Some welcome backchat

Sean Penn isn't someone I spend much time thinking about, but The Bovina Bloviator posted a heartwarming story of him delivering a little well-deserved defiance to the bossyboots anti-smoking Nazis at the Cannes Festival:

US actor and director Sean Penn lit up and led a minor revolt at the Cannes film festival against France's draconian new anti-smoking laws.

Penn, the head of the jury that will pick the best films, pulled out a cigarette and puffed on it at a press conference with fellow jury members, in defiance of laws in place since January that ban smoking in public enclosed spaces.

Good for him! My aunts in Victoria are frequently berated in public by impudent, unembarrassed little power-trippers who think that two old ladies who want to smoke a cigarette outside are suitable targets for pushing around. They've been insulted and driven away from bus shelters, open squares, terraces, anywhere a self-righteous nobody gets the urge to risk-free bullying. (Not quite risk-free; Auntie May got into a screaming match with one of these snotnoses once.)

I complain about Ottawa, but I have to be honest and admit that Victoria is A LOT worse in terms of the amount of bossy, nosy, nannyish harrassment people have to put up with. It's practically European in its mania for proscription and "for your own good" bullying.

But just when I'm thinking that Sean Penn is OK, one of my favourite bloggers, Arts & Ammo, digs up this piece of brilliance. On the whole, I think Chesterton would count his instinct for freedom as more important than his confused approach to politics, so he comes out slightly ahead on points this week.

Building a church that is half-slave, half-free

I read this article by Doug LeBlanc in Episcopal Life, and immediately thought of a scene in The Mahabharata. Perhaps it's not so odd that I've been seeing parallels between the Episcopal Church and various "end of the world" stories recently - what we are witnessing IS a small world ending, and these things seem to move in an almost choreographed way.

The article is typical of the well-meaning, honest, earnest conservative who is convinced that the innocence and transparency of his belief will naturally be rewarded by similar good faith on the part of liberals. They're the words of a person who hasn't yet realized that he's at war. The wistful hope still persists that somehow conservatives can negotiate a little safe space for themselves. Like dogs that roll over and show their bellies, they think that such a display of helplessness will convince the other side that they have nothing to fear, and so will treat them humanely. This misunderstands the relationship between left and right, and good and evil in the Episcopal Church.

The Mahabharata is a very interesting tale about a power struggle between two sets of royal cousins for control of the kingdom. They have a very complex family tree, so I won't explain just how they are related; all you need to know is that the family is divided into two sides -- the 5 Pandava brothers, who are half-human, half-god, and the Kurus, the 100 sons of the blind king, Dhritarashtra. The Pandavas are the true heirs to the kingdom - they not only have the best legal claim, they are by far the most worthy, being the embodiment of all the virtues. However, their uncle Dhritarashtra wants HIS son, the evil Duryodhan, to inherit the throne.

The Pandavas may be semi-divine, but they are not perfect. Partly due to their own flaws, they are swindled out of the kingdom by Duryodhan. They agree to temporarily give up the kingdom, and endure 13 years of exile and penance (thus, incidentally, further proving their fitness to rule). After 13 years they return, and now Duryodhan has to pay the piper; after 13 years of usurping their kingdom, he has to give it back. Naturally, he refuses, and war seems inevitable.

Then Krishna comes to court as a peace ambassador on behalf of the Pandavas. He has a proposal: Duryodhan can keep the kingdom, but give the Pandavas just 5 villages, and they will be satisfied. War will be averted. Duryodhan angrily declares that he will not give them 5 villages, or even one grain of sand. With that, Krishna's peace mission fails and everyone prepares for war.

The first time I saw this, I thought that Duryodhan's refusal to give just a paltry 5 villages proved how selfish and evil he was, but after thinking about it, I realized that he was behaving logically. Evil CANNOT endure the presence of good alongside it. Evil is destructive, and what it wants to destroy is goodness. If Duryodhan had give the Pandavas the 5 villages, in time they would have grown strong again, and they would eventually have conquered him. Goodness will live and grow, and so evil will try to kill it wherever it finds it.

