Why this is not making sense

If you were putting together a tribe, would it not make sense that the leaders are the ones that are the wisest and have passed on the greatest skills to the strongest new generation of hunters and gatherers? Would you not want the leaders to be capable of learning new things?

Well, if you have lived in North America for the past decade, what has happened is exactly the opposite. In The US, they have begun to straighten things out. They hit a rock bottom I hope we never get near. We are going to move up soon, as well, I hope.

Neo-Cons, Right wingnuts (Bush-Harper) have been running the place in exactly the worst way. They are close minded people who ignore the great learning of the tribe. Religion is fine as long as it does not cut off your Brain from learning new things. Where it thinks the enlightenment and the scientific revolution are things that need to be ignored...well you get the mess we have today and you get the kind of Relgion that blows other people up.

I still cannot fathom the neo-con version of Christianity which ignores the vast bulk of what Jesus is saying in scripture - um, it's been a few years but I think Jesus is an important part of Christianity? There is no kindness and humilty to these bible thumpers.

In other words, they don't even follow their own teachers.

Bush was dumb - smart people tell me Harper is smart, but it is so tough to believe that when everything he says and does is so mean and narrow-minded. I guess he is a pigeon - his brain can fly thousands of miles, but try and catch him and he flies exactly 4 feet - just the minimum effort to solve the most immediate problem.

Harper sees his party as the one of practicality, and the "right wing" liberals as one of rigid ideas. First - they are further to the right than ever. I guess Harper does not believe in the existence of the NDP. This reminded me of The Russian Revloution. Lenin named his side and named his opponents. He called his folks "Bolsheviks" which means moderate, and Kerensky's people "Mensheviks" which means "radical". (my apologies to the Russian Language). Lenin, was of course, the real radical. Just as Harper pins definitions on two parties, in exactly the reverse of what they are making himelf seem like "one of us" while liberals live in ivory towers. ( I think Paul Martin sold off the Ivory Towers LOL).

TF

P.S. I missed this during the campaign, but Alec Baldwin called Sarah Palin "Bible Spice" Love it!

Faux News and The American Coverage

As far as I can tell, MSNBC (the best one down there) had it's own article about Fox News' call to invade Canada while we were all at yoga class. CNN had a link to youtube. Fox, of course, NOTHING on this. ABC had nothing but did cover the fallen Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. CBS had nothing. I did not have a chance to check The Daily Planet....

Twitter

I have yet to catch the twitter big. I am a Luddite, and so, email, facebook, my blog, MSN Live, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, my Cell Phone and smoke signals are my only ways of contacting the outside world.

I certainly have nothing against it, but I would never do this:

A recent tweet by one would-be Cisco employee proves that when it comes to placing a permanent black mark on your resume via the Internet, Twitter is now the tool of choice. To illustrate, here’s the tweet the now Web-infamous "theconnor" shared with the world:

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

TF

My letter sent to The Red Eye show on Fox News

The American right wing elite media has no sense of humour about itself. So, do not expect Canadians to be amused that you spat on the graves on 116 Canadian soldiers who gave their lives in this war of terror, as your ally. I assume that your show is not in any way meant to be "news" as the rest of planet understands the word. It is not punditry. It was not satire, as satire is meant to be funny, not to denigrate to an ally.

Where did the re-directed airlines land on Sept 11, 2001? We were your ally since before the war began. It is a shame that as little as you know your enemy, you know your friends even less.

Thomas Forten
Mississauga, Ontario

Then again...

...if, as Fox News suggests, they invade Canada, that would get rid of Harper and have Obama in charge of us.....hmmmm

Fox News

I simply do not understand the right wing American media. I have commented before how a nutcase can get on CNN and his view that Katrina was sent by God because they had a gay pride parade. If you have not seen this, you will be surprised...or it will be surprising to you that you are not surprised:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJn5XlbSFk

An affront to soldiers who risk their lives is deplorable.

As I said somewhere else, Fox News is to the world as fart jokes are to literature.

BUT it you use the word "cunt", THAT can get you in trouble in The United States. I know maybe I should take a "who cares" approach to this, and treat it with all time and effort that is given to "The National Enquirer".

