Ain't you supposed to be separated by now?

Something I alluded to a few months ago. Quebec's "separatiste" movement is a sham. Dig the prophylactic metaphor Steyn uses at the end. And managing to work in Rue Ste Catherine.. brilliant

TRAVESTY

Ratner Surpases Singer BO; Fanboys weep, gnash teeth

Ecce Oilers

Classical photo composition. I'm not trying to be blasphemous... but Smitty was looking a little Christ-like as Whitney embraced him, no? You be the judge:



Murillo


Corregio


Ribera




"The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done"

Jim Matheson, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 Article tools
Printer friendly

RALEIGH - Former Oilers stickboy Ray Whitney gave Ryan Smyth a hug in the handshake line and wasn't sure what to say.

"Normally when you shake hands after a series is over, you really don't care that much that you just beat them," said Whitney.

"But I looked into Ryan's eyes and I knew what it meant to him after all the years in Edmonton. I said on the broadcast after the game that if we weren't going to win the Cup this year ... being an Edmontonian, I wanted the Oilers to win, for sure. I tried to downplay it as much as I could, but the Oilers have been a part of my life as long as I can remember."

They Died With Their Skates On

Colby Cosh, the sometime NP columnist and native Edmontonian has been blogging up a storm throughout the Oilers' improbably playoff run. Now that it's all over, it's worth revisiting some of his pieces, and reflecting on what might have been.

The Oilers, who played like lions --Christ, they didn't even know they were beaten last night with one minute left to play, they were still hustling-- became, for a brief moment in this country's hockey history, Canada's team. Lord knows I was rootin' for 'em.

Spider-man 3 trailer?

Nope. But a damn impressive fake nonetheless.

And incidentally, does anyone remember THIS? Possibly the coolest teaser trailer that hardly anyone saw. I don't blame the studio for pulling it, but I marvel (no pun intended) and the grotesque coincidence that a major motion picture would use such an iconic image, only to have real life events re-write the script.

Guard against fakes! Equip yourself with A baloney detector kit

It's World Cup 2006, and the old man has gone into seclusion

He needs to concentrate on willing the boys sporting the three lions on to victory...

Other matters:

A Letter from Jesus

The Democratic Party react to Zarq's demise

Guest blogger feature: Charmsley Brayington's Carnival of Bile

Hey folks, ya know, alot of people say it's important to count your blessings.

I'm not one of them. I say it is more important to count other people's misfortunes. Lets face it, sometimes blessings are few and far between in this life. But darn it if schadenfreude don't feel good sometimes. Honestly... when somebody gets what's coming to 'em, how many of us can deny that we don't breath a sigh of relief and think "better them than me"?

So in that spirit, I give you today's list of unfortunates. Let us ponder the vagaries of fate that delivered them such powerful boots to the nutsack:


1. Joey Delissio


2. The Zarkman


3. Ambassador Mike "Why Now?" Wilson

4. Ralanis (or is it Alanyan?): The Canadian celebrity supercouple that never really took off


5. Senior Cabeza


and remember, if you and a friend are out for a walk in the woods and a bear suddenly appears and begins to chase you, you don't have to outrun the bear... you just have to outrun your friend. Sure there will be self-recrimination later, when you are perched in a tree, and Smokey is off somewhere groaning with indigestion while your pal works his way through his plumbing, but guess who'll be eating bacon and eggs for breakfast tomorrow at the ranger station, and who won't be a stool sample at the foot of a douglas fir? That's right sunshine! It's you.

Til next time, keep your chin up!

Shameless Plug for George

This is a picture from last year's wedding in Spain. The dude in the red shirt is my dashing young entrepreneur brother, who has been working on starting up a travel business with some friends. I know those first few months can be pretty challenging, so I figured I'd plug it here... even though I have no illusions about my site traffic. Ever little bit helps, right?

The name of the Company is
Exclusive X-cursions Travel, and they offer great discounts for vacations to Costa Rica. The buzz from some of my friends who have been there is that Costa Rica is on the verge of becoming a trendy tourist hot-spot (a la Thailand or Cancun), so now is definitely the right time to go before prices skyrocket.

Back to Blogulating!



I visited Saint John's for work a couple of weeks ago. What a charming town! Brightly painted houses like these are a common site there. If it wasn't for its isolation and the relatively high cost of getting to the Easternmost tip of Canada, I think it would be a real tourist gem!

Courtesy of my intrepid sister:The Park Avenue Plebe gets the legal pimp hand from Iraq vet

I showed this to a couple of so-called communications professionals, and they didn't get it! Scary:Safire's rules for writers

My blog twin EERIE...


