Waking up with a nice cup of hemlock

So I come downstairs this morning, go to the computer and find a piece of paper propped up on the keyboard.  Laboriously printed in James's big handwriting is:

JAMESAND

THEDEADPE

OPLE

Thank you, James.  Just what I want to read first thing in the morning.  I can only suppose he found on YouTube a spoof of one of the Thomas the Tank Engine stories, and copied out the title, as he often does.  Though the knives have been disappearing from the kitchen lately.

The Sarah Palin conundrum

These people don’t hate Palin because of the lies; the lies exist to justify the hate.

As everyone knows, Sarah Palin announced last week that she was resigning her position as Governor of Alaska. Some pundits speculated that this meant that she was "clearing the decks" for a run at the Presidency in 2012, but I tend to agree with Mark Steyn that she's not going to be running for public office herself anymore. As Steyn says, "Occam's Razor leaves us with: Who needs this?"

The news that she'd consulted with Rudy Guiliani just before making her announcement makes me think that she has in mind more of a future like his - he doesn't have to put up with the insane garbage that now comes with "serving the public", and yet he's a respected, influential voice. Why shouldn't she do that? She'd be free to make money, free from the myriad ankle-biters who have all the leisure in the world to set mantraps every two inches and maliciously attack her family at no risk to themselves.

One of the most interesting attempts to analyze the insanity that overtook the Left when they saw Sarah Palin is at Reclusive Leftist, because the writer approaches it from the perspective of a leftist and feminist. She freely confesses that the subject of Palin Hatred is opaque to her, despite her very intelligent attempts to extract the truth from those who have given in to it.

Of course, the first answer you’ll get if you ask feminists why they hate Sarah Palin is that “it’s because she ____” — and then fill in the blank with the lie of choice: made rape victims pay for their own kits, is against contraception or sex ed, believes in abstinence-only, thinks the dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago, doesn’t believe in global warming, doesn’t believe in evolution, is stupid and can’t read, etc., etc., etc., etc.

But none of those things is true. None of them.

The first problem is that the haters have a fantasy figure in their minds. But if this were all, it could be remedied with the facts. After all, we're not talking about illiterates or people in isolated communities with no access to information. They're educated, even highly educated, in metropolitan centers with 24/7 news available everwhere.

But even weirder is what happens when you try to replace the myths with the truth. If you explain, “no, she didn’t charge rape victims,” your feminist interlocutor will come back with something else: “she’s abstinence-only!” No, you say, she’s not; and then the person comes back with, “she’s a creationist!” and so on. “She’s an uneducated moron!” Actually, Sarah Palin is not dumb at all, and based on her interviews and comments, I’d say she has a greater knowledge of evolution, global warming, and the Wisconsin glaciation in Alaska than the average citizen.

But after you’ve had a few of these myth-dispelling conversations, you start to realize that it doesn’t matter. These people don’t hate Palin because of the lies; the lies exist to justify the hate. That’s why they keep reaching and reaching for something else, until they finally get to “she winked on TV!” (And by the way: I’ve been winked at my whole life by my grandmother, aunts, and great-aunts. Who knew it was such a despicable act?)

That, I think, is the crux of the matter: The lies exist to justify the hate.

Much of the rest of the post (and the very interesting comments that follow) try to find an explanation for this phenomenon. Her discussion is very well thought-out and honest, and I think is full of insight, but as she's not a Christian, naturally I would have to say that she misses an essential component in the puzzle. That is the matter of Evil.

Even without a Christian belief, she comes very close to taking a Christian position when she writes

When I first started investigating Palin, I was very relieved to discover that she’s not nearly as nutty as she might be, given that she’s a Christian. I was pleased to learn that she’s not one of those fundies who thinks wives have to submit or that Adam and Eve rode on dinosaurs. She’s not into that whacked-out purity or abstinence-only stuff. That’s good. It’s good that she’s not a nutjob. So…why aren’t other feminists also happy that she’s not a nutjob? Why do they, in fact, spread lies to make her seem worse than she is?

This reminded me immediately of this passage from C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity":

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything--God and our friends and ourselves included--as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

This is what the fanatical Palin-haters gave themselves over to, and seemingly without reluctance. A few (a very few) of the comments that follow the blog post are from people who fell for the lies and now realize it. They are properly chagrined to admit that in the rush of the moment, pumped full of hysteria and panic that ALL was at stake, they joined the lynch mob. Now they realize that they were used and have returned to sanity. But many others defiantly continue to live the lie, vigorously repelling any contradictory evidence.

