Things Aboot Me:
Froot Loops, A Winter Storm And The Littlest Hobo
.
Before (last week) & During (this morning)
.
.
This isn’t even close to being the worst storm we’ve had in the past few years. But it is the worst one since I’ve had a digital camera and a blog. According to the TV People it’s -16C with the windchill. Which isn’t so bad. It’s the little icy pellets of stinging hate that stream into my exposed eyeballs that I have a hard time with. I also live in an old building, it’s one of the first ones built in my little village. So when the wind blows really hard things in my apartment move.
.
Like the blinds next to the computer. They’re usually flush to the window. I’ve put one of those plastic sheets up, the ones you kind of melt tight with a hair dryer. I’ve also stuck putty all the way around the sill and around where the glass meets the frame. I think the breeze has a lot to do with there being no insulation between the interior and exterior walls. Just a guess. Actually there is insulation, I can see it when I’m in the parking lot looking up at the softball-sized hole under my kitchen window. It’s yellow with large burnt-black spots. I’ve never seen insulation that colour that wasn’t being pulled out of a burning house.
.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my apartment. It’s massive and compared to what I was paying in Toronto and what some friends are paying in Ottawa the rent is nonexistent… this is my place when I moved in three years ago. Or at least the living room part. It’s actually not as crooked as this photo makes it look. When I moved to Toronto from Ottawa in 1998 I sold/gave away everything I owned and brought one gym-bag of clothes and my camera bag… it was for a new job at a magazine and basically I had two weeks to pack and find a place in Toronto before I started. When I moved back to my little village from Guelph in 2003 I brought back my decrepit computer, my camera, a bunch of books, a couple of CDs and my briefcase. And that cool lamp. So it wasn’t a total waste of time. My rent here is $375 plus gas and electricity, so aboot $450 per month (that’d be aboot 200lbs or US$400). The main part of the apartment is 30’x18′, the bedroom’s roughly 12’x14′, and there’s a large-enough bathtub and a mirror over the sink. For something similar in Toronto, within a 30 minute subway ride of Yonge and Bloor, I’d be paying at least one organ per month. But Toronto has enough bars, clubs, restaurants and events to justify turning out your little brother to pay the rent. Ottawa is actually more expensive to live than Toronto, at least in terms of rent. Ottawa, or Stubby Town, has some very nice museums but nothing else. There are a couple of venues worth seeing a band in, and a handful of restaurants in the Byward Market worth exploring, but… holy fuck is Ottawa boring otherwise. I lived in Ottawa between 1989 and 1998 and I actually had a lot of fun. Mostly because I moved to Ottawa from my little village where the weekend options were: drink, play Risk and get stoned OR drink, play guitar and get stoned. A really good weekend was doing all six at once. Architecturally there has been nothing or significance built in Ottawa since they had to rebuild the Parliament buildings 100 years ago. If you’ve got plans to visit Canada, stop off in Ottawa for a day or two to see the Museum of War and the Parliament buildings. And the Chateau Laurier. But only as a stop over between Montreal and Toronto. Halifax and Newfoundland are worth seeing for a little while as well. Edmonton sucks.
And now, some photos of my fridge and The Littlest Hobo (below). And some Froot Loops. The Littlest Hobo is classic Canadian Television… it’s aboot a dog who travels the country, which may or may not be Canada, helping out strangers. It was kind of like Lassie meets MacGyver without the socks. Most Canadian television programs created during the 80’s never took place in Canada. “Night Heat”, a fairly decent Cop Drama for a little while, was based in “Metro”, or “Metro City” or something equally stupid. It was because the producers always held out some vague hope of getting their program on American Network TV. I think Night Heat made it to an early, early morning CBS time slot. So Canadian taxpayers subsidized the creation of Canadian programs, which were filmed in Canadian cities but took place in Never-Neverland Cities with no names, and for ten years or more the word “Canada” was never spoken on Canadian TV. Except for “Street Legal”… but that sucked horse bag after the second season.
On my coffee table (bottom left) you maybe able to make out the DVD of “Bubba Ho-Tep” which is Elvis vs. The Mummy. If you can find it, buy it. If you promise to return it I may loan you mine. Elvis vs. The Mummy. Think aboot that for a minute. There’s also Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is as vital to my existence as Froot Loops, Extra Strength Tylenol and Johnny Cash. Yes, there’s a shiny unicorn on my TV. Where do you keep yours? The fridge (bottom right) is where I keep things I want cold. I haven’t been able to write anything serious lately because I’ve been sick all week. But, thanks to the miracles of antibiotics, mushy food and The Trailer Park Boys, I’m starting to get better.
