Constant Inanity

So so very very angry over $40.17

2009-08-13T22:17:00.004-04:00

I got home from my trip to Europe a few weeks ago and got my credit card bill, only to see that I was charged $40.17 for a phone call that lasted less than 5 minutes. I called my credit card and the customer service rep I spoke to said not in so many words that she sees people upset about this particular company's charges all the time. Seriously, I once called a friend on a cell phone in rural Togo and only got charged a dollar a minute. Even if I had used the whole 5 minutes I was charged for, the cost would have been 8.34$ a minute!

The company is International Satellite Communications and they're in San Ysidro,CA, so essentially, they're in Tijuana - and they charge credit cards for payphone calls in Spain... don't you just loooove globalization?!

Anyway, I'm furious. I kind of disliked Spain to begin with, it was hot, it smelled bad, the people we dealt with were rude and/or shady, the only nice Spanish speakers we met there turned out to be from South America.

I rarely travel anywhere that I don't find anything to like about a place... but I actually can't think of much that was good about Spain.

Well, it was kind of fun watching the pickpockets and hookers plying their trade on Las Ramblas.... but that's a bit of a stretch as a good quality about a place, isn't it?

I won't even bother getting into my frustration with the ridiculous service charges the landlord for the flat we rented levied on us. But at least I had the option to walk away from that shady deal because it was face to face. I never agreed to pay this amount for that phone call, and I'm going to have to pay it whether I like it or not.

I'm so fucking angry right now!!!

Top 5 Celebrity Women

2009-01-20T11:24:00.004-05:00

Dita Von Teese

Jennifer Connelly

Scarlet Johnasson

Marilyn Monroe

Top 5 Celebrity Men

2009-01-20T10:21:00.008-05:00

Some girlfriends and I were talking about our top fives last night and I was about to email them some pictures, but then I thought, why not post about it instead. I have pretty conventional taste, no?

Elvis Presley

Brad Pitt

Robert Redford

George Clooney

Scott Bakula

More restaurant closures in Toronto's Chinatown

2008-10-16T13:04:00.001-04:00

Some of my favourite restaurants in Chinatown have been closed down in the last week by a rat infestation that is plaguing the neighbourhood.

My poor knees

2008-10-09T11:57:00.001-04:00

I got the coolest new thing for my birthday - a spin dryer

2008-10-09T11:38:00.002-04:00

My aunt had one of these things in England when I was young. She lived in a 200 year old farm house.

On days when she wanted to do hand washing, she would wash the clothes in the sink and then spin the moisture out of them with the spin dryer.

Then if it was too rainy or cold to hang the clothes outside she would hang them in the kitchen. She had an AGA stove in her kitchen and so it was always the warmest room in the house. She also had such high ceilings, that she had a rack for drying the clothes that was on a pulley. She would lower the rack down to hang the clothes then pull it back up to the warmest driest most out of the way spot near the ceiling. The whole set up was ingenious.

I think a lot about energy efficiency, I also live in a pretty humid basement and I really like to do laundry, but I don't like to use the dryer. So, when I found one of these babies on the internet, I knew I had to have it.

I asked my mom and my godfather to go dutch on it for my birthday and it arrived yesterday. I tried it last night and I'm sooo pleased. I wish all my clothes and sheets were dirty so I could wash them all.

Here's how I'm using it. I put the clothes in the washer (cold water of course). Then when the washer is done I take them out and put them in the spin dryer. It spins them waaaaay faster than the washer does and it a few minutes it's extracted a whole lot of extra water (and suds, which lets me know that the washer doesn't do a great job at rinsing, or I use too much soap). The clothes come out almost dry. Then I either put them on the line or put them in the dryer for a few minutes to finish them off.

The thing is brilliant. Hanging clothes in my basement is often really frustrating for me because anything like sweaters or jeans is musty before it's dried fully - but putting sweaters in the dryer often wrecks them too. I'm anticipating never having to deal with musty clothes again!

A really great gift.

Listeria stupidity - why don't people have common sense?

2008-10-09T10:51:00.003-04:00

For those of you not following the Canadian news. One of our major meat producers here had an outbreak of Listeria in one of their plants a while ago. 20 people died. Now this seems like something to get all up in arms about and you would imagine that I'd be flipping out because I'm such a nut about bacteria but I'm not.
Here's why:

- if we hadn't started tracking outbreaks so closely here, then we likely would have never linked these 20 deaths to each other

- if you cook your meat properly you won't get listeriosis from buying listeria tainted meat

-listeria is extremely common and exists everywhere including your pet and probably your kitchen

I think that people are flipping out about this for a couple of reasons:
-people aren't savvy consumers of sensational news stories

-people think that living in a first world country magically makes them immune to disease.

