The Breadbin

I am a big proponent of "what works". In fact, that's pretty much my political philosophy in a nutshell. Does it work? If so, I support it. Does it not work? Then why isn't something being done to make it work?

Gun crime in Canada is dramatically up in recent years. My 50 Cent(s) says it's the culture that's responsible. Have you seen videos lately? It was a shock when NWA came out with Straight Outta Compton several years back. But that number sounds like the theme from A Summer Place when put on a playlist with some of today's top songs.

So what's to be done about all the gun violence?

Many people will tell you that it's merely a symptom of a disease called poverty. Treat the disease and you'll cure the symptoms, they say. That's a slanderous insult to the vast majority of working poor who are law-abiding. While it's true that more opportunities need to be created to lift the poor out of their ghetto, the mere lack of them isn't an …

God, what an eventful weekend.

We left Saturday at six in the morning, dropping off Tux at a friend's place, hitting Tim's for some go-juice, and then making the run north to Britt. The weather was moderately crappy from MacTier to Pointe Au Baril Station--par for the course on any day from mid-November to sometime in April.
Highway 400 has been extended most of the way to Parry Sound now. There's about six kilometers of two-laned road, still, around the Moon River. North of town, however, 69 is what it's always been, a highway that demands your attention as a driver. It's two-laned, with alternating two or three kilometer long passing lanes northbound and southbound every ten or fifteen klicks.
Why am I telling you all this? Because those three-laned sections, or more precisely the lack of them, cause some pretty scary situations.
Highway 69 is the first glimpse of the north that drivers from southern Ontario see. It's nowhere near as desolate as the roads nort…

If you go to Environment Canada's website right now, at 7:30 p.m. EST, and click on "watches and warnings" and then select anywhere through much of southern Ontario, you'll find we are in fact under a weather warning.
A "snowfall warning".
Not a blizzard warning. Not even a heavy snowfall warning. Just a snowfall warning, as in "Warning! White flakes are going to fall out of the sky! Take cover!"
The local radio station's in STORM CENTER mode; the Weather Network's got STORMWATCH in heavy rotation. All for six measly inches of snow, falling over a period of many hours. There's not even a wind to reduce visibility.
(Granted, in some parts of eastern Ontario, they're expecting up to 30 centimetres and even a touch more...which is at least a respectable amount. But here? 15 centimetres. Big whoopty-diddly-doo.
I wasn't a weather freak in early childhood...the disease came on in my teens, as I recall...but I'm pretty sure they didn&…

We are switching Internet providers. And television providers, while we're at it. We've decided that two years of vigorous Roger-ing is enough.
We've had no problem with the service, either cable or Internet, in and of itself. What bothers us is (a) having to pay in advance for it and (b) the fact the price keeps going up with no corresponding increase in features.
Rogers' billing service is only slightly more confusing than the tax code, and if you're even one day late with a payment (which they somehow calculate a month ahead), they can arbitrarily cut off any number of services without notice. This has only happened to us once.
Once is once too often.

So we're switching back to Bell as of Sunday, December 18th, sometime between noon and 4 p.m. Can you believe they make service calls on Sunday? Neither can I. Hopefully that's just one sign of the exceptional service to come.
The long and the short of it is, we'll be getting satellite with receivers for all…

I've been trying mighty hard not to write this blog entry. I get the sense that the Canadian public, and more importantly, my readership, is sick to death of politics and would like nothing better than to disengage for a long winter's nap...at least until after New Years'.
My fingers are quivering...quivering...

And most of what I have to say has already been said! Everywhere! So I need to resist the ever-present temptation to weigh in with both hands.

Quivering....

Ah, to hell with it.

My quiverfinger is due to outrage, and that outrage is directed at the Liberals. Their chief communicator, Scott Reid, is known around Ottawa as 'Paul's Pitbull', and he tore a chunk out of Canadian parents the other day. If you haven't been paying attention to the campaign (and honestly, at this point, I don't blame you), here's what happened:

Stephen Harper has promised $1200 a year, paid directly to parents for each child under six years of age, to help offset daycare…

I am currently watching a rather alarmist Marketplace on CBC. Its subject: food safety in supermarkets. The overwhelming impression you get from this program is that shopping at your local supermarket will make you ill and maybe kill you. There is a litany of mouse droppings, unwashed hands, improper handling and storage of food. Store after store, province after province, coast to coast, they document a truly astounding number of health violations.

I'm eighteen minutes in, and they haven't named one supermarket yet. I've watched very carefully, but they've screened their show even more carefully. I can't identify a single chain, either from decor cues or glimpses of store-brand products. Rather gutless, don't you think? To make all these accusations without naming names? It's like asserting that one-third of all NHL players dope up.

The show did clue me in to Toronto's rating system, which I had thought only applied to restaurants. It is mandatory in To…

I have a very bland palette.
I mean really bland. I am able to detect a single grain of common table pepper in a bowl of Kraft Dinner. I don't like ketchup because it completely overpowers anything it's put on. And as for "hot" food...

