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The Old Country

The Old Country

Stompin' Tom Connors

Canadian legend. Gone, but not forgotten.

Maple Leaf in Snow

News from the Old Country

While I was away on a brief holiday earlier this week there was an election in Canada. After several years of minority governments, my countrymen have decided to give the Conservative Party a majority. Outsiders may see this as a swing to the right in Canadian politics, and in a relative sense I suppose it is. More objectively though, calling a Conservative victory in Canada a "swing to the right" is like calling a Democrat victory in the U.S. a "swing to the left." Yeah, right...

The Liberal Party was almost wiped out in this election. Liberals have governed Canada for most of my life, so this is an interesting development. Interesting, but not unforeseen. The Liberals have been rotting from the inside for several years now.

The really big news is the NDP (New Democratic Party). I've been away too long to really know what these guys have been up to lately (and frankly, living in Japan is the perfect excuse not to follow Canadian politics...), but they used to be a real Left Wing party--unicorns in every backyard, free hot dogs for the kids, all that crap. The NDP is now the official opposition in Canada. This leads me to believe that either a) they've toned down the "heaven on earth" of most truly Left-leaning parties, or b) a lot of Canadians have lost their fucking minds. I'm going with a) because...

The NDP did something the Liberals could never manage to do--they completely obliterated the Bloc Quebecois. The Bloc is (was?) a political party whose sole reason for existence (hey, like Orwell, I think if I can say something in English then I should; if it gives me, in this particular instance, a certain feeling that I can't really describe to say it in English, well, that's life!)... Where was I...? Oh yeah, the Bloc existed only to destroy Canada. At one relatively recent point they were actually the official opposition. Good fucking riddance to a party that never fielded candidates outside of Quebec, and that benefited from the very political system and country it worked to destroy.

Apparently the leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, is quite a compelling figure. I honestly don't know much about the guy (I'm not following Canadian politics, remember?). Today, though, I saw this story from the CBC, in which it appears that Layton (in 1996) was a customer in a massage parlor that was raided by the Toronto police. No charges were ever laid but, somewhat strangely (well, not really) this story was leaked to the media a few days before the election.

I remember (back when I was still living in Canada--sometime around the Pleistocene Era) getting into a political argument at a party with a middle-aged woman (er, I was younger then...). In what I'm sure she considered a death blow to my left wing rantings, she blurted, "you liberals are all pornographers!" I think they call this a "straight line" in show business; it was certainly the line that I'd been waiting for. I countered, "yeah, well, you conservatives are all thieves, and what's wrong with fucking anyway?"

Remembering that encounter makes me feel a bit homesick...

CanCon

An old April Wine tune. I must have seen these guys 4-5 times at the Truro (NS) Stadium back in the 70s.



You don't have to like it. It's my blog and you'll notice there are no announcements advertising its quality or anything like that (well, outside some of the the posts themselves, you know?).

Happy Birthday, Canada

Let Me Out!

As an ex-pat Canadian with a blog, I'm bound by the laws of Canada to post the below video at least twice a year. In fact, my failure to do so in the past has resulted in angry letters from the Dept. of Assimilation and Domination threatening me with excommunication. I have a family to consider, so it is my sincere hope that readers of this blog can forgive both my capitulation to these demands and my apparent reliance on recycling old material.

[Reading from card] This video from the greatest band in world history is a brilliant interpretation of Canadian Juche. Canadians have been "locked in the trunk" of imperialism for long enough.

Let us out!



[Still reading from card] I am Canadian. And I am Tragically Hip!

Viola Desmond

I was somewhat startled (and a bit ashamed) to read for the first time this morning about someone whose name I should have learned in school (but didn't): Viola Desmond.