.
.
.
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.
1) Serbia Didn’t Do It: According to the BBC “Bosnian Muslim leaders have voiced disappointment” after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague in a 13-2 decision ruled that the slaughter of 8,000 boys and men in Srebrenica was genocide, but Belgrade (re: Serbia) was not directly responsible. People get disappointed when there are no cookies left in the jar. I personally get disappointed when there’s no Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper left at the convenience store. There was a genocide, in Europe — who kind of promised that kind of thing would never happen again — and the ICJ rules that the state which sponsored the genocide is not guilty of said genocide. The State, they said, is not responsible for the States decision to commit genocide. Oh, genocide did take place, they gave the victims that much. And the State of Serbia did sponsor and support the Bosnian Army in their genocidal ways and dead people are still being found in mass graves all over Bosnia and, yes, there were mass expulsions, mass killings and mass rape, and… okay, Serbia did nothing to actually, you know, stop the rapes, killings and expulsions it explicitly knew were occurring under it’s command, but in no way can the Serbian State be held accountable because… ahem. I don’t know, maybe nobody needs that kind of hassle. The ICJ, in its ruling, did say “Serbia and Montenegro had violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by not preventing or punishing the perpetrators of the genocide”. Oh. Well, there you go. Between 1992 and 1995 at least 100,000 people were killed in another European war that, once again, Europe was unable and seemingly unwilling to stop. Then American, British and Canadian troops felt compelled to step in — again (third time’s the charm) — to stop Europeans from killing each other because those civil wars were spreading right across the Balkans. The ICJ decision basically means that, unlike the last time, no State will be held to account this time for the industrial slaughter of citizens because of their ethnicity and/or religion. This genocide will be laid solely at the feet of individuals like Slobodan Milosevic, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. I don’t think these were the lessons Europe was supposed to have learned from Auschwitz. You’ve come a long way, baby.
2) Iran’s Probably Doing It: Large caches of weapons and explosives are turning up in Iraq with Iranian markings and serial numbers on them. Kuwait is taking delivery of newer and better American Patriot Missile platforms. American refueling planes, those giant flying gas stations, are being redeployed to the region. The US Marine Corps has deployed several ships of heavily armed men and women to the general location. A second American Aircraft Carrier Battle Group has officially entered the region and has announced that if anyone, anyone at all, even looked at them funny they would retaliate with a whole lot of overwhelming force. The announcement was then repeated several times at varying volumes in Perisan. The second Battle Group is considered to be, on it’s own, one of the top six most powerful Navy’s on Earth. The other five being Britain and the other four American Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups. America now has more nuclear megatonnes within five minutes of downtown Tehran than Europe has rusting in their collective bunkers. Tony Snow, the White House spokesperson, said “we prefer to avoid military confrontation, but the United States in unwilling to live with a nuclear Iran.” Hans Blix, some old guy, was then quoted as saying “that may be the plan, but plans can change overnight.” This is Kissinger diplomacy. Without the hammer the incentives mean nothing. Personally I think if the Iranian leadership believes the Americans are bluffing there will be several new, and very bright, holes in the Persian sky next year aboot this time. But I think they’ve gotten the message. From here on it’s aboot negotiating a face-saving deal of some kind.
3) Iraqi VP Almost Gets Done In : Five people were killed when a bomb detonated inside the Public Works Ministry in Baghdad. Vice-President Adel Abdul Mahdi and the Minister of Public Works, Riad Ghraib, were slightly wounded. According to the BBC “police are investigating how explosives were smuggled into the building.” My guess is through the front door in large sacks marked “Danger: Explosives”.
1) al-Qaida Might Do It Again: American VP Dick Cheney was in Pakistan today (Monday), apparently Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s strategy of allowing al-Qaida to run the northern third of his country may not be turning the terrorist organization into upstanding world citizens after all. Apparently both British and American intelligence services have tied the recent plots to blow up airliners over the Atlantic Ocean and maybe blow up a few subway cars in Britain to people in North Waziristan. A spokesperson for Musharraf said after the meeting that everything was fine and that there was nothing to see here. ABC reported that the “meetings got rather heated” and involved a top official from the CIA and a very detailed powerpoint presentation involving lots of surveillance photos of North Waziristan. In a weird coincidence the American Vice President was also fairly close to an explosion a little later in the day while he was in Afghanistan when a bomb went off outside the Bagram airbase where he was staying.
