Vocal minorities

While doing some quick research on the religious make-up of India to fact-check a story our paper was running, I was surprised to find that Christians, comprising 2.3 percent of the population, outnumber Sikhs (1.9 percent) Buddhists (0.8 percent) and Jains (0.4 percent) in India. The second largest group is Muslims (13.4 percent) with the dominant Hindu faith comprising 80.5 percent of the population (all figures are for 2001).

Casting about on the web for a similar set of figures for Canada, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the second largest "religious" grouping in Canada is atheist/agnostic/no religion.
Looking at the census data it is clear that not only is Canada becoming less Christian-dominated in terms of overall demographics, but that the bible-thumping literalist fundementalist Christian denominations are shrinking faster than the more liberal Christian faiths like the United Church.

We are still mostly Christian, with the Roman Catholic Church predominant at 43 percent of the population as a whole (cough Quebec cough) but the reality based community is number two with a bullet, doubling to about 16 percent of the population since 1981. The evangelical, apostolic and born-again churches have also doubled their following --- and here's the real kicker --- to a whopping 2.5 percent. That's right, in contrast to the U.S. where this group is growing at an alarming rate, there just aren't that many of them in Canada - 780,000 in 2001. So even if you include the other conservative leaning Christian faiths - the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, the Baptists (and Canadian Baptists are to Southern Baptists as Peewee hockey stars are to Wayne Gretzky) the numbers of the faithful still don't come close to the number of people who ticked the "none of the above" box for religion on the 2001 census. Suck on that you Focus on the Family, queer-hating, home-skoolin', what-about-the-children-for-God's-sake-what-about-the-children, Rapture-awaiting, book-banning, pulpit-pounding thickhead true believers.

Now would someone please explain to me why this tiny group of very vocal Christian cultist seem to have Stephen Harper's nutsack in a death-grip? Surely if you want to court the largest voting blocs in the country your priorities are the French Catholics, followed by the WASAA's (White Anglo-Saxon atheists and agnostics) and Christian liberals in the United Church.

So why do the Fundamentalists wield so much power in Ottawa and other centers of government.? Why do they have their own TV channels and carry so much weight with school boards and local governments? Why don't we pay them so much heed and the large chunk of the population that has no strong interest in religion so little? Is it because atheists tend to be lone wolves politically, running the full political spectrum from neofascist right-wing libertarian traditionalists to commie pinko anarchists to live-and-let-live libertarian liberals, while fundamentalist congregations tend to be flocks of voting sheep?

Follow the link for a whole bunch of interesting facts and figures about how Canada does religion.

The top ten:

Roman Catholic 12.8 million 43.2% of the population

No religion 4.8 million 16.2%

United Church 2.8 million 9.6%

Anglican 2.0 million 6.9%

Other Christian, 780 thousand 2.6%
Apostolic,
Born-again,
Evangelical

Baptist 729 thousand 2.5%

Lutheran 607 thousand 2.0%

Muslim 580 thousand 2.0%

Other Protestant 549 thousand 1.9%

Presbyterian 410 thousand 1.4%

For the record, Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists each comprised about 1 percent of the population.
All figures from the 2001 census, as compiled by Religious Tolerance.org, who have it all laid out in a nice chart at the link above.

Another interesting tidbit:"About 37% of people in the Yukon, 35% in British Columbia, and 23% in Alberta reported no religion. This compares to 6% in Quebec, and fewer than 2% in Newfoundland & Labrador."

I can understand how spending winters in the Yukon might convince you that there is no God, but 23 percent of people Alberta, usually portrayed as Canada's Bible belt, rejecting organized religion was a bit of a shock.

McCarthy does some

hard traveling on 'The Road'

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

Picador, 241 Pages, 24 dollars

Bleak, desolate, cheerless, barren, joyless, disheartening--there are over a dozen synonyms in the thesaurus, but none of them really do justice to Cormac McCarthy's stark, dark vision of postapocalyptic America put forth in The Road.

