Potus V Hawk

I still like W.C. Fields' idea. Broadcast it on every platform available so a virtual audience comprising thousands of arenas can attend, but leave the vast arena where it's held, football stadium size, completely empty except for crew of record, who would all be masked and at an appropriate distance from the combatants (what are zoom lenses for). The combatants if they wished could wear a mask, but POTUS has considered it beneath his dignity in the past, and this is the largest audience he can ever expect to attend an event he participates in; it's likely the Hawk with the new book would feel obliged to dispense with a mask also, though the battle will be close work.  About a dozen dumpsters are provided at each combatant's end of the field to supply ammunition, viz: socks full of horse manure. (Neither wants to be unprovided for at a crucial junction.) Go at it, gentlemen! Grab those socks and come out swinging.

WHAT WAS THAT MASKED GARDEN?

                             

I don’t know why I was thinking of Last Year at Marienbad when we were getting ready to visit the Laking Garden in Burlington. There was no more than the slightest similarity of geometrical design between the vast lawn where most of its exteriors were shot (whose statues were slightly more real than the grass, less sculpted than the trees) and the Garden grounds with profusion of irises and peonies in labelled rows, and even a small patch of clematis, a few stray hibiscus round rust red tree-constructs. I’d have to see the film again to be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were not a single flower to be seen on that immaculately manicured lawn the whole length of the film. Then it occurred to me: the masks! I was going with a medical mask, better than half the people we met there in passing had them too, and Marienbad (never seen in the film, because it was last year, which is notoriously difficult to photograph) was a town famous for its health spa.

I saw a deep purple iris I didn’t remember from last year called Anvil of Darkness, which cracked me up: by day an unassuming flower, by night a sturdy tool for pounding a horse shoe into shape.

I wouldn’t have called that middle-tone violet iris Zebra Night; it seems to me you need some kind of striping for a name like that.

A robin perched in a red iron tree form barren of leaves, except for the vine climbing up it on which bloomed a light purple hibiscus (a shade deeper than Zebra Night)—couldn’t get Marysia over with a camera quickly enough to capture the tableau.

Reading in a corner of the garden, on chairs conveniently provided—a fine occupation with a garden for backdrop over the top of your page: Rodge Glass’s biography of Alasdair Gray. I’m told (or more likely reminded, though I can’t remember from when) that Alasdair Gray did a comic lecture at a 1959 Scottish Fringe venue on the useful topic: How to Assemble Your Own Rhinoceros. I should try to find that lecture—did anyone ever bother to get it down on tape? I have most of the required parts, but I could use some tips on how to assemble them.

FOLLOW SOCIAL DISTANCING PROCEDURES

WASHROOM OCCUPANCY IS LIMITED TO ONE (1) PERSON AT A TIME

*Note: Co-Habitants Excluded*

            Please Knock Before Entering

(I should say so if there’s any wee chance someone’s taking advantage of the co-habiting loophole.)

Tales of Impotence

Not sure why outlets that carry

Fair Trade Coffee

Carry so little of it

1 brand in ten on average

Assuming the spirit is willing

The supply chain is weak?

Not sure why fair dealing

Should be anything but a given in trade and employment

But I do know inequities of this kind
(Look over the shifting quicksand

Of union contracts sometime)

Are the first link in the chain

That armours climate change against all sane resistance.

GAME ROOMS

                                                                              GAME ROOMS

            If you were blindfolded and transported in a wandering, deliberately deceptive way to a site deep in the bowels of one of the following: a casino, an AMC, an HMV, a state-of-the-art supermall, athree-storey "theme" restaurant and bar, an AMC or triple-decker bar inside a state-of-the-art supermall, it's unlikely, unless you wereexceptionally attuned to the subtlest audio impressions, that you could guess which it was by sound ambient alone. You would be able to guess that it was an establishment top-heavy with flourescent and neon,its surface--walls ceilings fixtures--the kind of glossy metal that returns and multiplies the sheen of tube lighting. You'd know not only because of the low-level sputter--which without the blindfold you'd very quickly cease to notice--but because of the impress of the light on your eyeballs through the cloth.

