November 17, 2001 - Christopher Wood

Picketers: Gregg Hagglund, Keith Henson, me
Leaflets: Gregg's Xenu Special

We arrived on at the org at around 1:00, with Gregg and me right on the sidewalk, and Keith Henson up the road. The picket lasted about an hour and twenty minutes, and we passed out a fair number of leaflets. All in all this was a fairly unremarkable picket, but there were some notable moments:

Peter Ramsay! As we pulled into the parking lot, there he was. Gregg got him on tape saying 'yes' to a question about whether Peter Ramsay looks forward to a trademark lawsuit.

Dan Bryenton. He independently initiated communication with Gregg, which rather puts the lie to the org's pretense of being terrified about the presence of picketers (in the past couple of months Scientologists have been acting all pretend-terrified). Wonder if when Dan became an OT that he knew about being too weak and incapable to handle mere enthetan picketers?

A passer-by telling me that my sign about science fiction and scientology was an insult to science fiction. I apologize again to that passer-by.

Later on in the picket a Scientologist came out and asked Gregg if he could be quiet, because he was "disturbing the students". Exactly how Gregg could be disturbing the students might be an interesting question to answer, because the traffic periodically drowned out his voice. Naturally, the lady didn't want to say if these were 'religious' students. Of course, none of the actual students came down to complain about any noise. Like a good TR-trained Scientologist, the lady kept saying "you're disturbing the students", IMNHO purely for the benefit of passers-by, so that they could see what an awful nasty suppressive person Gregg is, by disturbing the poor hard-working Scientology students. (Also, here's another Scientologist who apparently doesn't think that we're too awful to stand close to.)

But who were those students? Maybe they were from Avenue Road Roofing (a local WISE company). There were two incredibly junky cars parked in the lot when we arrived, one with the company name on the side, and the other with ladders tied to the top. There was another with a "psychiatry kills" sticker in the back window. If the alleged students upstairs were from Avenue Road Roofing, I wonder if the people taking the course knew about Scientology's technique of recruiting through WISE companies like that one.

Also, I am again a tourist attraction (like at the APA conference: http://xenu.ca/pickets/toronto/1998-06-01-wulfen.html). A guy from France videotaped me picketing for a bit, and we chatted about the cult. Unsurprisingly, he was familiar with the cult's issues in France.

As one of the day's definite highlights, I met Keith Henson. Keith is older, shorter, greyer, and nicer than what the friendly neighbourhood cult has been trying to make him out as. The kind of person that you'd have to be 1) completely insane or 2) a Scientologist to be in any way intimidated about. That said, I have neither of those problems, so realize the utterly ludicrous nature of what the cult tried to pin on him.

In other good news, I managed to finish the picket with all my long-unused picketing muscles still in working order.

Here's to another picket fairly soon.

(Note: I am not a new Toronto picketer. I have previously posted picket reports as Wulfen. I had a mid-life crisis and then synchronized my offline and online identities when I realized that some less than bright people had a problem making the connection. Just so you know.)