As a nation, we can take a joke - Jon Stewart referred to us as "gay us" and makes fun of us all the time. But it is meant in jest. I saw no humour in the Fox segment.

Besides, as we all know, God sent Katrina because he hates French people....

Obama

Watching Obama run the U.S., while Harper runs our country, is much like having the Dad from "My Three Sons" raising your neighbor's kids, while you and you siblings are being raised by the schoolteacher from "The Wall".

Obama, unlike Bush, thinks science is a good to, you know, "have". Canada's science minister does not even answer a blunt, direct question whether he believes in evolution. Oh boy, what a great guy to have as minister of science!

TF

Greed

Greed has been in the news a lot lately, and for good reason. Profiting by the extremely wealthy, at others' expense, even to the point of ruining the weakest of us, has been a favoured blood sport on acid lately.

Let's go back to the Irish famine of the 1840s. Abandoned by their own colonial overlords, the British, millions of Irish set sail in the “coffin ships”, so named because many of the passengers died en route to North America.

But luckily some got to Canada, and Canada has never done nasty things to profit on the misery of others. Well, guess what – many of the Irish refugees lived long enough to make it all the way to the infant city of Toronto. But in 1847 it was only a town, with a population just over 20,000. Over 40,000 Irish ended up here – twice the native population. After some time there was put in place a process of funds to save those who could be saved, and treating the sick in the way thought best at the time, quarantine. So many who have survived the coffin ships, and the screening process in Quebec, died in Toronto. Some of the funds were used to purchase coffins – even back then disposal of the dead was known to be a good idea.

Some of the fine people involved in organizing the burials, pocketed half the money and buried two people to a coffin .

People have always sucked: AIG and folks are not doing anything new, they just had the means to do it on a massive scale.


Tom

Remember When You Were Young….

I appreciate all kinds of good music. "Good "is defined as what I like, and what I don't like is stamped as "Bad".

My band is Pink Floyd. I liked the revival Gilmour lead 80s-90s stuff, certainly a good show, but the real Floyd ends with "The Wall" in 1979. The final cut..well….

I worked with a young musician in 2005 when the Geldolf live aid concerts were done, and he was even blown away by the one-off throw together concert the Floyds did with the more accessible songs like "Money" and "Wish you were Here". I laughed, and said yeah, I did not expect them to play "Careful with that Axe Eugene", in which Waters whispers then screams at the top of his lungs for the several minutes.

One's appreciation of art and music is entwined with one's emotions and state of mind at the time you read/listen. I re-read Tolstoy and loved every bit of it. I tried to re-read Dostoyevsky, and couldn't do it. Mr D could write, I just wasn't into it when I tried to re-read it.

Waters took over the band – you can hear the exact point – on Animals during "Dogs" when he takes over lead from Dave in the line "gotta admit…..". Now I know "Dogs" is 17 plus minutes long, but he kept the stick for the rest of the relay. I was very mad at Roger for a very, very long time. In 2005 I figured if Dave, Rick and Nick could forgive Roger, maybe I could too. In the winter of 2006, I re-considered it all from The First album on…and I was back!!

Now leave it to me to chose, as his favourite band, one where the founder went totally off, having fried his brain on LSD, and where the eventual new leader went almost as badly off into a bathos that was simply not listenable.

My dearly departed best friend of 25 years who left us in august 2007 attended the 1977 Montreal Olympic stadium concert where the band pretty much imploded as a live act, collapsing under their own weight of self-absurdity. She had a bootleg of that concert and the tender, loving anthem of "Echoes" was differently presented as, since it was at the end of the tour, Dave and Rick's voices were shot to hell and instead of a few mellow hippies singing about labyrinths and coral caves, it sounded like Johnny Rotten and Iggy Pop in a duet. It was also where Roger spat at the audience, something that Mr. Rotten did, and was a Rotten thing not a Roger thing. Of that friend, my tribute to her is, and shall always be, from "Shine on you crazy Diamond", Roger's tribute to Sid:

Pile on many more layers, and I'll be joining you there.

Next Week: How Jethro Tull helped me lose my religion.

Tom

A Process

This did not have a happy ending. But the ending is another thing all together.

