IT'S WINTER SO WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT SEALING AGAIN

Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, or that I continue to read Canadian newspapers, but I have been hearing far too much noise about the seal hunt recently.
Apparently the seal hunt is super cruel, so cruel the EU had to ban the importation of seal products. Apparently it is inhumane to murder seals and eat their meat and use their fur and oil. That is probably true. But it's also pretty rude that we keep millions of cows and chickens and pigs in terrible conditions and kill them and then eat their meat and use their skins. Seals at least live outside and get to do seal things; domestic animals mostly live inside and don't get to perform their normal behaviours. I don't need to get into debeaking or mulesing or any of the other awful practices done to animals kept in captivity for the purposes of keeping them docile and immobile; the videos and documents are already out there for anyone who cares to look for them. I think we can all acknowledge that humans don't have a great track record with animals, unless that animal looks adorable on the front page of the paper.

Look, I am no paragon of virtue. But I believe that if you are unprepared to deal with the way your food lived and died, you don't deserve to eat it. The opportunity has not yet arisen, but I would certainly eat venison, because before it became meat, that deer lived outside and did deer stuff until it was killed, hopefully cleanly and with as little suffering as possible. I am not a vegetarian because I believe it's wrong to eat meat; we are an omnivorous species and meat has a lot of nutrients in it; nutrients difficult to derive from plants. Grazing cattle used to be a way to turn grass, which humans can't eat, into beef, which humans can eat. It's not wrong to raise cows in a field; wild cows and domestic cows alike wander around eating grass as part of their normal daily lives. But cows aren't meant to be raised in confined spaces, fed on grain and slaughtered under stressful conditions. It's not ecologically efficient - humans can eat grain; feeding it to cows and then eating the cows produces only 10% of the same food energy as humans eating those grains directly - it's terrible for the cows' quality of life, and it affects the health and taste of the beef - stress hormones and antibiotics are FUCKING UP YOUR STEAK. If I cannot appeal to you on the grounds of animal welfare or human decency or the environment, let me appeal to you on the basis of flavour - COWS TASTE BETTER WHEN THEIR LIVES AND DEATHS DON'T SUCK.

It's that simple. Instead, we waste time weeping over seal pups, because they have cute faces and the image of red blood on white snow is much more visually shocking than the image of red blood on a dirty abattoir floor. Anyone interested in protesting the deaths of harp seals (which, for the record, are not endangered, and whose hunts are controlled by strict quotas from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, a government body staffed by scientists, not economists) should start with the real culprit - global warming. Seal pups are born on ice floes; when the ice is thin or soft, the pups are set adrift in the ocean before they learn to swim, and they drown. Interestingly enough, the largest contributor to the production of greenhouse gases and subsequent global warming, larger even than the transport sector, is livestock. 

Anyway, don't listen to me, I'm just an anonymous Internet blowhard. But maybe listen to Jacques Cousteau, who was probably pretty qualified to talk about oceans and what lives in them:

"We have to be logical. We have to aim our activity first to the endangered species. Those who are moved by the plight of the harp seal could also be moved by the plight of the pig – the way they are slaughtered is horrible."

ANOTHER FAIRLY STUPID SCANDAL FROM MY HOME AND NATIVE LAND

Really, now.

So Joachim Stroink, an MLA from Nova Scotia, went to a Dutch Christmas party and sat on Zwarte Piet's knee. Zwarte Piet is a mythical character usually portrayed by someone wearing blackface; Mr. Stroink decided to tweet his nice picture and was then very surprised when people got upset. 

"I didn't sign up for this," quoth he as the maelstrom broke. Presumably, Mr. Stroink refers to the scrutiny of his life and photographs. Is it right that members of government have every detail of their lives picked apart? Probably not. But it happens, and when you're posting the pictures yourself, I don't think you're allowed to be upset with the press for demonizing you. 

What's really irksome is this description of Zwarte Piet:
"A traditional song refers to the character as a “servant” to the elderly St. Nicholas, but in recent years those references have largely been replaced with the idea that he is black from chimney soot as he scrambles down to deliver toys and sweets for children who leave their shoes out overnight."

