Clowns for all seasons
St. Thomas More, the man for all seasons, was entirely correct when he said "The devil, that proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked"
Not bad for a bunch of clowns. As there may be a problem with the link, here's the whole thing from Neatorama

Here’s an excellent example of pwnage: when the white supremacist group VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK tried to host a hate rally in Knoxville, Tennessee, they were foiled by … clowns!

Unfortunately for [VNN] the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.

Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns. http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/7704982.html

“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

A hat tip to Cowboys for Social Responsibility, second home of the Ponoka police blotter.

Death to all violent extremists!
I agree with Pete King, but not in the way he might think.
He says:There are too many mosques. Imagine the shitstorm that would ensue if one were to replace "mosques" and "muslims" in his remarks with "churches" and "christians" or "synagouges" and "jews." Personally, I think we have too many of all three, especially of the fundementalist sorts, who refuse to cooperate with the state, send their children to public schools or abide by the law of the land regarding tolerance for those whose lifestyles or beliefs they disapprove of. Freedom of religion includes freedom from religion so quit knocking on my door to try to get me to take a copy of the Watchtower when I'm too hungover sleepy to argue with you. And stop trying to get the secular state to teach your addled, scientifically comic notions of where we come from alongside accepted, rational, emperical science. Believe what you like at home, but keep it to yourself, 'nuff said?
If there is one thing I can't stand, it is intolerance.

Listen and repeat: Karma's a bitch, ain't it?

Branch closings dim Nova's future
The Yomiuri Shimbun
English-conversation school operator Nova Corp.'s planned closure of about 50 branches at the end of this month is indicative of the severe business climate the company faces, following a number of student contract cancellations and an order from the government in June to partially suspend its operations.
The firm, the largest of its kind in the nation, has delayed paying some foreign teachers' salaries.
Nova plans to reduce costs by cutting personnel after the branch closures are completed. However, Nova's prospects remain uncertain.
According to the company, Nova had 418,000 students as of March 31, a more than 10 percent drop from the same time last year, due to former students filing a series of high-profile suits demanding the firm refund their tuition fees after they canceled lesson contracts.
Nova has also been hampered by a decline in the number of new students, following the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry's order in June to partially suspend its operations.
Nova listed revenues of 9.2 billion yen from April to June in fiscal
2007, a 31.9 percent drop from the same period last year. The firm had an after-tax deficit during the same period of 2.4 billion yen.
The firm's delay in salary payments to some foreign teachers has caused a great deal of anxiety. "I'm worried about what's going on," a foreign Nova teacher in Osaka said.

Lesson plan for level four advanced students
Target Language: Use of tags for emphasis and as interogatives.
Intro: Discuss students' past experience with renewing lesson packages and using all point before contract expiration. (Alternative: Speculation "What would you do if this school closed?" "What would you do if your company failed to pay your salary?"
Drills: Listen and repeat - Nova has had some problems lately, haven't they?
Nova has been cheating its students, haven't they?
Nova hasn't paid its teachers this month, have they?
Substitution drill: This school is in a fiery tailspin/up shit creek without a paddle/ neck deep in the big muddy, isn't it? (explain idioms as needed, get students to speculate on possible meanings or supply own metaphors)
This was only a matter of time/bound to happen/simple karma wasn't it?
This school is run by thieves/wankers/the yakuza, isn' t it?
Role play: A Nova teacher has not been paid and has no money. They are complaining to a Nova manager and demanding their money. The manager must come up with excuses not to pay (ie: the ministry of consumer affairs ate our account books, didn't they? The corporate jet needed repairs, didn't it?) and the teacher must come up with examples of what will happen to them or to the manager if they aren't paid. (ie: I'll be thrown out of my apartment, won't I? You don't think you'll get away with this, do you?)

(see if you can guess where I used to work and how I liked it)

Offensisensitivity
Many have tried over the years to craft the perfect response to the stunned cunts who complain about bad language and incivil invective on the interweb tubes. This magnificent bastard has at last succeeded.