And yet, amid the cold ashes of a nuclear winter, McCarthy shows us a tiny, glowing ember of hope in the love between a father and son and the purity of a small boy's heart.

In an ash-covered world of eternal twilight and biting cold, where nothing grows and the living often envy the desiccated corpses that litter the landscape, a nameless, tubercular father and his sickly young son travel the highways of the Northeastern United States, heading south and east. Their goal is the distant coast, where they hope in vain that things will be better somehow. Masked against the drifting ash, their meagre possessions piled in a shopping cart, the two trek on, scavenging canned food, tools and clothing where they are able and dodging gangs of cannibalistic bandits and slavers. Their only protection from such marauders is a revolver with just enough ammunition to take their own lives. Their only safeguard against the constant specter of death from starvation and cold is each other.

It is about as cheerful as it sounds. McCarthy's greatest strength as a writer is not his plots or characters, but the atmosphere he creates through artful minimalist descriptions and sparse narration. The atmosphere here is forbidding, to say the least.

At the same time, in a strange way, The Road may be McCarthy's warmest, most emotional work. The contrast between the bleak, hopeless landscape of a dying Earth and the tenderness for each other displayed by the father and son is heartrending.

McCarthy describes the two as "each the other's world entire" and it is clear that while it is the man who keeps the boy alive by foraging for food, building fires and protecting him from human predators, the father needs the son as much or even more than the son needs a provider and protector. The man, like the rest of the world, is dying and knows it, but goes to great pains to keep hope alive in the boy that things will get better. Despite having abandoned any pretense of morality in their fight for survival, the man draws strength from his son's insistence on kindness to strangers and faith that the parent and child are "the good guys." In an utterly amoral world, the boy is his father's moral compass, keeping him from following the rest of the world into savagery. At one point the child pleads for the life of a starving stranger who has stolen all their possessions, convincing the father to let the man go free after they have reclaimed their food and meagre equipment:

"He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die.

He's going to die anyway.

He's so scared, Papa.

The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.

The boy didn't answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You're not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldn't understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."

Indeed, the boy is the personification of all the good left in the man's world. His wife has given in to despair and taken her own life, and every vestige of the old world is gone. He stays alive only to make sure the boy survives and does not despair.

The two live a life of almost complete immediacy. For them there is no future but the vague aim of reaching the coast and, for the boy at least, no memory of the past except for a hazy recollection of his dead mother.

McCarthy's spare prose matches the barren landscape of the novel. It is stripped even of much of the punctuation--there are no quotation marks and precious few commas or apostrophes. Like Hemingway, McCarthy pares his writing down to the barest essentials, purging it of descriptive excess and extended metaphor until it becomes akin to prose poetry. One can open the book and chose a passage almost at random and see McCarthy's mastery of rhythm and imagery:

"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

Unlike Hemingway--whose entire body of work probably comprises a lexicon of no more than a few thousand words and only a few hundred of those of more than three syllables--McCarthy has a clear affection for using obscure but appropriate terminology. The man descends to a "gryke" in the stone of a mountainside; a roaming bandit army is accompanied by a "consort of catamites"; the man and boy are described as "mendicant friars."

Despite the gloom and doom, the book is ultimately uplifting and even moving, without descending into mawkish sentimentality or emotionalism. McCarthy is one of the most skilled writers working today, and The Road shows him at the top of his form.

(Feb. 3, 2007)

In Yer Ear

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

NORAH JONES

Not Too Late

Toshiba EMI, 2,500 yen

New York-based pop-jazz chanteuse Norah Jones is back with her third solo album, Not Too Late.

Jones continues to mine the same vein of subtle, sophisticated and subdued ear candy that made her two previous solo efforts smash hits. Not Too Late is possibly Jones' most personal album to date, recorded as it was in the home studio she shares with partner and longtime collaborator, bassist Lee Alexander.