2) Iraqi Militants Almost Do It: More aboot the Iraqi VP almost getting himself blowed up. ABC reports that ten people died in the attack. They also reported that the draft legislation is ready regarding the division of “oil wealth” to the peoples of Iraq. Some provisions were included to appease the Sunni’s in Central Iraq.
3) Al Gore Actually Didn’t Do It: It was a pop culture love fest as the Oscar’s, according to Leo DiCaprio, “went green”… apparently traveling a few miles in an hybrid car made of plastic which is made from oil, and printing irrelevant material on recycled paper is Hollywood’s idea of saving the environment. When something so shallow, so devoid of worth as “Celebrity” stands up and preaches from Babylon aboot anything we should take a step back, congratulate them all on their ability to memorize complete sentences, then put them back into their gilded cage for another year. Which is what has happened. Gore actually didn’t win the Academy Award. The Award went to filmmaker Davis Guggenheim. Gore just got up on stage and started talking. So this is twice he hasn’t won something but left Hollywood convinced he won both times. If he’s not installed again as President in 2008 look for Gore not to win the Nobel Prize and for Hollywood to celebrate his victory.
1) Jesus Tomb: The only thing the CBC loves more than pumping up weak stories into outright scandals aboot Canadian governments is trying to convince people that the Christian Church is being “fundamentally shaken to its foundations” every time a new movie comes out. “Last Temptation Of Christ” was supposed to turn Christians into right-thinking citizens… or something. “Dogma” was a threat to Catholic beliefs because… I don’t know, maybe because Ben Affleck was in it. Then “The Da Vinci Code” was going to expose the Opus Dei as a bunch of child eaters. If you’ve got a movie project based on slim to none evidence that Jesus was a gay-porn star who may, or may not, have sucked coke off of Judas’ engorged penis, the CBC will give you five minutes and Neil MacDonald will be only too happy to do the standup. This time it’s a “made for television documentary” aboot two limestone boxes the filmmakers believe once contained the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene during a news conference Monday at the New York Public Library. It’s called “The Lost Tomb of Christ”… I’m sure it’ll be in focus.
2) Canadian Citizenship Screwup: Okay… before 1947 there were no “Canadian Citizens”. We were “British Subjects”. So before 1947 there were no Canadians. But as of 1947 we’ve had our own Citizenship Act. Now… apparently, during the switch over, some people got lost in the Never Never Land of Canadian beaurocracy and they lost their citizenship because they didn’t fill out the right form. But no one told them they lost their citizenship, so they’ve been living and having children in Canada who then grew up not knowing either they weren’t citizens or that their parents weren’t citizens. They’re being called (as far as I can tell, only by the CBC) “The Lost Canadians”. The Canadian Government is holding hearings where one woman called herself a “tenth generation Canadian” but not a citizen. After applying for passports people were receiving letters telling them they had lost their citizenship when they reached their 24th birthday. The Economist Magazine ran an editorial called “Lost In Kafkaland. There are fewer than a thousand of these cases and the current Minister of Immigration says she’s working through each case as quickly as possible.
3) Judicial Selection Process Changed: And a chance to attack the government. Whoever was setting up the editorial lineup at the CBC must have been sweating through their underwear tonight. The CBC is a “public broadcaster” which receives around $1B/year from government subsidies, and they take every opportunity given to them to prove they’re not part of the government. Occasionally they do good reporting on stuff the government of the day fucks up on, but mostly it’s hype. The Conservative Government wants to put judges on the bench that reflect their philosophies regarding crime and punishment. Every Canadian government has done this since our country was created. Our judges are selected by Provincial committee’s, these selections are then offered up to the Prime Minister and, without consultation, he gets to pick whomever he wants. Instead of maybe bringing up this little piece of non-democratic Parliamentary procedure as something that needs changing, the CBC is going after Prime Minister Stephen Harper because he wants to put a law enforcement official (a cop) on each of the Provincial committees. That’s Billion, with a B.
1) The Jesus Box: The movie, “The Lost Tomb of Christ”, was produced by Titanic director, and Canadian, James Cameron and Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici. They claim to have found ten “ossuary’s”, or burial boxes, in Jerusalem which contain the skeletal remains of Jesus, his wife, Mary Magdalene, and their child. They have a few “scholars” and “experts” willing to stand up and be quoted.” The person who actually found the ossuary’s several years ago says that he thinks the filmmakers are full of dog crap. A professor of Religious Studies says all this Jesus-alternate universe stuff comes from a dissatisfaction with the original Jesus-narrative. But, he said, believing there’s truth in movies like this one and “DaVinci Code” is irresponsible and intellectually naive.