The sterile evil that now controls the Episcopal Church will never willingly allow Christian belief to remain unmolested. Conservatives who think that they can negotiate some sort of truce, or even a ghetto existence within the larger, demon-possessed church, are deluding themselves. As C.S. Lewis wrote, the sort of "agreement" these people come up with consists of saying "Oh, you can believe what you want, as long as you do it alone," and then they mutter under their breath, "and we'll see to it that you're NEVER alone." It's in their nature to try to eradicate every voice that answers their lies with the truth, because they rightly sense that it is the only way that they can survive.

Anglicanism has staked its entire 400-year existence on a dice game, and a bet that they CAN serve God and Mammon, they CAN build a church that is half-slave and half-free, and a house divided against itself CAN stand. Conservatives should not be putting themselves up as half of the stake.

Peter Cook explains it all to you

This must be the reason why Anglican churches are nearly empty!

UPDATE: One of the commenters mentioned it, so I was curious and went looking for it: SuperThunderStingCar is GOOOOOOOO!!!! I said that I'd never seen the British puppet shows that inspired this, and that's true - I've never seen an actual episode. But I have seen tiny clips or maybe ads, so I was familiar with the puppetry technique, and I have to say, Cook and Moore have it down uncannily well. It's a brilliant parody. Actually, I laughed more the second time I watched it - especially at the way nobody can remember the complicated name of the superweapon.

Emma Update

We finally got in to see our GP, after 2 weeks' wait. A week later, Emma went to the General Hospital and had an EEG - it was the middle of the day, not a time when she usually has a problem, so it didn't show up anything too unusual. Except when they started flashing the lights at her - when they got up to 16 pulses per second, her brainwaves started going haywire, so they stopped at that point and didn't do the last 3 levels (I think they can go up to 64 pulses per second).

About 2 weeks later, we finally got the referral to a neurologist at the Civic Hospital. Are you ready for this? The appointment is for August 18. April 4, when she had her big seizure, to August 18 - that's 4.5 months, for an 18-year old girl who is having chronic seizures. In a system of rationed health care, it's nice to know just how unimportant we are - if Dean were a hockey player, or a relative of Premier McGuinty, I'm sure we'd be having the appointment this week, but as it is...

I dream about getting rich, I'm sure many people do. But I never think, "If I had lots of money, I could buy a giant plasma TV and have a computer in every room of the house, and take vacations on a private island in the Caribbean." All I think is, "I'd get my kids the hell out of this dingy backwater, and down the U.S. where they have a decent medical system, and you don't die waiting for a doctor to look at a lump in your breast."

Linguistic stupidity

This article on growing Islamic terrorist threats in Canada appeared a few days ago in the Ottawa Citizen. What caught my eye was this quote from a Mountie:

"What we're facing is a violent Islamist born-again social movement," comprised mostly of young, second- or third-generation immigrants with a secular background, he told the Conference Board of Canada gathering of security, industry and government experts.

This must be one of the dumbest expressions I've heard yet to describe the phenomenon of totalitarian Islam, and it's coming from someone who's actually paid to think about it. I guess it's too much work to actually find out where that expression "born-again" comes from. Here it is, in John 3:

3In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

4"How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"

5Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. 6Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' 8The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

It's an exclusive claim made by Christians, and deals with their claims to salvation, but here it's being casually slung about as a shorthand term for "deracinated fanatic". The guy might just as well call them "Muslim Crusaders" for all the sense his statement makes. But I guess there's nothing new under the sun; I remember when the most fossilized Marxists in the Soviet Politburo were referred to by the press as "conservatives". You know, just like William F. Buckley, Jr. So just to keep things clear and easy to understand, we have violent terrorist wannabes, "emotionally motivated, motivated by images: rapes, murders, arrests creating moral outrage." And they're "born-again". You know, just like, um, George W. Bush - same thing. Everything clear now?

Enforced hiatus

Gotta make this quick - last week, our computer was hit with a net worm (maybe someone trying to defend the reputation of the Turkish Sultan). I took it in to Stapes on Tuesday for cleaning, and they told me it would be ready by Friday at the latest. On Saturday we phoned and were told it was ready. I picked it up, plugged it in, and discovered that absolutely NOTHING had been done to it! The same software trying to install itself and hijack the machine, the same popups, the same freezing - well, you get the picture. Naturally I phoned them in a mighty temper, and was told to bring it back so they could do the job. I said no, I want my money back and I'll be getting someone else to fix the problem. Now I have to bring the PC back on Monday, to PROVE that the problem still exists! That's tomorrow's job, and if I don't get back every penny of my money, it'll be the last time I ever set foot in a Staples again!