As I said, the Reclusive Leftist does a good job revisiting the anti-Palin smears, except for one area - the fury, the rage, that was poured upon Sarah Palin's children and upon herself for being their mother. Maybe it's just as well. Maybe the subject is just too dark and treacherous for anyone without strong spiritual armour to approach without danger. (Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.) I know that this is one area that one cannot discuss unless one gives credence to the existence of Evil. If there is any Evil in the world, we saw it there. The rage teetering into insanity - behind the blog posts and articles, I could see the hands of the women who typed the words; their fingers were curved and pointed like talons, venting their fury on keyboards because they could not sink their nails into the flesh of children.

Where did this murderous hatred come from? Because it is so inexplicable, I think it came from a spiritual source - a hatred of God. The scene was almost too perfectly constructed - I might even think that God himself had arranged it, the way an expert cinematographer can arrange light and shadow, colour and perspective to direct the viewer's eyes and provoke a desired reaction.

It was no accident that Palin and her family ARE Christians. As one of the commenters wrote, a similar family standing behind a Democratic candidate would not have provoked the same reaction. The political bona fides of the Democratic family would have reassured the viewers that this was a "safe" Christianity - a tame Christianity, that would know its place and not interfere. But a Republican Christian family was a different thing; this was Christianity red in tooth and claw, and the Left knew it for an enemy. And if there were any doubt, there was the evidence of the youngest child - a Down's Syndrome baby. Everyone knew what the existence of that child meant - the fact that he was alive at all was a testimony to the fact that these people really believed and were willing to suffer for their faith.

Wearing a cross around the neck, referring to God and Jesus in speeches, quoting the Bible - these are all insolent provocations to the easily-provoked anti-Christians. But a vulnerable baby is too much. This stirs up too many memories and associations, and the anti-Christian left reacted with fury, as if by merely bringing him into existence, God had arrogantly intruded into their private lives and challenged them.

G.K. Chesterton, in "The Everlasting Man", wrote about how even our subconscious will turn traitor and let in the intruder God:

...every Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind. It is not merely a theological difference. It is a psychological difference which can outlast any theologies. It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to say about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians; because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature. There is really difference between the man who knows it and the man who does not.

I really think that this is why the rage was so furious and unforgiving; because they felt God ambushing them when they thought they were safe. All the carefully constructed walls to keep Him out failed; it must have felt like a dirty trick, when He got in with a tactic so old.

Nooooooooo!

Dean came to me in a panic this morning, showing me this article on a spreading potato blight in the northeast US! This cannot be happening. The diseased plants (tomatoes, mostly - tomatoes and potatoes are from the same family, solanaceae; you can tell by the similarity in their leaves) are being sold in garden centers! We got our seed potatoes from a grower in Alberta, so I'm sure they were healthy, but a diseased plant in someone else's garden could spread widely and infect our plants. We can only hope that it doesn't get this far north, and the plants sold in Canada were clean before they arrived at the garden centers (that's where I got my tomatoes).

It's all due to the UNUSUALLY COLD AND WET summer we're having, as global warming continues to wreak its deadly havoc on the planet.

This confirms a plan I'd been discussing with Dean last week - to switch away from growing potatoes next year. Maybe we'll grow a small patch of them in the Old Garden, with some bins, but I want to give the New Garden a break from growing potatoes, just to ensure that we don't have any potato pathogens incubating in the soil. They say this is best, and we have grown potatoes in the same place 3 years in a row now, so we're tempting Fate a bit already. I think next year we'll try growing corn - the climate is good for it, since there are cornfields all around Ottawa, and the garden is big enough to allow the large plants. It'll be interesting to try something new.

Potato update

I know everyone has been anxiously waiting for news of how the potatoes have been progressing.  Well, relief is here at last!  Here is a picture of the potatoes growing in their bins, taken last week:

I've been poking my fingers into the dirt, but haven't encountered any actual potatoes yet, but the bins are deep, and I'm hoping the potatoes are further down near the bottom. At any rate, the plants themselves are doing splendidly, with lots of flowers. They should be producing potatoes, but we won't know until we turn the bins over and pour everything out.

Meanwhile, here is a picture of the regular potato patch in the backyard:

This was actually taken a week ago - the plants are bigger now. I finally got the payoff for all the bags of dry, shredded leaves I gathered in the fall and stored in the shed; I've dumped them all along the rows of potato plants to use as mulch. It should vastly reduce the amount of weeding I'll have to do, and it will double as "hilling-up" materials to protect the top potatoes from the sun. I saved over 30 bags, and used just 20 (for both gardens) so I can add more as the summer progresses. In the late fall, I'll plough everything under with the rototiller, and it can rot and enrich the garden.