Jones wrote or cowrote all 14 songs on Not Too Late and the recording shows her maturing as a songwriter and singer. While her previous albums were stylistically diverse with covers of Tom Waits, Hank Williams, Hoagy Carmichael, and even a bluegrass duet with Dolly Parton laid alongside Jones' own jazz-inflected mix of country, soul and classic pop, Not Too Late has a more cohesive feel to it. The songs flow into one another and there seems to be a more focused artistic vision.

That is not to say Jones' sound has become homogenized--if anything she has become more adventurous. As with her previous outings, most of the songs are built around Jones' piano and acoustic guitar played by a variety of guests including Jesse Harris, Tony Scherr and Kevin Breit. Jones even takes a crack at the fretboard herself on one track.

As a composer, Jones' early jazz training shows in every note, as does her obvious affection for simpler country, folk and old-time soul. Her songwriting style harks back to the prerock days of the Tin Pan Alley composers who wrote for artists such as Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline. While songs of that era may seem bland in comparison to punk rock, bebop jazz or more flamboyant modern pop, they, like Jones' compositions, have a sense of substance, craftsmanship and musicality that most rock-based pop music simply doesn't have. Jones' songs are very much in the tradition of these so-called standards.

Still mostly understated and midtempo, songs like "The Sun Doesn't Like You" and "Not My Friend" show a darker side than Jones has previously revealed. She also gives us some political ruminations--the Brechtian "Sinking Soon" sounds like something accidentally left out of "Cabaret." "My Dear Country" is an ominous minor key lament that reminds the listener that "Nothing is as scary as election day." Going a step further, Jones shows her political colors with the lines "Who knows, maybe the plans will change/Who knows, maybe he's not deranged" with the context leaving very little question who she's singing about.

Not Too Late is a deeper, darker and more complex work than any of Jones previous material but still eminently listenable.

KELLER WILLIAMS

Dream

Buffalo Records, 2,500 yen

Keller Williams is a name that is not well-known outside the jam-band subculture, and that is unfortunate because the singer-songwriter and one-man-band has the kind of positive, upbeat, quirky sound that has broad appeal.

Dream, Williams' ninth studio album, pairs him with a wish list of favorite artists who are also mostly off the beaten track. The guest list includes Grateful Dead frontman Bob Weir, experimental banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck, bass whiz Victor Wooten, jazz guitar ace Charlie Hunter, String Cheese Incident, Michael Franti, John Scofield and Martin Sexton.

Oddly enough, the standout track among the many excellent duets is "Restraint" a bouncy, earthily sexy and funny number that is pure Williams.

Dream is a must-have for Williams' fans and an excellent introduction to Williams and his kindred spirits for the uninitiated.

(From The Daily Yomiuri Feb. 3, 2007)

Free Josh Wolf

Journalist Josh Wolf Longest Jailed In History - News

"The federal grand jury is seeking unaired sections of a videotape Wolf made of an anarchist demonstration in San Francisco on July 8, 2005, in which a police officer was injured. The panel is investigating a possible attempted arson of a police car that was partly paid for with federal funds. Wolf contends that handing over the tape would make him into a spy for the government and impede his ability to work as a journalist."

Damn straight, make the Gestapo do its own dirty work! Fight on!

Blessed are the meek

Which is good because they aren't going to get much other than a blessing from Christians like the good Rev. E.F. Briggs. Now in his late 90s, I suppose he is hoping the hurry the rapture along. So much for turning the other cheek. Apparently the notion of freedom of religion including freedom from religion is lost on this bozo-of-the-cloth. Do by all means write and tell the good Rev. E.F. Briggs what you think of him, after all he has left us an address. I know I will.

Update: Apparently the not-so-good Rev. Briggs went to his reward last year, so he isn't likely to read your letters or mine.