Nova Scotia has apologized and granted a pardon to Viola Desmond, a black woman who was convicted for sitting in a whites-only section of a movie theatre in 1946.
[...]
Desmond, then a 32-year-old beautician, was driving from Halifax to Sydney on Nov. 8, 1946, when her car broke down in New Glasgow. She decided to see a movie at the Roseland Theatre while she waited for repairs.
Desmond sat downstairs, unaware of the theatre's rule that blacks could sit only in the balcony seats. She was asked to leave but refused. Eventually, the manager and a police officer pulled her out.
[...]
Desmond spent the night in jail. The next morning, she was convicted of tax evasion. Prosecutors made no mention of race. They told the judge that Desmond didn't pay the full price to sit up front and therefore didn't pay the proper tax — a difference of one cent.
She was fined $20 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Desmond decided to fight the case with the help of the newly created Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. She lost the first appeal but won a second attempt on a technicality.
Thanks to Desmond's public court battle, the Nova Scotia government ended up dismantling its segregation laws.

Nova Scotia had segregation laws? I never learned that in school either. I guess I'd better educate myself...

More Common Than You Might Think

Assholum Canadianum:

Canada's immigration minister says he takes "full responsibility" for a citizenship study guide that had all references to gay rights removed.
[...]
Records obtained by The Canadian Press show that an early draft of the guide, meant to prepare immigrants for citizenship tests starting March 15, contained sections citing milestones in gay rights, including decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969 and the same-sex marriage law of 2005.
But Kenney's office ordered those sections removed from the draft, and rebuffed an effort by bureaucrats to have them re-inserted last August. The new guide was released with fanfare in November.

The Canadian conservative: an asshole by any other name, eh?

A Proud Canadian

In more Olympic hockey-related news, apparently the International Olympic Committee is upset with the behavior of the Canadian women's hockey team after they won the gold medal (mouse over the link for a chuckle: "hockey women drinking"--sounds like a Canadian version of Girls of Spring Break or something). According to the article,

Several Canadian players returned to the ice surface at Canada Hockey Place roughly 30 minutes after their 2-0 win over the U.S. on Thursday night. The players drank cans of beer and bottles of champagne, and smoked cigars with their gold medals draped around their necks.

Erotica Canadiana: until now, spoken of only in whispered tones.
This story made me break out into a grin so wide that the top of my fucking head nearly fell off. Check this out:

In a statement released late Thursday, Hockey Canada apologized for the on-ice party.

"The members of Team Canada apologize if their on-ice celebrations, after fans had left the building, have offended anyone," the statement read.

Canadian through and through.

Thank you Team Canada. Thank you Hockey Canada. Thank you CBC.

Locked in the Trunk of a Car

The Tragically Hip are legendary in Canada. I'm certain I've posted this video before, but probably poorer quality. This is The Hip at their peak, lyrically and musically (or so I think). Too Canadian to make it down south:



Too Canadian? Get outta here:



"I had the dream of having no room"... I've had that dream every night since the day I was born.

Canadiana

Right Through the Heart

Another quote from the NY Times article in the previous post:

When I was a child, it wasn’t unusual for my 15-minute walk home from school to begin under clear skies and end in a blizzard. I remember once, when I was 8 years old, stumbling into my house, my hair covered in powder and my eyelashes frozen together, and screaming, “Why do we live here?!” My mother took my face in her warm hands and said, “Because it’s where people love you.”

At the time, that struck me as the lamest statement ever uttered by a human being. But today, as I sit under the California sun, it only strikes me as halfway lame, and maybe even less than that.

— TIM LONG, a writer for “The Simpsons”

I seem to have something in my eye...

Quote of the D'eh

From a New York Times editorial celebrating Canada Day:

Back home, hockey highlights lead off SportsCenter. That is the height of civilization.

— SEAN CULLEN, a comedian

Damn straight.

When in Rome...

Apparently the Governor General of Canada has caused a bit of a stir during a visit to Nunavut in the north of Canada. What did she do? Well, she gutted a seal and ate a piece of its heart.

