An eventful week.
Again.
Work is still piling on stresses, which I am sure is a contributing factor to my being sick.
Again.
I can't remember a six month period that has seen so many people I know fall ill, nor one in which I'VE been ill so frequently.
Today's combo platter features a moderately high fever, fluctuating between 100 and 103, and its attendant chills; oceans of snot; and the perennial persistent hacking cough, a relic of chronic bronchitis I suffered as a child.
The week in my world:
One best friend lost a cat, a member of her family for 17 years. People seem to expect you to shrug that kind of thing off like it was nothing, which is utter bull. I think bereavement leave is only proper for the loss of a pet.
Our cats are getting up there in age as well, and I dread the day I either find them dead...or have to put them down.
My other best friend is getting married at the end of next month. It'll be a simple civil ceremony in Toronto. I couldn't be happier for Jay and Brian. They've been together longer than Eva and I. It's nice to see them make it official.
T.S. Eliot said "April is the cruelest month". I happen to agree with him. Winter killed everything, but had the decency to cloak its victims in a blanket of white. In April they stand revealed: dead and desiccated, dismal and depressing. Muddy brown melts into dirty gray everywhere you look. Gross.
They are reporting that Terri Schiavo is dead. So that's the end of THAT circus.
And forgive me, but that's all I feel like writing for the moment. The bed beckons.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Friday, March 25, 2005
A GOOD Friday
I can't remember the last time I needed a day off this badly.
This past week has been hellacious.
MONDAY:
I was going to work 1-9, but I'd forgotten about the fifth meeting with Children's Aid in what now seems to be a neverending series. That appointment was for 4:30, and we had no idea how long it would go. So, after working 11-4, I made arrangements to do something I haven't done in nearly five years: work a night shift.
I must confess to a growing sense of frustration with this adoption process. We were told at the beginning that there are usually four or five homestudy sessions. Now I find out there are at least two more necessary: the next one is two weeks off. At this rate, we'll be asking our kids to call us Grandma and Grandpa.
Worse, the sense that this might all go for nothing is still with me. Tom keeps plucking objections to our raising adopted children out of his head like so much Kleenex. Each of these objections must be discussed at great length until Tom is satified we've overruled them. (Not that he ever says as much--for all we know, he's building a case against us and planning to surprise us with the verdict, say, in about a year.)
And his latest hurdle for us! "Your references are all very positive", he says, "but none of them are much help in telling us how you deal with children." He went on to tell us about the "classic" line--one I guess he'd seen in many references before: "If my children couldn't be with me, they always tell me they'd want to live with..."
Well, didn't I feel dandy. Not only had I neglected to parent a child before undergoing this adoption process, I'd made the error of not befriending other parents and their children.
Many of our recent friendships are with parents of fairly new families, but Children's Aid requires our references to have known us for at least three years.
Tom left us with some profiles of children and asked us how we would "hypothetically" integrate them into our home. Answers are due in two weeks.
Hypothetical is right. There are three profiles. One is of a male only child; the other two are fraternal twins. The singleton is near the top of the age range we're willing to consider. He's been the victim of all and sundry forms of abuse, and the profile hinted that he had seen much worse done to other members of his family. We were okay until we got to the "has heard voices" and "has exhibited destructive behaviour towards animals". The fact that this had occurred a couple of foster homes back and had not been observed again didn't exactly reassure us.
The twins are eight years old--considerably older than we're comfortable with. They were premature babies and have "exhibited cognitive delays in the moderate range". Here's what they call "moderate": The girl hasn't spoken yet. She communicates quite well, apparently, using a mixture of sign language and pictures. Her brother has those same cognitive delays, but the profile doesn't specify how they manifest themselves.
Can I deal with this? Sure. Is it something I want to deal with? Honestly, not really. Interpreting sign language--and, for that matter, pictures--has always been a real challenge for me. It's going to be hard enough to establish trust and love with adopted children without adding in communication barriers.
We had made it clear to Children's Aid that we are willing to take on any number of physical disabilities, but anything beyond a mild learning disability is beyond us. We further defined "mild" as things like attention deficit (doesn't every kid have that?), dyslexia, and so on. So the first time we have pictures and details about actual children to consider, we get--a six year old who hears voices and hurts animals, or a pair of cognitively-delayed twins, one of whom hasn't spoken (it's not made clear whether she can speak or not).
Whew.
MONDAY NIGHT:
With Tom and his charges on my mind, I was unable to nap before I went in to work for 9:00.
The reason I'm here has to do with this flyer we're running. It's HOT. Saturday, we blew our old daily sales record and customer count records away. Recovering from a weekend like that one required a positively massive warehouse order. Said order was due in at 4:00, and the five hours between then and close isn't anywhere near enough to get the shelves stocked. So I volunteered to work overnight, figuring with no customers to bother me or staples like milk to stock, I could get a lot done.
Boy, did I.
Despite the steadily increasing level of fatigue I felt, I was able to get a huge volume of work accomplished. Moreover, I actually enjoyed myself. If I needed confirmation that night shifts in and of themselves don't bother me, it came in spades. I may be shifting to full time nights, when and if kids arrive: I'd sleep while they're in school.
TUESDAY
...if I can remember how to sleep during the day. Wow, I'm tired. Why do you "pull" all-nighters, anyway? I PUSHED that one...through thick mud. I went to bed at 7:30 and dozed in and out until noon, at which point I forced myself out of bed. The last thing I wanted, truth be told, was to sleep too well, and then lay awake all night. By 7:00 p.m, I'm feeling almost ill with exhaustion. My hands and feet seem to be weighted with lead.
I'd forgotten about Circadia, the perverse little imp that lives in my brain stem. She's been largely quiet since I last worked a steady diet of nights, but that one all-nighter revived her and caused her to revive me, shortly before 11:00 p.m., with a cavalry charge: TIME TO GO TO WORK!
Shut up, Circ, you bitch.
WEDNESDAY
I'm back at work, and severely undermanned. An even bigger order than Monday's is coming in. And neither Monday's nor today's was anywhere near big enough.
Just SOME of the stuff on ad in my department this week:
Black Diamond Cheese Bars, $3.97 (regular $6.57)
Philadelphia Cream Cheese, $1.97 (regular $2.97)
Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, $.97 (regular $1.77)
Danone 12-pack yogurt, $2.97 (regular $5.27)
Neilson 10% cream, $2.17 (regular $3.17)
I don't have enough bunkers to properly display all the items I have on ad, which means continuously stocking shelves. I don't have enough refrigeration space to store all my stock. Thank God the nights are still cool enough to turn the trailer attached to one of our loading docks into a refrigerator.
The cheese bars, even with a limit of three, are walking out of the store all by themselves. I hate limits on items for several reasons. One, people don't know about them (or pretend not to) and get very upset when told at the tills that they can't buy 24 bars of cheese. (Many of these people, who invariably say they have large families or are shopping for their entire neighborhoods, are really trying to stock their own store shelves: our retail is much lower than their cost. We're losing almost $2.50 per bar, but they don't care.)
Two, even the people who know about the limit try to cheat it...by coming in again and again and again, or sending their kids through the tills with three bars of cheese each.
Three, upon seeing "Limit: 3 per family", the person who was only going to buy one bar usually buys three. In the end, limits don't limit your sales very much, if at all.
Next up: Holy Thursday...the busiest grocery shopping day of the year.
HOLY THURSDAY, THE BUSIEST GROCERY SHOPPING DAY OF THE YEAR:
Yup, the store is closed tomorrow. Everybody, one, two, three, PANIC!!!
Some very nasty thoughts go through my head on days like this--days before a holiday. I wonder: does anybody have jobs? How is it so many people get Thursday off, when Friday is the holiday?
I arrived this morning to discover I was nearly out of milk. Our milk delivery normally arrives between nine and ten. I called Neilson Dairy to see if they could contact our driver and get him to come here first. They told me the truck had left Georgetown an hour ago, and said they'd try to call the driver.
Two hours later, with nary a bag of milk in the store, I called again. This time I was told the truck was four hours late.
Oh, they picked a great day for this to happen.
You have to suck your gut in to turn around in my dairy aisle, and seemingly every last one of these people is looking for milk--reading the signs is just too much trouble; I hope they didn't actually drive to get here--or cheese (yup, out again, I only ordered 2000 bars for today, so sorry, folks).
Yogurt's also running just a bit late. It was supposed to be here yesterday.
At 2:00, my milk finally showed up. Hot on its heels came the yogurt--about a quarter of what I ordered. I'm beginning to wonder if my head will actually lift off my body and carom around the store, bouncing off carts and shelves.
I've managed to get almost 7,000 bars of cheese couriered to us for sometime this evening. So we'll be in stock for Saturday, at least. But as for today...as for this whole week...I'd like to click and drag it right on over into the Trash. Screw the Recycle Bin--no way would I inflict this on anyone again, least of all myself.
FRIDAY:
I'm OFF! And doing the square root of nothing at all. Hooray.
This past week has been hellacious.
MONDAY:
I was going to work 1-9, but I'd forgotten about the fifth meeting with Children's Aid in what now seems to be a neverending series. That appointment was for 4:30, and we had no idea how long it would go. So, after working 11-4, I made arrangements to do something I haven't done in nearly five years: work a night shift.
I must confess to a growing sense of frustration with this adoption process. We were told at the beginning that there are usually four or five homestudy sessions. Now I find out there are at least two more necessary: the next one is two weeks off. At this rate, we'll be asking our kids to call us Grandma and Grandpa.
Worse, the sense that this might all go for nothing is still with me. Tom keeps plucking objections to our raising adopted children out of his head like so much Kleenex. Each of these objections must be discussed at great length until Tom is satified we've overruled them. (Not that he ever says as much--for all we know, he's building a case against us and planning to surprise us with the verdict, say, in about a year.)
And his latest hurdle for us! "Your references are all very positive", he says, "but none of them are much help in telling us how you deal with children." He went on to tell us about the "classic" line--one I guess he'd seen in many references before: "If my children couldn't be with me, they always tell me they'd want to live with..."
Well, didn't I feel dandy. Not only had I neglected to parent a child before undergoing this adoption process, I'd made the error of not befriending other parents and their children.
Many of our recent friendships are with parents of fairly new families, but Children's Aid requires our references to have known us for at least three years.
Tom left us with some profiles of children and asked us how we would "hypothetically" integrate them into our home. Answers are due in two weeks.
Hypothetical is right. There are three profiles. One is of a male only child; the other two are fraternal twins. The singleton is near the top of the age range we're willing to consider. He's been the victim of all and sundry forms of abuse, and the profile hinted that he had seen much worse done to other members of his family. We were okay until we got to the "has heard voices" and "has exhibited destructive behaviour towards animals". The fact that this had occurred a couple of foster homes back and had not been observed again didn't exactly reassure us.
The twins are eight years old--considerably older than we're comfortable with. They were premature babies and have "exhibited cognitive delays in the moderate range". Here's what they call "moderate": The girl hasn't spoken yet. She communicates quite well, apparently, using a mixture of sign language and pictures. Her brother has those same cognitive delays, but the profile doesn't specify how they manifest themselves.
Can I deal with this? Sure. Is it something I want to deal with? Honestly, not really. Interpreting sign language--and, for that matter, pictures--has always been a real challenge for me. It's going to be hard enough to establish trust and love with adopted children without adding in communication barriers.
We had made it clear to Children's Aid that we are willing to take on any number of physical disabilities, but anything beyond a mild learning disability is beyond us. We further defined "mild" as things like attention deficit (doesn't every kid have that?), dyslexia, and so on. So the first time we have pictures and details about actual children to consider, we get--a six year old who hears voices and hurts animals, or a pair of cognitively-delayed twins, one of whom hasn't spoken (it's not made clear whether she can speak or not).
Whew.
MONDAY NIGHT:
With Tom and his charges on my mind, I was unable to nap before I went in to work for 9:00.
The reason I'm here has to do with this flyer we're running. It's HOT. Saturday, we blew our old daily sales record and customer count records away. Recovering from a weekend like that one required a positively massive warehouse order. Said order was due in at 4:00, and the five hours between then and close isn't anywhere near enough to get the shelves stocked. So I volunteered to work overnight, figuring with no customers to bother me or staples like milk to stock, I could get a lot done.
Boy, did I.
Despite the steadily increasing level of fatigue I felt, I was able to get a huge volume of work accomplished. Moreover, I actually enjoyed myself. If I needed confirmation that night shifts in and of themselves don't bother me, it came in spades. I may be shifting to full time nights, when and if kids arrive: I'd sleep while they're in school.
TUESDAY
...if I can remember how to sleep during the day. Wow, I'm tired. Why do you "pull" all-nighters, anyway? I PUSHED that one...through thick mud. I went to bed at 7:30 and dozed in and out until noon, at which point I forced myself out of bed. The last thing I wanted, truth be told, was to sleep too well, and then lay awake all night. By 7:00 p.m, I'm feeling almost ill with exhaustion. My hands and feet seem to be weighted with lead.
I'd forgotten about Circadia, the perverse little imp that lives in my brain stem. She's been largely quiet since I last worked a steady diet of nights, but that one all-nighter revived her and caused her to revive me, shortly before 11:00 p.m., with a cavalry charge: TIME TO GO TO WORK!
Shut up, Circ, you bitch.
WEDNESDAY
I'm back at work, and severely undermanned. An even bigger order than Monday's is coming in. And neither Monday's nor today's was anywhere near big enough.
Just SOME of the stuff on ad in my department this week:
Black Diamond Cheese Bars, $3.97 (regular $6.57)
Philadelphia Cream Cheese, $1.97 (regular $2.97)
Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, $.97 (regular $1.77)
Danone 12-pack yogurt, $2.97 (regular $5.27)
Neilson 10% cream, $2.17 (regular $3.17)
I don't have enough bunkers to properly display all the items I have on ad, which means continuously stocking shelves. I don't have enough refrigeration space to store all my stock. Thank God the nights are still cool enough to turn the trailer attached to one of our loading docks into a refrigerator.
The cheese bars, even with a limit of three, are walking out of the store all by themselves. I hate limits on items for several reasons. One, people don't know about them (or pretend not to) and get very upset when told at the tills that they can't buy 24 bars of cheese. (Many of these people, who invariably say they have large families or are shopping for their entire neighborhoods, are really trying to stock their own store shelves: our retail is much lower than their cost. We're losing almost $2.50 per bar, but they don't care.)
Two, even the people who know about the limit try to cheat it...by coming in again and again and again, or sending their kids through the tills with three bars of cheese each.
Three, upon seeing "Limit: 3 per family", the person who was only going to buy one bar usually buys three. In the end, limits don't limit your sales very much, if at all.
Next up: Holy Thursday...the busiest grocery shopping day of the year.
HOLY THURSDAY, THE BUSIEST GROCERY SHOPPING DAY OF THE YEAR:
Yup, the store is closed tomorrow. Everybody, one, two, three, PANIC!!!
Some very nasty thoughts go through my head on days like this--days before a holiday. I wonder: does anybody have jobs? How is it so many people get Thursday off, when Friday is the holiday?
I arrived this morning to discover I was nearly out of milk. Our milk delivery normally arrives between nine and ten. I called Neilson Dairy to see if they could contact our driver and get him to come here first. They told me the truck had left Georgetown an hour ago, and said they'd try to call the driver.
Two hours later, with nary a bag of milk in the store, I called again. This time I was told the truck was four hours late.
Oh, they picked a great day for this to happen.
You have to suck your gut in to turn around in my dairy aisle, and seemingly every last one of these people is looking for milk--reading the signs is just too much trouble; I hope they didn't actually drive to get here--or cheese (yup, out again, I only ordered 2000 bars for today, so sorry, folks).
Yogurt's also running just a bit late. It was supposed to be here yesterday.
At 2:00, my milk finally showed up. Hot on its heels came the yogurt--about a quarter of what I ordered. I'm beginning to wonder if my head will actually lift off my body and carom around the store, bouncing off carts and shelves.
I've managed to get almost 7,000 bars of cheese couriered to us for sometime this evening. So we'll be in stock for Saturday, at least. But as for today...as for this whole week...I'd like to click and drag it right on over into the Trash. Screw the Recycle Bin--no way would I inflict this on anyone again, least of all myself.