I hate offended people. They come in two flavours - huffy and whiny - and
it's hard to know which is worst. The huffy ones are self-important,narcissistic authoritarians in love with the sound of their own booming disapproval, while the whiny, sparrowlike ones are so annoying and sickly and ill-equipped for life on Earth you just want to smack them round the head until they stop crying and grow up. Combined, they're the very worst people on the planet - 20 times worse than child molesters, and I say that not because it's true (it isn't), but because it'll upset them unnecessarily, and these readers deserve to be upset unnecessarily, morning, noon and night, every sodding day, for the rest of their wheedling lives.

I nominate him for spiritual leader of the month

A bloggy night in Tokyo town
Hola amigos, it's been a while since I rapped at ya, but I've been busier than Rick Allen trying to play Moby Dick (My search for a Def Leppard link turned up this, don't go there unless you feel you deserve to be punished. I don't know who these guys are, which is a good thing, since if I did I would feel morally obligated to hunt them down and kill them in the most painful way available for high crimes against music. And I don't even like Def Leppard)
Anywhoo, Dave over at Jim Dandy Goodness went and said all these nice things about me and so I figured I owed my loyal readership, all nine of you, an explanation. First, its summer and I live in Tokyo. It is now 2 a.m. in mid September and it is still 33 degrees outside - in other words, it is too hot to do anything strenuous like type. Second, I've had the flu for the last week and anything that has gone into my body has exited through one orifice or another at speed and usually from the orifice least appropriate or comfortable at the time. Despite what you've seen on the right-wing blogs, it is tough to blog from the toilet. Third, the typhoon ate my blog post, honest.
It takes a circulation of millions to hold us back
Fourth, and this is the important one and constitutes an announcement of sorts I suppose, the powers that be down at the ministry of truth have decided to crack down on non-work related use of the intertubes. It seems that some doofus has been editing Wikipedia pages from the office, thus leaving the company's IP fingerprints all over his work. My guess is some knob bucking for a promotion has been inserting "alleged" in front of all references to the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women or some such stupidity and the company has decided to go after the ant sized affront to their dignity and reputation with atomic weapons. Thus, all non-work related computer use is banned, even in non-working hours. So, sadly, no more lunch time blogging for this ink-stained wretch.
In related news, they also appear to be about to get shirty over copyright violations, which means that all my bylined stuff I've archived here for your edification and my reference,( since there is no free online archive of past material at the paper and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay to look up my own work) will soon be removed from this site.
Not that there will be much more bylined stuff to look up anyways -- recent changes at the paper have meant that the CD column has been dropped and the big boss man is pushing for more translations and wire copy in the incredible shrinking shifting feature pages and less original material from the likes of yours truly.
A shame really, as I don't think my posting here of things I wrote for the paper really impinges on their bottom line, in fact I think it is more in the line of free advertising. I think I have a moral right to the use of my own work in this limited way, but moral and legal are two different things in this, and so many other cases. I may think I'm creating journalism and art and literature, but as far the the legal beagles are concerned I might as well be stamping out widgets with "intellectual property" stamped on the side on the assembly line and all widgets are property of The Man. So I may not produce too many more for him. So it goes.
Sick of reading? Blame Dave!
He's the one who said I covered politics, and so let me tug on your coat about a couple of things that are ticking me off that either would have been covered in more detail had I had more time earlier (Jesus, that sounds like the Goldberg variation)
A victory for historical revisionism: How the hell am I supposed to bitch and complain about the historical revisionism of the Yasukuni Shrine whackos who still claim Nanjing was a big misunderstanding and the so-called comfort women were all volunteers when a museum in my own country caves in to a few veterans who don't want to admit that what they did in the war might have been anything less than the apex of human moral perfection? If you don't think Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay would have been in dock for war crimes if the Allies had lost the war, think again. Just because we were the good guys doesn't mean we didn't do bad things. The important thing is to admit they were bad and not do them again, not pretend they were good and keep doing them.
The law is the law: And the law says you can wear whatever you want- veils, kilts, turbans, you name it - to vote as long as you carry ID, so can we please stop with the ignorant bullshit? I'm looking at you Lukiwski!
Power to the people! Not having lived in Canada for ten years, I don't feel I should get a vote, but I would urge all of you in Ontario to go out and vote in the referendum on changing the electoral system. Proportional representation is used all over the world with the exception of the United Kingdom, where becoming a member of the upper chamber is by aristocratic birth or political patronage appointment, and the United State, where the two party system went to die a slow horrible death from gluttony, patronage and corruption. The system works in Japan, New Zealand and Australia without any problem -- it could work in Ontario. Personally, I'd like to see it replace the current Canadian Senate.
Yes, it would mean the dingbat parties such as Christian Heritage would get a seat or two in the legislature. Once. After the harsh light of reality and public attention shines upon their dumbassery, the number of sensible people turning out to vote to make sure it never happens again will increase exponentially.
Yes, it would mean that voters in small towns far away from Toronto would have a slightly larger voice than the masses in the Golden Horseshoe. I don't see that as a bad thing. Ontario is a huge place - there are many rooms in the mansion- filled with multitudes of people in diverse communties each with a unique point of view united by their loathing of those arrogant bastards in Toronto. A little electoral smackdown for the 416-905 gang might be a good thing.

