la soubrette

A Quick Guide to Different Governments

2010-05-17T01:20:00.002-04:00

Bill, James, Tyler, Andrew, and Mike get together every Friday night and order pizza. They can never agree on what to get, though. Bill wants to get Meat Lovers'. James wants to get Canadian. Tyler wants to get pepperoni made with free-range meat because he is against animal cruelty. Andrew is a vegetarian, so he wants to get veggie pizza. Mike is vegan and wants to get vegetarian pizza with soy cheese. So how do they decide?

Direct Democracy
All five guys vote on toppings and eventually come to an agreement. Mike disagrees with their choice, but he got outvoted, so fuck him.

Republic
The five elect Tyler to choose the toppings. Tyler considers the preferences of his buddies when choosing.

Despotism/Dictatorship/Autocracy
Bill tells his friends that they're ordering Meat Lovers', and anyone who doesn't like it can order a knuckle sandwich.

Monarchy
James claims to have special pizza-related knowledge due to the time he spent at the Institute of Italian-American Cuisine. Although this claim is never verified, James ends up ordering every week, regardless of how good or bad his choice is.

Constitutional Monarchy
James suspects that someone is about to call bullshit on him, so he lets Tyler and Mike pick the toppings, but he still acts like he picked them himself.

Socialism
Once the pizza is ordered, Andrew realizes that he's a few bucks short for his part of the pizza, so Tyler spots him a few bucks, knowing that Andrew is never going to pay him back.

Capitalism
Bill offers to pay for the pizza if they get Meat Lovers'.

Communism
James orders plain cheese pizza, then adds each person's choice of toppings individually, after they've filled out the Pizza Requisition Forms and allowed 6 to 9 hours for processing.
(Alternatively, James calls up the pizza place and asks for a pizza that is 1/5 meat lovers', 1/5 Canadian, 1/5 pepperoni, 1/5 vegetarian and 1/5 vegan. When the pizza place tells him that they're not going to make a pizza like that, he says "fuck it" and orders half Canadian-half meat lovers'.)

Theocracy
Mike declares vegan to be the One True Pizza, and scares everyone else into agreeing by telling them stories of the awful things that happen to meat-eating infidels.

Facism
Andrew knows that his friends are too dumb to know what's good for them, so he orders the pizza himself, for their own good.

Oligarchy/Plutocracy
Mike and Tyler choose the pizza toppings, since they are cooler than Bill, James, and Andrew.

Imperialism
The guys order pepperoni, and they like it so much that they call the pizza place back and have them change everyone else's order to pepperoni as well.

Anarchy
The five guys argue until after the pizza place is closed. They end up eating whatever they can find in the house: instant mashed potatoes and breakfast cereal. Andrew steals Mike's breakfast cereal.

My Favourite Ten Books of 2009

2010-01-02T00:06:00.002-05:00

So as a year-end wrap-up type article, I thought I'd write about my favourite and least favourite literary experiences of 2009 -- the books that I've read this year -- as well as mention my literary hopes for the New Year.

The Best Ten Books I Read in 2009
10. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
This early-twentieth-century modernist novel was one of the few silent-personal-drama types that actually really kept my attention. Ford plays with chronology, detail, and character development in such a way that the affairs of Edward and Leonora unfold like a murder mystery.

9. The Divine Ryans by Wayne Johnson
Taking place in St. John's in 1967, the endearing failure of a nine-year-old hockey-loving anti-hero struggles to cope with his father's recent death and his family's suffocating under his matriarchal aunt. It's a funny coming-of-age story that touches on the importance of family, religion, and hockey to Canadians in the sixties.

8. A Bird in the House by Margaret Lawrence

7. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
This novel is ostensibly about a kid who survives almost a year in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, but I personally was more enthralled by the religious subplot. Pi is hailed by his religious leaders as an excellent Hindu, Christian, and Muslim boy -- at the same time. Even when lost at sea, Pi prays five times a day facing Mecca and says Hail Marys during storms. The end will leave you wondering: what does it all mean?

6. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
This 1944 novel would have been much better had it been finished, but considering the circumstances (Irène Némirovsky was an ethnic Jew and Russian living in France during WWII and died in Auschwitz) the fact that we have it at all, not to mention how exquisitely well-written it is, is a minor miracle. The appendices -- notes from Némirovsky's notebook for the unwritten three movements and correspondence between her, her family, and her publisher -- are almost as interesting as the novel itself. The intertwining and overlapping stories of people of all ages and classes fleeing Paris and then living under the Nazi occupation is enthralling, with a fair number of surprises. You could call this the WWII novel for people who don't like WWII novels.

5. Fight Club by Chuck Palihaniuk
I read this in my Studies in American Literature seminar, which was focused on utopias and dystopias. I thought this was a bit of a cryptic choice for a utopia class; is our very world of today a dystopia? (Typically "dystopia" novels are of the 1984 variety; tyrannical government control, mass unhappiness, or at least a nuclear holocaust or endemic zombie problem.) And why do fistfights make men feel better about their dystopia? I have my own theories, the scope of which don't fit here; read it and draw your own conclusions.

4. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munroe
When I wrote about this novel in my Canadian Fiction seminar, I wrote about how I loved Alice Munroe not shying away from sex in a coming-of-age story. Del's pregnant friend tells her that "Everyone does it," meaning sex. Look! People have been promiscuous forever! (Anne of Green Gables, for example, never had sex.) Friend and fellow reader Bruno pointed out that women seem to write disproportionately about sexual freedoms whereas real women "like doing other things" besides sex. While women pretty much like sex about as much as men do (and when we like doing something, we really enjoy talking about it), I don't want Bruno or you to think that this novel is just another feminist sexual liberation novel; it's funny and thoughtful and explores social pressures and relationships and pride and belonging and individuality among girls and women in small-town Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. If you've read and liked Lives of Girls and Women, I recommend you check out The Birth House by Ami McKay.

3. Green Grass Running Water by Thomas King
If Canadians are known for their sense of humour, this book's sense of humour is distinctly Canadian. Centered on a handful of members of a Blackfoot community in Alberta, the novel draws on oral storytelling techniques and King's delightful character of Coyote, the mischievous character who talks to both the narrator and hangs out with the cryptic, mysterious characters of Hawkeye, The Lone Ranger, Robinson Crusoe, and Ishmael. The humour is cynical at times, ridiculous at others -- and I challenge you to see if you can get each and every joke and reference.

2. La Guerre, Yes Sir! by Roch Carrier
Before I read La Guerre, Yes Sir! I knew Roch Carrier as the guy who wrote Le chandail de hockey, the children's book about playing pond hockey and quoted on the $5 bill. This short, hilarious novel is about the funeral of a WWII casualty and his wake in his small québécois village. One woman is town is hiding both her husband and her lover in the attic to save them from the draft and to ensure she always has a man to, ahem, meet her needs; another soldier is home on leave and has brought his recent bride, a prostitute and an anglophone; the dead soldier's family try to offer tourtière and cider to the anglophone army men who don't understand them and condemn the québécois, who spend the wake not only praying but getting drunk, telling dirty stories, and fighting. An excellent read, and you can tackle it in an afternoon.

1. LAMB: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
This is probably the funniest book I have ever read -- and yet, it offers a very fair treatment of the life of Jesus, a boy coming of age and curious about sex even though he is supposed to be without sin. I read it for a class called The Historical Jesus (more a history class than a religion class), and so duly noted that Moore did his research when including historical details about life in Nazareth in the first century AD. Moore imagines Jesus' childhood, his lost years (i.e. before he started his ministry), and his life up until his arrest, through the eyes of his childhood best friend, Biff. During the "lost years", Jesus and Biff journey to the east to find and seek wisdom from the wise men who attended Jesus' birth, and who teach him about Taoism, Bhuddism, and Hinduism before Jesus returns to start his ministry. There are a lot of gems of wisdom -- and history -- tucked away in this uproariously funny novel; it's the kind of thing you can read while on holiday, and still feel like you've read something important when you're finished.

The Biggest Disappointments of 2009
The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquart
I'd always heard that this was a big one in CanLit, and my reader-aunt loved it, but when I finally got around to it -- what a letdown. There was nothing original about the main character, Klara, and although her brother Tillman was interesting, not nearly enough time was devoted to him. I had to force myself to finish the book; the ending was trite and horribly contrived. It was as if Urquart forgot what she wanted to say by the end and just kind of threw everything into place at the last minute, like a school play in which things go awry backstage during the second act.

World Without End by Ken Follet
I've always been a fan of Follet for easy summer paperback reading; although his characters can be formulaic at times, his plots are always page-turners, and he writes very interesting and multifaceted villains, often refusing to make his villains pure evil or his heroes morally spotless. I especially enjoyed Pillars of the Earth, to which this novel was a sequel. Unfortunately, Follet scooped out everything good about Pillars and wrote a huge tome that, despite being moderately entertaining, had villains that were evil to the core, heroes who were perfect, a plot that dragged heavily by the end, and a happily-ever-after ending played out by characters who seemed like minor variations on the ones from Pillars. Twenty-five years, and this is his long-anticipated sequel?

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
I was looking forward to reading this as it seemed like a crowd favourite among many of my reader-friends. And though I absolutely love the concept, I just couldn't get into Kerouac's prose; I found it thick and difficult. I didn't feel like the character of Sal (the narrator) was developed well either. Dean may have been the hero, but it seemed like Sal didn't consider himself an important character. At times I felt like I was waiting for things to happen while Dean spouted off his craziness. It was an okay book, but not nearly what I'd been hoping for.

Books I am Excited to Read in 2010
Extraordinary Canadians: Pierre Elliot Trudeau by Nino Ricci
When I first heard about the new series, edited by John Ralston Saul, I knew right away that I'd want to read most, if not all of them. These are biographies written by novelists, instead of journalists or other nonfic writers, and if the excerpt from Daniel Poquelin's René Lévesque is any indication, it was a fantastic idea.

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
It won Canada Reads 2009 among other awards, and also came highly recommended by a few of my reader-friends. It's been sitting on my bookshelf after my mother loaned it to me six months ago -- why haven't I read it yet??

La grosse femme d'à côté est enciente and Thérèse et Pierrette à l'école des Saints-Anges by Michel Tremblay
Another book that's been on my shelf for six months. I even started reading Thérèse et Pierrette over the summer, when I bought in in a used book store in Montréal. Why haven't I finished it yet? All I can say is, man, reading novels in French is hard.

Bonjour Tristesse by Françose Sagan
Another French book that I've so far neglected to read, but this one is on quite a few must-read or best-book lists, and also, my copy is purse-sized, so I've no excuses really.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
I found this one in a used book store for an unbeatable price and, after reading Slaughterhouse-Five and A Man Without a Country, I couldn't resist. (I've also read Bagombo Snuff Box. Being some of Vonnegut's earlier stuff, its ho-hum-ness is forgiveable.) School reading and whatnot made me forget about it until now. Maybe I should just read less for school?

Misogynists Love Coors Light!

2009-07-21T21:56:00.005-04:00

Have you seen this ad?

[I can't find this ad on the internet. I will photograph it next time I see it.]

(For those of you with poor French and no English equivalents nearby, it reads, Colder than the 24-year-old girl whom you thought was 32!!)

Wow. I guess the Coors marketing department thought that "Coors: No Ugly Chicks!" lacked a certain subtlety. Now I'm not one to cry misogyny. I thought last summer's beer ad, "For the equality of the sexes: once at your place, once at hers" was amusing, unconsciously doing its little part to chip away at the sexual double standard (I am not sure what it said in English; as with this summer, I passed the fairweather months of 2008 in La Belle Province). Hey, even the old "scantily-clad women" fallback is okay. I mean, men like beautiful, scantily-clad women. This is a fact of life. (Women, on the other hand, like scantily-clad people in general, but ads still prefer to play instead to our often-crippling insecurities about how attractive we are.) But Coors really lost it on this one. This ad is being displayed to the general public, not exclusively in men's toilets and locker rooms. Therefore the ad gives off two distinct messages:
"Hey guys, if a girl rebuffs your come-ons, she must be frigid, ha ha ha!"
"Hey ladies, you have until 31 to land a man before you become unattractive. Quick, get married for your lives!"
And Coors is wondering why women don't buy their beer?!
Well, Coors, I hate to make generalizations, but I'm guessing that when your marketing department sits down to profile their target audience, "concerned about gender parity" doesn't quite make the list. So, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that you hire new marketing people, and maybe this time throw in a woman or two. Here, I'll even make you an ad to get started.

But you might want to photoshop it better.

Sarkozy and the Burqa

2009-06-23T18:06:00.004-04:00

French president Nicolas Sarkozy's recent controversial statements about the status of the burqa or niqab have divided the French blogosphere (according to a news article I read somewhere). No big surprise there. The complete veiling of Muslim women has always been something of a controversial issue in the West, so it's no surprise that such a strong stance against it, in a country with the largest Muslim population in western Europe, would draw considerable comment. Especially since the small number of veiled Muslim women in France is growing.

In a statement from Verseilles on Monday, M. Sarkozy said that to veil or not to veil was not a religious issue, but one that dealt with the subjugation of Muslim women, and finally that "la burqa n'est pas la bienvenue sur le territoire de la République française," (the burqa is not welcome in the French Republic).

"In our country, we cannot accept women imprisoned behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all
identity. That is not our idea of dignity for a woman."
- Nicolas Sarkozy, translation by me from this article

It isn't, or often isn't, a strictly religious issue -- I'll give M. Sarkozy that. But his comments betray an enormous ethnocentrism on his part. Westerners tend to view the niqab, the burqa, and even the hijab as a restraint forcably imposed on Muslim women by their misogynist or mistrustful male relatives, garments that keep women in their subjugated place. However, Muslim women tend to have a very different view of the role of veils. Ladies, how many of you have noticed a marked increase in wolf-whistles, creepy compliments, and other generally pervy behaviour on the parts of strange men (frequently on public transit or at stoplights for some reason) during shorts-and-t-shirt weather? Muslim women have figured this out, and they've realized that shapeless clothing makes you invisible to creepy pervs. For them, being veiled is not about being subjugated or objectified -- rather the opposite. And they have different standards of what is considered appropriate. In the same way that you wouldn't wear short-shorts or a tube top to your job at the bank, Muslim women don't want to go around with their necks and hair hanging out there for just anyone to see.

That being said, M. Sarkozy has a badly-phrased point. The burqa "issue" is one that goes back -- last summer, a veiled Muslim woman was denied French citizenship. Although the report made little mention of her niqab, the media made much mention of it, suggesting that the xenophobic immigration officials just wanted to keep Muslims out of the country. However, the real reasons for citizenship denial were rather more alarming.

A report from a French government commissioner submitted to the council said the woman told officials she was unaware of her right to vote, and would only remove her veil after men left the room. "She lives in total submission to the men in her family ... and the idea of contesting this submission doesn't even occur to her," the government report said.

There is nothing wrong with denying citizenship to someone who is unaware of their right to vote. Citizenship is far more involved than merely living in a country. Citizenship requires civic, social, and cultural education. To become a citizen of a new country implies a willingness to learn about and fit into it. Not being aware of your right to vote could not be phoning it in more. If this woman wanted to be a French citizen, she could have at least glanced at the workbook.

Bearing in mind that citizenship means accepting and integrating into a new culture (not necessarily abandoning your old culture, but not just taking advantage of the economy and living standards of a new country), a case can be made for abandoning veils. Eye contact is extremely important in Western culture, and we become unnerved and a bit weirded out when we are speaking face-to-face with someone we can't identify visually. And yes, women who choose to wear the veil must understand that it is perceived very differently in the West and that there are some who are going to feel pity and assume that it is a sign of subjugation, no matter the actual reasoning behind it. Perhaps those who criticize M. Sarkozy for stigmatizing and marginalizing Muslims in France should consider that, by choosing to dress differently from the traditional garb of the country in which they have chosen to live, these women are marginalizing themselves.

Bilingual sign analysis time

2009-06-21T22:45:00.004-04:00

One of the things I love most about living in the Ottawa/Montréal area has to be examining the translation idiosyncrasies in bilingual signage. Nothing ever quite reaches Engrish levels, but there are sure some interesting translations nonetheless. Today's bilingual sign comes from the window of a Montréal city bus.

Indeed, 'twas but a partially-opening window.

The ignored abortion debate

2009-06-04T16:58:00.003-04:00

Garson Romalis: Why I am an abortion doctor

The "abortion debate" between the left and the (frequently religious) right that centers on whether or not abortions should be legal is irrelevant when dealing with situations such as those described by Dr. Romalis. The pro-choicers versus the pro-lifers caught up in the issues of the right to life versus the right to choose what you do with your body (and any other smaller bodies which may be contained therein) is, philosophically, about as useful as whether or not war is a good idea. Very few people are pro-abortion. And of course, the legalities of the issue are not unimportant. But wars and abortions are going to happen whether they are legal or not. Theoretically, a woman does have the option to procure abortificants, or at least throw herself down the stairs or get a friend to punch her in the abdomen. No amount of legislation or pro-life ad space is going to change that. Sure, making safe abortions illegal might result in a few more unwanted, unhappy, impoverished babies being toted around by their unhappy, impoverished baby-mamas and -daddies, but it will definitely result in a lot more gruesome failed backalley or DIY abortions and dumpster babies.

The real issue is not abortion versus no abortion. It's safe, legal abortion versus horrifying deaths and illnesses resulting from illegal abortions. This is not about women being able to choose when to reproduce -- it's about women having access to proper physical and psychological care. Attacking abortion doctors because some women choose -- or are cornered into -- abortions is like attacking police officers because crimes have occurred.

Pro-life murderers: a further exploration of mental deficits among select members of the Religious Right

2009-06-01T12:33:00.006-04:00

There's been another abortionist shooting -- the first since 1998, but alarming nonetheless. The man was shot on a Sunday morning, while in church. I am sure that the pro-life groups, not to mention Jesus, are very proud of you, Mr. Roeder.

Probably the vast majority of people (most of those involved in pro-life groups included) can condemn this as anything from a really bad course of action to a crime against humanity. But, like many fundies in the near-theocratical USA, certain people have slightly disturbing views on the matter. From the New York Times article:

'Of Dr. Tiller’s death, Mr. Leach said, “To call this a crime is too simplistic,” adding, “There is Christian scripture that would support this."'

Oh. My. Fuck. For the benefit of Mr. Leach (and perhaps, unfortunately, others, who do not understand that disestablishmentarianism was one of the founding principles of America), let's review what "crime" really means.

Crime (noun):

1. An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction.
2. Unlawful activity: statistics relating to violent crime.
3. A serious offense, especially one in violation of morality.
4. An unjust, senseless, or disgraceful act or condition: It's a crime to squander our country's natural resources.

Apparently, Mr. Leach missed the part where it did not say, "An act not supported by Christian scripture. KJV only. Acts condemned by other religions still fair play." Because the act perpatrated by Mr. Roeder quite clearly fits definitions one through four (minus the stats bit).

Perhaps yet more disturbing were assassin Scott Roeder's apparent motive. You have to give credit, however begrudgingly, to someone who stands up for the defenseless and all that s/he believes to be good and right.

Someone named Scott Roeder posted a message on the Operation Rescue blog about Dr. Tiller that read, in part: “Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.”

However, someone who's just trying to chuck a scapegoat on the flames in order to save his own ass from "judgement"? You know, Mr. Roeder, I am not sure that offing a guy in church is the best way to avoid God's wrath. Jokes aside, statements like the above are apalling all on their own, even without the accompanying murder.

