Somebody at CBC has got guts

I watched part of the documentary IN THE NAME OF GOD: SCENES FROM THE EXTREME Sunday night. I've set my PVR to record it later. It's scenes from Pakistan, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Palestine showing the indoctrination that is inflicted upon the young in these countries.

I don't know what I found more disturbing, children that appear to be 8 or 9 singing the praises of martyrdom and jihad, or the parents that talk of sacrificing their children to Allah for the fight against the "Great Satan" the way we would talk about going to the store for groceries.

Something refreshing about the film is the complete lack of voiceover editorializing that's so common today (I'm looking at YOU Michael Moore!) and the fact that the filmmaker just lets the camera roll...allowing us to make up our own minds about what we're seeing, which is some pretty shocking stuff.

If anyone needs some reminders about what caused 9-11 you'll see it here.

My Canada Includes Accordian Guy

After reading both articles, Joey's and Mark Wegierski's I have to say I'm torn: Some of the things Wegierski says should be discussed - and on some I agree with Joey's "F you!"

A lot of that I can't argue with and I do believe that a lot of our history has been wrung through the "PC filter." I remember being in Vancouver in 1992, the 200th anniversary of George Vancouver's surveying expedition to the Strait of Georgia, and being struck by how Captain Vancouver's acheivements were downplayed (fer Christsake's they named the city after him after all!) with several groups calling him an Imperialist or Nazi etc. etc. This historic anniversary died without much celebration in the city named after him.

Well that's a bit of a stretch! Official multiculturalism as practised by the Federal Government, warts and all, does not drag us down into Third World status. It could stand some improving, but just because an immigrant here isn't British doesn't mean the whole country is going to hell. It might go to hell for many other reasons but pining for "Old Canada" isn't the way to solve many of them.

For the record, I'm first generation Canadian, born of Central European parents.

When my parents immigrated in the 50's they were called the "trash of Europe" and were asked why they didn't just stay "over there where they belonged." One such opinioner was a beauracrat that assigned my mother to work washing up in a TB hospital in Montreal where she caught - ding! - Tuberculosis. My dad they sent into the deepest woods in Quebec to chop them down.

Both of them loved this country more than any other and would die for it.

And neither of them were British. And neither am I. But I am Canadian.

I'd support it

Suddenly, Conservative

The telephone is ringing. At dinner, of course.

A telemarketer.

A very unfortunate telemarketer.

Because Rue's answering the phone, not me. But despite my expectations of bloodied eardrums on the other end of the phone, she hands the phone to me with a smile.

"Hello" I say tentatively, wondering who has gotten by the gatekeeper - she who is my wife - and what they want.

"Hello Mr. Kraut. This is Donald calling on behalf of Stephen Harper."

"Ah. OK. Put him on."

"Well, I'm actually calling on his behalf to say thank you for your recent response to our mailer."

Recent? I mailed that thing in December.

"So he's not going to talk to me?" I am soooooo loving this.

"Well, he's not actually in the office right now..."

"Is his cubicle next to yours?"

"Actually, Mr. Kraut, did you know that with an election call only days or weeks away, Mr. Harper would like to rally all Canadians who believe in accountable government to put an end to the excessive waste of 11 years of Liberal rule. Can we count on your support?"

"To do what, exactly?"

"Well, running a campaign against an organization as well-funded as the Liberal Party of Canada is an expensive proposition at best..."

"Oh, I see. The answer is no. I don't give money to political parties."

(pause) "Well, you could become a member for $10..."

"Can I yell and scream at meetings and votes?"

"Sure..."

"OK, count me in!"

"Well, now that you're a member, would you feel more comfortable contributing to the cause?"

"Sheeeesh! I told you I don't contribute to political parties. My membership's coming in the mail, right?"

"Yes sir...Have a good day."

"And you."

--click--

"Wanker." I say, putting the phone down and getting back to my now cold dinner.

