Comment faire l'amour avec un Negre sans se fatiguer by Dany Laferriere

this book took me a long time to finish, both because it was written in french and because it was boring.

it's a novel but not really a novel, rather a philosophical work about the identity of the african-american male and the war of the sexes.

the story (what story there is) takes place in montreal. the narrator, an anonymous african-american lives in an apartment on la rue st. denis with another african american named bouba. while bouba spends his days sleeping (he often sleeps up to seventy two hours at a time) and listening to jazz or reading from the koran or from freud ("allah is great and freud is his prophet"), the anonymous narator types away at an old typewriter that he purchased at a second hand store. the type writer once belonged to chester himes--or so the dealer says--and that's why the narator purchased it. anyway, when he's not writing, he's hanging out with his casual girlfriend, named only miz litterature or having sex with her friends.

aside from being boring, the novel is at times very funny. so if you're into that kind of thing, it might be worth reading just for the sense of humour. but it's also quite bitter about the situation of the african-american and related racial issues. but i guess i can forgive the bitterness, seeing as the novel was published in 1985.

Christmas

merry christmas.

so the christmas festivities are swinging--unless you happen to be living in bc and need to fly somewhere with air canada...

so, janelle and i have had this whole week off work, which is just amazingly awesome. on monday evening we had a sandwich party at our apartment with a nice crowd. i had a weirdo sandwich and it was delicious. after eating we played a game of cranium.

on tuesday vince flew in to halifax to spend christmas holidays in cape breton with ciela's family. ciela was meeting him at the airport and we decided to go see them. so, as it turned out we met up with ciela in the parking lot and we all headed in to wait for vince together. vince was flying air canada and they lost his baggage. (no surprise there). anyways, we had lunch together at our place--leftovers from the sandwich party--and then spent the afternoon shopping. after a pizza supper, we dropped vince and ciela back at the airport (where they had left ciela's car) and vince got his luggage (which must have come on a later flight from ottawa or something).

wednesday... yesterday. christmas eve. we slept in. we did six loads of laundry (we've been procrastinating), and had a little christmas celebration at the office and exchanged a few gifts. we got joy and jane some christmasy pyjamas and a fleece throw blanket for henry. (we all chipped in for a necklace for maryann, but she got that earlier.) we got a gift certificate for a restaurant from jane and joy and a gift card to nslc from maryann. henry got us some chocolates. yummy. afterwards, janelle headed to her parent's house to help them get all ready for the dinner and i stayed home and folded laundry while watching the movie traitor. (it's pretty good.)

then we headed over to janelle's parents place for some chinese food dinner. we played games, were entertained by rowdy kids (six of them!) and had a great time! we also had a gift exchange (i got some jelly beans and janelle got a singing frog, some silly string, and a glowy thing--i'm not sure what it does.) after everyone left, janelle and i stayed behind and hung out with ma and pa swan for a while. we chatted and reclined until we were all too tired to do anything...

then janelle and i headed home around twelve thirty, ate some clementines and opened our presents. they were great and we were both pleasantly surprised. :) thank you all!

today i'm looking forward to a family christmas dinner.

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

so, today i finished reading inkheart. i have to say, wow, what a great book.

the first chapter introduced so much suspense that i was hooked right away. it's a dark, rainy night and there's a stranger in the yard staring up at meggie's bedroom window ... (cue the suspenseful music.)

after chapter one i was slightly disappointed. the suspense didn't build up, in fact it dissipated. the plot took too long to unfold. but once the plot did unfold, it was great. and it had some awesome characters to make up for the slowly unfolding plot. my favourite characters were dustfinger and basta.

dustfinger is a sad lonely man. ever since silvertongue pulled him out of his story, he's been homesick and desperate to get back. he's got it into his head that silvertongue can put him back into his story ... but silvertongue just isn't doing it. so, pretty much everything dustfinger does is fueled by his desire to get back into his story; it's the only thing he wants. dustfinger made me really sad. i don't want to give away the ending(s) so don't read the end of this paragraph is you want to keep it a secret ... we find out that dustfinger's ending is really sad in his own story and at the end of this story, he still doesn't get back to his story but he's still desperate to get there, even though he knows he won't get a happy ending.

basta on the other hand isn't so sad to be out of his story. in fact, his whole life revolves around his evil master capricorn and basta loves him unquestioningly--like a dog loves his master. but basta is just as much a tragic character as dustfinger is, you see, capricorn doesn't love basta. capricorn doesn't even hate basta. capricorn nothings basta. capricorn wouldn't even notice if basta disappeared and never came back, he wouldn't care. but basta is devoted to capricorn nonetheless and everything he does, he does to get capricorn's approval, which he never gets. isn't that sad?

the most annoying character, hands down, is mortimer--or silvertongue. mortimer is a book doctor who accidentally discovers his magical ability to pull things out of stories. it's kind of sad that when he pulls basta, capricorn, and dustfinger out of one story his wife and two cats disappear into it to replace them. after this happens, he's so afraid of it happening again that he never reads aloud ever again. that's pretty much the most annoying thing in the world, right there. dustfinger constantly hounds mortimer to read him back into the story but mortimer won't even try because he's afraid of what might happen. also, he never tells meggie what's going on because he's afraid ... of what? i'm not sure. maybe he thinks she can't take it? that's annoying because whether or not she can take it, she's going to be right in the middle of it within one or two pages so why send her into it totally ignorant? anyways, mortimer is always pretty much paralyzed by fear and that just makes me totally lose interest in him. i don't mind characters who are afraid because fear is understandable but when that fear paralyzes them ... that's annoying.

that being said, the book is awesome!! read it! it's got fascinating characters. it's got maddening characters ... like mortola. ugh! i couldn't stand her! and it's got such endearing characters like farid and fenoglio. don't wait until the movie comes out, buy the book and read it! it'll make you laugh and cry and you'll love it.

The Witches by Roald Dahl

Ok, Roald Dahl is fast becoming one of my favourite children's authors, ranking right up there with whoever wrote Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (I guess that was Mordecai Richler) and Patricia MacLachlan. Who are triple-tied for first place. (J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis are tied for second place.)

The Witches is hilarious. It's got a feisty little Norweigan grandmother who smokes fat black cigars. It's got an extraordinarily clever little boy who actually likes being a mouse. It's got really creepy witches who turn children into frogs, pheasants, fish, and phmice. In short, it's a delightful book that will provide hours of suspense and hilarity for anyone. I guess now I can forgive Roal Dahl for writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Janelle Made the Dean's List!!!

Janelle is on the Dean's list at MSVU for 2007-2008 because of her outstanding academic records! Yay! :) The university even sent her a pin that says "MSVU Scholar."

Also, Janelle made it home safely from Cape Breton, despite the poor weather. She did have to stay until early afternoon though and didn't make it home until four thirty ish. It was quite the weekend. We had rain all day Sunday and most of the night. In the early morning on Monday, the rain turned to freezing rain and later snow. We woke up on Monday to a nice layer of icy snow everywhere. Schools all across Nova Scotia were closed. Also, large chunks of the city had no power. Fortunately, we never lost power. Today it's warming up again, and the snow is supposed to be all melted by the end of the week. Bummer. I'm hoping we get permanent snow before Christmas, but it's not likely.

Privateer

so i recently discovered the video game privateer and i am somewhat addicted.

what happened was that i found vega strike (which comes with my distribution of ubuntu); vega strike is a remake of privateer, but it's not complete yet, so many of the features don't work. i was disappointed because there was a lot of awesome features to vega strike. so when i found out that it was a remake, i went looking for the original and found that privateer was an abandonware game and was available for download and compatible with my distribution of ubuntu. so i downloaded it.

the premise is that you get your own spaceship. that's it. you can do anything you want with it. you can be a trader and trade goods all over the galaxy, you can be a pirate and shoot down merchants and steal their wares, you can be a mercenary and fight against pirates or enemy marauders, or you can be a bounty hunter and search for rogues and pirates or you can be all four at once. as you make money, you can upgrade your ship or trade it in for a different one. so it's pretty addictive.

so if i haven't been posting much lately, it's probably because i've been playing privateer. you can find the download at http://priv.solsector.net/ :)

Four

A) Four places that I go to over and over: the halifax gospel hall, the super store, my building (because i work in it, so i go all over in my building over and over), the washroom.

B) Four People who e-mail me regularly: mom. janelle. peter ramsey. ashleigh brilliant. (the last two because i am on their mailing lists).

C) Four of my favorite places to eat: subway, the fireside, east side mario's, and home. but especially at home.

D) Four places I would rather be right now: on a pirate ship (preferably as captain ... but i'd take pretty much anything else); on my own starship; backpacking across canada (well, maybe not right, right now because it's winter, but if it was summer i'd like to be doing that); just a few inches to the right.

E) Four people I think will respond: mom, janelle, ummm.... maybe ciela? maybe vince?

F) Four TV shows I watch: ugly betty, lipstick jungle, futurama, and the clone wars. mostly ugly betty though. i think i've seen all the futurama episodes and they're boring the second time around ... and i only watch lipstick jungle with janelle.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

The most positive thing I can say about this book is that it is very well written. The writing style is magnificent and it is easy and even pleasurable to read. Mengestu's writing is poetic.

