This blog, retired on May 10, 2010, will be resurrected with new vigor in the New Year.
There is a reason.
It will support another public effort to be soon announced.
Watch this space...but not too closely...until late December when all will be revealed.
In the words of Rogers & Hammerstein,
"So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night
I hate to go and leave this pretty sight
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu
Adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu."
Adios, shalom, tiejen, ciao carissimi...
Except for a short period last summer when I stopped writing the blog, I have been doing this continuously for over three and a half years now.
It's been a lot of fun and I've made many new friends.
Your comments have, in the main, been delightful, insightful, welcome and on the mark.
But all things come to an end.
Last year I cancelled my Vancouver Sun subscription. This morning I canceled my Globe & Mail subscription.
May music and laughter remain constants in all our lives.
May all the politicians retire and give us back our money.
May Life be kind to you.
Thank you and good night.
Maybe we need more of them in High Office.
One woman in Ottawa and one woman in Victoria have together shown courage and leadership that is rare.
We applaud them both and look for more in the same mold.
In Ottawa, the MP's have skulked away into the night, refusing to even comment on how or why they refuse to let Auditor-General Sheila Fraser look at how they casually spend HALF A BILLION TAX DOLLARS each year on themselves.
And in Victoria, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the provincial watchdog for children has had to go to the courts to get Campbell & Co to turn over cabinet documents. She won.
But, understand that in order to do her job protecting children and youth, she had to sue Gordon Campbell and Children's Minister, Mary Polak.
The Gulf Oil Spill has exceeded all imagined horrors.
A first, it was a tragedy focused on an explosion and 11 deaths.
Then it was about 40,000 gallons of oil leaking into the sea.
Then it became 200,000 gallons a day.
And now it is about an immense human disaster, eating away at wild life, the oceans, local communities, jobs, livelihoods and everything else in its wake.
It was somewhat encouraging to see President Obama being truly angry not only at BP and Halliburton and their complicit partners in this crime, but also the US office of Minerals Management Service.
While this anger and determination may be a bit of theatre and a bit of how we all feel, in the long run it may mean next to nothing.
Every weekend, the newspapers publish their biggest and no doubt most lucrative section called "Driving."
Oil is built thoroughly into our culture, our thinking, our very assumptions about how we live.
There is an old adage.
"Do not s--t where you eat."
We have, as an entire species, been ignoring this quint idea and we are running out of time and space.
I am a huge Willie Nelson fan.
Below are three classic videos that might get you onside if you are not already leading the cheers.
I don't really know much about the fellow's life or story.
What I do know is that he is in the top rank of singer's whose work is artfully artless.
A regular commenter to this site raised a very good question the other day, something I've been wondering about me own true self.
Campbell blah, blah, blah...yes, fair enough.
BUT...where is the NDP?
What are they doing to take advantage of all the self-inflicted wounds that the Liberals are offering them?
Where are the rallies, the town hall meetings, the press conferences are whatever else it takes to keep the heat on the current administration?
Yes, it's the HST.
But it is also the consistent pattern of Playing All the Big Games, while letting the little people hang out to dry.
It is the heartless and cruel approach to health and education and families.
So very many thousands of British Columbians have had it with this government and yet the NDP has stayed curiously off the radar.
What the heck are they waiting for?
America may be slightly mad in the heels, but if this were Colorado or New Jersey, the Official Opposition would be on TV and radio every night, screaming bloody murder and building their voter base.
Where are the Opposition Stars? Who are the Names? Who is positioning himself or herself for leadership?
If this is excitement, I need a pill.
Wake up Little Suzy...puleeeeze.
We pay enormous amounts of money for public education.
That money is called taxes.
Taxes on practically everything, but especially school levy taxes on home ownership.
(We also pay considerably for private education, but that's another story and another argument.)
Think then about the peculiarity of this headline:
Hyndes said trustees want to know how much the district could save by implementing a user-pay system. The district currently spends about $1.5 million on school buses.
Similar proposals have been considered in the past, but have never been implemented because of opposition by parents and trustees. Any new user pay system would not go into effect September 2010, but could be a possibility for 2011.
Some parents say the free service is unfair to those who pay for their own children's transit passes.
*****
This fun little announcement comes on the same day that You Know Who has declared that he will run for a fourth term as Premier in 2013.
Hey parents in the TriCities...better start saving up to buy your kid a skateboard.
O.K. Now it's official.
Members of Parliament are refusing to let Auditor-General Sheila Fraser examine their expenses, saying she has no right to look at their books – and they don’t plan to give her one.
The combined Houses of Parliament spend some $500-million a year.
But your MP's and Senators feel it is not our business how they spend tax dollars on themselves.
Welcome to Feudal England.
We were sitting in the window seats of a coffee shop the other day.
A young woman, perhaps late twenties, early thirties, jaywalked across the busy street in front of us.
She did this casually.
She was wearing a bright red T-shirt.
This is what the T-shirt declared in very large bold leters:
JUST DO ME
Just do me.
Just do me?
Clearly this young woman is not working for Rape Relief.
