Dinosaurs live! All right, they don't really live, but dinosaurs live! I saw them today! I was sitting at my desk proofreading some palpitatingly enthralling progress reports for a local not-for-profit organisation (hurrah for freelance! There are as many ways to say "flushed due to budgetary restrictions" as there are new condo developments in downtown Toronto.) when I heard a screech and then a loud series of bangs, followed by what sounded like series of large objects crashing to the ground from a great height.

I ran to the window and there they were, a herd of brachiosauruses attacking a building a short distance from mine. They were knocking out its walls by butting them with their heads and then pulling out the support beams until chunks the size of my entire kitchen came tumbling down from several stories up. "That's odd," I thought to myself as a complete ventilation system hung limply in the mouth of a brachiosaurus like giant ferns. "I didn't even know that dinosaurs ate buildings".

But they weren't really dinosaurs, of course. Everyone knows that dinosaurs died out, except for birds that is. According to Steven Spielberg, birds are really dinosaurs with feathers and beaks instead of scales and razor-sharp teeth. He should know what he's talking about. After all, he's the one who let everyone know about the dangers of swimming off the coast of New England and about how aliens with strange manicures can ride bikes in a totally heartwarmingly manipulative way. Instead, they were giant tractors with really long, biting tractor bits and they were knoking down a hospital to replace it with townhouses and a set of stacked, towering condos.

They looked a lot like some dinosaurs I did really see once, though, on this very cool BBC documentary that was like a nature show but about dinosaurs. It showed them hunting and eating and pooping and having sex and everything. Only, it wasn't really dinosaurs they were showing, of course, because everyone knows that video cameras hadn't been invented yet when dinosaurs were pooping everywhere. Instead, they were CGI representations of dinosaurs, so it was these giant blobs of pixels or whatever were the things that were hunting and eating and pooping and having sex. This was extra interesting to me because not only was I a dinosaur enthusiast when I was a kid, but I never even knew that there was CGI way back in dinosaur times. You can learn so much by using science these days.

When I was a kid I wanted a pet parasauropholus, not just because I figured I deserved one after learning to pronounce ‘parasauropholus', but because I thought it'd be pretty neat to have a pet parasirpoopigas or whatever. But my days of cool dinosaur enthusiast (now there's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one; it's like saying, "‘Star Trek' makes you sexy!") have definitely came to an ignoble end a few years ago: once when I was all growed up, I was having a chat with my cousin, 17-Going-On-30 (at the time his name was 5-Going-On-17), when I happened to mention a dinosaur called ‘brontosaurus'. He rolled his eyes at me and told me in no uncertain terms that no one, absolutely no one, calls it that anymore and that the correct terminology was ‘apatosaurus'. I was no longer even cool enough to be a dinosaur lover.

Another thing he told me was that I was born just after the dinosaurs died out, so it's not clear to me how reliable his paleontological facts actually are. He has just moved here to go to the University of Toronto and I'd planned for a while on using this last statement against him should he ever get too uppity, but I cannot for the life of me see how it makes me look good to state that I may have been born just after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Instead I'll have to think up other threats such as sending letters to his mother detailing what he gets up to in his first year of freedom. That'll keep him in line.