Ten facts and opinions about Canada

Have a happy Canada Day. Or else.

1. If you were to lay the history of planet earth from its frothy formation to the present day on a timeline representing the 7,300 kilometres from Canada’s West to East coasts, Canada’s birthday - July 1, 1867 - would be about 10 centimetres from the Newfoundland shore.
2. I’ve never measured this for accuracy.
3. It’s easier to cycle across the country from West to East, but more rewarding to go East to West. Why? You always have the best part to look forward to.
4. Someday I want to try to do this.
5. To Albertans, BC is short for Beyond Canada.
6. Two Canadians meet an American in a bar. The American says to them: it’s cold up here. The Canadians say: Sure is.
7. That counts as humour in Edmonton.
8. Some claim that Brian Mulroney was Canada’s worst post-war Prime Minister, others say that title belongs to Pierre Elliott Trudeau.  Discuss.
9. It is a little-known Canadian fact that Jesus was not born anywhere near Victoria, BC because they could locate neither three wise men nor a virgin.
10. It’s often said that Canadians define themselves by what they are not: they aren’t Americans.  True, but we’re more like Americans than we like to admit.  We also have social problems, toxic waste dumps and looming environmental catastrophes, serial killers and wannabe rightwing talkshow dingbats. 

And now it’s time to say a special hello to all you hospital patients and shut-ins, those who can’t get out to the  game, hope you’ve enjoyed this Canada Day broadcast on CKNW.  

For more Canadian content, visit

Raincoaster

Beaverboosh

Mausi

Azahar

Expatraveler

Wandering Coyote

timethief 

Canadada

Romi41

Brown Amazon

Zoom (aka knitnut)

Rositta

plus that unforgettable K-Tel advertisement staple: and many more.

Obama smear campaigner Larry Sinclair arrested after press conference

My first plunge into the frothy cesspool of US politics the other day resulted in a rude reminder of just what lurks out there, so at the risk of once again having my entire post swallowed up and regurgitated with my name changed on the right-wing drivel and splog site Free Republic, it’s time to take a look at what happened yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

That’s where Larry Sinclair, perpetrator of one of the most vile smear campaigns ever thrown at a US presidential candidate, got his chance to blow 3000 bucks and state his case before an invited press.

Well, turns out the man with the long criminal record and outstanding warrant was arrested shortly after and is now in custody.

So far the mainstream press has ignored his claims, including this recent development.  Even Fox Spews - Fare for the Unbalanced - has ignored the guy.

Granted, the Globe - no not the Boston Globe, the Alien Headhunters Kidnapped Pam Anderson’s Unborn Teenage Love Child supermarket checkout Globe - ran something on him a few months back, but from the wires, the mainstream newspapers, tv stations, websites?  Nada.

Given that there is nothing to substantiate his claims, is there any other reaction more appropriate?

I think there is.  Publish!  Get him on Larry King!  Get him on Jon Stewart!  Tell the world!  Let everyone get a good, long look at the level to which the enemies of a good man are willing to sink in order to draw attention to themselves and maybe even make a few bucks in the process.

It’s like Scientology.  The more you read about it, the more you realise not only how crazy the inventor must have been, but how deluded his followers are.

 

Too bad we can’t just ignore the Larry Sinclair smear campaign against Barack Obama

Mark June 18th on your calendar.
That’s the day the National Press Club in Washington, DC will give centre stage to the man behind one of the sleaziest smear campaigns ever perpetrated against a US presidential candidate.
Larry Sinclair has for months been blathering on his blog and in a YouTube video that Barack Obama has a dark secret his supporters wish would just go away. He says Obama likes to sleep with men.
Difficult to do, but in case you missed it, here’s a little rundown of his claims:

• Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair had sex in a Chicago hotel room in late 1999 while Sinclair was on parole.
• Barack Obama supplied the cocaine and crack cocaine he smoked while Sinclair performed oral sex on Obama
• Donald Young, the gay choir director at Obama’s former church, contacted Sinclair in December, 2007 shortly before Young was murdered. Sinclair says Young told him he had a similar relationship with Obama.
• Sinclair now claims to be getting death threats; cancel the press conference or get shot.

With the possible exception of The Cleveland Leader which points out Sinclair failed a polygraph test, the mainstream press has completely ignored him. So has Barack Obama, but leading up to Wednesday’s presser and beyond, you have to wonder for how long he can hold off.

There have been so many rumours circulating about Obama and his wife - Obama’s a Muslim, Obama’s book contains racist remarks, Obama’s hiding his birth certificate, Obama’s wife has been seen on video calling people “whitey” from a church pulpit, and other trash - they’ve set up a website to fight the smears. They even ask readers to send in new rumours they’ve heard so they can address them.