You may not have noticed, but the New Garden is bigger this year. We decided to rip up more of our useless lawn and dig it up for vegetable gardening. Last year, the garden measured about 30'x10'; this year, it's 30'x19' - quite an expansion! I also had the tree guys come along and trim away all the low-hanging branches of the tree on the north side, to increase the amount of sun getting to the ground. Everything looks much more open now.

Here are a few more garden pictures, from elsewhere around the house:

This year, we invested in proper bark mulch for the flower garden.  Six cubic yards, plus another 2 cu. yds. of blended topsoil - it filled a whole dump truck!  Thank goodness for wheelbarrows; I managed to move all the soil in one day, and the bark mulch over 3.  Now everything looks neat and tidy.  Next year I won't have to buy so much, maybe 4 cu. yds. of mulch, and 3 the year after.  Once you've got a decent base down, it's just a matter of topping up the level, but we had NOTHING, and had to cover the bare dirt, so it took a lot.

Congratulations, Emma!

A big day on Wednesday - Emma graduated from high school! It's been a long journey, 13 years slogging through various public school systems to get her this far, but she did a good job. She even won a silver medal for having over 90% in her top 6 Grade 12 subjects, and she was top of the class in the Child Care and Gerontology class she took this last semester.

In the morning I took her to get her hair done, and we went to the school at 1:00 for a 2:00 start. Dean stayed home with James and Thomas, as their classes had ended the day before. It's unfortunate, but that's just the way things are - we can never attend anything together, it's always one goes, the other stays at home with the boys.  But I took a good number of pictures (until the batteries ran out in the camera).

It was a long ceremony, held in the school auditorium, and on one of the hottest days of the year so far. I'm trying not to complain, because I was so grumpy a month ago about how cold and wet our spring was, but it was DAMN hot. It got hotter and hotter as the 90+ minutes went by - thank goodness I wore a cotton dress! Once it was over, Emma came down to meet me as I was inching my way up the aisle with the rest of the crowd. She wanted to dawdle and look around for people she knew, but I just had to get out of that hall, because I was starting to feel faint. It may have been 90C in the lobby, but that was better than 95C in the auditorium!

It took so long because every single one of the 155 graduates had to get a round of applause as they came up! Very badly managed. As they came to the stage in groups of 10, we should have applauded once they all had their diplomas, but this is how it was done, which probably doubled the length of the ceremony. I also must say, I've never been in a worse-behaved crowd for such an occasion. Even though the principal twice asked people to keep the volume down, because there were grandparents there and people with hearing aids, it made no difference at all. Friends and family members all yelled, hooted, whistled, bellowed, and lu-lu-lued when their precious kid came up. I guess I should be grateful they weren't firing off AK47s at the ceiling - maybe in a few more years. I couldn't believe such an absence of decorum. (crotchety geezer voice) Why back in my day, if the authority figure - the principal, no less - had told us to keep quiet and we'd gone ahead and hooted and whistled anyway, our parents would have dragged us out of that hall so fast you wouldn't have seen us for the dust. I probably would have been made to write letters of apology to every teacher present, and I wouldn't have heard the end of it for a month.

Now she's looking forward to visiting her great-aunts in Victoria next month, then she'll be attending college in the fall, studying Professional Writing.

Bombs in Gatineau park, near Ottawa

Sounds like someone was practicing out in the woods:

Gatineau police are investigating after two bombs -- one exploded, one not -- were found in a park just after midnight Friday.

Police responded to reports of an explosion in the St.-Onge St. park at 12:15 a.m. Saturday.

They found a mixed-liquid homemade bomb had gone off. Nobody was hurt and there wasn't anything damaged.

A Surete du Quebec bomb unit was brought in to diffuse the bomb and the park was back to normal by 7 a.m.

Police are investigating.

And no, this doesn't happen all the time in Ottawa, it's VERY rare.

Great game

Terrific hockey game last night, watching the Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup over the Detroit Redwings. The score was low (2-1), but there was lots of drama starting in the second period, when Pittsburgh lost Crosby to a knee injury. When he came back in the third, that just raised the anxiety level, because we were so worried that he SHOULDN'T be playing, but just couldn't keep out of the game. Thankfully, he realized after a short shift that he wasn't able to play at his peak, and sat down for the rest of the game. It must have been hard for him, but it was the right thing to do, putting the team first. But then, who expected Pittsburgh would play so well without Crosby? Those last 2 minutes of the third period were absolutely nerve-wracking, as Detroit poured on the pressure to tie the game, and Pittsburgh looked right at the end of their strength. If it had gone on another minute, I think Detroit would have scored. Dean and I were screaming "END!! END!!!!" as the final seconds ran out.