A week to clean a hard drive - that's ridiculous. And not a week of working on it; a week of it sitting in the back room, while other people's computers get fixed. The phone book is filled with ads for companies that come to the house to fix the problem, it's ridiculous to lug the thing out to a store that can't even give you a decent turnaround time. It's like my aunts, who were still RENTING their phone from Bell Canada - in 1999! Just because they had always done it that way.

Anyway, that's why it's been so quiet here. I haven't wasted the time, though - I finished painting the living room, rehung our icons and pictures (I'll post some pictures of the Marza paintings we have when I get back to full strength), and of course I've been doing some gardening. I'll try to post this in between flashing red X's, "System Warnings" and "Spyware Alerts". Hope it takes.

Dogs barking - must be a caravan nearby

The National Post has a good editorial on the Canadian Islamic Congress dog-and-pony show of Thursday.

Three weeks ago, the case being pressed by the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) was tossed out (albeit with an unprecedented display of regret) by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. How did CIC lawyer Faisal Joseph and his Osgoode Hall helpmates respond to the setback? Why, by calling a press conference and repeating their original demand for substantially equal space to rebut Mr. Steyn, with a few of the details changed. (They’ve relented, for example, on their insistence that they be allowed to control the physical design of the pages on which their counterblast would run.) Not only that, but they represented the demand as a renewed effort toward “reasonable conciliation” — while at the same time pledging to forge ahead with their legal threats outside Ontario if Maclean’s wasn’t “reasonable” enough to suit their tastes. “One way or another it’s going to be dealt with, either by agreement or by an imposed decision,” said Mr. Joseph.

The Post terms this "chutzpah", and observes, "You must admit, it takes an audacious general to demand the enemy’s surrender so soon after a losing battle."

True, but there are precedents.

[In 1676] The Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Host (from 'beyond the rapids', za porohamy), inhabiting the lands around the lower Dnieper River in Ukraine, had defeated Ottoman Turkish forces in battle. However, the Sultan of Ottoman Empire demanded that the Cossacks submit to Turkish rule.

I suspect the tactic will be as successful for the CIC as it was for the Sultan. They should be grateful Maclean's doesn't publish the Cossacks' letter on the editorial page:

Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!

You, turkish devil and damned devil's brother and friend, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are you, that can't slay a hedgehog with his naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. You will not, you son of a bitch, make subjects of Christian sons; we've no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck your mother.

You Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, Armenian pig, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig's snout, mare's arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw your own mother!

So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won't even be herding Christian pigs. Now we'll conclude, for we don't know the date and don't own a calendar; the moon's in the sky, the year in the book, the day's the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!

Koshovyi Otaman Ivan Sirko, with the whole Zaporozhian Host

Romanticizing suffering

This letter (from a teacher, no less) was published in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen.

Re: 'The age of scarcity,' April 25.

Thank you for making this story front-page news. I held it up for my high school students to see, and encouraged each student to keep a copy for their grandchildren, who will ask questions like: "What does a banana taste like?" and "What's a gas station?"

We are truly entering a new age. But I encouraged my students to see the bright side of this new age: our historically unprecedented comfort and consumerism have left us too independent, with equally unprecedented rates of depression, suicide and general societal malaise. Scarcity will force us to seek community, and that opens up the door to true happiness and fulfilment (and new challenges, too).

Dan Kaiser, Ottawa

This romanticizing the delights of mere subsistence is a common tone among enviromentalists. It comes exclusively from well-fed Westerners; you never hear immigrants (let alone refugees) from Third World countries speak nostalgically of the deprivation they left behind. And the virtues of living in scarcity never seem to translate into authority for those who are experiencing it right now: Westerners talk a good game about respecting Third World peoples, but that sympathy dries up pretty quickly when the conversation turns to sexual morals, about which the deprived have quite decided opinions.