What’s notable is they still have yet to mention Sinclair. But with more than 1.25 million hits on the Sinclair blog and hundreds of thousands having seen the YouTube video, they can’t deny nobody’s heard of it.

A number of prominent liberal blogs have said the National Press Club is simply feeding the troll by taking Sinclair’s 3000 bucks and booking his room. Thousands have already signed a petition asking the NPC to cancel the event.

I hope the press conference is held and I hope Obama does get around to Sinclair. There’s a risk that the ranks of Sinclair’s deluded fans and followers will grow in giving this guy the limelight, but if you’ve set up a website to counter rumours and allegations only to ignore the worst, it will be viewed as running away from the issue or pretending it doesn’t exist. Obama has to defend himself.

Besides, Sinclair may be renting a pulpit and floor space and hoping the cameras and scribblers show up, but he must know that going to the press is a double-edged sword. If they do decide to run with this story, playing up Sinclair’s dubious past is the most likely angle they’ll take. Sinclair’s police wanted poster on charges of theft and forgery will surely be included.

But if the world does turn out to be flat and Sinclair’s allegations somehow prove to be true, Obama should be shunned and banished from the stage forever, but not for taking drugs and having gay sex. What country on earth would want to have as its leader someone with such horrible taste? Have you watched that video? Surely if Obama was bent in that direction and could have his pick of lovers and rent boys, he could do one hell of a lot better than Larry Sinclair.

Asking questions of beauty in Paris, city of women

Back in early February after our long weekend in London, I mentioned that we were headed to Paris in the Spring. A commenter who is also a poet pointed out that London is usually seen as a man’s city, Paris a woman’s, and that he was interested in seeing my take on Paris as opposed to London.

In the meantime - a week or so before we left - A Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris was published. Written by the French foreign minister’s speech-writer, it caused a bit of a stir in feminist circles because it points out where to find the city’s most beautiful women according to age, manner of dress, income level, where you might catch a good view up their skirts, where to find the best-looking legs…

That shred of the lingering adolescent in me was tempted to grab a copy as soon as we got there as a bit of a lark, maybe check out a quarter or two to see if any of it had any truth, but I’m glad I didn’t. Around noon on our first day there, I’d already come to the conclusion it must be more joke novelty than guide.

Unless you’re blind or have a fetish for the morbidly obese, it’s impossible to walk more than a block or two in Paris without coming across a woman who is worth much more than a passing glance. It is full of well-dressed, attractive women of every age and race.

So it’s perhaps fitting that a city whose reputation celebrates the ultimate in feminine beauty should be hosting an exhibition entitled Femmes du Monde - The World’s Women.

The artist Titouan Lamazou spent six years collecting photographs of women in some of the most remote recesses of the planet, using those photos as a basis for portraiture in pencil, charcoal, pastel and watercolour.

Like the life-sized photo of a Mongolian woman sitting in her yurt, the images tempt you to step in and learn more about who they are, what their lives are like, where they’ve come from and where they’re going. A Sao Paolo garbage-picker who became a fashion model, a lone female UN soldier on an African peacekeeping mission, an Australian Aboriginal artist, refugees, factory workers, strippers, prostitutes… All are given equal weight with not a whiff of judgment on their choices or maudlin pity of their circumstances.

Saving the best for last, the exhibition hall terminates at where the concepts of idealised feminine beauty, freedom of choice and the market collide: our mania for plastic surgery and the phenomenon of the Real Doll - made-to-order life-sized male masturbation aides which sell for $8,000 US apiece. If you’ve never heard of the Real Doll, I suggest you click on that link.

On one side, a collection of photos of about 20 women - some pre- and post-op - from Calí, Colombia, the South American capital of surgical silicone.

On the other, a wall-sized photograph of the inside of Real Doll’s factory, their lifeless, spread-legged, open-mouthed female effigies suspended on a curving track along the ceiling like so much quartered beef at a slaughterhouse.

The best for last because the questions are almost screaming at you: Is the Real Doll the pinnacle of beauty that every woman should strive for no matter what the cost and no matter what the risk to her health? Or are the silicone breasts, suctioned hips and trimmed-back labia these women carry around the ideal for Real Doll? Which is the model for which?

This photo doesn’t do the room justice and is actually a little blurry because I took it furtively. But if you’re headed to Paris and would like to see the exhibition in person, it is in the Musée de l’Homme just a stone’s throw across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Due to popular demand it has been extended several times.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Into the ghosts of 1968

I’ve never been one to hit the streets with enough guts and grit to throw paving stones and firebombs, overturn cars and land in jail for a night or two.

Not a rebel, about the only thing I ever did to resist the deep-channel path my parents had laid out before me - of course you’ll go on to university - was to say Fuck It one day in Spring 1980, use the money I’d earned over the Winter to buy a backpack, a ticket to London, Let’s Go Europe and a Eurail pass, putting off for the second year in a row a university program I had no interest in continuing.