            If you were spun round three times before the blindfold was removed, it might still take quite a while for you to identifiy your surroundings. When you did, it would be function, not design and decor,that gave the game away. And even that might jumble in your head, in certain circumstances. A disorientation complete enough to make you think, playing a slot machine, you were actually watching, or performing in, a movie?--unlikely, but certainly far from impossible.

            You certainly wouldn't know, without outside information, if it were day or night.

            How long would it take--and what techniques would have to be applied--before your disorientation was so complete you could be persuaded you'd been shrunk, flattened and inserted into a "hyperreal" videogame? A man in Florida confessed to a murder he was acquitted of because all the physical evidence pointed away from him. So: six days tops I think, of sleep dep, sense dep or the two in tandem before almost any of us could be persuaded we were manipulable figures in a mechanical game with a strictly limited set of entirely predictable moves.

            "Hyperreal" in quotes because this refers to the technology that makes the simulacra in those games more apparently lifelike, not to any slightest tendency in videogames to project conditions in the real world. (Hyper-commercial units tend to resemble them only because both borrow their looks from currently dominant styles in film and video.) You don't get three chances to die in real life before you're out of the game--and when was the last time you had to kill even one person in self-defense on your way to the local mall for groceries? Bet you marked your calendar.

            This does however suggest a purpose for the brainwashing technique desribed earlier: it would be perfect for prepping assassins.No; not unless it were irrelevant to you who or how many because they'd be as anarchic and univeral in their killing sprees as a videogame hero. And how would you ever direct that purposefully in a political sense?

            There is another application. This would be an ideal technique for breeding hyper-consumers. The only key difference is that they're self-assassins as well, since the giddy whirl of exploitation and exhaustion of resources, planet-wide, is killing off eco-support systems at an accelerating rate. This is most unwise unless you have, at least, a planet or so in reserve to move to.

Apocalypse, Ah-Ha! Ah-ha, I like it (Ah-ha, ah-ha!)

My neice Ula posted this on Facebook, a reminder that young activists like Greta Thunberg have been around quite a while as the ecological crisis deepens. If there's anything encouraging about the current protests, it's that they're more widespread and harder to ignore, a fact underlined by the dismissive and patronizing 'reviews' of Greta Thunberg's activism (which is since Climate Strike Day the activism of a multitude). I had a look at one which suggested Greta Thunberg was the victim of child abuse in that she'd been inflected with apocalyptic terrors whose origin was politcal and ideological rather than scientific--which is more nearly the reverse of the truth. Most of the reasons for ignoring climate change have to do with political and media fawning over the wealthy, who stand to gain in the short term and have, as Mailer once noted, a 'psychopathic disregard for the future'. The most apocalyptic projections are written in dry, matter-of-fact language by concerned scientists. But what do you finally make of somebody who writes that concern for the rainforests goes back to the seventies and yet the rainforests--where uncontrollable fires range, hectares disappear to clearcutting every day, and erosion and desertification marches on apace--are 'doing ok'. Before very long somebody's bound to point out--on the bright side--that hurricanes, typhoons and tsunamis are a growth industry.

Hallucinogen

"How can we keep giving more money to the Pentagon than it needs when 40 million live in poverty, 34 million have no health insurance, and 140 million can't afford basic needs without going into debt?"

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/09/progressive-democrats-threaten-tank-733-billion-crazy-pentagon-spending-if-social?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork&fbclid=IwAR21VVrmMJKT4G5X3Zx4GsteK5ex0MLtNUkL5qt0ET68cIfI27bhQd6E9RA



Because we--and by 'we' I do mean the 1%, the major political parties and the media--prefer war and preparations for war to any kind of policy framed around the needs of people. Economies all over the world have become addicted to the stimulus of trade in weapons and armies. War is only a small part of the damage done by an economy under the stimulus of, if you think about it, the world's most widespread hallucinogen.

Restraints

"Utah considers ban on shackling woman prisoners who are pregnant." I'm of many more than two minds about this. An excellent thing to consider, though I think they should expedite that phase as much as humanly possible. "We're shackling woman prisoners? I think we should seriously consider cutting that out." "I think so too." "Me too." Chorus of assent. "Well we're all in agreement. We're considering it, what next?" "Actually do it?" "Stop shackling pregnant women you mean?" "I do." Chorus of voices: "IT'S SO CRAZY IT MIGHT WORK!" "Carried unanimously then. Send guards around to strike off all those shackles."