Anyway, in the words of Marty DiBergi, enough of my yakking. I promise to blog more soon, really.

Akash Bhairab is my co-pilot

Faith-based aircraft maintenance, an idea whose time has come...and gone. I think I'd rather walk. Go ahead and laugh at the heathens and their goofy religious practices all you enlightened Christians. Then on Sunday when you are finished speaking in tongues, handling snakes, or particpating in ritual cannibalism you can explain to me how this is different from Christians praying for someone to have a good flight or for the cancer to leave someone's body or for the President to save all the little fetuses. The difference between Athiests and Christians is that we disbelieve in one more god than you do.

CPC - Criminal Party of Canada

Remember how Harper and his gang of merry conservatards won the last election by running around calling the Liberals every variation on thief they could come up with over the sponsorship scandal and claiming they would restore integrity to government? The Liberals were justifiably chastised for using tax money to fund their own political campaigning, but apparently they weren't the only ones.

Like Lee Harvey Oswald, he was acting alone
An update to the story about the Conservatives appointing "local representatives" in ridings that had the temerity to elect opposition members of Parliament.
For those of you who haven't been following this, the chair of the CPC's BC caucus, the appropriately monickered Dick Harris, announced earlier in the month that residents of the riding of Skeena-Bulkley Valley, BC, having made the terrible mistake of returning the NDP's Nathan Cullen to Ottawa, were being given a second chance and that if they really wanted to get anything done by Kanada's Gnu Gummint they should go through their newly ordained representative/liason/go-to person Houston mayor and CPC candidate in the next election, Sharon "Northern Exposure" Stone Smith.
Naturally, some people disapproved of Dick's efforts to make government efficient and business-like. Especially, the elected member of parliament, Nathan Cullen, and apparently the CPC itself, which is backing water like a canoeist who hears the rumble of Niagara Falls around the bend in the river:

"He just kind of did that himself,'' government spokesman Ryan Sparrow said of Harris's move.
"(Smith) is the Conservative candidate in the next election. That's her only official capacity.''

Need we point out that this is not a government that has generally allowed its MPs to just kind do stuff by themselves? If there is one consistent thing about the CPC it has been that it is run from the top with an iron hand. MPs are not supposed to so much as comment on the weather or confirm that they think water is wet without checking with the PMO first. This was not just some backwater MP running his mouth, this was the head of the provincial caucus.

From the press release:

Harris said, “As Chairman of the BC Caucus of Conservative MPs, I am pleased that Sharon has accepted this role, and I know the constituents of Skeena-Bulkley Valley will derive a huge benefit from having direct contact with government, something that they have not had since 2004.
I and other BC Conservative MPs will work closely with Sharon Smith as she represents constituents of her riding to the government members. It will be a bonus for people of Skeena-Bulkley Valley to have direct representation to the government on so many issues,” continued Harris
Harris concluded, “Having an MP from the fourth party in the House just doesn’t cut it when it comes to actually getting things done for the folks in Skeena-Bulkley Valley . Sharon Smith with her direct government contact will ensure that things DO get done. The Terrace water infrastructure, Smithers Airport expansion, and Houston event center’s new “green” system are just a few examples of what can be accomplished when you have a direct link to government.