No. Zwarte Piet is not a white dude covered in soot from hustling up and down chimneys. The Dutch held colonies in Africa and captured slaves too. Let's not elide that part of history away, and let's not practice this kind of malignant euphemism, the same effort that produced the concept of "colour-blindness", that we don't see race when we look at other humans. Of course we see race; pretending skin colour doesn't mean anything does a fundamental disservice to people of colour. Feigning colour-blindness is the act of well-meaning white people trying to pretend that treating everyone the same is the same as treating everyone equitably, that we can just forge ahead as a united whole and leave all those nasty memories of slavery and segregation and lynchings behind. Similarly, claiming Zwarte Piet is just a sooty white man is harmful revisionism that attempts to avoid both history and the well-deserved controversy blackface performance generates. Zwarte Piet is a racist historical representation of a black servant. That is a fact. So, where does Canada's Dutch community go from this point? Ideally, by acknowledging these three things:

1. Yes, that happened. 
2. It was wrong.
3. Let's consign that tradition to the past.

I can already imagine the uproar, the claims that pluralism is neutering cultural celebrations. Never mind that if any other ethnic group in Canada had a special figure who was represented in whiteface, we would raise holy hell about it. The fact is, there is a lot of racist crap that we used to do that we don't do any more because it is no longer compatible with the world we inhabit. The cartoon image of the "darkey" eating watermelon or "talkin jive" was present in mainstream American culture for decades; it no longer resides there because it is offensive. It was deemed to be an unacceptable portrayal of real, live humans with feelings and individual personalities, so it faded away. Zwarte Piet, or at least his representation by humans in blackface, can fade too. 

CRISIS OF FAITH #5969

What am I even doing with my life.

I don't believe in Education to 18.
I believe in Education Forever, School to 14. Or maybe School to Whenever. Or School Never, Just Parasailing, if that's your thing.

We know teenagers have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes; it's why they come up with amazing ideas but can't predict the consequences of riding a skateboard off the roof. They lack impulse control; it's why we lock them up during the day under the guise of teaching them stuff.

I was thinking about geometry. Angles seem useful; I am in favour of children learning what a degree is and how to measure angles using a protractor. But we also teach kids a bunch of words like "acute" and "obtuse" and "reflex", which are words whose meanings they have to memorize. But why? Why is it important for a child to know that an angle less than 90 degrees is considered acute? I would argue that it is not.

I was also thinking about kidneys. In the Ontario curriculum, we spend a long time teaching students about the kidney, in a lot of detail. The names of all the pieces of the kidney, the impermeable regions of the loop of Henle, when the solutes move in and out. I don't know why we do this. When I teach the kidney, I relearn it all the night before because the little details always escape me. Fortunately, I have about 12304839 resources at my disposal, most of them digital, that are happy to instruct me in the minutiae of the kidney. I like kidneys; I think they're neat, I think they're elegant, I think it's weird that they are connected to blood pressure and red blood cell manufacturing and hormone release. I think it's important for doctors and nurses and diabetes educators and pharmacists to know how kidneys work. I don't understand why I have to make sure every seventeen-year-old can tell me how a kidney works before he or she leaves high school. Even those who will use that information later are going to relearn it. It's easier every time, sure. But is it worth precious class hours, drawing the nephron over and over, making students memorize words devoid of inherent meaning - glomerulus, Bowman's capsule, efferent arteriole - because 10% are going to need the information again later?

So the question is, what do we need to teach our students? I don't know. Reading. Fractions. How to amortize a mortgage. What it means when the car makes that weird ka-clunk-a-clunk noise. Why tontines are a pretty solid insurance idea on the surface but actually a good way to encourage murder. When do I get to just show Family Guy in class and then have my students figure out what all the literary allusions are? When do I get to smack phones out of kids' hands and tell them to stop texting in class because that is fucking rude, dammit? Not because I am your teacher but because we are all humans in this room, and when we talk, we look each other in the face and give each other the undivided attention and respect we deserve? When does my student come to me and say they want to do a marketing project where they use physics to analyse the claim that Company X's snowboards are better than Company Y's? When do I tell my students that we're making a garden and they can grow whatever they want as long as it's not something that the police would disapprove of? When do they get to build decoding bombes and we play WWII-at-Bletchley-Park? Never, because I am supposed to teach children to be quiet and open their textbooks.

DEFINITELY THE ORIGINAL TEXT FROM THE LOST FOLIO

My favourite part of Othello, shortly after the titular character smothers Desdemona with a pillow (spoiler alert!) and the maid Emilia finds her breathing her last:


             EMILIA
123       Oh no, you're dying, Desdemona! Who did this to you?

             DESDEMONA
124       Nobody. I did it. Peace out.