This sort of flirting with disaster often comes couched in phony concern for human well-being, as we see here: "our historically unprecedented comfort and consumerism have left us too independent, with equally unprecedented rates of depression, suicide and general societal malaise." But dying of hunger or disease leaves one every bit as dead as dying by suicide, and the risk of THAT sort of mortality leaves these utopians unmoved. On the contrary, there's a definite anti-life impetus to their program, a "one is too many" approach to human existence.

I was reminded of something similar that I read about: Roland Huntford's two great books on Antarctic exploration, Scott and Amundsen and Shackleton wrote about not only the details of the polar expeditions, but about the social context in which they were placed. A similar sort of general mood seemed to be playing out in Britain in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th. Then, as now, a long era of peace and prosperity had left people feeling enervated and filled with self-doubt. The British seemed almost hysterically driven to prove their "manliness", and gnawed by fear that their pre-emininent position in the world was not only threatened, but perhaps not really merited. Part of the enthusiasm for WWI stemmed from this self-doubt; finally, people thought, a chance to prove to the world and to ourselves that we're NOT soft, effete and decadent!

In Britain, it was an age which saw struggle as an end in itself. In the background lurked a nagging sense of decline and a desire for national regeneration. Darwinism and the Imperialist sentiment each played its part. Darwin's theory of evolution was transferred from Nature to human institutions. The Survival of the Fittest was a suitable dogma for Empire. It justified war, for example, as a school for character. Lord General Wolseley, the commander in chief of the British Army, considered that

war with all its evils calls out...some of the highest and best qualities of man. [It] is an invigorating antidote against that luxury and effeminacy which destroys nations as well as individuals.

Self-sacrifice as such was praised as the highest human quality, especially by the Anglican Church. Thus Francis Paget, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford:

Surely war, like every other form of suffering and misery, has its redeeming element in the beauty and splendour of character men, by God's grace show i it...men rise themselves and raise others by sacrifice of the self, and in war the greatness of self-sacrifice is set before us.

In Polar exploration, this had its exact parallel:

How nobly those gallant seamen toiled...sent to travel upon snow and ice, each with 200 pounds to drag...No man flinched from his work; some of the gallant fellows really died at the drag rope...but not a murmur arose...as the weak fell out...there were always more than enough of volunteers to take their places.

Of course, things never happen exactly the same way twice. The 20th century has cured the utopians of the idea that war is a suitable field for moral proving. Instead, it is proposed to simply return to an earlier age, when life was nasty, brutish and short, in order to improve our moral fibre. Perhaps it's no surprise that such people can find common cause with the very similar ambition of today's Muslim conquistadors. Of course, in neither case do the nostalgists foresee a lowly, debased role for themselves; somehow they will always manage to fall on their feet. Mr. Kaiser surely isn't foreseeing the deaths of 60% of his own children, when North America returns to a living standard of, say, the year 1640, sans ambulances, sans electrical plants, sans hospitals, sans the infrastructure that has raised his own lifespan from 40 years to about 78.

It's easy to laugh now at those naive souls in the early 1900s, who though war was the answer, but they at least thought of it as a voluntary action on the part of those who would demonstrate their strength and self-sacrifice. That idea has been quite abandoned, and now environmentalists think nothing of forcing those around them to participate in their schemes for an ugly, uncomfortable subsistence.

New devilry from James

James has invented a new game to drive us insane - we call it "soap scratching". It's just what it sounds like - taking a brand new bar of soap, ripping off the wrapper, and then standing near us and scratching it with his fingernails. I don't know why, but it's just maddening! All those little soap scrapings falling on the floor, and he's giggling like mad the whole time. Plus, you suddenly discover that 4 fresh bars of soap now have lost their wrappers, and they have to be put somewhere to keep them from getting tattered and dirty. I know - dirty soap sounds like an oxymoron, but it exists. And there's nothing worse than getting out a fresh bar of soap to wash your hands, and finding you have to scrub a layer of grubbiness off the soap before you can use it!

Hospital test today

Took Emma to the General Hospital for her EEG - it took a long time to get in to see our GP, but after telling him about the seizures, things started moving quite quickly. She did fine, except for getting lost on the way to the bathroom just before the test began. I finally went off in search of her, but someone had rescued her and brought her back, just as I was emerging from the ladies' room. The test looked pretty normal, except when they flashed lights at her. She was able to handle the lower frequency blinking, but when it got up to 16 flashes per second, her brainwaves began to go haywire, so they stopped. Now it'll be a few weeks before the results come in, and we're still waiting for a referral to a neurologist.

