There’s nothing like a bit of a crisis to get your homeward gaze up and running smoothly, is there? There have been a few in the last couple of weeks; some major and some relatively minor; nonetheless they caused a little blip in the gallivanting through life vibe. So last week, Queenie was wistfully looking towards the land where all the people she can moan at for hours over a bottle of wine live. And now she has been asked to do the equivalent of locking herself in an empty fridge for the New Year, i.e. work on a winter federal election campaign.
In Canada.
From which, due to the fact that she’s done this before (work on a winter campaign I mean, but not in Canada), all of her instincts are shying away like a startled unicorn. Except her sense of duty, of course, which much to Queenie’s chagrin usually wins out in the end. Particularly when it’s wedded to a bit of plamas. Thankfully, the Canucks haven’t figured out that bit of Queenie’s psychology yet, so maybe Queenie’s self-interested instincts might win out this time, if she can stop the relentless strong-arming towards the fridge that’s going on.
She’s trying. Making impossible demands that are ‘non-negotiable’. None of which they can afford to meet of course. But remarkably, they are trying to meet them. In a small, furry, left-wing party kind of way. In the hope that Queenie will see how much fun she’s going to have and walk into the fridge unassisted.
I think this time they’re going to have to lock me in.
I was out canvassing yesterday with another candidate and it was not fun. Despite it being a beautiful day, Queenie’s little hand froze into a claw around the clipboard she was carrying after an hour. And there was a lot of hostility wafting out of people’s doors along with the smell of roast beef and potatoes. People don’t want a Christmas campaign. Oh no sirree.
Well, it’s their own fault for electing a minority government. And I’m the one going to be out in the snow. Of course the problem is that the Bloc Quebecois get around fifty seats and that just messes the maths up no end. You have to have 155 to have an overall majority. Which means you have to win sixty per cent of the ‘available’ seats. Which is tricky. So it’ll probably be another minority government.
Why the hell don’t they just form coalitions like everyone else on the planet and be done with this madness.
Because the Yanks haven’t done it, I suppose.
On the plus side, there’s all the excitement and fun of an election campaign. On the minus side, there’s all the excitement and fun of knocking on doors in six feet of snow, no month of quiet time in January to do a bit of writing, and no financial incentive to make the 16/7/4 regime a bit more palatable. Well, not enough. They waved a bit at her today. And she’s managed to knock them down to three weeks of the campaign. And can still say no if she wants to.
So we’ll just kick it to touch for a week and see what happens. Maybe some election junkie will lose his job and take it on.
Queenie will start praying to St. Thomas More. Who is of course the patron saint of politicians. Queenie knows about this because she’s well up on her saints. That’s because of the Theo.
Which brings me back to my original point about missing my friends. And I was thinking today, what else do I miss about Ireland?
The Irish Times
God, I miss The Irish Times. I miss Saturday’s Times in particular. That lovely feeling of achievement when you’re up and out of the house and down in Coffee Java or whatever it’s called (Queenie is starting to forget stuff) before they stop serving breakfast. You’re waiting for your bacon and eggs and triple cappuccino, you have the nice window seat, and an as yet unfolded Times lying on the table calling ‘open me, open me’. You take out the review section carefully and see what the big story is (and hope to god Eileen Battersby didn’t read it) but before you have a big old read of it, you flick through the magazine and give yourself a clap on the back for not being a media slut like all of them that write for it.
The Globe and Mail is just not the same. Although it’s okay. But it’s not the same.
And you leave Drapier till last.
Queenie was introduced to the Nova Scotian political establishment in the Chronicle’s equivalent back a few months ago when she started working here. But they spelt her surname wrong, so she couldn’t photocopy it and send it to everyone she knows in Ireland. And Queenie was well pissed off about that, even though she could have PhotoShopped it if she knew how to do that. So every time she meets ‘NS Drapier’, who is a scatty blonde, she deliberately gets her name wrong now. She’s gotten to that stage in her life now where no, it’s not alright, actually.
Queenie misses The Observer too. She reads both of them on the web every day. But it’s not the same.
Aine Lawlor
Queenie never thought she’d say this. How many times has Queenie fallen over in the shower whilst having a blue fit at whatever sanctimonious crap Yawnya was bleating at some poor politician who got up at the crack of dawn to get to the RTE studios to appear on Moaning Ireland. And that laugh! It’d make your scars bleed.
But the CBC alternative is so much worse. Ohmygod, I want to strangle that man!! His name is Don. He’s one of those ‘I became a journalist in the sixties, therefore I am A JOURNALIST, therefore I don’t have to keep up with my reading, or ask any difficult questions, or do anything except listen to my lovely radio voice’ guys.
He does my head in. He doesn’t interview people; he oozes over them. A bit like Hanly did when he was interviewing an artist. Except with an Upper Canadian accent.
He has a sidekick called Elizabeth, who’s actually quite smart and funny, but she’s not allowed to interview anyone. She introduces all the items and laughs at Don’s appalling jokes. I bet she has to have therapy every morning at nine am after the show. I’d be at home sticking needles into a Don doll if I were she.
But yeah, Morning Ireland is the business compared to CBC. I miss Cockle too, even though he’s a bitter old git. But he has a great line in ironic weariness.
And I love the fact that people on RTE all had different accents, thus mimicking the diversity of Irish accents. Everyone on Nova Scotian CBC sounds like they’re from political Ottawa (oddewah).
And yes, I know I can listen to MI on the internet, but I want Yawnya and Cockle to be taking lumps out of John Hamm, or Darrell Dexter, or Frances McKenzie. It’s not the same when you’re so far away.
Tomato Cup a Soup
I bet most of you don’t know I was addicted to it. Oh yeah. And then they brought out a chilli version, with little bits of red pepper floating in it. Yum.
It took me four months to find a replacement cup a soup brand. Liptons do one, but they don’t do tomato. Or if they do, Atlantic Superstore doesn’t stock it. Cup a Soup is only proper cupasoup if it’s tomato. Now, I have to revive my three o’clock slump with mushroom soup. Christ on a bicycle giving Mary Magdalene a sidebar! Whoever heard of mushrooms giving you a buzz?
Silence
That’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? Magic Cup a Soup…
Marks and Spencers
Nipping into M&S of a Thursday evening for a pair of tights and coming out with three pairs of sexy knickers, a new bra, a skinny top, sixteen pairs of opaque cellulite control lycra whachyamacallits and a new pair of jammies.
Miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, oh, miss the precious sooo much...
And Avoca Handweavers. And Monsoon. And Rococco. Although the shopping is pretty good here, now that I’ve figured it out. There are a number of malls in Halifax, which do the Gap, Old Navy, Sears, The Bay chainstores thing, but the best boutiques are Downtown. There are three that are sooper dooper. Girly Peep Show, which is owned by the people who own Freaky Lunchbox, which is the best sweet shop in the world; Foreign Affair, which is an upmarket chain for business suits and slinky evening gear; and Le Chateau, which is a ‘total shopping experience’, according to their manager who is a row of pink frilly tents. But it is a great shopping experience. You just stay in the dressing room and they throw every single thing in the shop at you and tell you exactly what you look like in it.
And their stuff is really good value. I got a slinky pair of olive green trousers and an reddish orange velvet halter-neck for the Christmas party there for about eighty bucks. (No, they look fantastic, I don’t care what they sound like).
And he showed me how Gabrielle from DH straps her breasts up under a halterneck to get a cleavage so I could do the same.
I think I will do a shopping guide to Halifax, that’ll get you all over here. Well some of you anyway.
Ach, sure I’m having such a great time I don’t miss anything really.
Except I do of course.
Tesco/ Superquinn wine sales
Oh the wine here is like horse urine. I don’t know what it is. I try to buy the same wine, but it doesn’t taste the same. For example, I am drinking the last glass of a bottle of Valpolicella that I bought on Friday. There’s not a whole pile you can do to Valpolicella to mess it up. It’s pretty uniform stuff. But it tastes like horse urine over here.
Maybe my palette has changed.
But the liquor stores here are controlled by the government, and they have limited brands and it’s all ‘Gets Ya Locked Quick’ shiraz and ‘Demented Frog’ merlot and that kind of mass-produced, mass-marketed Australian shite that I HATE! So in order to have a proper bottle of wine you have to pay a small fortune. And then it still doesn’t taste nice.
There’s a wine shop down near the harbour that sells South African estate bottled wines that are nice, but it’s twenty-five dollars a pop for the cheapest (G.Y.L.Q. shitaz is ten dollars). So I don’t treat myself often enough. The Valpolicella was fifteen.
I think I’ll just go back to beer. They have nice beer here.
Mountains
I miss mountains. And hillwalking. Getting up at eight thirty on a Sunday morning after three hours sleep due to getting locked into Whelans the night before, purely by accident. Making a pot of coffee and pouring it into a thermos. Finding my wet gear. Making my sangidges. Packing my mini-Mars bars. Running down to Barbara and Caelan’s car and setting off for the day.
I remember the morning myself and JN were in the back of the car and poor Barbara was pregnant and the smell of drink wafting over her from the rear seats must have made her want to throw up. Because eventually even Caelan mentioned it. And I had been trying to breathe through my nose the whole time so it wouldn’t make her sick!
And then they made me run up the Spit.
Mr Bendy
Yoga will never be the same again. After Mr. Bendy in his leotard/cycling shorts. Yoga’s very spiritual here. The yoga studio is above the organic coffee co-op.
Ah no, I’m just being cynical. It’s fine here and the teachers are okay. I just miss Mr. Bendy. I never knew with him whether he was laughing at us all the whole time. I think he was.
I mean, he learned how to be a yoga teacher in LA for chrissakes.
Anyways…
So yeah, that’s some of the things that Queenie misses. As soon as she posts this, she’ll think of loads more, but it’s eleven o’clock now so she has to go to bed with her book.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Red Dress
Queenie has to go shopping for her Christmas party dress this evening. Yippee!
Here's a poem for all you chicks going shopping for your Christmas dress. Particularly for eileen and krista, who share the same love for Anthropologie, despite living on separate sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
What Do Women Want?
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight,
I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath.
I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world,
through the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned dress
they bury me in.
Kim Addonizio
Here's a poem for all you chicks going shopping for your Christmas dress. Particularly for eileen and krista, who share the same love for Anthropologie, despite living on separate sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
What Do Women Want?
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight,
I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath.
I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world,
through the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned dress
they bury me in.
Kim Addonizio
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The Old Irish Ones are the Best really
I was looking for this quotation by WB Yeats. It's from The Second Coming, which is one of the best poems ever written IMHO:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction; while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
and then I found this poem as well, which I had forgotten about. Which I love.
No Second Troy
WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
I love the way it gives the power back to Helen and everything she stands for.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction; while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
and then I found this poem as well, which I had forgotten about. Which I love.
No Second Troy
WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
I love the way it gives the power back to Helen and everything she stands for.
Lost in Canadian Airspace
Serious Lost Series One spoilers – you have been warned.
Coming from Ireland, you’d think I’d know about rain. I tell you, you haven’t seen rain till you’ve seen a rainy Tuesday in Halifax. I went to the movies. To see Water, funnily enough, the new Deepa Mehta film. She is such a great director. This one was in Hindi, set in Benares, mostly filmed at a ghat on the side of the sacred river, where they burn their dead and purify their souls.
It was about widows. And the lives they must lead when their husbands die. It was wonderful, poignant and angry and sad and funny all at the same time. And the photography got India perfectly. The colour and beauty juxtaposed on the squalor and the narrow, dark streets of the market.
Go see it. It’s great.
Anyway, as it was all about the way women are subservient to men in Hindu culture, it got me thinking about the whole men v women thing again. I had been thinking about it at length while I watched Lost. I took a week out of my life and sat through the twenty-two episodes of the first series in about six nights. And then I remembered I’d written a whole blog entry on it when I was flying to Edmonton, as you do when you’re on a plane. So rather than listen to the rain all night, I put on the excellent Elliot Brood cd and found the article, which was scribbled into the back of a notebook I carry around with me and I am typing it up.
Bruce has just come home and put a six pack in the fridge which is lucky because the twenty four pack he bought the other day is gone – it’s Tuesday for chrissakes - and he has gone into the sitting room to turn the tv on – yup – and he’d go into the other room to play Cotillion on the computer while listening to the tv except Jill has banned him from using it after ten because he stayed on it all night last week sometime. He bangs the keys very loudly, even I can hear him and I’m down the hall.
He’s in a right sulk these days. He sat in the dark on his own for six hours last night watching tv with the sound practically at mute. Except for Desperate Housewives, which he had up at top volume. I presume that he was trying to tell me something. Either ha ha, I’m watching it and you’re not, or why won’t you watch it with me anymore.
Because you had your three chances and you blew all of them dude. And as I said to someone recently, you only get three with me.
Well, nowadays, anyway!!
Anyways, who cares?
So, Lost.
I was sitting on the plane. We were on a commuter hop to Hamilton, after which most of the people on the plane would disembark, and we would go on to Edmonton, and everyone was watching TV. Everyone. It was scary. All around me, people were looking at little screens and watching their suppertime shows – the news, Dr. Phil, or Seinfield. I was sitting there, gob smacked that they had proper telly on the plane. Satellite, apparently. I asked the hostess how the satellite tracked the plane to send the signal and she looked at me like I was a moron.
Well, I don’t know how these things work!
OOOOOOOhhhhhhh! Bruce is using the computer and it’s 10.45pm. I should go in and stare at him until he freaks out and attacks me with his hockey stick.