Clearly this young woman has never heard of Rape Relief.
Possibly she's never heard of terrible things that happen to women every day of the week around the world.
Yes, even here in Supernatural.
Why aren't all of the women and at least half the men in this idiot's social circle telling her to think about what she is doing?
Is there someone who thinks this is clever or funny?
And if some madman attacked her, what would be her defense?
I was just kidding, your Honour?
He should have known that.
Turns out it wasn't an "act of God" after all.
Seems it was that old Triple Threat: Greed, Graft & Incompetence.
Always bound to get someone dead.
In this case - the Gulf Oil Spill - 11 people died in the explosion and the oil spill is ruining coast lines, livelihoods and communities.
Between BP's rush for crude at any cost, sloppy and sleepy management of the site and corruption of government regulators, this was entirely a man made disaster waiting for the green light.
Can the likes of Gordon Campbell and Stephen Harper be trusted to approve off-shore drilling with real and secure safety measures in place?
Come on, get serious.
Six and a half years.
The other day, I found myself thinking about the Basi-Virk case.
I was struggling to remember when all of that began.
Such is the beauty of the internet.
On Dec. 28, 2003, police executed a search warrant on the legislature in Victoria and seized documents and other evidence.
I cannot help but suspect the highest reaches of the current administration from having some hand in causing all these delays in bringing this case to trial.
As the story revolves somehow around the selling of BC Rail - with a little sidebar of narcotics thrown in for good measure - one wonders who has what to hide?
But we seem to specialize in justice gone astray in this neck of the woods, do we not?
How about 25 years?
Here's how we compute in B.C. under the regime of The Monumental Premier.
If you are a poor parent and your children have been placed in foster care, your housing allowance is now being cut from a family rate of $570 a month to a single person’s rate of about $375.
The government will save the taxpayers $195.
Of course, if your housing allowance is now $195 less than it was last month, you may have even more trouble than usual paying for your home, which in turn reduces your chance of getting your children back and out of foster care ad its intendant costs.
Lovely.
Of course, there is no problem funding the Site C dam, the new roof for The Playpen, the new convention centre, etc...
How do Campbell, Hansen, the Housing Minister, the Minister of Children & Families and the rest of these carpetbaggers sleep at night?
Probably very well.
Because they have a personal belief system that allows them to ignore this kind of human suffering in their own back yards.
Footnote:
Many of you will now tell us that parents whose children are in foster care are loafers and bums and that they are hardly citizens at all.
Thank you very much in advance.
The Cannes Film Festival is in full swing and the press can't say enough about the new Russell Crow/Ridley Scott version of "Robin Hood."
The press had yet to praise or condemn the film. They are too busy gushing over the stars.
On Monday, February 8th, I posted an item about this release, called "Merry Men."
If you missed it, here it is again.
Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" was published in 1932; George Orwell's "1984" in 1949.
In these two seminal and brilliant novels of the future, people were stunned and regulated automatons.
They were controlled in all their behaviours by overshadowing central governments.
They watched and were watched by TV screens.
They took soma tablets to stay happy.
On Monday, I was walking in the 'hood.
A girl of about 15, dressed in the uniform of a very expensive private school was walking towards me.
She was texting.
Of course.
She's a Happy Little Consumer Unit.
Her family thinks she's a person.
On Friday, I had a late breakfast with my son.
At the table next to us, two people met and texted and said, without looking at each other, "Great to see you."
They are Happy Consumer Units.
HCU's.
Somebody has mistaken them for real people.
But less frequently these days.
People in the UK are pissing so much Prozac into the toilets that the water systems are polluted with Happy Medicine.
One in ten Americans has a prescription for an anti-depressant.
HCU's rule.
The pharmaceutical bill is in the many, many billions of dollars, euros and yen.
Hank Haney, Tiger Woods swing coach, decided the other day to jump from the Tiger ship. After working with Woods for several years very closely, how did he break the news to his biggest client and a man he calls his close friend?
He texted him.
Tiger Texted back.
They may speak soon.
All the good HCU's are texting, watching the Big Plasma Screen and popping the Happy Pill.
Half the people driving in the lanes next to you are HCU's stoned on Happy Meds.
The rest are texting and talking on their cells.
Brave New World.
1984.
We thought it was just literature.
When the geniuses at the top of the heap that calls itself CBC Radio Two decided to Youthenize its formats, they scrubbed most of the classical and jazz playlist.
They decided that their audience was just too, too old.
Missing the point that Canada has been getting older by the day.
So enough already with the Ellington and Scarlotti.
In with the...uh, the...
What they've managed to do in the past few years is come up with a playlist that appears to be unique in broadcast worldwide.
They play a kind of pop/rock/folk/funk/hip/blues that apparently is known only to five guys in Nova Scotia.
This is Fall-Through-the-Cracks music.
It's music that never sells an album because it s second rate drek.
Oh, it's soulful alright.
It's cute and clever on occasion.
It's just not memorable or hummable or impactful.
It's Loser Tunes Inc. is what it is.
Somebody's cousin is running the shop.
Investigate and change, please.
