the trimphant return

Much of the total traffic on this blog once came from an early posting of the video for the Asylum Street Spankers song "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV" -- well, one of the geniuses behind that and other bits of brilliant lunacy is back blogging again.

Canadian ham and cheese on wry

Stolen from Jennifer over at Runesmith's Canadian Content, who stole it from Skwib

stolen from Scott over at The Tattered Sleeve

"In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution — from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States."
— MALCOLM GLADWELL, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Outliers: The Story of Success”

Stolen from the Noo Yawk Times article "Our True North" the collected remembrances of 11 Canadians living south of the border, as suggested by the esteemed mjs

In my mind I still need a place to go, all my changes were there

I've been living in Japan for a dozen years and I've only been home to Ontario a handful of times, so obviously I don't miss my home and native land that much right?

Wrong. Tonight I have a lump of homesickness that is sitting in my gut like a double order of congealed poutine.

Homesickness comes and goes, especially at the holidays, but Canada Day is always a tough one.

You see, one of my earliest jobs in the newspaper biz was at a little local weekly on the shores of Lake Erie - the Port Dover Maple Leaf - a nice little family owned and operated paper, which last I heard was being operated by the third generation of the Morris family. I was the only reporter for the paper - I actually lived over the Main Street office two blocks from the beach - and pretty much ate, slept and especially drank Port Dover 24/7/365.

(A brief digression: There is one good thing about being the only reporter for the only newspaper in town and that is that everyone in town knows you. There is one bad thing about being the only reporter for the only newspaper in town and that is that everyone in town knows you. The hour are very long and no matter how generous your boss is, he can't afford to pay you much wages. I didn't do these kinds of jobs for eight years across Southern Ontario because I was getting rich. 'Nuff said)

Port Dover, Ontario, perched (no pun intended) on the edge of Lake Erie, about an hour up the highway from Hamilton, is a summer town. It was, back in 1990 when I was there, the largest freshwater fishing port in the world. (See Stan Rogers "Tiny Fishes for Japan") and the fish they caught was the perch. The perch is not exactly a great sport fish. They don't get very big or put up much of a fight or require a tremendous amount of skill to catch with a rod and reel once you find them -- but cleaned, battered and deep fried when fresh out of the lake they are about the tastiest thing that swims as far as I'm concerned and I ate my share of them in Port Dover.

Aside from the fish, the town is a tourist trap. Back in the 20s and 30s it had been a big deal and all the steel barons from Hamilton and the rich folks from Toronto used to have summer homes there. Al Capone owned a mansion there during prohibition with a secret tunnel that led down to the lake for running rum across to the U.S. side. There were regular ferries from Erie Pa. and a big pier with a dance hall that was still a going concern when my parents were teenagers in nearby Brantford in the 5os an even into the 60s. There's a decent beach, a little hotel, a couple of bars and restaurants, a bunch of cheesy souvenir shops. Back when I was living in town, there was a great summer theatre too, and cherry blossoms in the spring, but the big attractions were the Friday the 13th Biker summits and CANADA DAY.

Friday the 13th promised excitement and noise and drunken partying and a sense of danger. I could sit in my front window and watch the fights in the parking lot of the Commercial Tavern across the street and see the bikes roar up and down the main street.

Canada Day promised local musical favorite Doug Feaver at the Norfolk Tavern, the Lions Club fish fry and beer garden and a huge parade right outside my front window. I entertained a lot in those days, with friends coming down summer weekends to drink beer, eat perch and hang out at the beach but Canada Day was the best. I'd have to shoot photos all day and night for the newspaper, but on a day like that people are glad to see the man with the camera and the notebook and just want to make sure their names are spelled right in the caption. Between the floats sponsored by local businesses, service clubs, church groups and politicians and the marching bands and the clowns and the school kids and the 4H kids and so on half the town marched in the parade and the other half - and thousands of tourists- lined the streets to watch them. Short of an isolated island in Algonquin Park with a bottle of Canadian Club and a few guitar-playing, canoe-paddling kindred spirits, it is by far the best place to spend Canada Day that I know.

Do I miss it? Would I swap working at the world's largest newspaper amid the bright lights of one of the world's greatest cities for covering planning council meetings in a hick, one-horse, backwater, struggling resort town in the middle of the South Ontario countryside?