I am joking.
So anyways, Lost.
Ludicrous plotlines. Just enough supernatural stuff to grab the remnants of The X Files generation. Remember back when, when we loved that show.
Enough totty to get the DH/ SATC fanbases interested.
Enough action to grab the blokes’ attention.
Very entertaining, very well filmed, well written. But I have some issues with it.
Well one in particular.
Why are the blokes in charge on the island?
So, yeah, why are all the blokes in charge?
Why do all the blokes have tragedy written all over their tired faces?
Why are so many of them labouring under the strain of a burdensome relationship with dad?
Why are all of them made to look like they have suffered from the nefarious acts of others? Even Said, who was a TORTURER, is romanticised because ‘he didn’t really mean it’ and when he found the love of a good woman he stopped. Until his plane crashed on a strange island in the middle of the Pacific anyway.
And why are all the women portrayed as a bit dodgy?
And then there’s Walt and Hurley, both of whom seem to be the lynchpins of the supernatural stuff, what with Walt’s ‘seeing eye’ and Hurley’s knowledge of the numbers. As a consequence they are not given any manly stuff to do, and although they are important characters, I felt they were still on the same level of the pecking order as the women, particularly Hurley, who’s made out to be the island gossip, when in fact he’s a really important networker that figured out there was a baddie on the island while all the others were having a big dick competition over Kate.
Then, what was the deal with the ‘ensign in the red shirt’ homage? Was that just a big in-joke? Cos it wasn’t funny. Don’t introduce a new character in the season finale and then blow him up. And was the fact that it was Boone who mentioned it and Boone who then died supposed to be ironic?
If you compare it with that other great ‘band of mismatched brothers’ set of incomparably long DVDs I ploughed through recently, it shows the gaps in the plot quite clearly. In LOTR, Gandalf gets pulled into a bottomless pit by a mysterious creature. In Lost, John Locke nearly does the same thing, but St. effin’ Jack saves him. Instead, it’s pregnant needy girl who disappears for a bit. Why is that?
Granted, they have one thing in common, in both, Dominic Monaghan makes a shite of finding them!
In LOTR, Boromir dies and it’s a big deal in terms of their future survival, as well as being tragic. Well, it was tragic for me! And in the book it’s very serious. In Lost, Boone dies. Tragic, but no biggie in terms of firepower. So again, why do it, other than to tweak our emotions. It doesn’t push the plot along much or cause a huge amount of dramatic tension.
But I digress. Back to my main question.
Why are the men in charge on the island?
Let’s examine their credentials, shall we?
Jack the brain surgeon
Ok, so he’s a brain surgeon and by definition smart and dextrous. But he engages in headless chicken management of the worst order.
D-E-L-E-G-A-T-E, dude!
Interesting how he teamed up with paranoid Michael. A true case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. (John Locke being his enemy).
John Locke the box salesman.
The Special Agent Mulder of the show. Unfortunately, SA Mulder doesn’t do so well without a rational sidekick that can pull rank on him. It is scary how much this guy reminds me of Bruce. Well, Bruce without the bushcraft.
I find it incredibly annoying to have yet another American television show that’s supposed to be good presenting me with a two-dimensional debate between Rationality and Faith. Jesus Christ on a bicycle, hasn’t anyone in Hollywood heard about complexity. No, lots of characters doesn’t mean complexity. It means difficult to produce.
Is it supposed to be a metaphor for what’s going on in the states? If that’s the case, should they not just rerun Twin Peaks?
Said the former Republican Guard turned good guy. Honest
I must say I found that scene very disturbing. Two Americans get an Arab to torture another American to find out something THEY need to know. What was the point of the scene, apart from giving Said the excuse to head off down the beach by himself and meet Danielle? To redeem him? He’s supposed to have turned his back on torture, due to the love of a good woman, and then, first chance he gets, he’s sharpening twigs and eyeing fingernails. Then, when a woman appears on the scene again, he comes to his senses and goes on a big haj around the island, where despite being a top notch RG soldier type, he gets caught and tortured by a madwoman.
And he’s one of the leaders?
So who’s left? Of the in charge ones?
Michael the moaning Minnie
Paranoid, easily affronted, insecure, moaning, selfish. If I were African American I’d weep. Although the boat is nifty.
Sawyer the Grifter
Well of course having learned nothing in thirty five years of dealing with men, this is the one Queenie would go for. If she were on the island. The serious totty. The tart with the heart of gold. The ‘tough on the outside, soft on the inside’ rogue. Who would run rings around her of course.
Like I said, serious totty.
And he’s in line for the leadership when Jack runs himself to death?
Jin the Korean Mafioso
Doesn’t speak the language of the camp. And of course, you can’t be in charge of anything nowadays if you don’t speak English.
I wonder does he speak Chinese. He certainly doesn’t speak female.
Is everyone talking about China the way they are here? It’s as bad as India here in Canada.
So yeah, why are the boys in charge on the island?
More on this later.
Coming from Ireland, you’d think I’d know about rain. I tell you, you haven’t seen rain till you’ve seen a rainy Tuesday in Halifax. I went to the movies. To see Water, funnily enough, the new Deepa Mehta film. She is such a great director. This one was in Hindi, set in Benares, mostly filmed at a ghat on the side of the sacred river, where they burn their dead and purify their souls.
It was about widows. And the lives they must lead when their husbands die. It was wonderful, poignant and angry and sad and funny all at the same time. And the photography got India perfectly. The colour and beauty juxtaposed on the squalor and the narrow, dark streets of the market.
Go see it. It’s great.
Anyway, as it was all about the way women are subservient to men in Hindu culture, it got me thinking about the whole men v women thing again. I had been thinking about it at length while I watched Lost. I took a week out of my life and sat through the twenty-two episodes of the first series in about six nights. And then I remembered I’d written a whole blog entry on it when I was flying to Edmonton, as you do when you’re on a plane. So rather than listen to the rain all night, I put on the excellent Elliot Brood cd and found the article, which was scribbled into the back of a notebook I carry around with me and I am typing it up.
Bruce has just come home and put a six pack in the fridge which is lucky because the twenty four pack he bought the other day is gone – it’s Tuesday for chrissakes - and he has gone into the sitting room to turn the tv on – yup – and he’d go into the other room to play Cotillion on the computer while listening to the tv except Jill has banned him from using it after ten because he stayed on it all night last week sometime. He bangs the keys very loudly, even I can hear him and I’m down the hall.
He’s in a right sulk these days. He sat in the dark on his own for six hours last night watching tv with the sound practically at mute. Except for Desperate Housewives, which he had up at top volume. I presume that he was trying to tell me something. Either ha ha, I’m watching it and you’re not, or why won’t you watch it with me anymore.
Because you had your three chances and you blew all of them dude. And as I said to someone recently, you only get three with me.
Well, nowadays, anyway!!
Anyways, who cares?
So, Lost.
I was sitting on the plane. We were on a commuter hop to Hamilton, after which most of the people on the plane would disembark, and we would go on to Edmonton, and everyone was watching TV. Everyone. It was scary. All around me, people were looking at little screens and watching their suppertime shows – the news, Dr. Phil, or Seinfield. I was sitting there, gob smacked that they had proper telly on the plane. Satellite, apparently. I asked the hostess how the satellite tracked the plane to send the signal and she looked at me like I was a moron.
Well, I don’t know how these things work!
OOOOOOOhhhhhhh! Bruce is using the computer and it’s 10.45pm. I should go in and stare at him until he freaks out and attacks me with his hockey stick.
I am joking.
So anyways, Lost.
Ludicrous plotlines. Just enough supernatural stuff to grab the remnants of The X Files generation. Remember back when, when we loved that show.
Enough totty to get the DH/ SATC fanbases interested.
Enough action to grab the blokes’ attention.
Very entertaining, very well filmed, well written. But I have some issues with it.
Well one in particular.
Why are the blokes in charge on the island?
So, yeah, why are all the blokes in charge?
Why do all the blokes have tragedy written all over their tired faces?
Why are so many of them labouring under the strain of a burdensome relationship with dad?
- Jack and his dad
- Sawyer and his dad
- John Locke and his dad
- Jin and Sun’s dad
- Michael being a dad
Why are all of them made to look like they have suffered from the nefarious acts of others? Even Said, who was a TORTURER, is romanticised because ‘he didn’t really mean it’ and when he found the love of a good woman he stopped. Until his plane crashed on a strange island in the middle of the Pacific anyway.
And why are all the women portrayed as a bit dodgy?
- Kate has a well dodgy past that includes murder, theft and accidental killing through selfishness.
- Sun is a poisoner, a liar and was a right flighty bird before all that.
- Boone’s sister is a spoilt, impetuous brat.
- Danielle is bonkers
- The pregnant Aussie is pregnant, needy and hormonal
And then there’s Walt and Hurley, both of whom seem to be the lynchpins of the supernatural stuff, what with Walt’s ‘seeing eye’ and Hurley’s knowledge of the numbers. As a consequence they are not given any manly stuff to do, and although they are important characters, I felt they were still on the same level of the pecking order as the women, particularly Hurley, who’s made out to be the island gossip, when in fact he’s a really important networker that figured out there was a baddie on the island while all the others were having a big dick competition over Kate.
Then, what was the deal with the ‘ensign in the red shirt’ homage? Was that just a big in-joke? Cos it wasn’t funny. Don’t introduce a new character in the season finale and then blow him up. And was the fact that it was Boone who mentioned it and Boone who then died supposed to be ironic?
If you compare it with that other great ‘band of mismatched brothers’ set of incomparably long DVDs I ploughed through recently, it shows the gaps in the plot quite clearly. In LOTR, Gandalf gets pulled into a bottomless pit by a mysterious creature. In Lost, John Locke nearly does the same thing, but St. effin’ Jack saves him. Instead, it’s pregnant needy girl who disappears for a bit. Why is that?
Granted, they have one thing in common, in both, Dominic Monaghan makes a shite of finding them!
In LOTR, Boromir dies and it’s a big deal in terms of their future survival, as well as being tragic. Well, it was tragic for me! And in the book it’s very serious. In Lost, Boone dies. Tragic, but no biggie in terms of firepower. So again, why do it, other than to tweak our emotions. It doesn’t push the plot along much or cause a huge amount of dramatic tension.
But I digress. Back to my main question.
Why are the men in charge on the island?
Let’s examine their credentials, shall we?
Jack the brain surgeon
Ok, so he’s a brain surgeon and by definition smart and dextrous. But he engages in headless chicken management of the worst order.
- Somebody’s missing – runs off to find them without stopping for a drink of water even
- Somebody’s being a pain – runs off to admonish them without stopping to find out the real problem from Kate
- Somebody’s found something interesting – runs off to tell them what to do without consulting anyone
D-E-L-E-G-A-T-E, dude!
Interesting how he teamed up with paranoid Michael. A true case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. (John Locke being his enemy).
John Locke the box salesman.
The Special Agent Mulder of the show. Unfortunately, SA Mulder doesn’t do so well without a rational sidekick that can pull rank on him. It is scary how much this guy reminds me of Bruce. Well, Bruce without the bushcraft.
I find it incredibly annoying to have yet another American television show that’s supposed to be good presenting me with a two-dimensional debate between Rationality and Faith. Jesus Christ on a bicycle, hasn’t anyone in Hollywood heard about complexity. No, lots of characters doesn’t mean complexity. It means difficult to produce.
Is it supposed to be a metaphor for what’s going on in the states? If that’s the case, should they not just rerun Twin Peaks?
Said the former Republican Guard turned good guy. Honest
I must say I found that scene very disturbing. Two Americans get an Arab to torture another American to find out something THEY need to know. What was the point of the scene, apart from giving Said the excuse to head off down the beach by himself and meet Danielle? To redeem him? He’s supposed to have turned his back on torture, due to the love of a good woman, and then, first chance he gets, he’s sharpening twigs and eyeing fingernails. Then, when a woman appears on the scene again, he comes to his senses and goes on a big haj around the island, where despite being a top notch RG soldier type, he gets caught and tortured by a madwoman.
And he’s one of the leaders?
So who’s left? Of the in charge ones?
Michael the moaning Minnie
Paranoid, easily affronted, insecure, moaning, selfish. If I were African American I’d weep. Although the boat is nifty.
Sawyer the Grifter
Well of course having learned nothing in thirty five years of dealing with men, this is the one Queenie would go for. If she were on the island. The serious totty. The tart with the heart of gold. The ‘tough on the outside, soft on the inside’ rogue. Who would run rings around her of course.
Like I said, serious totty.
And he’s in line for the leadership when Jack runs himself to death?
Jin the Korean Mafioso
Doesn’t speak the language of the camp. And of course, you can’t be in charge of anything nowadays if you don’t speak English.
I wonder does he speak Chinese. He certainly doesn’t speak female.
Is everyone talking about China the way they are here? It’s as bad as India here in Canada.
So yeah, why are the boys in charge on the island?
Sunday, November 20, 2005
It's great up north
Queenie really should stop ripping off the Observer, but the Queen Dad recommended this one.
After reading it, Queenie's initial reaction is hmmmm. Mr. Porter failed to point out that the reason there is going to be an election is that the Liberals were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, giving backhanders to friends during the Quebec referendum, and the NDP has called them on it. He failed to point out that the reason they are handing out tax breaks now (apart from there being a winter election) is because the NDP forced Martin's minority government to put last year's surplus into healthcare, education, training and immigrant services, to the extent that last year's budget was called the first NDP budget. He failed to point out that there are in fact four parties in Canadian politics, the fourth being the Bloc Quebecois, who recently elected a cokehead to lead them mostly because he's a secessionist. Which will raise that old hare again.
