Things have changed

Or so I'm told.

In the four months and twenty-one days since I last posted, the following things have happened:

* Total doofus Rodney MacDonald managed to get elected premier of Nova Scotia, though Leonard Preyra now sits as my NDP MLA;

* I decided to leave the federal NDP, throwing in instead with the Liberal leadership campaign of Martha Hall FIndlay, currently sitting at 1% of delegates to the convention;

* I went to Russia;

* I came back

* While in Russia, I started playing soccer again;

* In a not-unrelated development, I lost forty pounds;

* The Republican party continued its long slide towards the bottom of the barrel;

* I decided to restart the blog.

More exciting announcements forthcoming. Until then, keep fit, and have fun.

Yikes

The RCMP has arrested seventeen people in an alleged terror ring. Particularly frightening is the quantity of ammonium nitrate the police seized; three tons of fertilizer, or three times as much as Tim McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Away we go

Stephen Harper, true to his word, is reopening the same-sex marriage debate.

True to his headstrong, divisive, petty word.

I honestly don't understand why he's doing this. I don't believe that this is something that Harper cares deeply about-if he believed that gay marriage were an abomination, for example, I have to think that he'd try stronger medicine than a free vote on reopening the question. There's no realistic chance that Harper's side will win this vote, and he must know this. All this is going to do is hurt gay families and, when the vote ultimately fails, infuriate homophobic groups determined to repeal equal marriage laws. It's a terrible idea, and it speaks poorly of Harper that he's trying this stunt.

I didn't vote for Stephen Harper, and it's almost impossible to imagine circumstances in which I would. But I did think, back in the heady days of January 2006, that a change in government was a good idea, and I hoped that Harper would be a prime minister I could disagree with but respect. It seems increasingly clear that I was dreaming in Technicolor.

It Appears to be Petulant Week in Calgary

Perhaps Ralph Klein and Stephen Harper, like me, are just upset that the Flames bombed out of the Stanley Cup playoffs and the hated Oilers are one win away from the finals.

To be clear about this, neither Klein nor Harper is entirely to blame for their respective spats. It does require serious chutzpah to go to the province footing more or less all of the equalization bill and demand even more money, as the have-not premiers are apparently proposing to do. This is especially true if you're either a Nova Scotian or a Newfoundlander. And the national media is being equally silly in its spat with Harper-by and large, no one cares about the journalistic process except journalists.

That said, both of these guys have declared that they're going to take their ball and go home, which is decidedly childish, as well as impossible in Klein's case. As for Harper, I can't say that he's made a great first impression-he strikes me as paranoid, control-freakish and thin-skinned, none of which are good characteristics for a Prime Minister.

The drumbeat gets a little louder

You might have heard that the Iranians, being crazy, are going to make religious minorities wear strips of cloth on their clothes identifying them as non-Muslims. According to the stories, Christians would wear red, Zoroastrians blue, and Jews were to wear yellow badges, a colour with resonances I'm sure I don't have to explain to an audience as intelligent and attractive as yourselves.

Don't believe the hype.

The thing about false stories like this is that once they're out there they colour all future conversations about the country they're made about. As Jim Henley puts it, when-not if-the campaign to bomb Iran NOW NOW NOW gets fully underway, a number of people are going to half remember this fake story and say "Good riddance." That may be so for other, non-fake reasons, but bombing Iran remains an absolutely lunatic idea, and saying so and being heard just got a little louder.

The Return of Jaysblogging

The Jays have sent Josh Towers and Russ Adams to Syracuse.

There's no word yet on who's coming back the other way, so I think that I agree with the comments over at Batter's Box speculating that a deal is forthcoming. Apparently, Adams will be working out at second with the Skychiefs, which might clear the way for the Hill at shortstop, Adams at second defensive configuration I've wanted to see for about eight months now.

As for Towers...well, he's been horrendous this year, and tonight's demotion has the feel of something long anticipated come to pass. I hope he gets it together down in AAA, but I'm not terribly optimistic-his stuff has never been anything better than okay, and if he can't hit his spots he's never going to be anything better than lousy. But we'll see.

In spite of all of this, they're only two back of Boston, and playing pretty well. I remain optimistic-though that would probably be true if they were eight back as well...