The National Post has a sense of humour

2009-05-28T15:47:00.005-04:00

After Michaëlle Jean's controversial seal heart eating shennanigans (which, in my opinion, was awesome on several levels) and Europe's heart-stopping horror, and all this being in the wake of the EU's seal product ban, the National Post has demonstrated an understanding of satire. NP blogger Matt Gurney today wrote part one of a (implicitly) series on the horrors committed by Europeans for the sake of cuisine. The first harmless, helpless creature? The snail.

These helpless creatures' defences have proven no match for the cruelty of man. For thousands of years, they have been hunted and subjected to bizarre tortures before being consumed as a delicacy by heartless and out-of-touch Europeans.

From Barbaric European Food Practices, Part I: The snail

I was as surprised as you and my officemates were to find this delightful bit right of the National Post's yellow banner, but there you have it. If we can expect more of the same from Mr. Gurney, I'll finally have more reason to read the Post than idle wondering about what the right-wingers are saying about things.

Stop Banning Baby Seals!

2009-05-07T21:01:00.002-04:00

So the EU wants Canadians to stop cruelty to animals -- well, the cute ones, anyway.

The EU has banned seal products, in a sense. They can still be imported and even sold, just not promoted or advertised. Basically, Europeans who want some sweet sealskin or delicious healthy seal oil now need to whisper discreetly to the shopkeeper and take their purchase home in a brown paper bag. The reasons for condemning the seal hunt are about as obvious as it gets: baby seals are freaking adorable.

Condemning the death of adorable animals is about as uncontroversial a statement as you can make (usually), roughly on par with declaring that you are in favour of world peace or fewer reality TV shows. This is probably why so many celebrities oppose the "seal slaughter".

However, the reasons for supporting the Atlantic seal hunt are rather more complex. Canada's 2007 export of seal products was worth about $13M, a small but nevertheless significant amount. An estimated five to six thousand people are to some degree employed in sealing during the season. Some say that the bans are really unnecessary and that a free market should decide the seal hunt's fate. But with its bad press, well, the fate of this industry does not look good. Imagine this:
JANE: Hey, I love your jacket.
SUE: Thanks, it is made from dead baby seals!
Sue may as well hang a dead puppy around her neck. (Also, Jane and Sue are speaking Norwegian since 80% of sealskin goes to Norway.)

Opponents of the seal hunt need to ask themselves exactly what makes the seals so special, other than the fact that they are cute. A (slew of studies) found clubbing to be the most effective way of rendering seals dead, or at least brain dead. The seal population is anything but endangered, with caps being set on how many seals can be caught each year (actual numbers often fall quite short of these caps). No one is issuing a ban on the live boiling of lobsters, a more ugly and delicious source of meat. Most non-Muslims couldn't care less about the cause of death of their hamburger, at least when there are no mad cow scares going around. And if people had decided that the fact that chickens running around after their heads are cut off was indicative of severe pain and cruelty, there would be quite a hole in the fast food industry. Hell, it looks like all these celebrities and Europeans care more about baby seals than, say, waterborded US war prisoners or Tamils caught between terrorists and government armies.

The biggest proponents of the seal hunt ban are, of course, the folks at PETA. For those of you who are unaware, PETA is the organization that tries to convince people that cruelty to animals is wrong because hot naked girls think it is wrong, and also think that using human breast milk as an alternative to cow's milk is more humane. The sophists over at PETA have invested significantly less energy in saving lobsters and political prisoners.

The people in parliament want the Canadian Olympic Team to incorporate sealskin into their uniforms to help the cause. Opponents say that this will unnecessarily politicize the games. Superficially, sure, it is a political statement. But really, while it might be controversial to those who can't see past a whitecoat's big dark eyes, is it really any more "political" than any athlete wearing or using his or her country's trademark products? To anyone who thinks logically, it's about as inhumane as serving maple syrup.

Four-Twenty on the Hill

2009-04-21T00:36:00.002-04:00

One of the many things that makes me feel proud to be a Canadian is the fact that I can sit in front of my nation's legislative building (as well as one of its prominent landmarks) and peacefully smoke marijuana without anyone bothering me.

Marijuana enjoys a degree of bad PR, being associated with stoners and potheads who spend so much time getting and being high that they are incapable of basic responsibilities like paying rent, or more benignly, hippies who enjoy their pot with dreadlocks, organic food, hackey-sack and clothing of questionable cleanliness. However, a surprisingly large number of "normal people" enjoy smoking the wacky tabacky as well, as the Reefer Madness stigma gradually wears off. Marijuana is smoked by students, young professionals, and celebrated Canadian author and journalist, the late Pierre Berton.

Every year on 4/20, Parliament Hill is crowded with a greater-than-usual RCMP presence, to bust up those who get out of line. The thing is, I have never seen anyone making trouble at 4/20. Sure, they do produce a lot of litter (mostly food wrappers and discarded Green Party literature), but the stoners aren't there to cause ruckus. They blow bubbles, play guitar and hackey-sack, throw frisbees, and sunbathe. They crowd (patronize) all food-serving establishments within about 1.5km of Parliament Hill. They are too mellow to get into fights or deface public property. And the RCMP, apparently, understands this, and leaves them alone, providing they are not openly consuming alcohol.

(Another possible explanation is that it's really not plausible to arrest a thousand 15-to-35-year-olds, no matter how obvious it is that they are all smoking dope.)

The cheer that goes up from the crowd on Parliament Hill when the Peace Tower clock strikes 4:20, followed by profuse coughing, is more than a demonstration to legalize marijuana. It's symbolic of what a great country we live in -- a country that is reasonable, a country that does not let baseless morality prevent its citizens from engaging in harmless recreation.

10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong

2009-04-19T22:44:00.003-04:00

1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Brittany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

This appeared on a friend's Facebook notes (seeing the title and knowing the friend in question to be a liberal, albeit one of the southern-US variety, I was overwhelmed with curiosity). He didn't take credit for creating it, but was also unable to remember the source; in any case, I thought it cute and funny. Of course, my thinking it "cute" is probably a big reflection on the fact that I live in a jurisdiction where gay marriage is legal; I might feel rather more strongly about it should I live in, say, California or New York.

(Side note: Interestingly enough, there is some evidence to suggest that homosexuality is not merely just another orientation that doesn't, or shouldn't, affect straight people -- it may be one of nature's ways of dealing with overpopulation. I couldn't find any direct research or scholarly articles dealing with this study, so it should be treated carefully, but found several references, including in the Hypography science forums, to a study done with mice [and possibly again with monkeys] that, given sufficient food and water but finite amounts of space, populations would exhibit higher rates of homosexual sex as space ran out. So maybe Russel Peters was dead-on when he observed that "we could use a couple of homos in India right now.")

I found myself reading the Fundies Say The Darndest Things website last night (which is about hilarious/disturbing things said by ultra-conservative Christians and Christian Fundamentalists, not maritimers dealing with especially high tides). The Fundies in question take swipes primarily at homosexuals and atheists/evolutionists, although they don't leave out Muslims, Jews, pagans, liberals, or women (at least the ones who vote, work outside the home, or get raped). The idea that homosexuality is a choice or a lifestyle to which one can be "recruited" or "converted" rather than a genetic predisposition is kind of taken for granted:

"The only solution we have to stop gays from recruiting other people is to cut off the source."

[On what to do about their son, who recently came out]
"I talked it over with his therapist, who had the ludicrous idea that homosexuality was unchangable and that trying to repress could lead to lots of psychological damage (I've dropped him and will try to be finding another therapist with more moral beliefs). I wouldnt be surprised if he's the one who's feeding my son all the homosexual propaganda about how its 'ok' to be gay. That, or how homosexuality has engulfed the media, making it seem 'cool' and 'hip' and how they were just another oppressed minority. You didnt have to worry about seeing two men making out on tv at my age! I dont want to sound like a fanatic, but Im worried what other effects will come out of this increasingly secular, immoral society obsessed with filth." [sic]

And finally, a guy who has never heard of gay people practising safe sex, or straight people contracting/dying of STIs, or what exactly causes cancer:
"*If* it's right, why do most, if not all, homosexuals die young of diseases
like AIDS, Hepatitis and Cancer?"

Now that we know that homosexuality is genetic, this raises the question of what is considered "natural" -- most people would say that "natural" implies that something appears in or is caused by nature, as homosexuality clearly is, evidenced by the fact that it happens not infrequently in the animal world, too. The only way that one could argue that homosexuality is unnatural would be to say that it is uncommon, by which token albinos, those with birth defects, and those with "outie" belly-buttons are all unnatural. (One Fundie suggests that "most afflictions like this are caused by sins committed while still inside the womb." So if killing gays is desirable, and I can find out that my baby is gay while the bun's still in the oven, would that justify an abortion, Fundies?)

The problem with the Fundies is that you can't argue with them on fair terms; they pick and choose which facts they accept or reject. They will swear up and down that "nothing good has ever come from 'science'", but the day an archeological excavation unearths the stable in which baby Jesus was born, they will jump for joy and point fingers, saying that this is just more "proof" that Luke's (highly historically inaccurate) birth narrative is true, word for word, as found in the KJV.

(The KJV, by the way, is frequently held up by Fundamentalists and the uneducated alike as being the only reliable translation, sometimes going as far as to say that the KJV was in heaven, with God, in English, since the beginning of time. All "real" biblical scholars consider the KJV to be laughably inaccurate and highly theologized. The KJV is to the original Hebrew and Greek what the hilariously mistranslated subtitles are to the Chinese kung-fu movie.)

I did some further reading on one of the websites from which a Fundie quotation was lifted. It made a pretty serious case about "modest dress", and how wearing a bathing suit or looking at people wearing bathing suits is basically putting yourself on the path to hell. And I realized something: I could probably build a comparably strong case for running around naked. After all, isn't clothing just superfluous ornamentation designed to hide God's glorious creation that is the human body? It would be pretty presumptuous of a good Christian to assert that man-made clothes are better than God-given skin, right?

So here is what I propose: next time you find yourself conversing with a Fundie, take the moral high road. Inform them that crying at the funeral of a Christian is a shameful display of weak faith, that you are only having so much sex because the Holy Spirit wants you to, and that God created gay people for a reason (just like all the natural disasters, wars, famines, etc) and that questioning God's will in doing so is not very Christian.

Although, if you meet this guy:
"There are a lot of things I have concluded to be wrong, without studying them in-depth. Evolution is one of them. The fact that I don't know that much about it does not bother me in the least,"
You might have just as much fun replying, "Oh, I know! That is how I feel about church," just to watch his head explode.

The 7 Most Sexist Disnney Characters

2009-01-29T14:30:00.016-05:00

We've all seen and laughed over The 9 Most Racist Disney Characters. But stereotyping characters based on racial traits is not the only outdated idea to which Disney has contributed. Think about your favourite Disney films as a child. Those produced before about 1996 had a fairly basic model (stolen largely from European fairy tales): The pretty pretty princess, the evil stepmother or other ugly matron, and the prince. Occasionally there's a dad or some sort of talking animal companion, but this is more or less how the Disney movie runs, unless the plot is left mostly up to the men, thereby largely excluding female presence. (We could also do an article on homophobic characters, but Disney mostly stays away from this -- it would probably be movie characters in general).

Sure, Disney has smartened up lately. You've got Mulan, who joins the army to protect her father -- not her boyfriend -- and to prove that girls are good for more than marrying off. You've got Pocahontas, who is the voice of reason and understanding between warring races. You even have Hercules' Megara a supporting character with, oh my, depth! But for every Mulan, Pocahontas, Megara, and Belle (who at least teaches girls that it's totally cool to be smart and bookish, even if she is kind of helpless), there's a Maid Marian or a Cinderella who can't get a damned thing done for themselves, or a Madame Mim or an Yzma, who demonstrate that you can tell how good or evil a woman is by how pretty she is. Men, of course, are a different story:

If you make the same chart with female Disney characters, please, send it my way.

With this in mind, I give you The Seven Most Sexist Disney Characters.

#7. Mrs. Banks from Mary Poppins
Release: 1964

How she destroys the self-esteem of little girls everywhere: "Surely, not Mrs. Banks!" you're thinking. "She was a suffragette. She belongs on the list of The 7 Least Sexist Disney Characters!" And you'd be right about the suffragette bit. In Britain, women with a hankering to vote went to lengths just short of terrorism for that right. Mrs. Banks come home filled with joy and excitement about women chaining themselves to the Prime Minister's carriage, and then leads the household staff in a chorus of Sister Suffragettes, including the unforgettable line, "Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."

Unfortunately, as soon as the song ends, her husband comes home, and all that "no longer meek and mild subservients" stuff goes right out the window. She shoves away all the sashes (because she knows "how the cause infuriates Mr. Banks") before the husband waltzes in the door, oblivious to everything except the way she looks.
MRS. BANKS: Dear, it's about the children -!
MR. BANKS: Yes, yes, yes. [Turns around and walks away]
...
MRS. BANKS: They're missing, George!
MR. BANKS: Splendid, splendid.
He goes on to sing that he treats his "subjects ... servants ... children, wife, with a firm but gentle hand. Noblesse oblige." Meanwhile, his wife looks like she is about to cry. Maybe Mrs. Banks isn't the sexist character here. Maybe it's Mr. Banks. At least she attempts to make him acknowledge the sentience of his children. But she's still way too complicit in this thing. Mr. Banks lays heaps of blame on her, and she accepts that everything is her fault and all but apologizes for being a terrible, incompetent person. If her husband straight-up slapped her, she'd probably thank him for teaching her a lesson.

Unfortunate moral: Everything that goes wrong in your marriage is the woman's fault.

What would have made it better: If Winifred Banks stopped being a simpering ninny and told her husband to suck her left one once in a while.
MRS. BANKS: It's about the children, George - !
MR. BANKS: Yes, yes, yes.
MRS. BANKS: DID YOU HEAR WHAT I JUST FUCKING SAID?

#6. Princess Aurora/Briar Rose, from Sleeping Beauty
Release: 1959

How she destroys the self-esteem of little girls everywhere: Princess Aurora, aka Briar Rose, aka Sleeping Beauty, is loved by all. What did she do to deserve such affection? Not a damned thing. All she had to do was show up and look pretty. Okay, so her parents and her parents' friends love her, that's reasonable. Prince Phillip, however, just sees her and decides that politics be screwed, he's going to marry the hot peasant chick. I guess that what would have happened in the real world -- him either jumping out and raping her or just watching her from behind a tree while jerking off -- got vetoed by the Brothers Grimm as not moving the plot forward very well.

Well, you know the basic plot. Female Villain 1B shows up and curses the pretty pretty princess, the fairies whisk her away into the forest where she grows up singing to surprisingly docile forest creatures (if you ever wonder why princesses seem to attract forest creatures so much, the reasons are always either beauty or singing voice, or virginity if unicorns are involved). She meets the Prince, they decide to get hitched, but before they can, Briar Rose gets hauled back to her family's castle where she pricks her finger on the spindle which is supposed to make her die (of what? Blood loss? Gangrene? Did this happen a lot back then?) but thanks to Merryweather's blessing only puts her into a coma. Then she just lies around for a while, letting the prince do all the damned work until he shows up and wakes her up. Am I stretching it, this counter-feminism thing? Well, the Disney Sleeping Beauty story is still better than its precursor, which involves such delights as rape, cannibalism, and attempted murder. The prince gets away fine with the rape, it's his wife who is considered the evil one for trying to murder his mistress and children.

Unfortunate moral: The best way to get a man is to hang around and be as beautiful yet passive as possible. Nobody likes a woman who gets assertive when she's been offended.

What would have made it better: Briar Rose is taught kung fu while living in the forest with the fairies. When Maleficent tries to get her to prick her finger, she snaps out of it and kicks the wicked witch in the box, vanquishing her. When she turns around she sees prince Phillip watching, who says, "Shit! I liked you when you were just beautiful and useless, but now that I've seen what you can do, now I love you."

#5. Cruella DeVille et al. from 101 Dalmations
Release: 1961

How they destroy the self-esteem of little girls everywhere: Even if she had been named "Happy McFlowers", you'd know the lady on the right was the villain because she is an ugly woman. Compare with non-evil Anita:

"I'm too pretty to be cruel to animals!

Cruella Deville has to overcompensate for being so ugly by wearing too much lipstick, dying her hair weird colours, and making gigantic fur coats, sometimes out of the fur of stolen puppies. She first tries to peer-pressure Roger and Anita into selling their newborn puppies, and Roger is the one who has to tell her to suck it. So Cruella hires some guys to commit a B&E in order to get her hands on fifteen dalmation puppies. They quickly overpower the lovable old matron working for Roger and Anita and make off with the loot. Luckily, there are plenty of talking dogs and other animals (exclusively male) to help Pongo and Perdita get their puppies safely home.

The best moment in the film, however, occurs during the chase scene in which Cruella is so enraged about the setback in her fur coat plan that she goes on some kind of meth freak-out, chasing the van in which the dogs are hidden.

The driver of the van is nearly run of the road, plunging off the snowy bank into what in real life might well kill him, and what does he do? Mutters "Crazy woman driver!"

Unfortunate moral: Women are crazy when it comes to clothing. Also, they can't drive.

What would have made it better: When Horace and Jasper arrive to commit their B&E, Nanny pulls a revolver out of her garter, shoots them both, and then calmly calls 911 instead of hysterically running through the streets sobbing "Police! Police!"

#4. Snow White's Evil Stepmother, the Queen, from Snow White
Release: 1937

How she destroys the self-esteem of little girls everywhere: Okay, so this female villain is not exactly ugly, but seriously, if she's the fairest of them all, there's a big shortage of women 'round those parts. Or maybe the mirror is just into crazy-looking eyebrows. Who knows? But while Cruella up there was just into murdering puppies in the name of vanity, the Queen is taking it to a whole new level. Little girls everywhere, take note: if you are not the prettiest one in your class, the easiest solution is to kill everyone prettier than you. Other solutions include reordering your priorities, but that takes time and self-respect and does not result in marriage to a prince who looks like Ken.

Of course, we know that what the Queen is doing here is wrong. But why? Is it because it's not worth killing someone just to be at the top of the looks pyramid? Or because killing beautiful people is wrong? (Disney certainly doesn't seem to have qualms with killing ugly women.)

Snow White, luckily, survives thanks to her womanly instinct to clean whatever dirty house she happens upon, and the fact that she can cook (this is why the dwarfs allow her to stick around). And thanks to some necessary intervention from a prince. Apparently, in order to get married in fairytale land, princes need to find and save a woman in some sort of stepmother-induced distress, preferably one involving unconsciousness mistaken for death.

Unfortunate moral: Cooking, cleaning, being pretty, and singing well: everything a girl will ever need or the fairest woman is synonymous with the best.

What would have made it better: Snow White intentionally disfigures herself to avert the Queen's wrath, and ends up marrying a prince anyway. Everyone finds out what a huge bitch the Queen is, and stops going to her parties, leaving her alive and alone to talk to the mirror, reflecting on how screwed up she is.

#3. Duchess from The Aristocats
Released: 1970

How she destroys the self-esteem of little girls everywhere: Disney, was there some sort of law or marketing research or something that mandated pretty females in unfortunate situations getting rescued by males? Duchess is an aristoc(r)at living in Paris in 1910, and she and her three kittens (father unknown) belong to a wealthy retired opera singer who, apparently, has "crazy cat lady" written all over her, as she decides to leave her vast fortune to her cats. Understandably irritated but not-to-bright butler Edgar decides to get rid of the cats so that he might inherit the fortune himself. His incredibly complex plan involves simply dumping them somewhere in the countryside, where there does not even appear to be anything that might fight or prey upon the cats, yet Duchess is at a complete loss as to what to do until a guy-cat with an impossibly long name shows up to help her out.

"Excuse me, sir, do you suppose you could help me out? I am too pretty to be outdoors."