And it isn't the only time its happened from the looks of things either. There is reason to believe the same has been done in ridings in the Arctic and Vancouver Island North Riding.

If Dick Harris has "just kind of did this himself" I'd like to know what the Prime Minister intends to do about it. If not, when will the Prime Minister apologize for trying to make an end run around democracy?

Update: Alison has found another one, this time a failed candidate in the Sea-to-Sky West Vancouver riding who acts like he was the one who was elected.

Go to blogs on this: A creative revolution, Dawg's Blawg, and most of the Canadian Blogroll.

Serious Ontario Politcs blogging
Brent speak - you listen! Commentary on the upcoming Ontario election from a Green perspective.

How about now?
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom they say, and also of blogging. I took a few days off blogging this week to deal with various minor ailments - kids with colds, my own case of trench foot/jungle rot - and Kanada's Gnu Gummint lets the mask slip. I didn't blog about, but my associates in the unofficial "coalition of the swilling" (a term coined by JJ at Unrepentant Old Hippie) have done more than merely take up the slack. Take your pick from the blogroll: RossK at The Gazetter has some outstanding stuff on the use of agent provocateurs by the police at the Montebello summit, as does Dr. Dawg and Canadian Cynic - don't just follow the links, look around all three blogs as they all have several excellent posts on the ongoing revelations of the secret work of Canada's police for political purposes.
Inkstained wretch-in-Chief Dave over at Galloping Beaver has a good piece on the Harper's governments announcement that democracy is inefficient and that it will henceforth simply appoint official liasons to the federal government instead of dealing with opposition MPs.
Will those in the political center and the mainstream opposition and mass media now take seriously our fear that Harper and his minions have no respect for democracy or freedom and are really facists at heart, or does public security minister Stockwell "Doris" Day have to declare martial law first.

Okay, can we call call them facists now?
Digby turns over a rock and shines a light on the brownshirts of the group Family Security Matters. As the blogosphere has started to notice their lunacy, a number articles from their site have popped down the memory hole according to Digby. But this one on how George W. Bush has a duty to the American People, God and Righteousness to declare himself President for Life and stage a military coup and how the right thing to do would have been to pre-emptively nuke Iraq in the first place. I kid you not. And this is not the Birchers or the Mayberry Militia, this is clearly a well organized group with some money behind it that is going to transmit this kind of stuff until it enters the mainstream to the point that someday soon you'll see Katie Couric asking on the nightly news "Would it be so wrong if George Bush declared himself President for Life and used the Army to round up the terrorists and dirty hippie dissenters and anarchists in America? He'd be just like the great Julius Caesar! Hail Dubya!"

British General says "Bring the boys back home"
When the commander of the army says it's time to pull the troops out, it's time to pull the troops out. And he's been saying so for nearly a year now:

General Dannatt, speaking on a visit to Afghanistan, did not repeat the statement he made in October last year that Britain should "get out [of Iraq] sometime soon", but the thrust of British military thinking is clear enough - the key campaign is now in Afghanistan, and anything that can reduce and even eliminate the British commitment in Iraq can help in that task.
"The army is certainly stretched. And when I say that we can't deploy any more battle groups at the present moment, that's because we're trying to get a reasonable balance of life for our people" he told the BBC.

Further down in the story is a choice anecdote that goes a long way to explaining why the British are leaving and the country is sliding further into the crapper:

The Sunday Telegraph reported that the senior British officer in Basra, General Jonathan Shaw, got short shift when he started lecturing American officers on counter-insurgency.
"It's insufferable, for Christ's sake," was the reported reaction of one senior figure closely involved in US military planning.
"He comes on and he lectures everybody in the room about how to do a counter-insurgency. The guys were just rolling their eyeballs. The notorious Northern Ireland came up again."'