Also, the book comes very well recommended by both the New York Times Book Review and by Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner). It also made the "Notable Book of the Year" list in the New York Times Book Review.

The novel is about an Ethiopian immigrant named Sepha Stephanos who is trying to survive in the city of Washington D.C.. He owns a small store and lives in a low-rent apartment across the street in a run down part of the city. His two friends, Kenneth and Joseph (both also African immigrants) sporadically keep him company at his store where they share drinks and play a game where they quiz each other on the details of coups and bloodbaths and tyrannical dictators in Africa. He also makes friend with a neighbour, Judith and her daughter Naomi. Judith is one of the first white people to move into the predominantly black neighbourhood. Naomi is half black because her father was a black man from Mauritania.

That being said, I found the plot to be rather tedious. It doesn't progress; that's okay, the novel is mainly character driven. What can I say about the main character? Well, I sometimes felt sympathy for him but I was mostly annoyed at him. I kept waiting for one of the other characters to shake him by the shoulders and yell at him: "Sepha! Get over yourself!"

He immigrated to the United States after his father was murdered by a revolutionary militia during the Red Terror in Ethiopia during the 1970s. That's not the worst part--he was murdered because the militiamen found flyers in his house advertising anti-revolutionary meetings being held at a secret location; the flyers actually belonged to Sepha, who was spared because his father refused to say who the flyers belonged to. Okay, that's pretty scarring and I can imagine the emotional damage caused by such trauma. So now I seem like a black-hearted tool for wanting to tell him to get over himself.

Let me explain myself. When Sepha first comes to Washington D.C., he lives with his Uncle Berhane, who also fled to the United States during the revolution. In Ethiopia, Berhane was a wealthy bureaucrat but in Washington D.C. he drives a taxi and works late into the evening at menial jobs. Uncle Berhane is one of the most admirable characters in the novel. (Read it, you'll agree with me.) Sepha sleeps on Berhane's couch. His main goal is to go back to Ethiopia. What does he plan to do when he gets back? It's not clear. He just wants to go back. Uncle Berhane gets him a job as a bellhop at the Capitol Hotel. It's hard work, but it pays exceptionally well. While he works there, Sepha meets Kenneth and Joseph who are also bellhops. The three become lifelong friends. Later, Uncle Berhane convinces Sepha to go to University. So, Sepha enrolls into an engineering program at a local university. But he doesn't finish. He drops out. And quits his job at the Capitol Hotel. To go back to Ethiopia? No. He buys a small grocery store in a run down neighbourhood with a small business bank loan and moves into an apartment across the street. At first he is enthusiastic but gradually, he neglects his store more and more until it fails to make any profit. Then he wallows in self-pity because the store is doing poorly. He sleeps with prostitutes, spends odd evenings drinking with Kenneth and Joseph while they either argue about poetry, politics, business, economics, or their personal lives. If they're not arguing, they're playing a game where they make each other guess the details surrounding various African dictatorships. His life at this point is characterized by inaction. He does nothing to save his store or better himself. He gets up and opens his store, or sleeps in and keeps his store closed until he feels like getting up and walking across the street and opening the store. Some days, he stays home all day doing very little, if anything. And the store across the street slowly dies.

When Judith moves to his neighbourhood and makes friends with him, he bonds easily with her daughter Naomi. Romance begins to bud between Judith and Sepha. Judith and Naomi offer him a chance to become someone. At first, his enthusiasm is renewed. He cleans out the store and redecorates it, he starts to keep regular hours again. But then he lets his insecurities get offended by just about everything Judith is and does, then he alternately pushes her away and runs away from her. He refuses to be honest with her while acknowledging to himself the damage he is doing both to himself and their relationship, but he refuses to let go of his insecurities. Then he feels sorry for himself that things aren't working out with Judith and goes back to neglecting his store. At this point it's something like twenty years since he has moved to Washington and he is no closer to going back to Ethiopia, although he's always talking about it when he's with Kenneth and Joseph.

Okay, maybe I'm being a little hard on Sepha. I do feel sypathy for him. But, to me, if the novel shows anything, it shows how destructive self-pity can be and that's about all I've got to say.

daddy's whiskers

they're always in the way,
the cow eats them for hay
momma eats them in her sleep,
she thinks she's eating shredded wheat
they're always in the way.

(author unknown)

just thought i'd share that with all my avid readers. janelle sang it to me tonight as we were on our way home. do you know any silly songs?

fall on your knees

i finished reading fall on your knees by ann marie macdonald today. i have to say, it was very enjoyable to read. the writing style was excellent and the story and characters were engaging.

the novel is set on cape breton island during the early part of the 20th century and revolves around the piper family, particularly the four piper sisters, kathleen, mercedes, frances, and lily. the subject matter is often disturbing--like when three or four year old frances tries to baptize baby ambrose in the creek behind the house for example... but it gets worse. there are also moments of hilarity and joy, though. so it kind of balances out a little. the scales still tip a little too much to the disturbing side for me.

the first thing i noticed about the novel was it's descriptions of cape breton island. both times i've been to cape breton, i've found the place very charming and its people wonderful and colourful. but i've also found it very barren. as in, empty or sparsely populated. in fall on your knees cape breton is thriving. there are people everywhere. sydney is a small city that easily matches halifax (no one goes to halifax--especially not after 1917). busy little mining towns pop up all over the island almost overnight. the people are poor and live on a low income, but there are lots of them and some of them do quite well, like the jewish family that owns a delicatessen, or the lebanese family that owns a general store kind of thing that, towards the end of the novel, has grown into a chain of stores with offices and warehouses all over the province. james makes a very decent living as a bootlegger and a boot maker (funny, eh?). jameel mahmoud makes a decent, though desperate living operating a speakeasy during the prohibition era. almost everyone else works in the coal mines. i liked that the novel was well populated. it paints a rich landscape of the culture and economy of cape breton in the first half of the twentieth century.

i'll paraphrase one of my favourite thoughts in the novel: the cape bretonners are discussing the economic situation of the 1930s, saying that the great depression hasn't hit cape Breton quite so hard. someone else remarks that it's because for cape breton the great depression began in 1867, with confederation. and, at least in the novel, it's true.

it's not a novel i would freely recommend. it gets creepy and it gets horrifyingly disturbing ... like when you find out who lily's parents really are and what mercedes really saw the day before her mother's death.

favourite comfort food

my answer to mother's question regarding my favourite comfort food:

my comfort foods. i'm not sure if i have "comfort" foods per se. foods that seem most comforting to me are hot creamy soups or hot chunky, meaty stews. but i also like hot smashed potatoes, squash (especially that brown sugar and squash thing). pretty much anything that's hot and you can eat with little or no effort with a spoon.

my favourite meals.... another tough one because i like almost everything. everything, that is, except north american-chinese food. blech. i think it depends on how i feel or how hungry i am. because some days i'd like a simple smashed potatoes and chicken meal just fine ... other days i like steak and salad and, well, you know, all the courses that go with that. hmm. i would have to say though, that one meal i can have anytime, day, or place is soup and sandwiches or salad and sandwiches. also, german pancakes or finnish pancakes (like from the hoito) and belgian waffles i could eat those any time.

favourite dessert. well, here's the list not necessarily in any order, but just as i think of them: pumpkin pie; the brown sugar and squash thing (yes, i would eat it for dessert, breakfast, lunch, supper, or midnight snack); apple crisp (with vanilla ice cream); ice cream on a waffle sugar cone; sponge cake with some kind of tasteful icing (or none at all would be okay too). that's pretty much all i can think of right now :)

happiest childhood memories

my answer to mother's latest question: what are my happiest and saddest childhood memories

okay... my happiest childhood memories. this is a tough question because i don't really remember how i felt about stuff, i only remember what happened, so i can't really tell you when i was happiest, but i can tell you which memories make me happiest now.

the first one i can think of is the day dad, uncle louis, chad, and i went fishing at adam's creek. you and sophie may have been there, but i don't remember. we fished all day and didn't catch a single thing (as far as i can remember) and we went home soaking wet and exhausted but we had an awesome great time.

the other one isn't really one contiguous memory but rather just clumps of memory or vague nostalgic feelings. like exploring the rock "desert" (that's what we called it) next to our house with chad. or exploring the woods and fields on our property with chad. once, i think it was a snow day, chad and i were home alone and we packed a lunch and some supplies--chad's rifle, an axe, matches--and strapped on some snowshoes and then we went for a long hike through the woods in a blizzard. we were out all day, came back in time for supper. another happy memory is on a sunday afternoon, again we had a giant snow storm, mathieu was over for the afternoon and he, chad and i rode the old bomb (the black snow machine) all afternoon and into the evening--until we had to come back in to get ready for gospel meeting. i also remember chad and i shoveling the drive way late at night in dead still ice cold weather or blinding snowstorms and then coming inside to sit by the woodstove until our faces thawed. also the summers we spent at tower lake with cousin mitch.

my saddest childhood memories... hm. another tough one.