2) Hijab Banned From Soccer Field: An 11-year old girl was kicked off the soccer pitch at a tournament in Laval, Quebec, for refusing to remove her hijab. She had already played in two games without incident, but as she ran out for the third the referee kicked her out. The coach of her Ontario-based team consulted with his players and the decision was made to forfeit he rest of the tournament. Five other Ontario-based teams quickly followed. The girl says she still loves soccer, and wears a red hijab because that’s the ream colour. The tournament organizers backed the refs decision saying it was a safety issue and that the hijab could get caught on another player and cause choking or some such total bigoted bullshit. Women are playing soccer in Iran, Pakistan and in the West Bank wearing the hijab and no one has died from having a loose hijab. But this is Quebec, and in Quebec religion is treated in a manner very similar to Europe. The belief is, Quebec is a secular society having tossed Catholicism into the trash back in the 60’s, therefore everyone must give up their religious accoutrement. At least that’s what I thought until they said the ref’s a Muslim as well. And now I don’t know what the fuck to think because the reporter just dropped that bomb right at the end and threw it back to Lloyd at the news desk who… went onto the next story, which was:
3) Canada Puts $200M Into Afghanistan: The Canadian Government will be paying the salaries of Afghan teachers, police officers and increasing the number of road and school building projects over the next ten years. “Afghan’s”, someone said, “need to see short term, immediate gains to their lives so they can believe in their new[ish] government.” PM Stephen Harper said the money will go towards consolidating the security gains Canadian troops have made in Afghanistan. The opposition party’s in Canada’s Parliament automatically reacted by calling the new money an “admission on the government’s part that it’s strategy in Afghanistan is a failure.” The three Canadian opposition parties favour either 1) an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan or 2) troops should leave sooner. Both options would never result in a return of the Taliban because the Taliban would be forced to negotiate with the three Canadian opposition parties because that would be the moral thing to do.
3b) UK Puts New Troops Into Afghanistan: France and Germany have troops in Afghanistan, making coffee and cleaning up after meals. So Canada, Denmark, the Americans and the British are doing the actual fighting and dying. In order to make up for the fact France and Germany would get crushed by a soccer team of Ontario-based 11-year old girls, the United Kingdom has to send in another 1400 troops and Canada, already stretched, is being asked to send in another 100. France and Germany have done more damage to this planet, they have killed, slaughtered and fucked over more civilizations, than anyone else on this planet and they are deliberately sitting inside their bases in the suburbs of Kabul watching as Canadians, Americans, Danes, Brits and — even more importantly — Afghans get killed and injured every other freaking day… I could go on but my tooth hurts and I’m jacked up on Extra-Strength Tylenol. The good news is I could be in love. But the EZ To Swallow Extra Strength Tylenol could be messing with my mental reasoning, so it could still be a Deep Affection.
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.
Your first act of youthful anarchic aggression was tossing Pablum, a Canadian invention, into your mom’s face, or jamming a spoonful up your nose.
Your second act of youthful aggression was jamming twelve D-batteries into the portable stereo permanently attached to your arm so you could shut your parents out and impress your stoner friends with your ability to take 120db straight into your brain without bleeding or caring that in ten years you’d be stone-cold deaf and wearing a hearing aid the size of a small car just so you could listen to a plane takeoff.
And that completely inalienable right to force my musical tastes, no matter how insanely vile, into the brains of “adults”, and to look and act like a complete fucking idiot while doing it was introduced to the world by the portable electronic device. And the man who made that portable device possible was Lewis Frederick Urry, a Canadian chemical engineer and inventor.
Thanks to Urry, while I was in high school my friends and I would walk from the school down the main street of our little village, to the chip stand and back with my 36″ long and 10″ high portable radio blasting Anti Pasti, Charged GBH, Bunchofuckingoofs or some song aboot giving headbutts to random people.
That’s right, you can thank him.
In 1959, while working for Eveready, a division of Union Carbide — and later known as Energizer — Urry invented the alkaline battery and, later, the lithium battery. Forty-eight years later at least 80 percent of the dry-cell batteries in the world are based on Urry‘s work.