Franken 4 Senate
While he hasn't officially announced just yet, NBC is reporting that Al Franken will seek the Senate seat currently held by Republican Norm Coleman. Give'em hell Al! I bet you never really thought about this when you were introducing the Al Franken decade back on SNL, did you?

my old hometown
The depressing part of this story, aside from the obvious redneckery, is that my old hometown of Sault Ste. Marie has become shorthand for such bigotry to Quebecers. Personally, I always thought it was ironic that the city council there were the first gang of jackasses to jump on the English-only bandwagon back in the early 90s when the town has a French name and about a third of the population speaks Italian fluently. (thanks Joe!)

you can't make this stuff up

From Think Progress via Fark, we are told the new White House Pastry Chef is very, very well prepared for his new job.

Now hear this:
As you can see, we here at the Woodshed have made the leap to the new Blogger, though there seem to still be a few flies in the ointment.
In the meantime, you can listen to a brand new installment of Urayasu's answer to the three stooges on Rubber Chicken Radio.

Frankenreiter now riding his own wave

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

For Donavon Frankenreiter, life is all about balance. Hardly surprising for someone who started surfing at age 9 and turned pro at 16. But it isn't just a matter of keeping a low center of gravity on his surfboard. For Frankenreiter it means keeping a balance between family and career, between staying home in California and traveling the globe, between the artistic and the athletic.

Now 34 years old, Frankenreiter is still an active pro surfer, jetting off to ride the big waves in front of the cameras and promote his various sponsors. Since 2002, however, he has split his working life between surfing and making music.

"It's something I've always done. When I was traveling for surfing, it was just one of the things I always took along--some surfboards, a bag of clothes and an acoustic guitar," Frankenreiter told The Daily Yomiuri earlier this month over the phone from his home in California. Frankenreiter had just returned from the Caribbean, where he had been plying one of his trades for an upcoming surf film, the latest in the popular Drive Thru series, and was about to jet off to Brazil to play as a supporting act for Ben Harper a couple of days later.

After Brazil, Frankenreiter is planning a short recreational surfing trip to Hawaii to break up his flight to Japan, where he is to play nine shows across the country in just 12 days in February. The breakneck pace continues in March with a whirlwind tour of Europe.

Frankenreiter is no stranger to Japan, having visited about a dozen times on surfing expeditions and for the shooting of at least one surf video. He also wowed the crowd at the Fuji Rock Festival last summer and has a real affection for Japan.

"I love coming to Japan, it's like nowhere else in the world. We had a lot of fun at Fuji Rock. I just wish we could have stayed longer and checked out more of the bands."

"It's hard; I'm gone a lot. My wife is expecting our second child in April, so I'm taking some time off. It's tough to balance music, surfing and family--this will be the first break I've had in about four years, but I'm taking four months off," says Frankenreiter, adding sheepishly that he will probably spend a lot of time writing new songs with an eye to going back into the studio later this year to work on a new album.

Asked whether he considers himself a singing surfer or a surfing singer, the shrug can almost be heard over the phone. A few moments of conversation show that the two pursuits are very much Frankenreiter's yin and yang: "I love doing both, but it's great to be able to get away and do something else. The music thing can get pretty crazy with the touring and recording and promotional stuff, so it is really nice to be able to put it down and not think about it, just go surfing for a few weeks and then come back to it fresh. I've been surfing since I as 9 and surfing still keeps me healthy. It clears my mind and my soul...The two really balance each other out."

Frankenreiter's surfing connections have played a big part in his musical career. When he was 16 he moved to Hawaii's famed North Shore and rented a room from the wife of surfing legend Jeff Johnson, father of pro surfer-cum-pop star Jack Johnson. Being the same age and both fanatical surfers, the two became fast friends.

"I was already playing guitar when I met Jack and so was he, but we sort of bounced stuff off of each other. I'd teach him a song; he'd teach me a song. Later on, we did a few surf movies together," Frankenreiter says. "We've been friends a long time."

Both started getting more serious about music around the same time, and Johnson's early success enabled him to start his own label, Brushfire Records. Frankenreiter's first eponymous album came out on Brushfire in 2002.

