The 501 Queen car. Heading west to pay my overdue bill at the self-storage place.

Am minding my own business when I hear a monster "Ah-Choo!!" followed by a sputtered "Mother-FUCKER! Don't you cover your mouth?!?!"

The outraged voice belonged to a very well dressed black guy in his early 30s (cool facial hair -- his goatee was subdivided into two braided pigtails) who was wiping down the back of his head.

Sitting directly behind was a shabbily dressed, middle-aged Chinese guy who looked vaguely ashamed that he'd just sprayed down the back of someone's head with his blunderbuss of a sneeze.

"The one day my car breaks down and ...," muttered the still-seething recipient of the hose-down.

Stromb's transit poster

As with the launch of any new show, there are publicity efforts to accompany it.

On some of Toronto's finer buses, you will see a poster for CBC Newsworld's The George Stroumboulopoulos Hour-- actually, The Hour, but it's George's baby (see A very long Hour for my initial thoughts on the show).

George is facing the camera, his hands are clasped over his mouth -- and the pose makes him look really, really constipated. :)

Maybe that's meant to convey a sense of urgency. :^)

There's a wee bit of map over his left shoulder. It only shows a small chunk of northern Ontario.

It's not really my job to tell CBC how to design its ads, but when you use a map that shows five per cent of Canada's landmass, you open the door to those virulent critics who love to harp about the Corpse's Central Canadian bias.

Maybe the ads on the Moose Jaw city bus feature a chunk of Saskatchewan, but if so, that, in some ways, would be worse. It suggests an omniscient The Hour that's here, there and everywhere in this great land.

At this point, that's clearly not the case. It's not a Cross-Country Checkup for the hip.

Anyways, the map is a sideline to the main point, which is the current ad is a thinly veiled promo for Metamucil.

Having George looking intense is good. Having him look plugged up isn't.