FRIDAY:
I'm OFF! And doing the square root of nothing at all. Hooray.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
The Living Will of Congress
In both Canada and the United States, there are quite a few people who are disgusted with what they term "activist judges". According to these people, who are mostly on the right of the political spectrum, the legal system is engaged in a grand experiment to re-engineer society, usually (they argue) to its detriment.
If you talk to people who rail against activist judges, before long you'll hear something like this: "The courts are there to interpret laws, not make them. Making laws is government's job."
Such absolute faith in legislators! This is bizarre coming from the Right, which tends to distrust government and hold it at arm's length as if it smelled bad.
So judges are supposed to keep the hell away from government. Okay. Got it. But doesn't that mean the reverse should also be true...that the legislative branch shouldn't entwine itself in the judicial branch? You'd think so, wouldn't you? In fact, the Constitution of the United States, which serves as a benchmark for constitutions worldwide, incorporates a series of checks and balances to keep the branches of government separate, and it's worked, by and large, pretty well for over two hundred years.
Until Dubya.
I'm talking about the strange saga of Terri Schiavo. By now, unless you're living in Papua New Guinea, you've at least heard of her. If you have spent any time in the company of other human beings over the last few days, her name has probably come up. She's the woman--in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years--over whom there has been a colossal clash of personal and political will: should she live or should she die?
My thoughts on her case are secondary and completely irrelevant. That won't stop me from expressing them--does it ever?--but I'll at least put them off for a bit in favour of my point, which is this:
TERRI'S FATE WAS ALREADY DECIDED IN A COURT OF LAW. Whatever you may think about her, a judge has already decided (a) that her husband is her legal guardian and (b) he successfully argued his case to have her feeding tube removed.
Let's say Terri lived in Canada. And let's say a Canadian judge found the same way. There'd be the same controversy, no doubt, but I bet there'd be one marked difference: our government wouldn't get involved.
The actions of the President and Congress would have been illegal but for the nifty new law they created "just for this case". The American government has a long and accomplished history of ignoring court decisions it doesn't like--witness the softwood lumber dispute between the U.S. and Canada, just to use a recent example--but to my knowledge this is the first time they've been foolish enough to thumb their nose at their own legal system. It sets a dangerous precedent. What decision will the government ignore next time? I wouldn't want to hazard a guess, but I don't have to guess at the hazard.
The most recent news: The judge who heard the case ruled, in effect, to uphold the previous judge's ruling. Terri's parents have already filed an appeal. I wonder, if the same result holds, will the government intervene again? And maybe keep intervening until it gets a judge appointed by Bush instead of Clinton, and thus achieves its desired result?
And let's look at this desired result, shall we? The government seems awfully intent on keeping Terri Schiavo "alive". Her brain has largely turned into spinal fluid; her chances for improvement have been ruled to be zero to at least ten decimal places. I was recently chastised for daring to judge Terri's quality of life, but I am unrepentant. I dare anyone who would presume to play God and prolong this woman's existence to spend fifteen years on a hospital bed, mute and unmoving. I'd ask them how they felt at the end of it, except if they were to perfectly match Terri's state, there would be no end to it.
Terri's parents are valiantly engaged in fighting the good fight. I wonder, do they expect to be able to tell their daughter how hard they fought? Do they believe Terry will some day arise from her hospital bed and say "thanks for letting me sleep in"? Could they possibly be that selfish?
It's the Christian right that tends to insist on life at all costs. This doesn't jibe well with the Heaven in which they claim to believe, a place that is supposed to make our earthly existence pale in comparison. If Heaven is such a great place, surely keeping anybody sticking around earth--especially in a state that doesn't permit even limited enjoyment of earth's limited joys--should be seen as a crime.
A postscript to this: for the love of all that's sacred, if you haven't already done so, go and write yourself a living will. It might not help you overmuch if you're American--the government might turn around and decide it's invalid--but at least it'll be one more fence for them to break down. And if you live somewhere civilized, should Terri Schiavo's fate befall you, the people who love you will know what your wishes are.
If you talk to people who rail against activist judges, before long you'll hear something like this: "The courts are there to interpret laws, not make them. Making laws is government's job."
Such absolute faith in legislators! This is bizarre coming from the Right, which tends to distrust government and hold it at arm's length as if it smelled bad.
So judges are supposed to keep the hell away from government. Okay. Got it. But doesn't that mean the reverse should also be true...that the legislative branch shouldn't entwine itself in the judicial branch? You'd think so, wouldn't you? In fact, the Constitution of the United States, which serves as a benchmark for constitutions worldwide, incorporates a series of checks and balances to keep the branches of government separate, and it's worked, by and large, pretty well for over two hundred years.
Until Dubya.
I'm talking about the strange saga of Terri Schiavo. By now, unless you're living in Papua New Guinea, you've at least heard of her. If you have spent any time in the company of other human beings over the last few days, her name has probably come up. She's the woman--in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years--over whom there has been a colossal clash of personal and political will: should she live or should she die?
My thoughts on her case are secondary and completely irrelevant. That won't stop me from expressing them--does it ever?--but I'll at least put them off for a bit in favour of my point, which is this:
TERRI'S FATE WAS ALREADY DECIDED IN A COURT OF LAW. Whatever you may think about her, a judge has already decided (a) that her husband is her legal guardian and (b) he successfully argued his case to have her feeding tube removed.
Let's say Terri lived in Canada. And let's say a Canadian judge found the same way. There'd be the same controversy, no doubt, but I bet there'd be one marked difference: our government wouldn't get involved.
The actions of the President and Congress would have been illegal but for the nifty new law they created "just for this case". The American government has a long and accomplished history of ignoring court decisions it doesn't like--witness the softwood lumber dispute between the U.S. and Canada, just to use a recent example--but to my knowledge this is the first time they've been foolish enough to thumb their nose at their own legal system. It sets a dangerous precedent. What decision will the government ignore next time? I wouldn't want to hazard a guess, but I don't have to guess at the hazard.
The most recent news: The judge who heard the case ruled, in effect, to uphold the previous judge's ruling. Terri's parents have already filed an appeal. I wonder, if the same result holds, will the government intervene again? And maybe keep intervening until it gets a judge appointed by Bush instead of Clinton, and thus achieves its desired result?
And let's look at this desired result, shall we? The government seems awfully intent on keeping Terri Schiavo "alive". Her brain has largely turned into spinal fluid; her chances for improvement have been ruled to be zero to at least ten decimal places. I was recently chastised for daring to judge Terri's quality of life, but I am unrepentant. I dare anyone who would presume to play God and prolong this woman's existence to spend fifteen years on a hospital bed, mute and unmoving. I'd ask them how they felt at the end of it, except if they were to perfectly match Terri's state, there would be no end to it.
Terri's parents are valiantly engaged in fighting the good fight. I wonder, do they expect to be able to tell their daughter how hard they fought? Do they believe Terry will some day arise from her hospital bed and say "thanks for letting me sleep in"? Could they possibly be that selfish?
It's the Christian right that tends to insist on life at all costs. This doesn't jibe well with the Heaven in which they claim to believe, a place that is supposed to make our earthly existence pale in comparison. If Heaven is such a great place, surely keeping anybody sticking around earth--especially in a state that doesn't permit even limited enjoyment of earth's limited joys--should be seen as a crime.
A postscript to this: for the love of all that's sacred, if you haven't already done so, go and write yourself a living will. It might not help you overmuch if you're American--the government might turn around and decide it's invalid--but at least it'll be one more fence for them to break down. And if you live somewhere civilized, should Terri Schiavo's fate befall you, the people who love you will know what your wishes are.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Beware the Running Slipknots in the Net...
The Toronto Sun is doing a series, starting today, on cyber-molesters. Reading Part One was enough to chill my blood and numb my mind.
One of their reporters posed as a thirteen-year-old girl and in very short order had a wide variety of men propositioning her, masturbating for her via Webcam, and offering to drive thousands of miles to "make her happy". She stressed that she didn't have to go looking for these perverts...the perverts found her, and in seemingly innocuous online venues. In a few short weeks, she'd made well over a hundred contacts.
I would have found this astonishing had I never been online myself.
I first got on the Internet in early 1991. Cyberspace was primitive back then. The only graphics you tended to see online were ASCII art. Webcams were unheard of, and so were porno sites. When you checked your email, you didn't have to weed through offers to increase your penis size or show you "horny lezzie teens" or "Suzi and her horse".
That's not to say the 'Net was purer, necessarily, only that the sleaze was slightly less blatant.
Usenet (which still exists today) was my trolling ground. It was, and is, a collection of "newsgroups" on every conceivable topic...local to international and narrowly academic to widely recreational. Each group worked somewhat like a chatroom does today, without the capability of instant messaging.
When I discovered this stuff, I jumped in with both feet and promptly drowned in it. Imagine a place where my opinion could be read and praised by somebody on the other side of the planet. Or ridiculed: it hardly mattered which. Either way, I was getting my name out there and learning a lot from reading the opinions of other people. There was an ardent Quebec separatist on the can.politics group, my first glimpse of that sort of creature. On rec.sport.hockey, I was for a time venerated as a net.hockey.god, thanks to a few trenchant observations and lucky predictions. On alt.polyamory, I "met" a whole bunch of people who loved more than one person at a time; for quite a while I tried very hard to make their philosophy work for me. And, being a young man with working hormones and--at the time--nobody to share them with, I confess I spent some time browsing through the alt.sex hierarchy of newsgroups, a full listing of which would take probably a hundred pages and turn your mind inside out. I remember reading somewhere that the Internet was a vast repository of perversion...if you typed in that you wanted to have sex with a goat that was on fire, the computer would come back with "specify type of goat."
Then there was soc.penpals.
I happened to be skipping through that group one day, more out of idle curiosity than any real need for a penpal. What to my wondering eye should appear but an ad from somebody who said she was suffering from "empty mailbox syndrome"...and who attended my university.
After writing back and forth a few times--and we were probably in the same computer lab at least once when we exchanged emails--we agreed to meet.
That was the start of a close, five-year long relationship. In the end, I played the fool and threw it away, but it was important for me and wonderful while it lasted. But it was the beginning of the relationship that has bearing here. Anne, as I'll call her, told me that the only reason she responded to my initial sally was that I 'sounded okay and didn't propose marriage'. She showed me her mailbox, empty no longer. We counted no less than thirty marriage proposals, many of them originating from the Indian subcontinent.
I couldn't believe it. There were quite a lot of strange people out there.
Later, I came to learn that the Internet universe was not only stranger than I had supposed, but stranger that I could suppose. One girl offered to pay my airfare to the Southern U.S...and told my mother, in an email, that once she got me down there I wasn't likely to want to leave. I had a girl in upstate New York send me a picture of herself--not, I hasten to add, anything indecent, but then again, on very short notice, after no more than half an hour of idle online chit-chat.
The only link with my Internet past that I still maintain is one of the first links I ever forged: the Iowa Student Computer Association BBS (telnet:whip.isca.uiowa.edu). It's a smaller, self-contained version of Usenet, but with limited instant messaging capability. I used to get into conversations with six different people at once. You've got to be careful doing that, especially if you're flirting with one of them. Or worse, two of them. It's far too easy to send the wrong message to the wrong person.
I did have some reasonably healthy relationships on ISCA. And in introducing the BBS to a real-life friend, I unwittingly handed her the means by which she would meet her fiance; they've been together a good deal longer than Eva and I have been married. We have other friends who met online and have since married and had children. By no means am I against Internet relationships per se.
But male or female, you have to be exceedingly cautious!
The least reason you have to be cautious is that anybody might be misrepresenting themselves. Not everyone does, of course. But I have met a "woman" online who turned out to be a gay man, and it goes without saying that most personal ads on the 'Net are at least half creative fiction.
A much bigger reason to be concerned is the manufactured closeness that can be established so easily in the netherland between screens. In this world, everyone can be distilled to an essence, and that essence can be digested very quickly. It's possible to chat with someone for a few hours and feel you've known them for years. Believe me: I know this from repeated personal experience. The gullible can easily be convinced that lifelong love awaits them after a few keystrokes. You don't have to be young to be gullible: a little loneliness and a lack of self-esteem will do it every time.
You don't have to be young to be gullible, but it helps. According to a survey published in today's paper, 68% of kids surf without any supervision. Truly scary. Our computer will remain here in the living room where anyone can see it, and I don't care if every friend our kids make at school has a computer (with a webcam, no less!) in their bedroom. I recognize there's no surefire way to keep children safe, but I don't see the logic in actively courting the psychos.
Parents out there, beware: your computer monitor only looks like the screen you use as a rugrat-shutter-upper, pacifier, and general babysitter. As of yet, no sick freaks can reach through your television screen and beguile and befriend your sons and daughters. But it's depressingly easily done with a computer.
One of their reporters posed as a thirteen-year-old girl and in very short order had a wide variety of men propositioning her, masturbating for her via Webcam, and offering to drive thousands of miles to "make her happy". She stressed that she didn't have to go looking for these perverts...the perverts found her, and in seemingly innocuous online venues. In a few short weeks, she'd made well over a hundred contacts.
I would have found this astonishing had I never been online myself.
I first got on the Internet in early 1991. Cyberspace was primitive back then. The only graphics you tended to see online were ASCII art. Webcams were unheard of, and so were porno sites. When you checked your email, you didn't have to weed through offers to increase your penis size or show you "horny lezzie teens" or "Suzi and her horse".
That's not to say the 'Net was purer, necessarily, only that the sleaze was slightly less blatant.
Usenet (which still exists today) was my trolling ground. It was, and is, a collection of "newsgroups" on every conceivable topic...local to international and narrowly academic to widely recreational. Each group worked somewhat like a chatroom does today, without the capability of instant messaging.
When I discovered this stuff, I jumped in with both feet and promptly drowned in it. Imagine a place where my opinion could be read and praised by somebody on the other side of the planet. Or ridiculed: it hardly mattered which. Either way, I was getting my name out there and learning a lot from reading the opinions of other people. There was an ardent Quebec separatist on the can.politics group, my first glimpse of that sort of creature. On rec.sport.hockey, I was for a time venerated as a net.hockey.god, thanks to a few trenchant observations and lucky predictions. On alt.polyamory, I "met" a whole bunch of people who loved more than one person at a time; for quite a while I tried very hard to make their philosophy work for me. And, being a young man with working hormones and--at the time--nobody to share them with, I confess I spent some time browsing through the alt.sex hierarchy of newsgroups, a full listing of which would take probably a hundred pages and turn your mind inside out. I remember reading somewhere that the Internet was a vast repository of perversion...if you typed in that you wanted to have sex with a goat that was on fire, the computer would come back with "specify type of goat."
Then there was soc.penpals.
I happened to be skipping through that group one day, more out of idle curiosity than any real need for a penpal. What to my wondering eye should appear but an ad from somebody who said she was suffering from "empty mailbox syndrome"...and who attended my university.
After writing back and forth a few times--and we were probably in the same computer lab at least once when we exchanged emails--we agreed to meet.
That was the start of a close, five-year long relationship. In the end, I played the fool and threw it away, but it was important for me and wonderful while it lasted. But it was the beginning of the relationship that has bearing here. Anne, as I'll call her, told me that the only reason she responded to my initial sally was that I 'sounded okay and didn't propose marriage'. She showed me her mailbox, empty no longer. We counted no less than thirty marriage proposals, many of them originating from the Indian subcontinent.
I couldn't believe it. There were quite a lot of strange people out there.
Later, I came to learn that the Internet universe was not only stranger than I had supposed, but stranger that I could suppose. One girl offered to pay my airfare to the Southern U.S...and told my mother, in an email, that once she got me down there I wasn't likely to want to leave. I had a girl in upstate New York send me a picture of herself--not, I hasten to add, anything indecent, but then again, on very short notice, after no more than half an hour of idle online chit-chat.
The only link with my Internet past that I still maintain is one of the first links I ever forged: the Iowa Student Computer Association BBS (telnet:whip.isca.uiowa.edu). It's a smaller, self-contained version of Usenet, but with limited instant messaging capability. I used to get into conversations with six different people at once. You've got to be careful doing that, especially if you're flirting with one of them. Or worse, two of them. It's far too easy to send the wrong message to the wrong person.
