Ranting and Roaring

Maybe I’ll take the family here tomorrow.

Britney frenches her Mum in public.

Except in 1974, our school, St. Agnes School on Mumford Road, burned to the ground. I was in it when the fire started. I was in Grade 3. It was a freezing cold winter’s day, January or February. If I recall, there were some workmen working with a blow torch in one of the washrooms and it caught fire, spreading quickly. I remember the fire drill that brought us outside into the cold (without our coats or boots). I remember watching the firetrucks arriving and the principal coming to the door, telling us to hurry back inside, to put on our coats and boots and go straight home. Odd that they allowed us back in, but I suppose he had some idea of the spread of the fire.

He sent you back into a burning school to get your boots? Into a burning school? To get your boots? Burning school? Boots?

Maybe he just hated you all.

Using “so-called” in your argument doesn’t make it more effective. You know who you are. Thank you for your time.

Attention Tony Pierce.

Of course, some things still bring a smile to my face:

At last … Mars is within shooting range

An NDP election win in the fall?

Update: Mark’s permalinks don’t really work right now, so read the main page to get the joke. Fixed.

Write opinion columns, the Jeffie Simpson way!

The news from Iraq, conventionally defined, is mostly bad and sometimes horrific. What’s below the surface — that is, away from the headlines — might be more encouraging.

A suicide bomber blows up United Nations headquarters, killing at least 20 and wounding many others. Attacks on American soldiers have diminished, but almost 60 of them have died since President George W. Bush declared the war “over.”

Q: And when did Bush ever say the war was over, Jeffie?
A: Well, never. But he did use the word “over” once in a speech and that’s good enough for me!
Q (to editors): and what do you think of that?
A: Zzzzz. Huh? What? Uhhhh …. (drooling sounds). Zzzzz.

My first post on Switching To Glide is up. It’s a group blog about music in general and Canadian music in particular. More about this tomorrow! Swing by and leave us a comment, add it to your blogroll, etc..

I’ve got a backlog at work + I’m desperately trying to get switchingtoglide.ca going in the spare moments I can find. And my home machine is so screwed, I have no idea what to do. I can’t use IE anymore, and I can’t cut and paste links between windows, even when using Mozilla. Arrgggg.

Power way just restored to my house, 24:30 minutes after it went out! It was hot hot hot here last night and today, but everyone lived. More later on … we’re off to BBQ.

BlogMatrix will be down until tomorrow. My apologies to everyone affected.

I’ve registered — with great difficulty — the domain “switchingtoglide.ca”. The Canada domain registration process is hilarious, involvinng about 10,000 lines of legalize to wade through, offers of membership, bizarre 15 letter passwords, etc. Hopefully it will all work. I can reuse my main Hostmatters account, so the total cost looks to be pretty cheap.

Ah, yes. They (CIRA) just sent me a 118 page single spaced typewritter font typed 480K PDF copy of the contract. Brilliant. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

UPDATE: there’s DNS problems that have to be addressed. I’ll keep everyone up to date — dpj Monday morning.

So, how do you explain to Mommy and Daddy that your tits are on the front of the Girls Gone Wild video? Easy: say you were offered drugs! How do you explain that you’re a dope fiend to Mom and Dad? Also easy: say you didn’t accept the drugs! It all makes sense: they were so overwhelmed by the generosity of the free drug offer, they just had to do something nice in return…

Two Louisiana women are suing rapper-actor Snoop Dogg, saying they were offered drugs during Mardi Gras 2002 to flash their breasts for pictures that later appeared on the cover of a “Girls Gone Wild” video.

The lawsuit by Jaime Capdeboscq, who was 17 at the time, and Whitni Candiotto, who was 18, also names Joe Francis, owner of Mantra Films Inc., which produces the mail-order videos that feature nudity and sexual activity.

The women claim Francis broke a promise that their picture wouldn’t be used in connection with a video. However, when the video — known as “Girls Gone Wild Doggy Style” — came out, they found themselves on the cover, the lawsuit alleges.

The pictures were taken during a party at a New Orleans hotel for Snoop Dogg, who hosted the video, said plaintiff attorney Ron Macaluso.

Macaluso also said his clients were offered drugs but did not accept them.

I just ordered the follow stuff from Amazon.ca (two different orders, both with free shipping):

• Rough Guide to Reggae
• Sloan — Navy Blues
• U2: Elevation 2001 – Live From Boston (DVD)
• Trojan Ska Box Set 2
• The Trojan Box Set: British Reggae
• The Rough Guide To Ska

IE refuses to open new windows for me, so I’m trying to sort that out tonight. (This is Mozilla Phoenix, if you must know). Anyway: grrrrr.

Let’s set up a music blog, focusing on but not exclusive to Canadian music and scene.

Also: Sloan’s got a new CD coming out next week too, just in time! (note their blog, which looks to be Radio or MT powered).

At work!

I’m off to the airport.

It’s all falling apart now. Trinity-Anne’s been cutting a tooth for the last two days. It’s raining now — fortunately, the first time since we’ve came. And finally, I saw T3 last night: did anyone really like his horrible hamfisted piece of sh*t? I didn’t just want my 11 bucks back, I wanted the two hours of my life back too.

Mark Wickens writes (in response to my earlier post here:

I agree with Sari. Inherent, natural rights are at the bedrock of truly free countries. That there are certain things politicians have no say in, that are so fundamental that a 99% majority holds no weight in the opposite direction — this is essential to civilized society. A “right” means something that can’t be given or taken away. There’s another word for something that is held at someone else’s whim: “privilege.”