Born in Pontypool, Ontario, Urry earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Toronto after serving in the Canadian armed forces. By the time Urry retired he held 51 patents including several for lithium batteries, the energy source for most cell phones and cameras.
In a bizarre and almost certainly unintentional piece of irony Urry’s first alkaline battery was later enshrined close to Thomas Edison’s light bulb in the Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History. There are a lot of people who believe Edison invented the light bulb (he didn’t, Canadian James Woodward invented and patented the first light bulb, then sold the patent to Edison) and the batteries we use today (he didn’t). Urry’s designs and patents allowed electronic communication devices and… ahem… ‘other’ devices to become portable and handheld.
Previous batteries were massive, clunky and lasted for a few hours — at most — under the least stressful conditions. According to a 1999 article by the Associated Press “the typical U.S. household includes 18 devices that use [alkaline] batteries. Americans used an estimated four billion [alkaline] batteries in 1998.”
When I was a kid I was going through aboot twelve “D” batteries a month and now my digital camera is eating up aboot eight “AA” every six weeks (mostly because I forget to turn it off).
The Convenience Revolution of the 1950’s had left people limited to the length of their extension cords, but Urry’s invention unleashed the Mobile Gadget Revolution we have today. Lewis Urry died at the age of 77, after a short illness, on October 19, 2004.
“You Look Good To Me”;
‘Oscar Peterson: And the Bassists [Live In Montreux]’ (1977)
Ten Lost Years 1929-1939:
Memories of Canadians Who Survived The Depression
Barry Broadfoot (1973): In 1972, Broadfoot, a Canadian reporter working for the Vancouver Sun, quit his job and drove across Canada finding people who had lived through the Great Depression.
‘Ten LostYears‘ is an historical compilation of hundreds of heart wrenching first-person stories of starvation, murder and astonishing stories of survival told by farmers, widows, waitresses, hoboes and desperate families willing to do almost anything just to live another day.
Each single one of the hundreds of stories is simply overwhelming on their own, but one after the other they create an awe-inspiring testimony to the strength and absolute willpower these people had to have in order to survive what has to be the greatest series of natural disasters human beings have had to cope with, maybe only comparable to The Black Plague, HIV/AIDS and The Spanish Flu. ‘Ten Long Years’ sold 300,000 copies — a remarkable number in Canada — and spawned a successful stage play that ran for several years.
Broadfoot was a man who just got up one afternoon in 1972 and walked out of a successful seventeen year career as a daily reporter to travel across this massive country in a shit-box Volkswagen with his typewriter and tape recorder. He conducted hundreds and hundreds of interviews with the survivors, mostly in bars over glasses of beer or in family kitchens. The Canadians he spoke with had lived through The Spanish Flu, the “Dirty Thirties”, the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War without ever really talking about their experiences with anyone.
“I said “the hell with it,”” he later said in an interview with his former paper. “I put 17 years of inter-office memos into a shoebox, liberated the typewriter and walked out.”
Ten Lost Years was his first book, he went on to write eight more: “Six War Years” (1975), “The Pioneer Years” (1976), “Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame” (1977), “My Own Years” (1983), “The Veterans’ Years” (1985), “The Immigrant Years” (1986), “Next-Year Country” (1988) and “Ordinary Russians” 1989. Through all of his book Broadfoot gave ordinary Canadians a voice in our own history.
Broadfoot was the recipient of numerous awards and honours including the Order of Canada, which is the highest award Canada has to offer to our citizens. In 1998 Broadfoot suffered a stroke which left him blind and impaired his memory. He passed away in 2003 in Nanaimo, British Columbia.
Excerpt One “The Killing Of A Hobo”: (page 138) “I saw one man kill another man one night in a jungle at Kamloops in British Columbia. It wasn’t about food or money either, let me tell you.
“One fellow said Roosevelt was president of the United States and another said no, it was Mr. Coolidge. One thing led to another, they always do. The Roosevelt man grabbed the other fellow and threw him and he fell over and his head hit the iron arrangement we had to keep our pots over the fire. It appeared to me the iron point end went into his ear. Well anyway, it killed him. Or so we thought. Certainly ‘peared dead to me.
“The Roosevelt man took him up to the tracks and soon a freight came along and squished his head to nothing, so where was your evidence? I reckon 50 men saw that killing, if no one saw it. It happened all the time and I never heard of anyone getting hanged for that. I’ll freely grant you that, mister.”
