The Breadbin

The difference between a liberal and a conservative, I've come to believe, is that liberals have ideals.

I spend a good deal of time, if not outright angry at the world, at least mildly disgusted and contemptuous of it. That's because it so often fails to live up to my idea(l) of How Things Ought To Be. Whereas conservatives of my (online) acquaintance have been mildly disgusted and contemptuous -- sometimes not so mildly -- of me because I dared to voice the opinion that human nature evolves, that we're getting better.

Albeit oh-so-slowly.

"Better" is, of course, a judgment call: ask many a social conservative and you're apt to hear that things are wrong and getting wronger all the time. Depending on just how socially conservative you are, the wrongness started when the faggots began "getting married"...or when God was thrown out of the schools...or, if you're Rick Santorum, when people started using contraceptives (which means soon after babie…

I don't understand people. Even being one doesn't seem to help. --Spider Robinson

All too often I read something in the paper that utterly mystifies me. Today's mystery article is here.

"Who would want to be married to a person who nobody coveted?" asks the husband of the supposedly alluring Nigella Lawson. This question seems reasonable on the surface, but dig a little into it and there are several layers of wrongness underneath.

First and most facile, most men want to be married to someone whom no one else covets: witness the conventional reaction a husband has when confronted by another man who has a sexual interest in his wife. Yes, some men are aroused by this, but I think they're a minority: most of us feel at least a little insecurity, and some of us let our insecurities rule our rational thoughts.

(Perhaps I should restate that: most men want to marry a women whom everyone else covets, but who magically becomes completely undesirable to everyone but t…

So the CBC undertook an investigation and determined that non-Conservative supporters "all over Canada" were misled by phoney phone calls, purportedly from Elections Canada, telling them to report to fictitious polling stations.

If true, this is a scandal of the first order that should prove immediately fatal to the Harper government.

No one is disputing that these calls were made. The talk of the House has concerned little else for the last couple of weeks. There remain several questions to be answered in the official investigation that I fervently hope begins today:

1) Who knew what, when;

2) Just how extensive was this practice, i.e., did the election turn on it;

3) and my own contribution: WHY IS THIS COMING OUT NOW?

If this had happened to me, I would have come home from the deserted 'polling station' I'd been directed to and IMMEDIATELY contacted every media outlet I could find. I would have raised holy hell. But I'm supposed to believe that however ma…

Life is getting in the way of blogging, and not only my life. The Breadbin will be cold for an indefinite period of time. I will explain when I get back.

I've written some of what I'm about to write before. I make no apologies. Piano composition used to be my stress relief valve (and still is, for values of emotional stress that defy easy articulation)...but in most cases nowadays my first impulse is to write it out of my system. And the same little irritants keep happening over and over and over until they exert enough cranial pressure that I simply must blog. Either that or explode.

Most of my little irritants are in some way connected with communication--which would be one of my Ten Commandments were it not already implied in the first two. You can't empathize or question without communication.

We are far from the only species on this planet that communicates with others of our kind. But we are the only species entrusting our communication to machines. In so doing, we are gradually losing the ability to effectively communicate at all. (He says, snarkily, using a machine to communicate his points.)

Okay, back up a little.

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Happy birthday to Alexa Grace Hopf!

And I mean that literally--it really is a happy birth day. Alexa was born at 11:37 a.m. this morning, weighing in at a healthy 8 lbs. Baby, mommy Ally and daddy Jim are doing great.

And I'm an uncle.

That's an old, old, word, uncle. In fact, it ultimately derives from the Latin for 'little grandfather', and doesn't that make me feel, uh, senior.

English is, so far as I am aware, the only language to have a word like avuncular-- "of or relating to an uncle; by extension, kind, genial, benevolent, or tolerant". All four of which are words I hope little Alexa eventually associates with her uncle Ken. (In case you're wondering--I was, but I know I'm weird that way--the female equivalent of avuncular is materteral, "auntlike".

And while we're on etymology, Alexa means "noble" or "man's defender", and Grace of course means "favour" or "blessing".  Knowing this H…