[she dies]

             OTHELLO
125       Crap, why is she dead?

             EMILIA
126      Dunno.

             OTHELLO
127       Well, like she said, I didn't do it.

             EMILIA
128       She did say that.

             OTHELLO
129       ...She's a big liar, I definitely killed her!

             EMILIA
130       Aw, you're an a-hole!

HUMANS CONTINUE TO DISAPPOINT ME

I read a blog post. I will not link to it here; its author does not deserve the recognition or the free advertising, but it was about the inherent falseness of the idea of female self-esteem. Apparently, women should have absolutely no good feelings about themselves beyond the bare minimum needed to “prevent them committing suicide” (interesting, it’s never been my self-esteem but rather my awareness of reality that makes me want to reach for the pills). He says self-esteem should be earned through accomplishment – a sentiment (the only one in the entire article) with which I can wholeheartedly agree. What is so truly baffling, though, is that he follows this statement with the automatic assumption that women do not or cannot accomplish anything worthy of respect or merit.

The author then delivers an underhanded remark about women “barely squeaking through” colleges with low admission standards and earning their “masters in puppetry”. Hardly. It was at this point that I stopped reading; the gentleman (and I use the term verrrry loosely) was clearly no longer presenting an argument but merely baiting female readers in the hopes that one would reply and he could call her a rabid lesbian or something of that nature. (Hmm, maybe that should be the title of this blog – Rabid Lesbian: I Will Bite You In The Leg. Well, it’s a working title).

Of course he was American; he was possessed of the incredible hubris that only the young white American heterosexual male can really pull off. He encompasses an enormous part of what I find distasteful about Americans (and I generalize, of course; I refer mostly to those who embrace the American ethos, not specifically its geographical inhabitants) and what I find distasteful about men’s rights activitists the world over. The rhetoric is always the same and perpetually ignores the fact that there is no evidence other than mere cultural construction that women are inherently inferior to men. Different, yes, but inferior, not in the slightest. I am not so much angered as I am saddened, to see how “education” and “enlightenment” are shaking out in the global West. Not well, it seems; perhaps the author would have been better off getting his masters of puppetry instead.

A WHALE OF A PROBLEM

My father sent me this. I don't know why.

Basically, there was a dead whale on the beach and nobody knew what to do about it, but it was rotting and started to stink. The whale was too big to push back into the ocean, nobody was willing to cut it up to bury it, and it couldn't be burned (on this last part, I don't know why; the whale certainly would have burned with a little gasoline, but maybe the townspeople didn't want a giant grease fire on the beach). So they hired an engineer, who placed a whole lot of dynamite (20 crates, in fact) on the leeward side of the whale. It was supposed to blow the whale towards the ocean, and break it up into tiny pieces that crabs and birds would eat. Instead, it sprayed large chunks of decaying whale all over the surrounding area, including on passers-by and their vehicles. The next few days were spent repairing damage and using machinery to bury huge pieces of whale. After the fact, everyone sort of shook their collective heads and said, "Wait, we tried to blow up a whale? That was stupid." But the fact is, it wasn't that stupid. The problem wasn't the method - I defy you to find a better solution to dispose of a rotting whale. The real problem? They used too much dynamite.

Dynamite is a high explosive, meaning that the shock wave of the detonating material moves faster than the speed of sound...meaning that it blows stuff up really fast and really hard. The engineer in question decided that the whale should be treated as a "large boulder". Unfortunately, the force a boulder can absorb before cracking is a whole lot more than the force a decomposing whale body can withstand. The blood-red mist appearing high over the blast site is already an indication of a serious miscalculation. Small wonder that, instead of a controlled detonation, bits of whale ended up showering the area in a quarter-mile radius.

The plan was good; the execution was lacking. According to a quick Google search of "How much crap can I blow up with a case of dynamite?" (cue CSIS knocking at my door in 3, 2, 1...) a few sticks, not crates, nestled under the whale would have done the trick without the whale shower.

Also, how is this the first time anyone has dealt with a dead whale?! Whales beach themselves frequently, to my understanding, and not all of them are pushed back to the water in time. Surely, even in 1970, somebody must have already developed a method for handling whale carcasses. Or at least an estimate of how much dynamite it would really take to blow one up.

I AM NOT GETTING OUT OF BED TODAY

This country has made me far too serious.