Excerpt Two “We Ate Not Too Bad”: (page 217) “You ask me why I worked in a filling station for $5.50 a week, working 55 to 60 hours a week? Simple.
“That was 10 cents an hour. With 10 cents my mother could buy more than a pound of hamburger. A quart of milk. About three pounds of dried beans or nearly two pounds of rice or two loaves of bread. A pound of peanut butter for 20 cents, good stuff with real peanuts in it.
“I know these costs. They are burned into my brain.
“That $5.50 kept my mother and sister and me from starving. We didn’t do too well in the other departments, medicine and movies and clothes, but we ate not too bad.”
Excerpt Three “Because They Could Live Off The Land”: (page 299) “About 1931 when the federal government pushed through emergency assistance payments, the city family got $15 a month and the country family got $10 a month because they’d likely have a cow and a pig and a big garden — and the Indian family got $5 a month because they could live off the land.
“Indians haven’t lived off the land since the days of Custer, but you couldn’t tell the bastards in Ottawa that. I honestly think they didn’t consider Indians as people.”
Excerpt Four “Farmers Did Funny Things”: (page 42) “Dust would cover up the fence posts and the farmers would come along with a wagon load of more poles and string another fence, on top of the first. I could never figure out why they did this because there were no cattle wandering at large, they had all been slaughtered long ago or taken to the community pastures. Farmers did funny things in those days. They still do, but everybody was just a little bit loco in that country then.”
1) American Base Attacked: Six American soldiers were killed in Iraq today, two of the soldiers were killed “in a rare direct attack” against an American base north of Baghdad. A suicide bomber attacked a fuel tanker truck outside the base, insurgents then attacked the base. Seventeen American soldiers were also wounded in the attack, while three more were killed over the weekend. More than forty civilians were killed in and around Baghdad in separate attacks, more than sixty Iraqi civilians were killed in attacks on Sunday. Another American soldier was killed in Eastern Afghanistan today. The American military has been warning, for a few weeks, that there’s a “spring offensive planned” by the Taliban. NATO Commander, Dutch Maj.-Gen. Ton Van Loon, has said in recent days that NATO will not be sitting around waiting for the Taliban to regroup, but will be sending troops — and they will mostly be Canadians — into the mountains to attack the Taliban before they can prepare. French and German soldiers will continue to make coffee and perform laundry duty from somewhere deep inside their Kabul bunker network… vive le Resistance. In an effort to stem some of the paramilitary movement across the Afghan-Pakistan border a security barrier is being built by Pakistan. Pakistani officials have been complaining lately about not having their “sacrifices” acknowledged.
2) Train Bombed In India: At least sixty-six people were killed in India when the “Friendship Express”, a heavily armoured train supplying service between India and Pakistan, was attacked with bombs and Molotov cocktails. Many of the deaths occurred because the train’s doors were locked and windows barred shut in an effort to protect the travelers from attacks. Most of the dead and injured are Pakistani. There have been no claims of responsibility, but both Indian and Pakistani governments condemned the attacks. Last July nearly 200 people died in a similar attack. A lack of communication between the two countries left relatives and emergency personnel waiting in Pakistan for five hours before the train arrived. No one had informed the Pakistani relatives that the wounded and dead had been left in India.
3) Mideast Talks Resume: American Secretary of State stopped by on the way back from Iraq to see how Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Palestinian Authority’s President, Mahmoud Abbas, were doing. Apparently everything’s going great, cause Rice was there for aboot twenty minutes and left smiling. One weird thing, there’s always a handshake for the camera’s going into these events, and one for the camera’s coming out. But when it came time to gather in front of the camera’s afterwards Rice was on her own. Hamas were too busy helping Iran develop a cure for AIDS to attend the meeting.
1) Canned Tuna Controversy: Apparently a specific type of tuna contains a higher level of mercury than is currently thought safe for eating. In a CBC study involving sixty cans from nine different stores, 13 per cent of Albacore tuna was found to have mercury levels higher than the .5ppm allowed by Health Canada. Another 10 per cent were just under the limit. Some random guy from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency agreed that compliance with regulations should improve, but could never be 100 per cent. Apparently some countries, including a few American states, have health warnings on packaging and Health websites regarding Albacore tuna and, dammit, why isn’t Canada doing the same? Well, we are now. Health agencies around the world write up guidelines concerning the amount of food that is safe to eat at any one time. These guidelines are then ignored by all of their citizens. So, according to Health Canada yesterday, it was safe to eat a whole lot of tuna (Omega-3 and all that health crap) everyday. And now, today, if you’re pregnant you’re allowed one can of tuna per week, and if you’re a child a quarter can per week is okay. According to the reporter, because Rhode Island has more stringent guidelines, the Government of Canada is therefore happy to see people poisoned by mercury. But, hey, apparently it’s still okay to allow mercury laden fish into the system.