So that's it for hockey for this season. Now we'll have to watch baseball in the evenings. I was reminded of the famous Shakespearean Baseball Game by Wayne and Shuster, and was delighted to find it's on YouTube - two versions, as a matter of fact. There's a very early 1958 b&w version, which I believe I saw as a kid; I remember certain lines that were changed or edited out in later versions - "Is this a slugger I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee!" But the later version had its improvements, particularly the closing line, and the delivery was sharper and faster.

I don't suppose too many non-Canadians, at least under 40, would know who Wayne and Shuster are, but I've been surprised to read interviews of current comedians who list them as a formative influence - their timing was legendary. As a matter of fact, we believe that Wayne and Shuster were responsible for getting Dean his job in the Foreign Service. During one of the many rounds of interviews and tests he had to undergo, he had to do a role-playing game. He was told to pretend that he was an attaché at the Canadian Embassy in Bonn (this was pre-reunification), and his task was to put together a cultural show in order to present a portrait of Canada to the Germans. He was allowed to invite 10 famous Canadians to take part - whom would he choose?

Well, of course he was furiously calculating how to build a "balanced" group, so he started listing names: Margaret Atwood - she'd be good for the "artist" category (and she's a woman); Wayne Gretzky - sportsman; Rene Levesque - a Quebecer and a politician. He said he would have chosen Healey Willan to represent the musical side, but he had to choose LIVE Canadians - I think he chose Gordon Lightfoot instead. Finally he'd gotten up to 8 and was drawing a complete blank. So in desperation, he blurted out "Wayne and Shuster". The panel was highly amused at this, and told him that they'd been doing these interviews for years, and no one else had EVER suggested Wayne and Shuster! But the mere fact of doing something unexpected and original might have been the point that put him over the top, so ever since then, we've said that he owes his career to Wayne and Shuster.

With gratitude and affectionate remembrance, here is the Shakespearean Baseball Game:

Stand and deliver!

A recent news story quoted Barack Obama saying that "It's time to deliver" on health care. Here's a preview of just how the Canadian socialized medical system he wants to import to the U.S. reacts when "it's time to deliver":

A woman admitted to Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital for an induced birth was forced into a do-it-yourself delivery last month, with only her non-medically trained common-law partner to assist....

At about 5 a.m. on May 13, medical help failed to appear even after Karine Lachapelle's water broke.

Despite attempts to summon help by partner Mark Schouls, who was pushing a nurse-alert button with increasing frequency as Lachapelle's contractions became more intense, the two delivered their new son, Kristophe, entirely on their own.

Lachapelle pushed the child out past his shoulders and face down, allowing Schouls to get a grip and pull the newborn the rest of the way out, he recounted.

There were no complications, thank goodness, and the baby was born safely. But just consider - Karine Lachappelle didn't just show up at the hospital in the middle of the night, she went there for an induced labour. That means she was booked and scheduled; the hospital staff knew she was there, and had presumably started the IV drip to bring on contractions. Yet they still just managed to ignore a labour in progress that they themselves were controlling and supposedly monitoring. Are they this seat-of-the-pants when it's a patient who suddenly goes into crisis?

Of course the hospital is "concerned" (now the news has become public) and are making inquiries, but

Nobody on hospital staff will face disciplinary action, Kalina said.

No, this is just going to make an interesting chapter in future training manuals - Lachapelle and her partner should be honoured.

Kalina also declared that "finger-pointing, such as disciplinary action, is counter-productive. At best, it will not have any positive effects, and, at worst, it will create an atmosphere where service will decrease.

You know, they're probably right about that. Holding the nurses accountable will just piss them off, and they'll then take it out on other patients. Since the hospital is too short of staff to contemplate FIRING anyone, they're just stuck with what they have, and so they (that is, WE) just have to make the best of it and not make waves.

Braxton's Lear - Cleanup on aisle E

A Mr. or Rev. Tom Downs has hocked a complaint on the floor of the HOB/D listserve.

I am so mad I could spit.

Oh God, not again. Well, everyone put on their raincoats and galoshes - the Episcopalians are spitting again, and we all know what that means: get ready for more flying moisture than a Blue Man Group performance.

Friends, don't you see that if Thew Forrester is not confirmed we (TEC) will have willingly entered the brave new world of assassination by internet? Having proved it can be done; it will be done again. Perhaps it will be your candidate next time.