Arriving home a year later to begin a different program, I soon got restless again and started looking for a way to get back to Europe. Since I was now majoring in French, it made sense to go to France to learn it there for a year.

By the time I arrived in Grenoble in 1982, the flame and fury of the May 1968 Paris riots were already ancient history. Landing in the wrong place at the wrong time, this is about all the mischief in France I ever got up to:

When my wife and I get to Paris in a few days for a week of revisiting old friends, old haunts and old memories, it will be tempting to wander down a street or two which 40 years before was barricaded with burning cars and strewn with debris, but I doubt we’ll actually do so.

Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Chicago, Paris, Prague: I started paying attention to the news in 1968 after taking over my brother’s Vancouver Sun paper route. I was amazed to learn how the world outside our quiet, isolated little burg dug out of a corner of a still-undiscovered fjord on the West Coast of Canada could be roiling in such chaos, but I was only eight years old and too young to grasp much of anything, especially why the world was going through what it was.

Just an object of derision to my brothers’ friends, one of whom pointed and laughed at me from the back of a car one day and said: he still thinks his prick’s just for pissing!

Vive la révolution? Vive l’amour!

I can’t wait. Did I mention it’s going to be just the two of us?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

ipod mini discovery stuns archaeologists

This Definitely Not the Daily News special report is dedicated to Azahar of casa az fame, who is today celebrating the start of her third year of blogging and who a few weeks back in the midst of a tech consumption frenzy stopped to ask me, “What’s an iPod mini?”

by Elmer Schmedlapp
Seattle (DNTN) A team of archaeologists is attempting to decipher the contents of a recently discovered iPod mini to see if knowledge contained on the ancient device can give scientists insights into lost technologies and long-forgotten music listening practices.

The mini, which apparently fell behind the bookshelf of Walla Walla, Washington resident Wanda Woodsworth while Woodsworth was out walking one wet Wednesday in winter, 2005, had been given up for lost ever since.

Woodsworth recovered the long-dead Apple product last week while moving furniture.

“It had been so long, I didn’t recognise it for what it was at first” said Wordsworth, “so I phoned the university. They got really excited, told me not to touch it until experts could identify it, then evaluate its contents. “

The mini was a sleek, brushed-metal device which first appeard in January, 2004. It was suddenly pulled from the market 20 months later by iPod maker Apple because its relatively small 4 or 6GB size and miniature hard drive storage system was deemed “so last Thursday” by a bunch of 20-something shitheads sitting around a table at Silicon Valley focus group session.

“It was like, meh, whatever, get rid of it, you know?” said Charles “Chuck” Biscuits, a group member. “We thought, hey, like, you know. Yeah.”

Apple abandoned the mini barely six months after releasing a second-generation model amid cries of protest from Apple store salespeople, who this reporter can assure you once told him the mini was the best iPod ever produced.

“It was such a perfect design, easy to read display, great heft to it in the palm of your hand,” said Apple store owner Filbert McNutt. “Sure their battery life sucked, but if it died, you still had one great-looking paperweight. We were selling them so fast, we couldn’t stock ‘em, and then - Bang! Gone. I forget what they even looked like.”

One scientist at the university lab where the mini is being dissected said her team is excited at what they might find on the ancient personal audio player.

“The world has just so moved on since 2004,” said researcher Marla Baverstock. “To think that the ancients were actually willing to pay good money for iPods with monochrome displays, no video capability, and a spinning hard drive! How utterly desperate those times must have been.”

Cultural anthropologists are also looking forward to analysing the song selection stored on the mini’s drive. They say it’s an artefact which will give clues as to how the world might have been enjoying some down time while contemplating the horror of another four years of the George W. Bush administration.

“It was a unique time for music, pop culture, and world history in general,” said ET cultural and sexual deviations beat reporter Adda Dictomy.

“The number of people with a close-up view of Britney Spears’ and Paris Hilton’s crotch was still in the low four figures instead of the billions now thanks to the Internet, Anna Nicole Smith was still trying to convince everybody that her years of wiping the bum of a billionaire 70 years her senior was out of sheer love, SUV drivers were bitching about gas prices half the level they’re at now and people living in trailer parks and working at Burger King were being flim-flammed into half-million dollar mortgages so they could live in their dream home for a few months, then have it pulled out from under them.

Gosh, those were the days.”

© 2008 lettershometoyou

How to make every day a car-free earth day

One of the big things with this year’s Earth Day is going car-free and finding other ways of getting people to wean themselves away from the oil-drunk vampire which is our modern economy.

Not that labeling one day per year in honour of the planet we live on is going to change attitudes or the misguided policies which lock most of us into the most inefficient mode of transport.