The garden is getting underway - we spent the weekend filling up bags of dead leaves and branches. Dean moved most of them to the front porch to await pickup next week, but I stupidly left 3 in the backyard, and James dumped them out in order to use the large paper bags for a game. Now I'll have to go get some more bags; meanwhile, it's started raining, so the leaves are wet and heavy right now - maybe in a few days they'll be dry enough to gather again.

I put down copious amounts of fertilizer for the perennials and the fruit trees. One of the apple trees has flower buds on it this year, but I'm not sure about the other one. It might be a year younger than the first tree. The only thing is, you need two different varieties to cross-pollinate, so if there are no flowers on the smaller tree, the bigger tree probably won't be able to produce any fruit. It's no big deal; in another year the small tree will be more mature, and they seem to be producing leaves at about the same rate, so I hope their flowers will emerge together, too. I spotted what looks like a gall on a small branch of the damson, so I cut it off, and sprayed all the trees with a dormant spray mixture; it kills off any overwintering pests and diseases, and gives the trees a good start in the spring. The damson is still too early along to be able to tell if it will have any flowers, but that should become clearer in a week or so. The cherry is loaded with flower buds. The currants are also doing well, and the black currant I damaged last year has even managed to put out a few flower buds. I'll be extra cautious around them this year.

Dean was in Vancouver for two days last week. I asked him to go to Murchie's the tea company, and bring me back some Orange Spice tea, and also some Lapsang Souchong, because it's hard to find. He said the salesman warned him that that tea, "is an acquired taste" - probably didn't want Dean stomping back to the store the next day, demanding a refund for this cat-piss tea! It's a smoky flavour tea; I don't drink it too much, but it's nice on a rainy afternoon when I'm by myself. I told Dean only to get me 1/4 lb of it, and half a pound of the Orange Spice. He called me to say, "I got to Murchie's, and I found the tea, but then I couldn't remember if you wanted loose tea or teabags. So I panicked, ran away and got liquored up." As it happens, he got me equal amounts of both kinds, in both loose and bagged tea; so now I have a lot more Lapsang Souchong than I had counted on. I'm drinking some right now, as a matter of fact.

The long winter finally ends

This long, dreadful winter is finally over. We've been having temperatures in the mid 20s this past week, and it was enough to get rid of the snow. I looked at last year's blog, to get some idea of how this year compares, and I'd say we're about 3 weeks behind. This was the state of things on April 2 last year. This year, the chives are at about the same stage, but they have ZOOMED into growth. Three days ago, they were still under snow. The same goes for the rhubarb. A week ago, the bleeding hearts were just a little fringe 1" above the ground; today they're 6" high, with panicles of unopened flowers drooping on the stems!

The sudden warmth is making things grow more than twice as fast as last year, when it was a slow, gradual warming through late March and early April. I have to hurry outside to scrape up the dead leaves, because the new growth underneath needs air. No real leaves on the trees yet, but every day you can see more and more yellowish/green haze on the branches. In another week, there will be actual leaves out!

It wasn't too cold this winter, and the heavy snow insulated most plants, so I think the only loss so far is one of my Benjamin Britten roses. The snow came so early, I didn't have time to put styrofoam cones over them, and the weight of the snow split off half the rosebush. I guess the shock was too much for it. The other two seem to have survived, even though I ran out of time to prune them last year. The two apple trees are getting leaves, and the damson plum survived the winter - it's later than the apples and the cherry, but I can see the little leaf buds starting to get green at their tips.

Slanted reporting

This little paragraph was printed in the "Newsbriefs" section of our paper yesterday. These are typically little one-paragraph summaries of stories around the country, so one doesn't expect in-depth reporting.