probably the times i was mean to chad or the couple times i yelled at dad. like once when chad bonked his head and started crying and i called him a wimp. :(

or the time when dad and chad and i went hunting and i kept lagging behind and whining about it and my mittens came off and i got snow down my sleeves and i felt like dad wouldn't wait for me (that part doesn't really make me sad, the next part does:) dad kept bringing it up, almost every year when we went hunting after that and he would tell me how bad he felt and how he wished he would have come back and picked me up and carried. that makes me sad. i bet that if i came home today and got dad to take me hunting he'd bring it up again ...

also, when dad used to sing "cat's in the cradle" i always cried when he sang that ... and then he'd sing it just to make me cry and i'd get angry at him. i think i was fifteen or sixteen (old enough to be at the dentist by myself, but before the dentist office moved into the mall) i was in the dentist's chair and the hygienist was working in my head and the song came on the radio and i was so embarrassed and worried that i was going to start crying. fortunately, i didn't.

one time in early spring (early enough that there was still about five or six feet of snow on the ground but late enough that it was really warm and the snow was mostly slushy) chad, jeremy, and i went for a hike ... we were in snowshoes and for some reason chad and jeremy did okay but mine kept sinking and i couldn't keep them straight so they'd tip me over and then i'd trip and fall into the slush. so i took off my snowshoes when we were about halfway to our destination and tried ploughing through the slush but the layers of crust kept breaking under me and the snow was too deep for me to walk on the ground and keep my head above it, so i kind of had to swim/crawl through the snow and i kept getting wetter and wetter ... i was SO angry and upset. finally i just turned around and headed for home. chad and jeremy got to their destination, made a fire, had lunch and headed back before i even made it back to my snowshoes. by this time i was soaked right through my snowsuit to my underwear. jeremy made it to my snowshoes before i did and picked them up, chad caught up with me, picked me up and put me on his back and carried me the whole way home. that makes me sad because i regret being so angry and feeling sorry for myself for being wet and cold.

also, when dad had his gall bladder taken out. it was a saturday and he had to go to work, but there was a family breakfast thing at uncle louis' house. i drove dad to work and i think he wanted me to go straight to uncle louis' from there but i was really tired because i'd stayed up late the night before so i went home and went back to bed. at around nine or so, dad came home and woke me up because he wanted me to drive him to the hospital because his stomach hurt really badly. i got up, had a long hot shower while dad waited for me and then drove him to the hospital, just dropped him off, and then went to uncle louis' and waited until after breakfast when almost everyone else had left to tell uncle louis that dad was at the hospital!!!!! then, uncle louis got his jacket and keys and got right in the van and we drove to the hospital together and went to the emergency entrance where jesse was working in the reception area with the triage nurse. jesse told us that dad had been admitted... so we found him in a gowny thing on a hospital bed hooked up to an iv thing... and i felt so ashamed of myself.

i guess that's not really a childhood memory anymore though ... it's more like a young-adult memory so i'm gonna stop there.

earliest childhood memories

an avid reader asked me what my earliest childhood memories are, so after spending the morning delving into my brain, this is the result:

my childhood memories are very cloudy. i don't really remember one continuous stream of memories, just clumps.

my earliest ones involve playing in the sandbox with my brother chad behind our little yellow house on government road in kapuskasing. and we also played on the front deck. chad and i would slide through the bars and then back in... or that might have been at my grandmother's house on byng street, but in my memory it was at the yellow house. i also remember dad putting chad and i to bed, sleeping feet to feet at opposite ends and i had my braces on.

i remember cutting my finger on something in the basement of the rodger's house in val-rita (the one we moved into later) and it bled and bled (well, it seemed like it was bleeding a lot, but i couldn't have been more than four years old so it probably just seemed like a lot) and my mother said something about me going to school soon.

and then i remember moving to val-rita. for some reason, i remember my father and someone else knocking down a wall in the old yellow house and pulling a step-stool out from behind it. (i doubt that actually happened--it just seems so bizarre that we'd store a step-stool in the wall or that we'd even have room for one there considering that the house was so small, but that's how i remember it.) and i remember sitting on the tailgate of a pick up truck in grandma's driveway/parking lot and crying because i didn't want to move and mr. larocque telling me that i was gonna be living in a nicer, bigger house and that everything was gonna be ok. or something--i don't really remember what he said, just that he was teasing me or something.

i remember my first day of school. well, actually, i just remember mom getting me a blanket (for nap time) and a back pack and telling me that i was going to school. i started going to school in the afternoons. i remember standing at the end of our driveway in val-rita (where perras road splits
into our driveway) waiting for the bus. i remember being at school, and being surprised that i could speak english. i remember brian; he was a bully and every day he'd pick someone different to be his "friend" and one day i was all happy because he picked me.

i remember pooping my pants in kindergarten ... or was that grade one? and mom and grandma came to get me at school. wow, that still embarrasses me (not that mom and grandma came to get me, but that i pooped my pants.)

so... yeah, those are my earliest memories, i think. i hope they make for some nice funny reading.

Gideon's Spies -- the secret history of the mossad

so i just finished reading this book by gordon thomas, loaned to me by my brother in law, steve. it's a quite fascinating and remarkably (even surprisingly) well researched account of the history of mossad from its inception in the 1950s.

the book begins with an examination of the death of princess diana from mossad's perspective. it gives details about the conspiracy theories surrounding her death and the death of her lover dodi al fayed, and driver henri paul--who was an informant, not only for local french intelligence agencies, but also for mossad and other foreign intelligence services and the press.

the book is full of anecdotes. it tells the story of rafael eitan's kidnapping of adolf eichman in argentina, it tells stories about assassination attempts (both successful and unsuccessful) against terrorist leaders who could not be brought to justice. it also tells about mossad's involvement in the death of britain's media tycoon robert maxwell. the most annoying thing about these anecdotes is that they are often inconclusive. they tell a small part of a story, or are used as an example and then the author trails off to discuss something entirely different. for example, it tells the story of dr. ri che-woo, a north korean microbiologist who escaped from north korea along the new exodus route, revived by douglas shin--a korean-american pastor at a suburban los angeles church--, and norbert vollersten--a german doctor who completed a work term in north korea. the story is quite touching but ends abruptly when dr. ri che-woo is captured by chinese public security officers. nothing more is told about new exodus or any of its other participants, though they were painstakingly introduced.

the book made me think, though: it's hard to justify the existence of secret intelligence or security agencies in a democratic country. the very secrecy surrounding the actions of these agencies makes them inaccessible to the democratic process. the only way they can be controlled by the people is through the democratically elected head of state. but, these are often untrustworthy. furthermore, how can we even know that we can trust our democratically elected heads of state if some of the actions that they approve are forever cut off from public knowledge?

it is our fear of the 'other' that necessitates secret agencies: fear of terrorism, fear of enemy nations, fear of friendly nations... it was fear of the soviet union that brought on the need for secret agencies in canada and the usa, and much of the western world.

gideon's spies does not vilify mossad but neither does it lionize it. it simply "tells it like it ... is" (in the words of meir amit, former director general of mossad 1963-1968).

i think the main lesson from the book is that human intelligence (called "humint" in the book) is better than electronic intelligence, gathered by satellites and computers. mossad relies almost exclusively on human intelligence through its katsas (field agents) and sayanim (sleeper agents or informers). they have a relatively small number of katsas, but many thousands of sayanim in almost every country. mossad's model is contrasted with american intelligence agencies such as the nsa and the cia who rely heavily on satellites and space age computer technology.

the book should be required reading for anyone who wants to study modern history and the role of secret intelligence and security agencies around the world in the cold war era and the post cold war era.

Dan and Katie Come to Halifax for the Weekend

We had Dan and Katie for the weekend. They arrived shortly after midnight on Friday. (Thankfully, Janelle and I had the weekend off.) So after I got off work I did five loads of laundry and tidied up the apartment a little. By the time Janelle got home after seven, we were both exhausted. And Janelle had been so busy at Little Caesar's that she hadn't had supper yet. (It was halloween, they made their greatest sales ever.)

Saturday morning Dan and Katie, Heidi, Janelle and I went to the market. While Katie, Janelle, and Heidi shopped, I accompanied Dan to the part of the market where they sell peanut butter balls. Dan bought a couple and an apple and then we walked along the waterfront for a while.

Then Mary Ann (my big boss) called and I had to reclean an apartment that I had cleaned Friday... So we all went back home and Dan helped Janelle and I clean while Katie and Heidi went to the blackmarket. (Probably to buy drugs and guns--thereby ensuring Kenny's job security.) Anyways, it took a little more than an hour to clean the apartment, Janelle was fantastic because she knew just what to do and how to do it. It was a bit of a consolation to me that Mary Ann made the carpet cleaners redo their job in that apartment too.

After lunch we went to Peggy's cove (see Janelle's facebook for photos) and had a wonderful, great time. And when we got back we had Nathan and Andrew and Emma Joy and Heidi for supper. We decided that, instead of having a guestbook, we would make our guests draw pictures for us with the tablet. That's how we discovered that Nathan is an artistic genius.

Nathan painted this with watercolour

and drew this with crayons

this is heidi's contribution.

Dan drew this guy. He also drew the first one.