I did have some reasonably healthy relationships on ISCA. And in introducing the BBS to a real-life friend, I unwittingly handed her the means by which she would meet her fiance; they've been together a good deal longer than Eva and I have been married. We have other friends who met online and have since married and had children. By no means am I against Internet relationships per se.
But male or female, you have to be exceedingly cautious!
The least reason you have to be cautious is that anybody might be misrepresenting themselves. Not everyone does, of course. But I have met a "woman" online who turned out to be a gay man, and it goes without saying that most personal ads on the 'Net are at least half creative fiction.
A much bigger reason to be concerned is the manufactured closeness that can be established so easily in the netherland between screens. In this world, everyone can be distilled to an essence, and that essence can be digested very quickly. It's possible to chat with someone for a few hours and feel you've known them for years. Believe me: I know this from repeated personal experience. The gullible can easily be convinced that lifelong love awaits them after a few keystrokes. You don't have to be young to be gullible: a little loneliness and a lack of self-esteem will do it every time.
You don't have to be young to be gullible, but it helps. According to a survey published in today's paper, 68% of kids surf without any supervision. Truly scary. Our computer will remain here in the living room where anyone can see it, and I don't care if every friend our kids make at school has a computer (with a webcam, no less!) in their bedroom. I recognize there's no surefire way to keep children safe, but I don't see the logic in actively courting the psychos.
Parents out there, beware: your computer monitor only looks like the screen you use as a rugrat-shutter-upper, pacifier, and general babysitter. As of yet, no sick freaks can reach through your television screen and beguile and befriend your sons and daughters. But it's depressingly easily done with a computer.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
The kind of books I like to read are about imaginary worlds.
Big worlds, little worlds, it doesn't really matter. What matters (for me) is how well I can relate to the author's vision--do I lift my eye from the page and lament th I'm still here in this universe, in this dimension? Do I sit back after closing the book and fervently wish I could transform words into reality?
The worlds of Harry Potter enchant me, it's true. So do the worlds of Robert Sawyer and Guy Gavriel Kay. The zany universes of Douglas Adams have their charms, and I feel quite at home in many of the alternate realities Robert Heinlein dreamed up.
But the two most inspiring places I've ever visited in fiction--and dearly wished I could stay forever in--are the brainchildren of one Spider Robinson. They are a bar called Callahan's Place and a brothel called Lady Sally's House.
What was that, Ken? Did you, with your avowed hatred of alcohol, actually profess to admire a bar?
Yup. Admittedly, a fictional bar: Callahan's is the kind of bar where drinking booze isn't required. What is required there is humanity, nothing more and nothing less. It doesn't matter what problems plague you out in the parking lot. When you step in to Callahan's, you'll be made welcome by everyone there. If you choose to share your problem, you'll get the undivided attention of all patrons; if you choose not to share your problem, nobody will press you for it, on pain of getting bounced. Sooner or later, you'll unload.
There've been some real problems aired around that bar. An intergalactic hitman wandered in once, mere hours before he was slated to blow up the Earth. They welcomed him, shared his pain, and managed to collectively figure out how to stop the process. Not too long after, he married the barkeep's daughter.
There are time travellers, a talking dog, a man with two wives, an honest-to-God-vampire, telepaths, precognitives, and all manner of wild and crazy folk. So far, these nuts have been called on to save the Earth, the universe, and the macroverse; and for an encore they'll pun your socks off.
Merry place, this Callahan's. Their philosophy is simple: Shared pain is lessened, and shared joy is increased. That's the kind of philosophy I wish our little planet would take seriously.
Callahan's wife Sally ran this brothel in Brooklyn until she had to close it down and go and save the universe somewhere herself. This bordello was the kind of place you'd expect a bordello to be...in a sane world, where sex was considered an art form and its practitioners were trained Artists. They had a Parlour that was, not surprisingly, pretty similar to Callahan's bar; the fun was so infectious that a client could spend the evening there without even thinking of 'going upstairs'. If you went upstairs, you'd find function rooms (the Teenager's Bedroom, the O.R., the Dungeon, among a host of others); the Bower (three rules: take no for an answer, don't pee in the pool, and anything that happens in here, stays in here); studio and living apartments for all Artists on staff; and a further world of wonders. The pervasive attitude: enjoy yourself and love each other.
Not to get all hippie or anything, but I like that idea, too, and think the world could use a little more of it.
Big worlds, little worlds, it doesn't really matter. What matters (for me) is how well I can relate to the author's vision--do I lift my eye from the page and lament th I'm still here in this universe, in this dimension? Do I sit back after closing the book and fervently wish I could transform words into reality?
The worlds of Harry Potter enchant me, it's true. So do the worlds of Robert Sawyer and Guy Gavriel Kay. The zany universes of Douglas Adams have their charms, and I feel quite at home in many of the alternate realities Robert Heinlein dreamed up.
But the two most inspiring places I've ever visited in fiction--and dearly wished I could stay forever in--are the brainchildren of one Spider Robinson. They are a bar called Callahan's Place and a brothel called Lady Sally's House.
What was that, Ken? Did you, with your avowed hatred of alcohol, actually profess to admire a bar?
Yup. Admittedly, a fictional bar: Callahan's is the kind of bar where drinking booze isn't required. What is required there is humanity, nothing more and nothing less. It doesn't matter what problems plague you out in the parking lot. When you step in to Callahan's, you'll be made welcome by everyone there. If you choose to share your problem, you'll get the undivided attention of all patrons; if you choose not to share your problem, nobody will press you for it, on pain of getting bounced. Sooner or later, you'll unload.
There've been some real problems aired around that bar. An intergalactic hitman wandered in once, mere hours before he was slated to blow up the Earth. They welcomed him, shared his pain, and managed to collectively figure out how to stop the process. Not too long after, he married the barkeep's daughter.
There are time travellers, a talking dog, a man with two wives, an honest-to-God-vampire, telepaths, precognitives, and all manner of wild and crazy folk. So far, these nuts have been called on to save the Earth, the universe, and the macroverse; and for an encore they'll pun your socks off.
Merry place, this Callahan's. Their philosophy is simple: Shared pain is lessened, and shared joy is increased. That's the kind of philosophy I wish our little planet would take seriously.
Callahan's wife Sally ran this brothel in Brooklyn until she had to close it down and go and save the universe somewhere herself. This bordello was the kind of place you'd expect a bordello to be...in a sane world, where sex was considered an art form and its practitioners were trained Artists. They had a Parlour that was, not surprisingly, pretty similar to Callahan's bar; the fun was so infectious that a client could spend the evening there without even thinking of 'going upstairs'. If you went upstairs, you'd find function rooms (the Teenager's Bedroom, the O.R., the Dungeon, among a host of others); the Bower (three rules: take no for an answer, don't pee in the pool, and anything that happens in here, stays in here); studio and living apartments for all Artists on staff; and a further world of wonders. The pervasive attitude: enjoy yourself and love each other.
Not to get all hippie or anything, but I like that idea, too, and think the world could use a little more of it.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
March Madness
Sweeping out the random crumbs building up in this here Breadbin:
Can anybody explain to me just what it is about college basketball that inspires so much passion in a sizeable subset of Americans?
Better yet, why do Canadians play along?
I can understand rooting for your alma mater: I'm guilty of that myself on occasion. And as an inveterate homer, I can stretch my definition of 'alma mater' to 'school located in or near your hometown'...in a pinch. But so many people are so wrapped up in collegiate hoops...including people who have always lived hundreds or thousands of miles away from any American academic institution...that there simply has to be another explanation.
Damned if I know what it is.
After a good fifteen years of banging my head against the wall, I finally read an explanation for why the majority of criminals in this country don't serve their full sentences. According to Macleans, the Canadian philosophy is to reintegrate offenders into society before their terms are up, while the State can still impose conditions such as avoidance of areas where children may congregate or regular check-ins with parole officers. In the American system, you serve your full sentence, and then walk scot-free.
Humph. Since everyone but the crooks and (it seems) the judges agree that sentences are far too lenient, the obvious solution is to lengthen the sentences. This ain't exactly rocket surgery, is it, folks?
Let's say you molest a child. In the Canadian justice system, you'll get anything from house arrest to maybe a few years in prison. In the fixed-up Canadian justice system, you'd get a sentence of, let's say, minimum fifteen years--twelve of which must be served behind bars. (Of course, you'd be castrated; that goes without saying.)
And premeditated murder--by which I mean 'any wrongful death requiring thought and effort to bring about' would automatically mean life in jail..."life" being that period which precedes "death". (In special cases, where there are several witnesses or you're such a sick freak that you've videotaped the whole sordid mess--you get one trial, one appeal, and then immediate execution, say in a little room off the courtroom.
Ever since the big blackout of 2003, we've had the odd person wander in to our store and ask us why we aren't doing our bit for the environment. Remember how, in the days following the outage, stores used only half of their light fixtures, throwing their aisles into permanent twilight? I think that's what these folks want to see.
We replaced all our fixtures with new ones that use 80% less energy. Oddly enough, they're brighter. But the amount of energy we're spending lighting the store is twenty percent of what it used to be.
Of course, the amount of energy we spend lighting the store is minuscule relative to the amount of energy it takes to run the tills, the computers, the fridges and freezers and walk-ins. I don't think you environauts want to see us cut back in that department. Not unless you want a little something extra in your food.
Can anybody explain to me just what it is about college basketball that inspires so much passion in a sizeable subset of Americans?
Better yet, why do Canadians play along?
I can understand rooting for your alma mater: I'm guilty of that myself on occasion. And as an inveterate homer, I can stretch my definition of 'alma mater' to 'school located in or near your hometown'...in a pinch. But so many people are so wrapped up in collegiate hoops...including people who have always lived hundreds or thousands of miles away from any American academic institution...that there simply has to be another explanation.
Damned if I know what it is.
After a good fifteen years of banging my head against the wall, I finally read an explanation for why the majority of criminals in this country don't serve their full sentences. According to Macleans, the Canadian philosophy is to reintegrate offenders into society before their terms are up, while the State can still impose conditions such as avoidance of areas where children may congregate or regular check-ins with parole officers. In the American system, you serve your full sentence, and then walk scot-free.
Humph. Since everyone but the crooks and (it seems) the judges agree that sentences are far too lenient, the obvious solution is to lengthen the sentences. This ain't exactly rocket surgery, is it, folks?
Let's say you molest a child. In the Canadian justice system, you'll get anything from house arrest to maybe a few years in prison. In the fixed-up Canadian justice system, you'd get a sentence of, let's say, minimum fifteen years--twelve of which must be served behind bars. (Of course, you'd be castrated; that goes without saying.)
And premeditated murder--by which I mean 'any wrongful death requiring thought and effort to bring about' would automatically mean life in jail..."life" being that period which precedes "death". (In special cases, where there are several witnesses or you're such a sick freak that you've videotaped the whole sordid mess--you get one trial, one appeal, and then immediate execution, say in a little room off the courtroom.
Ever since the big blackout of 2003, we've had the odd person wander in to our store and ask us why we aren't doing our bit for the environment. Remember how, in the days following the outage, stores used only half of their light fixtures, throwing their aisles into permanent twilight? I think that's what these folks want to see.
We replaced all our fixtures with new ones that use 80% less energy. Oddly enough, they're brighter. But the amount of energy we're spending lighting the store is twenty percent of what it used to be.
Of course, the amount of energy we spend lighting the store is minuscule relative to the amount of energy it takes to run the tills, the computers, the fridges and freezers and walk-ins. I don't think you environauts want to see us cut back in that department. Not unless you want a little something extra in your food.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Where Great Shopping Lives
VAUGHAN MILLS--All it needs is a foot transplant centre somewhere near Entry 5.
To be fair, this mall has gone further than most to be tender on shoppers' tootsies: there's cushioning, and sometimes outright carpeting, under your toes. Still, by the time you've circumnavigated this mallworld, your feet will be feeling it, guaranteed.
I've always enjoyed walking malls...the big ones, anyway. Sure, many people will tell you they're all the same, that a mall is just a mall, but I don't agree. Every good-sized shopping center has stores, services, and little touches of decor that make it stand out. And any decent-sized mall is a welcome treat for this denizen of northern Waterloo region. They don't know from shopping centers in this city.
When I first heard about the opening of Vaughan Mills, billed as the largest mall in Ontario, I was, predictably, intrigued. Of course, I couldn't just rush out to inspect the place. It's just over an hour from here, for one thing. For another, I hate crowds. So I settled down to wait out the Christmas shopping season.
It's March now. Close thing, but I think Christmas is over until at least the second of September.
As you exit the 400 at Bass Pro Mills Drive, the sheer size of this 1.2 million square foot behemoth rises up and bitch-slaps you a few times. It's beyond huge. Getting a parking spot was relatively easy, as we arrived just fifteen minutes after opening, but plan for a hefty hike if you get here in the afternoon.
Vaughan Mills is impossible to get lost in. It's shaped like the world's longest cigar, and it's organized into "neighbourhoods"--numbered 1 through 6--each of which has an entirely different decor. As I said above, there's actual carpeting in one area.
The tone ranges from middle class up to "God would have to save up for a century or two just to LOOK in here" . They hid the lone dollar store off at an end so that the third-class citizens wouldn't have to infect the rest of the shoppers. Otherwise, the only thing lacking here seems to be an apparel store for plus-sized women...an inexcusable oversight in a place this big. Mind you, there aren't that many places anywhere for plus-sized women to shop for clothing in comfort...an inexcusable oversight for a society this obese.
Here, let me step down off my soapbox.
One store that did make an immediate and eye-popping impression was the Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World. The mall directory designates this place as store A1, and brother, they're not kidding. There's a 24,000 gallon fish tank, fully stocked with bass, trout, salmon, muskie, and--well, that's all I could identify, but there were others. Two guys were giving a fishing demonstration when we entered, casting down into the tank again and again and pulling up fish just as fast, leading me to reflect that fish must be the world's dumbest class of beings. Hey, LOOK! FOOD! *chomp* *yank* *gasp gasp gasp* *splash* *whew!* Hey, LOOK! FOOD!"
If you use it outside, it's here in this store. My dad needs to come down here, right quick.
Other highlights: there's a huge piano outlet in here! Okay, I forgot, you're not me. Well, there's the cheapest place on the planet to buy board games; the world's largest Tommy Hilfiger outlet (you'd have to pay me to go in, but as I said, you're not me, right?) There are hat stores, sock stores, a Ben and Jerry's kiosk, and a Rocky Mountain chocolate outlet.
Vaughan Mills: It's a great place to spend a few--or a few thousand--bucks. Y'oughta see it.
To be fair, this mall has gone further than most to be tender on shoppers' tootsies: there's cushioning, and sometimes outright carpeting, under your toes. Still, by the time you've circumnavigated this mallworld, your feet will be feeling it, guaranteed.
I've always enjoyed walking malls...the big ones, anyway. Sure, many people will tell you they're all the same, that a mall is just a mall, but I don't agree. Every good-sized shopping center has stores, services, and little touches of decor that make it stand out. And any decent-sized mall is a welcome treat for this denizen of northern Waterloo region. They don't know from shopping centers in this city.
When I first heard about the opening of Vaughan Mills, billed as the largest mall in Ontario, I was, predictably, intrigued. Of course, I couldn't just rush out to inspect the place. It's just over an hour from here, for one thing. For another, I hate crowds. So I settled down to wait out the Christmas shopping season.
It's March now. Close thing, but I think Christmas is over until at least the second of September.
As you exit the 400 at Bass Pro Mills Drive, the sheer size of this 1.2 million square foot behemoth rises up and bitch-slaps you a few times. It's beyond huge. Getting a parking spot was relatively easy, as we arrived just fifteen minutes after opening, but plan for a hefty hike if you get here in the afternoon.
Vaughan Mills is impossible to get lost in. It's shaped like the world's longest cigar, and it's organized into "neighbourhoods"--numbered 1 through 6--each of which has an entirely different decor. As I said above, there's actual carpeting in one area.
The tone ranges from middle class up to "God would have to save up for a century or two just to LOOK in here" . They hid the lone dollar store off at an end so that the third-class citizens wouldn't have to infect the rest of the shoppers. Otherwise, the only thing lacking here seems to be an apparel store for plus-sized women...an inexcusable oversight in a place this big. Mind you, there aren't that many places anywhere for plus-sized women to shop for clothing in comfort...an inexcusable oversight for a society this obese.
