I’m a person who gravitates toward non-fiction — I’m a journalist, after all — but too often these days I leave the theatre disappointed. Documentary filmmakers seem to be either polemicists beating the drum for their cause or fanboys, also beating the drum for their cause. What they aren’t: storytellers.

Case in point, the movie I saw tonight, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s, about the iconic department store. We can agree on that much. But what about Bergdorf Goodman’s? Well, it definitely wasn’t about the department-store doorman, highlighted in the bait-and-switch intro, never to be seen again. Was it a history of its past and founders? A celebration of the buyers and creative directors and the designers whose careers they helped make? A frothy confection as celebrities shared their favourite memories? A peek inside the inner workings of a distinctly American institution? A feature about the months-long process of designing their marquee Christmas windows? (The last third was certainly about the latter…)

I guess I don’t understand. Is it that, with digital film and iMovie, the bar is so low that any schmo who can hold a camera (sort of) steady can make a documentary? Because clearly there’s no premium placed on plot or character or arc or story — as if somehow those things don’t matter because this is Real Life. I suppose it makes me grateful for documentaries like the Up series…which has managed to carry a coherent concept across five decades.

In other news, one-fifth of Canadians surveyed said they were “very confident” in negotiating a good deal on a car. Who are these pushy, obnoxious, un-Canadian people?

Seriously, I don’t know what surprises me more: that a California doctor prescribed blow jobs to help a woman get over her gag-reflex problems or that a blogger could write up this bizarre-news item without making the obvious reference.

But suddenly the Great North is getting mucho attention…for its crack problem. Or, specifically, for the alleged crack problem of the mayor of Canada’s largest city, Toronto. Rob Ford supposedly has been caught on video lighting up.

I can figure out what’s the strangest part of this story. That the mayor of a major Canadian city is caught in a drug scandal. Or that Gawker cares enough to initiate a kickstarter campaign to raise money to buy the video.

Me, neither, but it seems that a mobile technology firm did just that, examining more than 600,000 phone calls to businesses for words like “please,” “thank you,” and “fuck off.” Their analysis showed that Ohioans cursed the most, roughly once every 150 calls. Washingtonians — the folks from the left-hand corner of the country, not from here in the capital — cursed at a rate half that. Carolinians, North and South, meanwhile, are the most courteous.

As someone who curses and is Canadian, I’m not sure if I believe profanity and politeness are mutually exclusive.

Topless. In February. In New York. I’d stare, too.

Except, of course, that I never go to McDonald’s. Unless I’m in India — a pretty yummy veggie burger.