First she gutted it. Then she had the bleeding heart pulled out of its furry, flabby carcass. Finally, she swallowed a slice of the mammal's oozing organ.
And when it was all over Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean wiped the blood of a freshly slaughtered seal off her crimson-spattered fingertips.
The Governor General made a graphic gesture of solidarity with the country's beleaguered seal hunters on the first day of a week-long Arctic visit Monday.
Hundreds of Inuit at a community festival gathered around as Jean knelt above a pair of carcasses and used a traditional ulu blade to slice the meat off the skin.
After repeated, vigorous slashes through the flesh the Queen's representative turned to the woman beside her and asked enthusiastically: "Could I try the heart?"
Within seconds Jean was holding a dripping chunk of seal-ticker, which she tucked into her mouth, swallowed whole, and turned to her daughter to say it tasted good.
Jean grabbed a tissue to wipe her blood-soaked fingers, and explained her gesture. She expressed dismay that anyone would characterize the Inuit's eons-old, traditional hunting practices as inhumane.
Jean gestured to the hundreds of people in a packed arena and noted that they would all be fed by the meat laid out on a tarp on the floor.
[Emphasis mine.]

Now, I won't even attempt to say that I would have done the same thing in a similar situation, because I honestly don't know if I could have. But I also won't deny that Ms. Jean earned my admiration when I read that story. Since coming to Japan I've managed to keep (I think!) a pretty calm exterior when offered raw fish, raw chicken, raw deer and, most recently, raw pig vagina. (Sashimi has become a regular part of my diet. Honestly, though, I prefer my meat cooked.) Ms. Jean, however, makes me look like a provincial hick by comparison!

The Governor General of Canada, in my opinion, has honored (sorry, honoured!) her position by showing herself to be the perfect guest. This is only made more poignant by the fact that her hosts were fellow countrymen (and I encourage readers to look at the above-linked story in its entirety to get a fuller picture).

Of course, while I was reading that story I knew it would only be a short time before the Europeans or PETA or some combination thereof began howling. And sure enough:

Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean snacking on a slain seal's raw heart has sparked criticism from the European Union and animal rights groups.
Barbara Slee, an anti-seal hunt campaigner at the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Brussels, said she was disgusted by Jean's actions.
"The fact that the Governor General in public is slashing and eating a seal, I don't think that really helps the cause, and I'm convinced that this will not change the mind of European citizens and politicians," Slee told The Associated Press.

Christ, what a silly, self-important idiot this woman sounds like. She's "disgusted"? Let's be clear about this: she's disgusted by Inuit eating habits and culture and the fact that they, with the support of their government, don't feel like listening to a bunch of asshole Europeans tell them how to live. The Inuit might well feel somewhat disgusted at Europeans' annoying habit of killing each other by the millions every few generations, but they're probably much to polite to say anything about it out loud. We might forgive them if they snicker when nobody's watching...

"It amazes us that a Canadian official would indulge in such bloodlust," Dan Mathews, senior vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, told the Toronto Star.
"It sounds like she's trying to give Canadians an even more Neanderthal image around the world than they already have."

The CBC stops at nothing to bring its readers/viewers entertaining quotes! A guy from PETA calling Canadians "neanderthals"? Hee hee! When I was a kid and my sisters hit me, I used to say, "what are you trying to do, tickle me?" What a lightweight. Is he trying to make PETA look more ridiculous than it it already does?

What this amounts to is a sort of cultural snobbery. The Europeans can enjoy their veal (or whatever) so long as they don't personally have to kill the calf (PETA members at least can fall back to the more consistent position of "meat is murder"--that doesn't make them any less annoying, though). Anyone who eats meat, however, and tries to say the hunting traditions of the Inuit are "barbaric" or "savage" is a hypocrite.

Connect the Dots

The body of a Canadian soldier who was killed in Afghanistan on Monday has begun its journey home.

Tearful soldiers carried the casket of Trooper Karine Blais onto a waiting plane at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday during a solemn ramp ceremony honouring a woman described as "full of energy" and "friendly to everyone."

Blais, 21, was killed Monday when the armoured vehicle she was in hit a roadside bomb north of the city of Kandahar.

[...] Blais, who had only been in Afghanistan for two weeks, was the second female Canadian soldier to be killed in the war-torn country. Her death comes nearly three years after Capt. Nicola Goddard was killed in a grenade attack west of Kandahar.

Meanwhile, in Kabul, a few hundred Afghan women who had gathered to protest a new law that basically legalizes rape were pelted with stones.