Here, let me step down off my soapbox.
One store that did make an immediate and eye-popping impression was the Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World. The mall directory designates this place as store A1, and brother, they're not kidding. There's a 24,000 gallon fish tank, fully stocked with bass, trout, salmon, muskie, and--well, that's all I could identify, but there were others. Two guys were giving a fishing demonstration when we entered, casting down into the tank again and again and pulling up fish just as fast, leading me to reflect that fish must be the world's dumbest class of beings. Hey, LOOK! FOOD! *chomp* *yank* *gasp gasp gasp* *splash* *whew!* Hey, LOOK! FOOD!"
If you use it outside, it's here in this store. My dad needs to come down here, right quick.
Other highlights: there's a huge piano outlet in here! Okay, I forgot, you're not me. Well, there's the cheapest place on the planet to buy board games; the world's largest Tommy Hilfiger outlet (you'd have to pay me to go in, but as I said, you're not me, right?) There are hat stores, sock stores, a Ben and Jerry's kiosk, and a Rocky Mountain chocolate outlet.
Vaughan Mills: It's a great place to spend a few--or a few thousand--bucks. Y'oughta see it.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Conflict
Tom from Children's Aid will be here once, perhaps twice more before he decides whether or not he can trust us with children, and if so, what kind of children.
We've finally moved off my childhood, which is a relief. I think Tom has simply given up on trying to understand that period of my life. I can't say I blame him. I don't understand that period of my life.
During a job interview, my wife was once asked, "how do you deal with deadlines?" Her response: "I meet them. I didn't know I had a choice."
I was tempted to answer last session's big question--"how do you deal with your anger?"--in the same flippant yet serious tone. Deal with anger? I just do. But that wasn't good enough for Tom; he kept trying to paint me into a corner. It was almost like he was trying to force a confession out of me. "Yeah, every once in a while, when I'm really pissed, I just haul off and punch people. Then I feel better."
Herewith, my mini-lecture on emotions. This is based on material from the Conversations with God series, and it's among many things from that series I try to keep in the back of my mind.
There are five natural emotions: grief, anger, envy, fear, and love. The last two, fear and love, are not only emotions themselves, but also filters for ALL emotion.
LOVE is a natural filter. If you take any of those natural emotions and filter them through love, you get a natural state. But if you use the other filter, FEAR, you get a corrupted, unnatural, damaging state.
To wit:
Grief, filtered through love, becomes sadness and mourning. Filtered through fear, it becomes despair and depression.
Anger, filtered through love, becomes compassion and a desire to correct or heal. Filtered through fear, it becomes rage.
Envy, filtered through love, yields a desire to grow. Filtered through fear, you get jealousy.
Fear, filtered through love, results in caution. Filtering fear through more fear results in panic.
Love, in the total absence of all fear, means freedom. Filter love through fear and you get possessiveness.
I try to always filter my emotions through love. I don't always succeed. But the nice thing about failing at this is that it's really easy to tell you've failed. All you have to do is stop and ask yourself what you're feeling. Is it natural? Or not? If not, where did the fear come from and how do you address it?
When I let fear mix with my anger, it's usually a stupid kind of fear: the fear of being wrong or appearing silly. Or it's a fear of being out of control--fear of the unknown. None of these are anything to be frightened of...or angry about. I've been wrong a lot, and it hasn't killed me yet. I've looked pretty damn silly, but few people think me stupid. And we all confront the unknown every single day just by getting out of bed.
If you let your emotions get the better of you, you can very easily forget all that.
---------
There came a telling moment midway through the session with Tom that I think convinced him just how different we are. While discussing anger, I mentioned that I kept a daily diary for the years 1988-1990, and related an anecdote contained therein. Eva confirmed that she had read the story, whereupon Tom blinked. (If you make a social worker blink, congratulations: you've shocked him.) "You've read his diary?" Tom asked Eva. I answered: "Of course she has--it was one of the first things I had her do when I realized we were getting serious. That's my life in there, and we were going to start sharing lives."
I can't be sure, but I think he blinked again. "That's the first time I've discussed somebody's diary with three people in the room."
Hopefully it won't be the last. I've shared my diary with everybody I've been attached to. You can learn a lot about a prospective partner from her reaction to your words penned years ago. One ex made the mistake of thinking decade-passed crushes and infatuations were still fresh in my head. Other people have simply wondered why I would share something so ostensibly private. That's easy: in opening up to someone, you expose your every flaw. If they can accept them all, you have the basis for a relationship.
-------
Next week, we are to discuss things Eva and I disagree on, and Tom warned us that he will try to provoke conflict to see how we deal with it.
This'll be fun.
Eva and I differ in a whole host of ways, most of them trivial. She, for instance, loves her television, whereas I (mostly) detest it...but don't separate me from my computer! Eva makes every effort to avoid news, while I seek it out. I confess I tend to seize on the worst-case scenario nearly every time, but then let it ago upon being reassured (admittedly, sometimes it takes three or four reassurances); Eva examines every possible scenario and loses sleep in the process. Stress impedes me; Eva thrives on it, to the point where its absence--on vacation, for example--will make her sick. And then, while she's sick, in the manner of women everywhere, you'd scarcely know it; I, meanwhile, treat every sniffle as an urgent call for immediate total bed rest. My wife has a deep and abiding love for all things animal; aside from pets (and a narrow definition of them at that--dogs and cats, mostly)--I don't care about animals one way or the other.
These aren't the sort of differences that provoke arguments. I've mostlly been cured of those. They invariably had to do with prejudice, things I hadn't bothered to think about. Some of them:
--tattoos and especially exotic piercings are for the criminal element. Yes, I believed this. I knew it to be true, actually. Look how many movies depict jailbirds with murals inked all over their bodies? And anybody willing to mutilate their own flesh by means of poking a bunch of holes in it might not hesitate to mutilate somebody else's, so you better stay clear.
Hard to believe I thought this way, once. I still shy away at inflicting pain on myself, but I was forced to re-evaluate my impressions on the matter when I met my wife, who has four tattoos and counting, and has also poked holes in her flesh.
Another thing pointing to my shallowness at one time: I didn't want to buy a house unless it was (a) a single detached and (b) in a "good" neighbourhood.
I'll never forget the first move we made as a family. It was 1980, and we were relocating to London...to a rented townhome. Upon realizing the finances weren't good enough at the time to get us a "proper" house, my mother burst into tears. To her way of thinking, living in a townhouse forever stained you as poor.
I've since lived--quite happily--in another townhouse, as well as a few apartments and semi-detached houses. But some of my mother's irrationality stuck with me, and I regarded such dwellings as temporary, things to be endured until I could afford a "real" house.
The "good neighbourhood" injunction was obvious. There's an old real estate maxim that states you should aim to buy the worst house in the best neighbourhood you can find. The house can be fixed up; it's much harder to "fix" a ghetto.
I've softened my stance on all this. Our neighbourhood is, by and large, pretty good. I admit I could do with a few less university students...it'll take more than ten years to wash that particular prejudice out. But few areas are so bad I would avoid living in them on general principle. And our semi-detached house is every inch a home I'm proud of.
One more--Vancouver is instituting safe injection sites for its population of addicted men and women. I was bitterly against this before Eva clarified my thinking. Why perpetuate people's addictions? I thought. The best thing to do with these people would be to lock them up, far from their "supply", and let them normalize. And if a few of them die in the process, well, then there'll be a few less brain-addled junkies in the world.
Real humane of me, don't you think? Eva very calmly told me that these brain-addled junkies were the remains of human beings from all walks of life. (I didn't understand this...having never felt the need to do drugs, I trivialized that need in other people. That's probably one of my worst faults: if I haven't had the experience of it, it doesn't exist, or isn't valid. I still need my nose rubbed in this on occasion.) Anyway, the downtown Eastside in Vancouver has the biggest concentration of AIDS cases in North America, and nobody needs or wants that scourge spreading around. And these people are human beings, people who no longer care about themselves, people whom nobody else cares about either. What could possibly be wrong with showing these folks that somebody does care, that somebody doesn't want them to die? Who knows, it might restore a sense of self worth, and then a life.
Not to mention--they'll take the drugs anyway, safely or not. Why not make it as safe as possible?
Doubtless more of these little pockets of alien thinking will surface in the years ahead. When confronted with one of these, Eva tends to say "Huh?! What the HELL are you thinking?" , dust her hands off, and dig into my brain, changing things as she goes, always for the better.
Conflict? Yes, we have it. But it's far from a defining point in this relationship. I hope, if nothing else, we can convince Tom of that.
We've finally moved off my childhood, which is a relief. I think Tom has simply given up on trying to understand that period of my life. I can't say I blame him. I don't understand that period of my life.
During a job interview, my wife was once asked, "how do you deal with deadlines?" Her response: "I meet them. I didn't know I had a choice."
I was tempted to answer last session's big question--"how do you deal with your anger?"--in the same flippant yet serious tone. Deal with anger? I just do. But that wasn't good enough for Tom; he kept trying to paint me into a corner. It was almost like he was trying to force a confession out of me. "Yeah, every once in a while, when I'm really pissed, I just haul off and punch people. Then I feel better."
Herewith, my mini-lecture on emotions. This is based on material from the Conversations with God series, and it's among many things from that series I try to keep in the back of my mind.
There are five natural emotions: grief, anger, envy, fear, and love. The last two, fear and love, are not only emotions themselves, but also filters for ALL emotion.
LOVE is a natural filter. If you take any of those natural emotions and filter them through love, you get a natural state. But if you use the other filter, FEAR, you get a corrupted, unnatural, damaging state.
To wit:
Grief, filtered through love, becomes sadness and mourning. Filtered through fear, it becomes despair and depression.
Anger, filtered through love, becomes compassion and a desire to correct or heal. Filtered through fear, it becomes rage.
Envy, filtered through love, yields a desire to grow. Filtered through fear, you get jealousy.
Fear, filtered through love, results in caution. Filtering fear through more fear results in panic.
Love, in the total absence of all fear, means freedom. Filter love through fear and you get possessiveness.
I try to always filter my emotions through love. I don't always succeed. But the nice thing about failing at this is that it's really easy to tell you've failed. All you have to do is stop and ask yourself what you're feeling. Is it natural? Or not? If not, where did the fear come from and how do you address it?
When I let fear mix with my anger, it's usually a stupid kind of fear: the fear of being wrong or appearing silly. Or it's a fear of being out of control--fear of the unknown. None of these are anything to be frightened of...or angry about. I've been wrong a lot, and it hasn't killed me yet. I've looked pretty damn silly, but few people think me stupid. And we all confront the unknown every single day just by getting out of bed.
If you let your emotions get the better of you, you can very easily forget all that.
---------
There came a telling moment midway through the session with Tom that I think convinced him just how different we are. While discussing anger, I mentioned that I kept a daily diary for the years 1988-1990, and related an anecdote contained therein. Eva confirmed that she had read the story, whereupon Tom blinked. (If you make a social worker blink, congratulations: you've shocked him.) "You've read his diary?" Tom asked Eva. I answered: "Of course she has--it was one of the first things I had her do when I realized we were getting serious. That's my life in there, and we were going to start sharing lives."
I can't be sure, but I think he blinked again. "That's the first time I've discussed somebody's diary with three people in the room."
Hopefully it won't be the last. I've shared my diary with everybody I've been attached to. You can learn a lot about a prospective partner from her reaction to your words penned years ago. One ex made the mistake of thinking decade-passed crushes and infatuations were still fresh in my head. Other people have simply wondered why I would share something so ostensibly private. That's easy: in opening up to someone, you expose your every flaw. If they can accept them all, you have the basis for a relationship.
-------
Next week, we are to discuss things Eva and I disagree on, and Tom warned us that he will try to provoke conflict to see how we deal with it.
This'll be fun.
Eva and I differ in a whole host of ways, most of them trivial. She, for instance, loves her television, whereas I (mostly) detest it...but don't separate me from my computer! Eva makes every effort to avoid news, while I seek it out. I confess I tend to seize on the worst-case scenario nearly every time, but then let it ago upon being reassured (admittedly, sometimes it takes three or four reassurances); Eva examines every possible scenario and loses sleep in the process. Stress impedes me; Eva thrives on it, to the point where its absence--on vacation, for example--will make her sick. And then, while she's sick, in the manner of women everywhere, you'd scarcely know it; I, meanwhile, treat every sniffle as an urgent call for immediate total bed rest. My wife has a deep and abiding love for all things animal; aside from pets (and a narrow definition of them at that--dogs and cats, mostly)--I don't care about animals one way or the other.
These aren't the sort of differences that provoke arguments. I've mostlly been cured of those. They invariably had to do with prejudice, things I hadn't bothered to think about. Some of them:
--tattoos and especially exotic piercings are for the criminal element. Yes, I believed this. I knew it to be true, actually. Look how many movies depict jailbirds with murals inked all over their bodies? And anybody willing to mutilate their own flesh by means of poking a bunch of holes in it might not hesitate to mutilate somebody else's, so you better stay clear.
Hard to believe I thought this way, once. I still shy away at inflicting pain on myself, but I was forced to re-evaluate my impressions on the matter when I met my wife, who has four tattoos and counting, and has also poked holes in her flesh.
Another thing pointing to my shallowness at one time: I didn't want to buy a house unless it was (a) a single detached and (b) in a "good" neighbourhood.
I'll never forget the first move we made as a family. It was 1980, and we were relocating to London...to a rented townhome. Upon realizing the finances weren't good enough at the time to get us a "proper" house, my mother burst into tears. To her way of thinking, living in a townhouse forever stained you as poor.
I've since lived--quite happily--in another townhouse, as well as a few apartments and semi-detached houses. But some of my mother's irrationality stuck with me, and I regarded such dwellings as temporary, things to be endured until I could afford a "real" house.
The "good neighbourhood" injunction was obvious. There's an old real estate maxim that states you should aim to buy the worst house in the best neighbourhood you can find. The house can be fixed up; it's much harder to "fix" a ghetto.
I've softened my stance on all this. Our neighbourhood is, by and large, pretty good. I admit I could do with a few less university students...it'll take more than ten years to wash that particular prejudice out. But few areas are so bad I would avoid living in them on general principle. And our semi-detached house is every inch a home I'm proud of.
One more--Vancouver is instituting safe injection sites for its population of addicted men and women. I was bitterly against this before Eva clarified my thinking. Why perpetuate people's addictions? I thought. The best thing to do with these people would be to lock them up, far from their "supply", and let them normalize. And if a few of them die in the process, well, then there'll be a few less brain-addled junkies in the world.
Real humane of me, don't you think? Eva very calmly told me that these brain-addled junkies were the remains of human beings from all walks of life. (I didn't understand this...having never felt the need to do drugs, I trivialized that need in other people. That's probably one of my worst faults: if I haven't had the experience of it, it doesn't exist, or isn't valid. I still need my nose rubbed in this on occasion.) Anyway, the downtown Eastside in Vancouver has the biggest concentration of AIDS cases in North America, and nobody needs or wants that scourge spreading around. And these people are human beings, people who no longer care about themselves, people whom nobody else cares about either. What could possibly be wrong with showing these folks that somebody does care, that somebody doesn't want them to die? Who knows, it might restore a sense of self worth, and then a life.
Not to mention--they'll take the drugs anyway, safely or not. Why not make it as safe as possible?
Doubtless more of these little pockets of alien thinking will surface in the years ahead. When confronted with one of these, Eva tends to say "Huh?! What the HELL are you thinking?" , dust her hands off, and dig into my brain, changing things as she goes, always for the better.
Conflict? Yes, we have it. But it's far from a defining point in this relationship. I hope, if nothing else, we can convince Tom of that.
Friday, March 04, 2005
R.I.P. CONSTABLE BROCK MYROL
CONSTABLE LEO JOHNSTON
CONSTABLE PETER SCHIEMANN
CONSTABLE ANTHONY GORDON
FALLEN IN THE LINE OF DUTY, MAINTAINING THE RIGHT
R.I.H....ROT IN HELL...JIM ROSZKO
Mayerthorpe. Rochfort Bridge. They sound like quaint English villages, the sorts of places where, on a daily basis, nothing makes a point of happening. News sometimes penetrates the town limits, but usually only in one direction. But every once in an old-timer's lifetime, reporters from all over scratch their heads in the newsroom and mutter "where the hell is that?" Whenever these places are referenced in the national news, always hundreds of kilometres from somewhere the viewing audience might possibly have heard of, you can be sure the event was sudden and horrible.