Props, however, to her daughter Marie, for telling her brothers that "Ladies do not start fights, but they can finish them." Her children (specifically the boys) are the only ones who seem to have any interest in doing normal cat stuff or acquiring real-world skills, while Duchess is more concerned with looking and acting like old money.

Unfortunate moral: If you are in a compromising or dangerous situation, you cannot hope to get out of it yourself. The best thing to do is to flirt with the nearest man, who will take care of everything for you.

What would have made it better: Duchess tells the strange alley cat to stay the fuck away from her children, and keeps herself and her kittens alive by learning to hunt and forage, like cats are supposed to.

#2. Bo Peep from Toy Story
Released: 1995

How she destroyed the self-esteem of little girls everywhere: Okay, we get it; Andy is a boy and he has boy toys. But seriously? Not even a G. I. Jane? Not even a female Lego-person or a purple Hotwheels car? Not even some cheap-ass McDonald's toy? All we get here is Bo Peep, who, as far as the plot is concerned, amounts to little more than Woody's hoe. She's there to suggestively imply that she might "get someone else to watch the sheep tonight", but doesn't really participate in any of the action.

"This plot is no place for a woman!"

Clearly the script was written by men. Although we guessed that around the same time we found out that the main characters were named "Buzz" and "Woody". Sure, Toy Story 2 redeems itself with the addition of female characters Jesse and Mrs. Potato Head. Mrs. Potato Head who, by simple virtue of her name, is automatically married to Mr. Potato Head.

"I have a meaningful existence putting eyeballs in my husband's plastic butt."

Although I guess if you want to talk about two people who were made for each other . . .

Unfortunate moral: Your sole reason for existing is to please men.

What would have made it better: If Andy had gotten a G. I. Jane for his birthday. And then G. I. Jane had stolen Bo Peep away from Woody.

#1. Ariel from The Little Mermaid
Release: 1989

How she destroyed the self-esteem of little girls everywhere: Ariel falls madly in love with a man she's never talked to, and sells her soul to the devil and abandons her friends, family, and everything she's ever known on the off chance that he might fall in love with her in return. A role model for my future daughter? I'll say!

Okay, well, let's say that in her ruthless looting of sunken ships, she finds some sort of art depicting human sex. And even though all the mermen in this movie look like the homoerotic dreams of every Greek artist of the classical era, mer-sex sucks, and Ariel wants a vagina to go with her legs. She's still in love with Prince Eric, a guy she knows only by sight, which has to be the most conditional form of love ever.

"Oh, Eric, I'll love you 'til the day you're ugly!"

Ariel decides to go visit the sea witch in order to procure legs through unholy means. Ursula, said sea which, is apparently the only humanoid creature under the sea who is fat and not Caucasian. This is in no way related to her having pets instead of a boyfriend, I'm sure. Ursula has Ariel trade her most valuable asset, her beautiful singing voice (once again, necessary to be a half-decent pretty princess), feeling pretty sure that she can get Eric to kiss her within 72 hours. Since this is a Disney movie, she can at least be sure that he isn't gay.

At the end of the movie, things work out for Ariel and Eric, who are in Disney-love and haven't known each other long enough to know about each other's irritating habits, so Ariel gets what she wants: she abandons her friends, family, and home, all for some dude. It's not even like she can go home if he turns out to be abusive. At least not until SCUBA is invented.

At the very least, we'll give her props for actually taking her fate into her own hands and doing something to achieve her goals, even if they are terrible ones.

Unfortunate moral: Your man is more important than your friends and family.

What would have made it better: Ariel finds out that Eric is actually a stuck-up jerk before he kisses her; she goes back into the ocean and becomes a sea-witch herself, except that she doesn't require people to give her their most valuable assets in exchange for help.

Honourable Mentions go to Cinderella, Tinkerbell, Wendy, and all those girls from the beginning of the article who misrepresent vaginas everywhere.

Budget Time

2009-01-27T18:17:00.000-05:00

It's really too bad that the budget, unlike the Throne Speech, is no good to drink to. Because after hearing about the latest budget, some of us might want a stiff one. In case you haven't heard, here are the highlights:

$85B deficit over five years
$20B personal tax cuts and $2B business tax cuts over six years
$12B for infrastructure, including $1B for "green" infrastructure and $1B for clean energy
Extended EI
$8.3B for skills and training
$2.7B loans to the auto industry

At first glance, it doesn't look so bad, if not surprisingly un-conservative. Jim Flaherty, luckily, was ready to ease the minds of those who might be confused.
JOURNALIST: It doesn't look like a very conservative budget, does it?
JIM FLAHERTY: Heh heh ... well ... you know ...
I'm not sure if that sounds like incompetence, or if that's really all there is to say at this point.

So what can we really expect from this budget? Well, it's a recession budget, that's inevitable, what with us all shitting our pants like it's 1929. The Minister of Finance was clearly keeping this in mind, as you can see that the first point is the -- wait, I'm going to put in the zeroes this time, just so you can see how many there are -- $85 000 000 000 deficit, because if there is one thing that this recession has taught us, it's that you can't go wrong spending money that you do not have.

Okay, okay, let's give the Tories the benefit of the doubt. You've got to spend money to create money, right? The $20B in personal tax cuts are targeted at the lower tax brackets, which is good, because it means that those of us who exist on a grand total of $10,000 per year (plus tuition fees) will still be able to afford no-name peanut butter for our sandwiches, despite possible economic hardships.
(Okay, I'm exaggerating. Kind of.)

$12B for infrastructure sounds pretty good too. Since basically the agricultural revolution, good infrastructure has been loosely connected to a good economy. You create jobs for people to design, build, run, and maintain said infrastructure itself, and the people who make stuff can take it to places where other people are waiting to buy it. In a more modern sense, you can take yourself from wherever you live to wherever you are employed on a daily basis. Sounds simple enough. Money for infrastructure = good! Oh, but federal funds are rarely anything resembling simple. Toronto mayor David Miller may be biased, sure, but he may also be kind of an expert on the subject. And his most recent press conference suggests that he is concerned that cities will have to jump through hoops of red tape in order to see any of that $12B -- if they do.

Extended EI and skills and training also sound good for a recession. After all, when the auto plant tells you not to bother coming in on Monday, you're going to need to learn to do something slightly more recession-proof, and you're still going to need to feed your self/family in the meantime. If you really want to, you could even go back and be a student, which is to some extent recession-proof. Remember, if you default on your student loan, the bank can't foreclose on your brain.

And medicine is a recession-proof field!

Finally, the auto industry money. At first, I was in favour of the whole auto bailout thing. My shameful secret is that my family is from the Niagara region, where the auto industry is kind of a big deal. The shame I feel at being so connected to St. Catharines is an indirect result of the GM plant there laying off basically everyone, thereby killing the economy, and everything good and beautiful in the city, and if there is one thing that terrifies me, it is the idea of living in a city like St. Catharines. So do I want auto plants across Canada to shut their doors, putting countless cities at risk of turning into St. Catharines?
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
We've got to fight economic collapse at every turn! Economic prosperity or death, my friends!

Then, I saw this photograph.

What are all those tiny white dots on that massive asphalt strip? Those, my friends, are unsold cars being stored until such time as the dealer requests them. This is not standard procedure. The auto companies have simply manufactured far more cars than they can sell. And the best part is, they are still making more. Therefore, I would like to propose that, in line with the principles of common sense, we stop making shit that no one can buy. Let's turn the auto assembly plants into auto disassembly plants, and salvage what we can from these beasts to make something useful. Now there's a long-term economic strategy.

To wrap up this budget-related rant, so what if it isn't a very conservative budget. It's not perfect, but it's the first indication we've had that the Tories might be willing to stop being jerks and play nice in the House. Layton may be shouting "Shame!" but that's just what he does. For heaven's sake, a 143-seat minority who is willing to co-operate is far, far preferable to an expensive and unwanted snap election, or even an unsteady, divisive coalition (although admittedly less thrilling). Would I personally prefer a conservative government? No. Do I think that it's the best thing for Canada right now? Heh heh ... well ... you know.

Nationalism: Another provocative blog brought to you by Bitey the Wonderfrog

2009-01-20T13:15:00.000-05:00

"Anglophones who insist on speaking English in Québec willingly refuse to integrate themselves. They don't have a place in Québec. They're taking advantage of the benefits of living in Québec while still insisting to bring their English Canada with them."

Remember the francophone from the Two Solitudes post? The one who thinks that anglophones are too dumb to learn French (and apparently has never heard of Pauline Marois)? When he talks to me, I am never sure whether to laugh or cry.

Recently, I joined the Facebook group Une province bilingue l’ONTARIO a bilingual province. I'm not usually mad about Facebook groups, but this is an important topic selon moi, as you might know from my ambiguous feelings about the way that the B&B Commission's recommendations were implemented. Ontario made some token gestures, but ultimately left its francophones hanging. Way to be a dick, Ontario. What, are the francophones outside of Québec not important?

(If you listen very closely, you can hear the small voice of bilingual New Brunswick saying, "Hey! Guys! Over here! We've got Acadians!" Poor New Brunswick.)

Bitey the Wonderfrog, in true internet-dick style, joined the group as well for the sole purpose of flaming it.

J------- N------, October 1:
I am not a Franco-Ontarian myself, but given the number of francophones in Ontario and their historical importance to this province, I fully support this proposal. I don't think that the economic argument holds much water because so many services are provided in French anyway. I also think that this will help national unity by cutting at Quebec's claim to be the sole voice of French-Canadians.

Bitey the Wonderfrog, January 20:
"I also think that this will help national unity by cutting at Quebec's claim to be the sole voice of French-Canadians."
I'm a franco-ontarian, but honestly... fuck off. Quebec sovereignty is more than about language, and Quebecers don't seek to harm other Canadians, while your goal is clearly just to fuck with Quebecers.

To clarify, he decided to send me a private message entitled "That's my beef with anglo-ontarians".
It's that kind of paternalistic conservative punishment bullshit with no regards for advancement that makes me really dislike "you people". (and take this quoted expression as an insult if you wish)

For once, I'm confused. Usually Bitey's ideas are pretty simple, but I'm not quite following him on this one. Why does he think that making Ontario officially bilingual would hurt the separatist/sovereigntist movement in Québec? Does he think that if people find out that francophones exist in other provinces, they won't want to separate anymore? Does he think that Ontario would recognize its francophone population solely as a cruel joke intended to mock Québec? (I honestly don't see how that would work as even the most obscure, colourless joke.) Does he think that Ontario would do it just to weaken Québec's imaginary monopoly on francophone culture?

The problem with this imaginary monopoly is that a lot of people imagine it, and quite vividly. If Canadians like the "Canada is not a bilingual country!" guy from the CBC B&B Commission footage decide to ignore that irritating thing called "reality", they'll continue to otherize one another and imagine that "French Canada" is a geographic place with clearly defined boarders, and not an idea that stretches from Whistler to L'anse aux Meadows. Of course the Québec sovereignty movement is about more than language. That would be like Toronto demanding special status because it contains immigrants.

Ideology aside. While I may ardently be what in Québec they call a federalist, I respect the sovereigntist movement. Many of points and concerns raised by sovereignty are valid, even if I am fiercely proud of living in a bilingual & bicultural Canada, warts and all. My concern is this: is Bitey the Wonderfrog expressing widely-held sentiments?

Ideological arguments are inevitable, and it's kind of okay, or at least understandable, to think someone is a complete douchebag for having one or another, because ideologies are something you pick and choose. (If someone has been indoctrinated with an ideology from a young age, please be nice and reserve the douchebag judgment until they've learned about the alternatives.) Some things you can't pick and choose, like where you were born and raised and what your first language is. And those are the things Bitey likes to attack. He doesn't insult people on the basis of their ideas, he insults them because they happen to be anglophones. And while it's easy to laugh him off, it raises the question of whether he was telling the truth when he said that a lot of francophones think this way. I personally have never noticed any anti-francophone sentiments among my peers, but just because I am unaware of them doesn't mean that they don't exist.

Are we a nation based on latent linguistic racism? I'm genuinely curious. Tell me your thoughts. Do you and/or your peers/friends/family discriminate based on where someone was born or which language(s) they spoke growing up? What about stereotypes? Are they positive ("I'm going to Alberta this summer to score some of that hot prairie tail"; "Of course he's smart, he's bilingual!") or negative ("Well of course you'd get angry about that, you're a francophone!"; "Doesn't everyone go to bed at 8:30 in Ontario?")? Do you think they are harmful or playful?

January Reading

2009-01-06T13:21:00.000-05:00

We had a little reading hiatus in December (most of us were probably too busy watching The Muppets' Christmas Carol and How The Grinch Stole Christmas to get any serious reading done, anyway -- maybe Christmas reading should have been The Polar Express!) but now that it's January and we're back in action, we need to get back to reading. January is kind of a depressing month, what with Christmas being over and us having to shovel and/or wade through snow that holds promise of slush and dirt rather than a white Christmas, so I figured that instead of a book that exposes humanity's horrific shortcomings or how enamoured we are with fart jokes, I'd pick something light and funny with a can-do attitude and a happy ending. Therefore, January's book is:
The Widows by Suzette Mayr.

I first encountered this gem in my second-year survey of Canadian literature course, and though it's not exactly a Canadian classic (too new, perhaps?), it certainly provided interesting fodder for class discussions. The plot centers around Hannelore, a German woman who lost her husband to the second world war and her son to an "ethnicky" new wife -- an artist who is into bare feet and healthy eating. Hannelore hauls herself and her older sister Clothilde from Germany to Edmonton to be close to her son and his family, but her rigid, traditional German style is at odds with her daughter-in-law's multicultural free-spiritedness. Thus, she spends her time trying to find a place where a 70-something widow fits in, along with her 80-something spinster sister and her sister's equally elderly divorcée "friend", Frau Schnadelhuber.

The trio find and lose jobs and lovers, things that do not commonly happen to women over 45 in the mainstream narrative. Throughout the novel, the plot trajectory of Hannelore loosely follows that of the life of Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive a tumble over Niagara Falls in a barrel. One look at the cover of the book, and you can see where this is going.

Hint: the climax occurs somewhere in Southern Ontario.

A personal favourite part occurs somewhere near the beginning of the book, but towards the end of the fragmented narrative: Hannelore realizes that her 80-something-year-old spinster sister might not be going through a phase -- she probably actually prefers women. Hey, phases can last upwards of sixty years, right?

If you've ever wondered what two old ladies fucking is like, this is the book for you. If you could live a happy and productive life without ever knowing what two old ladies fucking is like, thankyouverymuch, I promise it isn't that bad. Mayr, without glamourizing anyone or anything (she certainly doesn't shy away from describing old women in highly realistic terms), somehow manages to sublimate what would otherwise be graphic into hilarious, using pervasive and gentle satire to tackle touchy topics (for example, Hannelore's accidental pejorative terming of her daughter-in-law's naked paintings as "Jew art", or her in-denial defense when her granddaughter accuses her of having been part of the Hitlerjügen).

Should you read this book? Well, if you like third-wave feminism, books set in Canada, books about old ladies, ironic, slightly absurd situational humour, or if you think that Slaughterhouse-Five would be awesome if it made a little more sense and wasn't such a huge downer, then The Widows is for you.

Language Wars

2009-01-05T01:48:00.001-05:00

Dating someone who is smarter than you are can be an emotionally exhausting kind of experience, especially if you consider yourself to be pretty smart. Feeling good about your moderately high IQ and your typicaly good intellectual performance, especially when compared with your social peers, is deadly if you happen to start dating someone with an IQ higher than your monthly grocery budget. Of course, you can always try to console yourself with the fact that your apartment is way sweeter than his, but eventually you realize that he's way too smart to even care that his apartment is shitty, and that the best route to take is to graciously accept defeat and simply brag about him to your friends.

Of course, you still try to console yourself. There has to be something that you do better than him. No one is perfect, right? He certainly doesn't have a sweet rack like yours. But, like the apartment, his lack of nice tits does not seem to bother him. "Okay," you say to yourself. "Sure he is only twenty-four and already he speaks three languages, dances, cooks, is doing a PhD in applied physics, and sorts his recycling properly, but how is his grasp on the intracacies of English grammer? Ha! English is not even his first language. Surely I must have the market cornered on English grammer in this relationship."

Then, the bitch goes and says something about a verb tense you weren't even sure really existed, or differentiated itself from other verb tenses, in English.

Quick! What verb tense is this?

The problem, we agreed after some debate, was that hard-and-fast rules for the English language don't exist. Well, they do, but no one pays attention to them. French has the Academie Française, which currently protects the purity of the French language by freaking out over texting shorthand. What does English have? Oxford? Do you actually listen to Oxford? Does Oxford even bother?

Unfortunately, the English, the "inventors" of the English language, sprinkled a whole bunch of bastard colonies all over the world, one of which got uppity and usurped them as top dog, especially in cultural terms. Very few people want to sound like an English professor these days. They want to say "errrbody", "shotty", "oh noes!" and "lawl". My own sister speaks in acronyms ("No BD!"). I confess that I myself have said "Imma luuuvs you," more than once (but I did it ironically, which makes it okay). Can you imagine if Quebec suddenly became cooler than France, and everyone wanted to speak joual and say "Enteka, m'a aller faire un tit tour du béckosse"? The entire Academie Française would choke on their triple-crème brie.

Another problem with English might be that it wasn't so much invented as it was collected. As James Nicoll once observed, "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." Modern English almost isn't even a language, when you think about it. It's just its own little patois of conglomerated borrowed words that developed its own grammatical structure (and then colonized the fuck out of every country that wasn't populated by white people).

Usually, when someone says "I be", I assume that they are hilariously cultural-appropriating ebonics.

In a language where a made-up word distinguishing between something real and something imaginary goes in the dictionary and people actually argue in favour of their right to correctly use the non-word "irregardless", have we just given up completely and decided to go with the flow? Furthermore, is this a bad thing?

As for dating people far smarter than anyone else you know will ever be, I am still kind of ambiguous on whether or not I recommend it. All I can say is that a manageable IQ allows me to enjoy certain simple pleasures more than he does. Like being able to drunk-text someone and not run through every possibility re: what they'll say in the morning.

Parliament is in an Election Way

2008-12-28T02:19:00.000-05:00

Oh no, Parliament!

With Globe & Mail strategist Scott Reid predicting a possible election in as few as nine months, we honestly can't say that we didn't kind of see this coming. An election is always joyful news when Parliament has decided it is ready to have one, but unplanned elections -- eesh. This all could have been prevented with some minority government control. Shame on you, Stephen Harper. Everyone knows that pulling out doesn't work!

Of course, one strategist prediction does not an election make. Maybe the house should consider pissing on a few other strategists and see what they say. But let's assume the worst. Canada's been having elections left, right, and centre (mostly right) lately; we are poised to burst out into a chorus of Every Confidence Vote Is Sacred. But if we were responsible, we would at least use the rhythm method or something to keep these elections at bay until we could afford them. Elections are expensive, and what with the economic downturn at all, now is really not an optimal time. A federal election held right now would be an unhappy one, poorly neglected, and so ugly that even the social workers wouldn't take it away from us. We're all too busy cooing over our neighbour's beautiful recent election. (Really, isn't that Obama just the cutest thing?)

It's really too bad that we can't enjoy this election and celebrate the miracle of democracy. Ours is a particularly sweet brand (usually). Isn't it great that we can just dissolve the government whenever we -- well, okay, our MP(P)s -- want and elect a new one? Isn't it great that we don't have to sit around grumbling for four-plus years when our elected leader is being a huge douchebag? Maybe the current situation isn't the best example, but pretend it was a year or two ago and think about what your answer would have been. Jon Stewart certainly was impressed by it.

