)

3) Skeleton (Or, arguably, an Eating Disorder. Take your pick.)

2) Pirate (I guess the kiddies still like those Johnny-Depp-cashes-a-paycheck movies.)

But it was the number one most popular Halloween costume of 2011 that shocked the hell out me, so to speak.

1) The Devil

Boys, girls, the tiny five-year-olds, the giant teenagers, and at least one parent — they all wanted to hit the town and paint it devil-red. I was beginning to wonder if there was a fire sale on eternal damnation over at Walmart, but there was too much variety in evidence. These weren’t off-the-rack one-sin-fits-all getups. They were cobbled together do-in-yourself Beelzebubs and Belphegors. And it pleased me greatly. It was sinister, it was horror related, it was on-topic. And it had nothing to do with sparkling vampires or beefcake werewolves.

Satan had his night, so suck it you Jesus Ween tools. Eat shit you anti-scary-costume Calgary schools. And kindly suck my balls all you Christian fanatics who freak out every time anybody has anything critical to say about Christmas or Easter, but then turn around and fuck with my spooky pagan candy fest.

The horror nuts and gore hounds have taken back the night. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of that night melting my brain with another half-dozen crappy monster movies.

Pwned! All Your Soul Are Belong To Us.

I wish I could say I got up early to watch the royal wedding, but the fact is I just never went to bed.

The highlight for me was watching what felt like twenty minutes of Prince William trying to cram a ring onto Kate Middleton’s fat commoner finger. That’s what happens when you marry someone of such low breeding. You just can’t fit your multi-million-dollar baubles onto extremities that have been calloused by years of toil in a coal mine, or a smithy, or a woad factory. When will the royals learn? They’re intrinsically better than us, and should only marry each other. Granted, he and Kate are 11th cousins, and no royal wedding would be complete without SOME in-breeding, but that simply isn’t close enough. The Ptolemys had it right. You need to marry your brother or sister. That way you get to hoard all the wealth and power and DNA. If you dole out your precious royal juices willy-nilly, you only end up with some ginger monstrosity like Prince Harry, who is only fit serve as party organizer, bon vivant, and cannon fodder for the armed forces.

I played network roulette for a while, trying to decide whose coverage was the least awful. CBC had Peter Mansbridge literally seeing people who weren’t even there (he’s getting a tad old, admitting he covered Chuck and Di’s wedding from the exact same spot thirty years earlier). CTV had out-of-synch sound and Tracy Ullman poking fun at Canadian accents (keep it sharp and edgy as always Tracy, that’s what it’s all aboot, eh?) And of course there was CNN with their go-to royalist, Richard Quest (the single worst parody of a Brit since Dick Van Dyke chim chim cher-eed his way through Mary Poppins). That was an automatic pass. I briefly considered switching to Fox, but I figured their coverage would be all about how Obama, the Marxist-Kenyan Socialist, destroyed the U.S. economy by not getting an invite.

Now that it’s mercifully over, I will spend my late-night/early-morning TV- time more productively. There are some damn intriguing test patterns airing in that time slot.