Another nine miles

Rachel Marsden is back in the news again–National Post: Conservative pundit’s latest controversy. Another bad break-up. How bad? Involving the RCMP and national secrets and naked pictures and… what else? Oh, yeah, a pile of personal emails released to the public on her website. In 2005, I wrote a story about Ms. Marsden after she […]

Early morning music

This is a little nostalgia nugget I dug up for my father the other day at his request: The Merry Minuet by the Kingston Trio. It’s an old song–written in 1958 and recorded a year later–so I’m sure it’s irrelevant today.

The way forward

In considering the Alberta Human Rights panel’s [PDF] Lund/Boissoin decision, it just dawned on me that I’ve been looking at this thing the wrong way. I’ve been thinking of it as an individual rights thing, not a government-to-government power struggle. That decision’s revelation, written by panel chair Lori Andreachuk, is right near the end in […]

Your love, my right

When human rights compete, then they can’t by definition be universal
It’s International Human Rights Day, the 59th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. I suppose I should spend the day in sorrowful contemplation of all of the wickedness in the world, but instead I find myself singing:
Oh baby, your […]

Headline of the Year

Found it on Drudge this morning and have been chuckling to myself for about an hour.
Edmonton Sun: Hockey brawl between 8-year-olds stuns police
Ummm, maybe it’s time to get some different police, not so easily “stunned.”
“These are eight-year-olds,” said Staff Sgt. Neal Young of Guelph Police. “How ridiculous is that?”
I don’t know. How ridiculous is a […]

Christmas gift ideas

As we head into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be reasonable for me to make a couple of gift suggestions. This is for the coffee lover in your life; I mean the real coffee lover, not the Starbucks go-er who takes delight in that chain’s candy in a paper cup or mugs […]

At the lip of the volcano

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know

–What a Wonderful World

How could anyone miss a chance to remark on these kooks, at the vanguard in the cult of the apocalypse? Daily Mail: Meet the women who won’t have babies–because they’re not eco friendly. Next step? Virgin […]

Why I pay for cable

I’ve wanted to rhapsodize about Turner Classic Movies for a while now. It’s the only reason I continue to pay for cable (okay, maybe NFL football as well). As I type, TCM is playing The Lineup with Eli Wallach, 1958, a selection by this evening’s celebrity guest programmer, James Ellroy, which I’ve never seen before. […]

Hoys and toys

Let’s take a moment to salute Clare Hoy for his column in Caledon Citizen: Time to think about Olympic boycott? On the same theme, I’ll pair it with Doug Bandow in The American Spectator: China’s Biggest Olympics Test. Slotted beside those, in the “Oh c’mon, can this possibly get worse?” department, we have today’s Globe […]

Confidence

I went looking for a video of the opening of the Kenneth Clark series, Civilisation, where the host speaks about society and confidence. Though I didn’t find it, I discovered that on Oct. 22 someone had posted Clark’s statement from the end of the series which refers to the remarks on confidence at the beginning;
[kml_flashembed […]