This is not a good day to ask me that.

Let me ask you something - I've been gone from Canada longer than Abousfian Abdelrazik - so long that Canada's New Government has changed the law to say that I can't vote in Canadian elections without moving back to the Great White North. I don't own any property in Canada. I don't even have a Canadian bank account. Am I still Canadian?

Let me tell you something:

I still remind American co-workers why the White House is white. I am the go to guy in my Tokyo office if you have a question about French (though I barely scraped through high school French). I know my way around a canoe. I have a visceral loathing of American beer. My Japan-born-and-raised kids say "eh" when speaking English and blueberry pancakes with maple syrup is their favorite breakfast. I get cravings for peameal bacon and still call french fries "chips". I got drunk and argued politics one night at the Norfolk Tavern in Port Dover with Stompin' Tom Connors - my shoulder and left arm were even in the TV commercial for his "A Proud Canadian" album that they shot in Port Dover. I grew up playing hockey in Sault Ste. Marie when native sons Phil and Tony Esposito were huge stars and Wayne Gretzky spent a year at my high school while playing Jr. A for the Sault Greyhounds just before he turned pro and while the holy Montreal Canadiens were winning the Stanley Cup every year. I remember the windstorm that blew our neighbour's chimney down the night the the Edmund Fitzgerald sank a couple dozen miles away on Lake Superior. I've polka'd to Walter Ostenak live at Oktoberfest in Kitchener. I spent my 17th summer planting trees and clearing canoe portages northwest of Kenora for $10 a day. I cook tortiere at New Years from my aunt's recipie. I've seen bears at the dump. I spent a couple of St. Patrick's Days getting hammered and singing Stan Rogers songs with cadets from RMC at the Wellington in Kingston. I was once the editor of the oldest community newspaper in Canada. I've eaten moose and seen them up close in the wild. I've seen the Habs at the Forum and eaten smoked meat at Schwartz's, Ben's and Dunn's. I've slept under a beached canoe after watching the Northern Lights on a late summer evening in the middle of the bush in Northern Ontario 100 miles from anywhere. I've made maple syrup. I've eaten lobster bought right off the dock in Peggy's Cove. I've played hockey with my grandfather on a frozen pond. I've chased raccoons and skunks out of my garbage. I've eaten fresh smoke salmon in B.C. and salted dried cod in the fortress of Louisbourg. I am one (very small) part Mohawk. I've had my pipes freeze. I've called in sick to work because I've been snowed in. I've had beers with old soldiers at the Legion on Rememberance Day. I've heated my home with a woodstove. I've seen Neil Young at the Ex and Gordon Lightfoot and Bruce Cockburn at Hamilton Place and the Cowboy Junkies and Murray McLaughlin at the Festival of Friends and once met the Tragically Hip in a boozecan in Kingston. I've been rained on in Vancouver. I've jumped off the roof of my house into snow deeper than I was tall. I've been told to evacuate a provincial park in BC because there was a forest fire coming over the hill a mile away and closing, hell, I once fought a forest fire. I was in Montreal for the big "please don't separate" march before the last Quebec referendum. I was once a member of the Montreal Expos Battery Bleachers Fan Club when they still played at Jerry Park. I had a subscription to the original Captain Canuck comic book. I've been ice fishing. I own both and audio and a video cassette of the last Morningside with Peter Gzowski. Pierre Elliot Fucking Trudeau once asked me if I wanted to be Prime Minister when I grew up. I have tears flowing into my glass of Crown Royal and Canada Dry as I write this, but goddamn it Canada - There is a town in North Ontario with dream comfort memory to spare and I could drink a case of you and how I wish I was in Sherbrooke now.

Oh, Canada....

