The Breadbin

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I'm a lifelong Conservative. Raised in the Reform school, I've been getting progressively more, well, progressive the older I get. I almost voted for Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals last provincial election.

Almost. His platform looked pretty good, if I could get past that icky Liberal thing. What really impressed me was the (now infamous) quote "I won't cut your taxes. But I won't raise them either."

I can't tell you how shocked I was to be impressed by such a thing. I jerked my political knee right out of its socket a long time ago repeatedly calling (screaming, whining) for lower taxes. Now here was a politician actually announcing he had no intention of cutting taxes (at all! at all!) and I'm thinking of voting for him? That's like a quintessentially straight guy suddenly contemplating a gay lover.

In the end, I voted Conservative, but not out of any great love for Ernie Eves: I was really casting my vote in favour of my MPP, Elizabeth Witmer,…

Does anyone know where I can get a good ultra-beginner's-level introduction to Canadian economics?
This is one area I find myself woefully deficient in. You name it, I don't understand it. For instance:

Today it was reported that the Toronto Stock exchange was down nearly 400 points, the steepest one-day decline in some seven years. A variety of reasons were given. Retail sales are sharply higher; the price of oil has dropped considerably; there is some fear that interest rates will rise to "cool off" the economy.
Why would we want to "cool off" the economy, he asks, stupidly. I thought a hot economy was a good thing--for us plebes and the fat cats running the show. But no, supposedly this "hot economy" phenomenon inevitably leads, through yet another process I don't comprehend, to "inflation"--which in economic speak seems to be the equivalent of "the deepest darkest depths of Hell". One person speculating that inflation mi…

I'm baaaaack...
Okay, so I'm two days early. And my mission to get something in the mail en route to publication, fame, and fortune has hit a little snag. I still think it something of a minor miracle that I (mostly) managed a month without blogging. Even more surprising, to me at least, was that I rarely even thought about blogging, or regretted not blogging. It's certainly easy to fall out of habit.
My story, tentatively titled "Sleeping Like The Undead", is about two-thirds done. It concerns a couple (much like Eva and I in an alternate universe: all my couples tend to be) who go out and buy a bed ("write what you know!") only to find it turns certain people into vampires. The premise, I grant you, sounds flatly ridiculous. But I happen to believe that one mark of a good story is convincing a reader to accept the flatly ridiculous. Stephen King is a master at that sort of thing, and while I am no Stephen King, I'd like to think I've learned som…

Just popping in to say--okay, the writing's going so-so, one story just needs some polishing and the other's almost done, and I'll have both in the mail...to somewhere...before I do a real blog entry on July 23.

But why I'm really here: another friend of mine has joined the blogosphere.

I haven't seen Melanie in about fifteen years, but we've kept in touch. She's a woman of many talents. I first met her in the intermission of a Kiwanis Festival concert--she was playing clarinet on a devilishly hard piece called Hounds of Spring. Her band did quite well, as I recall, certainly better than the orchestra I was a part of.
She put her clarinet aside some years ago in favour of stained glass--which was at first a hobby and has now become a career. I could write pages on how phenomenal her work is...or I could just direct you to her site, where you can see for yourself.

Check it out, and bring your sense of wonder.