After supper Janelle, Katie, and Emma Joy went to the mall while Nathan, Andrew, Dan and I stayed at the apartment. We jammed for a bit, and drew pictures, and Andrew and Dan had plenty of Cape Bretonese conversations (yikes).

Sunday we had Heidi and her dad (who flew in from Fort McMurray on Saturday night--Janelle and Katie made a "welcome home" poster for him). for lunch. After lunch Dan and Katie had to head back for Sydney. And it was freezing cold outside. Janelle and I spent the rest of the evening recouperating from the weekend. We napped, snuggled, watched a movie...

On Monday, after work, Juaniece came over and we worked on her website. Ok, it's still not up yet, but I'm hoping to get something up SOON. This time she wanted it totally revamped... so we completely changed the look of it.

Sofa Shopping with the In Laws

janelle and i had the night off yesterday, so we called up her parents and decided to go sofa shopping.

so, after a wonderful meal with janelle's parents (baked potatoes, cheesy broccoli (how do you spell that anyway??), and roast beef (i think), with delicious carrots--i think she baked them with honey and orange juice--yum) i was full and sleepy. perfect for sofa shopping.

the first place we went to was ashley furniture in bayer's lake. it's a fantastic store with a huge sales floor full of sofas, mostly, tastefully arranged and set up to sell. also, the sales staff is really helpful and not pushy at all.

sofa shopping, especially when i'm not doing the purchasing, is probably one of the most relaxing things there is. i just sat on all the different couches and recliners while we discussed the pros and cons of different couches. we found one sofa that we all really liked, that would look excellent in janelle's parent's apartment but we were still wondering what else there was out there, so we went to sears.

sears is a ridiculous store. they just put everything they got on the floor with no arrangement or design to it so you have to go looking for what you want. anyways, we just sat in one couch and talked about the one we liked from ashley's, then we went back to ashley's and janelle and i waited in the car while mister and misses went inside to buy the sofa.

afterwards, we all went over to our apartment and played apples to apples and banagrams while we feasted on whole grain tortilla chips and cheesies and some caramel brule and wine. it was an altogether fantastic evening.

after they left, i was in a hurry to get out of my pants because they were getting painfully tight.

Bamboo Tablet Thing

so, janelle bought me a writing / drawing thing, like one of those tablets that come with a pen and you write on the tablet with the pen and it shows up on the computer screen. well, she bought me one of those.

so i started playing with it and at first i found it really hard to work with, but i've now figured it out (i think) and produced my first painting:


ok, so it's not that great--it's just a tree with a sky and a sun. but it's start, you know. maybe eventually i'll be able to paint all sorts of things. what i really want is to see janelle develop her stick figure art. :)

on the darker side... i've gone back over to windows :( well, at least 25% of the way there. we're now running windows exclusively on janelle's computer because i couldn't use the tablet thing on mine while it's running ubuntu. so here's to many more forays into piracy...

Che -- A Revolutionary Life

So, I recently finished reading "Che -- A Revolutionary Life," the biography of Ernesto Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson.

It's a good book because Ernesto Guevara is a fascinating and exciting character. He adopts the name "Che" (which means something like "Hey You!") around the same time he becomes a solid communist. Interestingly, though, he never joins the Soviet sponsored international Communist Party. After studying to become a doctor specializing in asthma and allergies, he spends the rest of his life trying to spread the proletarian revolution in South America. The book records his early life, his struggle to bring the revolution to the world by guerrila warfare first in Cuba and later in Africa and finally in Bolivia and finally his death by execution in the Bolivian Andes.

The detail provided in the book is amazing; it was obviously very well researched. What I liked most about the book was its honesty about Che's character. It wasn't romantic or glorified but it showed him as a regular human being. It's true that he was an outstanding man who did some very remarkable things, he also had some very admirable qualities--his determination, his hard work, his passion, and his quirky and kind of weird sense of humour--but the book also records his flaws and presents him as a deeply flawed individual (just like the rest of us).

For example, Che continues to believe unquestioningly that people are basically good and that they will put their self interest aside and work for the good of the group even when he is faced by the complete self-centeredness of some of his closest comrades who, after they have commited their lives to the revolution and are told by Che to count themselves as already dead, lose faith in the struggle and abandon both their comrades and the revolution.

When he goes to the Congo, the great Congolese revolutionary fighters won't fight, they run away dropping their weapons and baggage as soon as anyone fires at them; they won't carry anything but their weapons--when asked to they say, "what do I look like? a truck?" or "what do I look like? a woman?" or "what do I look like? a cuban?" (Because Che and his soldiers ended up having to do all the heavy carrying because the Congolese wouldn't). Anyways, the Congolese revolution ended in failure because of the simplicity and self-interestedness of its fighters.

In Bolivia, Che himself is betrayed by the people he came to help. His goal in Bolivia and in all of South America was to improve the conditions of the common people and give them a stake in their government because they were being oppressed by North American backed capitalist military dictatorships. It was the common people of Bolivia who, many times over, reported his whereabouts to the Bolivian army. It was the Bolivian army that tracked down and executed Che in the Bolivian Andes as he was trying to escape the country after the failure of his short-lived guerrilla campaign.

It's a book worth reading. It shows the flaws of the communist-socialist system through the eyes of a communist. Che drew much opposition and disapproval from the officials of the Soviet Union for his methods and practices, and also his militant anti-North American stance. But his stance is justified, to a certain degree; the book shows North American adventurism and imperialism and their effects in South America resulting in the poverty of the common people and the dependence of the state on North American industry for import/export and economic aid and how this dependence was fostered by American imperialism. It also showed how the North American anti-communist campaign saw many fascist dictatorships installed in South America: Augusto Pinochet's North American backed government in Chile; Batista's regime in pre-communist Cuba; the CIA sponsored coup of the Arbenz government in Guatamala when the US government thought he was getting to be a little too socialist; and the US supported dictatorship of Rene Barrientos in Bolivia. Nevertheless, it also demonstrates the imperialism of the Soviet Union as it tried to gain exclusive control over its sattelite states.

It's a book that can change your world-view of the events of the Cold War.

Bongo Drum

So the other day, Vince inspired me to buy a bongo drum for my wife.

Okay, well, he didn't exactly intentionally inspire me to buy a bongo drum for my wife, what he did was send me a book in the mail. Of course, I wasn't at home when the mail came it, so when I got off work I had a notice saying that I had a package at the post office.

Meanwhile, I've been wanting to buy Janelle a bongo drum ever since she bought me a guitar. That way I can play the guitar and she can beat the drum and we can be kind of like band. If only we could find someone to play bass.

Anyways, it just so happens that the music store is right across the street from the post office, so while I was at the post office getting my book from Vince I thought, hey, I'm gonna go look at how much those bongo drums cost. So I went. And they weren't as expensive as I thought they'd be. So I bought one and brought it home, and played with it, and left it in the livingroom.

So when Janelle got home from work, I surprised her with it and she was thrilled :) Now we read psalms to each other: one person reads and the other beats the drum.

And We're Back

So, after a long silence, we've returned. And, as you've probably noticed, we've also updated the website.

Maybe the reason I haven't written anything in so long is that noting really interesting has happened. We've had a long and mostly uneventful summer. The furthest from home we've gone is to Sydney to visit Dan and Katie and for Andrew and Emma Joy's wedding in Margaree. All on the same weekend. And we spent a week and a half in Ontario in June to see cute, dear little Jelena Joy Labelle. And her parents and grandparents, of course.

While we were in Ontario we also got to see my old room mate and great friend Jason and we found out that our automobile needs a new transmission. So we decided that we're going to sell it. Living without a car is going to be interesting...

There's a lot of things we intended to do but never did, like white water rafting, hiking, more travelling. But, all in all, we had a pretty good, quiet summer.

Now Janelle is back in school and very busy. I'm now working out of the office instead of doing all the cleaning, which is a nice break; also, I'm learning a lot of new things so that's pretty exciting. I'm sure it's temporary, though.

Also, Janelle and I are teaching ESL one night a week and we've made some great friends through that. It helps that a lot of our students live in our building.

We've kind of decided that we're going to try to go abroad to teach English with our friend Luke. We're thinking Egypt right now, but that could change. So I'm looking into taking a TESL course to get certified for teaching English. Janelle and Luke will both have it because they'll have graduated from the B.Ed. program at Mount Saint Vincent University.

Anyways, that's the boring plot of our uneventful lives.

Doughnuts and Coffee

so it's five am on sunday morning. i just relieved our night watchman. in three hours, we'll all be awake and ready to face another day of move ins and move outs. i can't wait until the craziness has subsided. janelle can't wait until school starts. (she's crazy.)

Capitalism Strikes Again

The province of Nova Scotia is in the process of increasing the minimum wage to something like ten dollars per hour or something like that.

One of the government's reasons for doing this is that it will match inflation rates. Which means that, as prices rise with inflation, the minimum wage rises so that stuff doesn't become unaffordable.

The main problem with this is that most people make their money by making and selling stuff. So with an increased minimum wage, it's now more expensive to make stuff. To offset this, company owners will either increase the price of their stuff or lay off lots of their employees. And the cycle begins again.

What causes inflation anyway? The simple answer is this: as the amount of money in circulation increases, prices increase accordingly. Deflation occurs when the amount of money in circulation decreases and prices decrease.

