“Star Spangled Banner & O’Canada”;
Game Four, Western Conference Finals (2006)
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Ten Minutes After The Ducks Fried The Wings…
last night, questions were being raised aboot who, in their right mind, would ever want to watch the Ottawa Somethings play the Anaheim… what the fuck are they called again? Every year it’s the same frigging thing… the Stanley Cup Finals start, and are instantly dismissed by a pack of “sports” reporters (I’m not going to say “American” because there are a few Canadian reporters asking the same question… although most of them work for the Toronto Star).
Every year it’s the same declaration made by the same ESPN, Fox Sports, Toronto-based robots: no American wants to watch the Carolina Hurricanes play the Edmonton Somethings in the Finals, or no Canadian will watch two American teams play so, therefore, the NHL is a failure.
Well fuck that. Yeah, sure it’s true. But so freaking what? Why is this a surprise? No American outside of Utah and San Antonio is watching the NBA Western Conference Finals either, you jackasses. The Finals, the Stanley Cup Finals, are for the City Fans, not the national ones.
The Stanley Cup Finals are consistently dismissed by exactly the same sneering “sports” reporters every year, but every year the Stanley Cup Finals prove themselves to be the most exciting Sports Tournament in North America, and possibly — with the exception of Afghanistans’s Buzkashi League — the entire Sporting World.
So who wants Duck? I do. The Anaheim Ducks finished the regular season with a record of 48-20-14 for 110 pts and were second overall in the Western Conference. They’re an exciting, fast and hard hitting team with a Playoff MVP goalie and Chris Pronger, and they’ve won more regular season games in the past four years than any other team.
And the Senators? Thanks to a slow start in the regular season the Ottawa Senators finished second (based on points) in the Eastern Conference, but since Christmas they’ve easily been the best team in the NHL. With a regular season record of 48-25-9 for 105 points they have the most dominant defense and the fastest forwards in the NHL. Ray Emery, their young goaltender, has proven himself over and over again to be one of the best in the League, and the top three scorers in the Playoffs to date are all Ottawa Senators.
Sixteen Wins out of a possible 28 games is what it takes to win the Stanley Cup. These have been the two best teams in the NHL all year and now they have seven games to win four… there are four more games to be won, and they are going to be exciting and a lot of fun to watch. And if you’re not in Ottawa or Anaheim, and want to watch, the games are online at CBC Sports and, I believe, TSN… it’s worth a shot, and the NHL always has great video of the games. And, seriously, if all you’re going to do is bitch and moan aboot the league somehow not doing its job by, you know, allowing the teams to decide who plays for and wins the Stanley Cup, you could always go report on Afghanistans’s Buzkashi League.
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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
Eastern Conference Finals Best of Seven:
Ottawa Senators 4, Buffalo Sabres 1
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Oh Baby, We’re In Uncharted Territory Now.
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When I was a kid my grandfather had season tickets at The Forum in Montreal. When my brother and I went up for a visit we’d get dressed up and go sit behind Ken Dryden. Ken Fucking Dryden. I watched Guy Lafleur skate. Steve Shutt, Larry Robinson and Serge Savard… each game my grandfather would make a point of pointing out Yvan Cournoyer’s nickname was “The Roadrunner”. I still have some of the ticket stubs, and at least one program. I was born, like my grandfather before me and his father before him, a Habs Fan.
But then, in 1992/1993, three things happened: 1) The Canadiens won the Stanley Cup based almost entirely on their defense and goaltending; 2) during the off-season Canadiens General Manager, Serge Savard, gave away said defense, and; 3) Ottawa was awarded an NHL franchise.
Now, Montreal didn’t really start sucking (relative to their previous 100 years as a franchise) for a few years… four words: Rejean Houle & Mario Tremblay. But I was living in Ottawa when the Senators had their inaugural season — in fact I had moved to Ottawa in time to sign the petition (twice) that was submitted to the NHL — and tickets to see the Senators play were cheap and plentiful because the Senators really, really did suck. In fact they set a record in their first year for the fewest wins in an NHL season, only ten in an 84 game season. So the Canadiens would come to town and I’d go watch them take advantage of Brad Marsh and his Half-A-Knee and poor Peter Sidorkiewicz, one of the only pro-goaltenders to ever lose 46 games in a single season (if you can find another one let me know).
