How I spent my summer vacation

Actually, just hanging around the house, doing housey things, it was fun and I feel somewhat organized for the first time in about two years -- its amazing how much junk accumulates, isn't it. I've been making trip after trip to take stuff to the Mennonites, which seem to be just about the only charitable agency left here which still handles their own donations.
But I've also been having fun reading other people's blog posts about their vacations.
Like from Doctor Grumpy:

Today we went whitewater rafting. Our guide, I swear, was a guy named Stoner.
[Middle son]Craig, of course, was horrified at the idea he might get wet, and so insisted on sitting in the middle of the raft. [Eldest son]Frank and [daughter]Marie loved the idea of getting soaked, and even wanted to help row. So Stoner gave them each a paddle.
For a while they were somewhat helpful, and it kept them busy. Until we hit a stretch of non-rowing quiet water.
Somehow a shouting match broke out, and I turned around just in time to see them beating each other WITH THE PADDLES while Craig tried to hide in the bottom of the raft. Before I could yell at them to stop, Frank sent Marie’s paddle into the river. Craig, trying to avenge his sister, stood up and knocked Frank’s into the river.
And now we were heading into white water, with half our paddles gone. Stoner was clearly horrified to be watching his company’s property floating behind us, and began frantically steering the boat to try to get them, while Mrs. Grumpy and I paddled away. The next few seconds sent some big waves crashing over the raft, drenching everyone (including Craig). He began hitting Marie on the grounds that it was her fault he was wet, since she’d lost her paddle.
Fortunately, we were able to collect the paddles at the other end of the rapid run. But we spent the rest of the day hearing from Craig about how this was “the worst day ever” because he got wet. All the kids, when we got back to shore, agreed that they liked the river rides at amusement parks better. Wimps.

And from Lance Mannion on the Maine coast:

There be whales here
You can categorize your own brand of geekitude by whether the title of this post made you think of Herman Melville or Star Trek or both.
Late this afternoon, after we’d set up our chairs and towels on a high spot on the beach at Nauset, I spotted a white-hulled sailboat far out on the horizon. The rest of our gang rushed headlong towards the water to throw themselves into the breaking waves but I stayed put with my binoculars, thinking that a closer look would show me that another Edward Hopper painting had come to life for a moment.
That happens down here, Edward Hopper paintings coming to life, and it’s no surprise, since the Cape was one of his favorite subjects.
Today happens to be Hopper’s birthday---he’d have been a hundred and eighteen---and it would have been a nice coincidence if it was one of his sailboats hauling by.

But just as I got my sights trained on the boat something black and rounded broke the surface in the foreground. It rose with a splash and disappeared with another toss of white foam and I thought:
“Whale?”

Nancy Nall stayed around Detroit:

It was hot this week­end. How hot was it? Here’s one of the neigh­bors at Alex’ house:

Alex said he’s never seen a squir­rel relax like this. I have, once. It was on a pic­nic table, and it was stretched out, belly down, in much this fash­ion. It was also on a hot day. Spriggy would stretch out like this, terrier-style, but almost always on a cool sur­face, like a tile floor, or even wood. That pic­nic table wasn’t cool, but maybe it was, rel­a­tive to every­thing around it.

And John Cole now has two dogs instead of just one:

In Retrospect It Was a Bad Idea
The dogs were driving me crazy and I couldn’t get any work done as apparently three walks before ten am is not enough, so I took them to the park to run. And they ran about 200 yards away from me, and Lily promptly spent the next minute and a half rolling in something. This picture can not describe the stench, but if I had to guess what it was, I would guess the rotting rancid remains of Satan’s bowel.

Ah, those lazy hazy crazy days of summer.

Long weekend

These people are nuts - part 2

A pseudo-Christian church in Florida is inviting people to burn the Koran:

It's astonishing that there are people in America who are so far gone in their islamophobia that they actually would celebrate 9/11 with a book burning.

Ahh, but, just like Breitbart says about the NAACP, any anti-Muslim racism in America is really Muslim people's own fault, because their very existence is just so provoking.
Hmmm, seems to me that we've come across this type of argument somewhere before...

For crying out loud

What a bizarre spin to put on a news story about an upcoming theatrical production -- 'Sympathetic' terrorist play gets boost.
I guess whenever government funds are involved, we are only supposed to see approved versions of history, not versions which ask whether an injustice might have been done?
So I certainly hope the media has investigated to make sure there were no government funds anywhere near this film or this one or this one. And let's hope the movie Ben Stiller is trying to put together about these guys isn't going to get a penny of public money, either.
Much closer to home, here's another one that I guess people shouldn't be seeing at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, which is supported by federal, provincial and municipal funds.

How hard would it be?