Those passing through such yawns in the road glance right, then left, and ten minutes later they've forgotten what that sign back there said. Those few who live here, though, feel the heartbeat of the town in their veins after a while: a soothing pulse that sounds like corn rustling. It's not a strong heartbeat, but it's steady.
On March 3, 2005, the heart of Rochfort Bridge went into tachycardia. And the heart of a national police force entered cardiac arrest as four of its Members were gunned down.
The suspect was known to police. Known very well, apparantly: the man's rap sheet was more like a rap book. The kind of guy who didn't feel quite right unless he was breaking a law. His dad had disowned him. His town dearly wanted to. By some unholy miracle, this piece of human excrement managed to get the drop on four peace officers. I dearly hope one of them was able to get off a killing shot of his own. I can't stand the thought that after murdering four cops--one recently engaged and none older than 33--this man could have been allowed the escape of suicide.
Drugs were at the root of this horror, as drugs so often are. Politics will therefore intrude on a nation's grief as each particular cause seeks to hijack this tragedy for its own ends. This is insult piled on obscenity, and yet it's also inevitable. When Chaos chews into our sane and ordered lives, we seek to fit it into our worldview, and never mind the jagged edges. So you'll hear how the demon weed needs to be expunged, and you'll hear that if pot was legal and regulated, this never would have happened. You'll hear the suspect's father say his son was a "wicked devil" ever since he first got involved with drugs, and you'll hear townspeople say he had a hate on for police, drugs or no. None of this posturing will bring those four constables back to life. None of it will resolve this picture into anything you'd want to look at. None of it makes sense.
Absolutely none.
CONSTABLE LEO JOHNSTON
CONSTABLE PETER SCHIEMANN
CONSTABLE ANTHONY GORDON
FALLEN IN THE LINE OF DUTY, MAINTAINING THE RIGHT
R.I.H....ROT IN HELL...JIM ROSZKO
Mayerthorpe. Rochfort Bridge. They sound like quaint English villages, the sorts of places where, on a daily basis, nothing makes a point of happening. News sometimes penetrates the town limits, but usually only in one direction. But every once in an old-timer's lifetime, reporters from all over scratch their heads in the newsroom and mutter "where the hell is that?" Whenever these places are referenced in the national news, always hundreds of kilometres from somewhere the viewing audience might possibly have heard of, you can be sure the event was sudden and horrible.
Those passing through such yawns in the road glance right, then left, and ten minutes later they've forgotten what that sign back there said. Those few who live here, though, feel the heartbeat of the town in their veins after a while: a soothing pulse that sounds like corn rustling. It's not a strong heartbeat, but it's steady.
On March 3, 2005, the heart of Rochfort Bridge went into tachycardia. And the heart of a national police force entered cardiac arrest as four of its Members were gunned down.
The suspect was known to police. Known very well, apparantly: the man's rap sheet was more like a rap book. The kind of guy who didn't feel quite right unless he was breaking a law. His dad had disowned him. His town dearly wanted to. By some unholy miracle, this piece of human excrement managed to get the drop on four peace officers. I dearly hope one of them was able to get off a killing shot of his own. I can't stand the thought that after murdering four cops--one recently engaged and none older than 33--this man could have been allowed the escape of suicide.
Drugs were at the root of this horror, as drugs so often are. Politics will therefore intrude on a nation's grief as each particular cause seeks to hijack this tragedy for its own ends. This is insult piled on obscenity, and yet it's also inevitable. When Chaos chews into our sane and ordered lives, we seek to fit it into our worldview, and never mind the jagged edges. So you'll hear how the demon weed needs to be expunged, and you'll hear that if pot was legal and regulated, this never would have happened. You'll hear the suspect's father say his son was a "wicked devil" ever since he first got involved with drugs, and you'll hear townspeople say he had a hate on for police, drugs or no. None of this posturing will bring those four constables back to life. None of it will resolve this picture into anything you'd want to look at. None of it makes sense.
Absolutely none.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Bonehead Move, Dithers
BMD: Ballistic Missile Defense. Just another in a long series of gaffes by our Prime Minister.
Look, Martin: I know you're leading a minority government, but just how minor do you want to look? Because you're looking petty, petulant, and pointless right now.
There are some people in your party who are cheering you, and I think Layton was considering naming you an honourary member of the New Democratic Party the other day. Way to stand up to those damn Yankee bastards, eh Paul? In pulling your moral support, you stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks.
Didn't you?
Okay, maybe not, but you delayed it, then, right?
No?
So this missile shield is going to be built anyway. At least you saved Canada a few billion dollars that the United States was asking us to kick in.
They didn't want any money?
Hmm. Oh! I get it! Somebody fed you a line about "the weaponization of space".And you know most Canadians are against that.
Well, Paul, I'll let you in on a little secret. BMD is a land-based system. So I'm guessing those pesky Americans were insisting on firing missiles from Canadian soil.
They weren't? In fact, they agreed not to?
Mr. Martin, with all due respect, I'm running out of objections here.
Canada has no enemies, right? We're that nice country backwater staying quietly in the background, standing up for nothing and offending nobody.
Even if you can ignore the tapes, purportedly from al-Qaeda, that name Canada as a potential target, you surely can't ignore our southern neighbour. Remember them? Those Yankees sure do have a bunch of enemies, don't they?
I'd like you to play a little game with me, Mr. Prime Minister. Can you think of a country, commonly thought of as a rogue state, that has been clamoring for nukes for years now...and threatening to use them? Their "Dear Leader" is widely considered to be among the most evil and megalomaniacal heads of state in the world today.
That's right! It's North Korea!
Let's just suppose they were to acquire the means to fire off a missile at the Pacific Coast of North America. Do you trust Kim Jong-il not to do it? Remember, the man's insane.
Here, follow me a little further out on my limb here. Let's imagine the unimaginable. Kim Jong-il has launched a missile at North America. This incoming bogey is based on Russian technology outdated a generation ago. As smart bombs go, this one's really kind of stupid.
It was aimed at San Francisco, but there was this malfunction, see? And now it's heading right for the Lion's Gate Bridge in Vancouver. Oops.
I know you'd like to think Dear Kim's pitching fits because his missile is off course. But you know, I don't think he cares overmuch. And even if he did, your problem remains. In about seven minutes it'll get exponentially bigger, too. But because you saved face in front of those Washington wackos, you no longer have a say in if, when or where the intercept happens. Well done, thou dithering, flip-flopping Liberal bumbler.
I'm left with one last-ditch argument...did you decide not to sign on to BMD because somewhere in your heart of hearts, you think George Dubya Bush is crazy?
Well, God knows there are more than a dozen Canadians who agree with you. So riddle me this, Mr. Prime MInister: what do you do with a crazy man and his crazy ideas? Particularly if he's a really powerful crazy man?
Do you humour him, since he's only asking for moral, not monetary or material, support? Then maybe, just maybe, yours will be a voice of reason? Or do you antagonize him and publically embarrass him and make sure your voice is shut out altogether?
The prudent course seems obvious to this lowly Canadian. So, Paul, please enlighten me.
What was your motive? Did you think that somehow you were striking a blow for Canadian sovereignty by turning over all decision on our defense to the President of the United States? If so, boy, do you need a few home truths knocked into you.
Look: Canada is not a sovereign country any more, and hasn't been for quite some time. It lost its sovereignty when it lost any meaningful capability to defend itself. I know, I know, we do not speak of these things. But somebody really ought to point out that the "new clothes" we Canadians are wearing are suspiciously transparent and without mass.
The only thing stopping the barbarians from taking us over is the United States. They've been silently defending us, basically for free, for decades now. Instead of gratitude, we pay them back with crass and sass and a diplomatic kick in the ass. Not all that surprisingly, resentment is building south of 49.
How long do you think it'll be before Washington decides we're not worth all this bother and simply takes us over? Ten years? Twenty? Surely no more than thirty.
Call me paranoid if you must. But don't think us paranoids are always wrong.
Look, Martin: I know you're leading a minority government, but just how minor do you want to look? Because you're looking petty, petulant, and pointless right now.
There are some people in your party who are cheering you, and I think Layton was considering naming you an honourary member of the New Democratic Party the other day. Way to stand up to those damn Yankee bastards, eh Paul? In pulling your moral support, you stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks.
Didn't you?
Okay, maybe not, but you delayed it, then, right?
No?
So this missile shield is going to be built anyway. At least you saved Canada a few billion dollars that the United States was asking us to kick in.
They didn't want any money?
Hmm. Oh! I get it! Somebody fed you a line about "the weaponization of space".And you know most Canadians are against that.
Well, Paul, I'll let you in on a little secret. BMD is a land-based system. So I'm guessing those pesky Americans were insisting on firing missiles from Canadian soil.
They weren't? In fact, they agreed not to?
Mr. Martin, with all due respect, I'm running out of objections here.
Canada has no enemies, right? We're that nice country backwater staying quietly in the background, standing up for nothing and offending nobody.
Even if you can ignore the tapes, purportedly from al-Qaeda, that name Canada as a potential target, you surely can't ignore our southern neighbour. Remember them? Those Yankees sure do have a bunch of enemies, don't they?
I'd like you to play a little game with me, Mr. Prime Minister. Can you think of a country, commonly thought of as a rogue state, that has been clamoring for nukes for years now...and threatening to use them? Their "Dear Leader" is widely considered to be among the most evil and megalomaniacal heads of state in the world today.
That's right! It's North Korea!
Let's just suppose they were to acquire the means to fire off a missile at the Pacific Coast of North America. Do you trust Kim Jong-il not to do it? Remember, the man's insane.
Here, follow me a little further out on my limb here. Let's imagine the unimaginable. Kim Jong-il has launched a missile at North America. This incoming bogey is based on Russian technology outdated a generation ago. As smart bombs go, this one's really kind of stupid.
It was aimed at San Francisco, but there was this malfunction, see? And now it's heading right for the Lion's Gate Bridge in Vancouver. Oops.
I know you'd like to think Dear Kim's pitching fits because his missile is off course. But you know, I don't think he cares overmuch. And even if he did, your problem remains. In about seven minutes it'll get exponentially bigger, too. But because you saved face in front of those Washington wackos, you no longer have a say in if, when or where the intercept happens. Well done, thou dithering, flip-flopping Liberal bumbler.
I'm left with one last-ditch argument...did you decide not to sign on to BMD because somewhere in your heart of hearts, you think George Dubya Bush is crazy?
Well, God knows there are more than a dozen Canadians who agree with you. So riddle me this, Mr. Prime MInister: what do you do with a crazy man and his crazy ideas? Particularly if he's a really powerful crazy man?
Do you humour him, since he's only asking for moral, not monetary or material, support? Then maybe, just maybe, yours will be a voice of reason? Or do you antagonize him and publically embarrass him and make sure your voice is shut out altogether?
The prudent course seems obvious to this lowly Canadian. So, Paul, please enlighten me.
What was your motive? Did you think that somehow you were striking a blow for Canadian sovereignty by turning over all decision on our defense to the President of the United States? If so, boy, do you need a few home truths knocked into you.
Look: Canada is not a sovereign country any more, and hasn't been for quite some time. It lost its sovereignty when it lost any meaningful capability to defend itself. I know, I know, we do not speak of these things. But somebody really ought to point out that the "new clothes" we Canadians are wearing are suspiciously transparent and without mass.
The only thing stopping the barbarians from taking us over is the United States. They've been silently defending us, basically for free, for decades now. Instead of gratitude, we pay them back with crass and sass and a diplomatic kick in the ass. Not all that surprisingly, resentment is building south of 49.
How long do you think it'll be before Washington decides we're not worth all this bother and simply takes us over? Ten years? Twenty? Surely no more than thirty.
Call me paranoid if you must. But don't think us paranoids are always wrong.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
The pitter-patter of past and future...
If life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car
And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are
--Meat Loaf
The incomparable Mr Loaf, power tenor in such rock opera classics as Paradise by the Dashboard Light and I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That), occasionally acheives something deceptively profound in his lyrics. I think so, anyway.
My life could change in as little as a couple of months. It could take longer, possibly a lot longer; and there's still a chance that Family and Children's Services may decide placing children with us would be a disservice. The probability of that depends on who you ask. Eva says there's nothing to worry about. I'm not quite so sanguine. And Tom, emissary from that bewildering continent called Sewshullwurkur, is not exactly scrutable on the subject.
The chief concern emanating from Sewshullwurkur is that I will physically discipline my adopted children, as I was once (for the first eight years of my life) physically disciplined. At any rate, this is the only concern Tom has alluded to aloud.
It's not a valid concern. There have been probably two or three occasions in my life when I have gone beyond anger into rage. At one of those points, stipulated, I knocked a kid out with one punch, doubtless surprising him, certainly frightening his friends, and outright shocking me. The accused pleads self-defense: had I not launched that pre-emptive strike, I could well have been the one on the floor ten or thirty seconds later.
That kid was a stranger to me. That in itself doesn't mitigate my attack--I'm of the mind that his wanting to bash my skull in rather does. He probably awoke with a headache and a newly formed conviction not to underestimate stick-figure geeks. That one punch might have saved some poor nerd's life, down the line.
The other rare times a red haze has decended over my vision, I was in the company of a person I knew and loved. I'll spare you the details of those encounters...some things are entirely too personal even for a man as open as I am. Suffice it to say that in one of them, a woman repeatedly punched me without provocation; in the other, another woman hit me with verbal jabs in rapid succession that packed every bit the power of punches.
Neither of those woman was touched in response. In both cases, I staggered away unable to think coherently, but possessed of a single overwhelming imperative that pounded in time with my pulse: DON'T HIT BACK.
Yes, I was physically punished as a kid, as was my mother before me and doubtless her father before her. I know that in the current social climate I'm supposed to acknowledge that this turned me into a potential, if not an actual, monster. That's crap, and a moment's thought will convince most anyone why: if it were true, there'd be quite a large proportion of monsters walking around. Post hoc, prompter hoc was a logical fallacy in ancient Rome, and it still is.
But being spanked didn't teach me much of value, nor did the pronouncements that accompanied each whack on the butt:
"This hurts me more than it hurts you!"
Oh, really? Tell you what, I'll trade you then!"
And in my case, being spanked was even less of a deterrent. After my mother spanked me, oftentimes she'd be so wracked with guilt that dinner out or a new toy would follow. So misbehaviour became a sure-fire attention-getting device: endure the pain and reap the gain.
That's not something I want my kids to learn.
The whole purpose of having kids, for us, is to teach them and learn from them and set them free in the world knowing they'll make a difference. What difference is entirely up to them. Hitting them won't accomplish any of this.
This is the kind of thing I do: mine the past for clues to the present and thus the future. As something life-altering approaches, I tend to retreat into my past. Fear plays a bit of a role here, I'll admit: but I don't rush headlong into the past in an effort to avoid the future. Instead, I simply look back along the highway to see where I've come from. It shows me where I am, and reaffirms I'm on the right highway.
In this mood, objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.
The last time I was here in the past was the night before I got married. Three or four hours went by in the real world; three or four actual lifetimes went by in my mind, along with a whole host of imagined alternate lifetimes. The imagined paths--what if I'd actually had the guts to take her broad hints at face value and ask Audrey out?--were fun to tread, but they lacked the signposts I could clearly see behind me and ahead of me: "Ken--THIS WAY!" I looked back through the valleys of mistakes made and lessons learned, gradually understanding that on some level of higher consciousness, I had put everyone in my life to better realize who I am. Seen in this light, you not only forgive people their trespasses, you comprehend there's no such thing as trespasses and therefore nothing to forgive. Whatever you thought at the time.
Kids like me. Always have. I'm not sure why. Well, part of it is probably that I treat them like people. I try not to talk down to them and I make a real effort to engage. My cousin, back when she was about eight, used to beg for my ghost stories. Years later, at her wedding, she told me that she still remembered a couple of them and the sleepless nights she endured because of them. That felt like high praise to me.
