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.