However, even I was shocked at how much bias and slant was packed into a mere 112 words, starting with the title: "British Columbia: Breakaway Anglican leader to give talk". It looks like the writer was hellbent on getting the word "breakaway" in the headline, even though the way it's written makes no sense at all. It suggests that Archbishop Venables is some sort of Anglican equivalent to Archbishop LeFebvre, when he is a perfectly normal Anglican clergyman. If the writer meant "leader of breakaway Anglicans" even that is false - the parishes he has "adopted" are still Anglican, just not answerable to the same bureaucracy as before. Redistricting is a common occurrence when it comes to political boundaries; this is something similar, only the people involved have done it for themselves.

A South American archbishop who adamantly opposes homosexual relationships is coming to Vancouver on Friday despite being told to stay away by Canada's top Anglican. Archbishop Gregory Venables, who claims to represent 15 breakaway Anglican congregations in Canada, will speak at a gathering in a Vancouver suburb. Archbishop Venables is recruiting Anglican congregations in Canada and the U.S. that have opposed the ordination of homosexuals and the church blessing of their relationships. The primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Fred Hilz, wrote a public letter to Archbishop Venables yesterday urging him to stay home and saying that entering his North American jurisdiction "will further harm the strained relations" between Canadian Anglicans.

That's it - that's the whole story, and yet it manages to squeeze in a misleading headline and 3 separate attacks, and I would say 2 downright lies, in the course of one paragraph. It makes me wonder if Canwest New Services is just lazily relaying ACC head office propaganda as news whenever they have to report on anything Anglican-related.

(BTW, I note that the word "relationship" is undergoing deformation: it now means exclusively "sexual congress", and yet the writer is too coy to actually admit it.)

Tweaking

Mark Steyn zeroed in on a statement by Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress, regarding the state of Canada's human rights commissions. After describing the limits the Supreme Court had (erroneously) assumed would be in place for any regulation of freedom of speech in Canada, he added,

So by all means, let's tweak the law to eliminate some of its discretionary elements.

I'm beginning to think that the word "tweak" has a different meaning in Canada, or maybe it's just in Ottawa, than it does in the rest of the world. Typically, it's a description of a minor adjustment of some sort. Your speakers are humming? Here, just move them one inch to the right, and voilà! Problem solved. There's a rattling sound on the right side of your car? Just tighten this little screw, and there you go - fixed.

Here in Ottawa, though, I've heard it used incessantly during this winter's disastrous hockey season. Actually, I've heard it over and over again for the past 3 YEARS whenever the Senators were asked why they have so much potential, yet always seem to fall down when it comes time to deliver.

"We put ourselves in a tough spot, but if they can win two at home, we can win two at home," Senators center Jason Spezza said. "We've just got to tweak a few things and get our crowd behind us. We feel we can win these two games." June 1, 2007

While Murray is undoubtedly be looking to tweak the Senator's lineup in the hopes of landing a skilled veteran to serve as an inspirational rallying point (à la Teemu, Bourque, Andreychuk...), giving up Fisher smacks of the short-term lunacy that has ruled the Leafs for decades. The Senators have a record of avoiding just this sort of short-term move. November 5, 2007

Instead of banishing Emery to the minors, waiving him, or just sending him home for the remainder of the year, Murray chose to tweak the cast around him. He moved Joe Corvo and Patrick Eaves to Carolina for Mike Commodore and Cory Stillman, and brought in veteran leader Martin Lapointe from Chicago at the trade deadline.
April 3, 2008

"We're still a pretty good young core of guys and we're gaining experience. We don't like to see ourselves in this position, and it's frustrating to all of us. I know myself, I feel like I'm still learning a bit on the job. Last year we had the great run and scored a lot of big goals and made clutch plays, and this year we haven't been able to do that. Maybe there's some things in my game I want to tweak. This maybe helps open up your eyes a little bit," he added. "The fortunate thing is you're still young still and can still learn from it. I think it would be a little drastic to blow up the core of guys we got. We're learning together here." (Jason Spezza, who got a royal total of one assist against Pittsburgh) April 15, 2008

That seems to be "tweaking", Canadian-style, and now it's being used (appropriately) to describe the Human Rights Commissions. It's a ritual lie, to describe something that's smashed beyond repair.

Like Monty Python's famous dead parrot: "'E's not dead! 'E just needs tweaking!"