Ottawa sucked so bad, for so long, they managed to get a high first round draft pick every year. So by 1995 the Senators were starting to get interesting… Alexei Yashin still wasn’t a total prick, Radek Bonk, Pavol Demetria, Martin Straka, Alexandre Daigle and Daniel Alfredsson were the best young players in the NHL. And then, right at this critical juncture in my career as a Hockey Fan the unthinkable happened…
Mario Tremblay, rookie coach and former player for the Canadiens, lost his fucking mind and let his goaltender, Patrick Roy, be humiliated by the Detroit Red Wings. And when Saint Patrick — the greatest athlete to ever play his position, one of the Top Five Hockey Players of All Freaking Time and the only touchstone to the Canadiens’ 1986 and 1993 Stanley Cups — was finally pulled from the game, he left the bench and told the team owners directly that he would never play for the Canadiens again. He was traded to the Colorado Avalanche a week later, where he won two more Stanley Cups.
Enough was enough. I still watched the Canadiens on television, I watched their “Smurf Line” get decimated by the Philadelphia Flyers and screamed at those fucking Refs for letting it happen. But their management was inept and no changes were coming anytime soon, and the Senators were just looking so new and pretty and shiny and fast and so, so, so talented. And Chris Phillips, Sammi Salo, Wade Redden, Ron Tugnutt, Andreas Dackell, Sergei Zholtok and Steve Duchense along with Yashin, Daigle, Bonk and Alfredsson took the Senators into the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the very first time where they took the second place Buffalo Sabres to the seventh game… well holy puck on a stick I was hooked.
My grandfather and I, when we were both living in Ottawa, would go see the Canadiens play at the Corel Centre whenever we could. One of the Papers I worked for gave me access to Season Tickets. Then I moved to Toronto… but now I’m back, and we’ve been a few times over the past three years. The last one was at Christmas. I think it finally hit him that I was serious aboot taking for the Senators so he’s been calling me every time the Senators lose. Aboot ten minutes after the game ends my phone rings… Redden is too slow, Spezza can’t play hockey, the coach is a fool. For the first few months, up until a week ago actually, it was aggravating and a huge pain in the ass. I don’t like being held responsible for the decisions of a team I don’t own. But I think I’m starting to understand what he’s doing. It takes me some time sometimes.
A Finn decides they’re going to cheer for Team Sweden in the IIHF World Championships. A Manchester United fan pulls on an Orange shirt and starts taking for Liverpool FC. Now, that’s kind of cool as long as Liverpool FC and Team Sweden suck wind… but picture that persons grandfather when Liverpool FC beats the shit out of ManU every year for four years. Or Team Sweden schools Team Finland for the Gold Medal four years running. Because that’s what Ottawa has been doing to Montreal during the regular season for the past four or five years. The Senators have been in the playoffs ten straight years, while the Canadiens are lucky to have a little hope left in the last game of the regular season.
Hockey isn’t ‘just’ a sport. Or, at least, Sports are not trivial. Sports mean something because of what the participants put into those Sports. In Game Five, a Buffalo Sabre named Chris Drury was hit directly in the face with a slapshot. Read that again. A frozen rubber disk flying at 90mph hit this man in his unprotected face. He took eleven stitches in his mouth, his face swelled up like a George Romero nightmare and his jaw was most likely broken, but he Came Back And Played In That Game. Sports define the people who ‘play’ them until those ‘players’ can define the Sport. Hockey put Chris Drury into that position, but Chris Drury defined what Hockey means.