I'm the Juggernaut...

Slow Boat to China

If Monday's season finale to 24 didn't get your juices flowing, go out to the garage, open the hood, hook the cables up to the battery, and clamp those babies on your earlobes, because I think you need a jump! SPOILERS FOLLOW

For starters, we have Jack, in fine form, slipping onto the nerve-gassy sub, which, as you know if you watched last week, is laden with all sorts of ordinance now aimed at major urban targets. Then we have him coaching the sole survivor of the Bierko attack, a wet-behind-the-ears petty officer, in the fine art of terrorist-throat-slitting; then, when the poor slob actually has to do it, the whole thing degenerates into a gruesome neck-knifing, a nauseating wet butcher's block sound punctuating the desperate clumsy jabbing. Somebody give the sound-man an emmy, he just caused me to lose my lunch!

The submarine: it is the space that made Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot a masterpiece of cinematic claustrophobia, and caused famed nebbish Jared Fogel's dramatic weight loss, paving the way for his evil rise to power as dorkus superiorus. (Jared begat many a nerd immitator, it is true: Napoleon Dynamite, that little prick on the insipid Red Green Show, William Hung, but Jared is the original ) Now the interior of a submarine is once again put to good dramatic use as the location of the final three-way showdown between Bierko, Bauer, and Robocop.

I'll spare you the details, if you haven't seen the episode yet, but suffice it
to say that Jack pulls a variation of an oldie from the Season Two Closer out of
the bag to dispatch one of his nemeses. And all this in the first few minutes of the show!

Also, I seriously hope that Greg Itzin gets an Emmy for his performance this season. Weak and vacillating, and yet malevolent and mean-spirited all at once! His Logan was a truly repugnant character. I actually shuddered with discomfort and loathing during that scene that the First Lady had to pretend to seduce president Chuck to buy Bauer some time. Incidentally, Jean Smart was also fantastic as Martha Logan all season long. Give her a matching Emmy to go with her on-screen partner's!

In my book, Season Five was arguably the best season since Season Two.

Move weekend


On Friday, Joe came up from Toronto for a quick visit before heading up to Algonquin Park on a canoe trip.

On Saturday, we finished boxing everything up.

On Sunday, we picked up the rental truck and moved everything from the apartment to the new house.

Now it is Monday, and we find ourselves sore, dazed, and up to our elbows in "stuff" that needs to be organized and put away... Isn't it amazing how many possessions we seem to accumulate over time without consciously setting out to do so? I always considered myself a minimalist --I'm not one to pick up the latest gadget or status symbol just because everyone else has it; I have been steadfast in avoiding acquiring a cellphone, for example. And yet, the mask has now been pulled away, and I see myself, for the first time, as I truly am. I am a packrat, squirreling useless things away in the eternal hope that one day, I will find a use for them.

The reality is that ya gotta let go sometime, so now the long-deferred "day of the garbage bag" has arrived, and I must go forth and be ruthless with it.

Later

I once read a Mad Magazine parody
where a fast food restaurant offered a mystery value meal that was basically "Here's what we scraped off the grill last night...we're not sure what it is, but we're putting it in a bag and selling it to you".

So, in that spirit, here are some leftovers -- items I had collecting dust for a while. May they tide you over til I get back to blogging:

I must believe that there is hope for the world, and that, in the end righteousness will prevail. But in order for this to happen, we must be re-learn the ability to make moral distinctions between right and wrong.

Basically, what I got from this article is thatCardinal Pell's lack of ignorance is an obstacle to dialogue on Islam. It is precisely because he understands it that as a believing Catholic, he is prepared to point out its shortcomings as it is currently practiced. Why has tolerance (I don't care) become so intermeshed with its dull distant cousin, ignorance (I don't know)? Because if you don't know anything about a reality, it is easy to tolerate it. I don't know, therefore, I don't care.

The opposite of course, is to learn about something, and in learning, come to understand it. But knowledge and understanding is not equivalent to acceptance. In fact, once you know a great deal about something, morality demands that you speak out if it is wrong. Yes, that is "judgmental", and "discriminatory" Once upon a time to discriminate meant To make a clear distinction; distinguish among the options available, or To make sensible decisions; judge wisely.