The Episcopal Arachne

Ruth Gledhill's blog had a neat little tidbit about The Madwoman of Second Avenue:

Incidentally, a source tells me that at one of these recent committee meetings at St Andrew's House, one KJS whiled away the boring hours by doing her needle-point. I stand willing and hopeful of being corrected on this, because the thought that this source might just have been telling the truth is almost beyond bearing.

No correction has been posted so far. This rumour led to a flurry of evocations of Mme Defarge, the villainess of "A Tale of Two Cities". But Mme Defarge was a knitter, not an embroideress. Instead, I immediately thought of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was famous for her embroidery. It was said that she used to embroider during meetings with her council or cabinet. And she was also a woman who seemed to ricochet from disaster to disaster and botched every job she tried.

Quiz: What dog breed are you?

I finally took Yin to the groomer today - she'd missed 2 previous appointments, because we'd been snowed in, and her hair had grown so long we could no longer see her eyes. She now looks like a puppy again. In honour of the occasion, here's a VERY ACCURATE personality test (well, I liked the results I ended up with):

Say it in pictures

Chris Johnson at MCJ has set up the Warman Store, with a number of pro-freedom of speech items for sale. Proceeds to go to Kathy Shaidle's legal fund. I ordered the yellow t-shirt for myself:
I think Warman lives here in Ottawa, so he might possibly see me wearing it around town one day. Especially as we all know by now that YELLOW is the colour most easily spotted by the human eye, thanks to a local optometrist and hockey fan. But I digress...

Blazing Cat Fur had a great graphic on her own site, which sums up perfectly how I feel about Canada pissing away its freedoms:


Reminds me of a particular scene from "The Monster Squad". I've heard it's going to be printed on a t-shirt soon. When they come out, I'm getting 3.

And since we're on the subject of t-shirts, I'll add one more that's not related to this Warman mess. My friend Nanette, who made the Angry Bee icon at the top, subscribes to a T-shirt shop called Threadless in Chicago, and she sent some pictures of the funny T-shirts they've come up with. The one I really liked was this one, the Loch Ness Imposter:


Every time I look at it, it reminds me of Mrs. Schori. I just visualize a little black oven mitt on that puppet's head.

Mental comfort food

This has been a bad news week; the Richard Warman lawsuits against Canadian bloggers got me very disturbed. It's not just the two I mentioned, Kathy Shaidle and Kate MacMillan, but also Ezra Levant and Free Dominion. Jay Currie's observations on Warman's manoeuvres to chop his way to the net and score 4 ugly goals are worth reading: he is suing for $50,000 (each, I suppose) because that's the maximum one can sue for and avoid the discovery phase of a trial.

Oddly enough, though, yesterday I started to feel better about all this, and reading Currie's comment this morning made me feel better still. I kept half-remembering some passage from Lord of the Rings that was relevant, so I got out my book, paged through it, and I think I found it. It's not one of the grand, emotional speeches about hope in the darkness and faith in the final victory of good. No, it was a plain, tactical comment:

In which no doubt you will see ourgood fortune and our hope. For imagining war he has let loose war, believing that he has no time to waste; for he that strikes the first blow, if he strikes it hard enough, may need to strike no more. So the forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended. Wise fool. For if he had used all his power to guard Mordor, so that none could enter, and bent all his guile to the hunting of the Ring, then indeed hope would have faded: neither Ring nor bearer could long have eluded him.

Currie is right:

One key thing: Warman is betting all the marbles here. His credibility and the credibility of the CHRC are now in play. Warman was the CHRC’s creature and, I suspect the evidence will show, the CHRC became his creature as he casually crossed the line between investigator and complainant. By filing this litigation Warman is putting his reputation on the line but, more importantly, he is putting the reputation of the Canadian Human Rights Commission into issue.

But what is more, I believe that this is not the course of action Warman would have preferred. I don't believe that this is the final unfolding of a well-laid plan, as the (easily impressed) Warren Kinsella believes. I think this is an unwelcome hastening of the pace, before victory is out of reach.

I think he would have preferred to use his familiar tools, the HRCs, with all their built-in advantages. He's had a 100% success rate with them so far; who would willingly give up such favourable ground in a battle? But I suspect that the attention and pressure from the blogosphere in the past 3-4 months have weakened that weapon. No more will he be able to work in such peaceful obscurity: every case he brings from now to eternity will be hauled into public and shouted to the world. His targets are no longer isolated, uninformed and abandoned to the well-oiled money-gouging humiliation machine he so lovingly worked upon. That particular game will never be the same.

