"We're thinking of actually changing the name of the show to Ratings-Challenged 30 Rock, just to take some of the power out of it. It's like taking back the N-word; we're gonna do it. It might make Elisabeth Hasselbeck cry, but we're gonna do it." -- acceptance speech for TCA Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Comedy
(Links and emphasis mine)
| Comments (1)
...I would so buy this bumper sticker.
It's moving season here in Quantico. Every day moving trucks line the streets of Thomason Park, the neighbourhood where we live in base housing. People are coming, and people are going. Our turn is next Wednesday. Strangers will come in, pack up all of our stuff, and load it into a truck to take it home to Canada. It will be a two day affair.
Friends of ours from Capt Mike's conference group went through the last part of it yesterday, so we all decided to go out for one last dinner together at Ristorante Renato. They'd never been before, and Capt Mike and I have been raving about their Café Diavolo since September. Renato's is famous for their Café Diavolo... a mixture of coffee, blended scotch, french brandy, creme de cacao, coffee liqueur, and golden rum. It's really all in the presentation though: the liquor is flambéd and poured through a flaming, spiral-cut orange.
And so Capt Mike and two of his American counterparts ordered three Café Diavolos (the restaurant will only go to the trouble of making a minimum order of 2), and all of us enjoyed watching the maitre d' prepare the concoction while he told us the story of its development at Romeo and Juliet's in Washington during the 1970s. We were pleasantly surprised when he informed us that tonight's Diavolos were on the house, because he and the restaurant wished to show their appreciation for servicemen helping to make the country what it is. And he said it in such a heartfelt manner, I couldn't help but allow a little lump form in my throat.
If you ever read The Globe and Mail's on-line comments, particularly those attached to stories about Afghanistan, it's easy to become quickly disheartened. The majority of the posters are decidedly against Canada's involvement. They rarely have a kind word to say, other than a perfunctory "My thoughts are with Solider X's family", before embarking on a long, rambling, often ill-informed tirade against the military, politicians, soldiers, and sometimes even soldiers' families. Sometimes, after reading through those comments, it's easy to wonder "why do we even bother?" Luckily, there are times like last night that balance it out. Amid all the negative comments and biases, there are people who recognise that soldiers are people, men and women who chose to serve. They may have little choice over what that service involves, but they are professionals who gave their word to do so without complaint or ego. I think that's something to be admired - something that often gets lost in the dull roar of arguments over magnetic decals, mandates, and withdrawal deadlines.
| Comments (1)
New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less
Best quote: "Sometimes I don't feel like moving my arms."
| Comments (0)
The United States has declared the polar bear a threatened species. While this may be applauded by environmental groups on both sides of the border, the new declaration will in fact do little to improve the forecast for the animal's future.
The biggest implication of this ruling is that sport hunters from the US will no longer be allowed to come up to the Canadian North to bring down bears and bring home trophy hides. However, that doesn't mean there won't still be a hunt. Current quotas take into account subsistence hunting and sport hunting. Tags that would otherwise have gone to sport hunters will instead go to subsistence hunters. The bears will still die...but now the economy of many northern communities is threatened too.
The only way to significantly improve the fate of the polar bear, and those who are dependent on it for survival, is to try to protect its habitat: the Arctic. Unfortunately, this means trying to limit the effects of climate change, something that would be far too inconvenient and expensive for either the American or Canadian governments to consider. The upside of saving the Arctic, however, would go far beyond ensuring the survival of one species of bear. The Inuit could benefit from a little protection, too.
It seems my eyes haven't stopped rolling much these days. I am beginning to worry they're going to roll right on into my brain.
What's set off this latest round? The newest craze among American teens: sexting. That's teenagers sending one another lewd or obscene text messages or audio-visual stimuli on the cell phones for which their mommies and daddies are likely footing the bill.
Most teens are pretty self-absorbed, not so self-aware, and definitely not under the impression that matter created in cyberspace cannot be destroyed, so it's only natural that they would use these newish multimedia resources to engage in a little titillation, much to the chagrin of their parents. Although the episode never aired, I am pretty sure Ward was ewually as shocked the first time he caught The Beav sneaking a look at his old pin-up mags out in the shed. Teenagers being stupid, especially when it comes to sex (and particularly in a country that places so much emphasis on abstinence-only education) should not surprise anyone. However, what is surprising, is that so many people are overlooking the easiest way to combat this particular scourge: don't let teens have cell phones.