Methinks Mr. Porter is a Liberal spy novelist, or at the very least he was being wined and dined by them. He got dazzled by their glamour, perhaps, the old style patronage politics that they indulge in. It's as if he went to Dublin and got introduced to some FFers at Shanahans on the Green, or to Galway during Race Week.
I disagree with his comment about grudging praise for Chretien's decision on Iraq. Most Canadians I've spoken to are delighted about that, and are worried about what their boys are up to in Afghanistan and Haiti. They just don't like Chretien anymore because the recent Gomery Commission report has blamed him pretty much totally (even though Martin was the Minister for Finance - remind you of anyone called bertie, boys and girls) for the corruption Gomery unearthed.
And finally, although Canadians are much better informed about the rest of the world than Americans, if I had a loonie for everytime I was told that the war was still raging in Ireland (no, really it is. Must be great to be here in peaceful ole Canada, eh?) I'd have the price of a flight home to see the Queen Dad.
All the rest of it is pretty accurate, though.
The US should look to Canada to find out how to balance both its budget and its life
Henry Porter
Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer
I booked the train ticket from New York to Toronto feeling good about my carbon footprint and imagining a pleasant day gliding north up the Hudson river to Niagara and the Great Lakes. The landscape was stunning and I'm glad I went that way. However, I could not recommend it. For one thing, Amtrak has perfected a meal - the only meal available - which is the final evolution of convenience food: a molten cheesy, doughy mass which is optimistically called either a breakfast roll or cheeseburger, though it approximates neither. For another, the trip takes 13 hours and includes many stops, the longest of which comes at the Canadian border, where endearingly - or cunningly - half the station is occupied by an antiques shop.
Midway through the morning, I was drinking a cup of coffee, watching the Hudson slide by when we came to a bend in the river. On the far bank was a large, forbidding establishment. My neighbour, a big man in his thirties, caught my eye. 'That's West Point,' he said. I nodded. 'That's West Point! The US Military Academy,' he insisted, his jaw clenching with pride.
'Really. I assumed it was a prison,' I replied truthfully. I don't know what reaction he hoped for, but this was not it. What was I meant to do? Salute? Nod in respect for the great work being done in white phosphorus 'shake'n' bake' tactics? The train rolled on and West Point disappeared from view. Some minutes later, he turned to me. 'You a liberal or something?'
'Eh, no. I really thought that was a prison.' A silence followed. 'You're a liberal; I can tell,' he said aggressively. I was about to give him my standard lecture about the tragedy of American politics descending from the contest between Republicans and Democrats to the remorseless demonisation of liberals when he crushed his paper cup, got up, glared and stalked off.
And that, in short, explains why leaving America for Canada is done with no enormous regret.
Behind you lies the weight of American touchiness and hysteria, the radio shock jocks, the twerpish, bow-tied TV pundits, the religious nuts who deny evolution with the phrase 'intelligent design' and the madness that descants on the ills of passive smoking, yet allows a tax break on SUVs that consume one gallon every 12 miles. This is to say little of a President who seems only confident when he is standing at a podium as commander-in-chief with bristling military types behind him talking about 'Amraaaaka'.
But one must not exaggerate. America is not in some proto-fascistic state and, actually, there is much I still love about the place, but the country is in a very weird mood. So much of its decency, cordiality, wit and thoughtfulness is drowned out by strident chaps wearing flags in their lapels and the babbling hatred that pours from the Fox Network. When you get to Canada, the clamour stops. Suddenly, you find yourself in the place that America should be and once was, though it would offend every American to think that Canada has anything the US should want.
Canada is the lame, slow-talking cousin up north where people say 'golly', 'cripes' and 'geeezzz' and the men wear cellphones on their belts. The origin of the name is held to be significant; it is commonly thought to derive from a Spanish cartographer who wrote on the early map of the land mass 'Aca-Nada', or 'nothing here'.
If only on the grounds of Canada's economic success, Americans should take more notice. Last week, the Liberal government announced that it would cut C$30 billion out of the budget because of the enormous fiscal surplus, currently running at about C$13.4bn a year. Just over C$5bn is to be given back to Canadians on taxes collected this year. And in the future, some of the the surplus will be spent on training, the settling of new immigrants and student grants.
Paul Martin's Liberal government will probably fall within the next 10 days, causing an election campaign to run through Christmas, but this will only mean a temporary delay. The Conservatives must at least match the Liberals' promise on the budget in order to win.
The main point, which you never hear in Britain or America, is that Canada alone among G7 countries is balancing its budget. When you compare its performance with the Bush administration's (the US trade deficit is $706bn; the budget deficit is predicted to be $521bn this year), it's a wonder Canadians aren't a bit more cocky. But during a week in Toronto, I didn't hear the tiniest bit of chauvinism, economic or otherwise.
Canadians are sceptical to a point where they appear simply unable to recognise that they live in a very successful and civilised country. 'We peer so suspiciously at each other,' Pierre Trudeau once said, 'that we cannot see that we Canadians are standing on the mountaintop of human wealth, freedom and privilege.'
He was right. Some 32 million people occupy a territory which is larger than Russia and is blessed with enormous natural resources. Canada is democratic to its marrow, relatively enlightened on environment, health and welfare issues and its political discourse, unlike America's, is recognisably connected to the rest of the free world. That is almost certainly because the centre ground of politics, the place where you find a nation's core values and you can most easily read its character, is some distance to the left of the centre ground in the US.
Canadians are obsessed by two things - politics and national identity. I am on a book tour here and have been amazed how knowledgeably and intensely these things are discussed in ordinary conversation. Canadians are engaged in their politics in way that Americans aren't, and they read obsessively. Canadians spend as much money on books (C$1.1bn) as on newspapers and going to the cinema and double the amount spent on sporting events.
To the outsider, Canadian politics is often mystifying and the conduct of the debate between Conservatives and Liberals seems slightly less genteel than a couple of ferrets in a sack. But on the big issues, the political class makes some good decisions. For example, Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister for 10 years who left office in 2003, refused to go to war with Iraq unless there was a second UN resolution, which is exactly the course Tony Blair could and should have taken. Canadians only grudgingly thank him for his sound judgment.
While a European may not feel entirely at home watching the news and reading the papers here, he does sense a familiar culture. On the news that serious fraud charges had been laid against Conrad Black in the US, it was quickly pointed out that since Lord Black had swapped his Canadian citizenship for a peerage and British naturalisation, he could well face expulsion from Canada because of the country's tough laws concerning those charged with indictable offences in other territories. The gleeful reaction in the press and at a party I attended in Lord Black's hometown had very much the ring of the old country about it, which is perhaps unsurprising since 30 per cent of Canadians originate from the British Isles.
There is also a sense that Lord Black sold his Canadian birthright for snobbish reasons and that does not go down well in a country so absorbed by its national identity. Someone once said Canadians were so busy explaining to the Americans that they weren't British and to the British that they weren't American that they hadn't found the time to be Canadian. I'm not sure that is true any longer and anyway an undue confidence in national identity and the mission that it suggests can get a country into an awful lot of trouble, as the British and Americans have found in the Middle East.
Just at the moment, Canadians seem to have got things about right.
After reading it, Queenie's initial reaction is hmmmm. Mr. Porter failed to point out that the reason there is going to be an election is that the Liberals were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, giving backhanders to friends during the Quebec referendum, and the NDP has called them on it. He failed to point out that the reason they are handing out tax breaks now (apart from there being a winter election) is because the NDP forced Martin's minority government to put last year's surplus into healthcare, education, training and immigrant services, to the extent that last year's budget was called the first NDP budget. He failed to point out that there are in fact four parties in Canadian politics, the fourth being the Bloc Quebecois, who recently elected a cokehead to lead them mostly because he's a secessionist. Which will raise that old hare again.
Methinks Mr. Porter is a Liberal spy novelist, or at the very least he was being wined and dined by them. He got dazzled by their glamour, perhaps, the old style patronage politics that they indulge in. It's as if he went to Dublin and got introduced to some FFers at Shanahans on the Green, or to Galway during Race Week.
I disagree with his comment about grudging praise for Chretien's decision on Iraq. Most Canadians I've spoken to are delighted about that, and are worried about what their boys are up to in Afghanistan and Haiti. They just don't like Chretien anymore because the recent Gomery Commission report has blamed him pretty much totally (even though Martin was the Minister for Finance - remind you of anyone called bertie, boys and girls) for the corruption Gomery unearthed.
And finally, although Canadians are much better informed about the rest of the world than Americans, if I had a loonie for everytime I was told that the war was still raging in Ireland (no, really it is. Must be great to be here in peaceful ole Canada, eh?) I'd have the price of a flight home to see the Queen Dad.
All the rest of it is pretty accurate, though.
The US should look to Canada to find out how to balance both its budget and its life
Henry Porter
Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer
I booked the train ticket from New York to Toronto feeling good about my carbon footprint and imagining a pleasant day gliding north up the Hudson river to Niagara and the Great Lakes. The landscape was stunning and I'm glad I went that way. However, I could not recommend it. For one thing, Amtrak has perfected a meal - the only meal available - which is the final evolution of convenience food: a molten cheesy, doughy mass which is optimistically called either a breakfast roll or cheeseburger, though it approximates neither. For another, the trip takes 13 hours and includes many stops, the longest of which comes at the Canadian border, where endearingly - or cunningly - half the station is occupied by an antiques shop.
Midway through the morning, I was drinking a cup of coffee, watching the Hudson slide by when we came to a bend in the river. On the far bank was a large, forbidding establishment. My neighbour, a big man in his thirties, caught my eye. 'That's West Point,' he said. I nodded. 'That's West Point! The US Military Academy,' he insisted, his jaw clenching with pride.
'Really. I assumed it was a prison,' I replied truthfully. I don't know what reaction he hoped for, but this was not it. What was I meant to do? Salute? Nod in respect for the great work being done in white phosphorus 'shake'n' bake' tactics? The train rolled on and West Point disappeared from view. Some minutes later, he turned to me. 'You a liberal or something?'
'Eh, no. I really thought that was a prison.' A silence followed. 'You're a liberal; I can tell,' he said aggressively. I was about to give him my standard lecture about the tragedy of American politics descending from the contest between Republicans and Democrats to the remorseless demonisation of liberals when he crushed his paper cup, got up, glared and stalked off.
And that, in short, explains why leaving America for Canada is done with no enormous regret.
Behind you lies the weight of American touchiness and hysteria, the radio shock jocks, the twerpish, bow-tied TV pundits, the religious nuts who deny evolution with the phrase 'intelligent design' and the madness that descants on the ills of passive smoking, yet allows a tax break on SUVs that consume one gallon every 12 miles. This is to say little of a President who seems only confident when he is standing at a podium as commander-in-chief with bristling military types behind him talking about 'Amraaaaka'.
But one must not exaggerate. America is not in some proto-fascistic state and, actually, there is much I still love about the place, but the country is in a very weird mood. So much of its decency, cordiality, wit and thoughtfulness is drowned out by strident chaps wearing flags in their lapels and the babbling hatred that pours from the Fox Network. When you get to Canada, the clamour stops. Suddenly, you find yourself in the place that America should be and once was, though it would offend every American to think that Canada has anything the US should want.
Canada is the lame, slow-talking cousin up north where people say 'golly', 'cripes' and 'geeezzz' and the men wear cellphones on their belts. The origin of the name is held to be significant; it is commonly thought to derive from a Spanish cartographer who wrote on the early map of the land mass 'Aca-Nada', or 'nothing here'.
If only on the grounds of Canada's economic success, Americans should take more notice. Last week, the Liberal government announced that it would cut C$30 billion out of the budget because of the enormous fiscal surplus, currently running at about C$13.4bn a year. Just over C$5bn is to be given back to Canadians on taxes collected this year. And in the future, some of the the surplus will be spent on training, the settling of new immigrants and student grants.
Paul Martin's Liberal government will probably fall within the next 10 days, causing an election campaign to run through Christmas, but this will only mean a temporary delay. The Conservatives must at least match the Liberals' promise on the budget in order to win.
The main point, which you never hear in Britain or America, is that Canada alone among G7 countries is balancing its budget. When you compare its performance with the Bush administration's (the US trade deficit is $706bn; the budget deficit is predicted to be $521bn this year), it's a wonder Canadians aren't a bit more cocky. But during a week in Toronto, I didn't hear the tiniest bit of chauvinism, economic or otherwise.
Canadians are sceptical to a point where they appear simply unable to recognise that they live in a very successful and civilised country. 'We peer so suspiciously at each other,' Pierre Trudeau once said, 'that we cannot see that we Canadians are standing on the mountaintop of human wealth, freedom and privilege.'
He was right. Some 32 million people occupy a territory which is larger than Russia and is blessed with enormous natural resources. Canada is democratic to its marrow, relatively enlightened on environment, health and welfare issues and its political discourse, unlike America's, is recognisably connected to the rest of the free world. That is almost certainly because the centre ground of politics, the place where you find a nation's core values and you can most easily read its character, is some distance to the left of the centre ground in the US.
Canadians are obsessed by two things - politics and national identity. I am on a book tour here and have been amazed how knowledgeably and intensely these things are discussed in ordinary conversation. Canadians are engaged in their politics in way that Americans aren't, and they read obsessively. Canadians spend as much money on books (C$1.1bn) as on newspapers and going to the cinema and double the amount spent on sporting events.