More importantly, Sports define relationships. My family are not “talkers”. We do not “open up”, we barely “communicate”. When I was growing up I would follow my grandfather until he needed me. When we stayed with him he would take my brother and myself to church — French Catholic with no English subtitles for the Anglophone grandkids. Then it was off Visiting his friends, another two hours where Luc and I couldn’t speak. But then, if the weather was good and the season was right, he would take us to the Pond and he’d strap magazines to my legs, hand me a baseball glove as a trapper, our boots became the goalposts and he’d skate circles around anyone else who wanted to play. And, occasionally, he’d tap my leg with his stick and say “nice save”. And, on at least a few occasions, he’d say “well, look at Mr. Dryden.” Holy Good Fucking Christ Did I Live For Those Moments.
I played, for one season, as a goalie for a few Men’s/Farmer Leagues around my home town and in a weekly high school game. My single mom, with no financial support, had no hope of getting her two sons into organized hockey, but I finally managed to “borrow” some equipment when I was sixteen. I was actually pretty good. My grandfather played, up in North Bay, and he was fantastic. He was the leagues leading scorer Every Fucking Year He Played. I’ve seen some of the clippings my mom has found in various archives. My grandfather, and his youngest brother, were written aboot in newspapers all across Northern Ontario and Western Quebec. Before the War he was scouted, Scouted, by the Canadiens… men from Montreal went to see my grandfather play hockey. After WW2 my grandfather played for the University of Ottawa Gee Gee’s, where he continued to break scoring records.
Aboot eighteen months ago my grandfather started having mini-strokes. He’s 86. Until the strokes he was actually very involved in following the Senators. He read both Ottawa daily Newspapers everyday, he watched every televised game and he could name and talk aboot all of the players. He even met and had lunch with Jacques Martin while Jacques was still the Senators’ head coach. He could speak, with authority, aboot most of the players and the prospects for the season ahead. The Senators, he would say, reminded him — a little — of the Canadiens from the Glory Years with their speed and potential. But then the strokes started coming. And age is not kind to the Mind. As the Mind ages it retreats to what is habitual because recall becomes impossible. And what is habitual, for my grandfather, is the Canadiens. Watching Guy Lafleaur and Ken Dryden and Maurice Richard and The Roadrunner all coached by Scottie Bowman. Les Glorieux.
And here’s his oldest* grandson wearing a Senators sweater. Of course he’s going to call me every time the Senators lose or screw up or there’s an unflattering column in the paper. And of course he’ll get upset, because he sees something taking something away from him… or maybe even someone. Sports define who we are, and what I’m seeing right now is making me realize just how close I am to not having him anymore. I’m also seeing that for the past few months — as I’ve being dealing with my recovery — I’ve been misinterpreting his phonecalls.
So… Sports define relationships, but they can also redefine them as well. The Senators are playing for The Stanley Cup for the first time and, even if he’s cheering for an American team because they’re not the Senators, I will be sitting in his livingroom watching the games with my grandfather… in HD on his giant new flatscreen. He still likes his toys.
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* My little brother was a Flyers Fan before he was a Senators Fan… which has never made any sense to me at all.
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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
Greatest Hits: Essential Canadian Writers — ‘George Bowering’ Everybody should have a favourite poet,aboot I have four and George Bowering is at the top of my list. George, who spent two years as Canada’s official Poet Laureate, pronounces it “aboot” and he does so proudly.
…this one was a pain in the ass to format. At the end of the post I wanted to leave one of his poems, otherwise why bother, right? But George uses the entire page, which meant using html and WordPress hates any html it thinks is weird. It took me aboot two hours to research and write the piece and another two hours just to get the poem laid out. But I got it done, and it’s exactly the way it looks in the book…
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Short Cuts: A Handy And Timely Guide To Four Of Buffalo’s Golfing Destinations Four Golf Courses For When… You Know: 1) Beaver Island: Grand Island, New York; 2) Hickory Ridge: Holley, New York; 3) Arrowhead Golf Club: Akron, New York; 4) South Park Golf Course: Buffalo, New York
This one was a little obscure. If you didn’t know the NHL was in Playoff Mode, and that the Ottawa Senators were beating the Buffalo Sabres in one of those Seven Game Playoffs, then you probably thought “mmmm… maybe he golfs and he’s going to Buffalo.” Nope. I don’t golf and the chances of my getting across the border are pretty slim. Hockey players, in the off season, golf. A lot. I was being kind and offering the Buffalo Sabres and their Fans a guide for their fast approaching regrouping season. I’m Canadian, we’re thoughtful like that.
