Guilty. Every damn one of them.

Good news from Kingston: the jury verdict in the Shafia mass-murder honour killing trial is in, and all three defendants are guilty of first degree murder. Thank goodness, the system worked and the murderers are headed for jail; 25 years with no chance of parole, then I guess we'll see. Christie Blatchford's reports have been terrific; I hope she writes a book about this case.

There was one thing she reported early on in the trial, when the court was hearing testimony from the teachers and social workers who could easily see that these girls were living in hellish abuse yet were too cowed by political correctness to intervene and save them.

One of the girls didn't want to go on a sugarbush field trip with her class, and the teacher told her firmly that she had to go, because this was "part of our culture" and it was important she learn about it. I was struck by the firmness and certainty about Canadian culture when it was a rather trivial, picturesque novelty in question. Why were these people never told with equal firmness about the other aspects of our culture they had to accept?

And not just the usual "human rights" blather that everyone piously intones at times like this. I mean something as simple as the way our laws work and what happens to people who try to defy them? I think making the Shafia adults watch a season of "CSI" would have been a more valuable introduction to our culture than a whole seminar on maple sugaring, snowshoeing, hockey, and how to bake butter tarts. Why didn't anyone ever say to Shafia "Do you know what we can do to you if you put a foot wrong? We have machines that can make the stones talk to us. We can overhear your whispers ten miles away. We can see what you do without even opening our eyes. We will find out everything and you can't hide from us."

Instead, this Afghan mini-tyrant was flattered and deferred to - at every turn, he was encouraged to believe that his foreign culture was a sort of magical cloak of invincibility that could deflect every presumptuous attempt by the infidel to interfere with him. No wonder when Shafia and his two accomplices finally turned their mind to committing murder, they figured the same threadbare little bag of tricks that thwarted the Montreal social workers would defeat the Kingston police.

"We'll just haughtily deny everything! We'll tell bald lies! We'll get on our high horse and act offended! We'll claim we can't understand! We'll throw ourselves on the ground and sob hysterically! What could go wrong? It's always worked before!"

It was like watching a spoiled 5-year old who thinks he can buy the CN Tower with the contents of his piggy bank. These three simply had no idea how a police investigation works or what sort of tools a modern Western criminal investigator has at his disposal. If someone had managed to get through their bumptious conceit and really teach them how this culture they were inhabiting worked, maybe they wouldn't have felt that murder was an option for dealing with disappointments.

But no, we didn't want to hurt their feelings by pointing out that they were backward hillbillies; we covered it up and ignored it so they sailed along confidently in their bubble of error, until they crossed a line we wouldn't ignore. I'm sure all 3 are bewildered at finding themselves in jail; they thought they'd figured us out and knew the magic formula for passing unscathed among us. And we let them think they had, until it was too late.

Word fun

My sister sent me this funny article. The task was to "to take
any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or
changing one letter and supply a new definition". I especially enjoyed the following:

Ignoranus: A person who is both stupid and an asshole.

Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.

I remember long ago finding an almost identical contest in the back pages of a Spectator magazine, only people were to take the name of a book, movie, poem, etc. and alter one letter to create a new work. The one I remember was "Wein Kampf: The inspiring story of Hitler's struggle against alcoholism."

The Tales of Hoffmann - Opera Nationale de Paris (Bastille) 2002

We're lucky that nearly every Sunday evening the French Ontario TV station TFO broadcasts an opera, usually in French, but sometimes in another language with French subtitles. This past Sunday they showed 'The Tales of Hoffmann', recorded in 2002 in Paris, with Neil Shicoff as Hoffmann and Bryn Terfel as Lindorf/Coppelius/Dr. Miracle/Dapertutto.

I normally prefer traditional stagings of opera, so when I saw the bare stage at the opening of this version, I didn't expect much. I was pleasantly surprised, due mostly to the performances of the leading male singers. Shicoff's Hoffmann was quite a different interpretation from what I'd seen before. This isn't the eagerly-awaited life of the party one usually sees entering Luther's tavern to the applause of enthusiastic students. This Hoffmann begins the opera alone in the dark, passed out drunk on the floor before the crowd even enters. As the opera house patrons flood in during intermission, they don't even notice Hoffmann until Niklaus hauls him up off the floor. The modern dress manages to downplay Hoffmann's "poet" identity; in his disheveled suit and askew tie, he doesn't look like a poet. He looks like one of those raffish, hard-drinking reporters from a 1940s Hollywood film (when they were still called "reporters" and not "journalists"). He's already drunk, so when he starts calling out "Allumons le punch! Grisons-nous!" it's more obvious than usual that he's not drinking to celebrate anything - he's bitter and rather unpleasant.

This gives an odd atmosphere to his first song, the "Kleinzach" number.