Now is the shitty-depressing-time-immediately-after- Christmas of our discontent, yes. But not all is lost. It is not too late to have a coalition government and terminate this election, if only we can get past the (apparent) moral issues. This could all be just a bad memory of a dumb mistake, and hopefully a lesson learned about making sure we practice safe minority governments. Canada, keep in mind that this is merely a rough patch. If we hold tight for a bit, we too may produce a shining beacon of a leader around whom we can all rally, an Obama to end our Bush administration. A knight in shining armour who won't get our country in trouble and then try to kick us down the stairs when they find out.

I'm just sayin' ... if I were a bettin' woman ...

Yet More Coalition Banter

2008-12-15T01:06:00.000-05:00

A handful of things have been preventing me from blogging lately, namely school work and personal frustration. But I have definitely been feeling guilty about it, and I seem to be arguing politics fairly regularly through Facebook and e-mail anyway, so I suppose I may as well do it on my blog (isn't loudly trumpeting one's views and the exclusive validity thereof the reason anyone even gets a blog, anyway?)

I doubt I have anything very original to say re: the coalition, given the plethora of discourse that already exists on the topic, but I feel compelled nonetheless. Canadians discuss politics when they aren't exciting, so this shouldn't be at all surprising. So. The Coalition. A coup d'état spearheaded by the scattered and discordant left plus the evil separatists, that is bent on deposing the democratically-elected right and sending Canada straight to hell, of course. It couldn't be simpler*!

*Valid only for right-wing media.

Where to even begin? A coup d'état is a sudden and decisive action in politics, esp. one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force¹, or at least the "illegally or by force" is what is usually implied when the term is used. A coalition, on the other hand, is a group of usually two to six male lions that drive off and replace the male lions in a pride in order to mate with the females and protect the resulting offspring. Ooops, wrong definition. I meant to say, a coalition is completely legal, and they happen in Europe all the time. As I'm sure anyone who has heard the phrase "62% Majority" (i.e. Canadians who read or watch the news, or exit their houses from time to time) is aware, the general argument contre the "coup" and "democratically elected" defense is that 62% of Canadians who voted said "I'd prefer someone other than the Tories to be in power." Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that 62% of Canadians support a coalition government, but, well, there are certain implications . . .

So, let's say that the left gets its shit together and does this thing. There is still the issue of the evil, soul-sucking Bloc whose main goal is to fuck up Canada as much as possible. I hear they eat kittens, too.

Bloc MPs, as depicted by the English media. Lucky for Harper that his patronus was a prorogue!

Wait, NEWSFLASH! It turns out that the Bloc is not made of evil and darkness, nor are they actually this poorly Photoshopped in real life. They are just regular MPs, elected by (whether anyone likes it or not) regular Canadians, and are a regular part of the House. The only difference is that they are epically disinterested in anything outside of their own province. In fact, the Bloc hasn't been running on a platform of separation for a while now. See for yourself.

Contrary to what the ROC seems to fear, a coalition with support from the Bloc does not mean that Quebec will be setting up boarders and issuing passports tomorrow, nor will they be holding a referendum, nor will the rest of Canada be forced to speak French, join unions, and close stores at 5 PM on weekdays. What those who rant and rave about the Bloc wanting to "hurt" Canada don't realize is that the Bloc simply doesn't care enough about the rest of Canada to "hurt" it. All they care about is Quebec getting a sweeter deal.

Interestingly enough, I take Bloc-related complaints from the Québécois more seriously than those coming from the ROC. One of my friends (interestingly enough, a federalist) is baffled that the Bloc, who of course did start out on the whole idea that Quebec should be independent, should be taking the side of the guy responsible for the Clarity Act. (This conversation took place before the Iggy Takeover.) "They are either dumb, or hypocrites," he said. He was no more supportive of Dion teaming up with his "mortal enemies" (and this is where the credibility stops for me).
"So basically you are against them putting aside their differences for the good of parliament?"
"Yes."
Welp, there you have it. Partisanship is the biggest barrier to national functioning.

Speaking of partisanship. I would have no problem with the Tories governing for a while -- I mean, they are the party that the fewest Canadian voters hate, fair and square -- if Harper was willing to play nice and share. The Conservatives got 38% of the vote, you can't argue with the facts. But that means that they did not get 62% of the vote, and the fact of a minority government is that you actually cannot just flip the bird at those who did not vote for you (or else you risk losing the confidence of the House, surprisingly enough). Harper, your buddy Charest just won a majority in Quebec and he's willing to play nice with Pauline Marois, or at least he says he is. Did you not think, "Hey, maybe stacking the senate with conservatives might piss off liberal and even centrist Canadians"? Or "Re-opening the gay marriage debate would be really cool, except that the vast majority of Canadians don't really seem at all interested in that"? If you're going to pretend that an election is winner-take-all, well, don't be surprised if the kids in second and third place decide to beat your ass.

Coalition Rally on Parliament Hill - Video

2008-12-04T18:17:00.000-05:00

As rallies go, this one had all the makings of a good one: clever signs, lousy weather, counter-protesters, and upbeat fiddle music.

This was slapped together a bit rapidly, but is still decent. Unfortunately, I arrived a bit late and didn't get any decent footage of anyone saying anything good. But there is plenty of clever sign footage!

(I apologize for the quality. I am still getting used to iMovie. I'll post something of higher quality within the next 24 hours.)

Sexy Candidate Reprise: David Grégoire

2008-11-28T01:00:00.002-05:00

David Grégoire, of Sexy Candidate 2008 fame, is taking another stab at his home riding -- this time in the upcoming provincial election.

After suffering a thrashing at the hands of Bloc-er Roger Gaudet in the federal election, David is presenting himself again in the same place (called Masson instead of Montcalm for provincial purposes). With an even sexier photo and hopefully more money to run his campaign so that he won't have to rely on scooting around town with campaign signs strapped to his back (although that WAS pretty cool), he's running in a riding which has not traditionally been keen to elect Liberals, or really anyone other than the PQ until last March. But maybe with Charest's focus on "L'économie d'abord", more Québécois will be scared into voting for a party who can protect their financial interests . . . the ones who can be bothered to vote, anyway. Basically, the Liberals are hoping for a re-do of the federal election -- I mean with the governing party maintaining the status quo, not the Liberals getting trounced!

Let's review David's "sexy" credentials:

Diverse skill set -- works as mathematician, plays the piano
Intelligent -- is member of Mensa Québec
Contributes to the economy and tourism industry -- owns a B&B
His accent is as sexy as he is innovative -- as evidenced by this Infoman clip

If you need any further references, look no further than Radio-Canada. In an attempt to cash in on the obvious success of the Sexy Candidates 2008 list, Infoman named David Grégoire Miss Candidat Fédérale 2008. Of course, that was October 16. Remember, folks, you heard about David Grégoire being sexy from me first.

Here's to wishing David Grégoire the best of luck on December 8, and of course, promising him a spot on the Sexy Politicians Hotlist if he pulls out a victory.

Trudeau, the B&B Comission, the failure of second-language education, and why this is important

2008-11-22T17:54:00.000-05:00

Normally, I am a pretty big Pierre Trudeau cheerleader. Had I been born around the same time as my mother, I'd be one of the many screaming star-struck girls cheering like he was the Beatles. Had P.E.T. been doing his thing in the last federal election, I'd be wrapping myself in nothing but a Canadian flag and posting "I've got a Crush on Trudeau" videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, there was one point on which Trudeay really screwed things up -- and it's an issue rather close to my heart.

In the early sixties, The Man in Ottawa had noticed young Québécois getting all uppity. They figured that they had better do something if they hoped to put a stop to all this talk of secession, so the Pearson government created the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, or the B&B Commission. They spent six years cruising around Canada, collecting data and asking for the opinions of the public.

Great CBC Archives footage here -- source here.

Finally, André Laurendeau and David Dunton came out with some recommendations, including the creation of the Official Languages Act, the creation of bilingual districts "where numbers warrant", the going-bilingual of Ontario and New Brunswick (to join Quebec, which was at that time officially bilingual), and giving parents the choice to send their kids to school in a minority language, again "where numbers warrant".

The Trudeau government, which had showed up in the House the year before, looked at the B&B Commission's recommendations and thought to itself, "Awesome. We are all over this. This is going to be the thing that re-asserts our centralized power, not to mention ~~shuts up those whiny Québécois nationalists~~, uh, builds national unity." The Official Languages Act was adopted that year, making Canada officially bilingual -- because apparently up until then, Canada had been blissfully ignoring reality. Hooray, Trudeau government! Twelve gold stars.

Unfortunately, the rest of the B&B Commission's recommendations didn't get quite the same treatment.

New Brunswick said "Good stuff," and made itself as officially bilingual as Canada, but Ontario went "Hmm, that looks expensive," and stopped returning Canada's phone calls. They did, however, plunk out a few French schools to keep people happy, as did many other provinces. This protected francophone populations outside of Quebec from assimilation, and everyone lived happily ever after. Oh, wait, no, that's not what happened at all!

Trudeau, with the best of intentions, decided that everyone should learn the "other" language (be it English or French) in school. Everyone in Canada became bilingual and could now make friends with each other. The hate stopped, and everyone sat in big circles with guitars singing bilingual songs of peace. Then Trudeau woke up, ate some breakfast, and turned on CBC. Obviously he didn't watch this clip, but it would have been really appropriate if he had. He would have noticed that second-language education in the primary grades may not have been working so well.

I expect that my experiences of second-language education is fairly typical for those who grew up in areas without official-language minority populations. In this case, it meant being taught French by anglophones who had once spent one to three years in France, or less often Quebec, when they were in their early twenties. After that, they spent the next twenty years speaking to twelve-year-old anglophones and occasionally watching French films, which has led to an entirely understandable breakdown in their proficiency, notably their accents. Their teaching materials are limited and often the cost of these materials is not completely covered by the school, leading to kids like me coming home asking for a cheque for fifteen dollars to pay for my French book while my mother grumbles and wonders where her tax money is going. French is rarely actually spoken in the classroom before grade 10, at least by anyone other than the teacher. Unsurprisingly, even the most studious French student is frequently confused and understands very little actual French. She can say "Je m'appelle Suzy. Comment t'appelles-tu?" off by heart, although she does not know what the words appeler or comment mean, and if someone asks, "C'est quoi, ton nom?" she will not have any idea what they are asking.

The fact that second-language education is made of fail is not the fault of the government, or the school board, or the teacher, or the student. The fact is simply that the conversations drilled into student's heads rarely occur as rehearsed in real life. Anglophones who once spent a few years in France are in short supply as it is, never mind people who are actually intimately familiar with French. And learning a second language is difficult.

Trudeau's dream was that every Canadian from coast to coast would be bilingual. This is like trying to make every Canadian a physicist. It's hopelessly unrealistic. A letter-carrier in Newfoundland, a farmer in B.C., or a chef in the Yukon simply doesn't need to speak French, will likely not have any opportunity to practice it on a daily basis, and, assuming he or she isn't a "languages person" will find it prohibitively difficult to learn. Now, if you live in, say, Montreal, learning a second language is pretty gosh darned easy! If you are a minority language group, it is even gosh darned easier!

"Where numbers warrant" is one of the key phrases when it comes to the B&B Commission, and it also represents a sad paradox. The only way to get people to be bilingual is to give them a chance at immersion. But realistically, this means minority language groups, and minority language groups are really good at getting assimilated, especially if they are francophone (thanks in large part to the nauseating overproduction of anglophone culture south of the boarder). So they only way to realistically make people bilingual is to put them in daily contact with the other language group, and the only way to do that is for the other language group (or the first one) to exist in such a position as they are likely to disappear within a few generations. Awesome.

This is not to say we should abolish compulsory second-language education in public schools, in the same way that we should not abolish math. We just need to reform our expectations, and by extension, our methods.

Trudeau's mistake was thinking that language barriers were the biggest obstacle to national unity. This isn't the case. For one thing, having every person in a country being perfectly bilingual renders one language superfluous. For every bilingual person, that's one or more people who don't need to be bilingual. But language barriers are not barriers to goodwill. The biggest problem with national unity is Otherness. Since the Plains of Abraham, this problem of subjectivity and objectivity has existed between English- and French-speaking populations in Canada. Today, it is becoming more of a problem that affects regions in Canada (i.e. the West, Central Canada, and the Maritimes), and sometimes allophone immigrant populations versus anglophone or francophone Canadians (Bouchard-Taylor Commission, anyone?).

The problem of the Other exists primarily when there is little familiarity of what is being "otherized". Hence, Canadians talk about the "pea soup-eaters" or the "maudits anglais". The Official Languages Act was moving in the right direction; seeing French on your ketchup or breakfast cereal says "Like it or not, the pea-soup eaters are your fellow Canadians," and also "Regardez, les maudits anglais ne fourrent toujours le chien." But it's a big step from reading the cereal box in the morning because your neighbour stole your newspaper again and not talking about how ignorant and selfish the damned (anglos/Quebeckers) are. If you hated second-language education in school, this probably did not help things.

Instead of focusing on producing language proficiency in schools, we need to focus on producing cultural proficiency. Being able to swear in another language is not good enough. Exposure to the other language's literature (probably translated), music, cinema (subtitles!), food, and geography would not only make second-language education a lot more fun, but it would do what mere dialogue memorization could not hope to: it would instill a sense of familiarity, hopefully weakening the traditional "us versus them" sentiments that have too often characterized the "two solitudes" and put everyone more in the "us" category. Of course, "Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought," says Simone de Beauvoir, quite truthfully. But we must be careful who we make the Other. It is interesting that from a "Canadian" perspective, this distinction does not exist. Unilingual Canadians can have a bilingual identity -- just ask Joe Canadian (ten bucks says his French is terrible).

Why is this important? Because Canadian unity is important. It is important to our identity, and it is important to our ability to function. It is as important today as it was at Confederation. Canada, for all the federalism we practice, cannot ultimately be governed by a decentralized government. We share the same values, and we need one another for social, cultural, and economic reasons. I actually have to go write an essay about that right now, so I'm going to let Stéphane Dion finish explaining for me:
If we have achieved all this -- and many other things as well -- it is quite simply because we are together. It would not be possible for ten inward-looking republics north of the United States to offer their citizens the same quality of life and the same future as the great, generous federation that brings us together. Canada is a success because we have worked to draw the best from each culture, each population, each of our provinces and territories. Because we have learned, perhaps better than any other people, that equality and unity are not synonymous with uniformity. Because we know that respect for diversity is what enables human beings to join forces to achieve what is the most true and the most universal.
- Recognizing Quebec: An Expression of Canadian Values, September 10 1997.

Two years after the latest referendum on Quebec's secession. Are there still two solitudes? It depends on who you ask.

Update on Sexy Politicians

2008-11-18T19:13:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note that the Sexy Politicians Hotlist has been updated, not only to reflect job changes but with added Sexy Politicians Yulia Tymoshenko, Nicolas Dufour, and Josée Beaudin. Unfortunately, it is really hard to find anything interesting to say about someone who has only just been elected (not to mention their birthday and romantic status). There is a decent amount of buzz around Baby of the House Nicolas Dufour, what with him barely being old enough to have his first baccalaureate and all, but if anyone knows anything about Josée Beaudin other than the pitiful point-form notes on her Bloc profile, please let me know!

Translation of the Sexy Politicians list to come in the near (entirely undefined) future.

I apologize for the lull in blogging lately. National Novel Writing Month and term paper season are to blame, so you can expect full blogging once more in December. In the meantime, if anyone would like to help me research hermeneutics, 18th-century stairists, or socioeconomic forces influencing the interfaces between French and English Canada, consider this an open invitation.

Drop fees, raise standards

2008-11-06T15:04:00.000-05:00

If you've been on a college campus recently, you will surely notice the plentiful Drop Fees campaign material. The CSF's relentless campaign to get tuition fees in Ontario lowered has come back reliably every year, inspiring some students to activism, and irking others (the general argument being that lower tuition fees mean a devalued degree).

Myself, I have felt somewhat ambiguous about this. It's true that tuition fees in Ontario, when compared with the rest of Canada, are pretty high (although still next to nothing when compared to, say, the US). Right now, I am paying just under $5 000 per year in tuition fees for my BA; if I was a resident of Quebec and studying at U Montreal or U Laval, I'd be paying just under $2 000 for the same thing. Yes, this means higher taxes for the citizens of Quebec, but if I was a baby boomer, one who anticipated retiring in the next decade or so and expecting to need doctors, nurses, pharmacists, accountants, law enforcement professionals, and above all, CPP contributors, well, I would understand the need to fork over part of my paycheque for education.

Yesterday, November 5, my school like many others joined in the rallies, marching from the atrium of the university centre to downtown Ottawa. Some students came up with an innovative way of advertising the march: sidewalk chalk. Chalked messages covered a number of surfaces around campus, like the one I saw in the quad this morning:
DROP FEES
NOV 5
MEET IN ARTIUM

If you're worried about lower tuition fees devaluing your degree, I propose a solution. Let's campaign for lower tuition fees in Ontario -- and higher admissions averages.

(Either that, or better education in our high schools. After the "literacy test", the obsession with the five-paragraph essay, and teachers who act more like baby sitters than instructors, it is a wonder than anyone graduates with any academic literacy at all.)

American Election results

2008-11-06T01:15:00.001-05:00

Dear Americans,

Thank you for not fucking up this election, and electing another Republican. We have yet to see if Obama can make up for Bush as far as we are concerned, but our hopes are pretty high at this point.

Sincerely, The Rest of The World.

I almost wish that Election Night in America had been a little closer, just so that we could all have enjoyed some seat-of-our pants type excitement. But of course, Obama winning by a large margin (even if he only had 52% of the popular vote) is infinitely preferable to McCain winning. After all, the only good McCain is a French fry! (Shut up, that is probably the last time I’ll get to say that.) When they called Virginia for Obama, and Will pointed out that one of the first states to succeed from the Union had just elected a black man for president, I realized that I was watching history in the making. Will.i.am appearing as a holographic guest on CNN just cemented that fact.

Canadians, if you guys are anything like me, you may be feeling mild chagrin mixed in with your relief. The vast majority of Canadian PMs have been (often old) white men. In Canada, if race is a factor in an election, it means that it is the late nineteenth century and an old white anglophone man is running against an old white francophone man. Okay, okay, it is true that Canada’s head of state is a black woman, and she succeeded an Asian woman. But there is a difference between being appointed and being elected (and the GG’s power is more or less entirely symbolic). How do we, Canada, known for being crazy left-wing socialists compared to most of the world, get away with electing old white guys all the time? England, India, even Pakistan is outstripping us! Even France has Ségolène Royal. The closest we have is E-May, and she barely even made it into the leaders’ debate. Even Ruby Dhalla doing a practice run in the Liberal leadership race would be a step forward. Are we racist?

The one thing that kept me on my high left-wing horse this election actually made me feel just a little worse about humanity. Half the voters in California voted in favour of Proposition 8, which, in a nutshell, flips the bird at gay marriage. You just know that Dan Savage is devoting an angry, sarcastic column to this. Socially liberal Canadians, please join me in symbolically facing south-west (or south), and chanting, “Shaaaaaame.”

Even if the overall results of this election were awesome, there are a few drawbacks we have to consider. One, Hustler’s Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? just won’t be the same (even if I’ve seen the non-sex YouTube spots, I feel like I have to see the whole thing, even if I fast-forward through the usual formulaic sex scenes). I am not sure whether copies of this film will appreciate in value, or whether they’ll be in the porn shop bargain bin come January. Two, now we all have to junk our clever I Hate Bush merchandise. That stuff won’t be cool again for another twenty-five years, at which point it will be appropriated by hipsters trying to look cool and ironic by making references to events that occurred before they were born. History repeats itself.