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The Lists:
Five Strangest Search Terms Used To Find CSN:AFU
5) notable achievements of benito mussolini 4) tickled while wearing knee-socks 3) uncle tom’s cavern 2) the concept of the evil seed 1) smoking weed on lithium
Honourable Mention: eigteen focking
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Top Five CSN:AFU Posts Since Last Friday:
1) A Handy And Timely Guide To Four Of Buffalo’s Golfing Destinations 2) Essential Canadian Writers — ‘George Bowering’ 3) Canadian Inventions — ‘Instant Replay’ 4) How Global Warming Will Affect The National Hockey League 5) redacted.
Honourable Mention: Canadians Invented Hollywood: What You Need To Know Aboot Canada’s Movie Industry — Part Two: A New Hope
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The Five Blogs I Visited Most This Week
1) The Bitter Guy 2) East Village Idiot 3) Queen Minx (now on hiatus) 4)Nita Writer 5) Sex In Canada
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This Week In General:
My week started with me moving 12 tonnes… of stone out of a field. Six tonnes into the tractor’s bucket and six tonnes from the trailer to the spot my step-father and I are building a wall. He was there in the field with me as well, but his back dropped out of alignment aboot ten minutes into the job. There was a farmer driving the tractor, but the first rule of construction and farming is: The Operator Never Lifts Stuff. So on Saturday morning, roughly 8am, I was in a field prying rocks out of the ground… actually fuck that: “mini-boulders”, the larger of these things were easily over 200lbs. It only took a couple of hours… actually, picking stones out of fields was my first job back when I was thirteen. The good farmers would hook a wagon to his tractor then drive, slowly, though the field while myself and some other sucker walked behind the wagon picking up rocks — mostly anything larger than a golf ball — and tossed them on the wagon (rocks get pushed up when the frost melts… then they get stuck in the farm machinery). The serious donkey fucker farmers would park a wagon in the middle of a field and the other sucker and myself would have to walk the rocks to the wagon. $2.50/hour. Good times. Surprisingly not the worst job on the farm, however.
I also turned off my gas stove this week, it usually supplies most of the heat to my apartment. Very easy to turn off, very difficult to turn back on which sucks because the weather took a turn for winter this week. I think the warmest it got all week was “Where’s My Scrotum?”. In order to turn the stove back on I’d have to move one of my bookcases, which means emptying it, then moving an end-table and my EZ Chair, then I’d have to bend over and reach behind the stove (it’s an enclosed fireplace really)… none of which, after moving twelve tonnes of stone, is possible. So I’ve got the electric baseboard in my bedroom set on “Climate Change” and I’ve strategically placed fans to circulate the heat… sweet, sweet, precious heat. It’s not that moving the stone has made it impossible for me to move stuff, I actually feel pretty good. It’s just that I’ve moved enough stuff this week.
Today my friends had the ribbon cutting for their Craft Brewery. “Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company” is now, officially, in business. Their first product, Beau’s Beer, won last years “Golden Tap Award” for Best Beer at the prestigious Toronto Beer Festival. It’s my friend Steve, his brother Phil and their dad Tim who own the thing. Then Jamie is the Guy In Charge of Ottawa Sales. Last spring they had five bars selling their beer, now they have fifty with another whole lot offering it later this spring. The local mayor was there, so was the mayor from Hawkesbury, the closest city. The provincial member of Parliament for the area was there, as was the federal MP. This weekend Beau’s is busing 1000 people from the Ottawa region to their brewery for taste testing and roast animals.