I've never cared much for this song; it seems a rather silly interruption to the story, and I've always just waited it out until it segues into his reminiscenses of his beloved. But here, it works in a different way from what I've experienced before. When the crowd calls out for him to "sing that song about Kleinzach", it doesn't feel like a bunch of friends happily asking to hear a familiar, fun story. Suddenly I got the feeling that this was a crowd in a bar cruelly egging on a drunk to make a fool of himself. Maybe these people aren't his friends after all.

Bryn Terfel as Councillor Lindorf has already appeared before this, plotting his seduction of Stella, but now he starts interacting with Hoffmann. It's hardly a fair contest. Shicoff is actually a bit on the short side, and Terfel is quite tall, but it's more Shicoff's acting ability that convinces us of Hoffmann's emotional turmoil and weakness. Lindorf is coolly scornful of his rival; Hoffmann's taunts never leave a mark, and his physical stumbling and weakness are a metaphor for his inner disarray. When Lindorf mockingly asks, "Ah! ah! ah! monsieur aime donc quelque fois?" ("So, the gentleman is in love, is he?") Hoffmann really looks wounded as he pauses, clutching his sad little pages of poetry, and I suddenly felt genuinely pained for him. It's so easy to make him suffer, and he can never hide it, no matter how he tries. Torturing him is child's play for a hardened villain like Lindorf; I almost wondered at that point how Hoffmann could possibly make it through the entire opera.

The main way this Hoffmann is different from all the others I've seen is that here, Hoffmann from the beginning is a loser. He doesn't really have friends, except for Niklaus. This whole story is going to be a list of the ways and things he's lost over the years. It's both an explanation of why he's down and out today, and why his history is one of failure and loss.

The story of Hoffmann's 3 loves begins with Olympia, the doll, and for the most part I enjoyed it. Olympia's mechanical party song starts with her waving a fan, which she eventually folds up and turns into a microphone, as she carries on a pop-diva performance, even to the point of holding out the mic to the audience for "callbacks" during the little repetitions in her song. Very funny. I immediately thought of Madonna, but she could have been any pop singer. I could have done without the simulated sex during the song, but this seems to be becoming more common in modern productions. I can't understand it myself; Olympia is supposed to be a robot, without heart or feelings. Why directors seem to think that this should also make her a nymphomaniac is beyond me. I think it's just because this is the most obviously comic part of the opera, and today "comic" seems to equal "lewd". It was funny and even a little shocking, but in a silly way, when her dress flew off and she was walking around "nude", though of course the soprano was encased in plastic "body armour", that I couldn't help noticing was not anatomically correct, just the way a real Barbie doll would be. Poor Spalanzani kept trying in vain to cover her offensive areas with nothing but his hands, which didn't do much good, but added a lot to the humour. At least he was having the normal reaction to seeing his "daughter" marching around in public stark naked!

Terfel's Coppelius doesn't have that big a role in this part, but he did well enough. I didn't find him that overpowering as Coppelius. When he was plucking eyeballs out of the giant jar of preserved ones sitting on the table, I really expected him to start juggling them. That would be a nice touch, frankly; I wonder if it's hard for a baritone to juggle while singing? I'll bet not many could do it. When at the end, he pulls out a saw and goes roaring off in search of revenge, he reminded me a lot of Sweeney Todd.

But it's Shicoff I wanted to watch all throughout this section. He's playing a younger self, and you can see it in his almost little-boy skittishness (even though Shicoff was over 50 for this performance, he still manages to carry it off). He simply can't protect himself; "heart on the sleeve" doesn't nearly adequately describe the way this Hoffmann surrenders to love. When he drops to his knees in adoration before Olympia, it's almost indecent to see so much emotion pouring out of a man. He's both wonderful and pathetic. Coppelius's suggestion to Spalanzani to marry off Olympia to Hoffmann manages to convey more than the usual random malice of an evil man. It fits because Hoffmann is a loser. He's not a naive, innocent boy who can be deceived; he's the sort who'll always end up with a piece of junk because that's what he deserves. Poor Hoffmann! I can feel sorry for him while realizing that he brings this sort of disaster on himself. He's not just a victim - he's complicit in his own degradation.

The next section deals with Antonia, the artist. I didn't care for the set design that much. The bottom/front section is an empty orchestra pit; the top/rear is a stage with closed curtain (the curtain opens when Antonia's mother finally appears). Most of the action between Hoffmann and Antonia takes place in the lower section, and I found it so dark it was hard to see what was going on. All the chairs and music stands seemed just so much clutter for the performers to thread their way through; this was one instance when I would have LIKED a bare stage. Antonia was fine, though I didn't detect much fire in her. She seemed depressed and colourless, as if the dark stage design sucked the life out of her. When she finally gives in to her desire to sing, she didn't seem to have that much fire; I've always thought Antonia should have a sort of hectic excitement whenever she sings, so you can believe that this could push her past the limits of her physical strength.