How hard would it be for the Canadian government to just adopt a policy that says, if you are a Canadian citizen and you get into trouble outside the country then our top priority is to help you?
Oh, yeah, him.
Never mind...
UPDATE: Just to clarify, in case it wasn't clear -- I believe citizenship is supposed to mean something. That neither the Harper Cons nor the Paul Martin Liberals would would try to repatriate Omar Khadr, however odiously that citizen and his family may have behaved, is shameful and has weakened the value of Canadian citizenship around the world.

Questions abour the G20

The Facebook group Canadians Demanding a Public Inquiry into Toronto G20 have released the list of the most urgent questions that an inquiry into police behaviour during the protests should answer:

1. Why were the police forcing peaceful protesters out of Queen's Park on Saturday when that was the designated protest area? ...

2. Were special powers actually extended to police for the duration of the G20 summit? If so, what exactly were they? ...
3. Why was the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms trampled on by the police through actions such as: Unwarranted searches, Intimidation to deter people from assembling, Arbitrary arrest, Detainment of innocent bystanders. Who is responsible for giving police orders to act this way? ...

4. Why are police officers allowed not to wear a nametag? Why are police officers allowed to refuse to identify themselves when a citizen asks for their name?
5. I would like to see every dollar of the security budget accounted for in a detailed expense report.
6. Who were the men seen in numerous videos in plain clothes, with batons, arresting peaceful protesters and putting them in unmarked minivans?

7. How does the 'kettling' technique (surrounding protesters with riot police and blocking exit paths from the protest area) comply with the rights of Canadians as laid out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms?
8. Will the tapes documenting the holding facilities be reviewed by an independent reviewer?
9. Why were members of the media cleared out of protest areas or in some cases, arrested?
10. Why were protesters blocked in and not allowed the option of leaving peacefully, especially those in designated protesting areas.

11. What were the reasons behind the orders sent to front line officers to 'stand down' when windows were being broken and cars were being torched, and who gave them?

These people are nuts

The closer the United States gets to the November mid-terms, the crazier some people are getting.
I watched this Red Dawn fantasy and I thought -- WTF?
It makes references to "Patriot Uprising" against "Despotism", but the most chilling line is this one: "I sincerely hope that enough people have crossed that personal line in the sand to join forces with the rest of us so that a small number of us are not required to use force and use of arms".
Why the Horst Wessel Song is playing at the end, who knows.


Boo Man writes about the Red vs. Blue divide:

Over hear in Blueville, there are certain things you don't do in polite company. For example, you don't break out in song with your rendition of "Barack the Magic Negro Lives in DC." You don't pose open-ended questions about the validity of the president's birth certificate. You don't use every cold day as an excuse to remind people that Al Gore is fat. If you don't know what socialism is, you avoid the topic and remain silent when it comes up. . . .
We increasingly live in two different, largely incompatible worlds. It's not all North vs. South. But it's definitely Blue vs. Red. And all of it is dividing people along the wrong lines. It should be those who have vs. those who don't. Instead, it's those who are tolerant vs. those who are not.

Summer of discontent

For a government which tries to pride itself on how well it handles problems, the Harper Conservatives have shot themselves in the foot with the census issue and the boss-from-hell at the RCMP.
Now the Wikileaks Afghanistan papers could result in the Afghan prisoner issue circling around to bite them in the ass again.
And its not even August yet.
No wonder Harper has disappeared.
Meanwhile, Iggy is kicking ass and taking names.

An alternate reality

I like parallel universe stories, so I enjoyed this Chris Kelly column on Huffington Post about the Alternate Earth in which the JournoList scandal is important:

The problem with the JournoList scandal is the problem with a lot of right wing news: It's not happening on Earth I, where you and I live. Like the Black Panthers taking over the Justice Department, or Shirley Sherrod's night raids on Andrew Breitbart's small family farm or Glenn Beck's lonely one-man struggle against the Tides Foundation, it exists in a parallel universe that only superficially resembles our own.
A universe where straight, rich white men are the only victims of anything, ever, and shrieking like an infant is their only defense; where Christianity and capitalism are in constant peril, where black lesbians and the very, very poor run everything and Iran has the Bomb and we don't. And where Andrew Breitbart is Biko, and revolutionary political power doesn't come from a gun, it comes, under TV lights, out of the puckered, anus-like mouth of a whining pink face.
You can imagine why the people in that universe are so unhappy. You wouldn't want to live there for five seconds.

Silence implies consent

Susan Delacourt discusses Munir Sheikh's testimony today that his enforced silence on the long-form census issue was being spun as approval of the Harper Conservative's census debacle.