Election Night in America

2008-11-04T20:29:00.001-05:00

The News is already predicting/outright saying that Pennsylvania has gone to Obama. If this is true, the fight is more or less over; but you can still play the CNN Election Night Drinking Game!

Drink every time CNN talks about having "the best political team on television"
Drink every time a pundit talks about Palin being a liability
Chug when Obama wins a state that Bush won in 'o4
Drink when a Republican pundit says the race is still close
Drink when Obama being black is mentioned
Chug when a Republican says "maverick"
Finish your drink if McCain doesn't carry Arizona
Drink every time the Bradley Effect is mentioned

(Thanks to Will.)

November Reading

2008-11-03T01:33:00.000-05:00

For November's novel, I've picked a Canadian author: Timothy Findley. If you ask someone what their favourite Findley novel is, assuming they have read Findley, they will probably say Not Wanted on the Voyage or even The Telling of Lies, but I keeping with monthly themes (and, it seems, an unintended theme of sex), I've picked:

The Wars (by Timothy Findley).
Cliché, I know, but hey, I could have picked Private Peaceful (I don't care if it is meant for the twelve-plus crowd, it's one of my all-time favourites).
The Wars, despite its name, is about much more than war. Although the first world war is the dominant event and element, and it contains much of the same themes as war literature -- the senselessness and futility of war, the disconnect between those giving orders and those fighting, homoerotic undertones -- historiography and gender roles are the dominant themes.

Typically, when one talks about "gender roles" in literature, especially literature written before the mid-twentieth century, it is from a feminist perspective. The Wars, however, was written in 1977, well after the second wave of feminism. And hey, if women can question their traditional role in Western society, can't men? The Wars looks at gender roles from what is sometimes called a masculinist perspective, which is more the companion of feminism than its opposite.

What is masculinity? Is it rigidly defined, or is the word polysemous? With words like "metrosexual" in the modern lexicon, we have fuzzier definitions of gender roles, but in 1917, things were pretty clear. Findley subverts traditional gender roles in this novel (consider the many meanings of the line from which the novel takes its name, "And this was what they called the wars."). He presents "successful" and "unsuccessful" masculinities. Successful ones are most often presented in terms of being a caretaker, and not necessarily in the financial sense. Robert Ross, the main character, is his sister's caretaker, and later, a caretaker of various animals. His father is at his best as a caretaker, rocking his wife or reading to his children. Most of the military officers, in their roles as caretakers of a sort, fail in their occupations. Unsuccessful masculinities are presented as vain attempts to fit the traditional mold. Robert, in his attempts to be "manly", finds only frustration at every turn. Even his role model of manliness is caught having kinky gay sex before Robert even makes it across the Atlantic. The heterosexual relationships Robert has are at best awkward and at worst violent.

Anyone who has studied war literature, especially war poetry, knows that homoerotic undertones are fairly common. In The Wars, even homoeroticism is complicated (for poor Robert, even masturbation is weird and creepy). Homosexuality expressed physically is depicted as horrifying, while mere homosexual feelings are confusing -- which of course is not surprising, considering this is 1917. The only person who seems to understand man-on-man love is little Juliet d'Orsey.

As much as the traditional gender roles of men are frustrated in The Wars, women get a similar treatment. Mrs. Ross, while her husband plays caretaker, responds with a helpless kind of anger to most of the events in the novel. Barbara d'Orsey acts like a playboy, moving from one good-looking man to the next with little regard for the emotional damage she causes. She uses men for sex as long as it is convenient for her; once a soldier loses his good looks and strong arms to the battle, she moves on. She is presented not so much as an "evil" character as a foil; she genuinely does not seem to understand what she's doing. Her little sister Juliet, on the other hand, acts like a fly on the wall and can observe sexual relationships objectively, being too young to have one herself.

As for the historiography of The Wars. The Wars presents history as a series of puzzle pieces to be put together, or rather as a series of disjointed fragments which overlap and leave gaps. The narrator is an unnamed individual who is trying to piece together the story of Robert Ross for reasons we are not told. Essentially, The Wars is saying that history is unknowable in its true and unadulterated form. Narratives inevitably only present one perspective, sometimes a thoroughly incomplete ones. This has plenty of implications for both war and gender roles.

If you like war literature and/or homoerotic themes but don't have time to read a whole book, check out some war poetry. Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfrid Owen is a personal favourite, but you can't go wrong with any Owen, Sassoon, or Hardy. Alternatively, if you like combinations of hilariousness and anti-war sentiments, get a good modern translation of Aristophanes's Lysistrata.

Halloween Fun

2008-10-31T16:59:00.000-04:00

For a bit of Halloween fun, one of my favourite poems, Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.

As much as I like the Simpson's version, they leave out a few stanzas, including the operative one. You can read the full version here, or search YouTube for the recording-only version read by the incomparable James Earl Jones. If you like Poe's poetry as much as I do, or think you might, read another of his popular gothic poems, Annabelle Lee.

Or, if you like zombies and/or sciency stuff, check out the science behind the zombie legend.

Two Solitudes?

2008-10-29T20:11:00.000-04:00

In 1945, Hugh MacLennan wrote the famous Canadian novel Two Solitudes. Since then, the term "two solitudes" has outstripped the novel itself in fame as a term symbolizing the traditionally strained relationship between English and French Canada, especially the lack of cultural understanding between the two groups.

In 2008, does the term "two solitudes" still apply? Or has, as Governor General Michaelle Jean said when she was appointed, the time of two solitudes passed? In the age of internet message boards, wikipedia, and widespread recreational travel, do the two cultures which make up Canada understand each other better or worse? Have equalization, language laws, the B&B commission, and the declining role of religion in everyday life done anything to improve communication between "Canadians" and "canadiens"?

Anglophone Quebec has always been an interesting case study of two solitudes. While it is true that anglos in Quebec, like any minority language group, tend to settle in clusters, they still live and work in an essentially French environment. According to Statistics Canada, the anglophone population of Quebec is declining, but still significant:
"In 2001, about 10.5% of the population in Quebec spoke English most often at home. While this was higher than the proportion of 8.3% who reported it as their mother tongue, the proportion using English as their home language continues to shrink."
StatsCan also reports that anglophones in Quebec have one of the highest rates of bilingualism nationally -- around 67% as of 2001.

Separatism has always been seen as possibly the biggest stymie to national unity. Wondering if this meant, as non-Quebeckers tend to assume, that separatists "hate anglophones", I composed a short e-mail to the folks at Le Québécois, a separatist newspaper, to ask them about whether anglophone Quebeckers would have a place in a Québec libre.

While waiting for their reply, I struck up a conversation with a francophone friend of mine on the topic. This guy is originally from Ottawa, currently studying at the Université de Montréal.
"Anglophones who insist on speaking English in Québec willingly refuse to integrate themselves," he told me. "They don't have a place in Québec. They're taking advantage of the benefits of living in Québec while still insisting to bring their English Canada with them. It's like a Muslim couple from Afghanistan who comes in Canada and the wife wears a burqa. Anglos who speak English in Québec don't truly believe they are part of the Québec nation."
"What about anglos whose families have lived in Quebec since before confederation?" I asked.
"They are British invaders, in a way," he replied. "Or the children of."
Interesting that he should think that anglos are unwilling to integrate into Quebec culture, considering their high rate of bilingualism, and the fact that according to StatsCan, almost one-third of anglo-Quebeckers had a franco spouse as of 2001, and the language transfer rate (i.e. anglophones who spoke French more often than English) was slightly above 10%.
My friend also complained about the rates of bilingualism between the two groups:
"The problem isn't that [anglophones] aren't learning French. It's that they don't care to." I pointed out that learning a second language isn't exactly easy, to which he replied, "It's not our fault if you guys aren't as intelligent as us and cannot learn two languages."
"Haven't you ever met a francophone who didn't speak English?" I asked, incredulously.
"I don't know a single francophone who doesn't know English, ever. In 22 years," he replied. He later conceded that he had met European francophones who did not speak English, but never a Canadian one. Interesting, considering that in 2006, only 42.4% of francophones in Canada spoke English. Granted, this is a much higher rate than the national 17.4% of bilingualism among Canadians, and among francophones outside of Quebec this number increased to 83.1%. Learning a second language is indisputably a difficult thing to do, especially when you have no chance for immersion -- as is often the case in most of Canada. Apparently, for some Canadians, the idea of two solitudes is still very much applicable today.

Finally, Le Quebecois responded to my e-mail. I was surprised to discover a response much more optimistic to inclusiveness.
"[...] je référerai au grand théoricien du nationalisme qu'est Anthony D. Smith. Feront partie du Québec libre ceux qui auront le sentiment d'en faire partie. Ce que cela signifie, c'est que les Anglos, les Allos et les Francos qui croiront faire partie de la Québécitude feront partie de cette nation nouvellement libre."
(I refer to the great nationalist theorist, Anthony D. Smith. All those who feel that they are part of a free Quebec are part of it. What this means is that all the anglos, allos, and francos who believe in Quebec-ness are part of this newly-free nation.)
Apparently, for other Canadians, even separatism does not necessitate two solitudes.

Cheap and Environmentally Friendly

2008-10-25T18:44:00.000-04:00

We all try to be a little bit environmentally friendly in our lives (well, those of us who aren't huge dicks, anyway). But sometimes, while the spirit may be willing, the wallet may be weak. Right now you are probably saying, "Rebs, I know what you are saying. I am under 26 and am gay for the planet, but being under 26 and all, I can barely keep myself in Ramen noodles and beer!" Ideal Reader, don't I have the same problem. The Good News is, you too can save money while being good to the earth! In fact, most of the common sense ideas were originally designed not to save the earth, but a few dollars.

How To Save The Earth And Money Idea #1: Remember what you learned in elementary school.
This one won't save you much money, but it is free, or as we like to call it, budget-neutral. Do you remember learning about the "3 Rs" back in second grade? I don't mean reading, riting, and 'rithmatic, I mean reduce, reuse, and recycle. For example, you can REDUCE the amount of trash you produce by REUSING those plastic ziplock baggies and RECYCLING your pop cans.

Recycling is, unfortunately, not very profitable for most things. Even with all the neat things you can make out of old pop bottles (pullover sweaters!! who would have guessed?) it is still an expensive process. But new technologies are constantly being developed, with new applications being discovered for recycled materials. But one thing that is actually profitable is aluminum -- pop cans for example. Aluminum is pretty awesome as far as poor metals go, and epically recyclable.

One of the things you can do to improve your recycling quotient is to make sure you know what kinds of plastic can be recycled in your area. Most of us instinctively throw an empty yogurt cup or margarine dish into the recycling box, but what about shampoo bottles, or that Tupperware dish you accidentally left on the stove burner and burned a big hole in? Your municipality should publish a list of what can and can't be recycled, as well as instructions for sorting. Just call them up and ask for a copy.

If you are too poor/cheap/lazy to procure an extra recycling box, or if you live in a building where there are big communal recycling boxes in the basement, you can make your own. For example, use an empty cardboard box (2-4s work great if you are mostly recycling paper), and just dump the whole package in your recycling pile.

Get Rich, Hobo-Style: In all provinces and territories, empty beer bottles (and frequently other types of beverage containers) are refundable, usually at 10 cents per bottle. If you are drinking the cheap buck-a-beer stuff, this means that 11 cases of empties equals one free full one! (10 for the beer and 1 for the deposit.)

How To Save The Earth And Money Idea #2: Reuse the stuff you buy.
Ziplock baggies are awesome. They keep your cheese from going all dry and hard in the fridge, and your egg salad sandwich from falling apart in your knapsack. They also keep your toiletries together and unexploded while traveling, and your large safety-pin collection from being scattered all over the bottom of your sock drawer. But the best thing about ziplock baggies is that one package can last upwards of a year if you take care of it. All you have to do is wash them out every now and again!

Glass bottles and old plastic containers are similarly awesome. Glass bottles, unlike the plastic ones, stand up much better to being washed-out and refilled while also not leaking crazy toxic shit into your drink. Plastic containers such as those used for packaging yogurt and margarine make great free tupperware (although their level of dishwasher- and microwave-safeness is seriously questionable).

There are tons of ways to reuse the stuff you buy. Things you should not reuse include toilet paper, condoms, and old science textbooks.

How To Save The Earth And Money Idea #3: Buy stuff meant to be reused.
Rechargeable batteries, tupperware, lunch boxes, water bottles, and paper clips are all great ideas that we know we should use (even if we don't).

But ladies, you may be missing something that is environmentally-friendly as well as being budget-friendly and friendly for your use as well.

The DivaCup requires an initial investment, but it lasts about 10 years (or until you first give birth, if you haven't already, at which point you'll need a new size). Think of how much you spend on your period in a year, then multiply that by 10. The DivaCup can cost you as little as 30 cents per period, or less (depending on how much you end up paying for it). In addition, it is made of medical-grade silicon, making it hypoallergenic, super-easy to sterilize, and less irritating to your va-jay-jay than super-absorbent tampons. It's great for traveling, as it doesn't take up much space in your bags and you won't have to worry about running out of supplies. Best of all is that it produces no waste after the initial packaging. If you'll save money with this baby, you will definitely save space in the landfill.

Other environmentally-friendly period products include sea sponges, which are worn internally and last a few periods each, and cloth pads, which are worn just like disposable ones but last for ages. Both are washed between uses. If you think washing in between use is gross, go ask your grandmother what she used during the war.

If you are not totally ready to switch to reusable products, you can at least make your Aunt Flo slightly more environmentally-friendly by switching to o.b. tampons, which are tiny and have no applicator, yet are still extremely effective. According to their website, these little suckers generate 1lb less waste per year than your average applicator tampon.

How To Save The Earth And Money Idea #4: Reuse stuff other people have already bought.
When was the last time you went to Value Village, Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or your other local thrift shop? I mean to buy stuff, not to drop off a garbage bag full of ill-fitting clothes you haven't worn in a year. Thrift shops are not the best place to go for up-to-the-minute fashion or a specific item, but they are great for staples like jeans or dress shirts/blouses, or the quirky or unique items. For homemade Halloween costumes, they are a great resource. The best thing to do is go with a few friends and a camera and make an afternoon of it. In between trying on wacky things that were very understandably donated, you'll likely find a few gems. Second-hand shoes are already broken in, and finding a classic item of clothing that fits you well is more flattering than a trendy overpriced item. It helps if you know how to sew, or have a friend who does; shirts, for example, are easy to take in for a better fit. Remember, things can be made into other things, too! Cool bedsheets, table cloths, and pillow cases make great skirts, shirts, and scarves. And if you don't mind mismatched sets, you can get an awesome kitchenware collection. No more drinking wine out of tumblers!

Church sales are another great place to look for things like kitchenware, books, records, and occasionally (though less often) clothing. They are often run largely by old ladies who undercharge for everything, and I challenge you to find Treasure Trolls or Moon Shoes at Toys'R'Us.

Another great resource for higher-ticket items is classifieds, like craigslist or kijiji. Both have free stuff sections too, if you are really poor, or you can try Freecycling. If your apartment is full of shitty secondhand stuff anyway, it may as well be as cheap as possible!

How To Save The Earth And Money Idea #5: When it comes to packaging, less is more.
Buying in bulk has an advantage other than being less expensive. Larger sizes mean fewer smaller sizes, and thus, less packaging. Individually-wrapped items are almost always more expensive than their wrapped-all-together counterparts. 2L of juice and a 99-cent reusable sippy box versus 13 juice boxes? You do the math. Go ahead and buy bulk! Just make sure that buying in bulk isn't causing you to eat in bulk.

How To Save The Earth And Money Idea #6: Don't pay more for processing.
Bottled water. Ugh. Don't make me say it again; we all know that bottled water is the hugest scam ever. There is a saying that bottled water started with some guy in France asking himself, "How dumb do I think Americans really are?" The answer, apparently, is dumber than he could ever have hoped or dreamed. If you are out somewhere with no water fountain in sight and you are dying of thirst, at least buy some apple juice or something in a glass bottle. That way, you are at least paying for some nutrients and flavour, and when you get thirsty again, you can refill your glass bottle with water at the nearest tap or fountain. The vast majority of tap water in North America and Western Europe is safe to drink, and if for some reason it isn't, there will usually be a sign nearby like "Don't drink this shit". If for whatever reason tap water gives you the heebie-jeebies, get a Brita filter. They are epically less expensive and environmentally devastating than bottled water. If you just like your water cold, for pete's sake put it in a Kool-Aid pitcher!

This section is great for talking to your grandparents about their experiences during the war(s). Back then, nothing was wasted, especially if they lived in Europe but even those living in Canada were saving everything to help the war effort. The Great Depression was another big saver; you might notice that your grandparents would never dare throw away leftovers and will wrap up and save the smallest crumb of food. (For a great example of this, read The Widows by Suzette Mayr. For one, Frau Schnadlehuber spreads bacon fat on her toast because just throwing out perfectly good fat is unacceptable.)

Very few items of clothing are ever thrown out at my grandma's house. If your underpants or bath towel are so old and worn out as to be indecent, the item in question will be cut up to make rags, which will be used to clean the bathroom, kitchen, and anything else requiring rags. No Lysol wipes here! Pine Sol? Screw that. Mix a little lemon or vinegar with water and put it in a reusable spray bottle -- this will clean 95% of anything that needs to be cleaned with a rag. Vinegar, baking soda, and hairspray are all part of her laundry stain-combating inventory. Why pay extra for commercial products when household remedies are much cheaper - and coincidentally, more environmentally-friendly? My grandfather, in the same vein, has jars upon jars of saved nails, screws, and other odds and ends in the garage, but that's a different story entirely ...

How To Save The Earth And Money Idea #7: Garden.
This may or may not be a workable idea for you, depending on whether you live in a house with a backyard, or an apartment where all your plants are either smokeable or from Ikea (the plant equivalent of being a zombie). If you don't have a backyard but still want to garden, you can check out community gardens in your area -- bigger cities especially often have public areas where you can have a little plot, although sometimes there are restrictions on what you are allowed to grow (flowers or veggies -- although you might circumvent this by growing edible flowers).

Vegetables are the best thing to grow for a great combination of cheap and environmentally-friendly. Many vegetables also taste much better when home-grown, as things like tomatoes and corn start losing their flavour the moment they're picked. Tomatoes are especially good for home gardens as they are easy to grow, versatile in cooking, and tend to grow quite profusely (you'll be giving your neighbours tomatoes throughout the month of July). You can even grow them in large pots if you have a balcony or fire escape but no back yard. Other great backyard crops for southern Canada are cucumbers, green beans, chives, sweet corn, strawberries, raspberries, and zucchini.

A great, environmentally-friendly boost to your garden is fertilizer, such as dried cow, pig, or sheep poop, available from your local Canadian Tire for around $10-$15 per bag. Wait, you don't want to pay money for literal crap? Then maybe you should try composting. This involves a big black box in your back yard which you fill with basically anything that's biodegradable. Pure plant matter (fruit & veggie scraps, non-treated lawn clippings, leaves, dead flowers) works best, followed by table scraps and certain other kitchen matter (moldy bread, coffee grounds and filters, wet paper towels). Egg shells are compostable but tend to decompose at a much slower rate, so you might still see them in your flowerbeds when you spread your compost. Dairy and meat are also technically compostable, but not recommended as it's not very hygienic and tends to smell terrible and attract wild animals. Poop is also technically compostable but certain bothersome laws prevent you from pooping in a bucket and putting it in your garden.

If you can't garden, you can at least make the gesture and do number 8 ...

How To Save The Earth And Money Idea #8: Buy local.
Ever notice how apples from Canada are cheaper than apples from Fiji? How tomatoes from Canada taste a lot better than the ones from Mexico? This is nature trying to tell you something.

