the blog quebecois

This one was the first that gave me some faint hope that we might be able to make a go of it. The song was good, with coherent lyrics. We played it well (you'll have to excuse the minute of badinage preceding it -- it was still an analog world, and we had to wait for tapes to play/rewind etc.). I mixed up some of the verses and forgot the first couple of lines in the second chorus; but overall we were happy with it.

I didn't like the title of it -- accurate, but kind of generic. Doesn't really capture the romance and glamour of the business.

Speaking of which, if a certain scrappy bantam rooster of the Leninist persuasion were to seek my advice, I would heartily recommend the telephonic method of seeking . . . release. Not only does it tend to be more discreet, it seriously reduces the "ick factor." At least it does from the girl's perspective.

So everybody, remember to vote tomorrow. And should some Asian-abusin' sleazeball Marxist pervo miraculously become PM, then I'll bid you all adieu, as I plan to kill myself and/or move to Antarctica. I suspect that Internet access in either case will be problematic.

Previous: Telephone Sex

NSFW

You may or may or may not see it coming, but it doesn't really matter. You're not going to have time to react. Because a bullet can travel at speeds exceeding 3200 feet per second, which is too fast to duck or yell or plead. Hang in there. Taking a cap to the dome means that it will be over faster than a fatal wound anywhere else.

I can't figure out for the life of me what triggered this article. But all those good things you've heard? Fuggetaboutit.

The Province:

I am disgusted to be a new Canadian. Although I felt considerable satisfaction when I cast my ballot Monday for the first time ever in a Canadian election, all pleasure at participating in my country's electoral process vanished in the face of the Tory majority.

I wish I could believe that vast numbers of Canadians support Prime Minister Stephen Harper because they're stupid.

I wish I could persuade myself that almost half of voters are so fantastically dim that they believed the contempt of Parliament finding against Harper's government was political manoeuvring instead of an attempt to impose accountability on an evasive authoritarian regime.

I would feel so much better if I could think that legions of Canadian morons believe shutting down Parliament for political purposes is OK because they don't understand what "proroguing" means but anything starting with "pro" must be good.

I want so badly to comfort myself with the thought that Canadians aren't outraged by the Harper government's unprecedented secrecy and muzzling of public servants because they're too dull-witted to understand that government transparency is crucial to democracy.

I wish I could believe the Canadian populace is so rife with idiots that Harper's proclamation that the Government of Canada is now the Stephen Harper Government was seen as creative branding rather than a minority party asserting absolute control over the nation.

I think it quite unfair that a cultured fellow such as yourself should be forced to live amongst barbarians. So let's pack up your massive brain and even more enormous ego -- wait, a wheelbarrow won't do: make it a U-Haul truck, and we'll even have room for your carpet-bags -- and trundle you south where you can lecture the natives how fortunate they are to live under kindly King Obama's reign. For the next year-and-a-half, anyway.

Write if you find work.

Via Charles Adler

This was one of my cousin's. He wasn't the best at writing lyrics (and I should know, being responsible for some real stinkers of my own) but musically he was quite clever, ending this with a lovely minor-chord coda that really wrapped up things nicely.

Having said that, I still have no idea who "the congressman and his mistress" were, or what the hell they were doing in our song. We were Canadian, dammit, and this was entirely the wrong way to go about getting some of that scrumptious government cheese.

JSOC CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT CLEARANCE G2 REQUIRED

[ . . . ]

SECDEF
Quiet everyone, the satellite feed is coming in. This infrared image is from the inside of chopper 1.

SECSTATE
Wait a minute... is this SEAL team 6?

COMGEN JSOC
Yes ma'am.

SECSTATE
Why aren't there any women?

Iowahawk takes us to the beating heart of Central Command.

Toronto Star:

They aren’t ready to hear this yet, but the anti-poverty activists who work tirelessly to promote the interests of low-income Canadians need to ask why so many of them voted for Stephen Harper last week.

They won’t like the answers they get. They won’t understand how food bank users and social housing tenants could think the Prime Minister is on their side. They’ll be tempted to interrupt or object.