2) Air India Inquiry Threatened: On June 22, 1985, Air India Flight 182 was blown up just off the coast of Ireland, killing 329 people, including 280 Canadians. Ever since it’s been one fuck up after another in trying to find out what went wrong and who knew what when. And now the Judge in charge of the “Air India Inquiry”, former Supreme Court Justice John Major, is threatening to shut the process down because the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Department of Foreign Affairs are withholding information critical to the proceedings. CSIS, who had the presumed-bombers under surveilance for months, and might have even known about the plot weeks in advance, burned and erased days worth of audio tapes after the bombing. The Canadian Government, for a decade, never really cared enough aboot the tragedy — most of the victims were born in India or of Indian descent — and didn’t even start a proper investigation for years. It wasn’t until 15 (Fifteen) years later that the first charges were laid. The only convictions have been for minor offences. No one has ever been held to account for what happened.
So last year, finally, the Conservative government launched a Public Inquiry into the events leading up to the explosions, what happened afterwards, and why government agencies have been Totally Fucking Up Any Chance For Truth In This Matter. Justice Major, in an effort to get a peek at more than 15,000 pages of blacked out pages from CSIC and the RCMP, has shut the inquiry down for two weeks. Prime Minister Harper has assigned his National Security Advisor to get the process back on track.
3) Political Ads Pulled: Only the CBC would consider this a story. The Conservative Party of Canada, the current governing party, has been running ads that — very mildly — attack the newly elected head of The Liberal Party of Canada (the Official Opposition). Some of these ads, the ones playing in Quebec, are being pulled because Quebec is heading into a provincial election next week, and the ads might be seen as supporting the current Quebec government. So, of course, the CBC reports the event as though the attack ads were being pulled because the Conservatives had done something wrong and were now admitting their bad behaviour.
1) New Political Poll: Newly elected Liberal Party of Canada leader, Stephane Dion, has lost any momentum from the leadership race and convention, and has dropped eight points in a new poll (just keep in mind there are four political parties in Parliament currently — the New Democrats (NDP), the Liberals, the Bloq Quebecois and the Conservatives). 53% of Canadians surveyed believe current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, “is a more decisive leader” 19% say Dion is decisive 33% say they “identify with Harper” 34% say they would vote for the Conservatives 29% say they’d vote for the Liberals (down 8% from just a month ago)
The strangest part of the Poll was the environment question. The Conservatives have been (unfairly) tagged as having wrecked Canada’s Kyoto agreements, even though the Liberals signed the agreement then did nothing for thirteen years. But after a year of Liberals attacking the Conservatives for not having a Kyoto strategy, Canadians apparently think all — or none — of the parties are capable of having a plan for fighting Climate Change:
Liberals: 23% Conservatives: 20%
NDP: 21% According to the poll, which was conducted between Feb. 15-18 by The Strategic Counsel for CTV News and The Globe and Mail (the largest national daily in Canada), Dion might not have been the right pick for the Liberals. Many members of his own party have come out in front of cameras and said too much emphasis was being placed on environmental issues, and that the current strategy of promising to meet the Kyoto targets within two years are simply insane. Meanwhile, Dion seems to have disappeared and left the defence to others in his caucus.
2) Ontario Puts Deadbeat Dads Online: The Government of Ontario is putting ‘mug shots’ and information on a website intended to shame “deadbeat dads” into paying their court ordered spousal and child support. In Ontario alone there are 190,000 outstanding complaints. $500 million was collected last year in support payments, with $1.3 billion remaining to be collected. Alberta already has one of these websites, which are popular in the United States. Alberta’s site has resulted in a 56% success rate in collections. As the child of a Fuck who never paid one fucking cent to my mother — who had to save for two months to afford a $5 haircut — I’d really like to see this retroactive to aboot 1978. You can see the people the Goverment has decided should be shamed into paying their support payments here: www.goodparentspay.com.