The comparisons were inevitable and possibly even apt, given how much the record was shaped by Johnson as producer. The two share some stylistic similarities and are old friends, but after a while Frankenreiter clearly got a little tired of being written off as a Jack Johnson imitator by people who clearly had not listened to his music.

"I wanted people to listen to my music and to know who I was...Sometimes it was a little too close for comfort," he says.

For his second effort, last year's Move by Yourself Frankenreiter moved to a new label under the Universal Music umbrella, Lost Highway. Two years on the road with his own band and a different approach to recording made for a different record.

"The first album was done with Jack's band and we recorded it on Pro Tools, which makes it really easy to move stuff around. I'd never done a record before and I was really impressed by the things they could do...It was great working with Jack at his studio in Hawaii."

The second album was done with Frankenreiter's own band, and most of it was recorded live onto two-inch tape. "Recording live like that is very much about capturing a moment, getting the best vibe down that you can," Frankenreiter says.

A slight departure from the mellow folksy charm of his debut, Move By Yourself is full of funky blue-eyed soul grooves that sound reminiscent of '70s R&B stalwarts Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder with a dollop of Lenny Kravitz and a smidgen of Beatles thrown into the mix for good measure.

The last track on the album, "Beautiful Day," was recorded in one take on the spur of the moment with bassist Matt Grundy improvising a guitar lead and drummer Craig Barnette playing a shaker that happened to be close to hand.

"It was about two in morning and I had this idea and I wanted to get it on tape, mostly for the guys to learn the song with the idea that we might record it. So we just crowded around one mike and I started playing--if you listen to it, you can hear the rhythm guitar is slightly out of tune--and it just worked. It has this great vibe to it."

In music, as in surfing, sometimes you just have to ride the wave.

Donavon Frankenreiter (with special guest Timmy Curran) will play Feb. 6-7, 7 p.m. at Ax in Shibuya, Tokyo, (03) 3444-6751; Feb. 9, 7 p.m. at Drum Logos in Fukuoka, (092) 771-9009; Feb. 10, 7 p.m. at Weather King in Miyazaki, (0985) 20-7111; Feb. 11, 7 p.m. at Club Quattro in Hiroshima, (082) 542-2280; Feb. 13, 7 p.m. at Big Cat in Osaka, (06) 6535-5569; Feb. 15, 7 p.m. at Club Quattro in Nagoya, (052) 264-8211; Feb. 16 7 p.m. at Kyoiku Bunka Kaikan in Toyama, (076) 432-5566; Feb. 18, 7 p.m. at Jasmac Plaza Zanaedu in Sapporo, (011) 261-5569.

(Jan. 27, 2007)

Obama puts the hurt on FOX
Barrack Obama is not and has never been a muslim, met his father only once, did not attend a madrassa as a child and Jon Gibson and Steve Doocey and the staff at Moonie owned Insight Magazine are a lying bunch of mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging cretins for saying otherwise and trying to claim that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign that gave them the info.
This is what the Democrats need to do every single time some charater assasin like Jon Gibson or Bill O'Reilly opens their piehole to spout bullshit. Call them on publically, loudly and point by point. Then demand a retraction and public apology, or better yet sue the bastards.

It's official, the terrorists have won
Although it goes against my principles to link to FOX for any reason whatsoever, even they seem to realize just how idiotic and wrong this is:

Australian Kicked Off Flight for Anti-Bush T-Shirt
Monday, January 22, 2007
An airline passenger has threatened legal action against Australia's flagship carrier Qantas for barring him from an international flight because he was wearing a T-shirt depicting US President George W. Bush as a terrorist.
Allen Jasson said today he was defending freedom of speech through his insistence on wearing the T-shirt.
Mr. Jasson, 55, an Australian IT specialist who lives in London, is staying with his daughter in Melbourne after he was refused entry to the flight to London at Melbourne Airport on Friday.
Airline staff argued that the T-shirt, which bears an image of the US president with the slogan 'World's number 1 terrorist', was a security risk or an item likely to upset passengers.
The airline earlier had prevented him from flying to Melbourne for Christmas with relatives on December 2 until he removed the shirt.
Domestic carrier Virgin Blue took the same action when Mr. Jasson tried to catch a connecting flight to Adelaide, but on a return flight to Melbourne with Qantas on Friday, he successfully wore the shirt.