A friend sent me an essay that drew together three threads of human tragedy, which I won't further elaborate upon, as the author hasn't given consent and I've no idea if he intends to publish. Suffice to say that it explores our inadequacies as humans. One of many intriguing considerations is our inability for any remedy, any kind word or embrace, to relieve the pain of the most fundamentally damaged.

I do not like to think of myself or any human, indeed, as damaged in ways beyond repair. But what stops us from being so? Some divine law preventing unfairness? Karma? The healing power of the universe? There is little justice on earth, especially where the law casts its shadow. It must be in the afterlife, then, that we are rewarded or condemned for our choices. Maybe that’s so. But it is guaranteed that this life, at least, may be filled with much more suffering than hope.

I have, after great struggle, found my own sense of God. But His existence does not mean, in my mind, a corresponding sense of purpose, or dedication to goodness, or even a natural order or process of events. Atheists live in a world where our existence was brought on by chance, and by the laws of physics; I would argue that the world of believers is worse. We live in an existence where God is real but cannot alleviate our suffering; our clockworks have been assembled by the Watchmaker but we have broken nonetheless; God created us of nothing but set us at odds with the rest of creation. If we are the chosen ones, meant to speak and read and invent, then our heartlessness and corruptibility means we have somehow broken a sacred contract. And if we are not, if we rose by accident long after the hand of God finished molding our planet, then our awfulness is inherent to all creatures; any living thing that becomes sentient will also likely take on our bizarre mix of good and evil. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are also the only other animals besides ourselves known to kill for fun. Either our nature is a violation of God’s intent, or it is a symptom of self-awareness. Neither is palatable.

I will not say that there is no goodness in us, just that our goodness is so fleeting, so difficult to transform into real, tangible things. We are indeed crippled by the vast difference between intent and results. Some people are irreparably damaged and it is almost certainly other humans that damaged them. We are indentured to Nature at birth, but worse, we are indentured to each other. We rely on each other to survive, and yet, we too often make it difficult for each other. We hurt those who create for us, underestimate their needs, punish them for trying to negate their own pain - even for trying to negate ours. Our goodness is mired in mediocrity, hate, imagined differences, bitterness, jealousy, apathy. Each one of us creates suffering or hope; failure to produce one is a de facto creation of the other. Not enough of us create hope so it is suffering that overwhelms us. 

So part of me believes there is other life out there. All of me believes it is smart enough to stay the hell away from us. 

Facts I have learned about the British today:

1. Southwark = "suth-erk"
2. The Tube is basically like the TTC, except apparently British people are quite short because the ceiling is about six foot at the max.
3. 5p looks like a dime, 10p looks like a quarter, 2p looks like a loonie, and the tiny, unassuming bronze thing is a pound.
4. "Walk left stand right" is exactly the same as back home, not the opposite, as I was told it would be.
5. Although it LOOKS like you can go through a Tube gate with your Oyster card from either direction, this is not true. There is a tiny X or green check telling you if you can pass through that side or not.
6. Street signs. Where are they?

USING GUNS TO STOP PEOPLE FROM USING GUNS IS A GREAT IDEA, YOU GUYS

I am late to the party on this one but I spend too much time trawling the Internet and running across macros like these in the months since the tragedy at Sandy Hook:

The NRA (and apparently some young people with too much time on their hands) believe that teachers should be armed to defend against school shooters. This is a terrible, terrible idea. The argument that one needs guns to defend oneself from other maniacs with guns is bullshit; what is really necessary is better control, licensing, and regulation, so that nobody has a gun and everybody avoids ballistics-related injuries at school. Virtually all of the weapons used in school shootings are obtained legally and legitimately, but the NRA somehow thinks the problem lies in a LACK of guns.

I mean, sure, it’s technically possible to fix a problem with more of that same problem. For example, the government could probably get rid of drug dealers by importing and distributing kilos and kilos of heroin – effectively flooding the market, dropping the price of a piece through the floor, and putting dealers out of business. But you don’t see anybody jumping at THAT plan, do you? Just because something will technically work doesn’t automatically make it the best plan, or even a feasible one.

Arming teachers is a similarly terrible idea. This residual Cold-War obsession with mutually assured destruction doesn’t work on a small scale because school shooters aren’t afraid of their own destruction. Arming teachers doesn’t keep maniacs out of schools, it just increases the likelihood that more children will be caught in the crossfire.