(a special tip of the touque to Rina for telling me I must move back immediately last night and to all the other expats who are pining for home this week)

And the horses they rode in on

While I have a professional vested interest in stylish writing and rhetorical eloquence, I still think content is more important than form. With all due respect to Marshall McCluhan, the message is the message, the medium merely shapes it. So with this delightful piece from the Guardian in mind, let me offer to those babbling bourgeois Babbitts who are horrified by the nasty language of liberal bloggers but have no problem expressing support for such politely phrased obscenities as "enhanced interrogation" and "collateral damage" a hale and hearty "Fuck you, you soulless motherfuckers." (and I'm looking at a certain cretinous commenter on the thread, not the good Doctor, with more examples of hateful fucktardary collected here by CC)

there ought to be a law

There ought to be a law that allows directors and writers to chop off the hands of greedy studio execs who chop up and repackage their work for resale without any thought for what they are doing to the creation. I'm not talking about studios giving directors carte blanche to pull a Francis Ford Coppola or worse, a Michael Cimino and nearly bankrupting them, I'm not talking about Howard Roark fantasies of blowing up buildings. I'm talking about the rat bastards that take a movie or television series that has been completed, signed off on, even released and then FUBAR the thing for rerelease to television or a foreign market or DVD.
For months I've heard people rave about "Tin Man", this supposedly great, edgy sci-fi re imagining of Frank Baum's Oz books starring the delectable Zooey Deschanel as a grown-up descendant of the original Dorothy Gale who gets thrown into the "Outer Zone" (O.Z. geddit?). I hoped it would eventually find it way onto cable TV here in Japan, as these things often do, or be released over here on DVD. Sure enough, I spotted it on the new release rack at my local video store under the title Outer Zone (Foreign films are often retitled in Japan). Hurrah!
Then I sat down and watched it - it was okay, but the story barely made sense, supporting characters seemed to come into the story from nowhere and background information about vital plot points often seemed to missing and the whole things seemed disjointed. So I broke down and looked it up on the Net and learned that the geniuses who packaged it for sale as a DVD in Japan HAD TAKEN A SIX HOUR MINISERIES AND CUT IT DOWN TO TWO HOURS. They even ran the end credits at what looked like triple speed to fit it all into exactly two hours.
I'm not a fanatical purist, honest. I could see them tightening up the edits with shorter establishing shots, getting rid of the inevitable "when we last left our heroes" recaps for people who missed the first episode, maybe even chopping one or two non-essential scenes the way Coppola did with the final cut of Apocalypse Now (though I prefer the restored version) Maybe getting it down to five hours, but cutting two thirds of any kind of story is almost bound to fundamentally change the story and probably not for the better.
If Hell existed, there would be a special circle of it for the people who do this. Hanging is too good for them, they should be stuffed in a sack full of starving weasels or forced to sit and watch Clockwork Orange-style the collected works of Vincent Gallo, David Lynch and Ed Wood with all scenes intercut in random order. They should be forced to listen to nothing but Michael Jackson for the rest of their live 24/7, backwards. A pox on them.

He's not illiterate, he can prove his parents were married

I don't read Kos on a regular basis, but he tweeted a few choice quotes from this bit of prize-winning hate mail he received. Glenn Beck needs to lay off the box wine.

What if Jack Chick were possessed by the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft?

I want to print a stack of these up to leave by the door to swap for copies of The Watchtower. They might make a nifty companion piece to the Gideon Bible you find in your hotel room too!
(a wave of the tentacle to PZ Myers at the fabulous Pharyngula)

Today in failure

Let's see, today we have Border fail, which sounds like a bit like Boehner fail, which was about energy, which lead us to this Nomenclature fail . Also, we have a comprehension fail in the War on Some People Use Some Kinds of Drugs, a Prime Ministerial denial fail and an anti-veil fail.

Bonus fail: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann-Turner-Overstatement (R-Failure), claims the passage of the climate bill = Mao's Cultural Revolution x (Stalin's forced famine in the Ukraine+Robspierre's Reign of Terror) to the power of N (N=South African Apartheid x Napoleon)

RIP the king of not-pop

Sky Saxon, lead singer of seminal garage rock band The Seeds died yesterday. He was a lot cooler than Michael Jackson, though to the best of my knowledge never dated Emmanual Lewis or a chimpanze.

Breaking News!

I hope the Old Perfessor and Treason-In-Defense-Of-Slavery Yankee and the gang at the Corner all have good alibis.

From the dept. of what took you so long?

Hal Turner has been an odious little pustule of hate for many years now, but you can't arrest someone for that. You can arrest them for publically calling for someone to murder a federal judge though, and today Turner got popped for exactly that. And before any free speech absolutists start in with the "I disagree with what he says, but I'll defend to the death his right to say it" stuff, let me point out that Turner didn't merely shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, he stood out front and begged people to set fire to the theatre. Inciting violence or making threats is not an excercise of free speech, it is illegal.