I have yet to be given one reasonable argument as to why children, and yes, these are children we're talking about, require the responsibility of owning or using such a sophisticated communication device. We do still live in a world where pay phones and block parents are readily available, do we not? In an emergency situation, I am pretty sure that a properly street-proofed Junior would be able to communicate the need for assistance to someone, somehow. But if you as a parent insist that your child must be contactable, or be able to contact you, at all times they are out of your supervision, why not just give them a long-range two-way radio? Or a cell phone capable of only dialing your number(s) and 911, and only receiving calls from you? These things do exist. Why does a child need a phone capable of recording and sending audio, video, and text?
I can remember when my sister was first allowed to have a telephone in her bedroom. It was a pretty big deal. I can also remember my parents removing it from her bedroom after she had been warned not to tie up the line for so long. She managed to survive the ordeal of having to place phone calls from the kitchen or basement where they could be heard by me or our parents. She also learned not to tie up the phone as much, and eventually got the privelege of having it in her room reinstated.
I don't know what's happened in the 20+ intervening years (don't worry Heath, that makes us both old) that has caused people to think that cell phones are indispensible to today's youth, and therefore cannot be used as a bargaining chip when kids act irresponsibly. Several hundreds of generations of humans managed to survive without texting. I am pretty sure today's teens can, too.
| Comments (2)
The Democratic Ticket will be Obama - Edwards.
| Comments (1)
Apparently you're allowed to have children even if you've been living under a rock since the mid-to-late 90s:
Dad unknowingly serves vodka cooler to 7 year old son
That's right. While at a baseball game, Christopher Ratte bought his son what he thought was plain ol' lemonade...despite clear indications on the bottle that Mike's Hard Lemonade is no soft drink. Apparently, he'd never heard of the beverage before. I am guessing he's also not one to read labels on the things he allows his children to ingest.
While putting Mr. Ratte's son into the system is a bit of a stiff punishment for giving junior a stiff drink, the Ratte family definitely need a crash course in not-so-current pop culture: Mike's Hard Lemonade is alcoholic, the chick in The Crying Game is actually a dude, and Al Gore did not in fact succeed in becoming president.
| Comments (2)
"From the corn syrup in your soda pop to the corn starch that makes your paper more printable – corn is all around you!"
- Iowa Corn Promotion Board, www.iowacorn.org 2008
So, not long after moving down here, I had a wee bit of a rant about how damn much high-fructose corn syrup they put in everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, in this country. Other people use sugar, the Americans use corn.
However, instead of examining their dependence on corn as a sweetener and provider of starch, the powers that be are trying to convince us that it is the use of corn as a source of ethanol that is causing food riots around the world.
Corn is all around us.... but very few of us are using it as a renewable energy source. Stop trying to shift our focus, Big Oil. Ethanol fuel is not the problem here.
| Comments (0)
...hate them because they are narcissistic enough to think that Southwestern Airlines banned them for being "too pretty".
My spidey senses tell me there's got to be more to this story.
Apparently, these two young women were the most attractive people on the flight (which isn't saying much about your average Southwestern passenger). As a result, there were discriminated against by the flight attendants... a profession well-known for employing only the aesthetically challenged, right?
| Comments (1)
So, this year marks the first time Capt Mike and I have watched the Super Bowl on an American channel uninterrupted by a Canadian feed. That means this is the first year we got to see all of the much-hyped Super Bowl ads.
My favourite was either the car full of sleeping badgers, or the baby who underestimated the creepiness factor of hiring a clown (thankfully, they didn't show the clown's face).
Oh yeah, and the game was pretty good, too.
The radio news reader said this right after informing us that there are 10 trussed steel bridges in Maryland, and 13 in Virginia. Oh, that's the type of bridge that collapsed in Minnesota the other day.
The American media engaging in virtually baseless fear mongering? Inconceivable! (And I think I do know what that word means.)
| Comments (0)
The Quantico Sentinel is actually the real name of the local paper, but I thought I would take some creative licence and use it as the title for my dispatches from the brink of insanity.
Mike and I have now been in Virginia for one week. The trip down here was fairly uneventful, minus a small snafu at the border. Nothing too serious, but to make a long story short I am here on a visitor permit for 6 months while the embassy here sorts me out with a passport and visa, which I will then have to leave the country to validate upon my return. Once we crossed the border, however, things went relatively smoothly. We drove from the Thousand Islands to Syracuse, then from Syracuse to Philadelphia (which we plan on visiting again... one day wasn't enough), and then from Philadelphia to Springfield, VA, where we remain to this day.
It seems that some of the paperwork required to cross the border was misplaced by our moving company after they picked our stuff up on July 6th, and they waited until July 16th, the day before our expected delivery date, to ask us to send them new copies. And so we wait. We took possession of the house already, which is a nice, roomy 3 bedrooms—all the more roomy since it is currently standing empty. Dexter is enjoying the free space though, and is contenting himself with playing frisbee in what will hopefully become the living room.