And that, dear reader, was how I became a member of the Conservative Party of Canada. God knows what kind of cataclysm this will produce in the future.

A party that would have me as a member...

Cringe, Laugh, Repeat

That's the basic reaction the first time you watch The Office (which I've spotted at $Cdn 37 for both seasons at Costco.)

Of course, NBC, after making an American version of another BBC favourite - Coupling: which is banned by the Geneva convention as a weapon of mass defecation - is at it again, "Americanizing" The Office and again the result is familiar:

Truth be told I found the original BBC show to be a bit of a downer. What makes up for it is the sheer nastiness of the humour. All are skewered.

American major network sitcoms are light and frothy - no one who watches NBC wants to be reminded of real life anytime soon - so something that is this nasty would be better suited to cable, where it could find an audience to appreciate it. The very things that make the BBC version funny preclude it from being a "feel good" "laugh a minute" riot-fest that the U.S. version of Coupling should and could have been- nastiness, office politics, disappointments great and small, and in the end layoffs.

Highlight below for discussion of what would be in the American version that would ruin it. Don't if you don't want to spoil the BBC version that you eventually must see:

In the American version Tim would get the girl (a supermodel posing as a receptionist, because the Dawn in the original wouldn't be acceptable to audiences accustomed to Friends-level attractiveness), Gareth would get laid, and David Brent would be spared redundancy layoff after begging for his job and there'd be an ahhhh shucks huggy moment at the end, where all the characters would learn something valuable about themselves and I'd puke puke puke

NBC should just walk away while it can...

The Canadian Kraut and the Cross-Border Shop

Carnival of the Canucks is at Ghost of a Flea this week. Check it out on Tuesday to see what True Northy goodness ensues.

I'm going to write about that quintessential Canadian passtime: the Cross Border Shop! Today, my target is a satellite radio system from Circuit City in Amherst, U. S. of A. The experience was quite positive: the border crossing at Queenston was empty, the US customs officer (now with prominently-displayed sidearm!) was pleasingly intimidating, and the choice of electronic superstores was thrilling.

So, you're asking. Everything went smoothly- no hiccups, no stories of stripsearches at the border, no nightsticks to the genitals by burly female American G.I.'s (darn!) Why the hell are you wasting our time with this boring entry?

Well, this trip does illustrate a point. My whole goal was to purchase a satellite radio system for our Honda Odyssey. I can't do this in Canada yet. We don't have satellite radio, even though the signal for the U.S. market reaches quite a ways into our vast great land...

I live in, what, the fifth or sixth largest metropolitan area on the continent, and I have to go to frickin' Niagara Falls, New York to get it. Why? Well when satellite radio comes to Canada, it'll be the same CRTC-mandated Canadian-Content crap that's been forced down our throats for a generation. The fact that the CBC is so prominently involved leads me to believe that Canadian satellite radio will be more of the same.

I resent that I have to wait for the best toys to come to Canada a year or so after every last small market town in the States is bored with them. Why no TIVO in Canada? Oh sure, the Rogers version is good; it has changed our viewing habits and times considerably, but it has limits and is the only game in town, unless you want to get a satellite dish...

But the whole Canadian content thing is what's sticking in my craw. What are we so afraid of? Look at Hollywood. Can you say that Canadians are under-represented there? Setting quotas and limits allows crappy artists to flourish and take over the local airwaves.

Remember some of the lousiest music of the 80's were due to Canadian content, and yet our government is terribly afraid of letting all of these losers get real jobs and sparing our ears.

Hopefully all of these crappy artists are confined to one unused channel that I can safely ignore with my new toy...

Books books books

Meme of the week. Books I've read in bold. Via Daimnation!

And no, seeing the movie version doesn't count...

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie.
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Hell, that's only 21. I've got some catching up to do.

Timing

So if we'd closed the sale of our house a bit earlier we would've been in town for the Memorial Cup?

Timing timing timing...

School Soon...