Change has to come on a personal level. If you really want to do something that counts, you have to vote with your feet, and the best way to do that is to stick both of them on pedals and get moving.

It’s really not that hard to do.

All you have to do is buy a bike, seven pairs of bike shorts, three pairs of bike gloves, two pairs of bike shoes, a pair of bike paniers, a water bottle, helmet, front and back lights and a small tool kit and you’re on your way. For an average commuter, that means for the price of a year or two worth of gas you can be cycling to work for the next five or ten years almost for free.

It won’t be easy. Most drivers are cool but there is a solid base of jerks out there waiting to honk their horns and scream at you for the slightest perceived provocation, so be prepared to turn the other cheek a lot. I think they hate the fact you get to work quicker than they do and pay no taxes, but I could be wrong.

The weather’s improving and on nice days the sun will warm your face as you discover the freedom of not having to sit in traffic jams, but come late fall and winter, you’ll get out of bed and shake your head thinking: there’s no way in hell I’m going to bike through that and arrive soaking wet to work.

Well, I do it all year round and sometimes arrive at the office drenched to the bone, but it’s really no big deal.

Before you leave, carefully roll up the clothes you plan to wear so they won’t wrinkle too much, stick them along with a decent towel in a sturdy plastic bag and carry it all with you in one of the paniers. Shoes go in a separate bag. Carry an extra t-shirt, bike shorts and socks for the ride home in case your stuff doesn’t dry during the day, and you can at least start the ride home again with clean and dry cycling clothes.

Our family does own one car. Based on the the city mileage it gets and current gas prices in Germany I save around €35 a month on gas alone by riding a total of 12km to the office and back every workday. If it’s true what they say that an average car costs 50 cents per km once you add in all the other costs such as annual registration tax, maintenance, insurance and the like, I’m saving about €125 a month, or €1600 a year. Wow, more than €10,000 over the past eight years. Not bad.

But beyond the financial, it’s how I feel when I arrive in the morning that keeps me on the bike through all types of wind and weather. On rare occasions when I absolutely have to drive because I’m running an errand after work, I have a lousy day. Why? Not because I’m expecting it to be so, it’s just that the pedal to work in the morning wakes me up and gets the blood moving more than three cups of coffee ever could, and the ride back home again squeezes out any stress I might have built up over the day.

But I won’t advise you to cycle to save the planet. I forget where I read this or I’d provide the link, but apparently those who commute to work by bicycle benefit so much from the exercise, they add an average of nine years onto their lives compared to their car-bound cousins.

That means that instead of kicking the bucket on cue, I’ll be hanging around another nine years. So simply by living in one of the world’s most highly industrialised societies that much longer, I’ll be consuming the equivalent of as many of the earth’s resources as I’ll have saved in all my years of bike commuting.

Piss on it. I’m going SUV shopping.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Former US Attorney general Ashcroft has heart attack in Hamburg

We have once again roused our reporter out of hibernation for another Definitely Not the Daily News world exclusive.

By Kathy Kitzler

Hamburg (DNTN) Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft has suffered what appears to be a heart attack while on a personal visit to the northern German port city of Hamburg.

Ashcroft, whose brilliant career at the US Justice Department included having a statue’s naked boobs covered up so he wouldn’t be photographed in front of it at press conferences, keeled over just as he was about to enter the tropical aquarium exhibit at Hamburg’s zoo.

“There’s this funny-looking house-like thingy outside the entrance with all this carved wood and stuff,” said a family friend. “John’s a little short-sighted, so he got up on tippy-toes to get a closer look. Poor bastard had a seizure right on the spot.”

The temple was hand-made in Nepal using ancient woodcarving techniques. It is dedicated to Lord Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism.

“That Cheever guy must have been one sick and depraved bastard as well,” said a weakened Ashcroft in a telephone interview from his hospital room, adding he thought the temple’s location couldn’t be worse.

“Imagine putting full-colour carvings of people engaged in such disgusting and immoral acts right in plain view at the entrance to a zoo, right where all those kiddies walk by!

What the hell is wrong with German people, anyway?“

The temple has been standing for nearly five years at the entrance to Hagenbeck’s, famous for being the first zoo in the world to come up with the idea of displaying animals in natural settings rather than cages.

Witnesses say they never noticed anything unusual about the building until the Ashcroft incident.

“It’s a good thing he wasn’t watching the boob tube,” said one 10-year-old zoo visitor. “You see this sort of thing on TV all the time here.”

Antipodean reaction to Ashcroft’s apparent angina attack was swift and decisive.

“That’s it, I’m headed to Hamburg,” said one well-known Australian nurse and blogger, adjusting her corset while logging on to a travel website. “I just love all those cute little figurines and stuff. Do you think they’d let me make a few plaster casts?”

© 2008 lettershometoyou