So, throwing more money into the mix is not going to fix the real problem of inflation. Inflation is a problem because it raises the price of stuff beyond it's actual worth into an area called "perceived worth," which is the amount of money people are willing to pay for it. The actual worth of stuff can be calculated by how much it costs to make it and then you can increase that number by as much as seven or eight million percent to make a profit. For example, at Little Caesar's Pizza(tm), it costs an estimated average of $0.18 to produce one bag of Crazy Bread (tm). The same Crazy Bread is then sold for $2.99 resulting in a profit of $2.81 per bag. (Cut that it half on Fridays and Wednesday.)

In actuality, the problem isn't inflation, it's the amount of money in circulation. And when you consider that as much as 75% of the money in circulation is actually artificial money--ie. Credit the problem of inflation becomes a little more understandable.

Survey finds passengers call airline service 'dismal' -- No Kidding.

So I was reading the news today and came across the titled article. Here's a quote from it:

"Passengers are more dissatisfied with airlines' customer service than they have been in years at a time when carriers are charging more and more for tickets and services.

"An annual survey being released Tuesday by the University of Michigan found customers giving airlines the worst grades since 2001, with the industry's overall scores dropping for the third straight year."

It's no secret that airline companies are scrambling for money. Ticket prices are increasing, major airlines are going under, other airlines are merging. They're all tightening the belt to save or make more money.

Do you want to know where your customer service is going? How well do you think these airlines treat their employees?

I worked in two different grocery stores and one pizza joint, so I'm kind of acquainted with the customer service industry. The one rule in customer service is this: treat your customers well and they'll come back.

But what's happening more and more is that the owners, always desperate for more money--it seems the more money they make, the more they want--are cutting their spending all over the place. When I worked at the Superstore, they were cutting labour hours drastically, including cashiers, to increase their earnings. If there's one thing you don't do at a grocery store, it's cut your cashier hours.

What resulted, as we expected, was less cashiers working during peak times, resulting in huge long lineups of customers at every cash. We found that more and more customers were leaving their groceries in their carts, at the checkout, and heading to other grocery stores. Do you think those customers will come back? Not to do their major groceries, they won't. Maybe to pick up bread and milk on the way home, if at all. Add to that the cost in labour of putting their unpurchased groceries back on the shelves and the cost of spoiled meat and dairy items being left in the cart too long while they wait (usually 12 hours to two days) for someone to put them away.

The bottom line is, if you want to keep your customers and have record setting customer service, treat your employees well and they will treat your customers well. If you have cranky employees who hate their jobs because they're being forced to do more and more work for less and less money (they get less hours per week--thus less money--and when they do work, they have to work harder because there are fewer people working) they aren't going to be very nice to their customers.

I've worked some places where the employees actually hate the customers. Granted, this is sometimes because the employees have personal problems, but often it's because they have more and more work piling up on them while more customers only mean more work.

At Last: All Moved In & Our New Job

So we're finally all moved in to our new apartment.

We got a new job, working for Killam Properties as resident managers and we're one week in. Well, one week and three days, to be exact.

The move was kind of stressful, we packed everything up and moved it one carload at a time over five or six days. Then Joanne and Colin loaned us their van and we moved our couch, bed, and bookshelves. And we bought a new couch from the Brick. It's in our office now, and it's getting lots of use.

We started working at the new job as soon as we moved in. It's great though, there's no commute. We can just hop out of bed, get dressed, and ride the elevator down to the office.

Our co-workers include, Joy, Henry, Lawson, Jane, and Mary-Anne. Joy is our immediate supervisor, she lives just down the hall from our apartment, which is real handy if we have any questions late at night. She's great. She works real hard but she's fun to work with and great to be around. Henry is our sweet little old maintenance man. His office is in the dungeon-parking garage. He fixes everything from plugged sinks to broken toilets. Lawson is the maintenance man for the building next door, but since the two buildings share one office, we get to see him all the time and he's a great help too if we have any questions. Jane is the manager of the building next door (she's Lawson's supervisor) but she mostly does paperwork in the office and since she's mostly always in the office, she's also the unofficial receptionist. Mary-Anne is everyone's boss. She's a great boss though, I mean, she's got a no-nonsense personality and high standards but she's also really nice and compassionate.

Anyway, our job is something like this: we start at eight o'clock and ride the elevator down to the office. Someone is always there before us with coffee from Tim Horton's across the street. Joy pays her kids to fetch the coffee on their way to school. If Mary-Anne is away (at a meeting or running late) we hang around the office for about twenty minutes or half an hour, drink coffee, and talk about the day and night before or whatever, just to get all caught up. If Mary-Anne is there, she doesn't like us hanging around the office, so we either hang out on the smoking dock while Joy and Jane and Lawson smoke or we get right to work.

The first thing we do is sweep and mop the lobby and all the elevators and in front of all the elevators on every floor, and the laundry room. This takes about an hour and a half or two hours. When Janelle and I do it together it takes less time and that always surprises Joy. We also check the hallways for garbage and the garbage chutes for any garbage or recyclables that haven't been properly disposed of. We store any glass or plastic bottles in the electrical rooms on every floor and every once in a while Henry will come by with a shopping cart and collect them all. Then they go down to the bottling room in the dungeon and when we have spare time we sort them into blue bags and once a month they get taken to the bottling place where we get the deposits back. And we have to check some of the gauges in the boiler room, to make sure everything is going okay. In the boiler room there's also a door that leads onto the roof, and I always like to stand on the roof and let the cool salty wind blow me around for a bit while I look out over the harbour and the city.

After the sweeping and mopping are done we check in at the office again to see what needs to be done, or if it's obvious we just do it. Last Monday they told me to sweep the parking garage. Just like that. So I hunted all over the building for one of those long brooms (that took about half an hour--but that's okay because I'm not getting paid by the hour) and I started sweeping up the dirt and the dust and the garbage in the parking garage. I had a nice big pile of dirt accumulated after about an hour and a half and I was calculating that the job would probably take me the rest of the day. It was hard work too, and I was covered in sweat and all the dirt that was flying up from my sweeping was sticking to me so I was really dirty, like an eighteenth century chimney sweeper from a Charles Dickens' novel. That's when Henry walked by and saw what I was doing. He started laughing and said, "Contrary to what they told you, you don't have to do that."

Then he explained that I don't have to sweep the whole garage, I just have to go through it and sweep up all the garbage, like little pieces of paper or broken bottles and things like that--anything that looks like it doesn't belong in a parking garage. So, after that it only took me until half an hour after lunch. Yeah, we get a one hour lunch from twelve to one. We usually go back up to our apartment for soup or sandwiches. I like to stretch out on the couch and take a nap or something. After I finished sweeping the parking garage I swept the stairs and that took me the rest of the day because it's a twelve storey building.

The next day Janelle and I mopped the stairs and it was a bit faster because there were two of us. (Janelle was working at Little Caesar's on Monday.) Aside from that, we vacuum every second week, sweep the back stairs (the tunnel to the Stupid Store) every second day--that only takes about ten minutes though--, and clean up the garbage on the lawn somewhat regularly; like when it looks bad. At four, we go home and have supper. And we're off for the night.

Every second night and every second weekend we're on call. That means one of us has to stay home all the time with the telephone, Killam gave us a cell phone and on the nights that we're on call, we turn on the call forwarding so that anyone calling the office phone will ring on this cell phone. So we deal with all kinds of things at night. Mostly it's the money machine in the laundry room. The paper feeder jams all the time. On Sunday I got called down to fix it four times, and two times on Saturday. Or if anyone gets locked out because they forgot their keys, we let them in. We also have to do the evening checks on the boiler room, and a quick walk through the building to make sure everything is okay and there's no garbage lying around. On Friday and Saturday a security guard comes in at night from ten to five and he deals with all the noise complaints and the people smoking in the lobby or drinking on the front step so that we can get some sleep.

Sometimes homeless people come in and sleep in the stairs. If we find them, we have to kick them out. The socialist in me feels bad about kicking them out, but it's my job and they defecate and urinate in the stairs and we have to clean up after them; we really don't need that. The insane part is that it's the tenants who let them in. If they see them waiting by the door, they hold the door open so the homeless people can come in. That doesn't make sense to me; what's the point of having a security system if you're not going to use it? Before we let anyone in, if they claim that they don't have their keys or got locked out, we need their apartment number or social inurance number and then we double check it in the office. If it doesn't check out, they can't come in. Mind you, if they wait by the door long enough, one of the tenants will let them in. But if they keep hanging around, we're supposed to call the police to have them removed. I'm glad Janelle can put on a pretty stern voice. Anyways, there are places they can go to spend the night but the reason they don't go is because they don't want to give up their booze and drugs.

On our first night on call, we got a call from someone in the laundry room complaining that his laundry had been stolen. So, I went down and double checked. The laundry was really gone. So I called Joy, who happened to be doing her laundry that night too, and she met me in the office where we checked the security cameras. It turned out that someone was helping Joy and she took the laundry from the wrong dryer. We found the missing laundry in Joy's apartment. The next day someone else came by the office with the same complaint and we found his laundry in Joy's apartment too.