Like with so many other topics, the Catholic Church offers a refreshingly unambiguous and blunt assessment of its main competitor religion and its adherents: They are in error. the following passage on the ethics of islam is from the article "Mohammed and Mohammedanism" in the Catholic Encyclopaedia Online:

It is hardly necessary here to emphasize the fact that the ethics of Islam are far inferior to those of Judaism and even more inferior to those of the New Testament. Furthermore, we cannot agree with Noldeke when he maintains that, although in many respects the ethics of Islam are not to be compared even with such Christianity as prevailed, and still prevails, in the East, nevertheless, in other points, the new faith — simple, robust, in the vigour of its youth — far surpassed the religion of the Syrian and Egyptian Christians, which was in a stagnating condition, and steadily sinking lower and lower into the depths of barbarism (op. cit., Wollaston, 71, 72). The history and the development, as well as the past and present religious, social, and ethical condition of all the Christian nations and countries, no matter of what sect or school they may be, as compared with these of the various Mohammedan countries, in all ages, is a sufficient refutation of Noldeke's assertion. That in the ethics of Islam there is a great deal to admire and to approve, is beyond dispute; but of originality or superiority, there is not. What is really good in Mohammedan ethics is either commonplace or borrowed from some other religions, whereas what is characteristic is nearly always imperfect or wicked.

*****
Sesame classics

Johnny Cash singing Don't Take Your Ones To Town? Amazing --If this does not bring a tear of nostalgia to your eye, you may not have a soul. One of my fave's is "Born to Add", featuring a leather-jacket wearing muppet doing a suprisingly good cover of one of the Boss's classics. There's alot of us adders on the Jersey shore -- a line good enough to have been in the original.

*****

Uh, is there any place cooler than Montreal? I lived there for a year, and as far as I know, there isn't. But what is the price of cool? It's pretty hefty, it turns out.

An editorial in the Gazette lays it out in stark terms:

We Montrealers have less disposable income than people with comparable jobs in other cities. Even those of us barely managing on an annual salary of less than $30,000 pay higher taxes than we would anywhere else in the country. So much for the tenacious myth that Quebec is kinder to its less well-to-do citizens. For too many years, Montrealers have clung to the fiction that we are better off than Torontonians or Vancouverites because housing is cheaper here. Fine - housing and living costs should be part of any comparison among cities. Taxes are not the whole story, it's true. The beauty of the recent study we're quoting is that it combined three elements - salaries, taxes and cost of living - to determine how well off residents of various cities are. It did the calculations for four family types - couples with and without children and single people earning high and low salaries - in order to take into account such social benefits as our $7-a-day daycare.
Once everything is thrown into the mix, the stark reality is impossible to avoid. Take for instance the Montreal couple with no kids. They earn $6,819 less a year than their counterparts in Vancouver - but pay $4,929 more in taxes! Incredible.

Guess that is what a statist political culture, and a patrician, pseudo-intellectual political elite educated abroad and dedicated to a completely impractical notion of quasi-independance will get you!

Let the hand wringing begin

So the Senators have been felled in five, and already the hounds, smelling blood, have begun their baying. In seeking a martyr to satiate their hunger, I trust they will look past Emery, who stood on his head during these playoffs and who wasn't even supposed to be between the posts-- don't kid yourself pal, one nod from the Dominator and they would have yanked poor Ray. Perhaps their gaze will fall on a more likely victim: the happless Alfie.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating firing the guy, but lets call a spade a shovel, and lay the blame where it belongs: Right between the wobbly ankles that allowed a snot-nosed punk who was on waivers at the beginning of the season to waltz around him like a young Wayne Gretzky, circa 1981, and score shorthanded in OT, for crissakes. I swore I saw Emery weeping.

From 2000 until the lockout, Daniel Alfredsson was racking up 70-80 points during the regular season, and he's a big part of the reason that the Senators have dominated of late. But then comes the playoffs, and a change seems to come over the guy. Alfredsson who plays like a norse hero for 82 games, suddenly becomes a mere mortal. You can see the bewilderment in his nordic blue eyes, as everyone around him seems to kick their game up a notch, and he is left, far too often, looking like he just can't do the same.

Now I know that fans will point to the Captain's goal last night, and his classy post-game interview. But as Luke writes in the Gospel, "of those to whom much is given, much is expected". Occasional moments of brilliance won't cut it. A player of Alfredsson's calibre who has the priviledge of wearing the C in arguably the league's best team should be consistently fantastic. It's the second round of the playoffs, and Ottawa is already out. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Long time no see!