And so I see in this sudden explosion of lawsuits a cry of rage: They're getting away!!! It's an aggressive move to cut off the enemy before he can close the circle on a killing siege.

I feel from afar his haste and fear. He has begun sooner than he would. Something has happened to stir him.

"We must push Sauron to his last throw," as Aragorn said, and Gimli said that the hasty stroke often goes awry. It takes heroism to make oneself the bait, as Ezra, Kathy, Kate and Connie have - if we have their back, I think we'll win, and break this obscene oppression so it won't rise again.

Jackass: The Opera

It used to be, when someone mentioned Germans doing Italian opera, we thought of the grand and aloof Herbert von Karajan conducting the greatest singers in the world. Now it's withered Brechtian wannabes indulging in the musical equivalent of fecal smearing:

Giuseppe Verdi, one might think, is hard to mess up. But a theater in the eastern German city of Erfurt seems to be doing its best. In a re-interpretation of the opera "A Masked Ball," which opens on Saturday, director Johann Kresnik has hit upon a dramatic novelty: His staging has naked pensioners wearing Mickey Mouse masks, wandering around the ruins of New York's World Trade Center.

"Novelty." Well, I guess someone's got to be the first one to do the stupidest opera staging in the world, so you could call that a "novelty" if you like. I'm guessing that the rest of humanity isn't too envious of the man who holds that title.

In all, there are to be 30 aged nudists -- between 50 and 69 years old -- sharing the stage with a Ground Zero backdrop. In other scenes, actors wander the stage wearing US flags and burning Uncle Sam hats. Indeed, there is little subtlety in the message Kresnik intends to send.

"Aged" nudists - yeah, that'll have them breaking the doors down. Nude protests these days seem to be a speciality of the aged, the flabby, the saggy and the shrivelled. And it's usually old-timers who want to do this kind of thing, the sort of people who just can't let go of the 70s, when they might have been in shape not to look too ridiculous doing it. I'm guessing that the aged nudists in this production aren't singers - not many opera singers are still going at 69. They must be just props - mutes hired to shuffle around in the buff.

"It will be a different, a provocative masked ball on the ruins of the World Trade Center," Kresnik told the German news agency DPA. "The naked stand for people without means, the victims of capitalism, the underclass, who don't have anything any more," he says.

Well, that's certainly been my experience, living in that world leader in capitalism, the United States. I never could walk around Dupont Circle without encountering hundreds of nude men, though come to think of it, that might not have been entirely due to the predations of capitalism.

He also admits to wanting to call America's global position of leadership into question.

Yeah, I'm sure they had to beat that confession out of him.

By the time Kresnik is finished with his radical remodelling of "A Masked Ball," little will be left of Verdi's story of love, jealousy and reconciliation. This production, assures Kresnik, whose Marxist background is well known, is intended to be dramatic political commentary.

"One has to introduce new elements," he says. Otherwise it is difficult to attract new theatergoers.

Oh, yes, that sparkly new concept, Marxism. Do you dare introduce something so novel and unfamiliar? In East Germany, of all places? I came across something novel myself this morning: a search through Wikipedia, which told me that Karl Marx was born in 1818 and died in 1883, while Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813 and died in 1901. By the time Verdi died, 'Das Kapital' was already grandpa's ground-breaking novelty.

It never fails to astonish me how time stands still for leftists. Darwinism and Marxism were born in an era when leeches and bleeding were still up-to-date medical practices, yet the old mutton legs still keep being warmed up and offered as spring lamb.

I get so mad when I read about frivolous assholes like this Kresnik. The Islamic fanatics are right when they say the West is weak and decadent, at least when this sort of garbage can rise to the top. With the incredible wealth of Western art and music at one's command, to ooze out an abortion like this is unforgivable. At times like this, I *want* the other side to win. I want fools like Kresnik to experience their own 9/11, to feel on their own hides what oppression and tyranny do. They've thrown away their birthright, so they deserve to starve and die in the desert outside the walls of the citadel - the walls they've gleefully helped tear down.