Tasty

January 7, 2004 at 11:03 pm | In yulelogStories | 1 Comment

This just in from the Toronto Star: Feds rule out ban on abattoir waste in cattle feed:

Federal officials have ruled out a ban on feeding slaughterhouse waste to cattle even though some government scientists say such a ban is the only way to be sure of stopping mad cow disease.

The reasoning — once you read down to the end — isn’t that “the science” doesn’t support a ban (as the ever-weaselly chief veterinarian for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Brian Evans, claims), but that the bureaucrats don’t think they can enforce it. In other words, Mr. Evans accepts as a given that the skunky crooked Canuck industrial farmer, as well (presumably) as the little guy, is going to skirt the law and feed cattle whatever is on hand.

Did you know that some farmers wean calves on blood?

What in heaven’s name are we doing here?

Let me get this straight: we have some really bad practices, and because the government says that it can’t regulate these practices, we’ll let them continue?

I have a headache.

Probably BSE.

And I think we need some new blood at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency….

10 C / 50 F

January 7, 2004 at 10:41 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off

Yes, it’s warmer again, the snow is a slushy memory, the grass is green again, no more hats, no more scarves, but really dirty wet dogs instead. One thing in favour of icy snowy cold is its dryness: low on the ground dogs don’t hoover up mud and city dirt, they stay clean in cold climates. When it’s warm and wet, they become dirt magnets again….

Chirac’s Rubik Cube

January 7, 2004 at 10:30 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off

The International Herald Tribune carried an article by Diana Pinto today that I thought was one of the smartest commentaries I’ve yet read on the French ban of religious dress and symbolism (aka “the head scarf ban”): The long, bloody path that led to French securalism: Head scarves and history. Pinto writes that

a militantly secular and neutral French republic is perceived by most citizens as the only possible response to a long and tormented French political past, rife with religious tragedy, a story in which Islam is simply the latest arrival. [emphasis added]
Most religions have, at some point, come into conflict — and even war — with the French state, and been cast out of the French body politic. The state has turned them into privileged interlocutors only after “whacking them into shape,” so to speak, in the interests of social and political order.

Pinto sketches a brief history of the beatings that the other major religions have had to take in France — in the name of upholding the freedoms of the citizen — and continues:

Given this turbulent past, it is easy to understand why so many French people rally around a secular republic as the only guarantor of national peace. They are all too aware that their nation is a boat with a complex religious balance, one that could easily be upset with the arrival of a particularly boisterous “passenger,” modern Islam.
In its contemporary demands, Islam has proven problematic for the French state, not because many consider it to be an “outsider,” non-European religion but because integrating it within the republic with in the spirit of today’s pluralist and multicultural outlook could awaken the jealousy of the other “domesticated” religions, which were never given such a choice.
The result would be to threaten the entire French republican edifice.(…)
Islam’s demands, especially for those in the camp of la

Extreme/ism

January 7, 2004 at 12:08 am | In yulelogStories | 3 Comments

We’ve had snow. Lots of snow. And it has been cold. Very cold.

This is not what I moved here for, but the high-low extreme climate spikes seem to be more routine these days no matter where you go — last June we had a 3-day heat wave that sent 35++Celsius temps our way. Might not sound like much to you, depending on where you live. But it was a lot here. Everything is relative.

Snow. In Victoria. Lots of snow: 8 centimetres the other day, about that much again today (i.e., about 3 inches each time). This city doesn’t know from snow plows. People have brooms, not shovels. Now it’s raining.

Naturally, I’m annoyed at everyone who says, “Isn’t it beautiful?” There’s something about very cold weather that really turns me off. We will be seeing our usual 9-10 Celsius again by tomorrow or Thursday (10 C is about 50 F), which means that till then I’ll have to survive somehow. Meanwhile, all these hardy souls who moved here from Saskatoon and Edmonton are giddily channeling their Arctic selves.

Which reminds me of a crazy news item I heard on the radio today. Even though the BSE infected cow found in Washington State came from a dairy herd in Alberta, Canada has closed its borders to American dog food (yup, you read right), which is wreaking havoc with an upcoming event, the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, a race that runs about 1600 kilometres (1000 miles) from Fairbanks, Alaska to Whitehorse, the Yukon. Here’s a link to the story. So: the US closed its borders to Canadian beef, and Canada closed its borders to American fowl and pork. Given that it’s more or less a continental market, that sure does make a mighty heap o’ sense, that does…

And while I’m on the subject of stupidity….

I have to stop reading some things altogether. Blogs, books, etc. I became so upset a few days ago with some of the stuff going on, the sheer stupidity, the talk of “wisdom” and “playful” references to chastisements, the alleged thoughtfulness of some, the alleged rectitude vs recklessness of others, and so on, that I almost lost it and nearly wrote an open flame of every asshole (male and female) who has ever pissed me off for being stupid. Oh yes, they are legion, and they’re out there, and they probably don’t read what I write, but they have blogs and would probably be vain enough to seek out their new inbound links on technorati. But in the end, I just read a couple of novels, which is uncharacteristic for me since I don’t read that much fiction. But anything, I thought, was better than reading more blogs. Not true, as I learned.

Among the books I had at my disposal was one that I had hoped would be the equivalent of a Ludlum — something like The Bourne Identity, which I’m not too proud to admit I found to be a pageturner when I read it 20 years ago. It was silly and contrived braincandy, but fun to read. The book I read the other day, however, was no Ludlum — the latter is a literary genius in comparison. The book in question was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which was without a doubt the worst book I’ve ever read in my life, and that’s saying something ’cause I’ve read some bigtime trash. I remember the guilty pleasure of reading The Valley of the Dolls when I was about 11 or 12, but I honestly cared more about the characters in that cheesy book than the yuppy idiots in Brown’s. I had heard that this book was a bestseller, I had heard that there were “controversial” ideas within regarding the role of women in Christianity, but the premise is so utterly silly (and boring!) that it leaves me wondering what on earth people are thinking in making this book the subject of serious debate (I think another blogger actually attended what might have been a scholarly/religious meeting on this “tome” — hey, if you need to waste time, I’ve got some heavy-duty housecleaning that needs doing…). It makes me wonder how it can become the kind of bestseller that makes the author rich enough to buy a small country and all its inhabitants, if he so wished. Has the world gone mad? I mean, who the hell cares if Jesus and Mary Magdalene got it on, or if they had kids? And why saddle an operation like Opus Dei with something as benign as “guarding” this “secret” (or not guarding it, trying to “destroy” it) when Opus Dei is up to so many more interesting real life tricks? Cripes, if you’re going to accuse them of shady dealings, at least get on with it and find something interesting to shove in their shoes.

At least J.K. Rowling doesn’t ask us to believe that Harry Potter really exists. But then, creating that tension properly is one of the essential facts of fiction. Dan Brown’s eagerness to convince exposes all his abundant weaknesses. He’s a lousy writer.

Then there was Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. Now that’s an interesting book, quite horrifying in a clinical sort of way. Imagine the story of a Nazi death camp doctor who disappears into a new identity in America after the war, but imagine the whole thing told backwards, from the doctor’s last incarnation spiralling back all the way through his time in America, to his time at war’s end, to his time as an assistant to Dr. Mengele. Imagine a kind of Doppelg

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