This must be a trailer for that terrifying summer movie: "YOOPER MADNESS!" Watch as normally clean-cut, docile Episcopalians go insane after one glimpse of StandFirm! They criticize homilies! They quote the Prayer Book! They go berserk at their keyboards, typing faster and faster! They don't call it high-speed internet connection for nothing, you know! Watch out - this scourge is sweeping the nation. It could strike your candidate...or yours...or YOURS!!!"

From now on potential candidates will have to be vetted like Supreme Court nominees, that means we will find ourselves favoring people who never published a single potentially controversial thing nor had an innovative thought they shared with anybody. Can any of you guess how much it is costing our federal government in time and money right now to get the current Supreme Court nominee past Congress?

Yes, the Democratic nominee of a Democratic president, struggling to run the gauntlet of a Democratic House and Democratic Senate, with a Democratic majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee - how can a liberal in the Episcopal Church possibly be expected to survive a similar ordeal?

And those of you who wrote so seriously about Thew Forrester's faults and then spread your thinking far and wide, you clergy, especially you who are already safely bishops, how many of you would survive this sort of scrutiny should everything you ever wrote or spoke be examined by the faculties of VTS, EDS, and Trinity seminaries, with their demonstrably different and sometimes contradictory points of view? (never mind the host of bloggers who are so constantly hostile to TEC)

C'mon, as if you've never used a drop-down menu during a baptismal liturgy! Everyone does it, we all know it, you're just too scared to admit it. This is so unfair - it's just like the Clinton impeachment trial.

And you who read all that stuff, who let the innuendos and half-truths color your thinking, who let suspicion about a diocese that did things differently creep in, who jumped on the "band wagon" (It wouldn't be a standard propaganda tool if it didn't work, would it?), are you so sure you made up your own mind? Do you personally know the candidate that well?

Northern Michigan is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Now, if you'd NOT read "all that stuff", and never met the candidate, and just voted 'Yes', you'd never have been exposed to suspicion that you're a weak-minded catspaw who just follows the herd.

We don't have any more feet to shoot ourselves in. Why don't we just shoot ourselves in the head and get it over with?

These parliamentary rules are so complicated...are you looking for someone to second that motion?

Did I mention I was so mad I could spit?

Yes you did.

The new Star Trek movie

I saw the new Star Trek movie last week. Just the way I like it, at a 10:30 AM showing, with 2 other people in the theatre. It's directed by J.J. Abrams, the same guy who created 'Fringe', and there's some crossover in the themes of the movie and the TV show. Leonard Nimoy was even in the closing episode of this season's 'Fringe', and there's a similarity in the "different worlds" theme in both, though in Fringe it's "alternate realities" while in Star Trek it's time travel.

I'm not a Star Trek fanatic, but I've done my share of Trek-watching, going back to the original series, which I'm old enough to have seen when it first aired. All through the years, I've happily watched reruns, and I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation quite faithfully through most of its seasons. I've seen some of the movies, but not all - I think I've managed to catch about every other one. Now that we have a HD TV, it's a little unnerving to watch the original series on it. Some things are great - faces and facial expressions are clear, and there's a crispness to all the straight-edged, streamlined sets that gives it a real "now we are in outer space" feel. On the other hand, it's all too clear now that the show was really built on a shoestring budget! The fabrics look terribly sleazy, the high-tech devices like phasers look like electric shavers, the dashboards look like cardboard panels with a few coloured lights inserted in them. Those "charts" on the walls of the bridge of the Enterprise are just photocopied pictures of vaguely scientific-looking stars and angles. One even has a ripple in it! We couldn't see any of that on our old fuzzy 1960s TVs, many of which were in black and white anyway. And William Shatner, though he looks very handsome, can be OVERPOWERING in his acting, especially when it's coming through that clear. Last week I saw the one where he encounters Americans of the future, reduced to savagery after a ruinous war with the Communists (the Yangs versus the Comms). When he reads and emotes through the preamble to the Constitution, holy moley! It's so over the top, it's almost impossible to bear! I never found it that way in the past, because it was filtered a bit through a less-than-perfect TV screen.

