Willy Loman

I'd hate to be a minority in Quebec, with all the fuss they are making about the twenty women in the province who wear the niqab. On second thought I probably would be a minority in Quebec. Anyway, the RCMP in Quebec and the Montreal police force, as well as other forces across Canada. have now vowed that the niqab will be removed before taking any any mug shots. Well thank god for that and I mean Jesus' dad here. Of course the officers making the announcement also confirmed to their knowledge no one wearing a niqab has ever refused to remove it for a mugshot. In fact, they can’t actually recall arresting anyone with a niqab either. Hey you never know, they could have poison darts in their mouthes and then quickly lift that veil and spit them out at you, right into your eyes. You'd never know what hit you. This is my third post about niqab wearing women in a month. I think I am getting infatuated . As reported by Canadian Press via CNEWS

A Niqab wearing housewife is poised to win the Dubai version of American Idol. The Million's Poet is an Arabic reality TV show that is a competition for the most talented poet in Arabic prose with a cash prize of over a million dollars. Hissa Hilal, the outspoken Saudi housewife, pictured above has become a heroine for women's rights speaking out in her poetry against fundamentalism, censorship of the press and even the validity the clerical fatwas and decrees. " I have seen evil in the eyes of fatwas: now the lawful and unlawful are confused " Or on suicide bombers, " When I unveil the truth, a monster appears from his hiding place; barbaric in thinking and action, angry and blind; wearing death as a dress and covering it with a belt. " The former journalist and poetry editor who is now considered to the front runner in the contest, has received death threats, but claims that she is not afraid. She defends wearing the Niqab. " When I went to ...

When the three liberals voted against the LPC motion last week I decided to send a couple of them an email. Although their reasons seemed obvious at the time based on what I have read about the gentlemen here or elsewhere, I thought I should at least ask the simple question. Their responses appeared to be personally crafted and I guess not surprisingly contained very similar language and justification. I will not post their emails but I would like to share my responses to those emails or at least a compilation of my replies. Dear Member, Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. Unfortunately I've always had a difficult time seeing things in black and white and although I somewhat envy your resolve and self confidence in describing yourself as Pro-Life, I personally refuse to label myself Pro anything in this debate.  It may be my naivety, but the pro-life label, simply and somewhat maliciously infers that those who disagree are pro-death which is logically and o...

Treat it like a floating fart. You can light matches, fill the air with air spray and just create more attention to the rancid odor or you can just ignore it and it will quickly and quietly dissipate.

New browser game from Insidious Designs here where you can spla t oil on Harper and Ignatieff. Even works on Safari. I hit Harper 20 times in row and I feel a lot better for it. Hit Ignatieff only 10. Article about their message and why you are splatting Harper here . As if we needed one.

The pope apologized to the Irish people this week for hiding four decades of sexual abuse inflicted by the Irish clergy upon thousands of Irish children. Reportedly not all the clergy, just some of them. Coming three days after St. Patty's day, many of the victims are still angry and believe that the church had intentionally failed to remove the snakes from within their own midst this time around. A Wal-Mart store manager apologized to black people this week , over the store's PA system. Reportedly not all black people, but just the one's that had previously been told to leave the store by a 16 year old who had also used the PA system. Many of the black people were still upset, after being told they did not have to leave the store and the 16 year old boy was arrested. Another member of Harper's cabinet apologized to Canadians this week for being an asshole at an airport security gate, but that seems to happen every month. Apparently Harper is going to issue an edi...

The saddest song ever written .... And the saddest performance ever televised . At least in my humble opinion.

I couldn't be more at odds with the Harper government, even if I purposely set out to do so. Harper's Safety Minister (another oxymoronic title) Toews, following in the boot steps of his predecessor Stockwell Day, has extended the grace period for registering our rifles for another year.  Toews claims that the long gun registry costs billions and that RCMP officers, have much more important things to do than harass my farmers and my hunters in my constituency when they have .22 rifles and .303s and shotguns that they use almost as tools. Of course the facts as reported last night on the CTV National prove the Minister either does not know what he is talking about or is purposely lying to Canadians. From CTV  and the Auditor General's report the long gun registry only costs $3 million a year to run. Law enforcement officers query the gun registry 10,000 times a day In 2008, 50% of gun related crimes in rural areas were committed with rifles and shotguns 18,000 of the 2...

You know you are in trouble when your government, your colleagues and in this case your employer start using your first name as a noun to describe bad behavior when boarding an airplane. When describing the latest airport tantrum by a Harper minister, Jean-Pierre Blackburn,  a senior government official said, on condition of anonymity. "He remained polite. He didn't pull a Helena apparently." Being an asshole, throwing a tantrum and demanding special treatment when boarding a plane is now called a Helena, by the conservatives. Helena noun: i: a person who throws a fit when their title does not garner them special treatment: you're a regular Helena ii. a temper tantrum: he started to do a Helena just before the security guards arrived I can see this spreading through the whole airline industry, a code word used to send security guards rushing to a gate or ticket counter to handle pompous irate air travelers, who refuse to believe that rules also apply to them. ...

Congratulations to Derek Lee, Jack Harris and Claude Blanchard .

*An unabashedly Gross line stolen from one of my childhood idols. See more Gross stuff here .

Having parliament is session and reading the daily onslaught of proposed changes that the Reformatories want to introduce is more frustrating that having them all prorogued and we do not even have the Olympics to watch. The Minister of Justice is proposing changes to the Youth Offenders rules , adding the ability to publish the names of minors convicted of crimes, the admittance of evidence from previous encounters with the law, not convictions, previous encounters, and prosecutors will now have to justify why they are not trying a 14 year old as an adult in a serious offense, not the other way around. The proposals are being wrapped in the oxymoronic message that they are putting the public first, focussing on confinement rather than rehabilitation. The facts according to experts who actually concern themselves with such things as facts, are that youth crime has continued to decline each year, including the current year, for both serious and non serious crimes and that t...