To the outsider, Canadian politics is often mystifying and the conduct of the debate between Conservatives and Liberals seems slightly less genteel than a couple of ferrets in a sack. But on the big issues, the political class makes some good decisions. For example, Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister for 10 years who left office in 2003, refused to go to war with Iraq unless there was a second UN resolution, which is exactly the course Tony Blair could and should have taken. Canadians only grudgingly thank him for his sound judgment.
While a European may not feel entirely at home watching the news and reading the papers here, he does sense a familiar culture. On the news that serious fraud charges had been laid against Conrad Black in the US, it was quickly pointed out that since Lord Black had swapped his Canadian citizenship for a peerage and British naturalisation, he could well face expulsion from Canada because of the country's tough laws concerning those charged with indictable offences in other territories. The gleeful reaction in the press and at a party I attended in Lord Black's hometown had very much the ring of the old country about it, which is perhaps unsurprising since 30 per cent of Canadians originate from the British Isles.
There is also a sense that Lord Black sold his Canadian birthright for snobbish reasons and that does not go down well in a country so absorbed by its national identity. Someone once said Canadians were so busy explaining to the Americans that they weren't British and to the British that they weren't American that they hadn't found the time to be Canadian. I'm not sure that is true any longer and anyway an undue confidence in national identity and the mission that it suggests can get a country into an awful lot of trouble, as the British and Americans have found in the Middle East.
Just at the moment, Canadians seem to have got things about right.
Queenie spots the new Bigfoot
Photos under the title as usual
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The mysterious hairy animal/ person/ whatever that roams the wildest places of North America. They found some hairs recently and the most sardonic scientist – a biologist or geneticist - I have ever come across was strong-armed by the media into testing them for DNA evidence of Bigfoot. He held a press conference when he got the results back, which had the entire country up in a heap, during which he told everyone in Canada to grow up for chrissakes, it was only sheep wool.
Unless it was a Bigfoot in sheep’s clothing, he added.
Really serious-minded scientists with tenure are great, aren’t they!
Despite this, the myth lives on apace. The Bigfoot website Queenie looked at today said: “It is a fact that, for over seventy years, people have been finding, photographing, and casting sets of very large human-shaped tracks. Most are discovered by chance in remote areas. These tracks continue to be found to this day.”
Well, not to take away from the serious and important work being undertaken by the Bigfoot people, Queenie went to Alberta last week and found some human-shaped tracks of her own that were very disturbing.
The environmentalists she works with/ on behalf of talk a lot about the ecological footprint. It’s a very interesting concept. Everyone has one. It is based on how much energy you use as a person. Canadians, generally, have quite a large footprint, between eight and twelve hectares each, living as they do in a car-based society that is very cold a lot of the time. And the fact that they are blessed with an abundance of natural resources – water, coal, oil, trees, fish, wildlife, land - means they can afford to be wasteful. One of my favourite statistics in this regard is one I sourced from the David Suzuki Foundation, which states that if everyone on the planet consumed resources like a Canadian, we would need four and a half planets like Earth to sustain us all.
Despite the wonderful work undertaken by Suzuki, Ron Coleman in GPI Atlantic here in Halifax, and others, these facts are not sinking in here. In part because they are too disturbing, they involve too much change for people used to a particular way of life. And in part because of the iron grip that multinationals have on Canada’s resources. And by default her lawmakers and protectors.
Queenie got a glimpse of the whole thing in action last week in Alberta and had a serious attack of the ‘shock and awes’. So much so that she cannot shake it.
Onto Isabella to get a load
After a bowl of cereal and the application of several layers of thermal clothing last Monday morning, she ventured out into minus 15 degrees Centrigade cold to spend the day in Himself’s truck.
Her name is Isabella. Named in earlier days, because Queenie was on a bit of an Isabella Rosselini kick at the time. She’s a brand new Western Star model with a hundred feet of trailer running behind her.
A big momma in other words.
After we filled the gas tank, we headed three hundred kilometres north on the road to Fort McMurray. It was snowing lightly but the cab was warm. Outside, the landscape slid past the iced up windows. A vast prairie of grass and canola stubble, the colour of butterscotch, lightly dusted with snow. Stands of bare poplars lined the road intermittently, huddled together like herds of bodiless zebras. Sometimes scrub clung to them, stringy and bare, its bark the colour of mulberries. Other than the trees, there was nothing to break up the emptiness of the land except rows and rows of hay bales.
We had four hours of this.
Past the gulag into the forest
A few miles before Fort McMurray, we turned off the highway and made our way through the Indian reservation that straggles along the edge of Lake Gregoire. IR No. 167 I think it was. They’re given numbers on the map, even though they all have names. Almost all of the houses fronted the lake, which stretched achingly white into the soft fuzz of a snowstorm on its far side. Houses, boats, barbeques, four wheelers, pick ups, trailers, toys, kayaks, bicycles, all the accessories of the Canadian lifestyle, lay about haphazardly, covered in snow. The sky had darkened and gave off an eerie violet glow that created a strange filter in front of the horizon.
We drove on and on down increasingly narrow tracks and took a wrong turn. Not pretty with a 100 foot of unbendable steel behind us. Finally, we found the forest, located at the back of a gas refinery under construction. After getting through tight security at the front gate, we had to skirt the edge of the building site to get to the wood loader.
It reminded me of a scene from a James Bond movie, I’m not sure which one, in which a weapons silo is being built in some Artic place. I counted nearly fifty cranes. Little machines were trundling to and fro, as well as all kinds of jeeps, half tons and other vehicles. There were no people in sight though.
Foundations for all kinds of buildings had been poured and were covered in snow while they waited to be finished. Rows and rows and rows of prefabricated buildings housed the thousands of men who must have been working on this huge site. I wondered where they were. None of the cranes seemed to be operating.
Never mind From Russia with Love. All it needed was a barbed wire fence and a gun tower and it would have been a gulag.
I kept expecting the whole thing to light up with a massive explosion, after which the young Sean Connery would run out of the blast in a tuxedo to hijack Izzy and drive her till her wheels came off. But we got round the site without incident and lurched onto a narrow track between the trees.
There were no signs to our loader, the D-Loader, just signs for the PK-Loader, so of course we got lost again. Eventually, we met an Indian driving a grader, who told us to go back to the 3km sign and follow the signs for the PK-Loader. Sure enough, even though it was for a different logging company (Russians who are so Orthodox they don’t allow their drivers to work on a Sunday, but who are canny enough to suggest they start work at 12.01am that night) we eventually found the loader and its operator, known for his bad temper, sitting in the cab glaring at us like a malevolent Buddha.
“You’re late. You know you’re supposed to ring dispatch if you’re late.”
“Yeah, well, we've been too busy trying to find the goddamn loader to call anyone.”
I could tell Himself was a bit stressed at this stage, so I said nothing. Apart from applauding his attitude with the loader guy. Of course I wasn’t allowed out of the truck, as there was heavy machinery and male stuff involved, which I would just get in the way of, so I stayed warm and took some pictures.
Stretching Izzy’s trailers out
The trailers weren’t at their full length, so they had to be stretched to take the trees piled up in the clearing. This seemed to involve quite a lot of motion, you know the sort. Getting in and out of the cab; and driving forward a bit and then stopping and getting out and swearing at things, and then getting back in again to lurch forward again, and then some more swearing. The bit of me that remembered going out testing with my dad when he was tired and busy kicked in reflexively, took over and made me as small and as quiet as possible.
Trailer one slid out nice and handy. Trailer two was more problematic. Eventually, he banged back into the cab, put his foot on the accelerator one more time, till the trailer suddenly gave and everything lurched forward with an almighty squeal and a sudden stop that snapped my head back on my neck with the force of a catapult.
Now I know why they call it whiplash.
I had cried out involuntarily. We both sat there for a moment. Then he went to look. Came back. The damned hole had slid too far past the other one and the fucking bar wouldn’t go through. He slammed the door shut and stalked off to kick something. I did what every woman should do when her man is fighting the malign forces of the entire galaxy single-handedly due to the stupidity of other men, specifically, another man he doesn’t like much; I sewed my mouth shut and took an intense interest in Izzy’s control panel for the next hour.
Every now and then there was another thump and a lurch as he tried to sort it out. But the stupid thing was immovable. Eventually he gave up, none of the other men present were being particularly helpful, and loaded her. With 63,000 kgs of 100ft deciduous tree trunks.
That’s a lot of wood. On a wobbly trailer. On a dirt forest track. I thought about unstitching my mouth to point this out, but then decided he knew best.
He finally got back into the cab. His hands and face were soooooo cold.
He was worried the trailer would pull apart too.
“Or the load might come forward”, he told me.
I hadn’t thought of that. I turned to look at the sheet of cracked plexi-glass that served as the back window of the cab and that was all that stood between us and 63,000 kgs of deciduous tree trunk. I was surprised at how unconcerned I was about the whole thing.
He wrapped the load with chains and straps to stabilise it, and ran a chain through the mismatched holes in the trailer pole and tried to call his boss to check whether it would be safe to move the truck, while I sat in the cab and tried to feel nervous.
Nope. Not a thing. I smoked a cigarette, and looked out at him and began feeling a bit disingenuous. I mean, here I was, sitting in a warm cab thinking I was incredibly post-modern by trying to existentialise the whole thing, while he was out there struggling with straps and chains and machines and a rude loader operator and his boss’s unavailability all at the same time in the freezing cold, so that he could get us home safely. I decided my best contribution to the situation was to not get nervous.
Eventually he got through to his boss who said the trailer would hold as long as it was loaded. And then ranted and raved a bit about the delay and time being money yadda, yadda.
They’re all like that out here. They’re exactly the same as the blokes you meet in Café Insane on a Friday night, except they all wear baseball caps and work boots and drive Dodge pickups. The bloke in Café Insane would be horrified to hear his Armani suit doesn’t cut him a swathe apart from a North Albertan cattleman or oilman or logger, but the obsession with the time/money interface, and the relentless search for a quick buck on the back of someone else’s hard work and ingenuity is the same.
Queenie takes a pit stop
It took us four hours to get to the mill, heading south down that road that runs from the North to Edmonton. It was beginning to get dark (a long drawn out affair in Northern Alberta) as we drove onto the main highway again. I really needed to use the bathroom, but I decided not to stop the truck in the woods in case the Furies played havoc with us. Besides, I had seen a couple of rest stops on the way up. With facilities.
After ninety minutes of being in a truck on a highway with a lot of trees being hauled behind you, I was a bit uncomfortable. So I mentioned it. We agreed he’d stop at the next rest stop. Or when it got dark. Whichever came first.
Well, the guy who comes round and rolls up the streets in Alberta every night at ten o’clock must’ve put them away early, because there was no sign of them on the way back to the mill. I held on for another hour or so. Yoga practice has its uses!!
Eventually, I started getting cranky. Then suddenly, Himself pulled up against some kind of large, square-shaped concrete bollard on the side of the road and said ‘There you go. No one will see you.”
I looked around. It was still light. We were on the only road into northern Alberta. Everyone was driving home from the Canadian Rodeo championships, so a steady stream of traffic was coming towards us. And it was a very small bollard.
“I could go in the woods”, I said.
“It’ll take you a time to walk in there”, he pointed out. “I’ve angled the truck so no one can see you”, he continued, with more patience than I deserved.
“Will there be bears still awake in the woods?”
“Probably. It’ll be fine here.”
“It’s a very small bollard.”
“ There’s tissues behind you in that box.”
I clambered down from the truck with a sigh.
Not see me, my ass! So to speak. Izzy’s wheels were as tall as my breastbone, for chrissakes, leaving a five foot gap under her that anyone in a car could see through. And it was so cold. And Himself had used the stop to get out to check the load strapping, so there wasn't a huge amount of privacy although he was on the opposite side of the truck.
Well, girl, I thought, it’s adventure you wanted… I took a deep breath and began to unbutton.
Just as I was getting into position a car screeched to a halt on the other side of the road. I stood up hurriedly and watched from behind one of Izzy’s wheels as the driver, a man, got out for a quick slash behind his car, then drove off in a hurry.
BASTARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The unfairness of it! With a heavy heart, I unbuttoned my jeans again and bared my ass to the Albertan winter, and God only knows how many cowboys and their children. Just as I finished, a silent breeze (called up no doubt by the gods from somewhere north of the Hudson Bay) caressed my butt and I knew the meaning of ass-numbing cold.
As I climbed back into the cab, teeth chattering, Himself said he was very proud of me.
The ninth circle of hell produces shock and awe
A couple of hours later, the feeling was coming back into my gluteals, as we pulled into the entrance to the mill, which is owned by a Japanese multinational who shall remain nameless, because I wasn’t supposed to be there.
A line of trucks loaded down with trees queued patiently for the scales to have their lumber weighed. Himself got two coffees from the women in the weigh station. After being weighed – there’s a hefty fine if you’re overweight – we drove to an unstrapping station, where he had to unchain and unstrap the lumber before driving Isabella towards the unloading bay. This was located beside a stack of lumber the size of Croke Park. To say it was immense would be an understatement. A horizontal, leafless, branchless forest.
To one side, a crane as large and impressive as Belfast’s Goliath stood waiting for us. We drove underneath it and got out. Suddenly, its giant claw descended smoothly and noiselessly and closed itself around the first trailer-full of logs. Then they slid smoothly up into the air, with no more consequence than if they were twigs in Zackie’s hand. Smoothly, quickly, they were hauled along the transom of the crane and dropped into an enormous funnel to my left.