Which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn't address the underlying difficulty: the Utah justice system allows for the shackling of pregnant woman prisoners. (A number of states do it seems on further investigation, and to be fair to Utah, it has previously prohibited the practice, but the prohibition hasn't been observed. Perhaps a ban will carry more force. Certainly it's a step in the right direction, but not having ever done it in the first place is loads preferable.) And that still leaves a large unanswered question: if we grant that male prisoners are rightly to be shackled (which some may doubt), what is it about women who aren't pregnant that makes them worthy of foot and hand bracelets of steel? I say nothing of the advantage horny guards might take: "You want out of those shackles, baby? I have just the ticket, right here in my pants." No, I think it wisest not to shackle female prisoners at all. I'm sure I'll be accused of liberalism, but there it is.

Colbert Links Big Pharma's Sackler Family To America's Opioid Crisis

The Moving Picture Rewrites

I've decided to make one last try at reinaugurating The Moving Picture Writes, which disappeared years ago in a malware hack and briefly returned in an uncongenial format, here on Facebook on the page that was originally meant simply to link to posts from the page. Here is the inaugural column.

The Moving Picture Writes

With this column I inaugurate a movie/tv appreciation website. Under the above title I'll be offering, from time to time, memoirs of my encounters over the years with film and, increasingly, tv. Under other headings I'll be doing film reviews, background studies, film commentary reviews (the first of these for The Ruling Class, since I planned when I was writing the review to comment on the Criterion Edition Extras, but discovered that, besides making the piece of unwieldy length (particularly for an online essay), it combined two pieces that might best be considered in tandem (independently of each other). I took the same approach with Performance, discussing the principals' reactions to the film and its place in their careers under the heading 'Background', tackling the film in the mimetic, synergistic style I hope soon to be famous for in a second short essay, 'All the Way'.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS1EKRrhopk

My colleague Andrew Tibbetts (who I hope will soon be joining in with some of his own erudite commentaries) contends that tv is currently much ahead of movies as a medium of artistic expression. Limiting the argument to North America as he does, I think it's pretty much incontestable; every serious two hour feature made in the U.S. in the past fifteen years (such as The Usual Suspects, Twelve Monkeys (why isn't anyone trying to line up Terry Gilliam for at least a mini-series? His currently on-again project, Don Quixote, certainly would make more sense within a wider frame) The Gangs of New York, Being John Malkovich) can be matched by at least one mini-series or extended series on television of comparable ambition (and the most innovative work by Suspects director Bryan Singer since Apt Pupil has been as producer of the series House): Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Oz, The Sopranos, In Treatment, Breaking Bad--not to mention fascinating torsos, cut off in their prime by premature cancellation like My So-Called Life. The only films that can potentially sustain a narrative in the same way as an extended series are the roman numeral franchises, and they tend less to delve deeper film by film into character and theme (if any) than to repeat, with as minimal variation as possible, what's gone before--and I think any art form's in trouble when its most sympathetic reviewers find themselves relentlessly parsing minute differences of style, energy and emphasis in the applied art of blowing things up real good. (Anyway who's ever going to top the killing of the serpent demon by luring it into Sunnydale High School, mined throughout with dynamite, setting it off and simultaneously blowing both school and demon sky-high?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKlihXmSqPE

TV's been a mature artistic force in Great Britain almost from the inception of the BBC. Great films like Black Narcissus, Odd Man Out, O Lucky Man! and the two I mentioned above have been comparative rareties at all times in England, whereas from the sixties on, television as radical and powerful as Steptoe and Son, Culloden, Pennies from Heaven, Grievous Bodily Harm, Our Friends in the North, Absolutely Fabulous, North Court, Jekyll and Coupling has turned up with almost alarming frequency on the Beeb and, latterly, Granada (Peter Barnes' final masterpiece Babies) and ITV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_uCv2pJhlY