I’ve tried to help out with the brewery when and if I can, but it’s still very hard to get out and interact with human beings, even when there’s beer involved. Last summer we painted a huge mural for the outside of their warehouse, and moved the brewing equipment into the factory. Last week I kind of hung around and occasionally hammered a board, then today I took photos of the event… which would be the first time in a year I’ve used the Real Camera… yikes. I think that’s it…
Oh yeah on Friday of last week my landlord handed me almost $500 in bills. I thought something was wrong… then, as he was handing them to me, I realized… he hadn’t given me an electric or gas bill since Christmas. Which would explain all the extra food in my cupboards. Good times.
Last thing… two friends, both from long ago, found me recently through this blog… but that may have been last week.
Everybody should have a favourite poet, I have four* and George Bowering is at the top of my list. George, who spent two years as Canada’s official Poet Laureate, pronounces it “aboot” and he does so proudly. He doesn’t write aboot the mysteries of Canada — although sometimes he does, George doesn’t write aboot the majesty that is Canadian landscapes — although sometimes he did, he writes aboot what he believes Canada should be like, what this country should be pissed off aboot and what this country means and has meant to him.
I first discovered George‘s writing in 1991. I was living in Ottawa and still pretending to be a poet when I found a press copy / reviewers copy of 1989’s “Sticks & Stones” in a tiny bookstore on Osgoode Street — it was a reprint of his legendary Rattlesnake Press (sort of) published 1962 book. Everything in the book Just Made Sense. That is so rare. Most poetry seems to have been written specifically to get a woman to take her clothes off. You read the words and they seem important because they’re on a page, and that page is laid out from left to right from top to bottom, and those pages are bound and the cover has a pleasant image on it, so obviously those bound, properly laid out pages must be important… otherwise, why would so many people have bothered to put so much work into producing the book? Those books seem to have been written and published so as to elicit a reaction of: “yup, you’re right. That sure is a book of poetry alright.” I think this is what my book of poems would have been like.
But George’sbook of poetry — the one I was holding in my hand and reading while sitting at “Fathers & Sons” restaurant across the street from the University of Ottawa, and just down the street from my Sandy Hill apartment, in the Spring of 1991 — wasn’t like that. Everything had meaning and that meaning was scattered across each page deliberately. Reading poetry is aboot using your mind, not just reading the words. Writing poetry is aboot forcing the reader to use their mind by using your words as their guide. “The best poetry,” George said, “is written in fear… When it has a good reader, the best poetry is read in fear.”
George studied at the University of British Columbia, where his masters thesis advisor was American poet Robert Creeley. As a young man he met and hung out and drank with and learned from Creeley and the other Black Mountain Poets, such as Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, all of whom influenced Bowering and his friends and fellow UofBC poets and writers either directly or through their work. George and the Black Mountain Poets were the writers who lived the way writers are supposed to live, if only because that’s the way we want writers to live… how we want to live. Every cliché, every tired representation of a poet in every piece of Hollywood-style trash, every image we receive from another garbage Top-40 song aboot how a writer and poet is supposed to look has, at its base, the life lived by George Bowering. When people tell you they are a “writer” what they are really saying to you is “I desperately want to be George Bowering, even if just for a stanza.”
In 1961 George co-founded and edited Tish (a renowned literary magazine) with Frank Davey establishing a post-modernist, avant-garde movement in British Columbia. George Bowering is an historian, a professor, he has written more than 60 books of poetry and both fiction and non-fiction novels and he was Canada’s Poet Laureate from 2002 until 2004. George won the Governor General’s Award twice in 1969 for two books of poetry — “Gangs Of Kosmos” and “Rocky Mountain Foot”, and again in 1980 for his novel “Burning Water“. George has also been an Officer of the Order of Canada since 2002. He was born in Penticton, B.C on December 1, 1935, to Ewart Bowering and Pearl Brinson Bowering and he has proudly said “aboot” his entire life.
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Excerpt From An Interview: “I can’t think of anything that is like writing prose. But I do know that I feel the way that a fisherman feels, maybe, when there’s something on the line. It can be wonderful to feel something is aboot to come visible, and when it does, it moves so nicely. I like the move.”