Ahh, yes Northern Ireland, where the British Army found out that torture is counter-productive to defeating an insurgency and that negotiation works in the long run. I can see why the American officers would roll their eyes, after all the British have decades of experience fighting insurgents in Kenya, Ireland, Malaysia, Oman, and other assorted corners of the globe over the years, while the U.S. Army's experience with counter insurgency since World War II has been limited to the howling success of Vietnam and training and arming death squads in Central America (and CIA assistance to their friends the Taliban, but let's not bring that up) What could Tommy possible have to teach GI Joe?
As we used to say back in the Sault, "You can always tell an American, but you can't tell him much."
The British are right to pull out and redirect their efforts to Afghanistan. The U.S. will be trapped in Iraq for as long as they think they can still have "peace with honor" when fighting a native insurgency and will be stuck in the middle of a sectarian civil war. There are ways to win before the end of the 2012 election cycle, but they are brutal and will ensure the "terrorists follow us home" -- There is no happy ending for Iraq at this point. Even if the U.S. forces could go out tomorrow and by noon unerringly and without any collateral damage, put a bullet between the eyes of every single person in Iraq who has engaged in violence against the U.S. forces or other Iraqis -- basically the neo-con wet dream -- the insurgency would not be over. Because every brother, father, son, cousin, brother-in-law and friend of those now dead insurgents would be looking for pay back.
That is what is happening now as the U.S. forces go around kicking in doors, roughing up or arresting innocent Iraqis out of frustration or in error, calling in airstrikes that kill civilians, being there to be the target of car bombs that kill Iraqis. They are creating a nation of "martyred heroes" for Al-Quaida to put on their recruiting posters.
Partitioning the country might be a long range solution, but is likely to be a bloody disaster. I'd love to see the U.S. clean up its mess in Iraq, I just don't know how they will ever do it. I don't think that bell can be unrung. And the British are well advised to get out while the getting is good.

Stranger than Fiction
This is just too bizarre to have been invented from scratch -- I'll be interested to see how much of it checks out, but it would explain the Turd Blossom's recent resignation. Besides, how often do you see a story headlined "I'm the proud owner of Karl Rove's father's solid gold cock ring"?

Spies and spirits haunt Gibson's 'Spook Country'

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Spook Country

By William Gibson

G.P. Putnam's Sons

384 pp, 25.95 dollars

Both spies and the spirits of the dead are thick on the ground in William Gibson's latest novel, Spook Country. While the novel has no literal supernatural element, its protagonists spend much of their time chasing spooks of one sort or another.

Gibson, who made his bones as a science fiction writer in the 1980s and '90s--he virtually invented the cyberpunk subgenre and famously coined the term "cyberspace"--has moved away from the genre's focus on the future, but keeps technology in the forefront in this, his ninth novel, while also weaving in some subtle satirical commentary on the post-9/11 national security state and the U.S. "cold civil war."

Set in February 2006, the story follows an outline familiar to readers of Gibson's previous works such as Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer: A specialist is set on a quest to find some sort of mysterious technological grail unrelated to their area of expertise by shadowy, powerful figures while in a parallel plotline other shadowy figures set other specialists on a collision course.

In Spook Country, rock-singer-turned-journalist Hollis Henry has been hired by Node, a magazine touted as "a European version of Wired, it seemed, though of course they never put it that way." The magazine may or may not actually exist, though it apparently has big money behind it. Her assignment is to write a feature on the new field of locative art--virtual reality (VR) installations tied to particular locations via GPS coordinates.

After interviewing a locative artist in Los Angeles who specializes in celebrity death scenes--a VR rendering of River Phoenix dying outside the Viper Room, a virtual shrine to Helmut Newton at the scene of his fatal crash outside the Chateau Marmont--Henry is told to track down the artist's technical advisor, a slightly paranoid GPS whiz kid who refuses to sleep in the same place twice. The journalist is also told to pay special attention if anything involving global shipping or iPods comes up.

Unsurprisingly, both the artist and his technical adviser just happen to be big fans of Henry's old band. On an unannounced visit to the techie's workspace, she catches a glimpse of a VR rendering of a shipping container that the GPS expert definitely did not mean for her to see, and the chase is on.