Yesterday's announcement from Towes, the I have a plan , Safety Minister featured the old Vic with a aqua blue banner professing to protect us. Today's announcement from Nicolson, the I am ignoring the fact that youth crime is declining , Justice Minister comes with a similar billboard and similar oxymoronic messaging. Well if it's good enough for these ideologues, it's good enough for me.

Shorter... A plan is a plan . What kind of a plan ? It's a plan . A plan is a plan . And when you have a good plan , it's because it's planned . from: the CNews, Gobe & Mail, CBC, Canwest, Macleans and Public Safety Canada

Continuing their assault on the climate our Alberta based federal government has again refused to provide funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences in their latest budget. The CFCAS is one of leading research foundations on climate change, financing research on everything from melting glaciers to drought on the Prairies to the thawing permafrost. Since its creation in 2000, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences has been a major source of financing and co-ordination for projects that gather and crunch data. The foundation has bankrolled $110 million of research, but hasn't received any new funding since the Conservative government was elected in 2006. Last winter, it made a formal request for $25 million annually over 10 years. Its existing mandate runs until March 2012, but without a fresh cash injection the 12 research networks currently under its umbrella will be shuttered by the end of 2010. Certainly a unique way to end the...

I always found the veiled look to be somewhat sexy or at least I did when I still had enough testosterone left in my body to find such things sexy. It is most likely a lingering memory of watching  Rita Hayworth movies with my father. I doubt if increased sexual arousal in aging old men is the intended purpose of the niquib, although it probably was the intended purpose in this old Sweet Marie chocolate bar ad. In a world where we are inundated with  more  and  more   semi clothed models  and  styles of clothing  that hide nothing of the human figure and in fact act as nothing more than a  colored skin covering , I find the scarfed, veiled and multi-layered look much more appealing, more mysterious and in fact sexier, whether it be the niqab, veil or the hijab, scarves worn by some muslim and orthodox jewish women. Of course I also liked the strippers who came out dressed as secretaries when I used to take my U...

OPP Constable Vu Pham was fatally shot on Monday by an apparently distraught seventy year old armed with a rifle. Although all the details have not been released it is assumed that the seventy year old's vehicle was spotted and approached by Constable Pham. If the rifle had been registered Constable Pham might have been forewarned that the seventy year was not only distraught but also possibly armed and dangerous and both men might still be alive.

Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday called the official version of the Sept. 11 attacks a “big lie” used by the U.S. as an excuse for the war on terror, Iranian state media reported. He got it half right, but it just goes to show you, that there is often some truth, even when it comes from the mouths of whack job, religious, ideologues. h/t from Associated Press, just to piss us off.

Mistakenly I thought that that I had discovered a new loud, fantastic blues guitarist when I downloaded Robin Trower from limewire six years ago (supposedly Trower got 35 cents for the download).  But as is typically is the case I was wrong because Robin Trower has been around for years. He was the original lead guitar in 1967 version of Procol Harum.  Although never reaching the same pinacle of fame, Trower was and is considered an equal with the other British guitar icons, Clapton, Page, Beck..  This is Trower at age 60, on his 2005 European tour with Davey Pattison on vocals (an aging Sottish tenor), Dave Bronze on bass (who has backed up Clapton and others) and Pete Thompson on Drums. When viewing the Trower you tubes and there are lot of them, you realize he has gotten better with age. They said of his early days that he could make his guitar sing, now he can make it cry.

Our Immigration Minister Jason Kenny is apparently not on the top of his game this week. He has not only just wiped our queer folks from the foreign, face of our country , but he also is making snap decisions on the validity of refugee claimants based on, I would assume, his own personal opinion. Seven foreigners who were in Vancouver for the games have claimed refugee status and although this happens at every Olympics and we have a Department of Immigration to handle such claims, Jason thinks this is, well ridiculous... Look, to get two claims from Japan? This is ridiculous. Japan is a liberal democratic country with full human rights protections," he said. "You have to wonder what kind of a system we have that encourages people from a democracy like that to be saying that they're victims of persecution and coming to Canada. Well firstly, Jason we just spent seventeen days telling and selling the world how wonderful we are, maybe they think Vancouver is like that every ...

I know it's not Friday night, the designated night for music around these, here parts, but this is one of the funniest things I have seen in weeks and since we all have nothing to look forward to for next while except more reformatory bullshit, it is with pleasure that I present Rodney Carrington's live performance of Show Them to Me.

As Canadians were glued to their TV sets last night to watch the Gold medal final, our other hockey team lost to New Zealand 3 to 2 , in a hard fought battle at the Hockey World Cup being held in India. A point my friends in New Zealand, rubbed in my face this afternoon. Similar to all kiwi sports teams, their national field hockey team, the Black Sticks has the word black in their name. Seriously all teams in New Zealand have black in their name. The famous All Blacks rugby team , the Black Sticks Field Hockey team, and believe it or not the Tall Blacks, basketball team . Talk about words having a different connotation in different parts of the world, you could not get away with calling your basketball team the Tall Blacks in North America, even if if they were all black and obviously tall. To some extent and leading to the point of this post, it sort of explains the bubble we all live in. Especially the 1,600 or so CTV employees that were in Vancouver and Whistler. I realize that ...