Excerpt From An Interview: “[…] I got into trouble for my principles. For example I was expelled for the last month of grade twelve because of my campaign against the recognition of the English monarch in Canada. Now I am her poet, or something. Well, in the meantime I have learned that the real campaign should be against the US takeover of our country and the minds of our young, who now seem to say, for example, Mawm instead of Mum.”
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Metaphor 1 (from “Sticks & Stones”, 1962)
(My speech obsessed by language
the very riding thru me of the
meta-phor ……………….thru me & away on a trip
past the margins of the mind)
A tree
an oak tree
an oak with a tree house
nailed between its branches ……………………………………stands ……………………………………in the field ……………………………………of my mind, ……………………………………growing, or ……………………………………staying grown
until I invest it with birds
brocading its limbs of reach,
sending back skippidy hop
patterns
…………………………….STOP …………………………………..it off ……………………………it is enough ……………………………it is in the moment ……………………………it is for ever
……………………………:done ……………………………& ……………………………:there
*In no particular order the other three would be: Gary Geddes, Colin Morton and William Blake.
“I Fought The Law”; ‘Trailer Park Boys Movie Soundtrack‘ (2006)
*TBDB Are: Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee (Rush), Ian Thornley (Big Wreck), Adam Gontier (Three Days Grace), Jeff Burrows (The Tea Party) and Care Failure (Die Mannequin)
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Eastern Conference Finals:
Ottawa Senators vs. Buffalo Sabres
Beaver Island: Grand Island, New York Public 18 hole course with driving range, Pro Shop and putting green. A snack bar is open during course hours. Beaver’s signature hole (4th, Par Five) “presents an opportunity for eagle if played properly. The lake comes into play along the left perimeter of the hole, following it from tee to green. Woods on the right prevent a bail-out. The second shot is played toward a green whose fairway widens slightly toward the target. Nothing prevents a straight ball on either shot [except maybe the tears of defeat getting in the eyes of the defeated], so miss to the front of the green if necessary.”
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Hickory Ridge: Holley, New York “The 17th is the hole golfers most talk about. It is a sharp dogleg left over a pond to an dramatically elevated green which has acquired the nickname of Heart Break Ridge. The Adirondack style Clubhouse offers a quaint setting of knotty pine walls and hardwood floors. A deck off of the clubhouse over looks the 9th and 18th greens offer a relaxing place for a drink or snack after your round. The dining hall in the clubhouse has a beautiful large stone fireplace with scenic views of the 9th and 18th hole. The clubhouse with a seating capacity up to 150 is also available for private parties, meetings, banquets or other functions. Our Partyhouse can seat up to 400 people for those big tournies [or an early-end-of-the-season wrap up party]. We also have outdoor outings under our tent.”
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Arrowhead Golf Club: Akron, New York “Arrowhead Golf Club (20 miles east of Buffalo) has been built from the ground up in the classic Scottish links style. Western New York’s premier upscale golf course was created to accommodate discerning golfers. The Club is a public facility that has 18 holes of championship golf and has been rated as one of the top courses in New York State and in the Northeast [much like the Northeast Division Champions, the Buffalo Sabres].”
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South Park Golf Course: Buffalo, New York Club Rental, Driving Range, Pull Cart Rental, Putting Green, Water Hazards, No Dress Code and Guests Allowed. “This course is well maintained and great for beginners. The fairways are wide open, and water hazards (ponds) come into play on a couple of holes. There are no slope or course ratings for either of the tees shown; ladies tee off from the same set of tees as the men [Which is perfect for Briere…].”
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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
Photo Evidence Photos of “Friends, Family And Me…” it’s still a rough Beta Version, but I’ve decided I like the look and feel of this page since I woke up from the two days of sleep I was owed… kind of. I’ll be updating it regularly. Kind of.