Anyway, back to the movie. I thought they did a good job for the most part of recreating these familiar characters as youngsters. Kirk was great, so were Spock and McCoy, though I didn't think we needed an explanation for how he got the nickname "Bones" - I always took it to be humorous old slang for a doctor: Sawbones. Sulu was also terrific - I loved the way his "combat training" consisted of fencing. Chekhov was a little young for my taste, and why did they make him blond and curly-haired? He had straight dark hair, originally. Scotty was just weird, nothing like the original, but one out of such a large number wasn't too hard to accept. I just figured that in THIS reality, Scotty came out completely different. The villain didn't seem much like a Romulan to me, either. He looked like a nasty British soccer hooligan. The Romulans were a militaristic people, and there should have been more discipline and order. I know he wasn't a soldier, but either the military ethic permeated the whole society, and he'd have run his revenge operation in a more military way, or it only affected the military caste of the planet - in which case, why was this guy adopting the whole honor/revenge thing? Logically, he'd be hopelessly at sea when it came to conducting a military campaign against Star Fleet, but he's as effective as a futuristic Attila the Hun. And what was with his "ship"? It looked like a grossly magnified dust mite. How the heck was a "mining ship" converted into such an effective warship?

Spock had a few moments when I thought that he was acting contrary to character - marooning Kirk on a nearby planet, an action that would have likely caused his death? What was wrong with the brig on the Enterprise? Spock wouldn't have overreacted like that, though maybe they wanted to show that he was unable to handle the stress of his situation. But nothing can explain his ABANDONING HIS COMMAND moments after he'd been given responsibility for the Enterprise, in order to run down to the surface of Vulcan to rescue his family. Spock just wouldn't do that, not even to rescue his parents. It was odd that the Enterprise seemed to be entirely staffed by 18-year old cadets, plus Captain Pike - where were the senior officers? Everyone on the bridge was straight out of the classroom, and I think they ALL got a chance to command the Enterprise at some point or another. Surely some of the teachers at the Academy would have been pressed into service before Starfleet was driven to man a brand-new starship with teenagers.

Still, there are minor complaints. Considering that they were making an "alternate reality" Star Trek, they stayed very faithful to the original in the most important things. They COULD have just said that this was a new Star Trek, and changed everything, but they didn't. This is quite acceptable as Star Trek. There were only a few things I found hard to absorb, and that's purely due to force of habit: when Spock's mother died, I kept thinking, "But she has that scene where she complains about 'Logic, logic, logic!'" and then I'd have to think, "Oh, yeah...I guess that never happened, because she dies here." "And the Pon Farr episode on Vulcan - how do they...oh yeah, there IS no Vulcan anymore. No Pon Farr, no T'Pau...it never happens." Well, they are going to resettle the remaining Vulcans somewhere else, so perhaps the society will be able to recreate itself somehow, and this will be taken care of in another storyline. On the bright side, I thought if this is a different reality Star Trek, then maybe there will never be a Wesley Crusher!

There was only one thing which I felt failed - the closing credits featured the original Star Trek theme music, and I thought it was completely out of place. It wasn't the voiceover part: Bing...Bong...Bing...Bong...Space - the final frontier...Dah-dah-DAAAAA... That was alright. It was the fast-paced, full-orchestra theme that began after "where no man has gone before" - the full theme. In this movie it just sounded so '60s. I swear, I could hear bongo drums in there somewhere. I never feel it's dated when I hear it on the original series, but here it didn't belong. I felt "That was MY Star Trek; this is a new one. It has to have a new theme."

Touching pitch

A Canadian MP, Pierre Poilievre, said in the House of Commons:

“On that side of the House, they have the man who fathered the carbon tax, put it up for adoption to his predecessor and now wants a paternity test to prove the tar baby was never his in the first place,” he said. He repeated the line again later.

Naturally, this has raised a furor and charges of "racism".

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary describes a tar baby as a situation “from which it is nearly impossible to extricate oneself,” but the term has been used pejoratively to describe black children.

The careful use of the passive voice should be your first tipoff that this is a bogus charge. Where does it come from, this claim that "tar baby" is a racist slur? I want proof. I have found a total of two quotes online to support it: first an interview of the novelist Toni Morrison, who used the term as the title of a novel, and said,

Tar Baby is also a name [...] that white people call black children, black girls, as I recall.
At one time, a tar pit was a holy place, at least an important place, because tar was used to build things.
It held together things like Moses' little boat and the pyramids.
For me, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together.

The other one is also from a novelist, John Updike:

In his book Coup, John Updike says of a white woman who prefers the company of black men, "some questing chromosome within holds her sexually fast to the tar baby."

Apart from this, there is the Urban Dictionary, claiming that there is a more explicit line "from a children's story", but no reference, and I've found no trace of such a story online. Unlike the more well-known racial slurs like "n*gger" and "coon", which are documented in hundreds of books, letters, songs, quotes and every other kind of verbal format, the existence of "tar baby" as a slur, as far as I can see, rests upon anecdotal evidence alone. And anecdotes that come from professional fabulators.