Terfel's Dr. Miracle is pretty sinister in this section, though I was a little amused because he was dressed in a tuxedo. With those little glasses, he reminded me a lot of John Candy's Dr. Tongue. I kept thinking, "Welcome to Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Opera!" The villain really dominates this section of the opera; in fact, Hoffmann hardly appears in it except near the beginning. Instead, it's a long interview between Miracle and M. Crespel, then another long interview between Miracle and Antonia. Hoffmann and Dr. Miracle don't actually meet at all. Antonia seems to be the best "match" for Hoffmann - they're both artists and they do genuinely love each other. But Hoffmann still looks like a scruffy loser; you can see why M. Crespel doesn't want this guy hanging around his lovely, talented daughter - he looks like a bum. He does lose her, but it's not exactly his fault this time. Instead, the problem seems to be that he's drawn to a woman he can never really win. She's an artist, and she'll choose her art over him, no matter how much he means to her, even though in the end it costs her life.

Finally, we come to the Giulietta segment, which naturally starts off with an orgy, which I found a bit meh, but other people seem to like this sort of thing. Giulietta is quite a piece of work - she looks like a 1920s blonde movie star, with lots of style and absolutely no heart whatsoever. I found her strangely convincing as a femme fatale for hire. The background of this set is a wall of (moving) theatre seats; the chorus occupies these seats both as participants in the action, and then will suddenly transform into an audience observing the performance. It's surprisingly effective to see the main performers suddenly turn their backs to us and stand facing this applauding "audience" - we're suddenly "backstage" watching someone else's theatre experience. Hoffmann arrives on the scene clutching a bottle; he's moved on from the bamboozled dope he was with Olympia and the runner-up he was with Antonia. Now he fancies himself a man of the world, and he walks right into Giulietta's setup. It's obvious to everyone else that she's out of his league, and can only be paying attention to him for some sinister purpose, but he thinks he's got a chance with her. Once again, Hoffmann throws himself head-first into this love affair, which we quickly realize is overwhelmingly sexual on his part. When he realizes he's been tricked out of his reflection, his anguish is real and crushing. As Giulietta is about to walk out of his life for good, he falls on his knees before her and buries his face between her thighs - she doesn't even notice him. The scene ends with Hoffmann having killed his rival for nothing, and the villain Dapertutto towering over him as he lies broken and damned.

Back we come to the tavern for the epilogue, where we discover that all 3 women are really 1 woman: Stella. Hoffmann, the eternal loser, is in the process of losing her, in all 3 ways we've just witnessed. She's a vain, empty flirt who performs a role; she's an artist who'll always care more about opera than about him; and she's a whore who can be bought by Lindorf's box of jewellery. The crowd surges out, following the diva and the triumphant villain, as Hoffmann collapses into a drunken stupor. Then the final reveal comes: Hoffmann's faithful friend Niklaus reappears, this time as the Muse. He can't see her, but she caresses him and revives him; he even momentarily leans his weary head on her shoulder, then notices his page of poetry lying scattered on the floor. His suffering turns to inspiration, and he begins to write. With her hand on his shoulder, he gets up and walks toward the distant light, a page of poetry held triumphantly aloft. I've seen versions where this final scene with the Muse is cut (I think the Powell and Pressburger film ends the film with the students singing as they leave), but it's a beautiful ending. Hoffmann is no longer a loser - he's been redeemed by his Art.

One thing that doesn't quite work for me is the deliberate theme of Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' that is carefully worked through the entire opera. Stella is performing in 'Don Giovanni'; the music scattered about the set in the Antonia scene is 'Don Giovanni', and I think Dapertutto is holding it during Hoffmann's destruction. It's the role Antonia's mother is costumed for; all the women carry the same black fan. There are some parallels between that opera and 'Tales of Hoffmann', but I don't think it quite works. Yes, in each case the hero is involved with 3 different women. But Hoffmann is uniformly unsuccessful in love, whereas up until this point, Don Giovanni is famous for his success. Both protagonists are accompanied by a companion (Niklaus/Leporello) who continually tries and fails to turn the main character from his mistaken path. And by the end of Act III Hoffmann has committed murder, lost his soul and even "falls" as if to damnation, like Don Giovanni but he is saved in the end. "Don Giovanni" doesn't have a separate villain; Don Giovanni IS the villain, as well as the hero. And the "happy ending" in "Don Giovanni" comes from the restoration of virtue through the destruction of vice; Hoffmann's ending is happy even though evil seems to have triumphed. They even eliminated the final scene in Act III where Giulietta accidentally drinks poison; "Ah, Giulietta, maladroite!" growls Dapertutto as his useful tool foolishly kills herself. So we never see anyone punished for their bad actions, only Hoffmann suffers. But at least his suffering is not pointless; he suffered as long as he sought something other than Art. And having suffered, he can now become the great artist he was meant to be, and transform his suffering into beauty.

