I got this from the Accordion Guy, a fellow Canuck.
I know. I don’t believe it either.
It’s the year of curling. I mean, I know I live in Canada and all, and grew up getting clonked on the head by my mother’s brooms in the hall closet every time I reached for my jacket. We had a broom closet, but she didn’t keep her brooms there. As I recall, she kept dog food, kitty litter, and old papers there. She had quite a variety of brooms, although she was not a big one for using them around the house. Just before my father came home from work each day, she’d throw away the newspaper and spray Pine-Sol in the air, and he’d say, “Oh, you’ve been cleaning!”
Myopia runs in the family. Hey, it has its uses.
Curling, right. Curling.
So my mother was a curler. My whole town was full of curlers; you could tell, because they were the grownups who weren’t ashamed to wear their team sweaters with the big shawl collars and their names in duplicate stitch, like some polar bowling team. I guess that’s what they were, really. Most of the action took place in the parking lot after the game (round? speil? chukker? Whatever the hell you call it) when the team would go out and crack open the beers that had been sitting in their cars, slowly becoming what they referred to as “Polar Cola” and what the police referred to as “Booze Slurpees.”
The police would send a car to sit opposite the parking lot and pull over anybody who got behind the wheel while he was still loaded. Mostly, though, people would get loaded, yak it up (so to speak, they did look like that, some of them, and after a couple of rounds smelled that way, too) for a couple of hours, and then get in the car and drive, more or less steadily, away. As long as the cop felt a decent slurpee-to-minute ratio had been achieved, he would let them go.
Curling. See, I just can’t seem to come around to talking about curling. My mother once asked me when I thought I’d be ready to take curling lessons, and I told her it would be shortly after, but definitely not before, my frontal lobotomy. I just couldn’t face it, then or now.
Now it’s cool. Curling. Cool. It’s on the front page of every paper, day after day. Countries are going nuts, and it’s not just Scotland this time. It was in Dose!
Years ago, I was flipping through channels and came across a truly eye-searing, couch-wetting pageant of the hilarious and the bizarre: a fashion show of Curling in the Twenty-First Century. As spectacle it could only be compared to watching the sidesplitting comedy routines of Yog-Sothoth, the Black Goat of the Wood with a Thousand Young. Let us just say that Barbarella does not look her best in a cowichan sweater, even if it’s knitted from strips of silver lame and adorned with dilithium crystals. This is not how the god Thunderbird sees himself, people.
But curling is here, it’s hot and there’s nothing I can do about it except hide. And link to amusing stories of spoiled journalists at the Olympics.
Egg McMuffins on their faces
Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star and some buddies were sitting in a McDonald’s making fun of curling – both, by the way, favorite pastimes of Olympic journalists.
“The lines got progressively worse as the evening went on,” Posnanski wrote, “which of course meant we were laughing harder. We probably were being pretty loud. But there was only one other guy in the entire restaurant, and hey, it was curling. What did he care?
” ‘Excuse me, guys,’ the guy said. He turned to us. He said: ‘I couldn’t help but overhear. It sounds like you guys are talking about my sport, curling.’
“We apologized for being loud. That’s when he reached into his bag and pulled out the silver medal he had won in curling at the Olympics in Nagano.
“Some things can happen only at the Olympics.
” ‘The sport’s not going anywhere,’ he said to us with a little edge in his voice, and he shook the Olympic medal. ‘The people are watching. The kids are playing.’ “
The recent Speech from the Throne was interesting for many reasons, but the particular aspect which caught my attention was, as it so often is with politics, the part which made no logical sense and threatened the foundations of our country.
Ain’t that always the way?
Here in Canada, we’ve enjoyed one of the very best medical systems in the world. Over the decades, the quality has been eroded by both the increasing service demands of the aging population and the sheer avarice and short-sightedness of the politicians, who advocate huge grants and guarantees for construction, but who insist on labour cutbacks, even in the face of crisis and economic self-sufficiency, leaving us with vast, costly, and empty buildings named after politicians, but no staff to run them. I’ll take this moment to point out that the increased usage by an aging population was forseen and adequately set aside for, but the funds were raided by…guess who? Politicians, that’s right. Go to the head of the class! By consistently hamstringing the medical infrastructure of Canada and particularly BC, the government has driven us to the current not-quite-crisis-yet-but-wait-for-it.
My friends from the UK may be surprised to hear the current NHS setup lauded as a paragon of probity, virtue, and market-driven good old-fashioned sense. Because it is a clusterfuck. The only reason anyone could get away with pretending otherwise is that they know that is in England and they don’t think anyone in Canada can read English papers, outside of the British Properties.
English? Why would I learn English? I’m never going to England! Homer Simpson
In any case, we here in Canuckistan have the Canada Health Act, which guarantees universal, accessible, comprehensive, portable, and publicly administered health care. Pretty unambiguous, eh?
Ah, but our BC government apparently has some difficulty with it, and seeks to define the terms. When a group seeks to define the terms after inheriting a signed and binding agreement, you can be pretty sure you’re dealing with a bunch of lawyers. Thus:
After four decades of public health care, supported by over $1.5 trillion dollars in public expenditures, those five principles remain largely undefined.
But of course, if you’d studied English rather than law, you’d know exactly what they meant.
What does the principle of “universality” mean when some citizens have special access to services and surgical options that others do not have, for lack of extended or private insurance? Or when only a handful of provinces even offer catastrophic drug coverage?
It means, of course, that the provincial governments are not living up to the terms of the Canada Health Act, which guarantees these rights. As for people who cannot be treated effectively because they lack private or extended (ie private) insurance, this is why we built the system of socialized medicine in the first place. We cannot rely on a market system to maintain the health of citizens when it is so much cheaper to let most of them die. I refer you to the “Death Futures” market in the United States for examples.