I have so much to tell you...
First of all, I'm worried! No not about the reverse-reconquista going on as immigrants squatting in European churches casually throw up banners proclaiming that Mohammed rocks... nah! That's just par-for-the-course in today's strange world. no I'm worried about something much more troubling because I am a North American navel-gazer who doesn't worry about things that happen in faraway lands. I worry about far more pressing and urgent things like soldiers with guns in Canadian cities and climate change ! After all, I just bought a new home! Will I have to spend money on roof-mounted General-Purpose Machine Guns to keep out rampaging paramilitaries? Not only that, will I have to buy extra insulation for my new home, or will somebody save us from Global Cooling. Al Gore, Maude Barlow, George Clooney, David Suzuki, somebody do something! Imagine the global chaos that global cooling will bring. And Iran has nukes now --or so the Zionistneocons would have us believe. A light dusting of snow over Tehran might be all it takes to send the Ayatollahs over the edge... then next thing ya know, Chuck Heston is raving on a beach in front of the top third of the Statue of Liberty!

*****

So anyway, I've been reading a bit about
Tony Blair and his issue with Gordon Brown, and I gotta tell ya, it reminds me an awful lot of the Chretien/Martin mess that ultimately brought down the most successful political machine in the history of Western Democracies (for now--trust not the fickle Canadian electorate). Taking a page out of the book of another Tony, Blair needs to pole-axe this clown, pronto, for the good of "the family".

******

As promised, here is more on the movie United 93. Rather than write my own review, I figured I would link to one of the best descriptions of a film-viewing experience I have ever read... it speaks more eloquently than anything I might have written.

*****

On Monday, we close the deal on the new house, and I join the ranks of those whose home is owned by a bank. If you don't hear from me for a while, it's probably because I pawned my PC to pay the mortgage.

Hasta la proxima, amigos!

In no particular order:

My refutation of The Gospel of Judas, and every other half baked conspiracy theory that Brown or Baigent (or Lee or Pagels or Brown, et. al) have ever come up with:

Apostolic Succession

*****

I went to see United 93 on Friday. Along the lines of what appears to be the general consensus, here is my five word review: IT IS NOT "TOO SOON"

I'll post more on this experience in a little while.

*****

Borat, the funniest member of the Sacha Baron Cohen triad, is getting his own movie, surely a cause for hand pleasure!

"That singer before me. Who was it? It was very courageous of MTV to start the show with a genuine transvestite, he was very convincing. It was only his hands and his testes satchels that gave it away."

Borat on Madonna, at the 2005 MTV Europe awards

Beware of Chimps

A few weeks ago I was watching the Kratt brothers' show "Be the Creature". If you didn't know, the Kratts are two quasi-interchangeable naturalist brothers who host children's wildlife programming on more than one network.

Anyway, this show is dedicated to developing a certain empathy through mimickry--immitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose. And this time, the subject of their flattery was the chimpanzee, which, we are told, is our nearest living relative in the animal kingdom. If so, much of human behaviour that I don't understand was explained for me during that half hour.

During the first half of the program, the brothers spent some time with some chimps in a sanctuary for orphans, roughousing and playing with the beasts. Then in the second half, they dragged a camera deep into the jungle to observe the creatures living in the wild, and the two clowns "aped" them-- if you pardon the expression -- climbing, scampering, rooting for food, calling out chimp-cries. Then, about 45 minutes into the broadcast, things got nasty... when the chimps went on a hunt, the young viewers were treated to the horrifying spectacle of the brutes leaping from tree to tree, seizing monkeys, and rending them limb from limb. The Kratts somberly informed us that as "omnivores", the chimps ate both meat and veggies. And how! These ones seemed to have a predilection for monkey tartar... or rather tear-tear, as that's what they did as they shared the bits of monkey between them, pulling limbs apart in a grotesque jungle tug-of-war.

This jarring image came rushing back into my head as I read this report of a Canadian being injured and his driver killed in a chimp attack in Sierra Leone. For all their cuteness, these are some dangerous and unpredictable beasts, which can turn nasty at a moment's notice. Is it any wonder we think of them as man's closest cousin?

Something for mean-spirited conspiracy-crazy bloggers to think about

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quire true, or not quite so bad as it turned out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemise as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Easter break 2006 - at home with the family in Windsor 

The Dome of Les Invalides. Paris, June 2005 

The Five Stages of 24

It Was the Best of Seasons and the Worst of Seasons...

by Julius Dithers April 10th, 2006

04:44:53 AM CST or How I Got Over Tony's Death and Can Still Watch This F*cking Manipulative Show:

Denial - "He can't be dead! It's a trick!"

Anger - "Those motherf*cking 24 showrunners authorized TONY'S DEATH!
F*ck Surnow,
f*ck Gordon,
f*ck Fury and f*ck Coto!"

Bargaining - "Why didn't they just kill that little
girl at the mall and spare Tony's life?!"

Depression - "If he's dead, nobody's safe! You, too, Sutherland! Ah, what's the point in watching this show anymore?"

Acceptance - "The President's the big bad?! Holy shit, what happens next?!"