.WAV of the Future

I have seen the light. The True Faith has finally been revealed:

Sweden has formally recognized the Church of Kopimism whose central tenet is the right to file-share.

The church claims that "kopyacting" - sharing information through copying - is akin to a religious service.

The church holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V (shortcuts for copy and paste) as sacred symbols.

It was founded by 19-year-old philosophy student and leader Isak Gerson. He hopes that file-sharing will now be given religious protection.

So I have decided to convert, from .RCC to .KOP. We even have a place of worship all ready to go:


I'll meet you there tomorrow, wearing my very best go-to-matinee hat!

Wounded knees and baked bread

The Christmas holiday is going pretty well. We're in another warm spell, and the snow that fell over Christmas has melted off the driveway. It's a strange pattern right now; we're in a sort of wave pattern, where it warms up almost to or over freezing, then drops way back down to -14 for a few days, then the pattern repeats. I'm not complaining; ever since I started driving the school bus, I anxiously watch out for snowstorms, and a dry winter is the best for me.

James somehow hurt his knee Saturday night. I don't know just what happened, but I thought I heard him stumble going up the stairs that evening. The next day, he was complaining about a hurting knee, and he hasn't walked on it since. He's just hopping all over the house on one foot. I'm sure it's just a muscle pull, because there's no bruising or even swelling, but you can't explain that to him. It's sort of funny to hear him saying "OWWWwwww!" in a surprised voice; he's not used to encountering something that can really stop or even inconvenience him.

I went out to the drugstore yesterday and got some liniment and joint-ache bandages. Now my hands smell of that awful eucalyptus, and he keeps demanding "Medicine!" but I think this is something that only time will heal. I've got him to at least stretch out his leg on a footstool under the desk when he's at the computer, and I think that's an improvement. Hopefully by tomorrow he'll try putting some weight on the foot.

He loves baguettes, and we'd run out by the weekend, so finally I couldn't stand him demanding "Bread!" all the time, so I decided to MAKE some bread. I got out the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, looked up the basic bread recipe and got started. It turns out it's not that hard to do after all. I've done it before, long ago, but in the last 20 years I used bread machines from time to time and just figured that this was the way to go from now on. But bread machines break, and I finally decided they take up too much space in our small kitchen, so I haven't made bread for many years.

I made a dozen buns and a loaf of white bread. My mom used to make buns, and I've always wanted to be able to do the same. Mine weren't quite as large, but I may be seeing the past through those kid-eyes that see everything as bigger and better. Maybe they weren't really that large. Mine tasted the same, though.

A nice Christmas

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! Ours was very nice, though it started a bit early, at around 6:30 AM when James leaped from bed and headed down the hall.

Actually, I'd woken up at 2:30 and couldn't sleep, so I sneaked downstairs at 3:00 to put the presents under the tree. Just as I finished, I looked out the window and saw that it had started snowing! It went on snowing most of Christmas Day, so against all the odds, we had a white Christmas this year.

The kids are getting older and more capable of waiting, so we were able to make the present-opening last about half an hour. I remember years when we were up before 6:00, and it was all over in about 5 minutes! And that usually involved Thomas opening EVERYONE'S presents for them.

Dean got me a new food processor, AND a blender! I'd asked for a blender because I'd needed a new one for several months, since James threw the glass pitcher out on the bricks in the back yard and smashed it. I'd specified that the pitcher would have to be metal or plastic, and both machines are nice, unbreakable plastic. I know it's not glamorous-sounding, but when you cook as much as I do you NEED some of these machines, and there are several things I just haven't made because I didn't have the equipment.

I gave him an electric blanket, because he'd grown very fond of an old one I'd picked up at an auction this summer. It was unused, in its original plastic, but I think it was at least 20 years old, and the wiring seemed a bit dodgy to me. One night, I think it caused the circuit breaker in our room to trip, so at that point I threw out the cord - I just don't like taking chances with electrical stuff. The new one is very soft and up-to-date.

For Emma, I got her the complete Twilight Zone dvd set. She's been asking for it for years, and I'm happy to see her taking an interest in live action drama instead of anime and cartoons. Besides, the Twilight Zone is classic; I may end up borrowing it to watch myself!

Government Goliath, Local Davids

I sent this local Ottawa story to Mark Steyn, in the hope he might write about it on his site or put it on his sidebar. It's similar to a story he's written about a few times, regarding a bridge near his little New Hampshire town that needed to be replaced.

This story, I think, is even a bit better, because it shows how government health care leads us on and on to more and more government dependence, even as the growing government does less and less for us.

A local man in poor health had to have his leg amputated this past year, and he required a ramp to be built at his house before he could go home. Not being related to a cabinet minister or a hockey player, he joined the line of supplicants for government funds to build the $4,800 ramp, and was turned down at every turn (with the encouraging promise that he could always reapply month after month until he finally succeeded). With no ramp, he couldn't leave the hospital, so he's been languishing in a hospital bed since August, at a cost to the government of over $90,000.