At large gatherings, I'm always the adult most likely to go out and throw/kick a ball around with the kids, at least for the ten or fifteen minutes it takes to warm them up and thoroughly exhaust me. That's kind of funny, actually. For a large portion of my life I was apt to dismiss all manner of things as childish and unworthy of my attention. (I was shut of cartoons at about ten.) But confronted with adults in large groups, I'd quickly scuttle back into Kidland.
You learn things there. You learn that children have three major wants: to be recognized as children, treated like adults, and loved for themselves. Balancing the first two while maintaining, unconditionally, the third will be the challenge of being a parent. It'a a challenge I think I'm up to.
My feelings about kids haven't changed much over the years. There's a sense of duty, almost overpowering at times. But miixed with that is a very welcome sense of fun and frivolity that I didn't permit myself when I was that age. I conclude that, at least in this respect, I'm fairly normal. That's a relief.
And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are
--Meat Loaf
The incomparable Mr Loaf, power tenor in such rock opera classics as Paradise by the Dashboard Light and I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That), occasionally acheives something deceptively profound in his lyrics. I think so, anyway.
My life could change in as little as a couple of months. It could take longer, possibly a lot longer; and there's still a chance that Family and Children's Services may decide placing children with us would be a disservice. The probability of that depends on who you ask. Eva says there's nothing to worry about. I'm not quite so sanguine. And Tom, emissary from that bewildering continent called Sewshullwurkur, is not exactly scrutable on the subject.
The chief concern emanating from Sewshullwurkur is that I will physically discipline my adopted children, as I was once (for the first eight years of my life) physically disciplined. At any rate, this is the only concern Tom has alluded to aloud.
It's not a valid concern. There have been probably two or three occasions in my life when I have gone beyond anger into rage. At one of those points, stipulated, I knocked a kid out with one punch, doubtless surprising him, certainly frightening his friends, and outright shocking me. The accused pleads self-defense: had I not launched that pre-emptive strike, I could well have been the one on the floor ten or thirty seconds later.
That kid was a stranger to me. That in itself doesn't mitigate my attack--I'm of the mind that his wanting to bash my skull in rather does. He probably awoke with a headache and a newly formed conviction not to underestimate stick-figure geeks. That one punch might have saved some poor nerd's life, down the line.
The other rare times a red haze has decended over my vision, I was in the company of a person I knew and loved. I'll spare you the details of those encounters...some things are entirely too personal even for a man as open as I am. Suffice it to say that in one of them, a woman repeatedly punched me without provocation; in the other, another woman hit me with verbal jabs in rapid succession that packed every bit the power of punches.
Neither of those woman was touched in response. In both cases, I staggered away unable to think coherently, but possessed of a single overwhelming imperative that pounded in time with my pulse: DON'T HIT BACK.
Yes, I was physically punished as a kid, as was my mother before me and doubtless her father before her. I know that in the current social climate I'm supposed to acknowledge that this turned me into a potential, if not an actual, monster. That's crap, and a moment's thought will convince most anyone why: if it were true, there'd be quite a large proportion of monsters walking around. Post hoc, prompter hoc was a logical fallacy in ancient Rome, and it still is.
But being spanked didn't teach me much of value, nor did the pronouncements that accompanied each whack on the butt:
"This hurts me more than it hurts you!"
Oh, really? Tell you what, I'll trade you then!"
And in my case, being spanked was even less of a deterrent. After my mother spanked me, oftentimes she'd be so wracked with guilt that dinner out or a new toy would follow. So misbehaviour became a sure-fire attention-getting device: endure the pain and reap the gain.
That's not something I want my kids to learn.
The whole purpose of having kids, for us, is to teach them and learn from them and set them free in the world knowing they'll make a difference. What difference is entirely up to them. Hitting them won't accomplish any of this.
This is the kind of thing I do: mine the past for clues to the present and thus the future. As something life-altering approaches, I tend to retreat into my past. Fear plays a bit of a role here, I'll admit: but I don't rush headlong into the past in an effort to avoid the future. Instead, I simply look back along the highway to see where I've come from. It shows me where I am, and reaffirms I'm on the right highway.
In this mood, objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.
The last time I was here in the past was the night before I got married. Three or four hours went by in the real world; three or four actual lifetimes went by in my mind, along with a whole host of imagined alternate lifetimes. The imagined paths--what if I'd actually had the guts to take her broad hints at face value and ask Audrey out?--were fun to tread, but they lacked the signposts I could clearly see behind me and ahead of me: "Ken--THIS WAY!" I looked back through the valleys of mistakes made and lessons learned, gradually understanding that on some level of higher consciousness, I had put everyone in my life to better realize who I am. Seen in this light, you not only forgive people their trespasses, you comprehend there's no such thing as trespasses and therefore nothing to forgive. Whatever you thought at the time.
Kids like me. Always have. I'm not sure why. Well, part of it is probably that I treat them like people. I try not to talk down to them and I make a real effort to engage. My cousin, back when she was about eight, used to beg for my ghost stories. Years later, at her wedding, she told me that she still remembered a couple of them and the sleepless nights she endured because of them. That felt like high praise to me.
At large gatherings, I'm always the adult most likely to go out and throw/kick a ball around with the kids, at least for the ten or fifteen minutes it takes to warm them up and thoroughly exhaust me. That's kind of funny, actually. For a large portion of my life I was apt to dismiss all manner of things as childish and unworthy of my attention. (I was shut of cartoons at about ten.) But confronted with adults in large groups, I'd quickly scuttle back into Kidland.
You learn things there. You learn that children have three major wants: to be recognized as children, treated like adults, and loved for themselves. Balancing the first two while maintaining, unconditionally, the third will be the challenge of being a parent. It'a a challenge I think I'm up to.
My feelings about kids haven't changed much over the years. There's a sense of duty, almost overpowering at times. But miixed with that is a very welcome sense of fun and frivolity that I didn't permit myself when I was that age. I conclude that, at least in this respect, I'm fairly normal. That's a relief.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
In the year 2525...
....the Liberal government has allocated $1.94 trillion dollars for interstellar highway repairs.
Okay, so that wasn't part of this budget, but damn it, it might as well have been. Pretty much everything else was in there, packaged in such a way as to appeal to the wide spectrum of Canadians who haven't quite mastered the fine art of thinking for themselves...not to mention the science of telling time.
Sadly, Stephen Harper seems to be one of that group. "There's certainly nothing in here that justifies calling an election", he says. "This budget's priorities are Conservative priorities", he says.
By Coservative priorities, Harper means tax cuts and defense spending. Harper and Goodale must be working from a different definition of the word "priority". Yes, Finance Minister Goodale has cut your taxes...by $16 for this year for the average Canadian. Don't spend that all in one place, okay? As for revitalizing our decrepit Armed Forces, the government has pledged $12.8 billion over five years to this cause. That sounds like a lot--it's the net worth of seven or eight NHL team owners, or about a quarter of Bill Gates' portfolio--but in reality, a goodish chunk of it is just money already promised being moved around. The majority of the genuine new spending is slated for four or five years from now. That's plenty of time to change, well, everything.
WHY do governments do budgets five or seven years ahead? Do they honestly think those numbers mean something?
My wife does budgets six months in advance. I think this is pretty sensible. We've got a pretty good idea where we are right now and where we'll be in half a year. Sure, we've sat down and discussed a five year plan, but doing an actual budget that far ahead is almost an exercise in random number generation.
It's even worse if you're a government. There is, quite simply, no way of knowing where your economy will be in five years. It could be booming, for sure, but it could just as easily be in the crapper. And the chances of PM still being P.M. in 2009 are...what's that thing that controls my television? Oh yeah, "remote".
This budget is actually a trial election platform. That's all it is, nothing less and certainly nothing more. Minority governments rarely last their full terms. This one admittedly could, because the Bloc has a vested interest in the status quo. But I wouldn't bet too many after-tax dollars on it.
So, as election platform, how does this stack up?
On the surface, it looks pretty good, doesn't it? The government has promised to spend lots and lots of your dollars, and in ways you've been baaa-ing about. Overall spending is up 11.8% and will keep rising through this five year plan the Liberals would like us to pretend we're locked in to. Four point three billion for health care. No specifics, at least none I've been able to locate, but hey, it's for health care! We like health care, right?
Five billion over five years for a national child care program. Pardon me for being a bit paranoid here, but after HRDC, the gun registry and Adscam, the last thing we need is a brand-spanking-new bureaucracy whisking our children away to become good little Liberals. (On second thought, "spanking"' is probably an ill-advised choice of words.)
I have a real problem with the notion of a national daycare system. I think the government would be much better off devising ways to allow parents to raise their own children. A huge majority of parents would do so "if they could afford it", according to a recent poll. My belief is that many people can't afford not to raise their kids themselves, but that's just me talking. Regardless, handing our kids over to Big Government to raise brings us one step closer to a Brave New World that I for one would just as soon not contemplate.
Goodale has, as I've said, effected some extremely modest tax relief for individuals, most of it for once upon a future time, far, far away. He's done the same thing for corporations, but our companies are still among the most heavily taxed in the free world. Way to goose the economy, boys. Good job.
There's money for Kyoto, too. Like everything else, there's money but no plan. I am not one of those people you've heard lately who say Kyoto is junk science, that it's a huge waste of time and money, that since the United States hasn't signed on there's no sense in anyone else doing so. Meeting the Kyoto Protocol would be a great way of thinking globally and actling locally, and who cares what anyone else does or doesn't do? We'd be doing our part. Despite the whining of Rick Mercer, nobody's actually told us what our part is, but what the heck, the plan we don't have only came into effect last week.
Lifting the 30% foreign content cap on RRSPs is about the only unqualified good thing Goodale's done. I'm all for investing in Canada, so long as Canada's worth investing in. (As an aside, I object to an artificially low dollar for much the same reason. Too many companies use it as a crutch.)
That's all for this year. Wait until next year, when everything will change!
Okay, so that wasn't part of this budget, but damn it, it might as well have been. Pretty much everything else was in there, packaged in such a way as to appeal to the wide spectrum of Canadians who haven't quite mastered the fine art of thinking for themselves...not to mention the science of telling time.
Sadly, Stephen Harper seems to be one of that group. "There's certainly nothing in here that justifies calling an election", he says. "This budget's priorities are Conservative priorities", he says.
By Coservative priorities, Harper means tax cuts and defense spending. Harper and Goodale must be working from a different definition of the word "priority". Yes, Finance Minister Goodale has cut your taxes...by $16 for this year for the average Canadian. Don't spend that all in one place, okay? As for revitalizing our decrepit Armed Forces, the government has pledged $12.8 billion over five years to this cause. That sounds like a lot--it's the net worth of seven or eight NHL team owners, or about a quarter of Bill Gates' portfolio--but in reality, a goodish chunk of it is just money already promised being moved around. The majority of the genuine new spending is slated for four or five years from now. That's plenty of time to change, well, everything.
WHY do governments do budgets five or seven years ahead? Do they honestly think those numbers mean something?
My wife does budgets six months in advance. I think this is pretty sensible. We've got a pretty good idea where we are right now and where we'll be in half a year. Sure, we've sat down and discussed a five year plan, but doing an actual budget that far ahead is almost an exercise in random number generation.
It's even worse if you're a government. There is, quite simply, no way of knowing where your economy will be in five years. It could be booming, for sure, but it could just as easily be in the crapper. And the chances of PM still being P.M. in 2009 are...what's that thing that controls my television? Oh yeah, "remote".
This budget is actually a trial election platform. That's all it is, nothing less and certainly nothing more. Minority governments rarely last their full terms. This one admittedly could, because the Bloc has a vested interest in the status quo. But I wouldn't bet too many after-tax dollars on it.
So, as election platform, how does this stack up?
On the surface, it looks pretty good, doesn't it? The government has promised to spend lots and lots of your dollars, and in ways you've been baaa-ing about. Overall spending is up 11.8% and will keep rising through this five year plan the Liberals would like us to pretend we're locked in to. Four point three billion for health care. No specifics, at least none I've been able to locate, but hey, it's for health care! We like health care, right?
Five billion over five years for a national child care program. Pardon me for being a bit paranoid here, but after HRDC, the gun registry and Adscam, the last thing we need is a brand-spanking-new bureaucracy whisking our children away to become good little Liberals. (On second thought, "spanking"' is probably an ill-advised choice of words.)
I have a real problem with the notion of a national daycare system. I think the government would be much better off devising ways to allow parents to raise their own children. A huge majority of parents would do so "if they could afford it", according to a recent poll. My belief is that many people can't afford not to raise their kids themselves, but that's just me talking. Regardless, handing our kids over to Big Government to raise brings us one step closer to a Brave New World that I for one would just as soon not contemplate.
Goodale has, as I've said, effected some extremely modest tax relief for individuals, most of it for once upon a future time, far, far away. He's done the same thing for corporations, but our companies are still among the most heavily taxed in the free world. Way to goose the economy, boys. Good job.
There's money for Kyoto, too. Like everything else, there's money but no plan. I am not one of those people you've heard lately who say Kyoto is junk science, that it's a huge waste of time and money, that since the United States hasn't signed on there's no sense in anyone else doing so. Meeting the Kyoto Protocol would be a great way of thinking globally and actling locally, and who cares what anyone else does or doesn't do? We'd be doing our part. Despite the whining of Rick Mercer, nobody's actually told us what our part is, but what the heck, the plan we don't have only came into effect last week.
Lifting the 30% foreign content cap on RRSPs is about the only unqualified good thing Goodale's done. I'm all for investing in Canada, so long as Canada's worth investing in. (As an aside, I object to an artificially low dollar for much the same reason. Too many companies use it as a crutch.)
That's all for this year. Wait until next year, when everything will change!
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
As I mentioned in my last post, I enjoy watching Antiques Roadshow. But only the American version.
This will be high treason to certain friends of mine, but I detest the original, British version. Everyone bringing objects to the appraisers in Britain has evidently been told that showing the slightest hint of emotion will instantly cut the value of their object by nine tenths. Fifty pounds, ten thousand pounds, it's all the same to these people.All of the enthusiasm just gets leached out of the show. You're left with items, some of them admittedly quite interesting, none of them worth half as much as you think they should be.
The American version, by contrast, has a whole whack of emotion: shock ("How much did you say this thing's worth? Really?? Wow!"); joy (some people act as if they've just put in a winning bid for a fabulous showcase on The Price Is Right); even dismay, when the unwitting dupe is told he's been had, that the $10,000 artifact he has worshipped for years is really a $100 fake.
Some of the items that come up on the American Roadshow are amazing in and of themselves. The original "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter. I was stunned to find out it had a value of only $35,000.That letter is known worldwide. You'd think it'd be double that, at least.
I always have fun trying to guess the value of each object. I'm often awaaaaaaay off. I have formulated Antiques Roadshow rules, but I often forget them. That I might remember them in a moment of heated appraisal, here they be:
1) The uglier the vase, the more it's worth.
2) In most cases, age has absoluely nothing to do with value. I have seen artifacts from before Christ valued at a couple of thousand dollars.
3) Jewellery is seldom worth more than an equivalent weight in gold.
4) Many objects seem to appreciate at exactly the rate of inflation.
5) A perfectly ordinary item can instantly quintuple in value if it can be proven that somebody Important once looked at it. I've NEVER understood this principle, but it is universal.
The other thing I enjoy about Antiques Roadshow is watching the appraisers strut their stuff. "This handkerchief was manufactured on the third floor of 436 East Knowitall Avenue in Smartypants, New Jersey, on August 8th, 1842. The factory was owned by Abraham Lincoln's third cousin's servant's illegitimate son. If you look on the upper left you can just make out a petrified piece of snot blown from the nose of Lord Hottootrot in 1875. This raises the value of the handkerchief. Unfortunately, it looks as though an ordinary Bic lighter has burned away this portion here in the lower right. I think it was a blue lighter, though it could possibly have been more of a teal colour. If that lighter had been one of the rare chartruese ones, we could safely estimate the value of this handkerchief to be $2000. Instead, it's only worth about $1700."
You can't help but shiver in the wake of such arcane knowledge so confidently blurted out.
Iamagine my excitement when I heard there was going to be a Canadian Antiques Roadshow. Great, I thought. Now we'll see what kind of things are scuttling around the objects of people I might actually know.
Not much, as it turns out.