Buying local is actually more environmentally friendly than buying organic, as not all chemical farming practices are bad. Buying organic strawberries from California instead of eating your own damned strawberries still means inflated prices and carbon emissions due to transportation, and strawberries that taste like nothing. Of course, if you live in Nova Scotia and you want to eat bananas, your locally-grown search might be, um, fruitless. You might have to make some dietary shifts. But, depending on where you live, there is probably a rich variety of fruits and veggies available. Go to weekend farmer's markets or buy from roadside stands and you can be sure you aren't buying anything grown more than 60 km away.

Liberal Leadership Litigation

2008-10-22T01:19:00.000-04:00

As we all expected, poor Mr. Dion did the smart thing and announced his resignation on Monday. However, he surprised us all -- and showed he had some fight in him -- by resigning to delay said resignation until May, when the Liberals will swarm Vancouver in an attempt to get elected leader of the party. Oh boy, oh boy, who will it be, this new leader?

Top contenders as of right now seem to be Bob Rae and Micheal Ignatieff, the two front-runners in the last Liberal leadership race before Dion snuck up with a surprise-attack Kennedy endorsement. But are either of them up to the job? I mean, it was bad enough two years ago, what with the Sponsorship scandal and Jean Chrétien's book and Canadians hating Paul Martin's big dumb face. Now, with their worst showing in over a century (that sounds WAY longer than "since Confederation," for some reason), the Grits are going to need some serious horsepower to pull them out of the mud. They'll need someone who can demonstrate strong leadership, ensure that the party isn't so desperately cash-strapped, and inspire confidence in voters in the way that Dion didn't seem to be able to.

While Rae and Iggy would probably objectively make good leaders, they both have baggage. Iggy the egghead spent 30 years gallivanting around the USA while Rae let the Ontario economy go down the tubes as premier in the 90s, before abandoning the Ontario NDP for the federal Liberals (the fact that his reasons for leaving were probably totally accurate is beside the point!).

So, I propose a few other names for Liberal leadership.

Indiana Jones
circa Raiders of the Lost Ark

Will pointed out that if Indiana Jones was a spry, treasure-hunting, Nazi-thwarting professor in the '30s, he is almost certainly dead by now, to which I reply that Indiana Jones is a fictional character and therefore cannot technically die. Dr. Jones almost certainly has tenure, considering he seems to be able to take long sabbaticals from work (maybe he simply doesn't lecture during the summer semester) and often be on the questionable side of the law without ever being fired, or even subject to a performance review. So we can safely assume that he has the intellect and dedication necessary to run a party and hopefully a country. After all, politics and Judeo-Christian history are practically the same thing, right? Furthermore, he's a doer as well as a thinker, and has an uncanny ability to talk his way out of situations before busting out the gun and/or whip.
Leadership skills: He can lead crusades and raiders, why not a parties and countries?
Financial force: He doesn't seem to be independently wealthy, so we are assuming he gets funding for his crazy adventures from the university. If you can convince your faculty to give you money to go find the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, you win the Lifetime Fundraiser Award.
Voter confidence: If he can woo the female vote as well as he can woo the females, he is basically set.

Batman

Batman is a total BAMF. No one is going to mess with him. Unfortunately, the House of Commons is more about verbal debates than ass-kicking, so Batman might be at a disadvantage there, but he looks so tough that it is going to be hard to criticize him for fear of what might happen in the parking lot afterward. Bruce Wayne is a business magnate, so we can feel confident that he knows what he's doing with the economy, and if his cabinet is anything like his collection of advisers in The Dark Knight, it will be iron-clad.
Leadership skills: So-so. He's more of a figurehead than a policy-maker, that's for sure. He had better find a Harvey Dent to be his deputy if he ever gets elected.
Financial force: Again, Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, so his head for finance should be good. At least you can rest assured that he will pay his tab after the leadership race is over.
Voter confidence: Questionable. Batman may not be the Prime Minister Canada wants, but the one it deserves ... or needs ... something like that.

Vladimir Putin

Sometimes I wonder if Vladimir Putin is a man, or a drop of some war god's testosterone-laden sweat made flesh. Putin's CV of ass-kicking could rival that of Batman -- Putin does it without a fancy suit or gadgets. Now, he even has a DVD out to help you learn judo! You too can fight tigers, Georgians, and nosy journalists.
Putin has an advantage over the other contenders on this list: political experience. He was President of Russia for a while, and then he decided to be Prime Minister (the electoral process is so messy, wouldn't you agree?). He might have a bit of a difficult time putting together a caucus, however, as nervous MPs look the other way while thinking about polonium cocktails.
Leadership skills: Proven to be absolute, even if it means circumventing democracy (or the spirit thereof).
Financial force: Russia's economy is no longer crap, so someone is doing something financially right. In a pinch, he can always sell more judo DVDs, or pose for a Vladimir Putin swimsuit calender.
Voter confidence: Depends on the demographic. He's already a political sex symbol, and fascists will love him. But the Ukranians aren't so crazy -- Putin would lose the prairies like Rae would lose Ontario.

Election post-mortem

2008-10-17T02:31:00.000-04:00

The 2008 Canadian federal election is over, and across the country, Canadians voted for change.

They voted for climate change. They voted for senate reform -- stacking it with Tories in order to pass bills. They voted for copyright reform, changing our laws to make them match those of the US -- yeah, that country we are always spending so much time telling everyone we don't resemble.

Canadians voted against the arts (and by extension, the economic benefits thereof) and against the Status of Women. They voted against the effective rehabilitation of young offenders, and against effective outreach to and rehabilitation of drug addicts through Insite, an initiative which has demonstrated promising success.

Those who voted for a Conservative MP for their riding actually voted against the interests of their riding; rather, they voted for the interests of the Conservative party. Everyone knows that Harper doesn't do free votes.

And almost 40% of them voted "I don't care." Not voting is as much of a statement as actually voting. They voted to let the government do whatever the hell it wants with their money, their laws, their country, their world. They voted that they didn't care where their money went, which laws they would be expected to obey, what would happen to their roads, schools, hospitals, parks, investments, public spaces, postal service, prices of goods and services, public service, publicly-funded radio and TV stations, and mountains of other things that affect them every day. In case you ever think your vote doesn't count, remember the riding of Egmont in P.E.I. Conservative Gail Shea broke a 24-year Liberal legacy, winning by sixty-two votes.

But, if you look closely at the numbers, only about one in five Canadians actually voted for Harper. The voter turnout rate was about 59%. Harper got just under 38% of the popular vote. If this English major has her math straight, that means 22% of eligible voters marked an X beside a Conservative candidate. The House of Commons is being controlled by the desires of one-fifth of Canadian citizens over the age of 18. Viva indirect democracy! Viva first-past-the-post!

E-night was depressing for everyone, with the possible exceptions of the Bloc and certain NDP supporters. The Bloc saw Harper's careful wooing of les Québécois fall flat, with the Conservatives actually losing one of their 11 seats in Quebec. The NDP picked up a handful. But the Tories fell short of their hoped-for majority, the status quo remained (meaning zillions of wasted dollars for an election which changed next to nothing), and the Liberals had their worst showing since 1867.

The Grits are in trouble. They're flat broke, and unable to fundraise like their Conservative counterparts. While they point fingers at the Conservatives' stagnant membership growth, they are in no position to compete. And while Liberal leaders traditionally get two bites at the apple, party insiders are already talking leadership race. Even Dion's supporters understand that he is maybe not the man for the job. As much as I like Dion (and I'm not even a big-L Liberal!), it's painfully clear that an adorably dorky professor is not doing it for Canadians. What the Liberal party needs now is strong Leadership -- someone who can rally the troops. People are looking at Iggy and Rae. What they need is Indiana Jones, Batman, or Vladimir Putin. Sure he hates journalists, but come on! The man shot a fucking tiger!

Liberty is another candidate for Liberal leadership, here demonstrating her ability to guide people.

As for what will happen next in the House? Well, there is some good news. Harper has made it clear that he's given up hiding under the covers about the economy, and is prepared to tackle it head-on. We're all nervous about a recession, possibly even a depression -- not to mention pissed off at those stupid American banks for handing out mortgage loans like meals at a soup kitchen. With any luck, my twelve-year-old cousin will still have something of an RESP in six years, and my mother will be able to retire, some day. That is, if the government manages to cut back its expenses -- and good luck, what with the EI and other expenses that inevitably accompany economic hardships. In the meantime, I'm going to take my tax cuts and run, because I know better than to rely on any more government-funded programs.

E-night

2008-10-14T23:15:00.000-04:00

If the Conservatives get a majority, I swear to fuck, I am moving to ~~Canada~~ Europe.

Election time Employment

2008-10-14T00:09:00.000-04:00

(or, How I Almost Ran for The Greens But Decided to Pass My Classes Instead)

One fine evening in July, after a few beers, Will finally convinced me that the fact that the Green Party did not appear to have a candidate for Durham meant that I had to present my candidature. I crafted a very eloquent e-mail to the guy from the riding association, outlining my qualifications (young smart left-winger, strong connections to the community, nominally bilingual). A few weeks later, he e-mailed me back, full of enthusiasm and talking about an upcoming nomination meeting. By this point it had become painfully clear that a writ was going to drop right smack-dab in the middle of the academic year. Sheepishly, I conceded that running in a riding six hours away from school might have a large negative impact on my GPA. Maybe next election.

The under-25 crowd has been seeing more than its fair share of nominations this election. The Liberals, for example, are running Gabriel Arsenault, a 20-year-old second-year U de M student, in Chambly-Borduas. Meanwhile the NDP is running a handful of under-20s, not unlike the Canadian Action party, and the Green Party will run just about anyone who's had their 18th birthday before the writ drops. The Tories' youngest candidate is 24, but they have plenty of old candidates and don't need fresh faces quite as badly. Shawn Reimer, 18, is running as an independant in Fort McMurray-Athabasca. How is it that so many fascinating political newbies can crop up amongst the demographic with the lowest voter turnout rate? Maybe they can at least rouse their friends to the polls, highschool-prez style.

Running in your local riding, or a riding nowhere near your local riding, is not however the only avenue of active participation in the electoral period. Many people choose to campaign for their local candidate of choice -- a particularly popular choice with students, as "payment" tends to come in the form of pizza most frequently. Perks include all the buttons and pamphlets you want. Campaigning can take the form of putting up signs or cold-calling unsuspecting electors, or it can also take the form of going door-to-door passing out lit and asking people ~~if they have a personal relationship with Jesus~~ how they plan to vote. Especially during October elections, it is not unlike Halloween, but instead of giving you candy, people launch into tirades about why they are or are not voting for the candidate you represent, or just kind of look at you awkwardly.

Finally, there is non-partisan work available through Elections Canada, in the form of working as a poll official. (If you are dying to work on E-day but still cling to partisanship, you can always be a scrutineer and just spend all day annoying poll officials.) As a poll official, you will get the sweet sense of satisfaction which comes from having upheld democracy in its purest form, without endowing it with political ideals. You will also get cranky voters who refuse to show you ID, don't speak English (or French), and are confused as to where they are and what they are supposed to be doing. But you will get good money for it -- assuming your definition of "good" is "better than $10/hour". But since you are working as a poll official, you probably do not have a regular full-time job anyway. You are probably either a poor student, or a bored retiree or housewife. Unfortunately, they specify that you cannot bring booze to work as a poll official during the training period (one can only imagine what kind of problems necessitated this specification), but the job itself is pretty interesting as it is, except for the slow period between noon and 7 pm.

I would elaborate, but it's past midnight and I must be getting to bed -- I have a poll to officiate tomorrow morning!

How to Vote

2008-10-13T22:21:00.000-04:00

The polls open in less than twelve hours and close in less than twenty-four. (For those of you not in the loop, it's 9:30-21:30. Yes, you can vote after work.) By this point, you had better know for whom you are voting. Wait, what do you mean you have no idea?!

Well, if you prefer to vote for candidates rather than parties, good for you. You're a selfish bastard. See if your riding is offering a Sexy Candidate to vote for.

If you vote for parties rather than candidates, congratulations on being a lazy, scheming bum who cares more about politics than the needs of your riding. You should check out the Toronto Star's super-fun Party Game (props to Vincent for finding this). Or, if arts are your favourite issue this election, check out my article on arts-related platforms at the La Scena Musicale's website, here and ici. You can read more La Scena Musicale articles about the arts and politics: The Arts Get Political and Understanding Canada's Cultural-Industrial Complex, if you like the economy too.

Have fun excersing your democratic right/duty.

Election 2008 soundtrack

2008-10-07T00:29:00.000-04:00

Campaign songs do not seem to be as popular for the 2008 Canadian election as they once were. Instead of custom-made ditties, plain old pop and rock songs with vaguely relevant lyrics are being blasted as the candidates march up to the podium. Not unlike what they've been doing in the U. S. since 1923, but not very much fun.

Nevertheless, various parties (not just the partisan vote-for-us kind) have remembered the power of music to rouse, incite, motivate, and other such synonyms. Despite the cuts to arts funding, the musicians have made sure that the 2008 election will not pass with mere boring talking!

In the interest of keeping you up-to-date and entertained, I present to you: The Top Five Songs of the 2008 Canadian Election.

Wayne & Shuster's Musical Parliament sketch would be great here by way of introduction, but every copy that ever existed seems to have mysteriously disappeared off the internet -- and by "mysterious" I mean "probably due to copyright violations". So you'll just have to imagine it.
Speaker of the House comes in, wearing sequined robe
Speaker: Hello! Hello!
Liberals in matching jackets: How-dee-do!
Speaker (in epic anglo accent): Bonjour et comment allez-vous!
Tories in matching jackets: Bonjour et comment allez vous!
Now start singing that damned doo-doo-doo part that always gets stuck in your head, accompanied by the obligatory desk banging to keep time.

#5: Le Bloc répond présent ! - Bloc Québécois
I know I was just complaining about the lack of campaign songs, but the Bloc actually stepped up and got themselves a real chanson de campagne. This one is a little more militant than their cheery Band-Aid stylin' 2004 campaign song. Seriously, if I was new to Quebec and didn't know anything about the Bloc when I first heard this song, I would have rushed out to vote Bloc, before wrapping my arms around the people beside me and bursting into song Woodstock-style. 2008's effort makes me feel like I should punch someone. Or at least, I should if I'm a québécois(e) de souche.

Listen/download here.

Best lyric: Si parfois, j’ai l’air en colère
C’est pas juste mon caractère
C’est parce que je suis fier
(If sometimes I seem angry, it's not just my personality, it's because I'm proud)

Hey, whose pride doesn't sometimes result in rage, right?
The Good: It's very catchy and makes a great drinking song.
The Bad: Depending on who you are drinking with, you may have some explaining to do.

#4: Bounce - Baba Brinkman
This partisan song, by "the Geoffrey Chaucer of hip-hop" has been called the unofficial Liberal campaign song. It's kind of obvious why it isn't official. But it is awfully clever -- if Dion had as many supporters as separatism, Baba Brinkman could be the Loco Locass of the federal Liberal party!

Listen here.

Best lyric: Canadians know they can't trust a man
With a mustache that looks like a muskrat
In the shape of a dustpan

What does Layton's mustache look like to you?

The Good: It's funny because it's true!
The Bad: So partisan it should contain an "authorized by the Liberal Party of Canada" tag ... but then again, a lot of non-authorized material is just as partisan.

#3: You Have A Choice - K-OS, Ed from Barenaked Ladies, Sarah Harmer, Hawksley Workman, Jason Collett from Broken Social Scene (and many more!)
This song is non-partisan in a sort of inculsive, everyone-but-Harper kind of way. Justin Trudeau probably had multiple orgasms while listening to this song; it's a rousing (incendiary, motivational) exhortation to take action, which in this case is synonymous with Vote Not Conservative, aimed squarely at the under-26 crowd. The conglomeration of popular artists responsible for this music and it's "We can make a difference!" message gives it a Band-Aid feel, except we haven't heard it enough to make us hate its guts.

Listen here / download here.

Best lyric: We can change things for the better
Not just dressing it up with a sweater

If you were unsure whether or not this song likes Harper, things should be clear by now.
The Good: Has the power to make apathetic young voters feel like voting, would sound good on your iPod.
The Bad: The clichées will eventually get to you.

#2: Time For Some Campaignin' - JibJab e-cards
Yeah, so this is an e-card. It's got the best original soundtrack an e-card ever dreamed of! A tip of the hat to the American election - because if you are following Canadian politics, chances are you are following American politics at least nominally, and of course everything that gets elected in the U.S.A. affects Canada. Make sure you watch the video, because half the jokes are visual. And they're all pretty funny, from Hillary smacking Bill with a frying pan to Obama riding a magical unicorn to the "Increase your Manhood" campaign promise. This would also make an excellent drinking song, and I am tragically sorry I didn't know it a few weeks ago - it would have made an epic sing-along in the pub after the kickoff party, with a few lyrical tweaks.

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Best lyrics: We spend billions of dollars to make our point clear

To get you to step up and cast your vote here

Then we spin you around and poke you in the rear

This song sounds like an optimistic pro-voting ballad, but it keeps a healthy sense of perspective -- whoever gets elected is gonna screw you somehow anyway.
The Good: It's a shining tribute to the power and beauty of indirect democracy.
The Bad: It exposes how deeply flawed indirect democracy really is.

#1: I've Got A Crush on Harper - Mashline Girl
What are Canadians really good at? If we ask History, one excellent answer would be "copying stuff that Britian and America does and bastardizing it to make it 'Canadian'". You guys all remember the Obama Girl, right? Well, this has been sanctioned by Barelypolitical.com as the "official" Canadian version. As far as copying stuff goes, it's pretty faithful. Although we figured Obama Girl was more or less serious about her crush; Mashline Girl is young and female and we are not sure what would attract her to Harper so much. She either loves irony, or being told what to do by her man. At least there's someone else out there who agrees with me - Canadian politics needs more sex if the voter turnout rate among youth is ever going to improve!

Watch here / download here.

Best lyric: When you're back in office with a new mandate
I won't leave you alone, 'cause I got a crush on Harper

Nothing is sexier than a stalker you've never met.
The Good: Finally, someone is sticking up for Harper.
The Bad: ... possibly ironically.

October Reading

2008-10-05T22:28:00.000-04:00

How about a little break from all that election business, hmm? Let's take a break for something less distressing and more relaxing, like say, Victorian Gothic literature!

Now that it's October, I hope at least a few of you have read (the Wikipedia page for) The Canterbury Tales. October is when things (well, leaves) start to die, and we celebrate this by hanging little plastic leaf-ghosts in our trees, or in some cases, by planting extravagant overpriced decorations bought at Wal-Mart on our lawns. Fun! And of course, what goes better with scaring the shit out of small children than feeding them large quantities of sugar? If you ask anyone under the age of 16, nothing.

Myself, I'm pretty into the whole Halloween thing. I love costumes and ghost stories and parties with candles shaped like eyeballs. I lament the days when making construction paper turkeys at school segwayed into making construction paper witches' hats. Luckily, although I am too old to get the same kick out of construction paper that I once did, age has opened up a new door to getting a kick out of literature.

Therefore, since literature must replace both construction paper crafts and tons of free candy for us grown-ups, I present my Halloween literary choice: Dracula by Bram Stoker.

Quick: what is Dracula about? Vampires? Nope, guess again. The correct answer is sex. To be more specific, female sexuality and sexual mores during the Victorian era. Now, I don't know if this is pure hermeneutics of suspicion or if Bram Stoker one day decided, "I think I'll write a gothic novel that contains heavy themes of sexuality as it is seen by society today," or something to that effect. Let's all be relativists for a moment and look at context.

Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was born in Dublin, had a childhood, got married, had a kid, etc etc. His contemporaries included Oscar Wilde and Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle. Gothic literature was also popular around the time Stoker was writing. He wrote a handful of other novels (mostly adventure) but they weren't as good and no one cares about them anymore.