After a few seconds, there was a low grumble as something tore into the 33,000 kgs of deciduous tree trunks we had delivered to its fate. In a few more seconds I could see pulp and dust sliding down different chutes towards the paper mill itself.
The claw came back for the second load. They were smoothly dispatched the way of the first lot. We were free to go and get another acre of forest. And bring it back here.
We sat back into the cab. I couldn’t speak for the shock and awes. Himself looked at it through my eyes and as usual, found the words for me.
“Oh my, what are we doing to the earth?”
“Oh my, what indeed. And why?”
All so as we can wipe our asses with soft tissue when we need to.
Queenie found a mighty big footprint, don't you think?
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The mysterious hairy animal/ person/ whatever that roams the wildest places of North America. They found some hairs recently and the most sardonic scientist – a biologist or geneticist - I have ever come across was strong-armed by the media into testing them for DNA evidence of Bigfoot. He held a press conference when he got the results back, which had the entire country up in a heap, during which he told everyone in Canada to grow up for chrissakes, it was only sheep wool.
Unless it was a Bigfoot in sheep’s clothing, he added.
Really serious-minded scientists with tenure are great, aren’t they!
Despite this, the myth lives on apace. The Bigfoot website Queenie looked at today said: “It is a fact that, for over seventy years, people have been finding, photographing, and casting sets of very large human-shaped tracks. Most are discovered by chance in remote areas. These tracks continue to be found to this day.”
Well, not to take away from the serious and important work being undertaken by the Bigfoot people, Queenie went to Alberta last week and found some human-shaped tracks of her own that were very disturbing.
The environmentalists she works with/ on behalf of talk a lot about the ecological footprint. It’s a very interesting concept. Everyone has one. It is based on how much energy you use as a person. Canadians, generally, have quite a large footprint, between eight and twelve hectares each, living as they do in a car-based society that is very cold a lot of the time. And the fact that they are blessed with an abundance of natural resources – water, coal, oil, trees, fish, wildlife, land - means they can afford to be wasteful. One of my favourite statistics in this regard is one I sourced from the David Suzuki Foundation, which states that if everyone on the planet consumed resources like a Canadian, we would need four and a half planets like Earth to sustain us all.
Despite the wonderful work undertaken by Suzuki, Ron Coleman in GPI Atlantic here in Halifax, and others, these facts are not sinking in here. In part because they are too disturbing, they involve too much change for people used to a particular way of life. And in part because of the iron grip that multinationals have on Canada’s resources. And by default her lawmakers and protectors.
Queenie got a glimpse of the whole thing in action last week in Alberta and had a serious attack of the ‘shock and awes’. So much so that she cannot shake it.
Onto Isabella to get a load
After a bowl of cereal and the application of several layers of thermal clothing last Monday morning, she ventured out into minus 15 degrees Centrigade cold to spend the day in Himself’s truck.
Her name is Isabella. Named in earlier days, because Queenie was on a bit of an Isabella Rosselini kick at the time. She’s a brand new Western Star model with a hundred feet of trailer running behind her.
A big momma in other words.
After we filled the gas tank, we headed three hundred kilometres north on the road to Fort McMurray. It was snowing lightly but the cab was warm. Outside, the landscape slid past the iced up windows. A vast prairie of grass and canola stubble, the colour of butterscotch, lightly dusted with snow. Stands of bare poplars lined the road intermittently, huddled together like herds of bodiless zebras. Sometimes scrub clung to them, stringy and bare, its bark the colour of mulberries. Other than the trees, there was nothing to break up the emptiness of the land except rows and rows of hay bales.
We had four hours of this.
Past the gulag into the forest
A few miles before Fort McMurray, we turned off the highway and made our way through the Indian reservation that straggles along the edge of Lake Gregoire. IR No. 167 I think it was. They’re given numbers on the map, even though they all have names. Almost all of the houses fronted the lake, which stretched achingly white into the soft fuzz of a snowstorm on its far side. Houses, boats, barbeques, four wheelers, pick ups, trailers, toys, kayaks, bicycles, all the accessories of the Canadian lifestyle, lay about haphazardly, covered in snow. The sky had darkened and gave off an eerie violet glow that created a strange filter in front of the horizon.
We drove on and on down increasingly narrow tracks and took a wrong turn. Not pretty with a 100 foot of unbendable steel behind us. Finally, we found the forest, located at the back of a gas refinery under construction. After getting through tight security at the front gate, we had to skirt the edge of the building site to get to the wood loader.
It reminded me of a scene from a James Bond movie, I’m not sure which one, in which a weapons silo is being built in some Artic place. I counted nearly fifty cranes. Little machines were trundling to and fro, as well as all kinds of jeeps, half tons and other vehicles. There were no people in sight though.
Foundations for all kinds of buildings had been poured and were covered in snow while they waited to be finished. Rows and rows and rows of prefabricated buildings housed the thousands of men who must have been working on this huge site. I wondered where they were. None of the cranes seemed to be operating.
Never mind From Russia with Love. All it needed was a barbed wire fence and a gun tower and it would have been a gulag.
I kept expecting the whole thing to light up with a massive explosion, after which the young Sean Connery would run out of the blast in a tuxedo to hijack Izzy and drive her till her wheels came off. But we got round the site without incident and lurched onto a narrow track between the trees.
There were no signs to our loader, the D-Loader, just signs for the PK-Loader, so of course we got lost again. Eventually, we met an Indian driving a grader, who told us to go back to the 3km sign and follow the signs for the PK-Loader. Sure enough, even though it was for a different logging company (Russians who are so Orthodox they don’t allow their drivers to work on a Sunday, but who are canny enough to suggest they start work at 12.01am that night) we eventually found the loader and its operator, known for his bad temper, sitting in the cab glaring at us like a malevolent Buddha.
“You’re late. You know you’re supposed to ring dispatch if you’re late.”
“Yeah, well, we've been too busy trying to find the goddamn loader to call anyone.”
I could tell Himself was a bit stressed at this stage, so I said nothing. Apart from applauding his attitude with the loader guy. Of course I wasn’t allowed out of the truck, as there was heavy machinery and male stuff involved, which I would just get in the way of, so I stayed warm and took some pictures.
Stretching Izzy’s trailers out
The trailers weren’t at their full length, so they had to be stretched to take the trees piled up in the clearing. This seemed to involve quite a lot of motion, you know the sort. Getting in and out of the cab; and driving forward a bit and then stopping and getting out and swearing at things, and then getting back in again to lurch forward again, and then some more swearing. The bit of me that remembered going out testing with my dad when he was tired and busy kicked in reflexively, took over and made me as small and as quiet as possible.
Trailer one slid out nice and handy. Trailer two was more problematic. Eventually, he banged back into the cab, put his foot on the accelerator one more time, till the trailer suddenly gave and everything lurched forward with an almighty squeal and a sudden stop that snapped my head back on my neck with the force of a catapult.
Now I know why they call it whiplash.
I had cried out involuntarily. We both sat there for a moment. Then he went to look. Came back. The damned hole had slid too far past the other one and the fucking bar wouldn’t go through. He slammed the door shut and stalked off to kick something. I did what every woman should do when her man is fighting the malign forces of the entire galaxy single-handedly due to the stupidity of other men, specifically, another man he doesn’t like much; I sewed my mouth shut and took an intense interest in Izzy’s control panel for the next hour.
Every now and then there was another thump and a lurch as he tried to sort it out. But the stupid thing was immovable. Eventually he gave up, none of the other men present were being particularly helpful, and loaded her. With 63,000 kgs of 100ft deciduous tree trunks.
That’s a lot of wood. On a wobbly trailer. On a dirt forest track. I thought about unstitching my mouth to point this out, but then decided he knew best.
He finally got back into the cab. His hands and face were soooooo cold.
He was worried the trailer would pull apart too.
“Or the load might come forward”, he told me.
I hadn’t thought of that. I turned to look at the sheet of cracked plexi-glass that served as the back window of the cab and that was all that stood between us and 63,000 kgs of deciduous tree trunk. I was surprised at how unconcerned I was about the whole thing.
He wrapped the load with chains and straps to stabilise it, and ran a chain through the mismatched holes in the trailer pole and tried to call his boss to check whether it would be safe to move the truck, while I sat in the cab and tried to feel nervous.
Nope. Not a thing. I smoked a cigarette, and looked out at him and began feeling a bit disingenuous. I mean, here I was, sitting in a warm cab thinking I was incredibly post-modern by trying to existentialise the whole thing, while he was out there struggling with straps and chains and machines and a rude loader operator and his boss’s unavailability all at the same time in the freezing cold, so that he could get us home safely. I decided my best contribution to the situation was to not get nervous.
Eventually he got through to his boss who said the trailer would hold as long as it was loaded. And then ranted and raved a bit about the delay and time being money yadda, yadda.
They’re all like that out here. They’re exactly the same as the blokes you meet in Café Insane on a Friday night, except they all wear baseball caps and work boots and drive Dodge pickups. The bloke in Café Insane would be horrified to hear his Armani suit doesn’t cut him a swathe apart from a North Albertan cattleman or oilman or logger, but the obsession with the time/money interface, and the relentless search for a quick buck on the back of someone else’s hard work and ingenuity is the same.
Queenie takes a pit stop
It took us four hours to get to the mill, heading south down that road that runs from the North to Edmonton. It was beginning to get dark (a long drawn out affair in Northern Alberta) as we drove onto the main highway again. I really needed to use the bathroom, but I decided not to stop the truck in the woods in case the Furies played havoc with us. Besides, I had seen a couple of rest stops on the way up. With facilities.
After ninety minutes of being in a truck on a highway with a lot of trees being hauled behind you, I was a bit uncomfortable. So I mentioned it. We agreed he’d stop at the next rest stop. Or when it got dark. Whichever came first.
Well, the guy who comes round and rolls up the streets in Alberta every night at ten o’clock must’ve put them away early, because there was no sign of them on the way back to the mill. I held on for another hour or so. Yoga practice has its uses!!
Eventually, I started getting cranky. Then suddenly, Himself pulled up against some kind of large, square-shaped concrete bollard on the side of the road and said ‘There you go. No one will see you.”
I looked around. It was still light. We were on the only road into northern Alberta. Everyone was driving home from the Canadian Rodeo championships, so a steady stream of traffic was coming towards us. And it was a very small bollard.
“I could go in the woods”, I said.
“It’ll take you a time to walk in there”, he pointed out. “I’ve angled the truck so no one can see you”, he continued, with more patience than I deserved.
“Will there be bears still awake in the woods?”
“Probably. It’ll be fine here.”
“It’s a very small bollard.”
“ There’s tissues behind you in that box.”
I clambered down from the truck with a sigh.
Not see me, my ass! So to speak. Izzy’s wheels were as tall as my breastbone, for chrissakes, leaving a five foot gap under her that anyone in a car could see through. And it was so cold. And Himself had used the stop to get out to check the load strapping, so there wasn't a huge amount of privacy although he was on the opposite side of the truck.
Well, girl, I thought, it’s adventure you wanted… I took a deep breath and began to unbutton.
Just as I was getting into position a car screeched to a halt on the other side of the road. I stood up hurriedly and watched from behind one of Izzy’s wheels as the driver, a man, got out for a quick slash behind his car, then drove off in a hurry.
BASTARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The unfairness of it! With a heavy heart, I unbuttoned my jeans again and bared my ass to the Albertan winter, and God only knows how many cowboys and their children. Just as I finished, a silent breeze (called up no doubt by the gods from somewhere north of the Hudson Bay) caressed my butt and I knew the meaning of ass-numbing cold.
As I climbed back into the cab, teeth chattering, Himself said he was very proud of me.
The ninth circle of hell produces shock and awe
A couple of hours later, the feeling was coming back into my gluteals, as we pulled into the entrance to the mill, which is owned by a Japanese multinational who shall remain nameless, because I wasn’t supposed to be there.
A line of trucks loaded down with trees queued patiently for the scales to have their lumber weighed. Himself got two coffees from the women in the weigh station. After being weighed – there’s a hefty fine if you’re overweight – we drove to an unstrapping station, where he had to unchain and unstrap the lumber before driving Isabella towards the unloading bay. This was located beside a stack of lumber the size of Croke Park. To say it was immense would be an understatement. A horizontal, leafless, branchless forest.
To one side, a crane as large and impressive as Belfast’s Goliath stood waiting for us. We drove underneath it and got out. Suddenly, its giant claw descended smoothly and noiselessly and closed itself around the first trailer-full of logs. Then they slid smoothly up into the air, with no more consequence than if they were twigs in Zackie’s hand. Smoothly, quickly, they were hauled along the transom of the crane and dropped into an enormous funnel to my left.
After a few seconds, there was a low grumble as something tore into the 33,000 kgs of deciduous tree trunks we had delivered to its fate. In a few more seconds I could see pulp and dust sliding down different chutes towards the paper mill itself.
The claw came back for the second load. They were smoothly dispatched the way of the first lot. We were free to go and get another acre of forest. And bring it back here.
We sat back into the cab. I couldn’t speak for the shock and awes. Himself looked at it through my eyes and as usual, found the words for me.
“Oh my, what are we doing to the earth?”
“Oh my, what indeed. And why?”
All so as we can wipe our asses with soft tissue when we need to.
Queenie found a mighty big footprint, don't you think?
A tidy room is a tidy mind!
