Do you remember watching The Mighty Hercules as a kid? Remember when Daedalus would think that he’d gotten one over on Hercules and he’d be all smarmy and pathetic and mean? And then, inevitably he’d lose and Herc would drag his ass around town and then the meanness was gone and he’d just be smarmy and pathetic?
That’s kinda like what the Toronto Sun is looking like these days. Here’s their front page from yesterday:
Now that’s professional headline writin’!
Just watched the final episode. So, so good. I miss it already.
Last one to leave the barn, turn out the lights.
It would seem that Canada’s opposition parties — the three largest left and centre-left parties: the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois — are about to merge. Agreements have been reached as to who should lead the party and hold cabinet positions, and a missive has been dispatched to the Governor General.
Back in October, following the federal election, I joked that the left wing parties should unite, but didn’t think they’d actually try it. Indeed, I don’t think they would have, but for the strategic error Stephen Harper made recently to change campaign finance rules and take away the $1.75 earned by political parties for each vote they gained. That move, coupled with other intended policies and an empty set of solutions for the current economic situation, would inevitably have brought about a major move by the opposition. Normally this would have taken the form of voting down the budget and spurring another election. Instead, the opposition is uniting and hoping to avoid an election. This would win them great gratitude from the public, who would rather juggle rattlesnakes than vote again this year.
Not surprisingly, though, many are upset about this, and the debate is well underway. Witness the nearly 1300 comments on the Globe and Mail’s article posted just 24 hours ago (which Mathew Ingram dissects) or the nearly 3500 on the CBC article. Unfortunately, because of my schedule, I’ve had little time to absorb any of this. Pity; I suspect we’re witnessing one of the more interesting events in Canadian politics in my lifetime.
Huh…I don’t know if I’ve ever taken that long a break from the blog, apart from when I’ve been traveling. It’s been a busy couple of days…a conference, Nellie’s holiday party, catching up on the ever-growing pile of stuff I/we need to do, visiting friends, trying unsuccessfully to see a movie last night, etc.
Probably the only thing really worth mentioning right now is a decision we made yesterday: that we’ll start eating meat again. Well…I guess we were still eating seafood so it’s not as if we were really vegetarians, but we decided to work other meat back into our diet.
While I think we’ve done pretty well to go off most meat for two full years, and off red meat for two and a half, I still view this decision as something of a failure. The main reason we’re adding more meat to our diet is because we’ve done a piss-poor job at ensuring protein is part of our diet. We’ve also sucked at expanding our usual meal choices over the past couple of years, such that I feel very limited in what I can eat now. I’m not saying that’s a valid reason to eat animals, I’m just saying it’s another way in which I failed at this. A big factor has been time constraints; both of us have been working a lot of hours lately, and when we do that we tend to sacrifice good eating habits. By reintroducing chicken to my diet — and I think that’s all I’ll take back for now — I hope to at least have more quick, healthy options to go to.
Certainly we’ll eat less meat than we did before we started this little experiment. I’ve had six meals since we made this decision and I have yet to eat any meat, so it’s not as if I feel a ravenous hunger for it. I feel guilt even thinking about eating meat (weird, since I’ve been eating fish for two years), as I should…if my rationale for going off meat was to spare animals, then I should keep in mind at all times the consequences of going back to it.
We’ve also decided not to buy meat in grocery stores, opting instead for places like Cumbrae’s and The Healthy Butcher. Their meat isn’t really any more humane — they still kill the animals — but if we’re going to do something as environmentally irresponsible as eat meat, we’ll try to do the least amount of damage possible.
Anyway, a few minutes after making the decision, Nellie had ordered her first bacon in over two years and seemed to enjoy it an awful lot. She’s gone to and from vegetarianism before, so maybe it’s a little easier for her. I’m just not sure when I’ll be able to bring myself to try chicken, or pork, or especially beef. I suspect the latter will happen in February…Nellie’s already decided she wants steak for her birthday.
Just busy. I probably won’t have a chance to blog until Saturday at the earliest. I just didn’t want anyone sending a squad car over to check on me because I hadn’t blogged in three days.
Stay tuned.
Let’s see, what’ve I been consuming lately?
Yesterday a friend asked, via Twitter, “Where were you 45 years ago today?” I hadn’t quite woken up yet so it took me a second to place the date: November 22. It was 45 years ago yesterday that JFK was assassinated.
History has a funny way of messing with your perception of time, particularly when something is still very much part of popular culture the way that Kennedy (and his assassination) is. That event always feels much older to me than how I perceive 45 years. While it happened before I was born, it’s not as if I’m unfamiliar with it…I’ve consumed a lot of films, documentaries and books about that assassination. In fact, when I thought about it yesterday, I found it mildly surprising that I was born only 12 years after John Kennedy’s assassination. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, and the two events seemed decades apart in my perception.
That thought stayed with me as I continued to read the first pages of Richard Evans‘ The Coming Of The Third Reich (amazon). He’s currently describing how antisemitism was alive and well, even fairly organized, in Germany in 1908, well before the start of even the first world war. 1908…that’s 100 years ago. It won’t even be for another six years that we hit the first anniversary of the beginning of WWI.
WWI seems like a big marker. We’re all taught so much about it that, to me, it seems like the starting point of what we perceive as ‘recent’ history; anything beyond that is just labeled history, full stop. I used to think recent history was whatever had transpired in the past hundred years or, when I was younger, whatever had happened earlier in the current century. WWI was that milestone for me, and probably for my father too, but I suspect it won’t be long until it fades and WWII becomes the new starting point. That’s strange for me, as I’ve been reading so much about WWI lately that it’s far more prominent and memorable, if that’s the right word, to me. History is delineated in our perceptions not by years, but by milestones, and their prevalence in our minds tricks us about their age.
Another example: it seems equally hard for me to believe that Nevermind by Nirvana was released 17 years ago as it is to believe that the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is still nearly four years away.
How tragic: just as the economy melts, the world experiences a whisky shortage.
How the hell am I supposed to cope now?!?
#@%&!
From the wonderful Malene Arpe at the Toronto Star:
Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz welcomed a son yesterday. His name is Bronx Mowgli Wentz, which will assure him a painful childhood full of taunting and school yard beatings. There is as of yet no photos of the little guy (something I’m confident will be rectified by People Magazine in short order), so instead, here are, well, The Bronx and Mowgli.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 