I do have a fair bit of experience with the Ontario health care system as I had a close family member who was ill off and on for over 35 years (the one I am talking about here). She was in very poor health the last few years of her life. Also, I worked in a non-medical role in 2 different, large hospitals – one in 1999, and another in 2001-2.

In July 2008, I was thrust, along with other family members, into the position of being in a hospital to provide support for major surgery to a close family member. On the day of the surgery we first sat in a pre-check in waiting area still with the patient herself. After check-in, we went to wait for her in the "waiting to be prepped, but has already been admitted" waiting room. Again the patient was still sitting with us. Then, she was called to be prepped. When she had been prepped for surgery, we remained in waiting room #2. Then, we were told she was prepped and we went to waiting room #3, in the "prepped, but not yet in surgery" waiting room. Here you could go two loved-ones at a time to see her in the prep room while she was waiting to be wheeled into the OR. Then, when she was off to the OR we were sent to another floor completely. We remained there in the "while the operation is in progress" waiting room.

One miss-step had occurred – she had gone for full blood work at a clinic the day before. Those results had been sent like lost luggage into limbo. It's as if the tests had never taken place. So, if the stress of surgery wasn't enough, they did an entire new set of blood tests on the cusp of he surgery. That could have gone better.

Waiting in the surgical room: Well, this was like enduring a missed or delayed flight connection at an airport, but with the added bonus of having a close family member having a serious operation! We had to push to get the first update. Finally a nurse or surgeon came to tell us there had been a delay as they had to fine tune the machines that collectively go "ping" to be in working order for the surgery. We were treated very well as this person left the OR to talk to us and that was helpful. When it was completed the head surgeon talked to us and filled us in, and stayed until all of our questions were answered. We were very, very well treated and informed.

It was a very structured process – not simply for the patient, but also for the loved-ones. I did simply not expect that kind of rigid structure. It seemed to be well thought out and probably well evolved since the bleeding with leeches era.

If you watch Grey's or House, let's say that what goes on as portrayed on television is done so for dramatic purposes. Reality is very different from drama. Since I have a B.A. in English, hopefully this is not something I only recently discovered. I also side with Alfred Hitchcock that drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out. On TV, the waiting room seems to be near the emergency entrance, right out in the open. I suspect this helps segue to plot B where the car crash or shooting accident victims come blasting through the doors and words like "Stat" and "GSW" are yelled out. We were far from any madding crowds on the 3^rd floor, nowhere near any main door. If I may use the term, we were in a place that seemed sterile.

I watched Michael Michael Moore's "Sicko" and while one must obviously take into consideration "Moore's Law", that he is going to wildly twist his thesis to suit his conclusion, I get the impression that in The United States, underwriters determine the course of a patient's treatment in many, many cases. I did not get that impression from my experience – that the hospital administration was on the phone to OHIP to approve treatment. I got the impression that the medical people made the medical decisions. Billing comes later. Our way is better. Period.

George Carlin

"The Greatest thing since sliced bread". So this is it, huh folks? The Pyramids; The Great Wall of China; Even a lava lamp, to me is greater than sliced bread. You got a knife, you got a loaf SLICE THE FUCKIN' THING!!

I think he was a great social commentator in the vein of Mark Twain (not the novelist but his public persona) and Will Rogers. In my case as a North American, Irish, Catholic, Atheist, I understood his perspective.

Most people get lower key when they get older. George got angrier. He was willing to take on religion in a country where you are pretty much not allowed to do that. Where the most idiotic idea, if it's author calls it "religion", gets you on CNN during prime time. There is no other 1^st world nation where that happens.

As Jon Stewart said, the good thing about George is that he left us thousands of hours of video.

In all that video and audio, one really always makes me chuckle. The famous 7 words lunched a law suit. One minister objected to them being aired. At some point during the process, George said:

Hey Reverend, the radio has two knobs, although I am pretty sure he is uncomfortable with anything that has two knobs. But, the first knob changes the station. The second one TURNS IT OFF.

What was also amazing is that I even missed the first decade and a half of his career, due to my age, yet he was a comic presence from my teens until my mid-forties. He never caught on as an actor, like other comedians, but he did do a children's show!