The plain fact is that you need to cook meat before you eat it, you just can't eat hot dogs straight from the package. If you want to take the chance and eat sandwich meat without cooking it yourself, then do it while you're young and healthy and not pregnant.

Burnt Toast!

2008-03-07T08:54:00.002-05:00

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and I smelled burnt toast! It made me think of this.

Bounty hunter coming back to the small screen

2008-02-29T17:15:00.001-05:00

HONOLULU, Hawaii (AP) -- TV bounty hunter Duane "Dog" Chapman is preparing a return to the airwaves.

Duane "Dog" Chapman's show was pulled off the air in November.

The Chapman family confirmed Thursday that filming is set to resume on the A&E show "Dog the Bounty Hunter."

The show features Chapman and crew in pursuit of bail jumpers in Hawaii and other states.

It was the highest rated show on A&E before the network pulled it off the air in November.

Chapman was heard in a taped phone conversation using a racial slur in reference to his son's black girlfriend.

Chapman has apologized and tried to make amends with the network and the black community.

Network officials say that since the show is about second chances, they decided to accept his apology and resume production. No air date has been announced.

Goal #43 - Change Banks

2008-02-22T09:17:00.004-05:00

The banking fees of most of the major banks in Canada are daylight robbery. It's really shocking that anyone puts up with it, yet I put up with it for years. As of yesterday, I'm not gonna take it anymore. I signed up for an account with PC Financial. I went whole hog and got all the services including overdraft protection and all that shiz. And something really interesting happened when the lady credit checked me. I think this may have been the first time in my life that I was credit checked, that I knew about. Apparently, I have perfect credit, how about that! My boyf and my mother, possibly the two most fiscally responsible humans on earth, would have you believe that I'm a fuck-up when it comes to my cash. And, yeah, maybe I don't balance the books all that much, or know my bank balance at any given moment in time. But, I did set my bank account to pay the minimum balance on my credit card every month, whether I remembered to do it or not. And voila! An A+ credit rating. Sure sometimes I forget/can't pay off the balance, and so sometimes I pay interest on my credit card purchases... but, I'm that much closer to Goal #1 Buy Property.
Big pats on the back for me!

I love to kick ass on skates, but this kicks ass on skates without any of the violence and I respect that!

2008-02-13T08:52:00.000-05:00

BlueAir 201

2008-02-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

I purchased this air purifier from a website in the US today. I am very excited about this purchase because I'm tired of all of my co-workers 'God Bless'ing me 30-40times a day. I'd be a lot more on board with the whole religion thing if there was someone I could pray to, or light candles to, who would lower my chances of getting hit with crazy customs fees. Fingers crossed!

A big weekend of not doing what I said I would

2008-02-11T11:59:00.000-05:00

Clearly the fear of God doesn't move me too much, it hasn't made me give up sleeping in on Sundays, eating meat on Good Friday, being mean, and the list goes on (I won't mention some of the bigger sins because sensitive eyes might be reading, but you get the idea)... well here's another one to add to the list! I started this Lent-themed-super-goal-crossing-off-extravaganza with a bang and then it all started to peter out. I lost my resolve, I did't run at all on the weekend, and I didn't floss!
Then I got an email today with a training schedule for a 10K run I'm doing in May and I almost had a heart attack just reading the thing. No frickin' way I can do all that training! On the other hand, if I do that training schedule (and floss while I run), all my goals will be done. I think I need a buddy for this training or something.
And Bill, you'll be happy to know that I haven't let #47 go, and that I have continued to make great strides at clearing my boxes out. Turns out my fear of my mother is a much greater motivator than my fear of God. Perhaps if her present career doesn't work out she should consider becoming a fitness trainer, the kind who rides along beside you in a golf cart.

Lent

2008-02-07T00:08:00.000-05:00

What the hey, I'm kickin' the goals thing into overdrive for lent, you know, instead of giving stuff up. I'm going to try and finish:
#3. Do 50 situps and 50 pushups every day for 50 days
#17. Floss every day for 90 days
#46. Run 3x per week for 2 months
#47. Clear the mountain of boxes out of my mother's living room left over from my move
Think I can do it? I'm sure going to have less time during the next couple of months.

Goal #11 - Run a 5K

2008-02-01T12:07:00.000-05:00

On December 30th, I got up in the bitter cold and went down to the Distillery District to run the Resolution Run.

It's a multi-cultural commute!