Right. After a week of wallowing in a slough of despondency and self-pity, Queenie has pulled herself together at last. She tidied her bedroom, an activity that always seems to have a similarly cleansing impact on her head. Everything’s much clearer now. She can see the floor again, so to speak. And she spent all afternoon buried in a Sarah Paretsky novel, which in line with much of America’s detective fiction these days, is more about the Patriot Act than the crime story she was trying to tell. So she’s happy because she got lost in something else for a while.
And she made a really great dance/ world/ electronica cd for the bloke in work who ran through her iPod the other day. ‘Cos that’s a great way to get to know someone … whatever … which she’s listening to now.
And she sent a very forthright email to Himself in Alberta telling him how to run his life, because she can do that now as they’re just friends and as Queenie knows better than most, your friends are the best people to have running your life for you.
And she bellowed at Bruce for being a patronising git who won’t stay out of her room. And he responded by telling her to calm down girl, which proved her point absolutely not that he will ever realise that.
And she ate a lot of toast. So now she feels a bit better about everything. Until tomorrow presumably, when the deitrus of two of the above activities will begin to settle in little clumps around her.
My, we are using a lot of demolition imagery this week, aren’t we Queenie. That’s because a house fell on our heads, so to speak. But as with all the other times this has happened, there’s nothing to do but dig our way out.
And she thought about going to see Jarhead tonight, but decided a two hour stint of war and misery was not what she needed in late November.
As she said to Colombo on the phone today, TS Eliot has it assways. April is not the cruellest month; November is. It’s the first miserable month of the winter. The first week is full of darkness, pain and gloominess as we all remember the Great War. Particularly bad in Canada where this year was The Year of the Veteran. Then, after the eleventh, they turn the Christmas lights on full blast and push crappy merchandise on you for the rest of the month, when you have no money and no inclination to go shopping.
No wonder we all go crazy and try to hibernate.
Queenie has decided there’s no point in fighting it this year. She’s going to go to work, go to the movies, go out with Shazz once a week, teach her English class, and stay home the rest of the time. To hell with it. It’s only a few months.
And if Bruce thinks he’s going to overshadow Queenie’s winter with his sulking, hulking, non-housework undertaking, beer-swilling, hockey-watching crap for the next three months he’s got another thing coming.
So anyways, on to better things, lots of Alberta blogging to do and then some.
And she made a really great dance/ world/ electronica cd for the bloke in work who ran through her iPod the other day. ‘Cos that’s a great way to get to know someone … whatever … which she’s listening to now.
And she sent a very forthright email to Himself in Alberta telling him how to run his life, because she can do that now as they’re just friends and as Queenie knows better than most, your friends are the best people to have running your life for you.
And she bellowed at Bruce for being a patronising git who won’t stay out of her room. And he responded by telling her to calm down girl, which proved her point absolutely not that he will ever realise that.
And she ate a lot of toast. So now she feels a bit better about everything. Until tomorrow presumably, when the deitrus of two of the above activities will begin to settle in little clumps around her.
My, we are using a lot of demolition imagery this week, aren’t we Queenie. That’s because a house fell on our heads, so to speak. But as with all the other times this has happened, there’s nothing to do but dig our way out.
And she thought about going to see Jarhead tonight, but decided a two hour stint of war and misery was not what she needed in late November.
As she said to Colombo on the phone today, TS Eliot has it assways. April is not the cruellest month; November is. It’s the first miserable month of the winter. The first week is full of darkness, pain and gloominess as we all remember the Great War. Particularly bad in Canada where this year was The Year of the Veteran. Then, after the eleventh, they turn the Christmas lights on full blast and push crappy merchandise on you for the rest of the month, when you have no money and no inclination to go shopping.
No wonder we all go crazy and try to hibernate.
Queenie has decided there’s no point in fighting it this year. She’s going to go to work, go to the movies, go out with Shazz once a week, teach her English class, and stay home the rest of the time. To hell with it. It’s only a few months.
And if Bruce thinks he’s going to overshadow Queenie’s winter with his sulking, hulking, non-housework undertaking, beer-swilling, hockey-watching crap for the next three months he’s got another thing coming.
So anyways, on to better things, lots of Alberta blogging to do and then some.
So no more asking why Queenie does these things!
L'une des clés d'une relation amoureuse est de respecter la maladie que l'autre porte en lui.
This is not the country that I once knew
Former President Jimmy Carter believes that a warring America is abandoning its fundamental values
Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer
In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.
These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.
Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.
At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organisations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements, including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.
Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of 'pre-emptive war', an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavoury regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.
Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by US leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world. These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of 'you are either with us or against us' has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.
Another disturbing realisation is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimise public awareness of casualties.
Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.
Of even greater concern is that the US has repudiated the Geneva accords and supported the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition programme. It is embarrassing to see the President and Vice President insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate 'cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment' on people in US custody.
Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them and, therefore, abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms-control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of 'first use' of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.
Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.
Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favours to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialised nations).
I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.
As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.
It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have promoted during the last 230 years.
· Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States. His latest book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, is published this month by Simon & Schuster.
Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer
In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.
These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.
Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.
At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organisations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements, including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.
Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of 'pre-emptive war', an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavoury regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.
Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by US leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world. These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of 'you are either with us or against us' has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.
Another disturbing realisation is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimise public awareness of casualties.
Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.
Of even greater concern is that the US has repudiated the Geneva accords and supported the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition programme. It is embarrassing to see the President and Vice President insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate 'cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment' on people in US custody.
Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them and, therefore, abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms-control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of 'first use' of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.
Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.
Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favours to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialised nations).
I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.
As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.
It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have promoted during the last 230 years.
· Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States. His latest book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, is published this month by Simon & Schuster.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
The howling of wolves is without world
The Howling of Wolves
by Ted Hughes
Is without world.
What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound
That dissolve in the mid-air silence?
Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Turning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl's ear,
Brings the wolves running - brings the steel traps clashing
And slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,
That they must live
Innocence crept into minerals.
The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.
The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.
It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly
It must feed its fur.
The night snows stars and the earth creaks.
for dad, who always keeps the wolves away.
by Ted Hughes
Is without world.
What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound
That dissolve in the mid-air silence?
Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Turning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl's ear,
Brings the wolves running - brings the steel traps clashing
And slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,
That they must live
Innocence crept into minerals.
The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.
The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.
It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly
It must feed its fur.
The night snows stars and the earth creaks.
for dad, who always keeps the wolves away.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Like I said, wolves are the new bears
Testing to be done on wolves to see if they killed Ontario man last week
The Canadian Press
SASKATOON (CP) - Two wolves from Saskatchewan's northern hinterland have been shot and sent to a Saskatoon lab to determine if they killed an Ontario man last week. The animals are suspected to be part of a pack seen around the body of Kenton Joel Carnegie, 22, when searchers found him, according to Tim Trottier, a wildlife ecologist with Saskatchewan Environment. However, he said there is also a possibility the animals were drawn to the site because there was a dead body. An autopsy has confirmed Carnegie was killed by some kind of animal, and RCMP said foul play has been ruled out.
Carnegie, a third-year geological engineering student from the University of Waterloo, was on a three-week work term. It would have been his dream job - working in a remote place surrounded by nature, said Leo Rothenburg, one of Carnegie's professors.
"He was a very kind soul, always trying to help everyone. He was also a very good artist. He does sketching and maybe that's why he was walking in the woods trying to find a place where he could sit down and sketch." Carnegie was staying at a mining camp near Points North, on the west part of Wollaston Lake, while doing aerial surveys for Ottawa-based Sander Geophysics Ltd. The other crew members left shortly after the incident.
At university, Carnegie was director of the engineering society, acting as intermediary between professors and students and was quite popular with both groups, Rothenburg said.
"He was very friendly, always smiling. I don't think I ever saw him upset," he said. "Students trusted him and he always knew what to do for the class. He was very meticulous in the way he dealt with student issues. It will be difficult to fill his shoes and presence."
Luise Sander, co-president of the survey company for which Carnegie was working, said an internal investigation is underway to review the incident and determine if any changes in protocol are necessary at the company.
Wolves are typically afraid of people but have become more comfortable around northern camps where food scraps are readily available, said Trottier. Wolves are at risk to attack if they are wounded or diseased and have been shunned by the pack. But there has never been a documented case of a fatal wolf attack in North America, Trottier said.
The Canadian Press
SASKATOON (CP) - Two wolves from Saskatchewan's northern hinterland have been shot and sent to a Saskatoon lab to determine if they killed an Ontario man last week. The animals are suspected to be part of a pack seen around the body of Kenton Joel Carnegie, 22, when searchers found him, according to Tim Trottier, a wildlife ecologist with Saskatchewan Environment. However, he said there is also a possibility the animals were drawn to the site because there was a dead body. An autopsy has confirmed Carnegie was killed by some kind of animal, and RCMP said foul play has been ruled out.
Carnegie, a third-year geological engineering student from the University of Waterloo, was on a three-week work term. It would have been his dream job - working in a remote place surrounded by nature, said Leo Rothenburg, one of Carnegie's professors.
"He was a very kind soul, always trying to help everyone. He was also a very good artist. He does sketching and maybe that's why he was walking in the woods trying to find a place where he could sit down and sketch." Carnegie was staying at a mining camp near Points North, on the west part of Wollaston Lake, while doing aerial surveys for Ottawa-based Sander Geophysics Ltd. The other crew members left shortly after the incident.
At university, Carnegie was director of the engineering society, acting as intermediary between professors and students and was quite popular with both groups, Rothenburg said.
"He was very friendly, always smiling. I don't think I ever saw him upset," he said. "Students trusted him and he always knew what to do for the class. He was very meticulous in the way he dealt with student issues. It will be difficult to fill his shoes and presence."
Luise Sander, co-president of the survey company for which Carnegie was working, said an internal investigation is underway to review the incident and determine if any changes in protocol are necessary at the company.
Wolves are typically afraid of people but have become more comfortable around northern camps where food scraps are readily available, said Trottier. Wolves are at risk to attack if they are wounded or diseased and have been shunned by the pack. But there has never been a documented case of a fatal wolf attack in North America, Trottier said.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
To Hell with the Consequences. And back again.
Queenie’s very tired. She’s been all the way to Alberta and back. Northern Alberta too. Over six thousand miles in five days. She’s a bit discombobulated.
It was very cold. When she landed in Edmonton last Thursday night it was minus 3 degrees. When she left this morning it was minus fifteen. Yes, that does sound very cold, doesn't it.
You should try having to pee by the side of the road in it.
A weird weekend. Queenie had a big case of the ‘where the hell am I’s’ most of the time. As well as a case of the ‘what the fuck am I doing here’s’. Which is the second time this has happened to her on a trip in November. For much the same reasons. Which is very scary and doesn’t bode well for travel in this month in the future.
I give up, do you know that!!
What would you make of a girl who spent hundreds of dollars on a plane ticket to go thousands of miles to see a bloke who completely blindsided her with a little speech he had prepared earlier, all about ‘I don’t think this is what I want; I think I want to be free!'
It had the usual enormous dollop of 'It's not you, it's me'. Interestingly, this time it was all wrapped up in a big helping of 'I don't want to lose you, just my sense of responsibility towards you, so I am dumping you three days before you fly home to Nova Scotia in order to spend the rest of the time persuading you that we can be friends forever. We can, can't we?'
You'd feel a bit sorry for her, wouldn't you? A bit of a domestic tragedy I suppose, you’d say. You'd understand if she was feeling a little bitter and cynical, wouldn't you?
Quite.
Now, what would you think of a girl who has had this happen to her twice in two consecutive years. In the same month.
Careless girl!
Yup, that’s exactly what I thought.
So there I was, sitting at the kitchen table in Himself’s house in Alberta last Sunday, hand-writing a blog entry because I had not brought my laptop. Sitting on my own save for a bottle of Canadian and a notebook, because everyone else had left me alone for a bit to sort myself out, bless them they're so kind, in what appeared to be an exciting new version of Hell.
“So what’s Hell like, Queenie?” I hear you ask.
Well, it sure as hell ain’t warm, boys and girls. Hell is Athabasca, Northern Alberta, population who effing cares. It was 4.30pm on a Sunday and already minus nine degrees Celsius.
Queenie was having one of her internal dialogues. The really boring one she’s had a few times in her life.
“So what did I do wrong this time?”
Darned if I know girl!
“So what could I have done differently this time?”
Darned if I know girl!
“Is there something I should have said or done differently to make this not have happened?”
Darned if I know girl, but why worry? You know you wouldn’t have pulled it off anyways, being too fond of saying what you think instead of the diplomatic/politic/ manipulative thing that other women seem to be able to say to retrieve these kind of situations and get things back on track with just a few tears and a wobbly chin.
My voices are not very helpful, as you can see.
Man, I am B-O-R-E-D with these conversations.
Bored. Bored. Bored.
And with that stupid question that women always ask themselves as they brush the shattered dreamglass and assorted debris of another classic, eleven-week panic, sixty-to-zero-in-8.3-seconds, male dumping manoeuvre out of their hair. Stand up to feel their arms, legs and assorted inner organs for numbness or bruising. Undertake a survey of the esteem damage done this time. All the time thinking:
Is there something wrong with me?
Queenie doesn’t know why she asks herself this question, because there is no answer. There’s nothing wrong with her: Queenie is just Queenie. She’s halfway to the seniors' home and she ain’t changing now. But she’s pretty happy with herself; she’s mellowed over the years. Not too bitchy. Not too whiney. Not too demanding (but she is a woman, for chrissakes). Not too insecure. A great believer in giving people space if they ask for it, in whatever shape it needs to take (in fact, being cool about her boyfriend moving to Alberta for the winter to sort his head out is a very good example of how understanding she is these days).