There are a few similar cases of this same ruckus being raised in the past few years:

John McCain said it in reference to a divorce issue. "The phrase is considered by some to be a racial epithet."

Mitt Romney used it as a metaphor for the Big Dig.

Tony Snow used it to refer to a problematic program.

Virginia Foxx of North Carolina used it last month to refer to the government bailout program.

Every one of the politicians who used the term used it correctly, as a reference to the Uncle Remus story describing a sticky situation from which extrication is impossible. Every one of them used it to describe a thing, not a person (and I don't think that inanimate objects have race). Only the article on Romney went to the trouble of finding a possible reference for the term as racial slur, and could still only come up with Updike's quote, which sounds to me like a novelist coining a clever double meaning, not tapping into a genuine Americanism. So we have a lot of assurances that some people, somewhere, think that this is a racial epithet, but next to no evidence that it has ever really been said or meant in this way. Just a few vague reminiscences that it's supposed to have happened, down in the south somewhere.

Frankly, I don't believe that this has ever been a racial epithet. I think people have vague memories of the expression "a lick of the tar brush" to describe a person of mixed-race ancestry, and have extrapolated from that a confused suspicion that "tar" must always be some kind of code for anti-black prejudice.

Since all that's required to start an outrage campaign is the assertion that a phrase "is considered by some" to be racist, I'm starting my own right now.

I hereby announce that the term "blackberry" is racist. "It has been used" to refer to black people. On November 5, 2008, someone said to someone else, "I can't believe anyone would vote for that blackberry." As they say in 'Plan 9 From Outer Space', can you prove it DIDN'T happen? And I think a black girl in the movie "Fame" says something about blackberries being sweeter, so that pretty much settles it.

I will now file a Canadian Human Rights complaint against the BlackBerry phone company, demanding that they change their name to BlueBerry. I also want $10 million in damages for myself, for the proliferation of their outrageous racist products in Canada. No, I'm not black, but actual injury is not a requirement, as we have discovered from the Richard Warman cases.

Brotherly love

Yesterday, the boys were fighting about the usual thing - who gets to control the computer. Finally, I persuaded Thomas to go downstairs and use the Dell in the basement in order to avoid James. Thinking I'd at last obtained peace, I turned to James, who was following me like a determined thundercloud, and said, "There! Thomas all gone!" He responded immediately with "Thomas all gone GARBAGE!" Uh, wait a minute... "Thomas all gone FIRE!!" No, no...

I had to break the news to James that we were not throwing Thomas in the garbage, no matter HOW mad he got at him. He stomped back to the computer, muttering darkly, "Thomas garbage."

Tape it! Tape it!!!

The Wrong Box isn't out on dvd yet (at least, not in a truly usable format - there's a Spanish release out, but it's not available in widescreen), but here's the next best thing: Turner Classic Movies is airing it late night Friday/early Saturday morning. I think the schedule of movies is the same all across North America, though the times may differ. So I'm not sure if the 1:15 AM time (ugh) here in the East is the same on the West Coast, or if you will have it listed at 10:15 PM Friday night instead. Whatever the time, look up your Friday/Saturday TV schedule and make sure you don't miss it!

Fighting off the invasion

Yesterday morning, I took Yin out at about 5:45 for her usual start-the-day-off-right pee, and walked half asleep down the steps from the deck to the garden, to suddenly find myself face to face with a rabbit. You may remember we had a struggle with a destructive rabbit a few years ago - it ended with me borrowing a trap, catching the rabbit, and then letting it go in a field on the other side of the river.

The rabbits have been back since, but none of them has done the damage of that original one, so I've been pretty laid-back about their incursions. They'd come by every 5 days or so (they seem to have a kind of circuit worked out, and must hit other yards in the neighbourhood in turn), eat some grass, then leave. Once we gave up growing carrots, there wasn't much that they were interested in that I could notice, so I didn't mind them; in fact, I rather enjoyed seeing rabbits in the yard from time to time.

The last time we saw this rabbit (last week), Yin had been completely flummoxed by it, and didn't really know what to do. She trotted a few steps toward it, but the rabbit was having nothing of her investigations, and immediately left via the big gap at the bottom of the gate. This time, Yin was ready and gave chase. It wasn't much of a contest, and the rabbit immediately departed in the usual way. We then went down into the garden to look over the plants, and I figured that that was it for the morning's adventures.