Oh, also? The spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry says the comparison between terrorism in Israel and school shootings in the US is nonsense, and that Israel actually depends on incredibly strict gun licensing laws. Nice try, Neo-Republican Assholes.

LITTERING

Part of me can't even believe people still do this. Maybe I'm just noticing this more now that I work at a conservation centre, but roadway littering is kind of a problem, and I don't get that. Littering requires deliberate movement; avoiding littering is a non-action - it requires zero effort. DO NOT roll down your window on the expressway, DO NOT shove your McDonald's wrapper or juice box or legal documents out the window. Congratulations, you have successfully NOT LITTERED.

I understand (at least sort of) how people might not want to get off their arses and plant a tree or walk to work. But when it comes to preserving the environment by NOT doing something, how effing hard is that?! If you are purposely expending energy to give the planet the finger, you might need another hobby.

BEARDY McBEARDERSON

PART MAN, PART PIT BULL

So, Tom Mulcair is in charge of stuff now over at the NDP desk. I suffer from a fatal character flaw: I’m a pragmatist. To that end, I’m not sure it matters if Mulcair’s plan on bringing the centre to the party is indeed the opposite. I just want a clear alternative so that Canadians stop voting in the Conservatives out of poverty of choice. Harper is not just ineffective, he is actually anti-progress. His government undoes good things and good laws that already exist. The legislation it enacts (or at least attempts to enact) does not reflect reality. In their minds, the Conservatives are already governing the perfect society they apparently hope to create. Their social platform is a series of hard lines drawn in the sand; their legislation is not based on any real survey of what the population needs, but rather on fulfilling the central party dogma.

Will the omnibus crime bill lower the crime rate, lower the recidivism rate, help rehabilitate non-violent offenders before their prison education ruins them for life? It’s highly unlikely. But that’s okay, because these are the Conservatives, and Conservatives are Tough on Crime.

Or the debacle a few years back, when Tony Clement threatened to rescind InSite’s government exemption? Never mind how many overdoses InSite has prevented, how many users were saved from HIV and hep C infection, how many users accepted passage into heroin detox facilities…Tony Clement is a Conservative, and Conservatives are Tough on Drugs!

This is no way to govern; these fools have to go.

Is Mulcair too Liberal? Almost certainly. After spending more than a decade as a Liberal MNA, I have no illusions that he’s magically left-ified all of his deepset political ideas.

On the count of divisiveness, I’m inclined to count the suit for defamation as a strong strike against him; obviously he doesn’t know how to play nicely with the other children (although I really just want to know what he said). On top of that, I also think he’s spent too much time dealing with the peculiarities of Quebecois politics and risks alienating the West by having the gall to reside in Central Canada. (I have no hope for Alberta, but the CCF-CLC merger was born in Saskatchewan, so the lack of NDP seats there is rather embarrassing).

Finally, does he need a shave? Quite desperately.

But, most importantly, does he represent a viable alternative to the Conservative juggernaut? If that answer is yes, how could we disagree? With the real Liberals in disgrace, maybe the best chance this country has of unseating the fuck-ups we let in this time is to present a centre-leaning, aggressive, outspoken leader who has enough street cred with Quebec to prevent the separatists from blowing things sky-high and derailing an otherwise productive term.

Anyway, forget all of this, I don’t have much faith left in the executive branch. As far as I’m concerned, elections are a kind of placebo that exists solely to give people the illusion of choice. The real work of keeping the nation on the rails falls to the judicial arm, so consider me an amicus curiae, at least until I end up with my own defamation suit.

YOUTH CULTURE FOR THE LOSE

I REACT TO THE TOP 15
I occasionally like to check out the MM(M) Top 10/15/20 to keep just enough on top of current music that my students can make fun of me for being so "mainstream". So, I braved the first top 15 of 2012:

1. Domino (Jessie J): Remember that time when Jessie J put out Do it Like a Dude and pretty much told the world that they could listen to her stuff or kiss her gargantuan balls? Yeah, I miss that time. What's with the downturn into bland synthpop, man?

2. Sprawl II (The Arcade Fire): Shit, I hate the Arcade Fire

3. Michigan Left (The Arkells): Didn't I JUST listen to this song?

4. Love on Top (Beyonce): As much as I love a woman in a ringmaster's jacket, there is no reason funk guitar should be anywhere near this video. Or music in general.