You can certainly see the adventure themes in between the sex and Christian moralism in Dracula. The men all but shout "This is no place for a woman!" as they march off to stand strong against vampire hussies together (compare: King Soloman's Mines, everything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote, the Hardy Boys).

One of the more interesting things about Dracula however is its undertones of suspicion regarding modernity. Stoker was writing around the time that the Industrial Revolution was picking up steam, and people were understandably suspicious about all this sciencey stuff. One of the morals you could draw from Dracula is "All the doctors in the world won't prevent your turning into a scary vampire hussy." Of course, we need the crazy foreign doctor Van Helsing (who, surprisingly enough, is nothing like he was in the moderately successful 2004 film Van Helsing) to tell us all this. Those crazy Dutch -- they'll believe anything!

In that same vein, apparently Christian paraphernalia is a weapon. Count Dracula is the pure and unquestioned embodiment of evil, yeah, I accept that. And apparently the Christian God and the paraphernalia thereof is the only one he recognizes. Wait, what? Not even a tip of the hat to anyone else? Well, maybe, but we don't know how the Jews or Muslims fared up against Dracula. In fact things are not even looking too bright for the Protestants. Wait, wasn't Stoker Irish and -- oh yeah. Apparently, it's not the faith you have in your crucifix or your communion wafer, it's how you wield them.

The mix of gothic versus modern certainly is interesting. You get your fill of gloomy castles and graveyards and innocent damsels in distress, but then it invades your nice, clean, modern, happy London! What's a band of guys who are in the process of losing a prospective finacée to do? Read Dracula to find out, obviously.

But, let's talk about the sex. (Spoiler alert) Lucy, not Mina, is the one who actually becomes a vampire. She is the obvious choice since she is a total slut who briefly contemplates the idea of marrying three men. Read the bit where Lucy gets bitten for the first time over again -- does it not sound like a really scary Victorian version of a girl losing her virginity? Vampires, whores, they're all bad for society and dangerous to men. When garlic flowers don't work, just move straight on to the wooden stake. Mina, of course, is the model of Victorian womanhood and therefore manages to resist Dracula's advances. She's such a good little Victorian wifey that she inspires a scene absolutely made of cheese towards the end of the novel when -- well, I won't spoil it that much. Also, check out the vampire vixens that Jonathan meets during his séjour with Count Dracula. Voluptuous seems to be one of Stoker's favourite words here. What does voluptuous actually mean?

voluptuous
/vluptyooss/
• adjective 1 relating to or characterized by luxury or sensual pleasure. 2 (of a woman) curvaceous and sexually attractive.
— DERIVATIVES voluptuously (adverb) voluptuousness (noun).
— ORIGIN Latin voluptuosus, from voluptas ‘pleasure’.

(Thank you, AskOxford!) Now, Stoker is using this term in a negative way, remember. Because as we all know, sexual pleasure is for whores and rakes. Now lie back and think of England.

Okay, so Stoker doesn't treat sex in quite the same way that Chaucer does. Try not to be disappointed though. Dracula's still more fun than a barrel of vampires, and if you like getting into the Halloween spirit, totally appropriate. If you are into the Halloween spirit but maybe not vampires and sexual symbolism, try some Edgar Allen Poe (his poetry is great for reading out loud!) or perhaps Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. If, on the other hand, you can't get enough of this whole mixing-Victorian-sexual-morals-with-the-supernatural business, I suggest you check out Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market.

Harper prend des forces: Conservatives court Québec

2008-09-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

LE QUÉBEC PREND DES FORCES.
The Tories have adopted this as their French-language slogan for the 2008 election.

In an effort to woo votes away from the Bloc in Quebec, Harper is courting Québécois voters. And he's going about it in an extremely effective way. A quick glance at the Conservative press release page is a pretty clear indicator of this. On September 18, while the arts community was still fuming over the cuts to funding, the Tories released a communiqué affirming that they were "committed to French-language TV" and that "Stephen Harper and the Conservative Government greatly value and support Quebec’s unique arts and culture." This was part of an announcement dedicating $25M to Quebec's TV5, including $15M for TV5MONDE, which has all kinds of implications for better branding of Canada as a bilingual nation (an endeavour which is currently sadly neglected). The day before, there was an even better one: "Conservative Government to Ensure CRTC Reflects Canada’s Linguistic Reality". Among the provisions is the resolution that the chairmanship of the CRTC will alternate between anglophones and francophones, and the big one: "Hearings related to French-language or Quebec broadcasters will be heard by a panel consisting of a majority of French-language or Quebec CRTC members." Some degree of self-government? That's just what we've always wanted!! In addition to these arts-related concessions, there are plenty of headlines in the following vein: "[Insert Québécois constituency here] Deserves a Conservative MP" or "Real Leadership in [Constituency]". They even make a token gesture of recognition for Franco-Ontariens!

Another big score for the Tories were their comments about 1837 and "true patriots". Québécois love talking about patriotes. And another of Harper's self-government-promising moves? On la St-Jean(!), he promised to "practise an open federalism, a federalism that respects the autonomy of the provinces and the original principles of the Constitution." Touching a nerve that goes all the way back to Confederation.

Perhaps the most illustrative gesture was the photograph of a smiling Harper in front of his Québécois campaign poster.

Many other Conservative candidates in Quebec have similar photos. But the TV ads are pretty illustrative as well. For example, this one, which, though it contains no Magic Sweater Vest, is just as wholesome -- they're drinking orange juice, and no one seems to stop nodding. There is even a chick in there! Of course, Harper only manages about three sentences, but his accent is definitely impressive for a Calgarian. More of the same are available here. Many of them begin with an "everyday normal" citizen apologizing to M. Duceppe for his incompetence in the face of Conservative leadership, and they all end the same way: "Avec les conservateurs, le Québec prend des forces." ("With the Conservatives, Quebec is getting stronger.") The ads are perfect, but for one small detail: Avec les conservateurs.

Apparently, the Tory PR department was hoping that the Québécois would overlook the fact that they (the Tories) currently only hold 11 of the 75 seats in Quebec. Ce n'est pas le Bloc indeed! If Quebec is prending any forces, it is not because of the Conservatives.

Harper and his gang are, like any party in any region, up and down in the Quebec polls depending on which paper you read and when. On August 29, the National Post declared that a "Quebec poll holds bright prospects for Conservatives". Exactly one month later, the CBC wondered whether Harper's Quebec support was softening. On September 14, CTV said that "the poll suggests Prime Minister Stephen Harper's gamble of recognizing Quebec as a nation has paid off," while the Toronto Star announced on September 25 that a "Bloc rebound hurts Tories in Quebec." Polls are awfully fickle like that.

Fickle polls are not enough to quiet my artsy, female, left-wing, social-justice-loving nerves though. All these ads about forces being prended have given me the envie to grab Quebeckers by the fleurs-de-lis and shake them, saying "Qu'est-ce que vous pensez?"

Quebec, despite being a distinct society, has inherited a lot of things from France: language, religion, a vague hostility towards immigrants, and a fairly socialist mindset. After all, the mandated 35-hour workweek, unionmania, cheap beer, and a penchant for protesting didn't come out of nowhere. The Conservatives, however, have not typically been associated very strongly with socialism. Not that any of the other parties who've made it to the house have (with the possible exception of the NDP), but none so weakly as the Tories. Let's compare and contrast a little more, shall we?

Things Quebeckers like	Things Harper has done or wants to do
Arts and culture, a very important component of patrie	Cut truckloads of arts funding, specifically the type that would help emerging Canadian artists; Bill C-10
Not sending the military where it doesn't belong (See Boer War, Conscription crisis, etc)	Increase military spending
Rehabilitation of young offenders	Youth Crime bill
The Habs	Be a Leafs fan

Seriously, Quebec. Don't get fooled. Remember la grande noirceur? Remember Le ciel est bleu, l'enfer est rouge? Didn't turn out to apply so well to politics, did it? Quebec, you do better under more liberal governments! I wish I could appeal to a sense of communion and federalism, but of course "federalism" means very different things in Quebec than it does in the rest of Canada.

I don't like to advocate the use partisan materials in such a way, but Quebec, maybe you should listen to that Bloc attack ad. Stephen Harper is saying all kinds of pretty things to you now -- but beware of cadeaux vides.

EDIT: This seemed pretty relevant, as well as entertaining.
Culture en Péril/Culture in Danger

Election time: Sexy candidates

2008-09-29T18:34:00.000-04:00

At long last, the Sexy Candidates 2008 list is here!
lasoubrette.webs.com/f_candidates.html

Of course, the Sexy Candidates 2008 list is a spin-off of the Sexy Politicians Hotlist, so you should all know what to expect, with a few minor discrepancies. Unless you've never seen the Sexy Politicians Hotlist, of course. So in the interest of shameless self-promotion, I've interviewed myself to compile a helpful Q&A.

What is the Sexy Candidates 2008 list?
Exactly what it sounds like. Most people already vote for someone based on very faint or terrible reasons, so why not choose a candidate based on how attractive he or she is? More seriously, it's a more light-hearted side to the heaviness, drama, and scandal which accompany any election, especially the general ones. Yes it's kind of dumb and shallow, but it's satire so it's okay.

How are candidates evaluated?
On the Sexy Politicians Hotlist, candidates were often chosen for a combination of good looks, interesting résumés, and half-naked photos that had appeared in the news. But the Sexy Candidates 2008 list is much shallower, and it doesn't care about inner beauty. Candidates were chosen strictly for their physical attractiveness. But in order to not look like a total pig, the list attempted to learn a thing or two about each candidate.

I expect you have some nice, politically correct things to say about each candidate.
Um, suffice it to say that if I ever run for office, I will have to destroy all evidence that this list was ever created.

Why do you use the first-person plural instead of singular?
It makes my unapologetically idiosyncratic choice of candidates seem more legitimate. And it makes it sound like La Soubrette is important enough to have multiple staffers.

Despite the fact that I have read through most of this unilingual post already, I am not terribly fluent in English. Is the list presented in both official languages?
I'm glad you asked. As a matter of fact it is! And it didn't even receive government funding.

Now go check it out.

Post Script on Attack Ads

2008-09-29T02:48:00.000-04:00

My favourite is the "Oh no!" at the end.

Read Pictures for Sad Children!

An open letter to an apathetic elector

2008-09-24T20:07:00.000-04:00

Dear Uncle ____,

My mother tells me that you are contemplating NOT VOTING. I feel a sense of responsibility as a fellow citizen who is equally subject to the powers of the government to be elected to ask you,

WHAT THE HELL?

Did you ever read or see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Do you remember the part at the beginning, where the world gets blown up because nobody launched any complaints or protests to the contrary? I think the comparison to voting is pretty clear. Do you agree with Dion's carbon tax? Are you in favour of reformed child care funding? Are you for tougher mandatory sentences for young offenders? Do you care about drastic cuts to arts funding? If you do not vote, you are basically saying "I do not care about any of these issues," and I know many of them affect you. And if you don't vote, you lose the right to complain about anything the feds do. You will just be handing them all you tax money and saying "Do whatever you feel like with this!"

I know, I know. You think your vote doesn't count. But realistically? The dollar you give to the Red Cross at the Wal-Mart checkout doesn't count. The low-flow toilet you recently installed doesn't count. The grade your daughter gets on her next spelling test won't count. But do you acknowledge any of this? Of course not. That would be way too nihilistic. And the Red Cross would be broke, the world would continue to waste water until there wasn't enough fresh water left, and our kids would all fail elementary school.

However, I have a piece of good news for you. Your vote kind of does count, or at least it doesn't not count as much as usual. You live in a swing riding, where, in the last federal election, the Liberal candidate lost to the Conservative one by a mere 455 votes (source: Wikipedia). Seriously, it is really quite important that you get out there and cast your ballot!

If you are totally disillusioned with all the major parties, at the very least cast a protest vote for the Marijuana or Communist or Family Coalition party. Because no matter who wins or looses on October 14, the most depressing number is going to be the voter turnout rate. Lots of people went to lots of trouble not only to ensure that you would be (mostly) governed by a democratically elected and therefore accountable government, but to ensure that it would be a government devoted entirely to Canadian interests, and not those of the British empire at large. Can't you even pay lip service to them?

Love, Rebecca

***

While we're on the topic, we should discuss how to talk to your parents about voting ... before someone else does.

The following is an actual conversation. My mother is a university-educated woman who reads frequently, can name and summarize every British monarch since the Tudors, and has been known to have arguments about the reformation at the dinner table. And yet, she has trouble figuring out who to vote for.

MOTHER: I don't know who to vote for. I hate the Harper government and I'd vote Liberal, but I like my [Conservative] MP.
ME: Hmm, well, what has your MP done that you like?
MOTHER: Um . . . I don't know.
ME: Well why do you like him then?
MOTHER: He communicates well.
ME: What do you mean he communicates well? You can't name anything he's done!
MOTHER: Yeah but he's always sending flyers to the house.
ME: Um . . . I'm gonna say you should vote Liberal.

Just a reminder. Talk to your parents -- and children, friends, colleagues, professors, senile grandparents, transit seatmates, and gynecologists -- about voting.

The bitches scooped me!

2008-09-24T18:22:00.000-04:00

While I sit here, feverishly working away on my Sexy Candidates list (and I do mean feverishly -- I've caught the nasty cold that's been going around campus, and the Dimetapp is not helping me work), the CBC has scooped me.

Now, they didn't necessarily take the "sexy" angle. Theirs was "candidates under 30". But since "sexy" and "under 30" are often synonymous when it comes to politicians, they scooped me on eight of my twenty-five Sexy Candidates. My only hope is that they didn't do the article in French, so I can at least reach the francophone community first.

You can read the article here, but I'd kind of rather you didn't.

Conservative comedy

2008-09-21T16:18:00.000-04:00

Oh, how dark it is.

Gerry Ritz's "cold cuts" joke may be old news-wise, but I am still getting Facebook invites to join a group calling for his resignation. And seriously, WTF?

I may have an incredibly dark sense of humour, but that's not why Mr. Ritz's joke doesn't bother me. The fact that it bothers so many other people so much is what bothers me. This is a clear case of PC-gone-wild if I ever saw one. I don't think it's a stretch to say that even the families of the victims -- oops, I mean, terminally bacterially challenged individuals -- are going a bit crazy (although I'll concede that the Wayne Easter line was a bit much).

And finally, I've found someone who agrees with me, in a fun tongue-in-cheek kind of way: Tabatha Southey, my new favourite Globe & Mail writer.

"Stephen Harper shouldn't axe anyone for demonstrating what Liberal leader Stéphane Dion calls 'a lack of sensitivity.' That would be like the New Democrats firing someone for smoking pot. Mr. Harper has long had the insensitive vote locked up. No reason for Mr. Dion to keep congratulating him on it."

You can read the full article here: Wait, what if the Conservative Party is just an elaborate, high-concept comedy act?

Election time: attack ad fun

2008-09-12T14:53:00.000-04:00

They say that politics is the second-oldest profession. If that's true, then attack ads must be the oldest form of ad. Back when "politician" was synonymous with "despot", the original attack ads were literal attacks, as in, "Accept my authority or I will attack you with my warriors." But then the agricultural revolution started getting really popular, and things like art and increased literacy meant that just having a bunch of soldiers and a state religion wasn't enough; you had to kind of convince the population at large that you were the right guy to make laws and declare wars and stuff.

I doubt that many elections, or wars of conquest or civil wars or revolutions, have been won by leaders who said, "You know, the guy currently in power is pretty cool. But I might also be pretty cool." No, you have to convince the masses that the guy currently in power is leading them on a path straight to hell, and that if you get in power, they will all become richer, happier, and better-looking. Or, if you are the guy in power, that if you get deposed God will rain down fire from the sky as punishment. Thus, the attack ad was born.

For a while, literacy was awesome for this purpose. You could appeal to voters' intellects to convince them that you were the right one to lead them into costly and sometimes unnecessary wars. Then universal suffrage happened and voter turnout became kind of a big deal; luckily radio and TV were invented shortly thereafter and you didn't have to appeal to voters' intellects anymore. Thank God.

Today (and I mean literally today, because for the purposes of this blog everything else is irrelevant), most political ads contain a combination of attack and promotion. This is the best way to go about it, because undermining your opponent does nothing unless you make yourself look good as well. But not all ads have the same combination. Observe:

The Liberals, perhaps assuming that the last two years of the Conservatives' minority government were attack enough and that Canadians want slow, gradual progress anyway, have run a fairly clean television campaign and mostly base their ads around the big, exciting new Green Shift platform. That's not to say they don't sling their share of mud, though. The Young Liberals, for example, participated in a smear campaign re: the Chuck Cadman affair as well as the In-and-Out Scandal the day after the RCMP raided Tory HQ. And just because they don't air attack ads on TV doesn't mean they don't exist: hi.im.a.liberal.ca.

The NDP and the Bloc have been kind of equally attack-y, although the NDP practically makes criticizing other parties part of their platform (Bob Rae knows what I'm talking about). And this is not necessarily a bad thing; duly noted criticism is part of any healthy democracy. Unfortunately, this is not something on which to build a government (Bob Rae knows what I'm talking about). But their caustically sarcastic New Kind of Strong ad is still a lot of fun. Attack ads can often be caustic, but they are rarely caustically sarcastic.

The Bloc was a little late in rolling out their ad (only just posted today on their website), and it's exactly what you'd expect from a Bloc ad: a mime who is sad that the Québecois don't get enough respect. I cannot fathom why M. Duceppe thinks that Quebeckers deserve "plus de respect" since they get plenty of it as it is - certainly financially! - but if he didn't, he wouldn't have a platform. As anyone who knows me knows, I absolutely adore French Canadians and Québec, but as anyone who has ever come close to mentioning separatism around me knows, don't even get me started. Hey Gilles? Why don't you complain about federal funding to Alberta? And why don't you complain about your culture getting the shaft to the Acadians? Still, the Bloc's chanson de campagne is kind of fun, in the same way that Mes Aïeux's Chanson à boire is fun.

Finally, the most attack-y: the Conservatives. And it's understandable that they be attack-y. When you're the guy in power, it's more about undercutting the other guy than building yourself up. Well, assuming your government is good, anyway. Maybe that's why they released the promote-y ads as well. But it's the promote-y ads I don't really understand. There are two extremes when it comes to evaluating politicians: the American way, and the French way. The American way says that a good politician is "good" in every aspect of his life: he goes to church, he has a wife and 2.5 children, the only time he ever drinks is a glass of red wine once a week for the health benefits, and everything he knows about marijuana cigarettes, he learned from Reefer Madness. You solicit gay sex in an airport bathroom just once, and all of a sudden, you are no longer a good candidate for government. In France, you can be caught sniffing cocaine in a blonde wig and high heels, and even though every man, woman, and child in France will read about it in the papers, if the economy is good you have a reasonable shot at re-election. Canada is somewhere in between these two extremes. Stephen Harper seems to think that we lean much more towards the American way. "Wow, Stephen Harper plays music with his kids? Well, that makes me feel much better about the copyright bill!" Am I the only one who finds it ironic that Stephen is styling himself as a "family man" only two years after he shook his kids' hands on the first day of school? (Say what you will about the triviality of this matter, it is not normal not to hug your elementary-aged children on the first day of school.) Weird promote-y commericals aside, the Conservatives' attack website against Dion, notaleader.ca, is still the most fun attack-related material I've seen since the writ dropped. Admittedly, I am the exact demographic it's targeting -- and it's totally working. Last post, I talked about the fun of "make-your-own-attack-ads". I couldn't find any at that time, but apparently Google failed me, because notaleader.com has one. Unfortunately, they had to infringe some copyrights to create this bit of fun, and a few of the copyright holders (TVO) were unimpressed. Maybe that's why when I tried to access it today, it wouldn't work. I foolishly believed that it was easy to load websites.