It's just a day in the life.

Crazy Beautiful Day

We had an awesome day today!

Our first real day off together in a really long time, we packed a picnic lunch of pitas and babaganouj and tzaziki and some grapefruit and pomegranate coolers and headed for the beach.

We found ourselves a nifty little beach on the side of the road just between Tantallon and Hubbards and hiked up the rocks out to a little point in the middle of the bay where we hunted for seashells, watched sea gulls and cranes, and watched the waves on the beach, and then we sat on a giant rock and ate our lunch while we chatted about all kinds of awesome things.

Afterwards we climbed a tree.

In and Absolut World

I read in the news this afternoon that many Americans are calling for a boycott of Swedish vodka manufacturer Absolut because it launched an ad campaign in Mexico featuring a pre-1846 map of parts of North America.

I wasn't alive back then, but some of you might remember a time when most of the United States was Mexican territory. American settlers tried to annex the state of Texas into the United States in 1846. The two countries went to war when Mexico refused to recognize the annexation and Mexico City was occupied by American troops, ending the war in 1848. Mexico was forced to cede most of its territory including what is now California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Colorado.

Now, the United States is constructing a large fence along the border between the two countries to prevent illegal immigrants (otherwise known as undocumented Mexicans) from crossing.

This thing about constructing fences is vaguely familiar. Wasn't it in Israel that international controversy was aroused by the construction of a protective barrier around parts of the West Bank to prevent Palestinian terrorists from launching suicide attacks on the Jewish population?

We feel justified in giving sympathy to the poor Palestinians who get so oppressed by their Jewish neighbours but we forget that Israel is the only country in all of history that has won every time it has gone to war and gave up the land it has conquered.

In 1948 Israel was invaded by five neighbouring states but managed to expand its borders.

In 1967, the six day war further expanded Israel's borders to include the Gaza Strip and the West Bank--Palestinian territories.

In 1973 Egypt and Syria tried to invade Israel but were repelled. Israeli troops took the Sinai peninsula from Egypt but later returned it peacefully in a series of peace negotiations with that country. Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize the state of Israel.

Since the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel is in the process of giving the right of self-government to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Despite huge territorial gains in war, Israel has made many significant concessions to Palestinian Nationalism. Shouldn't this principle be followed everywhere? Should the United States be forced to return the territory conquered from Mexico? We could even take this further and assume that all descendants of Europeans should be forced to return to Europe and allow the Americas to be ruled by 'indigenous' Americans.

One thing we must remember is that every power that has ever existed, every nationality or national group that exercises control over territory has won that territory from whatever national group possessed it first. The only rights that any nation has over territory is the right of conquest. You keep what you conquer. N'est-ce pas?

just thoughts

janelle and i went to bridgewater conference on easter sunday afternoon. it was nice to get out. some of the ministry made me think though.

i don't know why it is that just about every time we hear ministry about reverence, our behaviour in meeting is pretty much the main topic. i mean, don't get up to use the toilet, don't chew gum, don't fall asleep...

reverence is something that we do every single day. if we haven't got it monday to saturday, we aren't going to have it on sunday--even if we manage to sit through meeting without going to the toilet or without chewing gum and falling asleep.

the thing about ministry meetings or pretty much any conference meeting is that it's a facility for learning. when people get up on the platform it's to teach the Bible. the main problem with that is that only about a third of the people actually learn very well in a lecture style setting like most ministry meetings and conferences are. so the other two thirds of the people have to either work very hard to understand and to learn from and retain what the preacher is conveying or they get bored and uninterested. and regretably, sometimes the preaching is pretty shoddy. not that i want to knock anyone's preaching because i know it's a tough job, but realistically, it can be and sometimes is ineffective.

so what happens a lot in gospel hall culture is that the audience gets blamed for being uninterested, bored, and incapable of learning when it is quite possible that our whole system of teaching is fundamentally skewed to cater to only a minority of the people.

i'm a visual-kinetic learner, i learn from diagrams and charts and maps and things like that. it takes a lot of effort for me to follow a ministry meeting. especially if i've been up late the night before at a sing and full of delicious, hot food and full of exciting and fun people (like usually happens at conferences).

new at 3dhippo.com

so, i've started adding a "video of the week" feature to my website. unfortunately, i've been informed, many of you haven't been able to view the videos because of missing codecs. i don't know which codecs are missing, otherwise i would make them available for download, but i do have an alternative solution!

i suspect that you may have the same problem when attempting to view some of my older drawings. both problems can be solved by my alternative solution.

My alternative solution
get Ubuntu. it's a free, easy and safe linux-based operating system! go to www.ubuntu.com for more information on how to download and install Ubuntu. After this, you should be able to view my videos without a problem.

My Favourite Customer

I've never had this happen to me before ...

Yesterday I was working cash when this woman came in. Pretty much the first thing I noticed was that her boob was hanging out. It was kind of nerve racking but fortunately her order was really quick and she left. I felt really embarrassed but it was funny afterwards.

Anyways, I have a favourite customer. His name is Jason Sampson and he comes in at least once or twice a week. The first time I noticed him, he was calling in to complain that the pizzas he had ordered were old and getting really cold so we ended up giving him some free pizzas. (Someone wasn't rotating the pizzas properly in the box or something.) What makes him stand out to me, though, is that a normal customer, after getting an order like this, would ask for fresh pizzas (not ones from the hotbox) every time afterwards, but he never does. He just comes in, makes his order and takes what he can get and he never complains unless there's really a problem. I mean, I like it that if there is a problem with the pizza he will let us know and get us to get him free pizzas but that he won't just try and get free pizzas from us because he can (Little Caesar's has a product satisfaction guarantee) and he doesn't complain if he has to wait or anything.

Going to Space

So last night I dreamed that I went on a weird mission to Pluto to deploy a camera-satellite. It was a white circular device equipped with a lens that took pictures of the planet's surface.

After deploying the satellite, my partner and I donned our astronaut costumes--tight pants and capes--and disembarked the shuttle (which looked hauntingly like the Real Canadian Superstore) to have our photos taken by the satellite (so everyone back on earth could see us in our astronaut costumes??)

Anyways, when we got back to earth I wrote everyone an e-mail telling them that I was in space for a couple of days. So if you got that e-mail, it didn't really happen, it was just a dream, okay?

On Across the Universe

Janelle and I watched Across the Universe last night. It was really good; one thing that I really liked about it was that it didn't preach. It didn't have a big political message that was right at the forefront. It just had a handful of relevant themes.

One of these themes was war. And it depicted the anti-war and the peace movements in contrast to the Vietnam war. What becomes very evident, though, is that the anti-war protesters are in fact waging a war against war--an exercise that is eventually showed to be self-defeating. Other characters, though, while not waging a public and physical war, are nevertheless engaged in a real battle. What the film shows is that all the characters are deeply tangled in battles of their own.

I think this is true of every human being. We all have wars. Whether they are public and physical wars that we participate in--perhaps by going to Afghanistan as a member of the Canadian Armed Forces--or private, personal wars that we engage in every day. I believe in war. I believe that this planet--and that life itself--is a battlefield. Refusing to fight or denying that there is a war is denying the nature of humanity. I like the line from that film on WW1: "We do this because we're good at it."

Adventures

Yesterday I was reading an article about video and online gaming culture. At the end of the article, several gaming addicts and their partners or people close to them commented on the effects of this kind of addiction. Reading it, I was surprised at first at how many ordinary people are addicted to online gaming. I mean, these were nice, regular, family people, not computer geeks who hide out in basements and have no friends or significant others.

There were some women, but most of the online game addicts were men. And while I haven't much insight into why women would be addicted to this sort of thing, I think I can understand at least some of the reasons why some men can be addicted to video games. I mean, we sometimes automatically think--video games? and put all the gaming addicts into one box (or dingy basement) and label them all "geeks." But they're not, they're regular people...

So here are my thoughts; some reasons why men can be addicted to video and online games. I write from personal experience; I know about this because I know myself.

One game that I find particularly addictive is called Freeciv. It's got poor graphics and all that stuff, and when you get right to thinking about it, it's not so much fun. You just build an empire and conquer the world or send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri before the year 2000 or something like that. Anyways, the whole reason why I find it addictive is that I get to make big decisions, administer an empire, and while I know that it's a fantasy, it makes me feel competent and in control. It's a fantasy that I'm doing something meaningful and it's easy to get so caught up in it that you can think and believe that you're doing something meaningful and important.

I also like to play real time strategy games, for the same reason.

A different genre I find particularly addictive is the role playing game, also known as RPG. The reason this genre is addictive is that it gives me an adventure with varying degrees of freedom. Not that the freedom in itself is very important, but the fact that I have control over my adventure, my choices govern my adventure. The game presents me with a series of problems that I can solve whichever way I want. And that is pretty significant. Along the way to solving the problems there are always battles to fight.

I think there's something in the male psyche that is starved without adventure (I can't speak for the female psyche--I don't have one.) and these games offer us adventures. Sure, the adventures are artificial, but our world seems to have cut out adventure. For many of us, it's impossible to find real adventures outside of these games. I think these games wouldn't have nearly as much marketability if the real world offered real adventures. Instead, in the real world, I'm finding it hard to find a place for myself. My actions, my decisions have no impact. I don't make a difference--worse, I can't make a difference.