5. Party (Beyonce): Apparently this 90s-diva thing is the intended feel for the record. Hey, at least it seems more wholesome than some of the other stuff on this list. Oh wait, what's that? "So tonight/I'll do it every way/knockin' till the morning light"? Never mind.

6. It Will Rain (Bruno Mars): Is this the guy that did that stupid "Lazy Song"? I'm putting a hit out on this kid's head.

7. Hit Me Up (Danny Fernandes): All right, this is what I'm talking about! Get rid of whoever's singing, dial up the bass, and this is sheer dancehall.

8. Don't Stop (Foster the People): I don't know. Like Franz Ferdinand, only fuzzier. Is "shitty speakers" a mix effect now?

9. One Life (Hedley): "We been up when we should have been sleeping". Exactly. Rock out responsibly, kids. Even Hedley says you should.

10. The One that Got Away (Katy Perry): So maudlin. Obviously ghost-written by me.

11. Stronger (Kelly Clarkson): Don't break up with Kelly Clarkson 'cause she will write a kick-ass song about how she doesn't need you and then who's going to be sorry?

12. Marry the Night (Lady Gaga): I don't know, guys. I'm just not crazy about this Gaga single. I'm not feeling it.

13. It (Rich Aucoin): Son, you need a shave, and your music video consists entirely of you badly reenacting scenes from famous movies.
I like you.
Seriously, though. Like, do you need a razor or something? If you're not good with blades, I can get you an electric one.

14. Our Day Will Come (Amy Winehouse): Like I'd talk shit about Winehouse even if I didn't love this track, which I do. But, Amy-girl, if we can learn anything from Back to Black and your untimely death, it's that it's much safer to love blow than puff.

15. Stand Behind the Music (Anjulie): This girl had better be twenty-one or younger. Otherwise this bad-girl screw-the-industry rant veers from charmingly brash into wake-the-hell-up territory.

Conclusion: BAD NEWS, KIDS. Most of your shit sounds exactly the same. Someone bring me a Tommy James and the Shondells LP.

FELLOW HUMANS:

People, I cannot stress this enough: DO NOT FIRE GUNS INTO THE AIR.

Yes, the bullet will go up. Yes, at some point, its velocity will reach zero. But after that, it will fall back to Earth, and the effect of acceleration due to gravity will make sure it is travelling very, very fast on its return trip. Just like that penny thrown off the CN tower, a bullet falling from a thousand feet is going to hurt.

AWW, CRAP. ELECTION TIME AGAIN?

BRACE YOURSELVES - THE MAELSTROM IS COMING
How have I managed nine entire months without once needing to cuss out a public figure? Heaven only knows. Fortunately, we've got a provincial election coming up, which means plenty more stupid is about to hit the fan around here.

Let's start with the provincial Lie-beral promise, if elected, to extend teachers' college to two years.

Now, I AM a preservice teaching student, and can tell you that the vast majority of us are already in a minimum of five years' worth of debt. It must be nice for the province to be able to double the program length without spending any more money, but that scenario won't be the same for us.
I would also dearly love to know exactly how many professors who actually teach at teachers' colleges were consulted before this piece of brilliance was developed - I am guessing the number is zero. But hey, we can just pull another year's worth of content out of thin air, right?
Thirdly, let's address the math issues the Liberals are suffering here: they claim that they are going to reduce the number of graduates, as approximately 9000 new teachers are "flooding" the province each year. Well, yes. Throwing down another year of teachers' college will drop the number of graduates this year to zero - but only for this year. After that, we're back to 9000 grads a year who are even deeper in debt and even more desperate for teaching jobs.
This is such a bass-ackwards way of addressing the oversaturation of the teaching profession. Want fewer grads? Admit fewer teaching candidates. Don't try to temporarily stem the flow of output by hurling a one-time monkey wrench at the pipeline.

"BABY DOC" ONLY SOUNDS CUTE

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS GUY UP TO?!
Jean-Claude Duvalier, aka Baby Doc, the younger half of the two-generation terror squad ruling Haiti from 1957 to 1986, showed up in Haiti this week.
Haiti needs a lot of things - medical supplies and doctors, fresh water sources, food, transportation, repairs to flooded roads and damaged infrastructure, effective cholera treatments. One thing they don't need is this clown pulling into town after 25 years of exile in France and announcing he wants to help.
I don't blame the Haitians in the slightest for welcoming Duvalier - apparently, fully half of the country is under the age of 33, meaning they have little to no memory of how insanely evil, corrupt and brutal the ham-fisted Duvalier regime really was. But let's have a brief recap: at the end of their reign of terror, the one-two knockout punch of Duvaliers Sr and Jr could add millions of dollars in embezzlement, the executions of thousands of political opponents, and the introduction of the tontons macoutes (a distinctly evil secret police force) to their resumes. And let's not forget their continued dealings in narcotics and body parts (!), or the repeated violations of the Constitution, or the vote-rigging, or that time when Daddy Doc rewrote the Lord's prayer to include himself.
Haiti, you just can't catch a break, can you?


YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG
Toronto police have taken a man accused of shooting at and firebombing a house into custody. The enterprising young fellow, Atanas Markov, decided to return with a gun after a deal (and Markov's subsequent attempt at extortion) went south at his business partner's house. He fired at the house (?!) and then at a car parked in the driveway. Still not content, this champion returned three days later with a couple of friends, who helped him throw Molotov cocktails at the house. The damage they did, however, was mostly broken glass; fortunately, the business partner and his wife and two kids were unharmed.
What have we learned here? Not only is Markov insane enough to firebomb a house, the utter lack of, you know, fire damage suggests he's not even GOOD at making Molotov cocktails. Come on, son. You're just disgracing the real arsonists around here.

What is this I don't even.

Where do I even start?
Okay. The Soviets occupied Finland for a couple of years around the start of WWII, which sucked big-time for the Finns. Pretty much exhausted and really annoyed with the Russians by this time, Finland allowed the Nazis to occupy part of their country, until they realized that Nazis were actually really bad dudes, and put their cooperation pact through the cross-cut shredder a couple times.

MEANWHILE, a pharmaceutical company owner (Tor Borg) apparently had a dog who had a habit of raising its paw in the air, in what looked like to a few sun-starved Finns to be the Sig Heil salute. His wife nicknamed the dog Hitler; hilarity ensued. The Chancellory caught wind of this dog via some of their handy spies, and weren't too happy. They dispatched some more diplomats to find the dog and figure out just what was going on. All of this was very seriously reported via a series of cables - including a plot to destroy Borg's pharmaceutical company by having his wholesaler cut him off. (Does this sound weirdly like the CIA vs. Castro to anyone else, by the way?)

In the end, nothing much happened, apparently because none of the witnesses were willing to stand in open court and give their findings on a dog's party tricks.

Having read all of this, I have but one question...in the photograph, is that dog wearing sunglasses?

THIS DISPLEASES ME.

Julian Assange is a terrorist.

No, he doesn't even deserve the name "terrorist". He's a sulky little boy, a thug, a back-alley blackmailer.
"Listen up, world. Do what I want, or there's going to be a lot of trouble!"

He distributed the entire, uncensored, WikiLeaks file to tens of thousands of people, with only an encryption key preventing those people from actually accessing the material. However, he says, should he be brought to trial for any of his assorted crimes, he'll reveal the encryption key, millions of pages of classified documents will be freely available, and diplomatic relations between every country in the world are all going to hell.

Assange claims he's using the WikiLeaks key as an "insurance policy". He also said, likely in the same breath, that he'll release this "thermonuclear device" if his demands aren't met.

Now, I'm all for government clarity and transparency, but these documents aren't just financial records and self-congratulatory Post-it notes transferred between Cabinet ministers over their latest tax-dollar rip-off - among hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive material, there are classified military documents in that package, including information about current service members currently serving in missions across the globe. How can anyone justify releasing that kind of information all over the Internet? What kind of a monster decides that his escape from justice means that men and women who volunteered their lives to fight or keep peace overseas now get to have their troop positions and battle plans dished out to any private citizen with a CPU and a modem?!

And, here's the kicker - Assange isn't just trying to escape a rap for sedition or treason or whatever else you get charged with when you are a MAJOR ASSHOLE - he's trying to get out of rape charges - yes, he's using his status as founder and protector of WikiLeaks to avoid going to jail for sexually assaulting women, which is not only utterly heinous but also a crime totally unrelated to him publishing tons of really important government shit.

When someone hauls this idiot out of the Swedish woods, feel free to bring him on over to my place and I'll drop him with an M15 carbine - thanks to WikiLeaks, I'll know where to pick one up from my friendly local armed forces personnel!

DEAR AMERICA:

IF YOU BANNED HANDGUNS, THINGS LIKE THIS COULD HAPPEN IN YOUR COUNTRY TOO
There is very little explanation needed here - a man killed his father. In a library. With a crossbow.
Yes.