So I've no movie vs tv bias, and hope to give about equal attention to both media once I get a reliable substitute for the Toshiba wand I've been using on our DVD player, which stopped doing anything but basic start up and turn off when I switched the batteries--apparently you need to reprogramme it when you switch batteries, which you need the manual for and where is the manual? Where is the manual I ask you and well I might ask you since your guess is probably as good as mine. Should really get another wand, ideally a Panasonic to match our tv so it doesn't need fresh cuing every time I change the batteries for crying out loud! Once that deficiency's corrected I'll be able to see more than one episode in four per disc on my Buffy and Angel season sets and I can start telling you what I think of them--ideally after first having thought something. I hate it when people skip that all-important initial step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTzBgqXTzc0

Overviews will figure prominently: of particular artists (which I'll link to subsequent reviews of individual works); of series (which I'll link to reviews of individual seasons or sequences of episodes). Interviews, profiles? In time that too is possible. With any luck it'll be awesome. We'll talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpYfmpU5AJA

We'll talk, and the pictures will move. I'll aim to post about once a week, working from previous material mostly for a while.

Stat

"53% of Ontarians like Wynne's daycare plan, while 56% would prefer a balanced budget." Do you see why I don't reflexively believe the numbers I encounter in surveys and polls?

Dumb As

The only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a classroom of kids with a bunch of rocks. Wouldn't they have to keep individual samples in their desks to be able to reach them in time? Wouldn't they need practice (at least a period a day) to enhance their throwing skills? Wouldn't a David-style slingshot at least be advisable as a delivery system? I'm not sure this idea has been thought out.

This School Has Been Arming Classrooms With 5-Gallon Buckets Of Rocks In The Event Of A School Shooting

"If you have a 5-gallon bucket full of river stones, and we have 25 students and a teacher, it will serve as a deterrent."

BUZZFEED.COM

Coffee Break

        

Well, quite a few of my friends voted for him, especially those who don’t have a job and maybe I soon won’t as well, they’re thinning the herds—people working for half what they used to because of outsourcing and weak unions giving way to avoid outsourcing, slightly less than’ll put food on the table, do you blame them for being discontented? I sure don’t, but who do you elect logically as your champion if you want to fight the elite, the 1% who everybody you’re likely to see on a ballot with odds of a win will belong to or obediently serve? A man who’s honoured fewer contracts than he’s violated, a man with minimum skills in business who barely managed to boost his inheritance by the amount it would have increased with ordinary interest, whose towers topple into bankruptcy like dominoes leaving others to pick through the rubble and pay off the debt, very much including stiffed employees whose wages were never paid because there wasn’t money to cover them after more highly approved, less indigent creditors were satisfied, a man who said he’d invite states to a competition which could lower the minimum wage most? Reg voted for him, because he’s making nine dollars an hour at a dead end job, no hope of realizing the pension his company pissed away in its own bankruptcy proceedings (though the funds are likely in a bank in Switzerland, Panama or the Caymans), and he thinks DJT has a magic wand that’ll pouf! make jobs appear whichReg and others like him can step into as easily as a pair of workman’s boots. Nine dollars an hour? Wait’ll you’re making four fifty an hour with our new president’s blessing.

            A man who. . . that’s maybe the key point in his favour for testosterone America, much as it shames me to admit it in this day and age. The woman running against him was no prize, deep in the pockets of the self-satisfied hoarders who may be ready any day now to turn this republic into an out-and-out unabashed plutocracy, but she was considerably outmatched for duplicity, outright lying and behavior on the borderland between criminality and gaming of the law with its many loopholes for the wealthy by the man who now says he’ll close all those loopholes so the wealthy will be unable to act as cockily and irresponsibly as he has all his life. Believe that and I’ve got a castle in the air I can get you at a very reasonable price, tremendous castle, stupendous air, you’ll be very impressed by the size of the castle and the low down payment.

I asked a friend, you want his finger near the red button? and he said better that than my wife’s pussy, he wouldn’t like that much, he’s used to higher grade. Seriously though, it’s time the U.S. built up its nuclear deterrent again, we’re lagging behind the Russians. Pig’s eye we are! We’ve got a stockpile still functional that more than doubles Putin’s, and if we had half the weapons they do would a sane foreign leader attack us? It’d be more than enough, still, to wipe out any nation that tried it.

The smartest among them will be wondering what they were thinking soon enough, and repent at leisure as the saying goes.