I know... people will say, I do make a difference. And I know what you mean and I can accept that. I make a difference to the people who love me. I hope you know, you make a difference to me too. But...

...I'm talking about BIG difference here. I'm talking about adventures with far-reaching and life-altering consequences. I don't particularly care if people in Thailand know about me or not, the issue is not that I want fame or even money or glory, what I want is to feel like I've done something, accomplished something. Without that feeling, it's so easy to feel bored with the real world.

I don't hate my job. In fact, I have a lot of fun at work and I like my coworkers and I enjoy my work-environment. But I do find it by far the most boring job I have ever had or could ever have. Maybe that's an exaggeration... but the point is that I come to work, make and sell pizzas, and go home. I'm not saying that that's boring, on the contrary, making pizzas could be a very exciting thing. Let's pretend there was video game where you have to build a chain of pizza shops across a city. You have to pick the best locations for your stores, you have to interview and hire employees, you have to manage your stores and compete against other stores. Wow, that would be a great game! It would be addictive too. Isn't that weird? Something so brutally mundane as making and selling pizzas could become a best selling video game. (Ok, I'm not so sure about the best-selling part, but it would definitely turn a profit.)

Do you get the point though? The most exciting thing I've done at my job so far is sheet-outs. I try to make as many sheet-outs as I can in the smallest amount of time possible. That's exciting because I'm racing against time. I have a goal, and deadline, and I'm racing to meet it, working with my whole body, as fast as I can. Another exciting part of my job is when I'm on cash and we have to do a ring-off every half hour. Every day, Manager Colin sets a sales goal (well, he thinks of it as a forecast, I like to think of it as a goal because it makes my job more meaningful) anyways, the ring-offs are exciting because I get to see how we're doing compared to the goal. When we exceed the goal I'm thrilled because I feel like I accomplished something, I feel like I'm a contributing member of a winning team. And I think that's an important feeling. But in the everyday life of the real world, thrills like that are few and far between. In the artificial world of online and video gaming thrills like that are almost unavoidable.

new look at 3dhippo.com

in case you haven't noticed yet, 3dhippo.com has a new look... okay, the penguin wasn't supposed to have a black eye and his bow tie was supposed to be white. there are still a few glitches.

anyways, i plan to add product somewhat regularly. especially movies, now that i can make them again. (i found a way to make my computer run swish.)

a bit of news

good morning everyone. this is just to let you know that i've added most of the poetry i've written in the past year to my "work in progress" blog. i haven't posted in a very long time, so if you're at all like me, you've probably stopped checking it. so, just in case you're interested, it's back!

Headline Confusion

I was reading the news this morning and came across the following headline: "French Police Deal Blow to Microsoft." Intrigued, I clicked the link to read the article and discovered that my assumptions were mistaken. What the article was really about was the French police are switching all their computers to Linux Operating Systems, specifically, Ubuntu Linux, of which I am a big fan.

So I told Janelle about the headline and, after I explained the article to her, she said, "Oh, so they're not dealing cocaine to Microsoft." What a relief.

I pasted the article below, in case you're curious.


French police deal blow to Microsoft

The French paramilitary police force said Wednesday it is ditching Microsoft for the free Linux operating system, becoming one of the biggest administrations in the world to make the break.

The move completes the gendarmerie's severance from Microsoft which began in 2005 when it moved to open sourcing for office applications such as word processing. It switched to open source Internet browsers in 2006.

Linux is an open-source operating system, which used to be the reserve of computer geeks but is now an easy-to-use system aimed at average users.

The gendarmerie's 70,000 desktops currently use Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. But these will progressively change over to the Linux system distributed by Ubuntu, explained Colonel Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the gendarmerie's IT department.

"We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer," he said, "so this year we expect to change 5,000-8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000-15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014."

There are three reasons behind the move, Geraud said at the Solution Linux 2008 conference here. The first is to diversify suppliers and reduce the force's reliance on one company, the second is to give the gendarmerie mastery of the operating system and the third is cost, he said.

He also added that "the Linux interface is ahead of other operating systems currently on the market for professional use."

Vista, for example, Microsoft's latest operating system, is being spurned by consumers who cite "concerns about its cost, resource requirements, and incompatibility with their existing applications," according to InformationWeek.com.

Geraud explained that the move to an open source operating system was logical after the police switched in 2005 to open sourcing for its office applications and in 2006 for its Internet browsers and its email.

The move away from licenced products is saving the gendarmerie about seven million euros (10.3 million dollars) a year for all its PCs.

"In 2004 we had to buy 13,000 licences for office suites for our PCs," he said, "but in the three years since then we've only had to buy a total of 27 licences."

In 2005 the gendarmerie switched from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice -- a collection of applications such as a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation programme similar to Microsoft Powerpoint, all of which can be downloaded free.

A year later it abandoned Mircosoft's Internet Explorer for the Mozilla Foundation's browser Firefox and its email client Thunderbird.

"When we made that choice Firefox represented about 3.0 percent of Internet browsers and it's about 20 to 25 percent now which confirms our choice," Geraud said.

The gendarmerie with its 100,000 employees is the biggest administration to shift to open sourcing for its operating system, but it is not the first in France. That honour belongs to the National Assembly which adopted Ubuntu for its 1,200 PCs in 2007.

Although the gendarmerie is ahead of the market the market is catching up.

Dell, for example, this week started offering Ubuntu Linux 7.10 on its XPS 1330 laptops in France, Germany, Spain and Britain, while US customers will be able to order the machines within the next week or so, according to the company's website.

More Adventures of Patrick and Janelle

When we tried to leave the apartment this morning, Janelle and I discovered that our lock was broken and that we couldn't unlock the door. Janelle called our landlady who promised to have it fixed and I, using some ingenuity and a screw driver, removed the lock and slid the bolt using pliers. Then we headed out for a celebratory breakfast and some morning-shopping.

We had BELTs at Tim Horton's and then headed to Wal-Mart. Janelle bought some pants and a pitcher and a few other things. Then we drove down to TBC Computers and I asked for a price on a computer system. The price they gave me was so phenomenal that I bought the computer without doing any shopping around, like I had planned to, and they had it assembled for me in two hours! What was even more phenomenal was that they provided a free power surge protector. They explained that since they had started giving these gizmos away, the amount of money they lost on warranties dropped significantly.

Anyways, I brought Janelle to school, bought a keyboard at Staples, picked up the computer, brought it home and installed it, picked up Janelle at school and took her to lunch and to the post office, where we had Janelle's student loan processed by a room full of comedians... I brought Janelle back to school and had just enough time to get into my Little Caesar's uniform and before heading to work.

Afterwards Janelle and I had dinner at Dan and Katie's and it was fantastic.

The World Through My Glasses (Part Three)

The headline read something like this, "Britney Spears' British Accent Raises Questions About Her Psychological Health." As if everything else she's done hasn't? If speaking in a British accent makes one questionably insane, my wife is definitely under suspicion... along with just about everybody in England.

Today Janelle and I were at the post office and the lady behind the counter spoke with a distinct British accent. I felt like asking her if she was suspected of being insane.

Anyways...

The new Tata Nano was unveiled in India this month. By the way, Tata is the auto manufacturer that plans to buy Jaguar and Land Rover. The Nano is a car that costs only $2500 US, it is very minimal--for example, it has no power steering, no radio, no air conditioning. It boasts almost phenomenal gas mileage, though and is widely referred to as "the people's car"--I guess Volkswagen isn't anymore.

And what do environment activists have to say about this? They're not happy, because a cheap car will result in more people owning cars, roads will become more crowded, and--as a result--there will be more pollution. What do you think of that?

My big question is, what's the problem? If it's okay for some people to have a car, shouldn't it be okay for everyone to have a car? And if an auto manufacturer wants to make it possible for more people to have automobiles, that's fantastic! Or is it only okay for "rich" people to own cars? When we start to think this way, we jump over the individual, we think in terms of groups of people--or worse, we ignore the individual altogether and only think about our policies, and what is better for our world. I don't think any right-headed person or group would prevent any individuals from owning cars if they could afford them (for example) but when we say things like a cost-effective car like the Nano is harmful to the environment and, therefore, must be controlled or limited and we create government policies to that effect, what we are doing is preventing individuals from owning automobiles. To me, there's a certain amount of hypocrisy in that. We want to prevent lower-income people from owning automobiles because of the possibly disastrous results, but we ourselves won't give up our automobiles.

I said that I don't believe in changing the world, but I think we all agree that the world needs changing. And right now, I don't care about the Tata Nano or about government policies concerning the environment. I don't even care about Britney Spears' British accent. What I really want to talk about is individuals. When we talk politics, when we talk about global change, and activism, what we should be concerned about is not our policies and our ideas about what is good or bad for the environment because we cannot change the world systems. The world will always be corrupt, always be evil, always be governed by greed. We cannot change that. But we can change ourselves and that is the most effective and most important change we can make.

Of course, there's much more to be said on this...