Off-duty, but "on the job"

Yet another thug in uniform gets treated with kid gloves for an offense that would have gotten a civilian tasered, beaten and jailed for a least a year. If it hadn't been for the video of the drunken 250 pound off-duty cop beating up the 110 pound bartender, the cop probably wouldn't have even gotten probation.

I have the best readers

sent by reader and artist extraordinaire Theo Nelson, who does this twice a year (!!!), which makes me very happy.

An auspicious, if circular, debut on the blogroll

Please give a warm Woodshed welcome Our Man in Abiko, newly-added to the blogroll. He made the Woodshed his blog of the week with a sterling recommendation last week and just today, beat us to the post on our own tweeted observations. Also, he shares our disdain of the species Expaticus Onannicus Nipponica better known by its common name of Gaijin Wanker - the sort of expats that have become so culturally acclimatized that they have become more Japanese than the Japanese.
A beer-oriented meet-up may become necessary at some point.

The Devil canot abide to be mocked

Poor Dick Cheney, we can't be told what he had to say about outing CIA secret agent Valerie Plame after her husband contradicted the White House because someone might make fun of him.

Awwwwww, poor Dick.

Mind you, it isn't Cheney making this argument, it's Barack Obama's Justice Department. Meet the new boss...

Tip O' the Fez to No Blood for Hubris (see blogroll)

Militiacious damage

Yeah, because ideas like this have worked so well elsewhere in the world where there have been disputes between ethnic groups. I used to work in Caledonia and relations betweent the town and the reserve have never been great. Fletcher's Fusiliers are not going to help matters. I'm not sure what the solution to the problem in Caledonia is, but I know having a bunch of intolerant race-baiting running around playing vigilante and claiming to be a militia is not it. And if you doubt that is what this is really all about, just read what is being said by the knuckle-dragging mouthbreathers in the comments at the linked article.

Second thoughts on Iran

Having followed the Twitter frenzy over events in Iran and having read whatever else I could find (I would especially reccommend a few of the first hand accounts posted at Juan Cole's joint) I find I am leaning toward calling "Bullshit" on the widespread idea (which I initially bought into) that the Iranian Revolution is being driven by Twitter and social networking sites.
The case against the Twitter being a big deal for the Iranians is laid out in great detail and much more cogently over at Open Anthropology, but the main points are that very few Iranians actually use Twitter, the overwhelming majority of the the tweets being posted are repeats and copies of non-information and messages of support ( ie "support the Iranian Revolution by turning your profile picture green" "Change your location in Twitter to Tehran to make it harder for the Iranian censors to find Iranians twittering" "We are with you" "Freedom for Iran" etc etc etc) and warnings NOT to post info identifying Iranian dissidents and the same half dozen links to articles by journalists on the ground in Tehran. What little information there is to be found on Twitter is highly suspect, and much of it appears to be disinformation circulated to serve U.S. and Israeli interests -- claims that the government has imported thousands of Hezbollah and Hamas goons to violently suppress the demonstrations, for example, intended to drive a wedge between Iranians and the terrorist groups their government has supported (the Iranian government has no need to import goons, they have plenty on hand already). Much has been made of the U.S. State Department asking Twitter not to shut down for scheduled maintence as it had intended to do earlier in the week for a few hours, claiming that Twitter is an important communcations tools in Iran. It is an important communications tool, but for the Americans, not for the Iranians.

The exception might be YouTube, to which dissidents have been posting cell phone videos of clashes with the government forces. These serve as an important record and rallying point for the Iranian people. And ten minutes of video says a lot more than 140 characters of text can.

Clearly there is more going on here than is evident at first glance. Much of the public communication we are seeing is part of a propaganda effort intended to manipulate events and public perceptions, some of it is counter-insurgency work by the Iranian government, some of it is political posturing for domestic consumption by US political factions on both sides of the fence. Remember that a few months ago, many of the same conservatives now cheering for the Iranian Revolution were calling for bombing Tehran -- some were even hoping the previous administration would start a war with them before handing over the reins to Obama, who they now insist must "do something" or he will have "abandoned" the Iranians who wanted "freedom."