What if only one of the felony charges hanging over him results in conviction once he’s sworn in, as it’s likely more than one will? An administration run from behind prison bars? Sure it’s happened in a third world country or two, but I don’t think America’s ready for that yet. His vice P.’s almost as much of a horror, but he might have to step into the breach.  How far down the chain of command would you have to go to find an acceptable server who’d do a not too shabby job? Maybe one of the janitors that cleans up after the honourable members.

And on top of all that, you know what? This company issued coffee is just as lousy as it’s been for the last thirty years. Wouldn’t you think I’d know better by now and bring a thermos of the good stuff from home?

Vancouver (i) Oligarchic Punditry

"The rulers and the ruled are increasingly out of touch with each other."
                                                         Rex Murphy, July 23, National Post


This is the topic sentence of an opinion piece, quoted above it as a cut line, by Rex Murphy on Rob Ford, Brexit and the current surge of popularity for the baroque, elitist politics of Donald Trump, and how flummoxed all these phenomena have left the opining class. I disagree with the thrust of Rex's argument on many levels, but what distresses and offends me deeply about it is that it describes politics in Canada, Great Britain and the United States as if nothing could be more natural than to think of democracy in language that suavely assumes it isn't, nor should be, anything but a mask over an innately oligarchic system. It's obvious enough what tendencies, decades a-building, in social and commercial life have thrown so much weight on the side of a rarefied elite whose ascendancy is not at all intellectual, rather plutocratic, but have we really gone so far down that road that the ultimate seat of power in a democracy can be casually dismissed as 'the ruled' even by pundits claiming to write out of the deepest sympathy for the vastly ignored, inarticulate mass? The short answer, of course, is yes, and if we want to restore the political health of our democracies, we'll need something more than a reflexive contempt for the idea of citizenship as an active, engaged intelligence which guides public policy from the ground up in an effective democracy. Murphy's right in thinking the elite media and policy makers in our government are out of touch with the thought of common people (compare the far from favourable view in polls of the U.S. populace with the jingoistic norm of commentary in the press when it came to both wars in Iraq and the ancillary one in Afghanistan), but he's quite mistaken if he thinks the shabbily-masked elitism of the late Rob Ford and the newly coined candidate Trump is any kind of real articulation of the popular will. There is so little articulation of that in mainstream media that it's left to fictional tv series and the political analysis of comedians like John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Rick Mercer, Cathy Jones, Mary Walsh to give us any sense of it.  Meantime it's possible for pundits to gratulate themselves for evoking with sympathy the buried aspirations of people they refer to with blunt affection as 'the ruled'. Aux armes, citoyens.

Comparative Pestitude

A columnist in Toronto's Metro accuses mosquitoes worldwide of exceeding even humans in their 'jerkitude' toward human populations, citing infections in the hundreds of millions (over what period unspecified) and 725,000 deaths  on average every year.

I don't think the judgment's well thought-out here. You know what they'd call a year in which only 725,000 humans were killed by other humans? A year of near-miraculous global harmony, possibly the harmony of true world concord at last. A year of unexampled prosperity across every sector of the population as well, considering the huge death toll each year from malnutrition and poverty-borne illnesses of every description: wipe those out as completely as possible if you want human-sponsored human death tolls to sink anywhere near those attributable to mosquitoes.

Bear in mind that mosquitoes have  no special reason for valuing human life, perhaps no awareness that they threaten it. People do have a special interest, as members of the same species, but that concern seems rarely to slow down very much our prolific murder of each other. When our rate of collective suicide comes down to manageable proportions, we can start presenting bills of indictment against other noxious species perhaps; not before.  

A Head For Business

Somebody tells me “ ‘Til December 20^th we’re in the fall business.” Really? No-one bothered to inform me and now it’s almost too late! What investment opportunities have I failed to realize and actuate to their full extent or, any extent at all if it comes to that? What fortunes have escaped my grasp?

Never mind! forewarned is forearmed which is twice the usual number for humans, though an octopus would feel deprived to the tune of fifty percent. Never mind! it’s my understanding they can grow them back. Useful if people could, even more useful if I knew the trick of it and could help people grow them back for a fee. It wouldn’t be an excessive fee.