The World Through My Glasses (Part Two)

In Michigan over the Christmas holidays, I heard about a campaign to ban the purchase of items made in China. These are easy to spot, mostly because of the little sticker label, "Made in China." One major reason for this campaign is that the workers who made these items were exploited, paid very little and made to work very long hours. I heard about some pregnant women being forced to work until they delivered and given only fifteen minutes to deliver their baby after which, they had to be back to work. This sounds terrible. I've also heard about children being forced to work fourteen hour days for very little pay. All this so that big businesses could earn big profits and so that good little western capitalist-democrats could save money buying cheap products.

In my previous post I talked about how the world's environment is changing. I wrote that the world is changing, and those who do not change with it will be destroyed. This is also true economically and politically. The West condemns exploitation in China and India and pretty much everywhere else in the East but ignores the economic and political basis for this exploitation.

The whole world sees the west and its luxury and success and riches and power and wants to be like it. But, part of the problem is, that we don't even remember how we, the West, got here. We talk about how bad the exploitation of workers during the industrial revolution of the late 1700s was a terrible thing, but we forget that without that industrial revolution and the accompanying exploitation of children and men and women we would not have the luxury and wealth and power that we enjoy now. We also forget to ask ourselves, "Is it worth it?" Is our current standard of living worth what it took to get here? To me, the answer is no. Absolutely not.

But those who live daily struggling for the basic necessities--food and shelter--and see the wealth that we take for granted and the luxury that we thoughtlessly enjoy, can we blame them if they feel a tinge of envy? They feel it and they are working to bring themselves comparable wealth and luxury and in many cases they are succeeding.

China is a case in point. China is gaining commercial capital through trade and industry; never mind that it's a 'communist' country--I won't get into that. I have met with, worked with, evangelized to many Chinese men and women and children. A friend, Hong Gang said that the biggest moral problem with China was its materialism. He admitted that the biggest obstacle to him accepting Christianity was his materialism. The Chinese people have been told and believe that it is glorious to be wealthy. If, to become wealthy, people must be exploited, it's worth it--all for the greater glory and--or, through--wealth of China. What we are seeing right now in China and the East is the equivalent of Europe's and the West's Industrial Revolution. Children and women were exploited for the greater wealth of greedy capitalists and we believed it was worth it. We now enjoy wealth and prosperity, power, luxury--Glory--because of that period of exploitation.

Not only were people exploited at home in the factories, but the West through the hundreds of years of the 'Glorious' age of Imperialism exploited people all over the world--including the people in China. Research this period of history, find out what happened to Japan when they closed their ports to American and British trade because they were being exploited. Find out what happened to China when they did the same. Find out what the British and French did in India, what the British, Italians, Germans, and French did to Africa. People were exploited everywhere because we felt that it was worth it in order to accumulate the capital to build the kind of society we have now.

Today, no matter what you buy, someone was exploited to produce and sell that product; whether it was you, the buyer, or the person who made it, or the person who sold it, or the poor night crew stock clerks who put the product on the grocery store shelves.

Where did the Chinese get the idea that it's glorious to be wealthy? No doubt, some of it came from looking at us. If we felt it was worth centuries of exploitation to have the kind of society we have today, how much more does the East now, when they see the glorious results?

We, in the West, can easily condemn Brazil for deforesting the Amazon Basin, we can easily condemn China for exploiting its workers but remember: they are only doing what we did to get to where we are now.

I'm not saying it's wrong to stop exploitation. Please, let your compassion flow. I believe that Grace is all we have. More importantly, Grace is all we need to change the world.

But I don't believe in changing the world.

The World Through My Glasses (Part One)

We got our money back from the student loan people. It was unceremoniously dumped back into our account on Tuesday. Cheers to that! (I'm a BIG fan of getting my money back.)

So, before I got married I was told that if I didn't have sex before I got married, I'd have a boring sex life when I got married. Needless to say, I didn't believe it. A few years later I heard the exact same thing from my manager at Top Craft. He was talking about sex and saying that if you don't have sex before you're married, you'll have a terrible and boring and unpleasant sex life when you are married. The third time I heard this was from one of Janelle's fellow students at the Mount. He said that, before Janelle was married, way back when he found out that she wasn't going to have sex until after the wedding, he'd been worried about her, that she would have a terrible sex life with some guy who was no good in bed. (Don't get me wrong, I do believe there are guys who are terrible in bed--it's those selfish ones who are only in it for themselves.) Where do these people get these ideas? They must all read the same magazines.

First of all, how do they know? Everyone who's said this to me has had sex before they were married, so how would they know? Secondly, it's pretty ignorant to think that having sex before you're married improves your sex life after you're married. Either way, you're going to have sex for the first time at one point or another, and you're not going to start out an old pro at it on your first shot! Just like anything else, sex is something you get better at with practice--no matter what the magazines say. I don't know why people unquestioningly believe whatever shows up in those snot rags.

Speaking of "Science by Press Release" ...

If you ask anyone what climate change and global warming is, they'll probably tell you that it's carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing global temperature increase. Catastrophic consequences of this are the melting of the ice caps and the recession of glaciers resulting in rising sea levels and global flooding. That's why Canada is proposing a carbon tax to encourage industries to reduce their carbon emissions. There are global initiatives, such as the UNFCCC to reduce levels of carbon emissions world-wide. However, there is no proof that carbon dioxide causes climate change.

I think that the whole idea of Global Warming as a catastrophe is based on the assumption that planet Earth has always been a certain way. The Theory of Evolution is based on this same assumption that the Earth is static. But the Earth is not static, it changes and fluctuates. Right this minute we are still in the process of emerging from an ice age. Scientists postulate that the Earth is naturally ice-free, even in the high latitudes--except during periods of glaciation (otherwise known as ice-ages) when ice sheets advance to cover larger areas of the world. There is evidence that the whole planet, include the far north, was at the same sub-tropical climate; for example, mammoths have been found frozen whole in sheets of ice with sub-tropical vegetation undigested in their stomachs--keep in mind that they would have had to have frozen straight through and very quickly and this happened before the invention of any kind of deep-freeze device. Ice core samples in Greenland show that much of the southern inner mainland of Greenland was suitable for farming, raising crops and herds around 800 to 1300 AD, during what is known as the medieval warming period. These are only two examples; there are many others . The glaciers in Alberta's Jasper National Park are receding. I have heard this often cited in the news media as evidence for the severity of global warming. There are also glaciers in the Andes Mountains in South America that are receding. A recent news cast reported the almost overnight disappearance of a large lake in the Andes mountains because of a melting glacier. This was also blamed on global warming. However, if the Earth is emerging from an ice age, it makes sense that glaciers and ice sheets would retreat.

(photo of the Athabasca Glacier, Jasper Nat'l Park)

While I do believe that carbon emissions reduction is beneficial to the environment I also think that the problem is not so much that carbon emissions are causing global warming but that we have built our cities too close to the water. Of course, this is unavoidable. But we've built them on the assumption that the world does not change, that change is bad. In reality, though, I believe the Earth will change and those who do not change with it will be destroyed.

More Adventures of Patrick and Janelle

So after we flew in from Toronto, went to bed, slept in, and woke up, new adventures were already waiting for us at home. Pretty much the first thing I did when I got home was check our bank account to see how much money we'd spent over the holiday.

Well, those nasty student loan people did it again. It just so happens that I'm paying off my student loan by monthly payments. Every month, an amount of money is automatically withdrawn from my bank account and put against my student loan, until my loan is payed off.

Last month the student loan people took three payments out of my account for different amounts. This was unexpected and devastating. I checked the status of my student loan and noticed that none of the additional payments were registering, but there was also an outstanding amount of interest which nearly matched the extra amount taken out of my account. At the time, I concluded that the extra payments paid my outstanding interest and let it go.

When the same thing happened again in December, I figured there must be something wrong. So I telephoned the student loan people and they weren't even able to account for the extra withdrawals. So I called the bank. The bank put a stop on the additional payments and advised me to go to one of their locations to fill out a disputation form. So Janelle and I went to the Superstore at Joe Howe and while Janelle did a few groceries, I filled out four disputation forms (one for each amount). The disputation form was pretty much just a sheet saying that I never authorized these withdrawals and had my signature and the signature of a witness. They said that I would likely hear back from them within seven to ten days. That done, Janelle and I went home, enjoyed some chocolate milk and had a relaxing afternoon.

After meeting that evening Andrew came over with Dan and Katie for some pizza. Andrew surprised us by showing off his goofy whimsical side. We had a great time.

And the next day I was back at work, seven days in a row. Brutal; my feet hurt like the devil. Those nine hour shifts will be the death of me. It's funny, because I could handle ten to twelve hour shifts at the Superstore, no problem, but anything more than six or seven hours at Little Caesar's is killer. My feet go all stiff and afterwards I can't walk properly. Janelle and I were sitting in the study when the phone rang out in the living room, Janelle had her mouth full so I ran out to answer it, but I stumbled and limped and was all awkward because my feet were stiff and ran into the wall. I ended up crawling on my hands and knees to get the phone before it stopped ringing. That was funny. I've started wearing Janelle's crocs to work, they're far more comfortable, and they feel like I'm wearing socks. Except for when the floor is wet. Then they're just slippery.