Along with Richard Pryor, and even before them Lenny Bruce, he expanded the boundaries of what was acceptable in stand-up comedy. But like a Picasso of gags, George knew the rules he was breaking. A lot of today's comics are obscene and vulgar, but far from Picasso-like, they are monkeys flinging paint at canvas.

George, as much as any single performer, actor or individual artist, seemed to take my brain where it was going to go anyway – but he paved the way.

Unfortunately, unlike Twain, rumours of his death were not at all exaggerated.

RIP You irreverent old Hippie!

Tom

Hardship

“Rich people are different”
“Yes, they have more money"
- The Great Gatsby

An article in today’s paper, begins:

A number of charity and awareness walks may cause some serious traffic congestion in the city today.

Um, ok, factual and practical – but it kind of shows what priorities people have these days, or perhaps, have always had. It must be hell for a hung-over rock star puking in his limo to be held up by people out walking to raise money for children with autism.

After my “80” in grade 13 economics, my knowledge of the subject has been on a downward bust cycle, no booms. But I once heard that when the employment rate goes up, stocks go down. Isn’t that awful? Mr. and Ms. Suburbia have to wait another month to re-model the breakfast nook because some low-life jerk gets herself a minimum wage job serving coffee.

It must have been a strange world to live in – czarist Russia, where 97% of the people were serfs living at bare subsistence level, and 3% of the people owned everything. At least in our world I think that 1% own 90% of things at least there is 10% left for the rest of us to fight over.

Intersting Observation

I was waiting for a subway train at union and I had some gum I wanted to get rid of. Then I remembered hearing that I would not find a garbage can (and I DIDN'T) as they are really neat places to hide bombs and IED's. I forget if that was a post 9/11 change or a 7/7 one. I do recall some Jewish fellows all named "IRA" placing bombs in garbage cans in the 70s in London. So I spat the gum on the tracks which i assumed would not result in a derailment.

TF

Eight Belles

A horse finishing second then breaking both ankles and having to be euthanized right on the track is a nasty thing. Barbaro died of injuries sustained in 2006. I first remember this happening in 1975. Another Filly, in fact the most successful Filly of all time, Ruffian, broke a leg and later had to be put down. I had followed this horse’s career for some time. I never really followed racing again because this broke my heart. I had to be taken aside and told she had been put down like an aunt had died. I am actually unofficially named after an ancestor who was a harness racer.

Garth Woolsey in today’s Toronto Star asked the same question I had asked myself: Is this a cruel sport that should be banned? Well, certainly as in any sport, such as getting rid of rug turf in football that injuries (which with horses usually means fatalities) must lead to changes in safety.

Joe Theisman broke his leg on national TV, but he ended up in the broadcast booth, not in the ground.

Ray Chapman was killed by a pitch in a 1920 game between Cleveland and New York. This lead to major changes in baseball.

An outcry has likened racing to cock or dog fighting. We find these "sports" to be repugnant. We don’t mind it when people fight. But then again, people choose to do it.

No, it is not the same as dog fighting, as horses naturally run.

As sad as I am at another beautiful animal dying for money and entertainment I am going to go with the theory that what happened Saturday is rare. We don’t hear about the thousands of daily races where nothing happens. We don’t hear about planes that don’t crash, bridges that don’t collapse or people who did not get murdered.

Being a race horse is much, much safer than being president of The United States. There have only been 43 of those and 3 of them were murdered. Reagan came close, and shots have been taken at many more. But we don’t ban this job.

Tragedy yes and, I hope very much, rare.

Tom.

A Stan Rogers Line

On a Stan Rogers Live album, as he is introducing a song he says "Ontario is now a 'have-not' Province". 35 years later that phrase was used all over the place. I am not going to get into the actual condition a province has to be in to officially be one, nor am I going to actually learn what it means. The spirit does fine for me.

There was an editorial in The Toronto Star recently. I think it was abour how EI differs between provinces. The Star pointed out that these decisions are made as if there are still tons of jobs in Ontario. There aren't.

There aren't

TF

A Decade Since

These days when I am at work doing tech support, if I want to feel/act very old I’ll throw in the phrase “hey, I go back to the punch card era!”. I guess I am only a few cranky rants away from wearing my pants under my armpits.