Not that it effing gets her anywhere.
And she’s not looking for Mr. Perfect. She gave that up a long time ago. In fact, she wasn’t looking for anyone when this happened. But it did and he was up for it and she thought, fuck it, life’s too short to worry about things not working out. To hell with the consequences.
And now here we are.
Queenie and her consequences.
Back from hell.
Sigh.....
Them’s the breaks, girl.
So, what has Queenie learned?
It was very cold. When she landed in Edmonton last Thursday night it was minus 3 degrees. When she left this morning it was minus fifteen. Yes, that does sound very cold, doesn't it.
You should try having to pee by the side of the road in it.
A weird weekend. Queenie had a big case of the ‘where the hell am I’s’ most of the time. As well as a case of the ‘what the fuck am I doing here’s’. Which is the second time this has happened to her on a trip in November. For much the same reasons. Which is very scary and doesn’t bode well for travel in this month in the future.
I give up, do you know that!!
What would you make of a girl who spent hundreds of dollars on a plane ticket to go thousands of miles to see a bloke who completely blindsided her with a little speech he had prepared earlier, all about ‘I don’t think this is what I want; I think I want to be free!'
It had the usual enormous dollop of 'It's not you, it's me'. Interestingly, this time it was all wrapped up in a big helping of 'I don't want to lose you, just my sense of responsibility towards you, so I am dumping you three days before you fly home to Nova Scotia in order to spend the rest of the time persuading you that we can be friends forever. We can, can't we?'
You'd feel a bit sorry for her, wouldn't you? A bit of a domestic tragedy I suppose, you’d say. You'd understand if she was feeling a little bitter and cynical, wouldn't you?
Quite.
Now, what would you think of a girl who has had this happen to her twice in two consecutive years. In the same month.
Careless girl!
Yup, that’s exactly what I thought.
So there I was, sitting at the kitchen table in Himself’s house in Alberta last Sunday, hand-writing a blog entry because I had not brought my laptop. Sitting on my own save for a bottle of Canadian and a notebook, because everyone else had left me alone for a bit to sort myself out, bless them they're so kind, in what appeared to be an exciting new version of Hell.
“So what’s Hell like, Queenie?” I hear you ask.
Well, it sure as hell ain’t warm, boys and girls. Hell is Athabasca, Northern Alberta, population who effing cares. It was 4.30pm on a Sunday and already minus nine degrees Celsius.
Queenie was having one of her internal dialogues. The really boring one she’s had a few times in her life.
“So what did I do wrong this time?”
Darned if I know girl!
“So what could I have done differently this time?”
Darned if I know girl!
“Is there something I should have said or done differently to make this not have happened?”
Darned if I know girl, but why worry? You know you wouldn’t have pulled it off anyways, being too fond of saying what you think instead of the diplomatic/politic/ manipulative thing that other women seem to be able to say to retrieve these kind of situations and get things back on track with just a few tears and a wobbly chin.
My voices are not very helpful, as you can see.
Man, I am B-O-R-E-D with these conversations.
Bored. Bored. Bored.
And with that stupid question that women always ask themselves as they brush the shattered dreamglass and assorted debris of another classic, eleven-week panic, sixty-to-zero-in-8.3-seconds, male dumping manoeuvre out of their hair. Stand up to feel their arms, legs and assorted inner organs for numbness or bruising. Undertake a survey of the esteem damage done this time. All the time thinking:
Is there something wrong with me?
Queenie doesn’t know why she asks herself this question, because there is no answer. There’s nothing wrong with her: Queenie is just Queenie. She’s halfway to the seniors' home and she ain’t changing now. But she’s pretty happy with herself; she’s mellowed over the years. Not too bitchy. Not too whiney. Not too demanding (but she is a woman, for chrissakes). Not too insecure. A great believer in giving people space if they ask for it, in whatever shape it needs to take (in fact, being cool about her boyfriend moving to Alberta for the winter to sort his head out is a very good example of how understanding she is these days).
Not that it effing gets her anywhere.
And she’s not looking for Mr. Perfect. She gave that up a long time ago. In fact, she wasn’t looking for anyone when this happened. But it did and he was up for it and she thought, fuck it, life’s too short to worry about things not working out. To hell with the consequences.
And now here we are.
Queenie and her consequences.
Back from hell.
Sigh.....
Them’s the breaks, girl.
So, what has Queenie learned?
- Don’t ever fly anywhere to visit a bloke in November ever again. Ever!
- Don’t expect a bloke to know what he wants, particularly if you think he should be allowed to decide for himself.
- Remember that you knew this before, and somehow forgot it. And don’t ever forget it again.
So, anyways, Hell. Now that she’s back from there, Queenie supposes it’s worth a paragraph or two.
My first impression of Alberta was terrible. Edmonton is a really ugly, dull city with huge low-rise blocks and a dingy downtown. The West Edmonton Mall, which is the biggest in the Americas, has sucked all its life out I think.
We spent a night there in a hotel populated mostly by cowboys in town for the National Rodeo Championships, which were taking place that weekend. We were too tired to deal with cowboys, so we just stayed in our room and had a couple of drinks.
Next day, we went to the Mall. Jesus Christ, I hate shopping almost as much as I hate spending my road trip savings on a ticket to Dumpville. (Okay, half a ticket). But there was nothing for it; I had to get a winter jacket. I managed to find one that goes all the way to minus thirty but still gives me a waistline for less than a hundred bucks. So I was pretty pleased. Then I had to go to Gap and buy jeans because I have lost the ability to pack a rucksack after four months in the one place. Then out of the shopping mall from hell I did get rapid.
(Having said that, if you like shopping, then it’s the place for you. It’s just not Queenie’s thing. Particularly with a bloke in tow)
Then it was into the truck (vehicle, not lorry) and up to Athabasca, a couple of hours north on the road to Fort McMurray.
Why did Kate Bush put a song about her washing machine on her new album? It is too strange. The second disc is much better than the first, isn’t it?
Man, central Alberta’s some flat, as Himself would say. A flat, endless landscape. And dull. No features. No shadows. A weak November light didn’t even make it to the ground, or so it seemed. All the poplar trees along the way were completely bare, their silver and black barks reflecting what little light there was. They stood in miles and miles of canola stubble and dead grass, a beach of palest barley yellow.
The whole vast expanse of it screamed absence of light. There wasn’t even that tigerish yellow tinge that you get in Ireland at this time of year, something to do with the sun shining through dark blue-grey clouds. Here there was nothing – just pale, non-blue sky, pale fields and pale trees.
As we got further north, the landscape became a little more interesting. Less flat. The Athabasca river is wide and strong and the ice floes building up in it gave it a mottled sheen that was quite pretty to look at. All the green had been leached out of the grass up here too, though. That was what I found really unnerving, and gave me the first sense of ‘where the hell am I’, a feeling that lasted all weekend and has followed me home to dear, leafy, historic Halifax, where it is a balmy six degrees above zero.
I’m scared the same thing will happen here. Everything will shut down its life source in preparation for the cold winter. What am I supposed to do? I keep getting panicky about the winter (not helped by being wound up by psycho-Bruce about being snowed in with him for a week, and some people at home hoping I’ll freeze to death in punishment for escaping Dublin). Then I look at everyone I know here, none of whom are terribly tough (all of the really tough people I know have gone to Alberta where it’s FUCKING cold) and all these wimpish people have done dozens of winter and survived. And so will I.
But I’m really scared.
Not that that's a new feeling for Queenie in November.
And I don't feel it so much now that I’ve done that few days. And survived with not even a runny nose.
Athabasca is a small town spread out across a valley created by two smooth gentle hills that give an intimation of what’s looming in the southwest. Wandering around it in the sunshine on Sunday morning gave me an exhilarating feeling – the one you get when you go skiing – the combination of cold and sun and clean, fresh air a mile and a half above sea level. It made me long to jump in a car and head for the Rockies.
Actually, the whole weekend has given me a serious case of the itchies. In the absence of a major lottery win my choices are a bit limited. Maybe BC? Possibly a bit warmer than Halifax, what with potentially two winter elections coming up.
We'll see.......
Let's get to Christmas. As Jersey Girl reminded me the other day - only 38 days to go!
That's enough for now! I’m very tired and it’s very late and I have to go to work tomorrow, so I’ll tell you all about the logging truck trip as soon as I can.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Five Questions for Queenie
I asked Myles to ask me five questions, as he was doing the same thing on his blog and the results were interesting. So he obliged and here they are:
Five Questions for Queenie
1. [Literature] What's your favourite book from before you were 18 and why?
Too many to choose from. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, because it made me understand the power of simple language, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, by Alexander Solzhynitzen, because it made me realize that the Soviets were evil, Animal Farm and anything else by George Orwell, because it gave me the tools to analyse inequity, any of Somerset Maugham’s short stories, because they gave me my obsession with travel and new experiences.
2. [Life] What have you done today that you've never done before?
Brought a hot water bottle and a bottle of aspirin to work (see yesterday’s post).
3. [History] Describe one turning point in your life. How would your life be if it had turned out differently?
I decided not to try to be a journalist. I was too scared to try. If I hadn’t, I’d probably be a journalist now. I don’t know if my life would have been any better – just different. Possibly my life would have been better in that I wouldn’t have had to wade through the river of self-pity caused by being a complete wuss at one point in my life to the dry land of ‘stop beating yourself up over it Queenie’.
Which took forever.
But I'm there now, so who cares. And blogging is the new journalism they say.
4. [Embarrassing] Have you had pet names for parts of the body? What were they?
No. I have had pet names for parts of other people’s bodies, but, as John Bruton said once, you didn’t ask me the right question.
Smirk.
5. [Distance] What physical thing do you most miss from home?
The Wicklow Mountains. Specifically, Glendalough Valley.
And my car.
Five Questions for Queenie
1. [Literature] What's your favourite book from before you were 18 and why?
Too many to choose from. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, because it made me understand the power of simple language, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, by Alexander Solzhynitzen, because it made me realize that the Soviets were evil, Animal Farm and anything else by George Orwell, because it gave me the tools to analyse inequity, any of Somerset Maugham’s short stories, because they gave me my obsession with travel and new experiences.
2. [Life] What have you done today that you've never done before?
Brought a hot water bottle and a bottle of aspirin to work (see yesterday’s post).
3. [History] Describe one turning point in your life. How would your life be if it had turned out differently?
I decided not to try to be a journalist. I was too scared to try. If I hadn’t, I’d probably be a journalist now. I don’t know if my life would have been any better – just different. Possibly my life would have been better in that I wouldn’t have had to wade through the river of self-pity caused by being a complete wuss at one point in my life to the dry land of ‘stop beating yourself up over it Queenie’.
Which took forever.
But I'm there now, so who cares. And blogging is the new journalism they say.
4. [Embarrassing] Have you had pet names for parts of the body? What were they?
No. I have had pet names for parts of other people’s bodies, but, as John Bruton said once, you didn’t ask me the right question.
Smirk.
5. [Distance] What physical thing do you most miss from home?
The Wicklow Mountains. Specifically, Glendalough Valley.
And my car.
Monday, November 07, 2005
A hot water bottle and some aspirin
Queenie’s going to talk about periods today. Hold forth on the curse at length. Mention the menses, so to speak. Talk about interior design, as they say.
So if you’re squeamish, avert your browser.
Periods. Menstruation, menses, monthlies, on the rag, the little red fairies, the painters and decorators, the time of the month, Lady Moonbeam. The curse.
I hate the fact that it’s called the curse, but some months it surely is. The month you get it for Christmas. The month you get it when you're going on holidays. The month you get it the day of that huge presentation you have to make. The month you get it really bad. The month you miss yoga and it's like you never did a stomach crunch in your life before.
The month you get it the week you're going to Alberta.
Once, in desperate need to think positively about the whole thing, after yet another male doctor had listened to my sceal of woe, my need to control this aspect of my life in some way, shook his head patronisingly and told me I’d be grand once I’d had a baby/ gotten one of those injections that stops them altogether and no it doesn't destroy your libido that's all in your head/ stopped drinking coffee/ took 200 evening primroses capsules a day/ whatever the fad was, I bought a book on loving the female cycle.
It was called Red Moon, I think. It was all about enjoying the beautiful mystery that is the cycle of birth and death.
The book said women were a dark moon, or a white moon, depending on your cycle. I was whenever the flippin' thing arrived.
The book said women had four phases – the Virgin, the Lover, the Empress, the Hag. I went from Hag to Virgin to Hag to Virgin. At least I think that was what it was, I couldn't really understand the questionnaires.
I couldn’t summon the will to keep a Moon Log, or have a Menses Circle, or any of the soothing pseudo-Wiccan rituals Megan or whatever her name was suggested I do to take my mind off the pain. And I was thinking this afternoon on the way home, the woman who wrote that book probably never had the day Queenie had today.
In addition, the woman in the book probably has a really caring, slightly ripe but loving male Wiccan life partner who makes chamomile compresses for her and counts her moon blessings with her in the time of the Empress. Queenie’s experience of these things is that although the men in her life are usually up for a bit of TLC during ‘the time of the empress’, so long as it's not too discommoding, but they’re still a bit traumatised by the fortnight of the Hag they've just survived. So they're a bit circumspect. Not quite sure where the tire iron is located so to speak.
Honest to God, or Gaia, or Brig, or Imbolg, or whoever’s fault this is: Queenie has had enough of this shit to last her a lifetime.