Dutiful silence is an honoured tradition in Canadian public service, but if it becomes a weapon in someone else's hands, that should make us all worried. And it might make public servants reconsider whether discretion is always the better part of valour.. . . we in the media, yes that means me too, should be careful about allowing mischievous spin to fill a duty-bound silence.

So this is what it has come to -- Canadian civil servants have to resign if they want to tell us the truth?

Yawn

There must be something wrong with me.
I could care less about Conrad Black.

"They hate us for our freedom"

Phil Nugent describes the situation of racists in the US today:

...most of the people who look at Obama and start thinking such deep thoughts as, "We need to take our country back!" probably have kids who grew up in the post-King era--hell, in post-Yo! MTV Raps-era--and they have no idea why Mom and Pop are so het up ...
I know that living in a world that the Fonz and Richie Cunningham never made is rough on them, but in a way, they brought their seething misery on themselves. They look at all the people who disgust and bewilder them because they're not howling in protest about the black president and the immigrants and the welfare bums whose existence they register like a fish bone in the throat, and they can find no peace, a condition made all the more unbearable by the fact that so many people who ought to be on their side find peace with it just fine. They suffer from an apparently unbeatable psychological condition, one that I think George W. Bush described best: they look at all the sane people in the world, and they hate us for our freedom.

Going all in

We seem to be in a Texas Hold-Em culture these days, where everybody is going all in, all the time.
Chet discusses how the flying monkeys of the right wing have swung into knee-jerk formation behind dismantling the mandatory long-form census:

. . . in literally days, following Clement's out-of-the-blue announcement, a whole set of new convictions has been created about the perfidy of the census, and there are passionate tweeters and commenters pushing those convictions as if they'd had them for their whole lives.
This is one reason, really, why following politics is so surreal these days.

Of course our side has its own orthodoxies -- as I found out when I posted heretical opinions this winter about the gun registry and the Olympics. But the right wing construct is more elaborate, comprehensive and predictable

a loud unending chorus of census evil! socialism! social engineering! liberal statist fascism! . . . [as well as] the usual guff about government-worshipping Stalinist prairie-hating hippies

And this tide of hyperbole engulfs everything, whether it makes sense or not -- for instance, why did climate science ever become a left-right issue, to the point that the ruminations of a bunch of nerdy climatologists are so threatening to the right wing that the mere mention of Al Gore drives them absolutely nuts? It's WEATHER, for heavens sake, its where we all live. And then there is stem cell research, and abortion, and who people can marry, and what children should be taught in school, and who we should let into the country, and what paperwork people need to fill out when they buy a gun.
It all seems to get wrapped up in the same big tangled ball of string. Not only is there no nuance anymore, but anyone who thinks nuance should still be possible is actually being naive.
After I expressed my own doubts about the gun registry, I kept bumping into right wing opinions about how dismantling the registry would be just the first step in a long list of other culture war battles up to and including how people should be able to carry handguns into church, and I thought, whoa! all I wanted is that we should cut the paperwork for a few hunters so where did THAT come from?
If dismantling the gun registry is the first step down the road to dismantling the wheat board, outlawing gay marriage and teaching creationism, then count me all out.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Arrogant twit

"I think people are just, you know, wishful thinking. There is an absolutely really good reason why we have to be firm about the March deadline because as soon as the deadlines start to drag on, people begin to substitute other things and there begins to be other excuses. If we allow for one, believe me, every municipality from one end to the other will have a reason why their deadline should be extended," [Con MP Brad Trost] said in an interview.
"I understand where they're coming from, but the moment we extend the deadline they're going to be like kids with homework, all of a sudden they're out playing in the park rather than getting the homework done"

Emphasis mine.
This is 36-year-old Saskatoon Humboldt Con MP Brad Trost's insulting, dismissive response to requests from Saskatchewan municipalities that the federal government extend the deadline for infrastructure projects --without an extension, the municipalities will be on the hook for millions if the projects cannot be finished during the wettest summer we've ever had.
Being younger than just about every other politician in Saskatchewan, I guess Trost figures he should be able to lecture everyone else about kids and playgrounds!
Trost's condescending remarks are being condemned across the province -- even John Gormley is pissed, and if the Cons have lost Gormley on an issue, you know its bad.
But our lone Liberal MP Ralph Goodale says it best:

"What an insulting, condescending little twit. I mean, that is outrageous for a person of his position to lay that kind of abuse . . . on the cities and towns and villages and rural municipalities of Saskatchewan. That is just appalling," said Goodale.

Trost is making some kind of announcement in Humboldt later this morning, and I expect we'll be hearing later today about how he was "mis-quoted" and "taken out of context" -- stay tuned.
(And if the name Brad Trost seems eeriely familiar to non-Sask readers, this is the same guy who shot off his mouth last year about the Toronto Pride Parade funding.)
NOTE: I updated and sourced the original quote.