I have been using the internet since 1991 before there even was a WWW. Newsgroups were where scientists exchanged information about particle physics. Ok, in my case it was the latest episode of Star Trek! But I won’t even go back that far, let alone to punch cards (and Van Halen and The original cast of SNL, work boots worn to school….).

Let’s go back to say 1998: An even decade. By then almost everyone I knew was using computers and the internet either at home or at work. E-mail had become an acceptable way to communicate with others. But everyone was still on dial-up so downloading music or full-length videos was in its infancy. Yahoo was the number one search engine. If you wanted to hear a radio program you had to, well, listen to the radio or record it on to a cassette. You could buy CDs but few could make them themselves. DVD players were around if you were rich and no way anyone was ever going to make them themselves (what do DVD-Rs go for now – 40 cents?).

Most people were still learning from things called “books”. Now it so happens in that year all my books were about computers as I was a tech student at tech college.

Yes, it was a very primitive world. You were lucky to get 75 channels on your tv! If you even had a cell phone you could not get an e-mail there. AND you had to make phone calls from a phone and not your computer. That’s right you had to use your radio for radio, your phone for phone calls and your computer for emails. What the fuck?

Camera’s used something called “film” and unless you had a neato Polaroid, you had to pay someone to develop this film. Only then would you find out that 11 of your 12 pictures completely sucked! (There was no “delete” button).

When you rode the bus, or drove your car, you had to play a CD that you actually had to buy, or deal with the performance loss of a cassette player if you wanted to cheap out and record other people’s CDs. Anyone with a laptop on the bus was actually WORKING and not watching Season 4 of “Corner Gas”.

And while there was spam, it did not comprise 95% of all e-mail.

Today I got an e-mail from Stanley Kowalski. That’s right – Spam is now so bad even fictional characters are sending it!

STELLA!!!!!.....HEY STELLA!!!!!!.....

TWF

Naval Holiday

Wanting to write just comes and goes for me. I haven't posted much for about I guess 18 months.

It's not that things stopped pissing me off - being French-Irish I wake up pissed off, just that nothing new has really pissed me off, or in a new way that I wanted to write about.

The criticisms I have of Harper were there before he was even elected and he is still him. At this point it's like making Lincoln top hat jokes. (K what WAS up with those hats? I think that's when we started to poke holes in the ozone layer). Ditto Bush and they have fallen.

The major change is having a job where I am not only allowed to think, but expected to do so. So in most of my previous jobs I had to put my brain on stand-by at work, and to paraphrase the brat pack, "do my thinkin' in the evenin' time". Now, I have to power on and go through the boot process to go "live" at 2:30PM when my shift begins.

And since I talk on the phone to anyone in the world who can speak English, life is laaaak a baaaaauxxx of choclaaaaaaatttts. I have no idea what is coming up next.

For instance:

A caller was in London but he was an Italian fellow who bought his stereo equipment in Milan. European electricity and stuff works differently from North America.

a French guy from Paris was living in Hong Kong.

A very sweet 85 year old woman was in England. And she said that when it comes to technology her knowledge was like "that of the apes". I burst out laughing.

Oh, oh and the American customers. Apparently my vowels, especially my "o"s give me away.

"Where are you", one guy said.

I replied:"Just outside of Toronto".

"Canada? Jeez, what are you French or something?"

Well... actually...hee hee....

I did inherit the wine and cheese gene for sure!

Viva La Canada Libre!

TF

WKRP In Cincinnatti

This show is now coming out on DVD.

In 1978 WKRP in Cincinnati debuted. – it was a big hit with my high school crowd even though it was not a huge general success out of the gate. Andy Travis is hired as a program director to run a radio station that is 16^th in an 18 station market. In fact the station is owned by “Mother Carlson” and is essentially a play toy for her son Arthur. Andy decides to take the job seriously and he changes the format from snooze fest to contemporary rock. It also helped that as a kid I was a huge Reds fan - I never took to The Expos even though I was born not far from Montreal.