When I was in secondary school, I nearly passed out with the pain on a regular basis and was staggering out of class one day to be brought home to bed when I heard one of the lads in her class say “She’s on the rag again, lads!” Effing hilarious you were that day, Billy Dooley. In fact, I’d have laughed myself stupid if I hadn’t been bent over double trying not to throw up or pass out.
If you ‘got caught’ without a tampon in school, (which I always was because I was very disorganised when I was a teenager due to having a growing brain. Apparently.) you had to go to Sr. Nora in the tuck shop and make the international gesture for ‘do you have a sanitary towel I could blag from you as I have no money for the machine in the ladies’ (arm across stomach feigning cramp, vague downward pointing motion with the other hand). She would then make the international gesture for ‘of course, pet’, which in her case was completely exaggerated (eyes crossed in sympathy, mouth silently forming the word curse?).
Then all the boys in the queue would snigger and point as she went to THE CUPBOARD and pulled out a monstrous nappy-shaped object, before beckoning you to the side door and shoving it up the tight sleeve of your school pullover. After that, you had to get yourself and your lumpen arm to the girls’ toilet and retrieve said monstrosity without ripping it to bits. Then you had to try not to walk like John Wayne for the rest of the afternoon till you got home to the box of LilLets.
No! Having an involuntary erection in geography class when you were fourteen does not count as ‘as bad’.
Not by a long shot.
At least nowadays, the poor unfortunate who experiences this would have a mobile phone to ring mammy and get her to come to the rescue. If she’s lucky enough to have a stay at home mum, I suppose. I was lucky. Once I figured out a way home, I always got put to bed with a hot water bottle and a couple of pills and enough compassion to ease the pain so I could just sleep it off.
University was a bit easier in that you could just nip off home when it got too bad. Of course, there was the odd month when you’d drunk the tampon money the night before. Or horrors, the month when you’d drunk the tampon money the night before and then the flippin’ thing arrived while you were still ensconced in some flat that was not yours. Then you had to go scrounging fifty pences from people whose bedding/ couch you had just destroyed till you had the price of one of those blue and yellow boxes that they still put in a brown paper bag for you in some shops in Dublin.
What is it with the brown paper bag???? Am I some kind of shameful hussy for havin’ my bleedin’ period? Do they put Durex in a brown paper bag?
I don’t flippin’ think so.
But the workplace is the worst. When Queenie started work it was fine, but she’s noticed a change over the years. Because we’re all equal now, and the world has moved on and technology is great, so is that part of life not sorted yet? I think that's the vibe anyway.
I should point out that it’s not men’s fault. It’s my own fault. If you tell a bloke in work that you have your period nowadays, at worst you will get ‘carefully arranged compassion’ face and an offer of some ibuprofen. Which is what you get from the average female boss anyway. Usually, you get to decide whether you should go home, unless you're really busy, in which case you wouldn't even mention that you had 'a little bit of a cramp'.
Queenie has fond memories of the old days, when you could mention the ‘cramp’ word to a boss and expect ‘terrified rabbit in the headlights’ face and “Just go home, yeah, whatever”.
Which is of course bloke for Quick, quick, before I faint at the thought of it, ewww.
But with the increase in compassion and understanding, there seems to be less ability to just go home. There seems to be an ‘I understand your pain, no really I do. Remember I worked last week when I had that sinus cold thing. That was terrible.’ vibe around now. Which is a genuine attempt to understand the unknowable. And although it's well meaning, it really pisses Queenie off, because although she will never know for sure, she reckons that if men had the kind of sudden, piercing, cold-sweated, gut-twisting, dinner-churning, spots-before-the-eyes inducing, consciousness swimming in and out of lucidity, this one goes up to eleven, o-o-o-o-w-w-w-w-! pain she experienced for two hours today, they would be sent home in an ambulance.
But Queenie being used to Lady Moonbeam ‘testing’ her, tried to struggle on, reading mind-numbingly boring preparatory documentation for the Montreal Kyoto Meeting that she couldn’t see for the pain, until she realised it was madness and went downstairs to walk around a little. This was to stretch her pelvic muscles, which had started constricting like an anaconda on a buck rabbit, and to try to stop feeling dizzy.
There’s a little coven of women who sit outside the building at lunchtime. By the time I got downstairs, I was faint, so I hunkered down to stretch my lower back muscles and explained my predicament.
Women just get it. There was a sigh of understanding. An immediate consensus on the need for a hot water bottle. One of them said “it’s the lift, too, it affects you when you go up and down”.
It does?
“All that gravity rushing towards you, girl!” This woman talks like the really emotional teacher in Boston Public. She even looks a bit like her.
Marla or whatever her name is decided I needed aspirin. Aspirin is the only thing. Had I tried it? No, I hadn’t. It helps with the - you know - apparently. I didn’t know what the ‘you know’ was, but I would have tried heroin at that point.
Aspirin emerged from a bag. I was really hoping she had a hot water bottle as well, because at this point I just wanted to lie down on the street and go to sleep forever. No hot water bottle. It was decided that I would go to the drugstore and buy one and then go home. So I did. Well I tried to.
Could Queenie get a taxi? Could she ****, as the builder said to the judge.
So, another day wasted. Another day when I could have worked through the pile on my desk, or stared out the window, or gone to the movies, or whatever. Anything rather than lie here all afternoon and evening with a hot water bottle against my back and a stomach full of painkillers.
I have tried every pill, injection, diet, exercise regime and book known to man and the only thing that works is a hot water bottle and some ibuprofen. If I ever run a business or an office, I’m going to put a comfy armchair somewhere, with some painkillers and a range of hot water bottles tucked underneath it. And if any of my girls are having an off day, they can just go curl up on the couch with the hot water bottle and the newspaper until they’re well enough to move. Or the taxi arrives. Or their mammy.
Whatever they decide.
So if you’re squeamish, avert your browser.
Periods. Menstruation, menses, monthlies, on the rag, the little red fairies, the painters and decorators, the time of the month, Lady Moonbeam. The curse.
I hate the fact that it’s called the curse, but some months it surely is. The month you get it for Christmas. The month you get it when you're going on holidays. The month you get it the day of that huge presentation you have to make. The month you get it really bad. The month you miss yoga and it's like you never did a stomach crunch in your life before.
The month you get it the week you're going to Alberta.
Once, in desperate need to think positively about the whole thing, after yet another male doctor had listened to my sceal of woe, my need to control this aspect of my life in some way, shook his head patronisingly and told me I’d be grand once I’d had a baby/ gotten one of those injections that stops them altogether and no it doesn't destroy your libido that's all in your head/ stopped drinking coffee/ took 200 evening primroses capsules a day/ whatever the fad was, I bought a book on loving the female cycle.
It was called Red Moon, I think. It was all about enjoying the beautiful mystery that is the cycle of birth and death.
The book said women were a dark moon, or a white moon, depending on your cycle. I was whenever the flippin' thing arrived.
The book said women had four phases – the Virgin, the Lover, the Empress, the Hag. I went from Hag to Virgin to Hag to Virgin. At least I think that was what it was, I couldn't really understand the questionnaires.
I couldn’t summon the will to keep a Moon Log, or have a Menses Circle, or any of the soothing pseudo-Wiccan rituals Megan or whatever her name was suggested I do to take my mind off the pain. And I was thinking this afternoon on the way home, the woman who wrote that book probably never had the day Queenie had today.
In addition, the woman in the book probably has a really caring, slightly ripe but loving male Wiccan life partner who makes chamomile compresses for her and counts her moon blessings with her in the time of the Empress. Queenie’s experience of these things is that although the men in her life are usually up for a bit of TLC during ‘the time of the empress’, so long as it's not too discommoding, but they’re still a bit traumatised by the fortnight of the Hag they've just survived. So they're a bit circumspect. Not quite sure where the tire iron is located so to speak.
Honest to God, or Gaia, or Brig, or Imbolg, or whoever’s fault this is: Queenie has had enough of this shit to last her a lifetime.
When I was in secondary school, I nearly passed out with the pain on a regular basis and was staggering out of class one day to be brought home to bed when I heard one of the lads in her class say “She’s on the rag again, lads!” Effing hilarious you were that day, Billy Dooley. In fact, I’d have laughed myself stupid if I hadn’t been bent over double trying not to throw up or pass out.
If you ‘got caught’ without a tampon in school, (which I always was because I was very disorganised when I was a teenager due to having a growing brain. Apparently.) you had to go to Sr. Nora in the tuck shop and make the international gesture for ‘do you have a sanitary towel I could blag from you as I have no money for the machine in the ladies’ (arm across stomach feigning cramp, vague downward pointing motion with the other hand). She would then make the international gesture for ‘of course, pet’, which in her case was completely exaggerated (eyes crossed in sympathy, mouth silently forming the word curse?).
Then all the boys in the queue would snigger and point as she went to THE CUPBOARD and pulled out a monstrous nappy-shaped object, before beckoning you to the side door and shoving it up the tight sleeve of your school pullover. After that, you had to get yourself and your lumpen arm to the girls’ toilet and retrieve said monstrosity without ripping it to bits. Then you had to try not to walk like John Wayne for the rest of the afternoon till you got home to the box of LilLets.
No! Having an involuntary erection in geography class when you were fourteen does not count as ‘as bad’.
Not by a long shot.
At least nowadays, the poor unfortunate who experiences this would have a mobile phone to ring mammy and get her to come to the rescue. If she’s lucky enough to have a stay at home mum, I suppose. I was lucky. Once I figured out a way home, I always got put to bed with a hot water bottle and a couple of pills and enough compassion to ease the pain so I could just sleep it off.
University was a bit easier in that you could just nip off home when it got too bad. Of course, there was the odd month when you’d drunk the tampon money the night before. Or horrors, the month when you’d drunk the tampon money the night before and then the flippin’ thing arrived while you were still ensconced in some flat that was not yours. Then you had to go scrounging fifty pences from people whose bedding/ couch you had just destroyed till you had the price of one of those blue and yellow boxes that they still put in a brown paper bag for you in some shops in Dublin.
What is it with the brown paper bag???? Am I some kind of shameful hussy for havin’ my bleedin’ period? Do they put Durex in a brown paper bag?
I don’t flippin’ think so.
But the workplace is the worst. When Queenie started work it was fine, but she’s noticed a change over the years. Because we’re all equal now, and the world has moved on and technology is great, so is that part of life not sorted yet? I think that's the vibe anyway.
I should point out that it’s not men’s fault. It’s my own fault. If you tell a bloke in work that you have your period nowadays, at worst you will get ‘carefully arranged compassion’ face and an offer of some ibuprofen. Which is what you get from the average female boss anyway. Usually, you get to decide whether you should go home, unless you're really busy, in which case you wouldn't even mention that you had 'a little bit of a cramp'.
Queenie has fond memories of the old days, when you could mention the ‘cramp’ word to a boss and expect ‘terrified rabbit in the headlights’ face and “Just go home, yeah, whatever”.
Which is of course bloke for Quick, quick, before I faint at the thought of it, ewww.
But with the increase in compassion and understanding, there seems to be less ability to just go home. There seems to be an ‘I understand your pain, no really I do. Remember I worked last week when I had that sinus cold thing. That was terrible.’ vibe around now. Which is a genuine attempt to understand the unknowable. And although it's well meaning, it really pisses Queenie off, because although she will never know for sure, she reckons that if men had the kind of sudden, piercing, cold-sweated, gut-twisting, dinner-churning, spots-before-the-eyes inducing, consciousness swimming in and out of lucidity, this one goes up to eleven, o-o-o-o-w-w-w-w-! pain she experienced for two hours today, they would be sent home in an ambulance.
But Queenie being used to Lady Moonbeam ‘testing’ her, tried to struggle on, reading mind-numbingly boring preparatory documentation for the Montreal Kyoto Meeting that she couldn’t see for the pain, until she realised it was madness and went downstairs to walk around a little. This was to stretch her pelvic muscles, which had started constricting like an anaconda on a buck rabbit, and to try to stop feeling dizzy.
There’s a little coven of women who sit outside the building at lunchtime. By the time I got downstairs, I was faint, so I hunkered down to stretch my lower back muscles and explained my predicament.
Women just get it. There was a sigh of understanding. An immediate consensus on the need for a hot water bottle. One of them said “it’s the lift, too, it affects you when you go up and down”.
It does?
“All that gravity rushing towards you, girl!” This woman talks like the really emotional teacher in Boston Public. She even looks a bit like her.
Marla or whatever her name is decided I needed aspirin. Aspirin is the only thing. Had I tried it? No, I hadn’t. It helps with the - you know - apparently. I didn’t know what the ‘you know’ was, but I would have tried heroin at that point.
Aspirin emerged from a bag. I was really hoping she had a hot water bottle as well, because at this point I just wanted to lie down on the street and go to sleep forever. No hot water bottle. It was decided that I would go to the drugstore and buy one and then go home. So I did. Well I tried to.
Could Queenie get a taxi? Could she ****, as the builder said to the judge.
So, another day wasted. Another day when I could have worked through the pile on my desk, or stared out the window, or gone to the movies, or whatever. Anything rather than lie here all afternoon and evening with a hot water bottle against my back and a stomach full of painkillers.
I have tried every pill, injection, diet, exercise regime and book known to man and the only thing that works is a hot water bottle and some ibuprofen. If I ever run a business or an office, I’m going to put a comfy armchair somewhere, with some painkillers and a range of hot water bottles tucked underneath it. And if any of my girls are having an off day, they can just go curl up on the couch with the hot water bottle and the newspaper until they’re well enough to move. Or the taxi arrives. Or their mammy.
Whatever they decide.
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