The story came to mercifully happy end, though, and, just as in Steyn's bridge case, it was no thanks to the multi-million dollar government do-gooder ministries. I'll quote the Citizen article, because it has that tell-tale ring of good common sense, practicality and neighbourliness that's becoming all too rare these days:

After I left him the details on a phone message Thursday, (local Conservative MP Jack) MacLaren called Friday morning to tell me what he was working on with Tom Black, president of the Ontario Landowners Association.

In addition to promoting property rights, MacLaren, a former president of the association, says the group helps people in need whenever it can.

As MacLaren sees it, it's almost Christmas, and what a "real nice Christmas event" this would be if Larry is reunited with his wife for the holidays without having to worry about returning to hospital afterward.

"I'm sure this man would be much happier, and much healthier, at home," he said. "Everyone wants to be home, right? He needs a ramp and it needs to be built. We have the people and the resources to do that, and we will do that."

The work could start as early as tomorrow and be completed by midweek. The ramp is going to be built in Black's barn and then assembled at Larry's house. MacLaren said the ramp will be built by volunteers who the association can call on. One building supplier has already offered a price discount on lumber.

Today's paper had a followup:

The people who promised to build Larry Torrington a wheelchair ramp so he could finally be released from Saint-Vincent Hospital obviously don't fool around.

The ramp was designed Saturday, built Sunday and assembled outside Larry's Stittsville house Monday.

With the ramp in place, Larry - who had surgery in March to remove the lower part of his right leg because of complications from diabetes - was expected to leave hospital and arrive home early this afternoon.

So to recap: Local newspaper alerts local MP of situation on Thursday; by Friday MP has contacted local community leaders and they have assessed problem and are figuring out how to solve it. Tuesday: wheelchair ramp is built and installed and Larry returns home.

This contrasts with 4 months of fruitless petitioning to several government sources of funding, resulting in nothing, and coincidentally costing over $93,000 in hospital expenses, covered by government health insurance.

Now, I don't want to be a Grinch; this is a genuine feelgood story, the good guys came to the rescue and everything worked out the way we would hope it should. But there's still something about this story that bugs me. It's not the insane difference between the money saved by one stingy government bureaucracy versus the amount squandered as a result by a different government bureaucracy, or how nobody could seem to line up those two items into one mind and decide, "This is ridiculous! Give the poor guy his ramp, and let's free up that hospital bed!"

No, it's the way things happened in such an unnatural order. Why was the simplest, most direct course of action the LAST resort? Why did Larry have to spend 4 months wasting his time entreating the government to take pity on him when help was just around the corner? Why do we resign ourselves to filling out endless little bits of paper to feed into an anonymous machine in the hope of getting what we need eventually, instead of speaking directly to the people nearest us, who know us best?

It's not just Larry - we all do this. I think Steyn is right when he warns about how government medical care changes the nature of our relationship with the government. We don't think it will, but we find ourselves just sliding into this supplicant position without even thinking about it.

What's even worse, it seems that as the government takes over the provision of more and more of our needs, it inevitably takes over bits of our life that we never willingly agreed to assign to them. Think about it: this whole story concerned the building of a wooden platform outside a man's house. If Larry's wife had wanted a clothesline erected at the back door, he would have just built it himself or hired a handyman to do it in an afternoon. But somehow because government medical care has gotten involved, a little bit of carpentry has suddenly become "government business", and we slump resignedly as we wait our turn for the government to get to us and take care of the business that we no longer even imagine can be done any other way.

Why do we do this? It isn't because we're getting better service from the government; look at Larry - he never got anything at all, at least, not what he wanted. There was plenty of what he didn't want - moping in a hospital, but nothing at all of what he, his doctors and everyone who knew him knew he needed. Maybe we have all decided that it's too hard to make personal appeals to people we know - it's shameful to reveal that we have needs we can't take care of ourself. And we worry too much about being a burden and a bother to people around us. But a government doesn't have a personality we have to worry about interacting with. We never really think "If I get this, then someone else can't have what they need" because it's never presented that way to us individually. We know that one department loses funding while another one gains it, but it's never personalized. Whereas, with real human beings, we might think "My son's family had to give up their vacation this year to help me to pay for my new furnace" and the resulting discomfort makes us unhappy.

Of course, by eliminating the possibility of getting personal help from someone, we also eliminate the other person's ability to be generous and experience the happiness of helping. Instead, we get our "stuff" - not very good, and maybe extremely late - and there are no messy human interactions to worry about. Even without intending to, letting government help us all the time ends up creating a distant, alienated society of people who don't know each other and don't know how to deal with each other.

Emergencies can still override this numbing effect, but in everyday life we seem to be slumping into a poorer, lonelier existence.