Of course most television shows, and especially comedies, are character-driven. Can you imagine Seinfeld without Kramer? Andy was the hunky cowboy who rides into town. Jennifer was the sexpot who had no particular function you could ascertain yet she drew a large salary, had rich men dripping off of her, but had wisdom of her own and was no dummy. Bailey Quarters was the quiet “girl next door” that just needed a bit of self-confidence. Herb Tarlek encapsulated the polyester “shoes match the belt’ excesses of the 1970s. Johnny Fever was the ex-hippie DJ who suffered from acid flashbacks. Venus Flytrap was the hip funkmeister DJ, a Barry White style ladies man.

The characters were well-set right away in the pilot even though it took us some time to get to know them. Andy and Jennifer always liked to let Carlson think he was running the place and they would protect him from his tyrannical mother.

Topics that are now routine were once new – in the 70s you could have a character that people mistakenly thought was gay, but not a gay character (think of Jack Tripper). Les Nessman, the bow-tied news announcer, is the victim of a misspoken comment when someone calls him a “queer little fellow”. A "Les is gay" rumour goes around and Les goes out on a ledge ready to jump off of the ledge at the station. Andy talks him back into the building.The misheard word or mistaken premise is a time honoured comedic trick that goes back to Roman farce, and of course flourished in Shakespeare.

The funniest episode maybe ever was when Carlson decided, as a Thanksgiving promotion, to throw 20 live turkeys out of a helicopter. The only problem is, they crashed to earth and died a splatty death. “With God as my witness”, Carlson says “I thought turkeys could fly”.

Who could ever forget the bait shop that was the station's main advertiser and their jingo that went: “Red wigglers – the Cadillac of worms”.

It was certainly one of the best comedies of the late 70s early 80s, and that means it stands up against the likes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Barney Miller.

If not the Cadillac of comedies, it was at least the Lincoln.

TF

How Language Changes

There is a book out:

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I have never read her but I have seen her in documentaries and she is wonderful. She was talking about the book with Jon Stewart. Lincoln said "It is better to have your enemies in your tent pissing out than to have them outside pissing in". In another passage, she describes a letter between two civil war generals who were friends, and this is not a gay thing (If you want gay from that era, read Walt Whitman). Anyway, the one writes to the other "I cannot wait until we meet again by the lake, hold hands and engage in gentle intercourse".

In 2007 if I get an offer of gentle intercourse from another man, my response would begin "While I am certainly flattered....."

The famous line "It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all" was written by Tennyson regarding the death of a male friend.

No, he did not hang out with a steelworker, a guy in native headdress, a guy in leather chaps....

Thomas.

Denial

"I don't believe in Beatles "
- John Lennon

I am not talking about people with the wit and poetic talent of John Lennon! Denial is a great hobby these days for many people, and 3 major things come to mind:

The Holocaust

Nobody denies Pearl Harbour or the Yalta Conference, but from the very same conflict people deny something that was so immense that it would seem to me to be about as undeniable as the 2004 Tsunami. Hitler had the big lie and his modern followers, or bastard children, have the big denial. This has included the leader of Iran. Maybe some people in New York City should deny that Mohammed ever existed - oh, the Iranians would get quite the chuckle out of that - why don't we depict it in a cartoon!

Evolution

Another world leader who knows bupkes about world history is George W Bush. Acoording to him when it comes to Evolution, he says "The jury is still out". As comedian Lewis Black said "WHAT jury?. The jury from the scopes trail in the 1920s?". Religions such as Christianity are wonderful, amazing, complicated often very dangerous belief systems that people have spent life times studying. In complexity they kick the shit out of evolution. Here's evolution - sitting down folks? - "Things change over time". Boy, that ain't Thomas Aquinas or St. Paul! And why isn't George W Bush a Catholic? Because religions...um....evolve...over time.

Global Warming

Another world leader who knows jack-shit about world history is our own - Steven "W" Harper. He said since we can't predict the weather next week how can we possibly know anything about climate change? As Jon Stewart I think said "just because Venus is our sister planet does not mean we want IT'S CLIMATE".

At least the heartless bastards who took away Pluto's Planet standard do not deny it exists!!

How long will it be before people deny John Lennon was shot to death??

Thomas.