I can't begin to enumerate the number of times I've been offered something that looks like it might be spicy. Such offerings invariably go something like this:
"Hey, Ken, try this."
Ken eyes it suspiciously, looking for telltale signs: smoke, an inner pilot light, a subtle vibration...
"Is it hot?"
"No. Not at all."
"Yeah, right."
"No, really, there's hardly any spice in it at all. It's just really flavourful."
Ken looks at it again, holding it up to the light, examining it from all angles. No steam. He dips a finger in. It doesn't burn through his skin. He gingerly pops it into his mouth and begins chewing.
"Hmmm, this isn't ba---HOLY FUCK! WATER! WATER! YOU ASSHOLE,…

...came on last night's Global National. Kevin Newman was interviewing someone who looked, for all intents and purposes, to be a normal teenage boy on the streets of Toronto. Newman asked the kid whether all the guns on the streets scared him or not. The kid said "No."
Newman: "Why not?"
Kid: "'Cause, like, it's, you know, pretty normal now."
Newman: "It's pretty normal now. Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?"
Kid: "Hey, it's, like, 2005 now."
I have to commend Kevin Newman on his bravery. He basically just told a kid--who probably has many friends with access to guns--that what he said was ridiculous. These days in Toronto, people are murdered for less.
Violent altercations between groups of teens are almost a nightly occurrence at our bus terminal here in Kitchener-Waterloo. Ten years ago, my daily commute took me through that terminal, and I mastered the art of looking totally harmless and yet entirely unworth ac…

I hear that a group of Canadian Muslims is en route to Iraq to plead with the Swords of Righteousness. That's the group that has kidnapped two Canadians, one American and one Briton and threatened to kill them by Thursday if all Iraqis are released from American and Iraqi prisons.
Admirable, brave...and wrongheaded.
There's no pleading with these people, particularly by Canadian Muslims...which, to the Swords of Righteousness, is a contradiction in terms. If you're a true Muslim, according to this lunatic fringe, you're obligated to be in Iraq killing westerners. And if you're not a true Muslim, by definition, you're just as marked for death.
When will the Canadian government, and Canadians in general, understand this? These aren't people who will be shut up if you throw a nice cushy grant their way. Diplomacy does not work in the Muslim world, and it hasn't for centuries. You can't bargain with a fundamentalist...of any faith. Their minds are made up…

Well...looking around the blogosphere tonight, I came across Jen's 'Everything Comes In Threes' entry. It covered some things I don't think I have, so I borrowed it.

Three names I go by: Ken, Kenny (ugh) and Macaw.
"Macaw" is my long-standing nickname coined by my dad when I was about two--because, he said, all I ever did was squawk and shit.

Three screen names I go by: Why would anyone have more than one? I'm Ken Breadbox everywhere.

Three physical things I like about myself: I'd be lying if I said there was even one. Not that my body image is particularly terrible, but it's not particularly good, either. It's not particularly anything; I rarely even think of my body. Think of memorable Christmas presents you have received over the years. Now think about what they came wrapped in. Don't remember, do you? That's how I feel about bodies.

Three physical things I dislike about myself: My chronic inflexibility; my poor eyesight; my misshapen, m…

I've attempted this blog entry three times now. Each try has proven too strident even for me. My recent conversion into the faith of environmental skepticism has led several people to try and stage an intervention and bring me back to the Suzuki path.
Both sides of the global warming debate have a wealth of information at their fingertips--as with most things in life, you can bend the data to prove whatever you want to, especially if you look at it with preconceived notions of what it's supposed to prove. I think it's fair to say that if scientists have split off into opposing teams, each touting entirely contradictory theories, more research is obviously needed. One group of people doesn't know what they're talking about. Worse, they think they do. That can have potentially disastrous consequences.
Let's look at the much-vaunted Kyoto Protocol closely, shall we? As Canada has signed this treaty, every thinking person here should understand just what it is we hav…

When I was a kid, the radio was a magic machine. Voices came out of it, but it had no mouth; all manner of music came out of it, but it had nothing on it resembling a musical instrument. The concept of "radio stations" was eventually explained to me, and I sort of understood. Radio stations were the places where the concerts were held, right? That worked for me until the day when, dialling along, I caught the same song playing on two different stations at the same time. Impossible--how could one band be in two places at once?
Well, duh.
Much later on than I'd care to admit, I found myself singing a well-known Christmas carol to a crowd. Why do all these "well, duh" moments always seem to happen when there are other people around? Anyway, I got to the second verse and belted out:

Later on, we'll perspire
As we dream by the fire...

--"uh, Ken?"
"What?"
"That's CONspire. Later on, we'll conspire..."
"Huh? What the hell does t…

There are so many things that I am not.
I am not a sportsman. I am less flexible than most two-by-fours. There is no meal I can't mangle: just ask anybody who lived on Mac 2 West in 1990-91. For all I know they still tell the story of the time (one of the very few times) I used the floor kitchen. I set my Kraft Dinner water to boil and wandered back to my room in search of a book to read. While still combing the shelves for the perfect novel For That Moment, I heard running footsteps and a bellow:
"BREAD--NERRRRRRRR!!!"
It sounded like Doom on two legs out there. I cautiously opened the door and beheld the don of my floor. Craig stood all of five-two, but he was not a man to be ignored. I once saw him pick up a man who stood six-four, clean and jerk him, and then pitch him across a room. I stepped out into the hall before Craig could yank my arm out of its socket, and half-ran, was half-dragged, back to the kitchen. Rounding the corner, I found flames shooting up all around…

Two days into the campaign, and controversy already.
Pity poor Mr. Harper. No matter what he says, no matter what he does, there's a CBC flunky there to discredit him. No wonder the man looks so angry all the time...
Kim Campbell, the astute and intelligent woman selected to be the Mulroney fall girl, said something very telling during her one and only campaign: that "an election is no time to discuss serious issues". She was crucified without wood or nails for saying so, and yet truer words have rarely passed anyone's lips in Canadian political history.
Fresh out of the gate, and the Liberals are jumping for joy because Harper brought up same-sex marriage. Merely mentioning the words 'same-sex marriage' on the hustings is political suicide if you're Conservative. Because if the words so much as leak out, a Liberal will enlist the services of their trusted organ, the CBC, to stomp all over you and call you an ideologue, a right wing homophobe, and worse...…