But their feelings are not the point. There is a serious gap in their knowledge.

Ah, the ol' "you people are too stupid to understand" meme. There's a long history of this kind of elitist condescension, most lately given voice by Thomas Frank's 2004 book, What's The Matter with Kansas?, in which he bemoans the public's refusal to vote for Democrats because they are, well, stupid. A mistake that our benevolent media are happy to point out by calling people, uh, stupid.

Which seems at best to be strategically, shall we say, stupid. But what do we stupid peasants know?

(To be fair, Carol Goar is not arguing that point; rather she's cautioning against it.)

A Teamster on vacation in Las Vegas decided to check out the brothels.

At the first he went to he inquired of the madam: "Madam, is this house a union shop or non-union?"

She replied: "We are non-union. 80% of the profits are paid to management, leaving only 20% to the workers."

Disgusted, the Teamster went on to the next establishment and inquired of the madam: "Madam, is this house a union shop or non-union?

She replied: "We are a union shop. 20% of the profits are paid to management, leaving 80% to the workers."

"Excellent!" the Teamster cried. Pointing out a particularly curvacious blonde, he threw his money down on the table and shouted, "I want to buy the night with that woman!"

The madam, as she gathered up the money, said, "I'm sure you would, but --"

I had written a song about a year previous titled "She Ain't No Human." There was one teensy problem with it, in that I came across as some obsessed weirdo.

Though that much is true, I didn't see much upside in proclaiming it to the world. So I set about writing a new chorus for it, and tentatively renamed the title. I was quite pleased with the rewrite, especially the line "Were she a rebel, she'd cause an uprising," which not only contained a wickedly crafted double-entendre but also the correct use of the future subjunctive mood.

So I wasn't just the creepy guy in the stockroom. I was the creepy guy with impeccable grammar in the stockroom.

I don't know if you were around for the glory years of Saturday Night Live, when it was actually funny.* One bit that was notorious was Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin in a "Point/Counterpoint" segment on Weekend Update that invariably included the line "Jane, you ignorant slut." (Curtin would rebut with "Dan, you pompous ass.") People were actually scandalized by Ackroyd's joke, but as I noted at the time, if the Standards and Practices folks (the networks' supervisors of legal and moral issues) raised a red flag, the writers would simply point to the standard dictionary definition (which might have had some sexual innuendo in that an unwholesome woman might also have unwholesome impulses in other directions -- but this was strictly a matter of inference).

Which brings us to the "Slutwalks" of late, which are more of an excuse for silly women to parade around in their underwear, imagining that they are making some profound statement or other. Janet Street Porter comments on the incongruity of it all:

Why are women so keen to appropriate the word slut? It’s a mystery to me. Slut, as Germaine Greer pointed out the other day, historically means ‘a woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance, a foul slattern’ — nothing to do with sex and everything to do with cleanliness.

Maybe they've hit upon it unconsciously:

This is just a guess on my part, but I'll bet a substantial number of them are unacquainted with the finer points of personal hygiene; let alone the business end of a dishrag.

(* In retrospect, I was stoned much of the time, which even made their typically interminable beating-a-joke-to-death routines tolerable.)

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Hm. I heard Jack Layton whining away on TV about the lack of women in Harper's new cabinet. Oddly, though, I can find no trace of it in the printed press. Wonder why that is?

It got me thinking, though, about the type of woman that the Vietnamese Vandalizer would thrust into the seat of power. Someone with an iron grip but a velvet touch as she struggles with the limp wriggling worm of policy. Someone who greases the machinery and with masterful strokes coaxes the throbbing organ of the state into a magnificent sweating edifice -- nay, erection until the sweet juices of oh! OHOH! ohohmyAUDREY!AUDREY!ALEXA!ohmyEDBROADBENT!!ohmyTOMMYDOUGLAS!!!ohTOMMY!!!TOMMY!!!ohmyTOMMY !!!

so thank God we gave Stephen Harper a majority government to keep an eye on it.