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New Posts:
Short Cuts: I Wanna Destroy, Possibly? OR Taking A Holiday In Cambodia Activists have always warned aboot how humanity will be held accountable by The Children Of Tomorrow, but no generation ever holds the previous one to account. No one is ever held accountable, therefore everyone is both blamed and blameless. There must be consequences, we must start penalizing retroactively. We must start beating the elderly more often and with more gusto. Bats. We should all have bats.
“Short Cuts” are something I came up with to fill in space while I looked after my grandfather this past week, but I like them a lot so I’m going to try to have a couple of them a week.
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Short Cuts: There Is No Blue Sky OR Why Justin Trudeau Only Comes Out In The Daytime All of life’s illusions are concentrated during the daylight hours. There is no sky, it is an illusion of light refracting across our atmosphere. There is no blue sky. Thinking, believing, there is a blue sky is mankinds first religion. This could explain some of “Trudeaumania” (1969-2000)… and maybe even its recent parody “Trudeausuperfluous” (2007-2007).
I should have incorporated an explanation as to who the Trudeau’s are… basically, think of Pierre Trudeau (mania) as John Kennedy. Kind of. Pierre’s son has decided, now that he’s in his 30’s, that he too wants to be a politician (superfluous).
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Canada: Crazy Americans Fear Canada… Twice OR Two $0.25 Stories In A $0.93 Newspaper Two stories featured in Canadian news this week will create Urban Legends that are going to need to be explained away by our Grandchildren’s Grandchildren to their Grandchildren unless we stop them here and now:
1) Canada is not the worlds leader in Pirated Movies — camcorder or otherwise — the MPAA statistics ‘proving’ we are were first discredited three years ago and several times since.
2) the American Defence Department never believed the Canadian “Poppy Quarter” was a tracking device.
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Short Cuts: Evangelicals Took Iraq So Atheists Want Afghanistan OR Look Who The Savage’s Are Now In order to be considered for deployment to Iraq by the American State Department, as a civil servent responsible for the real democracy process, people were judged on their voting patterns and whether they believed abortion is murder. Just as ridiculous as the four year hallucination that has been the hyper-Evangelical American and British desire to build democracy in Iraq, is the Atheistic fantasy of protecting Afghans by removing United Nations authorized and NATO led troops from Afghanistan, then negotiating a settlement with people who see us with the same eyes our ancestors saw Native Peoples and pre-colonial Africans.
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In General:
My week started with my mom and grandmother… telling me my grandfather had another stroke. He had, they told me, lost his ability to recognize numbers (which would be huge, him being an engineer) and was sleeping nearly all the time. So, based on how mom says “you should spend some time with him” I’m thinking the doctors have given him three weeks to live. The first couple of days I was thinking “man… he doesn’t seem that bad.” So Wednesday my grandfather and I went shopping for a bar-fridge, microwave and answering machine so he can upgrade his condo. He was converting millimetres into centimetres and then into inches, then into square feet faster than I could write the numbers down. Then we went out for lunch and he left exactly 20 percent as a tip. We spent the entire day talking aboot his engineering projects, some construction problems Montreal is having, his early days as a surveyer… he remembers his golf scores from last year for Christ’s sake… he played 63 games of golf last year, in 2005 he played 98, and he played his first game of this season yesterday.
So the reports of my grandfathers health had been greatly exaggerated… a good friend of his from back in the construction days died recently and the funeral was last week. So he drove 4.5 hours to Pembroke, stayed overnight and drove back the next day. He’s 86 and spent nine hours on the road because one of the last of his friends from Back In The Day passed away… when he got back he was exhausted, so my grandmother and mother decided he had suffered a stroke. Aaaaargh.
Anyway, I spent most of last week volunteering on three different renovation jobs, updated large portions of this blog, spent for too much time around other people… me being an extreme introvert and all… and trying to write emails to people I haven’t spoken to (but wanted to) in several years. So I’ve been exhausted from living on three or four different schedules, but I think I’m feeling better now.*
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* “In General” contains 12% new material previously not sent in emails explaining why I’ve been hiding.
0_o
cultural sn:afu 