Once more, stay tuned for more Election time fun. Next time, how to talk to a friend who refuses to vote.

Edit: A Liberal attack ad!
One finally made it to the televised arena after all, but since no one actually watches TV anymore, you can see it here: Harpernomics ad
This changes the entire spectrum I so cleverly photoshopped up there. I'm not going to re-photoshop it though. I have two papers and a magazine article to write in the next 72 hours!

Election time!

2008-09-09T22:33:00.000-04:00

Everybody loves election time!

Although I confess that my sample group is skewed, as the majority of the people I hang out with on a day-to-day basis are from the Political Science and other politically-oriented departments at my university (politically affiliated boys totally put out). We must also keep in mind the number of taxpayers who are unimpressed with another multi-million-dollar election to pay for. We must keep in mind the members of the electorate for whom the last general election was practically last week, not to mention those in Ontario who are scratching their heads and thinking "Didn't we just have an election last October?"

There is a disturbing number of registered voters who engage in a number of disturbing practises, including but not limited to:

Voting for a party because it's the same party for which they've voted for the last 65 years
Voting for a party because it's the party their parents vote for
Choosing a party to vote for using methods not much more sophisticated than closing their eyes, waving their arms around, and placing an X wherever the pencil lands
Ignoring the 18,000 sets of verbal instructions and diagrams, and marking the ballot improperly
Not voting

But sometimes I wonder if we can really blame them (for all but marking the ballot improperly). In a perfect world, everyone would act like they belonged to the Political Science department, and general elections would be as exciting as the Olympics, the playoffs, and New Year's Eve put together. On election night, everyone would get together at the bar or their friend's place to gather round the TV and trade projections as to the outcomes while the CBC played the Election Night in Canada theme (too soon?). Sadly, this is not the case. Much to my bafflement, people don't discuss politics around the dinner table or water cooler with the same frequency that we do in the campus bar. Or at least, not analytically. For many, many people, general elections are just another nuisance that hog media attention for a month and add another errand to the to-do list on E-day. And let's be honest: your vote, all by its lonesome self, doesn't actually count. But, like the 7 cents of change you drop in the Tim Horton's charity box, it's part of a greater whole.

So, putting all that depressing cynicism behind us, let's discuss the exciting parts of the general election!

Campaigning is fun, and not just for the free food. Interesting people campaign. If someone is campaigning, or even just showing up at a rally or debate, it is indicative of the fact that they care. How much is open to debate, but at least enough to drag themselves on down. Youth events have the palpable taste of youthful enthusiasm, making them feel like a smarter, cooler frosh week where you don't have to hide your alcohol. The conversations might not be objective, but with a little prompting, they can certainly be analytical. Best of all, you don't need to prove your party allegiance in order to go campaigning, which means that theoretically you can campaign for as many parties as you like. Be careful though, lest you be accused of being an ideology whore.

Speculation is fun. The conversations at the campus pub get more heated and urgent. And you learn things, sometimes more than you did in the lecture you just left. For example, last provincial election, I learned that there are blue Tories under the age of twenty-five.

Attack ads are fun. So far, my favourite is the wickedly clever DionBook and Excuse Generator from the Conservatives' notaleader.ca. During the 2004 provincial election, the Star ran a "create-your-own-attack-ad" Madlib, because they were just so darned easy to satirize. I can't find it anymore, so maybe I'll make one of my own. Keep reading!

Working as a poll official is fun. There are the obvious perks (money, a power trip when you get to count up the ballots, prestige and respect in the form of a big yellow sticker, all the free pens you can steal), but the sense of excitement and satisfaction gained from knowing you helped to uphold democracy is, well . . . almost as cool as the free pens.

There is no doubt going to be much more about the election over the next month. Keep reading for dissertations on Harper's soulless stare, Dion's wicked English, Layton's critical chops, why Elizabeth May can't (but should be able to) catch a break, and Gilles Duceppe's beautiful blue eyes - plus why opinion polls are important, why I withdrew my offer to run for the Greens in Durham, and why you should talk to your parents about how they'll be voting before somebody else does.

September Reading

2008-09-05T22:04:00.000-04:00

Don't you just love the first day of school?!

It's the biggest thrill of my life.

Now that it's back-to-school time, the scholars among us are opening our wallets and dumping the contents of our bank accounts at the bookstores. And all of a sudden, we have about 84,000 hours a week more of reading to do than we did in the summer (a typical week only contains 168 hours, so you can imagine how distressing this is).

Those among us who are not scholars are laughing. Scholars, take heart. We'll SEE who's laughing at tax time.

My little sis is partaking of higher education for the very first time this September. And, knowing full well (but perhaps not realizing) that she would be doing much, much more reading than she is used to in the coming months, she asked me, her older, wiser, English-major sister, for books. That's right, she wanted to carve out some time to read the classics. In an attempt not to scare her off right away, I picked out two easy ones for her: Dracula and The Great Gatsby. Also, they were on sale, which in my opinion made them even better choices.

Couldn't we each carve out a little time to make ourselves a little better-read? It might not improve our chances of getting a job or make us any healthier, but it might make us slightly more interesting at parties, thereby increasing our chances of getting laid. So, I present to you my recommendation for your September reading list.

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

You may have heard things about the Canterbury Tales which have scared you off. You may have even had a look at the original, which scared you so off that you've never considered reading it in its entirety. The thing about the Canterbury Tales is that it was written in Middle English (which bears no relation to Middle Earth). Some people mistakenly think that The Canterbury Tales is "Old English". Other people mistakenly think Shakespeare is Old English. What is actually Old English is Beowulf, and Old English is in fact so far removed from Modern English that it probably bears a closer resemblance to German, with a little Scottish thrown in. Shakespeare is Modern English. The Canterbury Tales is Middle English. Now you know.

Middle English, while still vaguely comprehensible to the Modern English reader, is rather hard to read through comfortably -- not unlike Trainspotting. For example:

When that Aprille with his showres swoot
The drought of Marche hath percèd to the root,
And bathèd every veyn in suche licoúr,
From which vertu engendred is the flour;
When Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Enspirèd hath in every holte and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe course runne,
And smale fowles maken melodie,
That slepen al the night with open eye,
So pricketh them natúre in their coráges:—
Thenne longen folk to go on pilgrimàges,
And palmers for to seeken strange strandes,
To distant seintes, known in sondry landes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Canturbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seeke,
That them hath holpen when that they were weeke.

- The General Prologue

As you may have noticed, this was in the 1380s, before Webster or the Oxford University Press, and people were not particularly concerned with standardized spelling. Also, pronunciation was a little different from what it is today. All this is enough to discourage the casual classics reader who is just trying to get laid. I mean, what the heck are "swoot showres"? Where is Engelond, anyway? And who is this blissful martyr fellow, if that's what he really is? (He's Thomas à Beckett. Look it up on Wikipedia.)

Modern-day Chaucer lovers feel your pain. And for that reason, translated versions of the Canterbury Tales are available! I just picked up a sweet illustrated hardcover copy at Chapters on sale for $20, but if you aren't quite as lucky, or aren't sure you'll like it $20 worth, you can find it in numerous places online, including here: http://www.librarius.com/cantales.htm. And of course, like any true classic, you can always check it out on Wikipedia or Sparknotes.

I should point out that I am kind of an expert on the Canterbury Tales, having written no less than three academic essays on the topic. Well, okay, two essays and a short paper. On the Wife of Bath. Well, how many papers have YOU written dealing with the Canterbury Tales, hmm?

The Canterbury Tales is a classic, even despite the fact that Chaucer never actually got around to finishing it before he died. And here's something people rarely think of when they think of the Canterbury Tales: this stuff is comedy. It has all the sex, toilet humour, clever satire, witticisms, petty sqaubbles, and masterful storytelling of anything you'll see on TV this fall (and likely a great deal more of the masterful storytelling). Popular favourites are the toilet-humour Miller's Tale, the awesomely-unironically-racist Prioress's Tale, and the feministic Wife of Bath's Tale. But there are a few lesser-known gems, such as the epic Knight's Tale and the suprise-ending Shipman's Tale, of which Caryl Churchill must have been thinking when she said "You can't separate fucking and economics."

I say that the Prioress's Tale is "awesomely-unironically-racist" in the same way that Uncle Remus singing "Zip-a-dee-do-dah" in the Disney "classic" Song of the South is awesomely-unironically racist (see what I'm talking about here - number 2). It's so bad it's good. It's completely unaware of its own over-the-top hilarity, kind of like Micheal on The Office. As for the Wife of Bath's tale being feminist, well, most people will agree with me - but don't tell my TA from ENGL 2300 I said that, because she wrote a long-ass comment about calling a Chaucer character a "feminist" being an anarchronism on my first paper. If you're into the whole 1380s Chaucer-led feminism thing, you'll also enjoy the Franklin's Tale, as well as the Merchant's Tale if you're also into sublte satire. Hooray for January-May romances!

In summary, think of the Canterbury Tales as Aesop's Fabels meets South Park, except written during the reign of Henry IV. Before Joan of Arc. If nothing else, read it to illustrate the point that people have had basically the exact same sense of humour since forever.

All-natural = safe. Not.

2008-08-12T00:02:00.000-04:00

Ah, the voice of reason. How sweet it sounds -- or in this case, reads.

Canada.com ran an article today which introduced the Environmental Working Group (EWG)'s new list of which fruits and veggies contain the highest number of pesticides. This seems like a good public information endeavor, no? Their project presents a bunch of fruit and veg, listing their "pesticide loads". Onions, for example, have a "pesticide load" of 1, whereas peaches have a "pesticide load" of 100. Wait a second, EWG, what exactly is a "pesticide load"? My first warning flag went up when there were no defined units. Does "100" mean my peach got a slightly-bigger-than-normal spray of a mild compound, or was it dunked in cancer-causing toxic sludge?

The article later clarifies that it simply means that there are 100 times the pesticides on your typical peach than on your typical onion. In other words, a "pesticide load" is an arbitrary unit of measurement which is next to meaningless. The fine author of the article in question goes on to interview a scientist who asserts the importance of real units of measurements to determine whether there actually is a risk associated with eating commercially-grown peaches.

"Just because something is there doesn't mean that it's doing anything. Amounts matter. Where is the information that the level of pesticide contamination that they're talking about has any relevance to humans? Where is any study that has shown that those amounts have any negative effect?"

- Joe Schwarcz, the director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society

Now, I must confess to being a little more informed and a little more biased than average on the topic of "chemicals", or at least as they relate to the chemical-versus-all-natural debate. I am the daughter of one pharmacist and the niece of another. I was given medication for most of the ailments I encountered as a child, and have been subjected to many pharmacological debates over family dinners. Thanks to the information I have absorbed from my mother, I know which kinds of OTC medications can be mixed with alcohol and with one another; I know which medications are okay to take before bed and which ones will keep you awake; I know the generic names of more drugs than I can count on my fingers. I can even identify the indications of several drugs based on their suffixes! As if this weren't enough, I have suffered from migraines since the age of six. I am pretty convinced: chemicals are my friend.

My mother, while being an advocate of dugs, is also a strong advocate of common sense. Whenever anyone (usually my hippie grandmother) trots out a new, barely-supported claim that too much such-and-such is bad for you, my mother will reply, "Yeah, well, too much water is bad for you!" She isn't making this up; water poisoning occurs when you drink way too much water way too fast, and your body's chemistry is altered due to the overwhelming amount of water compared to sodium and electrolytes in your system. Apparently, your brain is not a big fan of this kind of thing. In any case, you have little to worry about; you need to chug around 10 litres of water in the span of a few minutes, without eating or drinking anything else. And something tells me that the average person will probably feel pretty darned uncomfortable before they hit seven.
In another example of quantity over chemical, my mother has advised me more than once that I should never, under any circumstances, eat a polar bear's liver. Vitamin A, while crucial to good health in moderate doses, is present in such great quantities in polar bears' livers that to eat one would be fatal. Now you know.

This, however, does not mean that my mother the druggist nor I shun "natural" or herbal remedies. My mother always supplements the drugs she recommends with non-medication advice: cold clothes and dark rooms for headaches, heating pads for cramps, better diet for constipation. And she takes herbal remedies herself. Until ColdFX appeared on the market, there was always a steady supply of echinachea on hand for any colds or flus that might crop up in our family. (The reason we switched to ColdFX is that it can be safely taken all winter long; echinachea merely stimulates your immune system to go double-time, and if taken for more than a couple weeks, can result in "burn out".) I myself have conducted extensive research which suggests that a certain herbal remedy, when smoked, is an excellent painkiller. But please don't tell my mother that.

Still not convinced? Then please stop reading my blog, I only want smart people here. Nah, just kidding, you can stay. Provided you look at the following chart. This information doesn't really require a chart, but charts are kind of exciting.

	All-Natural	Synthetic, or "chemical"
Safe and/or beneficial	Aloe vera, evening primrose oil, chamomile	ibuprofen, lidocaine, clotrimazole
Unsafe and/or highly poisonous	Poison ivy, hemlock, holly ... asbestos, mercury, perchlorates ...	Bisphenol-A, gasoline, phthalates
Not necessarily safe, but a lot of fun	Marijuana, magic mushrooms	MDMA, LSD

I would like to add some weighty words in support of chemicals to beef up my argument, and thus I turn to Mr. Dave Barry:

"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer."

On one final note, I would like to point out that I have somewhat above-average knowledge regarding peaches and pesticides as well. The summer after I graduated high school, I worked picking fruit for a sweet old Dutch couple. They grew, among other things, currents, raspberries, and peaches.
Now, picking fruit is not an intellectually demanding activity, and thus you tend to converse with those around you as you pick. The wife half of the sweet old Dutch couple once told us a story about a friend, another fruit farmer (peaches are rather a popular crop in the Niagara region) whose peach-growing neighbour elected to go "all-natural" and forego the use of pesticides on his peaches. The peaches became so gross and pesticide-infested that the friend-farmer was forced to secretly spray a row of the neighbour-farmer's peaches when he did his own, to prevent his own crop from getting nastied up. So really, we need to assess chemicals on a risk basis: would you rather have slightly pesticide-y peaches, or gross, wormy peaches?

Amusing news: August 8 2008

2008-08-08T23:25:00.000-04:00

One of my favourite quotations in the news this past week (or however long I've been saving it up; I've been so busy working on my upcoming website, traveling to Québec City, and dates, I've not had a chance to update for a while) came from a Canada.com article titled "Women on antidepressants benefit from Viagara". This could be good news, except that there is a small problem with marketing:

"I'm going to get myself in big trouble for saying this, (but) I'm not sure women are willing to pay eight bucks a pop to have sex," says Croft, medical director of the San Antonio Psychiatric Research Centre. "Guys are."

Another great news article came from National Geographic. It seems humans aren't the only race dealing with baby mamas and teen sex, although at least Tasmanian Devils have a good excuse - it seems a widespread cancerous facial tumor is reducing their life expectancy, necessitating popping out baby devils earlier.

But my (dubious) favourite was the recent story about the crazy Phelps family from Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas going to protest Tim Mclean's funeral. For those of you that haven't been following along, Tim Mclean was killed in a graphic, gory bus murder that reads more like a midlist horror film than a news story. Because I am a total voyeur for sensationalist news, I did a bit of back-reading on WBC and the Phelps family, and I am not really sure whether or not they're serious. (Check out godhatesfags.com to see what I mean.) If they are, I am forced to conclude that they've spent so much time being right-wing nut jobs and telling the world how much God hates it that they haven't had time to get through the last of the minor prophets and into the New Testament parts of their Bibles. Man, are they going to be embarrassed when they find out that God gave up on the whole "wrathful" thing and decided to go "loving"! I watched several YouTube interviews, and not once did anyone mention the word "Jesus". In fact, Shirley Phelps-Roper actually told Tyra Banks that the way to get to heaven was, essentially, being a good person (ie not being a "fag" or a "fag enabler"). Clear proof that she got stuck in Leviticus and didn't make it to the new testament.

In closing, a jab at both WBC and Fox news: this was my favourite Phelps-Roper interview. Once again, Fox presents us with fine investigative journalism. Tough it out through the nauseating patriotism to the interview with Shirley PR, and you'll see what I mean.

(I am not certain of the exact date of airing, although the date it was added to YouTube was June 14, 2006).

Death of a Politician

2008-07-08T21:36:00.000-04:00

There is a young politician.

For the past several years, the incumbent party has been letting their government slide. Inflation is out of control, and there is no middle class. The opposition party is gaining ground. The people are ready - desperate, in fact - for a change. And from one of the poorest neighbourhoods comes this guy. He represents the opposition. He's promising the people of his city better health care, better infrastructure, more government accountability. He's a youth activist. He teaches tired, jaded people, disillusioned with their government, about their rights. He's young and charismatic and well-liked. He is a promising young individual, exemplary, a figurehead and a symbol for his party, for change.

Due to the recent election, he has been on the road a lot. He is exhausted. He hasn't seen his wife and two young children for weeks. His wife misses him. She begs him to please come home, to see her, to see his family, just for one night. He agrees.
That night, he visits with his family. He sees all his extended relatives, as well as neighbours and friends. They believe in him; they believe that he can change things and make a better country for all of them. He is happy to be able to see his kids. He hopes they will grow up with the same idealism and spirit, but in a country with a higher standard of living, with greater freedom. He hopes they will not spend their lives in a slum like this one. He makes love to his wife that night, and sleeps soundly, relishing the chance to rest.

The next morning, his wife wakes up early. She knows he needs to sleep, so she quietly gets the children ready for school. She is cooking breakfast for them when there is a knock at the door.
Several big men are standing outside her door. Some of them are armed, with huge black guns. They ask to see her husband. The sight of the guns frightens her, and so, trying to keep the panic out of her voice, she calls to her husband in the bedroom, telling him that someone is asking for him. He sleepily replies that he needs more rest, and tells her to ask them to come back later. Still scared, but putting on a brave face, she politely but firmly asks them if they can please come back later. They push her away from the door violently, knocking her down, and force their way into the house.
Now she is terrified. She gathers her children in the kitchen, tells them to be quiet and not to move. She is terribly afraid for her husband, but even more afraid for herself and for her children - she cannot hope to stand up to several armed men. The children are scared and confused and obey their mother out of fear and shock.
In the bedroom, the thugs beat the young politician.
His nose is broken. Blood is running down his face and over his lips and chin. His limbs are bruised. He is hit so many times that his head starts getting fuzzy. Finally, the men drag him out of the bedroom. He is wearing nothing but a pair of underwear. He sees his terrified family as he is being dragged through the kitchen, but he can't say or do anything.
The men throw him into the back seat of a truck. He screams, but nothing changes. His wife and children are standing at the front door, shocked and horrified as they watch the events unfold. One of the thugs stuffs a dirty rag into his mouth, and another wraps something around his neck and tightens. The politician can't breathe. He's panicking. He knows he's going to die. He sees his family through the tiny window, and then everything goes black.

His wife and children watch the truck pull away from the house.
Weeks later, his body is discovered, by accident, in a morgue several cities away. His face is so badly smashed that identification is difficult.

If this happened, why didn't anyone do anything about it?
Why were the thugs not tracked down and arrested?
Why didn't it make headlines?

Because it happened in Zimbabwe.
www.blueridgenow.com/article/20080622/ZNYT03/806220405/1042/NEWS/ZNYT03/Assassins_in_Zimbabwe_Aim_at_the_Grass_Roots
That promising young man, 30 years old with a young family, was just another victim of the violence in Africa which has become so characteristic that we barely even think about it anymore.