We begin again with a callback

Way back when, I added a nifty graphic over there on the left to the sidebar over this recently-moribund blog, in support of breast cancer research. In the post announcing the sweetly pie-in-the-sky challenge accompanying the graphic, I challenged all of you to donate any pink ribbon quarters you get in your change to cancer research, along with an extra quarter to match. Then I forgot all about the challenge for a month and a half, during which I also apparently forgot about this blog.

Well, tonight I got my first pink quarters back, and will consequently be donating at least one whole dollar to the Canadian Cancer Society. Instead of doing this in dribs and drabs every time I get a quarter, I think I'm going to add a running tally on the left there and do it all in one shot when I register for the Run for a Cure in October, but the game's officially on.

Stuff on Iran forthcoming.

We'll be back shortly

Apologies, of course, for the long, long, long hiatus. Coming up: book reviews, political commentary and baseball. In short, the same old song.

Bad Role Models

The Harper government is embroiled in their first political crisis, and it revolves around Canadian war dead in Afghanistan. First, the government decided that they would no longer lower the flag over the Peace Tower to half-mast to mark the death of Canadian soldiers. Then they banned the media from attending the return of the remains of the four soldiers killed recently in Afghanistan as the first case in a new policy of keeping the media away from these events.

I think that I basically agree with Adam Radwanski, supporting the flag decision while opposing the media one. I understand why people are up in arms that the government has stopped lowering the flag for these soldiers, but I think on balance it was a bad idea to start lowering it in the first place. We honour Canada's war dead on Remembrance Day and in the run-up to it, which I would argue is a far more powerful symbol of mourning and remembrance than lowering a flag on Parliament Hill.

What worries me about the other decision is not the decision itself: according to the CBC, a lot of soldiers wouldn't want the media there if it was them. I still think the time for privacy is whatever memorial service a family chooses to hold, rather than the military's return of these soldiers to Canada, but I understand the impulse.

What worries me is that this is, for better or for worse, something that the Bush administration has also been doing with regard to casualties in Iraq, and fits nicely into the ongoing narrative of the secrecy of the Harper government. They won't allow ministers to talk to the media about anything other than the Topic of the Day, they have a more suspicious view of the media than any government in recent history, and now they appear to be taking steps that will, whatever the merits of them, hide the cost of our war in Afghanistan.

It worries me. It worries me because I don't get why they're so big on secrecy. It worries me because I think the root of the Bush administration's evil, or at least the reason they've been as horrendous as they've been, is their fanatical insistence on keeping things in the dark. Generally speaking, there's no good reason for a government to insist on governing without letting people know what they're doing-that the Harper government appears to have taken a page from the Cheney crowd is disturbing.

I gotta say, it never would have occured to me.

Colin Burn might not like to look at this, but a guy has recreated the bottom of the tenth of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series using RBI baseball, and the results are weirdly compelling for baseball geeks. He spliced Vin Scully's broadcast up to the video-game images, and thereby demonstrates just how good an announcer Vin Scully is. I know how the game turned out-hell, it was twenty years ago-I have no rooting interest in either the Mets or the Red Sox, the players, in this case, are 1980s video game sprites, and even so Scully's call is perfect in its evocation of the tension of the game.

The guy in question, having spent ten hours fiddling with a twenty year old video game to get the inning just right has landed a job with a film restoration company, so kudos to him. The story can be found here, via Fred Clark.

Now, to precisely replicate the Immaculate Reception using (ironically, he said) Madden...

Happy Belated, Will

Let me not to the marraige of true minds
admit impediments. Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
that looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
but bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-Sonnet CXVI

Yesterday was the 442nd anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, as well as the 390th of his death, and apparently the Royal Shakespeare Company is celebrating by performing all of his works.

There are certainly performances I'd take a pass on-I've hated A Midsummer Night's Dream ever since I studied it something like four times in a row in high scool, and there's a reason that Henry VI, King John and Titus Andronicus aren't often performed-but it sounds awesome. They do a thing here and I imagine in most reasonably sized cities where they read all of the sonnets on the 23rd, and one of these years I'm going to find out about it before it happens. Until then, having given you my 2nd-favourite sonnet, here's my favourite:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
Coral is far more red than her lips' red.
If snow be white, why then her breasts be dun.
If hair be wires, black wires grow upon her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white
but no such roses see I in her cheeks
and in some perfumes is there more delight
than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
that music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go-
my mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
as any she belied with false compare.

-Sonnet CXXX