Meanwhile, Gibson introduces us to Tito, a Chinese-Cuban from Havana whose entire family has relocated to United States where they have continued the family espionage business on a freelance basis. Tito has been delivering iPods full of data to an old man in New York's Washington Square and communicating with his extended family of spies in Volapuk, a Russian-based "universal language" that uses Western keyboard characters to mimic the cyrillic alphabet. He is being watched by Brown, another spy who may or may not work for the U.S. government. Brown has abducted Milgrim, a hapless Ativan junkie and Russian scholar, to translate intercepted text messages.

Clearly, those aforementioned collision courses are full of twists and turns. Spook Country has fewer straight lines than a spilled bowl of ramen. The plot tends to be a bit baffling for the first part of the book, but when the pieces start to fit together Spook Country draws the reader in like a black hole.

Gibson provides plenty of spooks of both sorts. In addition to the VR ghosts of the locative artists, Henry is haunted in her own mind by the memory of her former band's bassist, dead of a heroin overdose. Tito is consumed with questions about the death of his father and constantly influenced by the spirits that make up his deeply held belief in Santeria.

On the more corporeal side of the coin are Tito's clan of clandestine operatives; the clearly-connected-but-not-necessarily-legitimate Brown, who is occasionally cartoonishly right-wing and not quite as capable as he thinks he is; and the nameless old man from Washington Square, a former senior U.S. intelligence agent with a serious hate of the neo-conservatives and war profiteers who have taken over the U.S. government and its agencies. Somewhere between the two lies the unorthodox billionaire Belgian advertising genius Hubertus Bigend, and his minions, who first appeared in Pattern Recognition.

Gibson uses the various secret agents and operatives both to poke fun at America's obsession with security and to ask some pertinent questions about the country that has, as one character puts it, "developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11." After ratcheting up the tension as the competing factions seek out the mysterious shipping container, Gibson's climax turns out to be more of an elaborate practical joke than an epoch-making transformation, though it is hardly a letdown.

In addition to a familiar plot structure, Gibson also leans on some his favorite themes, including the notion of subcultures and smaller social groups serving as tribes and substitute families. Locative artists, Bigend and his employees, and fans of Henry's indie rock band are all discrete, self-sustaining phylums of humanity with their own social rules and goals. Henry never mentions her biological family, but her ex-bandmates behave like siblings despite their acrimonious break-up, willing to advise her, admonish her and bail her out of trouble with an axe handle as needed.

In his early work, one of Gibson's stylistic touchstones was the use of familiar brand names for futuristic, far-fetched or ironic products he invented for the sake of the story. The future has now caught up with the futurist and left him behind. What is the use of inventing ironic or iconic brand-name gadgets in world where magnetic levitation beds exist and Adidas really does make a boot named after a German antiterrorist squad?

As always, Gibson's greatest strengths as a writer remain his ability to conjure up realistic, gritty, urban settings and create an atmosphere from subtle changes in tone. His previously muted dry humor is more in evidence here, but his tight prose still sings like a high-tension wire and his characterization is as original and exact as ever.
(The Daily Yomiuri, Aug. 18, 2007)

"The mother, the father, the serpent, the priest. The foreman, the woman, the widow, the beast. "
One for Peter "Chainsaw" Hoffman, Mike Szombathy, and Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington
eventually technology and the internet catches up with what we do here




Not too sure about the foozeball, but he's right about the bass player



"smoking on a night train, chewing on a Jellyroll"
let's hear it for pasty-faced white boys like Mark McKinney and Danny Ackroyd

"I never heard anybody up on murder charge try to pin it on Pete Seeger"

I was thinking about a guy from my old stomping grounds in Port Dover named Doug Feaver aka the Grim City Cowboy. Those who know him that watch this will understand why.

Some like it hot

I don't.

I grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, north of the Great Lakes, in a grassy subdivision where everyone had a lawn and most people didn't have or need air conditioning. A hot day meant it was 75 or 80 degrees F - though it did occasionally get hotter in late August. Later when we moved to southern Ontario, the slightly hotter, more humid weather was mitigated by the fact that we had a pool in the backyard and central air. Even so, a hot, sticky summer in the Golden Cresent was not always pleasant.