I’m not saying the issue of gay marriage is clear-cut, or that the Charter is perfect (far from it in the latter case). But when the idea that rights are inherent and inviolable is abandoned, a person has far more to worry about than the gay couple next door being allowed to get married. No, at that point he ought to be terrified at the realization that he has no basis on which to fight against injustices perpetrated against him, be it by a dictator or a majority.

Like Mark, I certainly believe my rights are inherent, perhaps even “natural”. However, my last several years of thinking about this issue have lead me to believe that asserting this is … not pointless, but perhaps something akin to being merely rhetoric. For example, I can state with certainly and conviction that I have right X. Someone else can assert (with all sincerity) that they have right Y. So, where does this leave us? How do we decide that X in fact is one of our natural rights, and Y is not? I believe that the West has discovered the correct manner to do this: we argue about it generation after generation, we make it very difficult to make X a right that trumps our laws and lawmakers, and once X is so enumerated, we make it very difficult to take X off that list.

The Supreme Court was very clever in selecting gay rights to be “read in” to the CCOR. It was basically in lockstep with public and political opinion; 8 or 9 of the provinces had already added similar provisions to their human rights codes. Very few groups would be willing to make it a huge issue and that groups that did make it an issue were basically considered by most of society to be the lunatic fringe (i.e. prairie province Christians). Furthermore, the Supremes knowingly went against the will of Parliament and the provinces specifically with the issue of gay rights: it was considered for inclusion and rejected. Thus, the Supremes made the Charter “living” with themselves as the new ongoing authors.

Obviously gay rights are an important issue but it’s important to note that homosexuals didn’t live in some sort of nightmare rights-free distopia before the “reading in” by the Supremes. However, the mechanism by which these rights were added to our constitution has broken key protections we enjoyed as Canadian citizens — the difficulty of changing the constitution and the fact that we (through our politicians) were in charge of the process. Is this a big deal? You bet. In a few years time, it’s possible that Mark may find it’s impossible to evict a non-paying tenants from a property he owns (class discrimination) and that Sari will no longer have the right to criticize Palestinians murdering Israelis (racial discrimination against a disfranchised minority group).

Previous discussion of these issues scattered on this page here.

Attn: Mike, Alan (and other interested readers) Re: Hopping Penguins. More action in the comments here.

Sari Stein writes:

When human rights are decided by popular vote, then the whole notion of equality falls apart. A lot of people say that the supreme court has no place redefining marriage. But I disagree. This is an issue of law. It’s the most basic law we have. As stated in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 15, article 1:

Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Even if sexual orientation isn’t specifically listed as an “in particular” category, neither is it precluded from the definition. Every individual is equal before and under the law. It’s a right we cherish as Canadians. It’s time we started applying that like we mean it, even to people we may disagree with.

Well fair enough, but how are we as a society to determine what our human rights are and how they are to be applied with force of law if not through debate in parliament and society? The above list is not received wisdom, it wasn’t handed to us on stone slates, nor are all the items on (and not on) that list obvious to everybody. This is not a minor technical issue of application, the people opposed to the expansion and reinterpretation of the above list not necessarily mean-spirited reactionary bigots looking to keep civilization in the 18th century.

Do you believe that there shouldn’t be discrimination on the basis of national origin? Then should anyone who stands on Canadian teritory be able to vote in our elections? Should there be men and women pay different prices for automobile insurance? I certainly don’t believe so — I think it is blatant bigotry — but you can pick up the Globe and Mail and read sincerely written articles and letters stating since the difference in accident rates can be quantified, it’s OK. Is it OK to do this on the basis of race too then? How about life insurance rates, where women pay higher costs because they live longer? These last two issues affect almost every Canadian substantially, far more than gay marriage ever will, yet there’s hardly an effort to enforce equality here as if we “mean it”.

The preceding issues are only dealing with listed rights. Should landlords be able to look at credit records before deciding whether to let you an apartment? Some say yes, some say no: it’s certainly discrimination on the grounds of economic status, of class if not caste. I have no particular issue with it, but if the NDP was appointing the Supreme Court, I doubt I’d get to have a say any more. And in fact, they’d probably say I don’t deserve a say: rights are rights, listed or not. Take a look at the board members or the upper management of any large company: they’ll be disproportionately tall people. Are short people stupid or somehow lacking in management skills? This is quantifiable and unjustifiable and probably “easy to fix” if the government (or the CHRC) were to insist that every company keep a tape measure and start submitting semiannual reports with an action plan to put an end to it. These examples are not pedantically chosen: there are people out there who believe in this kind of stuff so passionately the concept that you and I have any right to a say in this sort of issue is incomprehensible to them.

I’m not saying that homosexuals shouldn’t have the same marriage rights as the rest of Canadians. However, if majority of parliamentarians can’t (or won’t) vote for it, it’s unlikely that it reflects the mores of our society. It’ll be sad, but I do not believe this is a “giving women the vote” issue. The Charter of Rights is cherished because it reflects — for the most part — the values of Canadians at this particular time. If rights become something that the Council of Superiors simply imposes on us, something outside the realm of debate except in rarified academic circles, then as a society we’ve lost our most important right: the right to govern ourselves.

Is it just me, or is it a slow day here in the Blogosphere?