I had a slight disagreement, more of an exchange of snark really, with Laurence Simon aka Crap Mariner (of 100 Word Stories fame) about what Obama should do and he mentioned smuggling satellite phones and uplinks into the country to help dissidents get the word out to the rest of the world. Given statements like this, I'm not so sure he cares that deeply about helping the Iranians so much as complaining about Obama. A few things about the smuggling idea: 1)The Iranians don't really lack high tech gear, nor do they really care what the rest of the world thinks for the most part 2) Who's to say the United States isn't doing exactly that right now? If they were, they would hardly be advertising the fact since it would play into the government's efforts to portray the opposition as tools of the West and 3)anyone caught with such equipment would probably be executed as a spy.

I think all Obama can and should do openly is to condemn any and all violence and call for the two sides in Iran to work things out peacefully without outside interference. He could also denounce the violations of human rights going on in the country, but given that he wants to reestablish diplomatic ties or at least hold direct talks with whoever eventually becomes president, he may have to hold back and let others (like the Twitternauts) send that message.

The more I learn and the more I think about it, I don't think there is a revolution going on in Iran. There is political and civil unrest to be sure, but at the end of the day, even if the protestors get what they want, the country will still be a conservative, authoritarian fundementalist Muslim theocracy. If the opposition wins out, the people in power might be slightly less unreasonable and the control of the mullahs may slacken ever so slightly - both good things - but I the pro- and anti-government demonstrators both chant "God is Great" at their rallies and will be back to chanting "Death to the Jews, Death to America" in six months. The current struggle might in fact be serving to help the government purge the real revolutionaries who want true change by drawing them out into the open while at the same time allowing the population to blow off some of the social pressure built up by 30 years of repression without any real changes being made.

It may be that sometime in the future Iranians will look back at all the green profile pictures on Twitter and and find a softer spot in their hearts for America, but I think it is more likely that most will see it as another attempt by "the Great Satan" to interfere in their nation's politics. Internet users are a small minority in Iran and those using Twitter an even smaller minority among them. Those people are more likely already interested in Western ideas and culture and in favor of real change in their country. Twitter activists in the West appears to be preaching to the converted and possibly even endangering those whose cause they claim to champion.

Happy Bloomsday

105 years ago today.....

"STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned..."

Wiki has a decent capsule study of the whole thing.

Tune into Radio Woodshed starting a noon EDT to hear the whole novel read aloud, unabridged, all 27+ hours of it.

And if you think Ulysses was hard to read or listen to, imagine writing a 265,000-word novel with a vocabulary of about 30,000 words that all takes place in a single day - it only took

Joyce seven years to write it, but has taken most people much more time to read and develop an understanding of it.

Culture, beeyoches, come get some!

The revolution may not be televised

but it sure as hell is being tweeted. I am ashamed to admit that my initial kneejerk reaction to seeing the first messages on Twitter about the rioting following the election results announcements in Iran was that it would be really easy for the CIA to put a half a dozen people in a room full of computer gear and convince people that a revolution was starting halfway around the world, simply by having them work the social media sites and blocking media transmissions from the country in question and blaming the local government. Clearly, I have see "Wag the Dog" far too many times.
I am most emphatically not saying this is what happened in Iran. I think these pictures pretty much prove that this is no CIA smoke and mirrors show. I'm not sure what anyone outside Iran can do, in fact I think any outside interference at this point is going to allow the government to frame the whole thing as the work of Western-funded agitators, so I guess we are stuck cheering from the sidelines for the time being.
I don't think the challenger, former President Mir Hossain Mousavi, is any kind of combination of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, Elvis and Abe Lincoln - in fact I suspect he's probably a fundamentalist bastard. However, I think he is a bit less of a fundamentalist bastard and definitely less of an authoritarian whackjob than the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Even small change is better than no change, so viva la revolution!

Bloody Unions

There are certain individuals who used to be with the union who have since chosen to go it alone. This despite the fact that without the union some of them would very likely have been let go after six months and replaced  with another temp. There are others who quit who felt that certain work habits of their fellow union members reflected poorly on them, while forgetting why they joined the union in the first place. All of them ask the same question: "What have the unions ever done for us?"

(a hearty tip of the hardhat to fellow Prog Blogger Matthais in Marburg )