After ten years in Tokyo, I vow never to complain about summer heat in Canada ever again, not even if the earth moves closer to the sun and global warming turns the tundra into the tropics.

Have a look at today's weather in Tokyo here. It was 32C when I got up this morning at 7:30 with the humidity running at about 60%, which meant it felt like it was 39C - it was 36C by noon

and the humidity had dropped to about 50%, relatively dry for Tokyo in August, which meant it felt 41 C. It may go up to 40C over the weekend, with higher humidity making it feel like you've been dipped in kerosene and set alight in the shower room at the gym.

The weather forecast for the next few days is as follows:

Friday: Hot as a $3 pistol and swamplike

Saturday: Scorching and saunalike

Sunday: Sweet, sweaty Jesus, it's #$&*#ing hot.

Monday: Hot enough you'll want to die and go to Hell so you can cool off

Tuesday: "Kill me, kill me now, please" with scattered spontaneous human combustion in the business district.

and so on, and so on, until about the end of September.

And you can't really appreciate what that's like until you've ridden home on the rush hour train, packed in like pressurized sardines with a carriage-load of corpulent office drones who took a hot bath last night before they went to bed, got up and put on a three piece suit and long sleeved polyester dress shirt and tie, smoked until brown traces of nicotine started to ooze from their pores and ate fish and garlic for lunch, topped with a half a dozen doubtlessly much needed beers after work that, since they lack a particular bit of DNA that allows them to process alcohol, have caused them to turn the color of a ripe cherry and sweat like a frat boy whose girlfriend is week late. Fragrant doesn't even start to cover it.

I don't know how people lived here a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago without air conditioning and artificial refrigeration. I know the heat island effect and all the concrete drive the temperature in Tokyo up a few degrees and on going global warming blah blah blah, but Tokyo's always been hot and probably used to be more humid, and have open sewers. And it was a city of million people by the 1600s. No wonder the samuri used to have licence to go around hacking the heads off of anyone from the lower classes who looked at them sideway. I'd have been in pissy mood too. Besides, if you were a manual labourer in old Edo in August and coolest thing around was stagnat well water, you'd probably think of violent beheading as sweet release.

While the dress code in our office doesn't require neckties, praise Allah, coming to work in a loincloth made of two bags of ice cubes and duct tape would probably be frowned upon.

I'm six feet tall, weigh in at 120 kilos and am somewhat hirstute. (I know, I know -- you're getting turn on just seeing that description on your computer monitor) I have a body like Sylvester Stallone--in Copland. I look like Schwartzenggar would look if he had quit pumping iron fifteen years ago, drank a dozen beer a day and developed a cheeseburger addiction. I generally keep my shirt on at the beach - some are born modest, some have modesty thrust upon them and some are issued with restraining orders against going shirtless by the United Nations' High Commissioner for Good Taste. Nobody needs to see me naked, but if this heat keeps up, before long I'll be going around in nothing but a tube sock with a five pound block of ice strapped on top of my head.

You want to talk about climate change -- I'm all for it. Screw Al Gore and the so-called scientists, screw spending money on AIDS in Africa or paving the Middle East from the air to kill the bad people or feeding and educating our own population -- I want Gates and Soros and Murdoch and the rest of the billionaires to concentrate on finding a way to control the weather. I'm not talking about getting rid of hurricanes or making it rain in the Sahara, just lower the freakin' thermostat a few notch, cantcha? They used to warn us that another ice age was going to come someday, lets see what we can do to make that happen ASAP. Bring on the glaciers! I'm happy to put on a sweater, throw an extra blanket on the bed, wrassle polar bears while snowshoeing to work -- whatever. Just stop with the heat already!

Update: Apparently my complaint is well founded- this day was the hottest day in Japan ever.

