John Legend - PDA live at Royal Albert Hall

We're going to see John Legend this evening at The Centre, so I thought a little preview wouldn't hoit...

Good News First

The doctor prescribed two medications.

I paid the Safeway pharmacy $93.36 for the two, took them home, read the patient info sheets and was sufficiently horrified. The list of possible side effects, which went on for pages, included losing your dick and being trapped in a small cell with Ryan Seacrest for the rest of your life.

I went back to the doctor.

He agreed that this treatment was optional.

I went back to the Safeway pharmacy. They agreed that they could take the medications back because I hadn't opened either of the packages and the pills were all secured in blister packs.

Did I have the bill?

Mysteriously, I did not. Where the hell was it? I tore the house apart. No luck.

Meanwhile Louise, the head Pharmacist at Safeway, had already assured me that even if I couldn't find my bill, she would re-imburse me. How kind and generous is that!!!

Yesterday I went into the doctor's office and asked the nurse/receptionist if she had found the bill. She got my file and searched for it. No luck.

I was maybe 20 feet along the street when the nurse came flying out after me.

"Mr. Berner, Mr. Berner. I found it!"

Thus, the story ends well. Money returned, bill on hand for verification.

But much praise and thanks to both the nurse for her diligence and especially to Louise at Safeway for resolving this tiny, human problem so graciously.

Emperor's Clothes

How can we take the new "Green" initiatives seriously when everything in the marketplace denies the need?

Example.

This morning's paper comes with an 8-page, 4-color, high-gloss flyer from Chrysler.

I counted 28 vehicles on display. Not one of these monstrosities is a compact or hybrid or fuel efficient machine. They are all huge, gas-guzzling, polluting muscle trucks, SUVs and the like.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Clearly we don't believe for a moment in the necessity of conservation and sustainability.

The preacher at the pulpit is drinking and fornicating in the back room. Not news, I realize.

The New Mothers

An idiot leaves her baby alone in a parked car in Kits and goes shopping. Ditz in Kits.

Firefighters arrive and the woman is "warned" by the police.

Why not charge her with criminal negligence? Because we don't want to fill up our jails? Because we don't want to deprive the child of such a caring, thoughtful parent?

Last summer, I was in the middle of exactly this situation.

Spotting an infant alone in a van, I called 911.

About 5 minutes later, as I waited for the police, the "mother" stepped out of a tanning salon. When the police arrived, one officer stood with me and one with the lovely mother. Apparently, the officer with the mother thought I was as funny as the mother did. Apparently, I was a busy-body old fool minding other people's business. Apparently, leaving an infant alone in a van is a sit-com. Who knew?

How is this any different from the cardiologist and his G.P. wife who left their 3 children under the age of 4 to go have a quiet romantic dinner while on vacation in Portugal?

Why not just dump your babies face-down in public toilets? That's being done too, so it must be alright.

You're A Perv, But you are OUR Perv.

Professional "Colleges" are a scourge.

I speak of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the College of Nurses and the College of Teachers, each of which has proven time and again to be most interested in maintaining the status quo at all costs. They pull up the drawbridge, fill the moat with more alligators and tell the world to mind its own business.

The only problem is...their business is our business.

And when these self-protecting, secretive cabals keep good doctors, nurse and teachers who have immigrated to Canada from working, they are harming all of us.

And when they fail to discipline or rout the miscreants and dogs in their midst, they again harm all of us.

The case of the nutty sex perv who has been teaching teen-age girls in Abbotsford, Chilliwak and Mission is a prime example.

The fool has been flagged time and again since 1995 for "inappropriate" behaviour, warned by various school boards, slapped on his very long, inquisitive wrists, but the College of teachers has never had the guts to step up to the plate and say, "Sir, what you do is not permitted in our midst. Goodbye, sayonara, auf vederzein, ciao, take a hike."

They claim the fault here was "an administrative error."

These groups always have that kind of claim.

New legislation should - and it does not - include a closer and more open relationship with the Colleges. They might try coming out of the Dark Ages and into the light.

The Unroyal Dismounted Muddied Police

What a sad spectacle our national police have become.

Underfunded, undermanned, asked to cover millions of acres of parks when they can't get their cars started in suburbia.

Daily now are the revelations of incompetence, bungling, collusion, cover-ups.

Now, this atrocity in Smalltown, BC. A young, inexperienced officer shoots a prisoner in the back of the head. The prisoner's crime is that he had a beer at a hockey game.

We don't know how all this went down; we weren't there. But apparently the officers and other officials who were there, weren't entirely there either.

The body of the shot young man was allowed to sit and decompose in the detachment office for 2 days before it was finally delivered - in an unrefrigerated vehicle - to the pathologist for an autopsy. Further, the pathologist's work was shoddy at best, negligent if truth be told.

What are we to do? How will Canada ever regain self-respect and self-confidence in this once proud organization? Throw more green at the red and blue?

Where is the leadership?

Bob Dylan - I want you

Why not 3 songs? Did I mention it's his birthday?