What was I saying? oh yes! mustn’t grumble, what if the fall business is almost done? Winter figures to have the same and this time I can get in on the ground floor. People say I have no head for business but I’ll show them you bet I will!

I & Q

Have you noticed how many inexplicable quips turn up in journalism these days? Lines without any air of being uttered in jest or with humorous intent, which are nevertheless designated quips?

Probably they don't come up as often as icons. I once abandoned an article in the Entertainment section of the Star because, not even half a sentence in, some stolid and durable pillar of the entertainment community was referred to as an icon. I decided to apply the same test to the rest of the Entertainment section, which in consequence took me less than two minutes to read; I think the deepest any of these stories got before dropping an 'icon' or 'iconic' was paragraph 2--unusual restraint I'm sure you'll agree.

To be fair, this was a little above the common degree of usage--most days I'd have had to read through at least one story, maybe two, if my only test for skipping was whether they dropped the 'i' bomb.

Coming back to quipping, a piece on Kevin Pillar's outstanding April work on defence and even offence (Friday April 17 the story came out, so there's a full half month's play for sample) includes this: " 'The way he's played the first week and a half, you should give him the Gold Glove right now,' pitcher Mark Beuhrle quipped."

This isn't a perfect example, as there plainly is some humorous intent behind the remark. More typically someone 'quips' "He's been hitting over .300 for the last half year--surprising given that his lifetime average over several years in the majors is .217." If they'd said Beuhrle 'joked' or 'kidded'--nothing implied about how good a joke it was or how noticeable a kid--I suppose I'd let it go--but quips, surely, are a little more rare and should be held to a higher standard. When Dizzy Dean said, "If Satchel Paige were pitching with me for St Louis, we could win the pennant by June and take July and August off to go fishing," that was a quip, not to mention a good sized chunk from the hide of a shaggy dog. On the other hand, a line that good can just be quoted--you don't need to dress it up with inflatable speech tags.

Views on an Election Win That Wasn't

Rob   Ford’s back on the airways, saying on a talk radio show that if he’d run for Mayor in the most recent election, he’d have won. 

If I were the citizens of Toronto (and as it happens I’m one of them), I’d be offended. A putatively reformed crack head and alcoholic with a monotonous ongoing spiel about fiscal responsibility to accompany as fiscally irresponsible a term as any of us have seen in our lifetimes, a man in whom you never knew where the mendacity left off and the hyperbolic braggadocio began, a man who claimed a billion dollars saved by his administration by the interesting expedient of counting losses and gains indiscriminately on the credit side, would have won a second term as mayor after serving a first term which was, first to last, a campaign against Rob Ford as Mayor? I don’t think so. The numbers of Ford nation had shrunk appreciably, and Ford was elected originally (by a little over a third of the electorate because of the number of candidates and the first-past-the-post rule in our elections) largely as a gesture of protest. He’d given the protest vote plenty of reason to come out in favour of any candidate, very nearly, so long as that candidate wasn’t a Ford. He might have done marginally better than his brother (who’d been parachuted into the race by means many considered irregular), because he’s more likeable and personable, but he wouldn’t have pulled a single vote away from any of the other candidates, and his deflating hard core of supporters wouldn’t have been enough. Since he would only have continued to contest the election if he were cancer-free, it’s very likely he would have had a relapse of his other condition, binging on booze or free-base cocaine very loudly and publicly in the few weeks remaining before the election. (The first stages of recovery are the most delicate, and require calm and some degree of isolation from stress—not easy to come by in the heat of a mayoral race.) There would still be a hard core of support this wouldn’t have lost him, but it would shrink a touch more. It might have won him some sympathy (as the cancer diagnosis certainly did) among voters like me who favoured other candidates in the last election, but it wouldn’t have won him any of our votes. I felt sympathy, in spite of his belligerence (who knew how long and hungry a day he’d put in?), for the man begging at the Grenview exit to the Royal York Subway last night, and if I’d been a little more flush myself would have helped him more than I did. I wouldn’t have given him my vote for any elective office.