Steely Dan do it again for opening

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
To mark the opening of the their chain of clubs, the bookers for Billboard have scored something of a coup: a series of club dates by Steely Dan. The original hypercool jazzy rockers have already sold out their opening week at the Tokyo venue and tickets for their multinight stands in Osaka and Fukuoka are going fast as Daniacs rush to take advantage of the chance to revel in the smooth, sharp sounds of Steely Dan in such an intimate setting.
The 2007 Heavy Rollers tour--the band's most extensive ever--features Steely Dan's original creative locus of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen backed by a 10-piece band, including a full horn section. Set lists on the tour thus far have reportedly leaned on material from their best-known album, 1977's Aja, and its 1980 follow-up, Gaucho, with a smattering of earlier hits and songs from their most recent two albums.
Reports from the road have it that Fagen is in excellent voice and is performing early hits, such as "Chain Lighting" and "Bad Sneakers," with polish and verve. Becker has shouldered the bulk of the guitar duties, with the aid of the formidable Everything Must Go and Two Against Nature contributor Jon Hernington. Uncharacteristically, Becker also has been seen singing often on the tour.
In their original heyday in the 1970s, Steely Dan rarely played live. The technology available at the time simply could not do the band justice in a live setting and Becker and Fagen were more interested in practicing their studio wizardry than performing in front of an audience. Nor was Steely Dan a band in the traditional sense. The lineup of performers varied widely after the first few years, not only from album to album, but from song to song.
Keyboard player and later singer Fagen and bassist/guitarist Becker, the creative bright lights around which the original band clustered, had originally met in 1967 at Bard College in New York. United by their love of black humor and soul music, the two played in various pickup bands in New York before joining established mainstream pop band Jay and the Americans in 1970. Their brief tenure with the band, which had scored a few hits in the early '60s but were clearly on their way out, resulted in a job as contract songwriters for ABC records.
Becker and Fagen saved their best songs for themselves, rehearsing the original band in their office after working hours. Naming themselves after a sexual prosthesis from William Burroughs' controversial novel Naked Lunch, their 1972 debut Can't Buy A Thrill established the band's reputation for top-notch musicianship, subversive sardonic humor and intelligent jazz-tinged rock.
Breaking up the original group after 1974, Becker and Fagen parked themselves in the studio for the rest of the decade, earning a reputation for being incredibly choosy about sound and performances. They were notorious for trying out as many as 20 guitar players from among the cream of the crop of Los Angeles' studio jazz and rock aces for a single guitar solo and recording over 50 snare drum sounds before settling on one for a single track. They also pioneered the use of digital technology in recording.
Their discerning perseverance paid off with seven platinum albums between 1972 and 1980. After a 10-year hiatus in the '80s, sound technology had caught up, and Becker and Fagan assembled a touring company that circled the globe repeatedly in the '90s. Inspired and creatively reinvigorated by the the live experience, they returned to the studio late in the decade, eventually emerging with 2000's Two Against Nature, that year's Grammy winner for album of the year. Their 2003 follow up Everything Must Go also earned critical praise.
(Aug. 11, 2007)

Note - just found out today that there will be room for me on the guest list after all. It's a good thing I'm such a jaded, cynical old journalist now or I'd be jumping around the newsroom screaming like a schoolgirl.

Head rat to leave sinking ship
The man alternately known as Bush's Brain and Turd Blossom (and who says it wouldn't be the same thing) announces his resignation. This could make for an entertaining final year in office for Dubya, since he doesn't know how to wipe his own backside without advice from the man they named a really digusting sex act after. (don't click the link if you have ever been grossed out by a Kevin Smith movie or fecal matter) I hope they check to make sure the silverwear is all there after he leaves. Anyone want to offer me odds on how often his name comes up in the upcoming Gonzales impeachment?

Betcha didn't know he had his dirty little paws in the Watergate debacle too. Yep, he was head of the College Republicans at the time and something of an apprentice to convicted felon and professional dirty trickster Donald Segretti.


Hat tip to News Sophisticate for the video clip, and Dan Rather for the crackerjack reportage.

"A human asterisk"
Another tip from my dad, the Montreal Gazette's Jack Todd (our favorite sportswriter) hints that Barry Bonds home run achievements might not be all that and a bag of chips.

"Barry Bonds sits alone atop of the dunghill: The most arrogant, repellent,
selfish, dishonest, grotesque and chemically enhanced player to hit more home
runs than the great Hank Aaron. Bonds is a human asterisk; not the greatest
home-run hitter in the history of the game by any means, but beyond question its
biggest cheat."