Vancouver's quadriplegic mayor, Sam Sullivan, faces a tough road before the city hosts the Winter Olympics in 2010.  Aside from the usual construction and beautifying projects, Vancouver also has one of the worst slums in the world for an affluent city.  In the Downtown Eastside neighborhood, approximately 5000 drug addicts live in a 16-block area.  And Vancouver's new police chief has an idea for cleaning up the problem: deport them.

Chief Const. Jim Chu said the Vancouver police department is considering what he called a "home-for-the-holidays" program that partly uses donated travel miles from local businesses as a way to slash the escalating property-crime rate.

Yep, that's right: Chu wants to buy homeless junkies a one-way ticket out of town.  All in all, it's a pretty fair proposal, at least compared to the Beijing Olympics.  When asked to comment on the proposal, a homeless Chinese man said, "Help, I'm buried in a shallow mass grave!"

[100% Injury Rate] 

I'm not sure if ESPN covered this event last weekend, but my friend Dogtown Surfer spent part of his Sunday used the power of malt liquor and cash rewards to make homeless people run around for his amusement.  He called it the Hobo 500:

I thought to myself: why not have them race their carriages around the parking lot down at the pier? It would be good exercise for them and given enough alcohol it should almost certainly be entertaining if not dangerous…..hell yes, let's do it. [...]

As they get ready to make the turn Kenny has pulled out to a substantial lead with 2nd and 3rd place still running side by side. Notice the tourists wondering what the fuck is going on with these 3 homeless guys running full bore at them, each pushing a baby carriage full of rags, beer cans and dirty sleeping bags.

The entire story is chock-full of hobo pictures and highly recommended.  Naturally, I applaud Dogtown Surfer's initiative to make the homeless be of some kind of use, and if you need any ideas for next time… two words: blood sport.  Think of it like dog fighting, but more beneficial to society.

Bums from Scotland proved themselves superior to bums throughout the rest of the world with their 9-3 win over Poland in the Homeless World Cup championship game in Copenhagen.  They got a crappy-looking trophy and everything, which was quickly traded in for one of those really long submarine sandwiches and a case of Budweiser Hurricanes.

In a related story, fifteen players from four countries (Burundi, Liberia, Cameroon, and Afghanistan) abandoned their teams and have gone missing.  And who can blame them?  They must be so excited to be homeless in a new country.  They might not speak Denmarkese or Hollandaise or whatever the native language in Copenhagen is, but it beats running away from dinosaurs and mass executions and whatever else is going on in those countries.  I heard that Afghanistan doesn't even have oxygen in its air.  People have to get by on nitrogen and fumes from piles of human waste.  

In other homeless news: a hobo tasered himself in the groin.  Because what else does he have to live for? 

The fifth annual Homeless World Cup is presently being held in Copenhagen, which I'm sure is just awesome for the tourism industry there.  There's a wealth of comedy to be mined here, but the Homeless World Cup has excellent intentions.

The Homeless World Cup exists to be a catalyst for lasting change through the development of street soccer worldwide in a way that that creates a maximum social impact for the players involved – socially excluded, homeless people and people living in poverty… 77% of players involved significantly change their lives forever.

Whatever, they need to get their message out to Brooklyn, because the motherfuckers are still in front of the Starbucks below my apartment, every deli on the street, and the grocery the next block over from me.  I walk five blocks and get hassled on every one of them.  "Spare some change?"  "Help out a Vietnam vet!"  "Help me get something to eat."  "Do you have a minute for the environment?"  No, no, no, and yes but don't talk to me.  I just want to walk down the street, not make the world a better place.  Jeez.

But if there's something good that comes out of this — other than homeless people getting shipped to another country — it's that you can gamble on the event!  Huzzah!  We're one step closer to killing hobos for sport!

On Friday I shared with you the misadventures of the HobOlympics at Venice Beach, and although the games have since closed, the Venice Surf Report notes that the hobo-athletes are already training for the next event.  After dispensing with today's surf report (crappy conditions), the heroic blogger details how HobOlympian Christian passed out Sunday afternoon at the front of the pier, where — to the delight of families walking on the beach — he also lost control of his bladder.

How long are we going to tolerate this, America?  People are only supposed to sleep in their own urine in the streets of Bangladesh, parts of India, and most of the Middle East.  If officers of the law don't have the guts to quietly kill these threats to America's natural beauty, it's time for a new breed of vigilantism. 

Now, I'm not saying that hobos HAVE to be killed.  I'm sure there are all sorts of dangerous medical and scientific tests that a couple of them could survive.  In fact, as I write this, cosmetics companies are torturing perfectly good monkeys and delicious rabbits when they could just as easily be putting bums to good use.  Win-win.

I've always thought that homeless people are only good for annoying me and smelling bad, but it turns out that if you get enough of them together, you can use them for your own entertainment.  (They will still, however, smell bad.)  The fine people at the nobly named Farting Bag have alerted me to Random Thoughts of a Surf Reporter, which tells the story of the 2007 HobOlympics at Venice Beach:

First up was the “chug-of-war” so I took orders for beer. Requests ranged for everything from Camo Silver Ice 21 (Victor), Budweiser (Leprechaun), Whatever the Fuck Has Alcohol In It (Christian) and even something called "Hurricane" by Randy and a couple of the other irregulars. Off I went to the "little fucking Korean" and filled up a soft sided cooler with 2 beers for each contestant. Even at “little fucking Korean” prices I was able to get about 14-15 24 oz. beers for only 20 bucks.

"OK, the first person to finish their beer gets: Ten Dollars!"… It soon becomes clear that Randy is either going to win this thing or die trying. I can honestly say that I have never, anywhere, seen someone chug beer that fast…"Look, Mom, I finally won something!" he shouted.

I'm not gonna lie to you, this surf reporter dude is my new hero.  In the rest of the story, he makes a bum vomit, toys with bums' hopes for cash rewards, sucker-punches a bum in the kidney, and insults Minnie Driver to her face.  The only way it could have ended better is if he sent them to the "showers" at the end of the day and buried them in a mass grave.  Ha ha, just kidding!  Not really.