The new neighbourhood is quite nice, too. Lots of playparks and green space, and a local family resource center that seems more like a country club, with a private gym, pool, and internet cafe (where I sit while I write this). All in all, things could be worse. They could definitely be better, but they could seriously be worse.
To fill in the time we should have been spending unpacking, Mike and I have tried to familiarise ourselves with the area. On Tuesday we took a trip to Manassas, where the Battle of Bull Run occurred, and explored the battlefrield where Stonewall Jackson earned his nickname. Yesterday we went in to Pentagon City and D.C. Pentagon City boasts one of the biggest malls I've ever seen (Jane and Tracy: you need to check this place out). In D.C., we visited the International Spy Museum, part of the Smithsonian. They even had a teeny tiny section describing some of the things CSIS does. It wasn't quite as spectacular as the parts that talked about MI-6 or the Rosenbergs, but it was nice to see Canada representing... After that, we went out for a lovely meal at a little "Freedom" bistro downtown. I don't think they got the joke when we referred to it as such. Too soon, I guess.
I had arrived at work early, a little after 7. I was quite happily editing away, when really confused-looking coworkers started showing up. They'd been listening to the radio on their drive in, and no one could make sense of what the announcers were saying. Planes falling out of the skies? What the hell was going on? At first we thought it was some kind of a sick joke. We all tried to log on to CBC.ca and CNN.com to see what was happening, but it seemed that everyone in the world was thinking the same thing at that moment. All of the news sites were down. I had an illicit copy of MSN messenger on my computer, and figured now was as good a time as any to use it on company time. I logged in and asked Tim if he knew anything more. My primary concern was that nothing was happening on the west coast. By this time, both towers had been hit, as had the Pentagon, and the passengers of United 93 were preparing to sacrifice themselves to avoid another target.
It was pretty easy to see that no more work was going to be done that day. We all sat in the conference room on the second floor, our eyes glued to the grainy antenna image we could pick up on the television normally reserved for teleconferences. We watched as people trapped above the crash site waved out of the windows. We watched as the second, and then the first, tower collapsed. We watched as people emerged from the giant dust cloud, covered in the shrapnel. We watched, helpless to do anything but gasp in disbelief.
The Centres for Disease Control are asking all American women to take control of their health by quitting smoking, eating a healthy diet high in folic acid, and controlling their body weight. But not because any of these things leads to an improvement in their quality of life. That's just a pleasant side effect. Rather, the new guidelines issued by the CDC are asking all American women of child-bearing age to consider themselves "pre-pregnant" and to take these steps to ensure that the fetus they might one day find themselves carrying, planned or not, is as healthy as possible.
I think Americans of voting-age who are anticipating delivering another presidency to the GOP should consider themselves pre-screwed.
For a couple of months, Dan Savage has been sounding the alarm for "breeders" to wake up and smell the half-caf no-foam double latte: American conservatives are waging war on sex. Not just gay sex either. Straight sex, premarital sex, married sex, adolescent sex, kinky sex, pretty much any kind of sex you can imagine or think to look up on Google. And he's been right. And we, his straight readers, have been nodding absentmindedly and wishing he'd go back to answering letters from the total freaks who make us feel better about our own inadequecies.
Now he's not the only one speaking up. In this week's column, he printed an excerpt from The New York Times Magazine cover story "The War on Contraception", by Russell Shorto. You can read everything Dan Savage has to say about the article here, but I think this paragraph is all you really need to know:
"The American Taliban is not just opposed to straight premarital sex, with their abstinence education and hilariously ineffective virginity pledges, or gay sex, with their "ex-gay" campaigns and their anti-gay-marriage amendments. The American Taliban doesn't think married heterosexual couples should be able to use birth control. If you care about your own freedom—not just your right to have premarital sex, but your right to decide whether, when, and how many children you're going to have—you need to read "The War On Contraception." And don't comfort yourself with the notion that these are just some anti-sex religious wackos: The Bush administration not only listens to these wackos, it appoints them to important positions all over the federal government—and let's not even think about the members of the American Taliban that Bush has already appointed to lifetime positions in the federal judiciary."
So, an appeal to all American voters who value the idea that the government has no place in the bedrooms of its citizens: you have an opportunity to send a message in this year's midterm elections that you no longer want your nation to be run as a theocracy. Just because you're not voting for the President, doesn't mean you're not able to vote for a change.