What does the principle of “accessibility” really mean, in light of existing access to primary care, surgical care, or extended care across Canada?
Again, I refer you to the English language and the responsibility incumbent upon government to act on behalf of its people.
What does “comprehensive” and “portable” mean to Canadians, given the wide discrepancy in insurable services across our country?
Sweetie, do we really need to go over this again?
How should we define concepts like “reasonable access” to “medically necessary” services, so that the courts are not left to interpret them for us?
At this point, I’m thinking it’s better to put my faith in a judge who, at least in BC, may not be a lawyer. I certainly and at all times avoid putting my faith in a bunch of people who overuse “quotation” marks.
Does it really matter to patients where or how they obtain their surgical treatment if it is paid for with public funds?
Uh, yes. I refer you to both the specific terms of the Canada Health Act, which guarantees publicly administered health care, and to the disastrous provincial money-saving, efficiency-boosting Public-Private-Partnership (P3) experiment in closing community hospitals; life expectancy went down by, I believe, nearly a year in rural areas, and we do live, after all, in Canada; have you seen it? Quite a lot of rurality out there.
Why are we so afraid to look at mixed health care delivery models, when other states in Europe and around the world have used them to produce better results for patients at a lower cost to taxpayers?
Because, in fact, these have been disastrous, as anyone with Internet access could tell you. Even Aftenpoten publishes in English.
Why are we so quick to condemn any consideration of other systems as a slippery slope to an American-style system that none of us wants?
Because of course, they are. The American system is inferior, because it is linked to higher mortality and lower life expectancy and quality of life, and because it is by far the most expensive and wasteful system in the world, both in dollar terms and in human cost. It consists of the caregivers on one side, the patients on the other, and a huge, avaricious bureaucracy standing in the middle, demanding its cut; for what? Pushing paper and running systems to push paper. If it worked that well, would they really be sneaking across the border and buying their drugs from us?
And now, for a parting shot from *gasp* Americans! Thanks to Robert Anton Wilson and the GUNS AND DOPE PARTY!
or at least confused to death.
BoingBoing, a techie/culture blog, has been put on a blacklist as featuring “nudity.” While it does, from time to time, link to some art including nudes, it’s not exactly your typical nudie site, mostly sticking to actually rather boring DRM reporting, book updates, “see what my friends are working on” (thank god they have talented friends and their books are good), and the odd … well, oddity. Like the Cthulhu mythos as interpreted in Lego: Clthulego; that was a classic.
BoingBoing has decided not to take its blacklisting lying down, nor kneeling in front thereof (ie change their editorial policy so they obey the blacklister’s commands). They have, instead, and vastly to their credit, decided to culture jam the censors, thusly.
Quote:
BoingBoing banned in UAE, Qatar, elsewhere. Our response to net-censors: Get bent!
We’ve decided not to rejig our editorial process to make it easier for a censorware company to block us for their customers. Instead, we’re creating a clearinghouse of information on how to defeat censorware.
Stick Michelangelo’s “David” on your blog to protest censorware
BoingBoing reader Kurt von Finck says,
Read with a mixture of dismay and pleasure today’s BB article regarding blocking by SmartFilter. Dismay that a product with “Smart” in its moniker is so stupid, and pleasure that you’ve decided to stand up to it. Let me suggest an additional strategy.
What happens when the blogosphere uses so much tasteful nudity that the web is unusable for SmartFilter users? What happens when SmartFilter blocks so much content that the web is crippled for its users?
So, I have created the attached button (standard 120×90 size) that BB readers can put on their sites. It features the pubic region of Michelangelo’s David sculpture, uses fairly neutral colors, and is taken from public domain stock photography. I release this work into the public domain, relinquish any claims over its use, and encourage BB readers to put it on their sites.
Maybe if enough of us do so, SmartFilter will just collapse under the weight of its own odious censoring.
Yo, here come da context:
I think I’ve been waiting to write an entry like this since I was in Grade Four. When you’re in Grade Four, you’re still allowed to be your own illustrator, so there I was, writing and illustrating away. God knows, Andy Warhol had no reason to be looking over his shoulder, but a kid should be allowed to draw, even if the adults get all toe-curlingly squeamish about it. Honestly, I cannot remember the story I wrote, although my mother no doubt kept it pressed between the leaves of Collier’s Encyclopedia, $19.99 a volume at the grocery store, with detergent proof of purchase. For all I know, it resides there to this day, confusing the descendants of the original garage sale buyers.
No, I can’t remember the story at all, but I do remember the illustration I made to go with it. It was in pencil, at the bottom of the blue-lined notebook pages, because there was a bit of a margin there and you could almost pretend there weren’t any lines except just across the tops of their heads, and even then you could pretend, or try to make them into tiaras or something; I think I did, a blue tiara, but after all these years I could be mistaken. But it’s something I’d do: when life hands me a blue-lined notebook, I make blue tiaras out of it.
The illustration. Right. It was based on Botticelli’s Venus, as I recall, a daring choice for a nine-year-old.
Particularly as the teacher told me point-blank that if I didn’t cover her up, I’d be thrown out of school. I argued, I raged, I pulled out every library book that this and other nude pictures inhabited; our school, it turned out, was absolutely crawling with nekkids. It made no difference; they said they’d suspend me, so in the end I caved and covered her in enough hideous fur to hide a family of Bigfoots. And, of course, I’ve never forgiven myself. I learned too late, during many empty, echoing midnights. that it was better to be a martyr than a success.
raincoaster 