With the exception of one painting valued at half a million Canadian dollars, most everything I have seen to date was trifling, and some of the things are damn near worthless. To hear an appraiser profile something at length and then come out with a figure of $300 (and that in deflated Canadian currency, no less!) is to wince and sigh and reach for the remote. Also, these appraisers don't seem to know much at all. "This plate, it's English, it's worth about $500" is all the information the viewer gets, sometimes.
And Valerie Pringle! Can somebody slip some downers into her coffee, please? A manic person would tell her to chill out a bit. Her voice is so gratingly cheerful that it actually hurts my ear.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For those of you awaiting my take on the federal budget, never fear. I will digest it tomorrow and spew forth my observations.
Bye for now.
This will be high treason to certain friends of mine, but I detest the original, British version. Everyone bringing objects to the appraisers in Britain has evidently been told that showing the slightest hint of emotion will instantly cut the value of their object by nine tenths. Fifty pounds, ten thousand pounds, it's all the same to these people.All of the enthusiasm just gets leached out of the show. You're left with items, some of them admittedly quite interesting, none of them worth half as much as you think they should be.
The American version, by contrast, has a whole whack of emotion: shock ("How much did you say this thing's worth? Really?? Wow!"); joy (some people act as if they've just put in a winning bid for a fabulous showcase on The Price Is Right); even dismay, when the unwitting dupe is told he's been had, that the $10,000 artifact he has worshipped for years is really a $100 fake.
Some of the items that come up on the American Roadshow are amazing in and of themselves. The original "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter. I was stunned to find out it had a value of only $35,000.That letter is known worldwide. You'd think it'd be double that, at least.
I always have fun trying to guess the value of each object. I'm often awaaaaaaay off. I have formulated Antiques Roadshow rules, but I often forget them. That I might remember them in a moment of heated appraisal, here they be:
1) The uglier the vase, the more it's worth.
2) In most cases, age has absoluely nothing to do with value. I have seen artifacts from before Christ valued at a couple of thousand dollars.
3) Jewellery is seldom worth more than an equivalent weight in gold.
4) Many objects seem to appreciate at exactly the rate of inflation.
5) A perfectly ordinary item can instantly quintuple in value if it can be proven that somebody Important once looked at it. I've NEVER understood this principle, but it is universal.
The other thing I enjoy about Antiques Roadshow is watching the appraisers strut their stuff. "This handkerchief was manufactured on the third floor of 436 East Knowitall Avenue in Smartypants, New Jersey, on August 8th, 1842. The factory was owned by Abraham Lincoln's third cousin's servant's illegitimate son. If you look on the upper left you can just make out a petrified piece of snot blown from the nose of Lord Hottootrot in 1875. This raises the value of the handkerchief. Unfortunately, it looks as though an ordinary Bic lighter has burned away this portion here in the lower right. I think it was a blue lighter, though it could possibly have been more of a teal colour. If that lighter had been one of the rare chartruese ones, we could safely estimate the value of this handkerchief to be $2000. Instead, it's only worth about $1700."
You can't help but shiver in the wake of such arcane knowledge so confidently blurted out.
Iamagine my excitement when I heard there was going to be a Canadian Antiques Roadshow. Great, I thought. Now we'll see what kind of things are scuttling around the objects of people I might actually know.
Not much, as it turns out.
With the exception of one painting valued at half a million Canadian dollars, most everything I have seen to date was trifling, and some of the things are damn near worthless. To hear an appraiser profile something at length and then come out with a figure of $300 (and that in deflated Canadian currency, no less!) is to wince and sigh and reach for the remote. Also, these appraisers don't seem to know much at all. "This plate, it's English, it's worth about $500" is all the information the viewer gets, sometimes.
And Valerie Pringle! Can somebody slip some downers into her coffee, please? A manic person would tell her to chill out a bit. Her voice is so gratingly cheerful that it actually hurts my ear.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For those of you awaiting my take on the federal budget, never fear. I will digest it tomorrow and spew forth my observations.
Bye for now.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Bland is grand...
At the ripe old age of 33, I must proclaim that I Am An Old Fart.
I don't look like one, unless you're fifteen. But oh God do I act like one.
I go to bed between nine and ten at night...sometimes earlier. Even on Saturday nights, when there is no reason for me not to stay up. I watch old farty things like Antiques Roadshow and enjoy it. These days, nearly every artist who wins a Grammy is an artist I've never heard of.
No, I'll tell you just how much of a fogey I am: my meals are planned. Not all of them, I hasten to add, but quite a few of them. Wednesday night's supper is often roast chicken; Thursday night is stew night; Friday night brings pork chops. Sunday lunch is almost always grilled cheese sandwiches and soup...and it's usually the same soup.
And you know what? I like it this way.
We just managed to settle into this routine, almost unnoticed, and by now I've gone beyond acknowledging the routine: I feel the need to celebrate it. The meals become touchstones in the week, events to look forward to.
I am a simple man with simple tastes, easily pleased. I know that this, above all, causes a stale odor of wrinkled butt to cling to me. And I don't care.
It's not as if I didn't come through chaos to get here. Actually, I created a good deal of it for myself.
Life used to be quite different, and not all that long ago, either...
1997
They say money can't buy happiness. In testing this assumption I have learned that money can buy nearly infinite varieties of loneliness. and boredom. You can eat nearly every meal out if you want, but an endless smorgasbord eventually pales...as does your wallet, rather more rapidly. You can go to a theater to watch Hollywood's latest release twice a week, and sooner or later you realize that most of what Hollywood releases should never have been caught in the first place.
It's taken this thought a long time to occur to me. Like human beings everywhere, my standard solution to the pain I felt was to keep doing exactly what I'd been doing all along, only more of it. Search long enough, I thought, and I'd find The Good Stuff--whatever that was.
I work at 7-Eleven. Mostly nights. I won't bore you with the stories about obnoxious asshole drunks...if you've met me I've probably told you enough stories as it is. Some day, maybe, I'll write all that down in some online diary someplace. Right now I'm just too damn tired.
The fatigue is all-encompassing. It defines my life. I've come to think of it as a garment, a tight-fitting, malodorous strait-jacket. Some days, I go to sleep at ten in the morning and wake up at ten at night, still exhausted. A couple of times now, circumstances have forced me to stay awake until three or four in the afternoon. I'm a right bastard when I'm this zonked. It's really no wonder all my friends are some distance away. Any closer and I'd probably lose them.
I'd do speed if I was the kind of guy with any interest in drugs. As it is, I drink more than a half gallon of Coke every single day
And the food I eat! I can't be bothered to cook anything; it takes too long. It's much easier just to grab a 7-Eleven burger or two, maybe some chips--a big bag of them, what the hell--a tub of Haagen-Dazs, yeah, a chocolate bar or three...add a newspaper to keep my mind occupied while I mindlessly scarf all that down, and that's breakfast. Or supper. Or food of some kind, anyway...
You may wonder how it is that a man who works at 7-Eleven, on a 7-Eleven salary, can eat nothing but 7-Eleven food. Very well, I'll tell you: by means of a nifty device known as
THE CHARGE
When I started here, it was more like THE CHARGE, but it's kind of....grown... over the years. Now it's taken over my life and made me its slave. Actually, it's more like a god than a master. In return for all those yummy empty calories, it merely demands about ninety percent of my discretionary income. Having devoured most of my paycheque, it leaves me with no money for groceries (not that I'd willingly walk the three-mile round trip to a grocery store...hell, no! What do you think I have, energy or something?) So the cycle renews itself, again and again and again.
I left home much too early, in hindsight. My parents didn't really kick me out, but the script of my childhood called for me to finish high school as quickly as possible, for reasons never fully explained to me. I even went to summer school, not for remedial reasons, but to put myself ahead a year. Living life in the present the way I did, I never thought to question this mad rush..it was simply life, to be lived a day at a time. And, let's face it, the idea of leaving home, to a teenager--even one as stunted as me--is certainly appealing.
My parents didn't exactly raise an accountant, either. Money was a private matter in our house, an adult matter. I never learned how much my parents made, or what kind of bite the mortgage took out of that, or the heating bill, or anything. If someone had asked me, growing up, what my household income was, I probably would have been off by tens of thousands of dollars.
It seems odd to me now, but it didn't then. Ask my parents about money? It would have been easier to ask them to describe the last time they had wild animal sex...and I'd probably get much the same response.
So--predictably--I was unpredictable when I finally left the nest, flying hither and yon, only alighting for an instant, scattering money to the four winds. I didn't spend it on booze or smokes, but there's a defunct arcade in Waterloo that made off with probably a thousand of my dollars, a whole bunch of restaurants that rely on my patronage to keep afloat, and you should have seen my monthly phone bill! It was usually the highest in our dorm.
Speaking of residence, my room-mate that year (who is the epitome of responsible) still blames himself for not reining me in. I've told him again and again that blowing that money was my decision. It's been seven years. Maybe in another eight he'll stop apologizing for something that was entirely my doing.
I'm still stuck in this rut, though...THE CHARGE has sunk its talons deep. Someone else is going to have to pull me out of this one, I think. Not that I'm ever likely to meet anyone, working this godforsaken night shift.
2005
My store closed soon after. I had to quit THE CHARGE cold-turkey. The store closing started a sequence of events that led, inexorably, to my marriage. Eva ruthlessly stomped out any remaining inclination I had to spend beyond my means, but she accomplished that in such a positive way: when she took over the financing, she made sure. I still had perks, but they were in sensible proportion to the rest of my life. Much-needed stabilty ensued. After the self-inflicted disorder of the previous decade, I found myself craving the mundane, and discovering the little joys that lurk in it.
It's been great for me. Other people may look at me and see Dull personified, but I'm living this life, and let me tell you, I've found an inexhaustible supply of The Good Stuff.
I don't look like one, unless you're fifteen. But oh God do I act like one.
I go to bed between nine and ten at night...sometimes earlier. Even on Saturday nights, when there is no reason for me not to stay up. I watch old farty things like Antiques Roadshow and enjoy it. These days, nearly every artist who wins a Grammy is an artist I've never heard of.
No, I'll tell you just how much of a fogey I am: my meals are planned. Not all of them, I hasten to add, but quite a few of them. Wednesday night's supper is often roast chicken; Thursday night is stew night; Friday night brings pork chops. Sunday lunch is almost always grilled cheese sandwiches and soup...and it's usually the same soup.
And you know what? I like it this way.
We just managed to settle into this routine, almost unnoticed, and by now I've gone beyond acknowledging the routine: I feel the need to celebrate it. The meals become touchstones in the week, events to look forward to.
I am a simple man with simple tastes, easily pleased. I know that this, above all, causes a stale odor of wrinkled butt to cling to me. And I don't care.
It's not as if I didn't come through chaos to get here. Actually, I created a good deal of it for myself.
Life used to be quite different, and not all that long ago, either...
1997
They say money can't buy happiness. In testing this assumption I have learned that money can buy nearly infinite varieties of loneliness. and boredom. You can eat nearly every meal out if you want, but an endless smorgasbord eventually pales...as does your wallet, rather more rapidly. You can go to a theater to watch Hollywood's latest release twice a week, and sooner or later you realize that most of what Hollywood releases should never have been caught in the first place.
It's taken this thought a long time to occur to me. Like human beings everywhere, my standard solution to the pain I felt was to keep doing exactly what I'd been doing all along, only more of it. Search long enough, I thought, and I'd find The Good Stuff--whatever that was.
I work at 7-Eleven. Mostly nights. I won't bore you with the stories about obnoxious asshole drunks...if you've met me I've probably told you enough stories as it is. Some day, maybe, I'll write all that down in some online diary someplace. Right now I'm just too damn tired.
The fatigue is all-encompassing. It defines my life. I've come to think of it as a garment, a tight-fitting, malodorous strait-jacket. Some days, I go to sleep at ten in the morning and wake up at ten at night, still exhausted. A couple of times now, circumstances have forced me to stay awake until three or four in the afternoon. I'm a right bastard when I'm this zonked. It's really no wonder all my friends are some distance away. Any closer and I'd probably lose them.
I'd do speed if I was the kind of guy with any interest in drugs. As it is, I drink more than a half gallon of Coke every single day
And the food I eat! I can't be bothered to cook anything; it takes too long. It's much easier just to grab a 7-Eleven burger or two, maybe some chips--a big bag of them, what the hell--a tub of Haagen-Dazs, yeah, a chocolate bar or three...add a newspaper to keep my mind occupied while I mindlessly scarf all that down, and that's breakfast. Or supper. Or food of some kind, anyway...
You may wonder how it is that a man who works at 7-Eleven, on a 7-Eleven salary, can eat nothing but 7-Eleven food. Very well, I'll tell you: by means of a nifty device known as
THE CHARGE
When I started here, it was more like THE CHARGE, but it's kind of....grown... over the years. Now it's taken over my life and made me its slave. Actually, it's more like a god than a master. In return for all those yummy empty calories, it merely demands about ninety percent of my discretionary income. Having devoured most of my paycheque, it leaves me with no money for groceries (not that I'd willingly walk the three-mile round trip to a grocery store...hell, no! What do you think I have, energy or something?) So the cycle renews itself, again and again and again.
I left home much too early, in hindsight. My parents didn't really kick me out, but the script of my childhood called for me to finish high school as quickly as possible, for reasons never fully explained to me. I even went to summer school, not for remedial reasons, but to put myself ahead a year. Living life in the present the way I did, I never thought to question this mad rush..it was simply life, to be lived a day at a time. And, let's face it, the idea of leaving home, to a teenager--even one as stunted as me--is certainly appealing.
My parents didn't exactly raise an accountant, either. Money was a private matter in our house, an adult matter. I never learned how much my parents made, or what kind of bite the mortgage took out of that, or the heating bill, or anything. If someone had asked me, growing up, what my household income was, I probably would have been off by tens of thousands of dollars.
It seems odd to me now, but it didn't then. Ask my parents about money? It would have been easier to ask them to describe the last time they had wild animal sex...and I'd probably get much the same response.
So--predictably--I was unpredictable when I finally left the nest, flying hither and yon, only alighting for an instant, scattering money to the four winds. I didn't spend it on booze or smokes, but there's a defunct arcade in Waterloo that made off with probably a thousand of my dollars, a whole bunch of restaurants that rely on my patronage to keep afloat, and you should have seen my monthly phone bill! It was usually the highest in our dorm.
Speaking of residence, my room-mate that year (who is the epitome of responsible) still blames himself for not reining me in. I've told him again and again that blowing that money was my decision. It's been seven years. Maybe in another eight he'll stop apologizing for something that was entirely my doing.
I'm still stuck in this rut, though...THE CHARGE has sunk its talons deep. Someone else is going to have to pull me out of this one, I think. Not that I'm ever likely to meet anyone, working this godforsaken night shift.
2005
My store closed soon after. I had to quit THE CHARGE cold-turkey. The store closing started a sequence of events that led, inexorably, to my marriage. Eva ruthlessly stomped out any remaining inclination I had to spend beyond my means, but she accomplished that in such a positive way: when she took over the financing, she made sure. I still had perks, but they were in sensible proportion to the rest of my life. Much-needed stabilty ensued. After the self-inflicted disorder of the previous decade, I found myself craving the mundane, and discovering the little joys that lurk in it.
It's been great for me. Other people may look at me and see Dull personified, but I'm living this life, and let me tell you, I've found an inexhaustible supply of The Good Stuff.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
And I thought I didn't care....
It's official.
No hockey this year.
Big surprise, eh?
Well, yes, actually, it was.As of last night I was all but positive a deal would get done. There had been movement from both sides (most of it, of course, from the players), and going into this morning there was something that looked like a serious desire to bridge the last gap. The players had to be thinking about getting some kind of a paycheque again, albeit diminished; the owners surely had visions of playoff loot dancing in their pointy little heads. Never mind that any season starting this late would be a complete and utter joke: when money's involved, people everywhere tend to lose their sense of humour.
To come this close and not succeed is unforgiveable. Bettman and Goodenow should--both--be summarily axed at this point. And whoever replaces them should have a mandate set before them: either get a deal done before September 15 or face the dissolution of the National Hockey League.
I'm not kidding on this last. The league has, almost mercifully, slipped into a coma, and death is just over the boards. There are really only two choices here: use the coma to promote real healing, or let the patient slip away.