On such a winter's day
The counter-culture deathwatch continues with the death of Papa Denny Doherty.

You'll believe a lasagna can fly
The Illuminati want you to believe that Robert Anton Wilson has died.
He was seventy-four-fnord years old and a truly admirable wacko. One of our people and he will be missed.

Somewhere a speechwriter's butt is sore

Shorter Bush TV address: "I've lost 3,000 shooting craps so far, so the smart thing to do is bet another 21,500 and try to win my money back"

I know that when Dubya said:

"Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship"

we were supposed to think of the last war the United States won
But how many people out there thought of this:

Kanadian Korner #2
Rock'em Sock'em Hockey


These guys are Americans and not really brothers, but we won't hold that against them. Many decry fighting in hockey, and while I dislike goonery and cheap shots and think Don Cherry long ago became a parody of himself, I do think fisticuffs have a place in the game. Now there is a book that makes the case that fights actually reduce the number of cheap shots and high sticks-- something almost anyone who has played the game knows. It also has some great stories in it, like this one from Dave Hanson:

The stories in the book are worth the price of admission, so much fun. My
favorite was a doozy that Dave Hanson told in which he wound up going at it with
none other than the great Bobby Hull. Dave, of course, was one of the famous
fighting "Hanson Brothers" from the classic movie "Slap Shot."

"The most memorable fight I ever got into over my career would have to
be the one with Bobby Hull, probably the biggest star in the game at the time,"
Hanson recalled. "I was with Birmingham and we were playing Winnipeg. I was
trying to establish myself as a player in the league and make an impact, so I
was playing pretty physical. Well, I am out there skating around and I run into
Bobby, which was like running into a brick s--- house. He just bowled me over.
So, when the next opportunity came later on in the game, I gave it back to him
pretty good. Bobby took offense and dropped his gloves, so I followed suit.

"We were just going at it with lefts and rights, and then, all of a
sudden, he just stopped. You could have heard a pin drop in there at that
moment. So, I looked up at the crowd and it was like everybody was just frozen.
I looked back at Bobby and I am thinking to myself, 'Something doesn't quite
look right here.' Sure enough, I looked down at my hand and I'll be damned if
his wig wasn't caught in my knuckles. I had somehow caught it and ripped it
right off of his head. It was unbelievable.

"They tossed me in the box and threw the book at me. I got two minutes
for elbowing, five minutes for fighting and 10 minutes for pulling hair. Well,
Bobby skated off and came back out with a helmet after that. Later on, I wound
up in the faceoff circle with him and said, 'Mr. Hull, I am really sorry.' Bobby
just looked at me, smiled and said in his deep, raspy voice, 'Ah, don't worry
about it kid, I needed a new one anyhow.' Bobby and I later became good friends,
but to this day, we have never spoken of that night."

I've met Bobby Hull a few times at amateur hockey events and I know he and his high scoring son were estranged for many reason. Bobby didn't strike me as the nicest guy in the room. He was cocky, a bit arrogant and self satisfied and seemed to be a bit of a bully-type jock. I won't say more than that for the simple reason that despite my being six feet tall and two hundred and (cough, mumble) pounds and 27 years younger than him, the Golden Jet could still rip me in two with one hand while stick handling with the other and not raise a sweat even 26 years after he played his last pro hockey game. And even that would hurt less than stepping in front of one of his famous slapshots, which I am sure age has slowed to below his old muzzle velocity of 120 miles per hour, say down to 115 mph. Although I still haven't forgiven him for jumping to the WHL.