Afghan women protesting against a new law that severely undermines women's rights were pelted with stones in the country's capital Wednesday, say reports.

About 300 mostly young women gathered in Kabul to show their opposition to a recently passed law that forbids women from refusing to have sex with their husbands and requires them to get a male relative's permission to leave the house.

The demonstration was organized by women's rights activists in Afghanistan. Critics of the law say it effectively legalizes rape within marriage and is a return to Taliban-style rule.

[...] "You are a dog. You are not a Shiite woman," one man shouted to a young woman in a headscarf holding aloft a banner that said, "We don't want Taliban law."

"You are a dog"... Picture this scene in your mind. A "man" is throwing rocks at a woman and calling her a "dog". Can any sane person in the entire world imagine a context in which this kind of behavior might be justified? I imagine a scumbag like this crying and screaming and pulling his hair out like a spoiled little sissy over a cartoon depicting his god in an unfavorable light. Then I imagine him beating or stoning or killing his wife, or his sister, or his daughter, for this or that or some other imagined offense. If there is anything more "offensive" in the world than "men" like this, it escapes me.

News from the Old Country

Greg Gutfeld, the host of Fox's late-night show Red Eye, after apparently insulting damn near everyone in Canada with a "lighthearted, humorous and ridiculous" portrayal of the Canadian military, and in particular its activities in Afghanistan, felt compelled to issue an apology. Well, actually, it seems the apology only came after Canada's Minister of Defence contacted Fox and demanded one.

Here's a clip of the "offending" segment, and I encourage readers to try and get through 30 or 60 seconds before stopping...



If you're anything like me, you probably found that clip offensive too. Not, however, because it mocked Canadians and the Canadian military, but because it's about the lamest, most puerile, un-funny piece of shit you've likely seen in a while. Christ on a fucking stick, if all these clowns can offer up is lame stereotypes from 30 years ago, then they should be apologizing to Americans (whom one would assume are the intended audience). What's offensive is that these fifth-rate shitheads couldn't even haul their heads out of their own asses long enough to check a fucking newspaper to see if anything they said had any remote connection to the real world. [Hint to other would-be comedians: it's only funny if there's some chance, however remote, that what you're saying could be true. Simply making stuff up requires a subtlety and nuance that nobody at Fox is capable of. At this rate, I'd say that in about 10 years anything commonly recognized as "comedy" will be associated exclusively with "the Left."]

Personally, I'd have been quite happy if the Canadian government had just ignored this. Being offended by the content of this clip is like getting upset after seeing some monkeys whacking off in their cage at the zoo...

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According to this CBC story, Canadians are among the most optimistic people in the world about their financial future. Actually, I have no idea what this is about. Possibly this?

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Good grief. Was Canada's health care the problem in Natasha Richardson's death?

Assuming Richardson initially declined medical care here [in the U.S.--R] as well, once she did present to caregivers that she was suffering from a possible head trauma, she would've been immediately transported by air, weather permitting, and arrived in Denver in less than an hour. If this weren't possible, in both resorts she would've been seen within 15 minutes at a local facility with CT scanning and someone who could perform temporary drainage until transfer to a neurosurgeon was possible. If she were conscious at 4 p.m., she most likely would have been diagnosed and treated about that time, receiving care unavailable in the local Canadian hospital. She might still have died or suffered brain damage but her chances of surviving would have been much greater in the U.S.

Sigh... I most certainly mean no disrespect to Natasha Richardson in the following, but...

I've read nothing to make me believe that she didn't receive medical care at least as good as I (a Canadian citizen) would have received in similar circumstances. And I seriously question whether I, a hypothetical not-rich visitor to the United States would receive the kind of medical care described above. In fact I question whether most Americans would receive that kind of care, as theoretically possible as it may be.

In more general terms, I sure would like to live forever, but shit happens, and I'm not going to be the guy crying because I'm on the waiting list for a heart transplant or something. That, to my mind, is not what a "health care system" is about.

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Today's weather forecast for Halifax: partly cloudy, and a bit on the cool side at -3C.