Being the parent of a two-and-a-half year old, it's come to my attention that I'll actually have to start paying attention to the public education system, and by definition: teachers.

But considering that Ontario is following California into the big black hole of Class Size Reduction (CSR) it's a good thing we're moving to British Columbia: there all we'll have to deal with is the annual strike for whatever damned cause of the moment Organized Labour comes up with...

Colby Cosh gave me some material to chew over:

Smells more like a smokescreen. We're not going to actually deal with the real challenges facing the education system: we'll just latch on to an arbitrary idea that's simplistic enough to catch on with the clapping seals that'll elect us, and then we'll blame the previous government when it doesn't work.

So in other words, the rather simplistic assumption that small class sizes yield better results than hiring better qualified staff is an idea that doesn't hold any water.

The big warning sign flashing in my head is "emergency credentials." Yes more stopgap, underqualified staff to fill the 20-1 cap is just what Ontario needs.

Now I have to do research into what's wrong with B.C.'s education system. Any commentators out there want a soapbox to climb up on?

Jeez, not like Dalton would make an expensive promise just to win an election, would he? Could someone tell me what promise the Ontario Liberals have actually kept? To be honest I think he should break this one, too. Considering how much this will cost for dubious benefit, he should instead adequately fund the schools and make the boards TRULY accountable for their decisions.

Yawn

10 years, 2 hours and 4 minutes later:

That's how long it took for pathetic Monkey-Boy to get the girl.

I stopped watching about two or three years ago, except for last night (and I wasn't lost in the slightest...)

One thing I'd like to ask: Where's the feminist reaction? I mean, Rachel has to drop everything (perfect job in Paris for Pete's sake!) and everyone's all so damn happy that she got off the plane?

Oh, but it's so romantic, you say.

- Right -

Everyone calls this show a sit-com, but actually it's a fantasy:

Look at the what the show's trying to tell you:

• People can have kids with no ill effects to their health, lifestyle, appearance, WALLET! I mean where the hell did BEN go? What about those triplets Phoebe carried for her Trogloditic brother?
• Huge apartments can be affordable in NYC for waitresses, out of work actors, junior cooks, etc.
• Fat teenage girls can be rail-thin skeletons later in life without dealing with the fallout from anorexia/bulimia. No implications about negative body image and the problems that young girls can have. But it's a big fuckin' laugh when we see "fat Monica" because jeez, isn't she pathetic? Har har har! All you teenage fat girls should get skinny like Monica! Because you're losers if you don't!
• The ultimate expression of love is to agree to hand over your life savings so your obsessive-compulsive fiancee can plan the dream wedding her Barbie's never had, and that she could never pay for herself. And if you don't, you don't really love her! (yes this one was my pet peeve...)

I could go on and on. Thankfully, Friends won't. Except in reruns. But I doubt if it'll have the longevity that MASH or Seinfeld will have. Some of the early Friends episodes already appear dated- none of the Seinfelds do.

Aftermath of the Sale...

So today is the day that our agent is supposed to call us and tell us that she has the condition waivers and the deposit from the buyer of our house in hand...

I'm not too worried as the 4-hour inspection yesterday went well, with only minor problems specified, not enough to re-open any kind of price negotiation...They would've had to lock me up for murder if we had to negotiate price again.

So today, a lot of the stress Rue and I have been under has dissipated. Rue promptly caught a cold yesterday and I've ordered her to bed to rest, as she wasn't looking too good while she was up. Punkin' and Boo Boo are also sick and mercifully sleeping at the moment...

I myself feel a slight tickle at the throat that always precedes my nasty allergy/headcold double-whammy that always hits me in May-June...

The fact that we've been under stress for so long about selling the house makes it so much weirder now that the stress is gone.

No wonder we've all gotten sick.

SOLD

The first offer came in on Thursday. We liked it, and the inspection was done today. We'll be heading on out to Kelowna mid-June!

Cross-posted with the Pocus.