Ross Bernstein's book, "The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL." apparently talks at lenght about why and when hockey players fight. I haven't managed to get my hands on a copy yet, but from what I've seen written about it, he seems to make a good case for what most players and fans know to be true: that fighting exists in the game as a way of enforcing the rules. It is, in a weird way, democratic and honorable and above all effective at keeping the sticks down and limiting the cheap shots.

If you know Marty McSorely is going to tear you a new one if you even try it, you are not going to take a whack at Wayne Gretzky's ankle. And if you do try it and you back away from taking your punishment, then it's open season on your ass everytime you step on the ice. The ref may not see you do it, but Wayne will feel it and Marty will know about it, as sure as Michael knew it was Fredo that betrayed him and will deal with it in much the same way. So you play by the rules or else.

That is why fighting is a part of hockey and hopefully always will be.

But please, no foil.

One in four
Surely such polls cannot be correct, but apparently more people think Jesus will return to Earth in 2007 than think George W. Bush is doing a good job. Apparently drug abuse is much more prevelant than I thought.

M-I-C (see you in court) K-E-Y (Why? because we're bastards) M-O-U-S-E
KSFO radio is a haven for bigots and hatemongers. Blogger Spocko has been waging a campaign to make the station's sponsors aware of what their advertising dollar is paying for. As a result, the owners of KSFO - ABC and Disney - are trying to use legal muscle to stomp Spocko. Have a look at the link to hear the kind of hateful crap being spewed on KSFO and ask yourself if they should even be permitted a broadcasting licence for the public airwaves. Is radio WKKK far behind? Even an old anti-Semite like Walt Disney would have drawn the line at this sort of crap.

Kanadian Korner #1

In the beginning...

Where it all began. The start of late 20th century- early 21st century Canadian nationalism. Without Bob and Doug, there would have been no "I am Canadian" campaign or the revival of Johnny Canuckism that we so enjoy.

songs that made america great
An internet comment about an obscure 1975 album that has and thoroughly deserves a cult following and the subsequent discovery that said album was rereleased in 1997 has prompted me to pony up some yen for my very own copy of Patrick Sky's masterpiece "Songs that made America Great"
Click the link and go have a listen -- I think you'll agree it isn't for everyone, but it should be. He should have won a grammy for "Rambling Hunchback Blues" alone. My former partner in musical crime Rick Bauer aka Sonny Lematina, introduced me to this album 15 years ago and I've been searching for it ever since. I used to cover "Rambling Hunchback Blues" between John Prine tunes at folk clubs to considerable appalled indifference. Ah misty, water-coloured memories....

Sky wrote almost all the material on the album except for this dirge by Dave Van Ronk. Luang Prabang was the capital of the kingdom of Laos, but if you think of it as Baghdad, you won't be far wrong -- Its raw, but its right.

Luang Prabang

When I got back from Luang Prabang
I didn't have a thing where my balls used to hang
But I got a wooden medal and a fine "hoorang"
And now I'm a fuckin' hero

Mourn your dead, land of the free
If you want to be a hero, follow me
Mourn your dead, land of the free
If you want to be a hero, follow me

And now the boys all envy me
I fought for Christian democracy
With nothin' but air where my balls used to be
Now I'm a fuckin' hero

Mourn your dead, land of the free
If you want to be a hero, follow me
Mourn your dead, land of the free
If you want to be a hero, follow me

And one and twenty cannon thunder
Into the bloody wild blue yonder
For a patriotic ball-less wonder
Now I'm a fuckin' hero

Mourn your dead, land of the free
If you want to be a hero, follow me
Mourn your dead, land of the free
If you want to be a hero, follow me

In Luang Prabang there is a spot
Where the corpses of your brothers rot
And every corpse is a patriot
And every corpse is a hero

Mourn your dead, land of the free
If you want to be a hero, follow me
Mourn your dead, land of the free
If you want to be a hero, follow me
--© Dave Van Ronk