I just thought I’d run this up the flagpole and see who saluted…
News of the Restless A door at the end of a dead-end street…
Another Liberal not worthy of the name
June 29, 2006 — Sabina BeckerYou can always tell who the cynical power-jockeys are up here in the Great North. They gravitate to the party most likely to get them elected, even when they have little or nothing in common with the values implicit in the party name. These infiltrators are almost laughably transparent, but it’s never stopped any of them from trying it yet, even when they get their pee-pees whacked by their constituents in the end.
Take the once-dominant Liberals (please!). There used to be a sub-group within the party calling themselves “Liberals for Life”, even though they were neither. What they should have called themselves was Closet Conservatives Against Choice, which is a far less catchy thing to call oneself, and also far less likely to get votes. But at least then, they’d have been honest. What I don’t understand is why they weren’t in the Tories all along, since their ideology would have fit and then they’d have been in power, where they could have wrought a helluva lot more havoc. (Plus, in the end, they’d have gone down a bit earlier on the same ship with their ideological soulmates instead of continuing to infest an already rat-ridden-enough party.)
There’s a reason I’m bringing this up. Here it is:
On June 21st, Parliament saw first reading of a private member’s bill by Liberal MP Paul Steckle to re-criminalize abortion. Bill C-338, “An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (procuring a miscarriage after 20 weeks of gestation)”, would restrict later abortions performed after twenty weeks.
The bill would allow exceptions to save the woman’s life and “to prevent severe pathological physical morbidity of the woman.” Otherwise, anyone who “uses any means or permits any means to be used” to perform an abortion past 20 weeks would be subject to penalties of a prison term of up to five years, and/or a fine of up to $100,000.
A most literary funeral
June 27, 2006 — Sabina BeckerIt’s the stuff of a Gothic romance writer’s dreams: A loving and famous couple, parted by death and grief, are reunited in the grave more than a century later.
No, it’s not fiction. Read on:
The remains of the wife of 19th Century US writer Nathaniel Hawthorne have been reburied next to those of the author, after more than a century apart.
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne left the US with her children after her husband’s death in 1864. She went to England, where she died six years later.
Her remains and those of daughter Una were exhumed from a London cemetery, after their plot fell into disrepair.
Macondo remains fictitious
June 26, 2006 — Sabina BeckerAnd meanwhile, Aracataca remains real.
The Colombian town of Aracataca, birthplace of Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, will not be renamed to honour its most famous son.
The town’s mayor proposed renaming Aracataca after Macondo, the fictional setting for the writer’s most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
What’s in a face?
June 24, 2006 — Sabina Becker
What’s in a name?
–Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
The less clear we are about “who wrote Shakespeare”, the more “Shakespeare” can be idealized and indeed idolized. … Just as “man bites dog” is a more eye-catching headline than “dog bites man”, so “Oxford is Shakespeare” makes a better story than “Shakespeare is Shakespeare”–at least in some quarters. The brouhaha about any portrait is beside the point if the subject of the portrait didn’t write the plays.
–Marjorie Garber, “Looking the Part” (in Shakespeare’s Face, 2002)
It all began in the spring of 2001. Stephanie Nolen, a young reporter for the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, was chatting on the phone with her mother. Seems the parents’ up-the-street neighbor in a suburb of Ottawa, Lloyd Sullivan, was the proud heir to the only oil portrait of William Shakespeare painted in the Bard’s lifetime. The modest-sized likeness, dated 1603, was rendered on oak board by one John Sanders, Lloyd Sullivan’s distant ancestor. Sullivan had gone to a lot of trouble to trace the painting (which had spent many years under his invalid grandmother’s bed in Montreal!) to its source. He had spent ten years and thousands of dollars to have it authenticated by the best experts in the field, and now he was finally ready to make it public. Nolen, captivated from the first moment she laid eyes on “Willy Shake”, as Sullivan had dubbed the picture, was more than happy to break the news to the world. And everyone who heard the story was agog.
Why such a fuss over a little old oil painting?
Festive Left Friday Blogging: One gorgeous mural
June 23, 2006 — Sabina BeckerCaracas isn’t famous for its urban beauty spots. But then again, we haven’t heard nearly enough about its Bolivarian murals…such as this one:
Quotable: Noam Chomsky on the unspeakable c-word
June 22, 2006 — Sabina Becker“In the United States you’re not allowed to talk about class differences. In fact, only two groups are allowed to be class-conscious in the United States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class-conscious. When you read their literature, it’s all full of the danger of the masses and their rising power and how we have to defeat them. It’s kind of vulgar, inverted Marxism.
“The other group is the high planning sectors of the government. They talk the same way–how we have to worry about the rising aspirations of the common man and the impoverished masses who are seeking to improve standards and harming the business climate.
“So they can be class-conscious. They have a job to do. But it’s extremely important to make other people, the rest of the population, believe that there is no such thing as class. We’re all just equal, we’re all Americans, we live in harmony, we all work together, everything is great.”
–Noam Chomsky, interview with David Barsamian, in The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Odonian Press, 1994)
Indefinitely detained at Gitmo
June 22, 2006 — Sabina Becker
But on the bright side, organ donations are up…
June 21, 2006 — Sabina BeckerA pathologist friend-of-friends often refers to motorcycles as “donorcycles”. See if you can tell me why after reading this.
Motorcycle fatalities involving riders without helmets have soared in the nearly six years since Gov. Jeb Bush repealed the state’s mandatory helmet law, a newspaper reported Sunday.
A Florida Today analysis of federal motorcycle crash statistics found “unhelmeted” deaths in Florida rose from 22 in 1998 and 1999, the years before the helmet law repeal, to 250 in 2004, the most recent year of available data.
Total motorcycle deaths in the state have increased 67 percent, from 259 in 2000 to 432 in 2004, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics.
Watch out, kiddies, or you’ll catch the gay!
June 20, 2006 — Sabina BeckerOh, no! As if being an interfering peacenik wasn’t bad enough, look what else Jim Loney has been doing to corrupt the good Christian youth of the world…
Former hostage James Loney is accusing an Ontario Catholic camp he once worked for of closing its doors because of his homosexuality.
The closure of the Ontario Catholic Youth Leadership Camp by the Knights of Columbus Ontario State Council, which finances the camp, was an act of discrimination, Loney told a news conference Tuesday.