HOW TO BRING THE NHL BACK TO LIFE
The Physician's Oath--"first, do no harm" has been trampled on . Harm has been done, and not just by these protracted labour negotiations. The harm dates back over ten years.
No hockey this year.
Big surprise, eh?
Well, yes, actually, it was.As of last night I was all but positive a deal would get done. There had been movement from both sides (most of it, of course, from the players), and going into this morning there was something that looked like a serious desire to bridge the last gap. The players had to be thinking about getting some kind of a paycheque again, albeit diminished; the owners surely had visions of playoff loot dancing in their pointy little heads. Never mind that any season starting this late would be a complete and utter joke: when money's involved, people everywhere tend to lose their sense of humour.
To come this close and not succeed is unforgiveable. Bettman and Goodenow should--both--be summarily axed at this point. And whoever replaces them should have a mandate set before them: either get a deal done before September 15 or face the dissolution of the National Hockey League.
I'm not kidding on this last. The league has, almost mercifully, slipped into a coma, and death is just over the boards. There are really only two choices here: use the coma to promote real healing, or let the patient slip away.
HOW TO BRING THE NHL BACK TO LIFE
The Physician's Oath--"first, do no harm" has been trampled on . Harm has been done, and not just by these protracted labour negotiations. The harm dates back over ten years.
- There are too many teams, in too many southern locales that wouldn't know a slapshot from a hole in the beach. Any place that doesn't at least have a nodding acquaintance with snow shouldn't have an NHL team. Period. I don't care if Wayne Gretzky owns it. Is there a beach volleyball team in Iqaluit? No? I rest my case.
- The schedule is too long. It should start on the weekend of the World Series and the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals should be played on the night baseball season starts.
- The game is, let's face it, deadly boring. There are a whole bunch of ways to fix this, and most of them have been talked over for years at this point without any real action. Following are a whole bunch of things that could be done, ranging from minor tinkering up to a radical overhaul. I would suggest any four of these must be implemented, three from the trifling list and one from the major list. Take your pick, hockey fans:
MINOR TWEAKS
Eliminate the red line; move the nets back a foot or two; move the bluelines out a few feet; institute automatic, "no-touch" icing (this should be done in any event); remove the instigator (also); insist that all penalty time be served, regardless of how many goals are scored against; call icing on penalized teams; establish a maximum size for goalie padding, about twenty percent lower than at present.
MAJOR QUACKS
Eliminate one defenseman; penalize all players, not just goalies, for shooting the puck over the glass; enlarge the nets; add another puck (I LOVE this one); roll only three lines, not four; settle all ties with either unlimited overtime or a shootout.
A word on shootouts. I hate them. But I can't deny they are dramatic...and drama is exactly what will entice the fans back. The alternative, unlimited overtime, is unappealing on weeknights, but what the hell--baseball does it. With more space between games due to a shorter schedule, it could work. I bet many games would be settled right quick, before exhaustion could set in.
If the on-ice game isn't fixed, we might as well kiss the league goodbye. If there ever is an on-ice game to fix.
Monday, February 14, 2005
It's called WINTER, people!
I'm listening to the radio. The list of closures and cancellations took four solid minutes to recite and the deejay was rapping them off at a pretty fair clip. We've got about a quarter inch of freezing rain, due to end between 9 and 10 a.m. And I'm wondering...
HAVE WE ALL TURNED INTO A NATION OF WUSSIES?
Thinking back to my schooling career, I recall exactly half of one snow day in fifteen years. To be fair, there were probably a couple more that I can't bring to mind. The one I can was also due to freezing rain, except this was a freak storm in the middle of October. The ice accumulated on the trees, which shed limbs on to power lines, which knocked out the power, which -- eventually -- knocked out the school. It stayed open until noon. I went--one of four in my grade that did--and spent four hours playing piano with my then-girlfriend in the music room.
And believe me, the lack of snow days wasn't for a lack of weather. Winter used to be a lot worse than it is now. We've had one snow event I'd call a storm this season: it dropped about ten inches. That kind of thing used to happen at least three times every year. In 1977, most of Southern Ontario got hit with three feet that drifted to over eight. Now that's a storm worth closing things down for.
A bit of freezing rain? Please.
It seems like nobody understands how to deal with winter any more. Here in Waterloo, the salters just started their rounds, long after the freezing rain hit. Talk about hitting the brakes after the collision. The salting should have been finished as the weather hit. I salted my driveway late last night, because I pay attention to weather forecasts.
The city employees aren't the only ones with a reckless disregard for winter. That description also has to apply to drivers, who--even now, after months of getting used to inclement weather--still tend to shrug it off and figure they can meet or exceed any given speed limit. Then, when they careen off the road, they blame the road conditions. There have been several dozen accidents in the Waterloo area in the last few hours. I don't like the term 'accident', really, because it seems to imply that it couldn't be helped. Nearly every "accident" is preventable, and in weather like this, you can eliminate about 90% of these things just by SLOWING DOWN.
I'm watching somebody across the street trying to get out of their driveway. The SUV engine--God, what a hoot, I swear, it's an SUV--is roaring and whining and the tires are spinning like mad and gee, whaddaya know, the thing's not moving anywhere. I don't even drive and I know all about how to 'rock' your vehicle for traction.
I'm really not trying to sound like a superior know-it-all asshole. I'm just a Canadian. Winter comes standard. I thoughteveryone KNEW that.
*sigh*
HAVE WE ALL TURNED INTO A NATION OF WUSSIES?
Thinking back to my schooling career, I recall exactly half of one snow day in fifteen years. To be fair, there were probably a couple more that I can't bring to mind. The one I can was also due to freezing rain, except this was a freak storm in the middle of October. The ice accumulated on the trees, which shed limbs on to power lines, which knocked out the power, which -- eventually -- knocked out the school. It stayed open until noon. I went--one of four in my grade that did--and spent four hours playing piano with my then-girlfriend in the music room.
And believe me, the lack of snow days wasn't for a lack of weather. Winter used to be a lot worse than it is now. We've had one snow event I'd call a storm this season: it dropped about ten inches. That kind of thing used to happen at least three times every year. In 1977, most of Southern Ontario got hit with three feet that drifted to over eight. Now that's a storm worth closing things down for.
A bit of freezing rain? Please.
It seems like nobody understands how to deal with winter any more. Here in Waterloo, the salters just started their rounds, long after the freezing rain hit. Talk about hitting the brakes after the collision. The salting should have been finished as the weather hit. I salted my driveway late last night, because I pay attention to weather forecasts.
The city employees aren't the only ones with a reckless disregard for winter. That description also has to apply to drivers, who--even now, after months of getting used to inclement weather--still tend to shrug it off and figure they can meet or exceed any given speed limit. Then, when they careen off the road, they blame the road conditions. There have been several dozen accidents in the Waterloo area in the last few hours. I don't like the term 'accident', really, because it seems to imply that it couldn't be helped. Nearly every "accident" is preventable, and in weather like this, you can eliminate about 90% of these things just by SLOWING DOWN.
I'm watching somebody across the street trying to get out of their driveway. The SUV engine--God, what a hoot, I swear, it's an SUV--is roaring and whining and the tires are spinning like mad and gee, whaddaya know, the thing's not moving anywhere. I don't even drive and I know all about how to 'rock' your vehicle for traction.
I'm really not trying to sound like a superior know-it-all asshole. I'm just a Canadian. Winter comes standard. I thoughteveryone KNEW that.
*sigh*
Thursday, February 10, 2005
The Gomery Pile...
So...got any answers yet?
You'd think, after two Prime Ministers testified at the Gomery Inquiry, we'd be a little further along the path of finding out why millions of taxpayers' dollars went missing. Then again, since these were Liberal Prime Ministers both, it's no great shock that we're still in the dark.
Oh, who am I kidding? Politicians of every stripe take a top-secret series of courses within three weeks of arriving in Ottawa. The curriculum includes the following:
MEDIA SCRUM 100: Answering questions in such a way as to dispense absolutely no information, without offending anyone; how to camouflage opinions; how to appear to have two or more opinions on any given issue at any given time.
POLITICS 103: Damage control: "Passing the Buck--How Far Can It Be Thrown?"; Politics as War, or, The Other Side Are All Heathens!; Taxpayers And Their Bottomless Pockets.
DEPROGRAMMING 224: "Common Sense--Myth or Fantasy?"; "How to Spend Other People's Money And Put A Smile On Their Face"; the difference between your old budget (written in stone) and your new one (written in water).
POLLS 368: "Reading the Wind"; trial balloons, the concept of plausible deniability.
Jean Chretien acheived top marks in every one of these courses and a dozen others besides. The man's a political genius with the heart of a machine. And he's got balls...golf balls. Lots and lots and lots of them, all nicely monogrammed by Very Impoertant People. They prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that...well, they prove something, anyway. I'm not sure what.
The judge really dropped the (golf) ball on this one. He should have been merciless in keeping Chretien to the topic at hand, namely, the missing monies, where they might have gone, who knew about it and when they knew it. The hijinks pulled by Chretien should have been enough to earn a hefty contempt of court fine. There's no doubting the truth of it: le petit gars de Shawinigan has nothing but contempt for Gomery, for the inquiry, and for the Canadian taxpayers funding it. Chretien 's actions are of course above the law...the man is a law unto himself. He very strongly believes that nobody should have the right to question him, because He Knows Best.
Martin came across quite differently on the stand, today. There were no theatrics and no visible scorn. Not much else, either. He knew nothing. Whatever he did know, it wasn't of consequence. He's either lying or painfully incompetent. Possibly both.
Nobody seems to be asking the real questions here--the underlying ones that have been with us since Confederation. Millions of dollars were spent trying to keep Quebec in Canada. If you add up all the money that's ever been spent doing that, you get a figure that really is quite staggering--it makes AdScam look like three coins in the fountain.
WHY?
Don't get me wrong, for territorial integrity, natural resources, and--yes--culture, Quebec is an asset to Canada. But is that asset worth the money we've spent trying to secure it? How many billions on bilingualism? How many sops by Quebecois Prime Ministers to Quebecois ridings? How many sweet little side deals, the kind Paul Martin calls 'assymetrical federalism' and the rest of us call the tail not just wagging the dog but spinning it around in circles?
Surely I'm not the only one asking these questions. And Jean Chretien can get all misty-eyed and say it was all for national unity if we wants. Not unity, Jean. Impunity. Unfortunately, you've got it.
You'd think, after two Prime Ministers testified at the Gomery Inquiry, we'd be a little further along the path of finding out why millions of taxpayers' dollars went missing. Then again, since these were Liberal Prime Ministers both, it's no great shock that we're still in the dark.
Oh, who am I kidding? Politicians of every stripe take a top-secret series of courses within three weeks of arriving in Ottawa. The curriculum includes the following:
MEDIA SCRUM 100: Answering questions in such a way as to dispense absolutely no information, without offending anyone; how to camouflage opinions; how to appear to have two or more opinions on any given issue at any given time.
POLITICS 103: Damage control: "Passing the Buck--How Far Can It Be Thrown?"; Politics as War, or, The Other Side Are All Heathens!; Taxpayers And Their Bottomless Pockets.
DEPROGRAMMING 224: "Common Sense--Myth or Fantasy?"; "How to Spend Other People's Money And Put A Smile On Their Face"; the difference between your old budget (written in stone) and your new one (written in water).
POLLS 368: "Reading the Wind"; trial balloons, the concept of plausible deniability.
Jean Chretien acheived top marks in every one of these courses and a dozen others besides. The man's a political genius with the heart of a machine. And he's got balls...golf balls. Lots and lots and lots of them, all nicely monogrammed by Very Impoertant People. They prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that...well, they prove something, anyway. I'm not sure what.
The judge really dropped the (golf) ball on this one. He should have been merciless in keeping Chretien to the topic at hand, namely, the missing monies, where they might have gone, who knew about it and when they knew it. The hijinks pulled by Chretien should have been enough to earn a hefty contempt of court fine. There's no doubting the truth of it: le petit gars de Shawinigan has nothing but contempt for Gomery, for the inquiry, and for the Canadian taxpayers funding it. Chretien 's actions are of course above the law...the man is a law unto himself. He very strongly believes that nobody should have the right to question him, because He Knows Best.
Martin came across quite differently on the stand, today. There were no theatrics and no visible scorn. Not much else, either. He knew nothing. Whatever he did know, it wasn't of consequence. He's either lying or painfully incompetent. Possibly both.
Nobody seems to be asking the real questions here--the underlying ones that have been with us since Confederation. Millions of dollars were spent trying to keep Quebec in Canada. If you add up all the money that's ever been spent doing that, you get a figure that really is quite staggering--it makes AdScam look like three coins in the fountain.
WHY?
Don't get me wrong, for territorial integrity, natural resources, and--yes--culture, Quebec is an asset to Canada. But is that asset worth the money we've spent trying to secure it? How many billions on bilingualism? How many sops by Quebecois Prime Ministers to Quebecois ridings? How many sweet little side deals, the kind Paul Martin calls 'assymetrical federalism' and the rest of us call the tail not just wagging the dog but spinning it around in circles?
Surely I'm not the only one asking these questions. And Jean Chretien can get all misty-eyed and say it was all for national unity if we wants. Not unity, Jean. Impunity. Unfortunately, you've got it.
Monday, February 07, 2005
Money, money, money....
If you ask ten Canadians what the most important issue facing the country today is, fourteen of them will say "health care".
If you ask ten university students what the bane of their existence is, fifteen of them will say "high tuition".
And if you ask ten members of any city council what the most pressing need in their ward is, well, you'll get about seventy different answers, but all of them will boil down to....MONEY.
There are some deeply ingrained beliefs in Canadian culture that defy logical explanation. In Toronto, city council spends well over $200 million trying to address rampant homelessness, creating--to no one's surprise but their own--more rampant homelessness. The health care budget eats up untold billions each and every year, and yet our health care system stutters along on life support, and the prognosis is bleak. Consider just a few of the symptoms:
If you ask ten university students what the bane of their existence is, fifteen of them will say "high tuition".
And if you ask ten members of any city council what the most pressing need in their ward is, well, you'll get about seventy different answers, but all of them will boil down to....MONEY.
There are some deeply ingrained beliefs in Canadian culture that defy logical explanation. In Toronto, city council spends well over $200 million trying to address rampant homelessness, creating--to no one's surprise but their own--more rampant homelessness. The health care budget eats up untold billions each and every year, and yet our health care system stutters along on life support, and the prognosis is bleak. Consider just a few of the symptoms:
- Again in Toronto, it is not uncommon for paramedics to wait seven or eight hours to drop their patiesnts at emergency wards.
- There are an estimated two million Ontarians without access to a family doctor.
- It can take over a year to see a specialist in some disciplines.
- Even routine procedures such as MRIs and CT-scans can take weeks.
I have no doubt that our health care system could swallow the whole of every Canadian's paycheque without anyone noticing an improvement.
As far as education goes, I find it completely incomprehensible that students (especially in Arts programs) pay such ridiculously high tuition fees. It's not as if the use of multi-million dollar equipment is necessary to get a degree in Political Science. But universities, like hospitals, are crying poor. I'd guess the University of Waterloo brings in well over a hundred million dollars a year just from tution. That's not enough? Show me why.
My property tax bill is going up over six percent this year--triple the rate of inflation. Council says they're going to use the extra funds to (a) match the library budget to the library budgets of other comparable cities; (b) top up "reserve" funds; (c) continue paying off the RIM Park fiasco.
(A) I would be all for spending more money on the library, because our library is, quite frankly, a disgrace. But, as I've written before, there's a perfectly good library system in our city already, inexplicably separate from the one our council is fretting over. It shouldn't cost any extra money to amalgate the library systems of Kitchener and Waterloo. In fact, done properly, it should save money...
(B)...that could go to top up these "reserve" funds.
(C) RIM Park is a huge sportsplex on the north end of town. The city crossed its i's and didn't dot its t's when it came to financing this white elephant, and it got stuck with a huge debt it wasn't anticipating. So rather than refinance the thing over a longer period, the city is sticking all us ratepayers with the additional costs. Gee, thanks.
Now I hear the federal government is going to create a national child care program. If it turns out anything like the gun registry (and it probably will), you might as well withdraw the contents of your bank account and forward it to Revenue Canada.
Welcome to Canada. This is a stick-up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)