Bob Dylan - Maggies Farm (Live)

Hey...It's his birthday!

Canada in Flight - A Charming Story

ITEM: From the morning paper: "A former Air Canada cleaner says security was so lax at Toronto's Pearson International Airport on the day of the Air India bombing in 1985 that he wandered undetected around the doomed airplane for 10 minutes - even sitting down in the cockpit - in the hours before takeoff from Toronto."

ITEM: From the morning paper: "A Canadian pilot, who was once rejected by the Canadian forces, was honored Wednesday by the Queen and the Royal Air Force with a medal for bravery under fire in Afghanistan."

These comedy/horror shows cannot be written. Only real life works this devilishly well.

How Insane Can Religion Be if You Give It Half a Chance and Half a Brain?

The Pope in a speech in Brazil declared recently, "Christ was the Saviour America's Natives silently yearned for."

He thus alienated several millions of God's children, who happen to not share his persuasions.

How did he know this? Could we get the address book of his email?

Says Who? The Drug Drek Continues

The National Post has a major, front page story today headlined "Tories to Shun Safe Drug Sites."



Almost everything in the details of this article is either flat wrong or wrong-headed.



First, the paper reports that the federal government will now allocate a new $64 Million over two years for treatment, enforcement and prevention. As Harm reduction is not mentioned, everyone and his dog who has been sucking at the harm reduction tit for the last umpteen years is freaking out. One such fool who works in HIV-AIDS cries, "There is is no money for harm reduction, which is quite ominous..."



Well, it's not ominous at all. First, there are already millions of dollars allocated for harm reduction and that waste will continue. Second, harm reduction is ALL that has been funded until now, so stop your whining. And third, harm reduction has accomplished nothing other than more harm.



Then it is reported that drug treatment could get $32 Million, including money for research aimed at treating crystal meth addicts.



There are two things wrong with this little gem. First, $32 Million for treatment - when there has been ZERO money for treatment for 30 years is a pea in the pissoir. It is just short of next to the shadow of a whisper of nothing. Second, we don't need to spend more money on research on any addictions. We have had all the answers staring us in the face for 50 years or more now. All we need is the courage and then political will to get to work. And third, money assigned for treatment should go, oddly enough - wouldn't you think? - to treatment not to research, which is not treatment it is research.



Finally, the article claims that we already spend in Canada $385 Million a year on treatment, prevention and harm reduction. THIS IS NOT SO. If we spend that money, where may I ask are the BEDS??? Where are all the treatment centres that families are quickly turning to in desperation? Where?



This subject is maddening for all the lies, stupidity, misinformation, opinionation based on intellectual masturbation and claims made by people who have accomplished nothing in terms of saving lives, but much in building handsome little empires funded by tax dollars.

T-t-t-timing is ever, everything...

Just a question...why is the National Post running excerpts from a book by Conrad Black about Richard Nixon? Why now? To cash in on Mr. Blacks' current notoriety, as h stands before a Chicago court and the world press?

Can we call this tacky? Can we say we don't care to read the stuff?

Counter Intelligence

The fact that the Anti-Poverty Committee are goons is not up for debate.

They debase the idea of protest by adding the elements of violence, destruction and personal attacks. And they discredit those of us who have been immune to or against the hysteria of good cheer for the Olympics from the beginning. Many thousands of British Columbians could care less about this expenditure of almost $2 Billion and the secrecy in which the spending is shrouded. Many of us would rather put tax money to work on health, schools, roads, police. But we aren't smashing fax machines or stalking private citizens to their homes.

What makes the APC interesting - while still disgusting and counterproductive - is that they are like you and me and most of this juvenile, adolescent culture we call Canada.

This is the only city in the world where drivers either don't understand or willfully ignore traffic circles - even police cars! If a building has a NO PARKING sign painted on its side, you can bet a fleet of middle-aged rebels will be stationed below it. People regularly walk across red lights and expect drivers to be ware of them. Fifty year old men and women wear "distressed" jeans - the only thing about them, being how distressed we are to have to bear witness to this embarrassment. The Pirate Syndrome, a new category of psychological disturbance that I have invented, was in full flight again at the end of this moribund hockey season, school teachers and bank clerks aflutter with the flapping of their Canucks flags against the side windows of their Toyota Camrys. Yeah, Yeah, Johnny Reb. Yawn...

The APC are hooligans and bums looking for a brawl. A shame, because there is much to protest about this bread and circuses fiasco called 2010. But pouring water on the secretary's blackberry won't cut it. The APC is the best PR campaign the Vanoc could hope for.

The King And I - Shall We Dance

And speaking of little lost treasures...here is the voice of Seattle's Marni Nixon, who also sang for Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady," and Natalie Wood in "West Side Story,' so seamlessly in each case that one never suspected it wasn't Deborah Kerr or Audrey or Natalie singing. I saw Yul Brynner do this role on stage here in Vancouver, when he was suffering from cancer. You would never know it. He was beyond magnificent.