Mysterious doings at local Presbyterian church

An interesting, if obscure, story in today's Ottawa Citizen:

OTTAWA — Today marks a new era at St. Giles Presbyterian Church. It is the congregation’s first Sunday in “exile.”

The prominent red-brick building has stood at the corner of Bank Street and First Avenue since 1928. But last Sunday night, in a grave ceremony, the congregants were locked out of the building’s main sanctuary. The Presbytery of Ottawa, which said the congregation showed a “lack of respect” for its authority, announced that until the flock repents, it will be allowed to pray only in the basement.

The presbytery, which oversees the 18 Presbyterian churches in Ottawa (and one in Gatineau), imposed the move after St. Giles members signed a petition asking for the removal of the pastor.

I know this church - we used to live just two blocks away. But the story is very unclear in just what the problem is here. Maybe someone who knows will enlighten us. It just sounds like a pretty heavy-handed reaction on the part of the local presbytery (I guess the equivalent of a diocese). From the comments I gather that the congregation is pretty elderly (no surprise there) and not exactly large, especially compared to the size of the building they occupy. They don't fit the profile of Occupy-style troublemakers, though I can well believe that they could be recalcitrant and set in their ways. What did the pastor do to get them so riled?

The only clue is that their petition to have him removed complains of his sermons and actions, which left them feeling alienated and troubled. Is he some radical slash-and-burn type who wants to start doing gay weddings in the Glebe? Or is he just the sort who keeps lecturing them on their laziness? It could be anything. Though to tell the truth, I always wonder at ministers who think they can nag a congregation of octogenarians into leaping from their pews and charging out to evangelize the world. People wear out when they get old. You have to keep some young people around to do the heavy lifting; it's unreasonable to expect age and weariness to disappear just because it's church work that needs doing. Then again, why would any young people want to hang around a joint that's full of creaky old codgers? Especially once they realize that they'll have to pull a triple load to make up for the old-timers who are beyond it (and often don't see, or more likely, have forgotten, the point of the exertion anyway)? Vicious circle.

Whatever the reason, they sent them away from the table with a good solid thrashing:

Hymns chosen for the congregation to sing included “We come to ask Your forgiveness.” The responsive readings included a turn for the congregation to say “Compassionate God, how quickly we forget you. We trust instead in our own judgments; we pursue our own agendas.”

The scriptural reading was from the book of Lamentations, Chapter 3, with words spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord’s wrath. He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light.”

The sermon, given by Rev. Jack Archibald of St. Paul’s Presbyterian on Woodroffe Avenue, made the comparison explicit, likening the St. Giles congregants to the Jews of Judah who suffered expulsion from their temple in Jerusalem and exile from the Holy Land.

Archibald spoke of the calamity and humiliation involved in both the biblical and current episodes.

“It’s a tragedy,” Archibald went on to say. “But you know what makes it the greatest tragedy of all? Certainly for Judah it was this: that they had brought it on themselves. They knew that they had deserted their god, that they had left him and were worshipping idols as their pagan neighbours did. And they were warned by prophet after prophet who came to speak to them until finally it was too late.”

There was a lesson there, he said.

Anyway, exiling these people to the basement of their own church is the sort of action that would be advertised far and wide as an example of heavy-handed inflexibility if it were the Roman Catholic Church doing it. The Presbyterians don't really have that reputation, so I'm wondering what's going on.

It occurred to me that maybe the newspaper has hit on a new way of sparking interest in their product. Instead of the old-fashioned method of just telling us all the news in one edition, they can turn this story into a serial, like the old Charles Dickens method of publishing his novels in monthly installments. I know I can't wait for Part II of this intriguing mystery - I'll be watching the paper like a hawk for the followup story, where we may learn a little more.

UPDATE: No real additional information, but Metro News seems to have sent their own reporter along to the church this morning, and she reports that 40 people attended the service in the basement, which is a good turnout(!). I guess this church is a bit more "fragile", in the words of the minister, than I realized. The earlier story implied a church membership of nearly 200, but this sounds like a very small, probably elderly group, and the worries that people will just leave are probably very well-founded. Nobody wants to say just what is wrong there. I didn't think of it at first, but the pastor is ALSO down there in the basement with the rebellious congregation. Oh joy. It must have been a great way to begin Advent.

The Playing Fields of Penn State University

Mark Steyn has a good (as always) piece up about the disastrous child-rape scandal in the football programme at Penn State University. How telling that this scandal erupted in the university's sports programme, and not just in any sport, but the football programme.

I know one of the arguments for sports is the health one, but few people who love sports are thrilling to the sight of calories being burned on the field, or muscle resistance being built. That's the utilitarian facade erected to satisfy the philistines (and the one resorted to to force people like me, lazy dreamers who hate participating in sports, into smelly gyms and onto cold fields 3 times a week in school). People who LOVE a sport love it for its beauty, and the human skills and strengths required to do it well.