A Vacation from Cigarettes

I should've started smoking years ago. According to an ad posted in the washroom of my favourite pub, if I quit smoking now I can visit Thailand. Not necessarily my first choice, but if you can visit Thailand, practically speaking you should be able to visit any place that's the same distance or less. I could go for that, but unfortunately I've never smoked so I'm unable to quit. Why didn't somebody tell me about this years ago? Now if I start, who knows how long it'll take to earn travel reward points by quitting. Hey! What's to stop somebody from taking the habit up again and again, like Mark Twain: "It's easy to give up smoking. I've done it a hundred times." Surely there can't be many easier ways to become a traveler to faraway places on a regular basis, if this ad is to be believed.

Rob Ford; math skills

Rob Ford has pointed out that neither of his most recently declared rivals in the upcoming mayoral race “has the record of Rob Ford”, an unusually generous endorsement of two opponents, but surely this could be fine tuned further. One of them must have a record less like Rob Ford than the other, and if somebody could perform the necessary differential analysis we’d have one reasonably efficient measure of who might make the best mayor. (Should we want an anti-Ford who’s also a better saxophonist than Bill Clinton, we should get behind Richard Underhill.) John Tory and Karen Stintz both differ from Ford in possessing basic math skills---neither imagines a loss or break even on city revenues accompanied by steep cuts in basic services is a saving in the neighbourhood of a billion dollars, and I doubt either one even imagines such a thing as a city being “ten times better off than it was” after three years of a mayoral term distinguished mainly by chaotic governance, bullying and mendacity—or for that matter after three years of sober, industrious, socially and fiscally responsible leadership, things simply don’t change that radically and dramatically, over so short a time span, in a sprawling metropolis with over two million citizens—some of whom, incidentally, are getting tired of being referred to all the time as customers. On a related subject, how do you stop a rhino from charging? Take away its credit card.

Speaking of math skills, a settlement in a class action abuse case brought by inmates judged to have suffered abuse, physical, sexual or both, at Rideau and Southwest regional centres (David McKillop recalls being beaten and sexually abused at the age of 4 ½) yielded a collective settlement of $32 million, which, doled out amongst 4,300 plaintiffs, works out to a little under $7,450 apiece. One’s obliged to say, I suppose, that it’s better than nothing. 

                                                            Notes on a Glib List

http://listverse.com/2012/11/04/top-10-things-people-believe-without-proof/>

(Unfortunately, this link takes you to the current page, but if you go into the Archive you can find the list, "10 Things People Believe Without Proof", in the entry for Nov 4)


My reply, which they haven't let me post yet at Listverse (said they'd send me an email with a password, but haven't yet.) Aliens strike me as remarkably plausible, not necessarily walking among us, but there's a lot of room in the universe for extraterrestrial life. (As for whether they're walking among us, I recall reading once that the one 'hard fact' we had was that they weren't; but that's as difficult to prove as any negative--how would we know for sure?) Cryptids--I don't know, we're discovering new species all the time, many of them passing strange, with very solid empirical evidence--do they count? I don't believe in Astrology, but then I wouldn't--I'm a Taurus on the cusp of Gemini. Ghosts? Psychic mediums? Never seen any persuasive evidence. (Apparently the traces ghosthunters find in spooky mansions that turn up in photographs are traces of their own activity.) I'm pretty sure if you don't believe in Karma something bad's liable to happen to you. Intuition doesn't strike me as even controversial unless you spook up its definition the way this piece does. To some extent it's the subconscious sorting through evidence too rapidly for verbal reasoning to process. It has a few other acceptable meanings, none of which is hard to verify in action. Fate's a commonplace belief of scientists these days, but it's called determinism and opposed to free will. A man named Harris wrote a book expounding the idea recently--that what people do is absolutely determined by the conditions of their lives and the actions of the universe around them. It isn't a scientific idea because it's embraced by science, and so far as there's evidence, it leans both ways. It makes more sense, if you intend to do anything, to hold out some realistic hope that you're not going through motions that are totally determined by genetics and environment--the modern dress of fate--but allow for the wiggle room of some effective input from within yourself. There are so many nuances to religious belief--whether in a God gods, God in nature or the agnostic faith of the Buddha--that it's ludicrous to sum it up as belief in a Holy book whose words are regarded as true and sacrosanct. That level of Fundamentalism is relatively commmon in Christianity and Islam, less so in Judaism, much less so in poly- or pan-theistic faiths.