Gordon Macrae

Here's one of the great songs sung by one of the great singers. NO accident that he was the star of both "Oklahoma" and "Carousel" from which this song is taken.

The Sound of...?

The votes are in.

Thank you bloggists.

99% of you prefer the written word here to the audiofile. In other words, our audiophile isn't such.

I will do both on and off as I see fit for the next little while. When I've improved the mike and sound...well, we'll see.

Meanwhile, thanks for your feedback.

Close Encounters of the Furry Kind

Hello mensche.

You may remember the days I describe below. Listen with your heart. Here is my story for today.

Today, a squirrel visited me, peering into my kitchen window from my porch rail . He was, perhaps, a great-great-great grandchild from a cherished time. I looked at him, sipped my tea, and remembered.

Drift back with me, 40 some years. A time when life kissed your skin every morning. And you never kissed it back. Because, like me, you thought life's morning kiss was only a pillow away. Now we know. Not so.

Remember.

When I was in university, vigorous and vacuous, ( weren't we all) I lived in a series of depressing hovels. One was a house full of students with a biker landlord who had heinous doberman we hated. The house had a closed back porch and the dobie would sleep, growl and drool on that porch, lunging at us (me) when we stumbled, drunkenly, up the back steps at 2 am. We would fall. We really hated that dog.

One day, I was studying in the kitchen, a communal slop house where all 19 students ate by stealing each other's food from a common fridge. The porch was visible outside the kitchen window. On that day I looked up from my books to see the demonic dobie corner a squirrel on the porch. He crowded the squirrel into the corner, closer and closer. There was a clothes pin basket in the deepest part of the corner. The dog came closer. I put down my sandwich and thought, "poor little squirrel". The squirrel jumped into the little basket of clothes pins, his last refuge before death by dobie. The squirrel trembled.

Then he jumped out.! He went for the dobie's lower lip and bit hard. His 4 claws raked the jaw. The dobie screamed ( dogs do that) and ran, bleeding and pissing while the squirrel held on and then dropped at a time of his choosing, watching the dobie slip in his own piss. I have, since that day, retained a respect for these pimped out rodents. They are sewer rats in fur coats. Something like politicians.

A boulevardier

When is a Fight not a Fight? When it's "Consensual."

Wasn't it just a week ago that a video of 2 teenage girls fighting furiously was all the rage on the net? The girls were from some woebegotten school in that centre of civilization, Nanaimo. Although the fight was vicious, nothing of consequence followed. That is, no school sanctions, detentions, evictions, talking-tos. Why? Because this was considered a "consensual" fight.

Which is to say, that the school, like most of our public institutions, has abandoned any hope of moral or civic leadership. They don't want to leave their position, frozen in time, of being "nice" and "Caring."

Today's headline is all about a 13-year old child dying in a knife fight that took place at 5 in the afternoon on a holiday weekend in front of the Science World.

Was this tragedy a result of a "consensual" fight? You bet. Relativism at its best.

And what consequence will flow as readily as this child's blood?

No doubt we will perform circus acts of elasticity in "understanding" the little shit who did the stabbing.

The grief counsellors have already parachuted in, as have the criminoligists, citing the "low statistical probability" of such an event, which is, no doubt, of tremendous help to the family.

Not far away, on the same remote planet, the police wanting to take down a protester, disguised themselves as a reporter for "24 Hours," thus, in one swell foop, disgracing themselves and the media. Nice work, boys.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is about to consider the case of "Chief," the wonder-dog, who sniffed and found drugs in school kids' backpacks. No matter that the drugs are illegal and harmful and that they have no place in the school environment. The "issue" is that Chief may have put his little paws all over the children's Charter Rights.

Amen.

Gone sailing...

There are 3 reasons (spurious at best) for this short, written post this morning:

First, I don't know about you, Kids, but I didn't see a thing in the news that caught my attention. CSIS knew there was going to be a bombing on Air India. The Premier gets a 54% pay raise. The mayor hires a politico to do a job that can't and won't be done and is unnecessary, and he can't say what the salary or terms of reference of the job are even though he's the guy who did the deal. Wolfowitz finally quits. Bush and Blair are still kissing and smiling.

In other words, same old, same old.

Second, I've noticed that my numbers of hits and visitors on the blog have declined precipitously (and I can't even say, "precipitously!") since I started doing the audio thing.

Is it the quality of the audio? Is it my shrieky teenage voice? Do you prefer the written word? Have you finally realized what an old crank I really am?

And Finally (YEAH! YEAH!), I off to Winnipeg early tomorrow morning for the 90th birthday of a good friend, which means that I won't be posting anything over the long weekend.

In the meantime, you could COMMENT and tell me how you feel about the AUDIO versus the WRITING and so on.

Here's what I hope. I hope the next 4 days are sunny and warm wherever you may be and that you enjoy the good company of people whom you consider good company.

Back on Tuesday. Salute! Che vediamo! Ciao....

WE JUST MONKEY AROUND