3) Air India Inquiry: Pretty much the same report as CBC, so I’ll give some more of the background… until the early 1980’s Canada had one agency in charge of both federal (and some provincial) policing responsibility and national spying. If you know aboot the American federal security system, pre-Patriot Act, the RCMP were our equivalent of the ATF, FBI, Secret Service, DEA and US Marshal Service, with Anti-Terrorism Response tossed in. By the early 80’s it had become pretty clear that having one agency responsible for so much was inherently dangerous. By then the RCMP had active files on over a million Canadians, this in a population of less than 22 million. So the government broke the RCMP up into smaller parts. One of these parts was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which had a mandate to keep track of “dangerous” people living in this country (Canada has no international spy force, we do have a monitoring service called the Canadian Security Exchange, which spies on American communications… seriously.). So. In 1985 Canada had a new spy agency called CSIS, which — instead of working with the RCMP, they saw themselves as in competition with the RCMP (“we don’t report to you fuckers”). So when CSIS found out aboot a plan to blow up a plane over Ireland, they didn’t tell anyone. They kept it a secret, which is what they thought they were supposed to do. Then, after the Big Bang, they suddenly decided it would be a really, really smart idea to clean out some of their tape collection.
1) US Plans For Bombing Iran: I’m not entirely sure why people are surprised that the Americans would have a few plans for pacifying an enemy lying around. Lets not forget, the animosity in this relationship goes back aboot thirty years. For crying out loud, the Americans were willing to overlook the insanities of Saddam Hussein for ten years because he was willing to toss a few hundred thousand members of his Unwilling-but-Volunteered Force at Iran. Iran has spent thirty years arming Hezbolla, taking care of Hamas, sending weapons into Iraq to arm Shiites against their Sunni oppressors. America treats Israel like a 51st State, Iran would like very much to use Israeli’s for the Iranian “Shoot A Jew Into The Sun” missile program. Of course there are plans. Fuck, there are plans for an American invasion of Canada… possibly as a result of our unleashing Celine onto their unsuspecting elderly. I’m sure there are even plans in the New Hampshire Legislature for an invasion of Vermont. This is what militaries do in their spare time. What, you thought they just ran in place until war was declared?
2) Train Bombing In India: Not much different from the other reports. The reporter did get into some dangerously unsourced areas by saying something like “underneath their friendly exterior some Indian authorities believe Pakistan may not be completely innocent in this incident.” If you’re going to say something like that, have a better source than “Maybe”, “Possibly” and “Some Guy”. I could make an outsourced unsourced joke here… but I’m too tired.
3) Militants Attack UN In Kosovo: Three United Nations cars were damaged in a fairly minor attack near Kosovo’s capital Pristina. Kosovo has been run by the UN since 1999 when “NATO” (re: America, Canada and Great Britain) stopped an insane war of ethnic cleansing. There have been ongoing negotiations and votes regarding creating a new ethnically-Albanian country from breaking Kosovo away from Serbia. I’m sure, with the UN firmly in control, there will be no further problems.
.
.
.
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.
Your first act of youthful anarchic aggression was taking a bowl of this stuff and dumping it on your head, in your mom’s lap, throwing it across the room, spitting it into your fathers face, covering yourself in it like it was peanut butter and you were chocolate, jamming it aboot two inches straight up your nose for no other reason than it made you feel good.
“Pablum” was the world’s first commercially available pre-cooked dried food created specifically for infants (just add water to create the mush).
In 1930 three Canadian doctors — Frederick Tisdall, Theodore Drake and Alan Brown — working at Toronto’s Hospital For Sick Children created the pre-cooked, vitamin-enriched, easily digestible cereal that has since saved millions of babies around the world from starvation and vitamin deficiencies. The ingredients included vitamins A, B1 and B2, D and E, and was “produced from a mixture of wheat, oats, corn, and bone meal plus wheat germ, dried brewer’s yeast, and alfalfa.
This was all then ground, mixed, dried, and pre-cooked.” Pablum is credited for greatly reducing the incidence of — among others — “rickets“, a crippling childhood disease.
The ease of preparing Pablum, and the longevity of the product in its packaged form, made the cereal a critical part of easing childhood malnutrition in the early part of the 20th century in America, Europe and Canada, and has also been used for the same reasons in developing nations.
The royalties from early sales of Pablum went to the Hospital For Sick Children and funded paediatric research at the hospital for 25 years. The mushy, bland, easily thrown cereal is still sold around the world today.
Spelled with a lowercase “p”, ‘pablum’ is defined as: “indicating something bland or oversimplified, especially a work of literature or speech. This usage predates the invention of the cereal.”
0_o
cultural sn:afu 