Wellington never really said "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton", but it makes a sort of sense - you can see why the saying caught on. Sports are small-scale yet magnified enactments of human endeavour, and when they're done well they involve much more than pure muscle development. A football game employs physical strength, but combined with farsighted planning, canny strategy, wily deception - it's a whole little battlefield, scaled down to manageable size.

In short, sports showcase what have traditionally been called "the manly virtues" - courage, daring, innovation, loyalty, camaraderie, and more. This is why sport has always been praised as "character-building". How pathetic to find in a crisis that the development has all been on the outside for some of these sports leaders. Where is the "character" that should come from all these years of "building"?

Steyn rightly scorns the 28-year old assistant who witnessed a little boy being raped and then ran away. The apologists have gone the usual route of exculpating the responsible adults by mewing about typical reactions to severe shock, how "nobody can know what they'd do in such a situation". Steyn quote Kathy Shaidle who correctly squashes this pre-emptive surrender by saying "When we say 'we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances,' we make cowardice the default position."

How acceptable would the "I was so surprised I just froze" or "I couldn't think of what to do so I just ran away" argument be if a football game were in progress? Part of the game is to try to outwit the opposition and ruin their plans. If a player has been prepared to do a certain play and the opposing team suddenly does something unexpected, what is the player required to do? He's supposed to have some backup plan to immediately switch to in reaction. He can't just stand there open-mouthed and refuse to act. You have to do SOMETHING, to TRY to rescue the situation.
You can't just give up and then snap at critics, "Yeah, well, I'd like to see YOU play the hero without warning!" Life is all without warning.

I was disappointed that one of my favourite newspaper columnists, David Warren, took a rather lackadaisacal approach to this matter when he wrote about it last week. One argument (or lack of argument) that sets my teeth on edge is the laid-back "Oh, this is nothing new. It's ALWAYS been like this" approach to evil. It smells of that pre-emptive "making cowardice the default" mentioned above. What's the point of doing anything? Nothing will change, so why even try? His argument is that people responsible for institutions might see that more harm than good can come of taking swift and thorough action. Theoretically, I can see that that's true, but practically it seems to be that the opposite is true: however much harm might have been done by calling in the police and having Sandusky arrested, could it really have been MORE than leaving sleeping dogs lie, and having the scandal erupt more than 10 years later? Who really benefitted from the delay except Sandusky? He had 10 more years of child-hunting to enjoy. Everyone else is getting now, and much worse, what they could have weathered more easily back when the crime occurred.

Refinishing the bed, Part II - veneer

Yesterday I got started on applying the veneer to the spot on the bedrail when it peeled off. Don't believe these DIY websites that say applying veneer is so easy; it's VERY DIFFICULT. I spoiled so many pieces of veneer with false cuts.



Stupidly, I took seriously the advice not to use straight lines, but to cut the veneer on a curve to hide the lines of the repair. If I'd just completely removed the veneer from the entire rectangular section of rail, from edge to edge, I could have easily applied two pieces to fit, and it would have been done in an hour or so. Instead, I laboriously traced an outline of the curved section that needed fixing and went through hell trying to cut veneer to fit.

One thing that did work well, though, was taking off the old veneer around the edge of my design. I used a steam iron to loosen the glue and then pried it off easily with a putty knife.




Then came tracing the shape on paper and cutting it out:



I tried to do it in 2 sections, but I had to give up when I was about half through. The pieces just wouldn't fit, so I got the first piece glued down then the second piece broke in half and I glued that down, and resumed work today.

Today I redrew the remaining section so the curves are a little wider, and applied the last piece.



Here's hoping it glues down without too many bubbles and gaps; I'm getting sick of trying to squeeze glue into tiny cracks and clamp every square inch of this thing. I don't know if I'll bother fixing the back of the rail - this was really hard to do, and took me 2 days. The back won't be seen when the bed is in use; it could just be left and nobody would ever know.

Bawdy humour - Nicolas Cage's Agent

Yes, it's a bit vulgar. But it also made me laugh so hard I literally fell over sideways and had to beg Emma to stop the video because I couldn't hear the lines anymore. I'm not a fan of Nicolas Cage - the only movie of his I actually have watched from beginning to end is 'Raising Arizona' (and I liked it a lot). But I gather from this that he may be a little lacking in discrimination when it comes to movie projects.

Another refinishing project

I have a new furniture project: stripping and refinishing the bookcase earlier this year went so well, I decided to try my hand at another one. A few years ago at a country auction I bought an interesting bedstead - it's rather plain in design - just flat wood with a small Art Decoish trim on the footboard - but it has one interesting feature: in the headboard, on either side, there are two diamond-shaped cutouts with glass in them, and behind the glass is a little light fixture! I guess you could use this to read by in bed, or else just as a nightlight while getting ready to sleep.