I've GISed until my eyes glazed over, but I just can't find any pictures of Roethlisberger's "touchdown". Maybe because it wasn't one. Hell, you could see it on his face as he wrenched the ball out from underneath himself to slide it over the line. It wasn't in. He knew it. We know it. The guys upstairs knew it.
Now, I am about as impartial as they come when it comes to football. (I find it highly entertaining, but I really don't care too much who wins on any given Sunday.) But my favourite quote from this morning's coverage is definitely "I guess Pittburgh's 12th man wears black and white stripes."
Tickets to the Super Bowl are starting at US$3000.00 for a seat up in the nosebleeds.
The colosseum in Rome was built to pacify the unruly (read: poor) masses. Why is watching our modern-day gladiators so prohibitively expensive? And we don't get to see even half as much bloodshed...
| Comments (1)
At least for the time being.
U.S. Senate blocks drilling in Alaskan wildlife refuge
| Comments (1)
I got a kick out of this AP headline:
Bush: Radicals seek to intimidate world
Editor's Note: It seems that an hour after posting the article, the AP changed the headline to "Militants". I guess someone pointed out the possible confusion?
I can recite the pledge of allegiance, even though I am not American. I used to be able to recite the entire regular Catholic mass as well. Call it overexposure, on both counts. And in neither case did I necessarily believe in or even really understand what I was saying, or how it has changed over time. I am guessing that I am likely not the only person in this boat, so I decided to do a little research.
The pledge of allegiance was originally written by a Socialist Baptist minister in 1892. It originally read as follows:
I pledge allegiance to my flag, and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
That's right. Not the version millions of American school children recite every morning. And not the version that was ruled "unconstitutional" earlier this morning. That version has only been around since 1954, when the Knights of Columbus campaigned to have the words "under God" added to the oath. (The Daughters of the American Revolution had previously changed "my flag" to "the flag of the United States of America" in the 1920s.) Happily coinciding with the Red Scare, it was also a good tool to differentiate the leaders of the free world from the Godless communist enemy.
This ruling is likely to spark a huge public outcry. It will be seen as evidence of the further moral decay of America at the hands of liberals, hippies, and activist judges. I can already hear Bill O'Reilly's rant. If we remove the pledge of allegiance from public schools, all of our children will become gay, want to marry dogs, and spend all day smoking hydroponic weed like up in Soviet Canuckistan.
In all the furor, no one will think twice about the fact that the original author deliberately omitted God in an effort to create an inclusive oath for all Americans to recite together, nor the fact that he was a liberal; no one will see those ironies.
*A registered slogan and trademark of SC Johnson Wax
| Comments (0)
Recently, Fox News debuted north of the 49th. I didn't get around to seeing any of it until today. When I did watch it, the following came to mind:
(a) Colonel Oliver North is one of their Military Affairs correspondents. I guess fair and balanced reporting is another neat idea.
(b) If you're going to have a no-fly list (not that I necessarily think it's a good idea, or an idea that's particularly well-executed to begin with), shouldn't the purpose of said no-fly list be that the people on it not be allowed to fly? Isn't forcing the landing of a plane carrying someone whose name matches a name on said list kind of like closing the barn door? Shouldn't you double check to make sure they're not the person you don't want flying before the plane takes off? I mean, if you're even bothering with that to begin with?
| Comments (0)
Am I the only one who thought that last night's Oscar extravaganza was one of the most painfully dull egofests ever transmitted over the airwaves? It would seem that the producers of the annual Hollywood strokeapalooza were so eager to cut down on the longwindedness of the evening that they managed to completely do away with all pretense of festivity. They seem to have forgotten that we, the viewers at home, don't tune in to see Hillary Swank thank her lawyers (which she did, by the way)... we tune in to see Michael Moore take a swipe at the Bush administration... we tune in to see Bjork wear a dress inspired by dead poultry... we tune in to see a spectacle.
Hell, we even get a kick out of seeing the little people thank other little people. But this year, half of them weren't even allowed on the stage. The winners of awards for achievement in make-up and animated short films were relegated to making their acceptance speeches from the Academy's version of the kiddie table. They can tell that no body cares about their contribution to a film based on the size of their paycheques; they don't need to be reminded of their perceived unimportance on an international broadcast. Next year, they will likely face the same treatment as the film "geeks" who win awards for technical achievement, and won't even be allowed in the Kodak theatre with such luminaries as Marisa Tomei or Bobcat Goldthwaite. Because the Academy's real talent must be carefully sequestered from the plebians who actually make movies happen.
Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and family!
Sick of turkey? This year, why not try a turducken? Yes... that was a hypothetical question...