But not so! When we headed back to the house, there was the rabbit again!. Yin chased it away in the same fashion, and we went inside. I thought that was a bit odd; these rabbits usually don't come back after they've been shown the door, at least not for a few hours, until they're sure the coast is clear. Then half an hour later, I looked out the window and couldn't believe - the rabbit had come back a THIRD time! This time I watched it. First it seemed to be digging a bit in a place where I have a few perennials and bulbs struggling against the crabgrass. I figured it was trying to unearth a bulb to eat it. A few minutes later, I saw it had crossed to another spot, and was pulling up some creeping thyme groundcover - no surprise that it would like to eat that, I thought. But wait...it wasn't eating it. It was carrying it! Right over to that...hole.

Uh oh. I know from 'Watership Down' that rabbits don't carry food with them to eat somewhere else. I took a closer look and saw that the rabbit was making several trips with mouthfuls of thyme, and it was stuffing them down the hole. I know what this means when birds do it, so I went to the computer and did a quick search and found that it was as I suspected: this rabbit wasn't a HE, he was a SHE, and she was building a nest! I was going to have a litter of baby rabbits right in my back garden!

What to do? My first impulse was soft-hearted; I mean, come on - rabbits are CUTE!

The reports said that these are temporary burrows, and the rabbits actually live elsewhere in big warrens. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad - the babies would be born, grow quickly and then leave. But then I read that rabbits can have 7 litters a year! What if she decides that this is a great place for birthin' babies, and keeps coming back? How many rabbits would I have running around? Not to mention, that they mature quickly, and the litters would soon be able to have their own babies!

I finally went out to take a close look at what she was doing. I wasn't worried that there would be babies there already; the websites said that the mother rabbits do this nest-building a few days before they're due. So I chased her off (she didn't go far, though - she sat nearby watching me, and nonchalently washing her face!) and examined the burrow. I pulled out many clumps of thyme, then discovered something that made my mind up in a hurry: in the course of her burrowing, she'd dug right under one of my nice mature poppy plants, and completely severed its roots! The leaves just pulled off in my hand!

At this point I made up my mind: the rabbit had to go. I know she'd been back 3 times, so she must have thought that our yard was absolutely THE place, but this was too much. She was a fast digger; I figured if I tossed her out now, she'd still have plenty of time to dig a burrow somewhere else. So I chased her under the gate, and then barricaded the gap underneath with boards and bricks! I'll have to remove them every time I open it, but I can go a long time without having to open the gate, and this was too important. So far she hasn't been back, so I'm hoping she gave up on our place. I even threw the thyme over the fence into the wilderness to enourage her to make a burrow over there.

Potato experiment

The garden is slowly returning to life - no leaves on any trees or shrubs yet, but the perennials are coming back, and we even have a few flowers on the grape hyacinths. The indestructible rhubarb was the first to appear: this was taken a few weeks ago, but you can see that it was poking above the ground even while the snow was still surrounding it!
I think I'm going to divide it this year, and move it to a spot at the back of the Old Garden. Then I'll move 4 forlorn blueberry plants up to the front, and see if they can do any better there, away from the strangling presence of the raspberries. If this doesn't work, then off with their heads. Five years is a long enough chance, and if they can't produce, then maybe the garden just isn't suited to growing blueberries.

I'm trying something new this year: I'm going to try growing potatoes in containers. I've read that it's not that hard to do, provided you have a big enough container. I bought 3 big round tubs, the sort you use for carrying laundry, and drilled drainage holes at the bottom. What one does is put a layer of 4" soil or compost on the bottom, then lay down 5 little potatoes or potato sections. They are supposed to be "chitted", which means they've started growing, putting out those prickly little knobs. We had a lot of teeny potatoes left from last year, and Dean couldn't bring himself to throw them away, so he stored them in the basement. It was cool, but not cold enough to retard growth, so a few weeks ago when I pulled them out, I was astounded to see that some had grown 6" to 8" long! I couldn't use those, so I picked out 15 that were just starting out, and planted them in the tubs. Since it's been cold so far, I stacked the tubs in the garage.

Today it's going to be sunny, and getting up to 20C - the next three days will be even better, going up to 28C! So I pulled the tubs out into the sun, and am happy to see that 14 out of my 15 plantings are nicely above the soil.

Now, the process is to wait until the plants are about 6" high, then cover them with another layer of soil and compost leaving just the tip visible. The plant grows higher, and then you repeat the process, until you're within 2" or so of the top of the container. Then the plant can be allowed to grow out and put forth leaves. The potatoes will form underground, along the length of the stem that's been buried by the soil. We'll see how it goes as the summer progresses. I've planted 5 Chaleurs, 5 Blue Russians, and 5 All Reds.