My sister saw a bed like this in Vancouver and really liked it, though I think in her case the cutout was a different shape - maybe a circle, like a porthole. Anyway, the finish has deteriorated over time, and on one of the side rails some of the wood veneer got damp and peeled off. I'm going to strip the finish off, try to patch the veneer, and rewire the electric fixture, to make this bed fully functional again.



I started early this week, simply stripping the finish from the side rails, and moved on to the footboard yesterday. I was so surprised when the finish started coming off. I'd thought the bed was some very dark wood, like cherry. It's hard to show in pictures, because the flash tends to brighten the grain of the wood and it DOES look like walnut, but these pictures are pretty close to the darkness of the wood in everyday light. I always mentally considered this bed as black - almost as if it came from the House of Dracula! You can see what it looks like with one of the glass windows illuminated. It turns out it's just light walnut veneer! There were so many layers of varnish, and it had turned so dark, it gave the impression of near-black wood. When the stripper went to work, the top layer of varnish just started to crystallize, and then the lower layers of stain (I had to do several coats of stripper) peeled off with a putty knife, just like icing on a cake!


Anyway, today I finished stripping the headboard, so the whole thing is stripped now and ready for a new finish. I'll go to Lee Valley Tools, where they sell small sheets of veneer, and get some to patch that one rail. If that fails, there's another trick I could try; the inside of the rails is also veneered, but with no finish. I could lift off a piece of veneer from there and use it to patch the front (sort of like a skin graft). Then I could patch the back with the bought veneer, not caring if it doesn't match that well, because this part will never be seen once the mattress is set inside.

I'll take some more pictures when I start working on the electrical part of the project, perhaps next week.

Outrageous

This is the sort of "public service" we enjoy in Ottawa:


And no, we don't see what preceded this, but the guy who videotaped it was there, and didn't report that the young guy was attacking or abusing the driver - there is NO EXCUSE for what this pig did to this young man.

Dean told me this morning that the kid apparently has Asperger's Syndrome. So does Emma. (The article shows a nice confusion between the terms "mentally ill" and "mentally handicapped", which doesn't help.) It took us years of practice to get Emma to be able to ride the bus by herself; I want to be sure that she doesn't run into this pig of a driver some day and find herself being screamed at because she laughed or chatted too much, and then flung off the bus in the middle of nowhere, maybe in the winter. And what's worse is that she's come to trust bus drivers, because most of them have been pleasant to her; she'd be completely defenceless against an attack like this. If she even WITNESSED it, she'd probably be so traumatized she wouldn't want to go back on a city bus again.

Two weeks ago this entire city was bawling and striking dramatic "Never again" poses over the suicide of a young man who was victimized by bullies. Well, what is this incident but pure, naked bullying? What breaks my heart is the poor kid blurting out "Sorry," as he runs out of the bus - it must have been the cherry on the sundae for that thuggish driver. Terrify a kid and then have him humbly apologize for his own torture - must have made his day!

I hope they throw this asswipe out the door, but I have little hope of that. Instead of being concerned by the behaviour of Mr. Bus-Pig towards a vulnerable passenger, the Hog-In-Chief of the drivers' union had his priorities right:

Transit Union Local 279 president Garry Queale took aim at the passenger who videotaped the driver threatening a rider, saying the employee’s privacy was violated.

Queale said the person who captured the incident on video shouldn’t have been filming in the first place, even though a city bylaw allows recording on buses for personal use.

Just sit back and enjoy the brilliant brain power involved in that statement. According to this guy, every employee walks around the world encased in an inviolable virtual bubble of "privacy", even when he's out in public doing a job that involves dealing with the public. I guess people who look at him when they board the bus can be fined for peeping, too.

Just to reassure myself

After the great Vindaloo Disaster, I wanted to prove that I still could cook something new and different, so I turned to a French tart cookbook that I'd picked up at the library's used bookstore a few months ago.

Last week I took the kids to Smyth's Apple Orchard, because it's that time of year when rare types of apples are appearing, and some I can only find if I go out into the country. They also had some nice pears, and I ended up buying a basket. After a week or so, we were sick of eating fresh pears, so I decided to find a nice recipe to cook them into a dessert. I knew the French were better at cooking pears than the English, so I looked until I found a recipe for Tarte Bourdaloue. (It wasn't exactly this recipe, but very similar.) It's poached pears baked in a sweet custard called frangipane, and topped with crumbled cookies.

It was rather a more difficult recipe than I usually make, with lots of steps like "whip the eggs and sugar then add the flour little by little" followed by "boil the milk, then add it little by little along with the ground almonds", so I had a lot of ingredients out and had to be quick grabbing and adding them in sequence. Then I had to cook the frangipane, and they didn't tell you how to know if it was thickening properly; mine started getting a little lumpy, so I grabbed a whisk and began beating it energetically, and that seemed to do the trick. This was also my first time making a pâte brisé, which is basically a shortbread.

Anyway, it all turned out beautifully: my first French dessert! My confidence is restored.