G&M EXPLODES WITH RIDICULOUS

DENSITY (EXCUSE ME WHILE I GEEK OUT)
Neat density-related facts I have discovered this month:
1) When diet and non-diet soft drinks are placed together in a bucket of ice-water for the purpose of keeping them cool, the sugar in the non-diet drinks increases their density enough that they sink, while diet drinks float near the top.
2) In my 50-pack of Halloween candy (thank you, November 1st!), a natural resettling of the candy bar contents moved most of the high-density, rice-crisp-based Mr. Big bars towards the top of the box, while the denser, nougat- or caramel-based Wunderbar and Caramilk bars moved towards the bottom.

NANOWRIMO
For those not in the know of quirky literary events, NaNoWriMo is an international event where participants strive to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. Naturally, once a thing is around long enough, people start being assholes about it.
NaNoWriMo has been accused of being everything from self-indulgent to an affront to real literature to a useless expenditure of time.
At its heart, NaNoWriMo is about doing something huge, something that people often say they'd like to do "some day", and saying, Why not today? Why not do something big and fun that scares you a little? It's about shaking off the chains of needing perfection right from the start, and finding the fun in a tough, but not insurmountable, challenge. Yes, maybe your final product shouldn't ever see the light of day, but it isn't about creating publishable material or degrading literature with one month's worth of low-quality output. It isn't really about the destination, about the 50,000 words at all. It's about doing something, doing anything, without being crippled by fear or perfectionism or even procrastination. NaNo doesn't make you a better writer, it makes you a better person. So to criticize NaNo for producing hastily-written, unpolished manuscripts is completely besides the point.

THIS IS NOT HOW LIBEL WORKS
Ontario PC caucus leader Tim Hudak accused a Liberal minister of tweeting statements that were both libelous and unworthy of a cabinet minister, and demanded a public apology or the minister's resignation. First of all, judging by the list of words and phrases that are banned from further use in the House of Commons, I don't see how this particular statement is somehow "beneath the role of a cabinet minister". Secondly, I distinctly remember learning in Grade 11 Law that the one group of people who could not accuse others of libel were elected politicians. This is a pretty neat amendment when you consider that it prevents us from going to jail for criticizing the government's policies or calling the prime minister a buckethead. So, no matter how offended Hudak may have felt by being lumped in with Harper and Rob Ford in the "trifecta of republican-style, right wing ignorance and bigotry", he has no recourse to call anything libelous, no matter from which side of the House it emanates.

BREAKING INTERNATIONAL LAW IS TOTALLY JOKES, GUYS
The lawyer representing an Asian youth who disguised himself as an elderly white man in order to board a flight from Hong Kong to Canada called the Canadian Border Services Agency "negligent" for releasing photos of his client in and out of the mask, and demanded a media publication ban on the photos in order to protect his client's privacy. Privacy? If you want privacy, how about next time you don't violate international law by impersonating someone else on a flight to Vancouver! Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about a Globe reader recognizing him - the majority of the people who read this newspaper undoubtedly think all Asians look the same.

PEDOPHILES
Amazon.com is being slammed by the public for allowing a self-published e-book geared towards helping pedophiles stay within the law to be available through its website. At first glance, this seems like a no-brainer - a how-to guide for pedophiles doesn't belong on the market. But look a little deeper, and again, we butt up against the issue of harm reduction vs. standing on principle. Yes, the rape and molestation of children is abhorrent. But it continues to this day despite legislation against it. This book seems not to be so much focused on how to evade police, but on safe forms of release for people whose sexual preference falls on minors - i.e. forms that do not actually involve the touching or molestation of a child! We have a choice - continue to stick to the principle that pedophilia is wrong, or accept that, despite its wrongness, pedophilia continues to exist, and that a book that helps pedophiles find other ways of handling their feelings without actually harming children might be a worthwhile product. There is such a thing as dangerous information...but this isn't it.

EVERYONE NEEDS TO MOVE TO BRAZIL
The tagline for this article by G&M writer Chris Frey:
"Tiririca (or Grumpy) the clown wins big with Brazilian voters on campaign of ‘Vote Tiririca! It can’t get any worse,’ but may be brought down by alleged illiteracy."

There is nothing else I can say. I would like to applaud the nation, the clown, and this writer, for reminding us all that truth is by far stranger than fiction.