2008-02-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

There's a big snow storm in TO today. They're advising that everyone stay off the roads if they can. Since I still have to get to work, my solution to this problem is to leave my car, and all that insurance liability, at home and take a cab to work. So, this morning, I got dressed for the elements, called a cab and went outside to shovel some snow until it arrived.
When I got in the cab, my driver was chatting on his cell phone in a language I didn't recognise with a CD hanging from the rearview mirror with Arabic writing on it. The heater in the cab was cranked to 5 million degrees and I started to feel almost immediately that I was going to doze off. But it also got me thinking.
(Now, I don't want to start anyone bitching about cab drivers or immigration, because I'm a big supporter of immigration and I'm greatful to our cab drivers for doing a very dangerous and difficult job. And if anyone says anything that even hints at racism in my comment section I will delete it.)
It just occurred to me how funny it is that almost every single cabbie in Toronto is from a warm weather country and how silly it is that they're the ones who are on the road getting us around 24/7 in hail, sleet and snow. Driving a cab is often the first job an immigrant gets when they come here, and these guys probably never in their lives had to drive in, or even experience, these kinds of conditions before they came here. So it's really a pretty ridiculous situation when I, who grew up here, and learned to cope with these conditions from when I was a little kid, is depending on a guy who has probably been here less than a year to get me around in bad weather. I read recently that the weather condition that causes the most traffic accidents worldwide is sandstorms.
Sometimes, in fair weather I get frustrated with the cabbies for how carelessly they often drive, but on days like today I appreciate the hell out of them and their 5 million degree heaters.

Goal #8 - Pay off credit card debt

2008-01-31T16:39:00.000-05:00

As you all know, carrying credit card debt sucks. But I just couldn't seem to pay it down. This one was going to be a really hard one when I set out to do it. But it actually just kind of happened by itself. My mom broke her leg - and when I say broke her leg - I don't just mean crutches and colourful cast. She's still not back to work and it happened last fall. There's nothing like giving up a lot of your social events to move home with your sick parent, to keep you from overspending.

Goals #5 and 6

2008-01-31T16:27:00.000-05:00

I'm really taking care of business today!

Goal #5 Bring lunch to work every day for a week
This one's not so ground breaking.... but.... the week I did this was the only week I've done this the whole time I've had this job. So clearly it was an achievement.

Goal #6 Get a Permanent Job
Getting a permanent job was an acheivement 10 years in the making. I've never really liked moving around (making new friends, finding someone to have lunch with, getting into a routine), but I didn't like staying the same place either (most people get old fast). I've done a lot of maternity leaves in the past. It's a really good amount of time to work somewhere. You're there long enough to make friends and find the good lunch places, but not so long that there isn't a light at the end of the tunnel. Also, I hate performance reviews, and the great thing about working contracts is that you don't have to do performance reviews. The last permanent job I had, I actually quit during my first perfomance review.
The place I'm working at now is awesome, I love most of my co-workers, it has a great vibe, and I see myself staying here for a long time. So, it's worth staying, even though they make me do performance reviews.

Back on the horse and Xing off Goals - #2

2008-01-31T16:20:00.000-05:00

Getting an RRSP. I know it's not super sexy, but it's way sexier than eating cat food when you're old. Besides, it's been one of my life goals to retire as soon as I freakin' can. Anyway, I've been at my job over a year now, so let me into their matching RRSP plan. Signing up was a pain and I was very disappointed with the lack of choice and not excellent performance of the green and ethical ones. So I just picked one and tried to forget about it. Then I got my year end statement, and I already had 800 bucks in there woohoo!

New Entry - my god she's back!

2008-01-31T16:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah yeah, I've been super AWOL, I'm sorry.
I've been busy. This is the first time in months that I've had a quiet minute in front of the computer. The BF and I have officially given up our apartment, and I'd just like to mention that moving sucks. I'm not totally done because I've filled my mother's living room with boxes and predictably she's pissed about it, so I have weeks of work ahead of me sorting boxes.
I've not only neglected my blog, I've also neglected my friends. So, if you're reading this, and I normally send you a gift on your b-day and you didn't get one this year, send me your list, I'm ready to be thoughtful now.
My first priority now is my goals, I'm sooo behind. I need to clean em up, write the rest of them out, get flossing, run places, and write posts about the stuff I've already done. Whew!

I'm back and I'm in love!

2008-01-24T10:14:00.001-05:00

Raw Video: Rare Lemur Born in English Zoo

Spills & thrills

2007-11-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

Trash and Smash, centre, a blocker for Les Contrabanditas takes out a member of La Racaille at the Montreal Roller Derby. (John Morstad)
More pictures

Don't let their retro-style skates and short skirts fool you. On the rink these roller derby vixens will trash talk and bodycheck their way to the finish. It's fast, rough and dirty - and it's bringing spectators to their feet
M.J. STONE

From Friday's Globe and Mail

November 23, 2007 at 8:46 AM EST

MONTREAL — The capacity crowd at the Aréna Saint Louis is on its feet. Gliding into a corner, Beater Pan Tease delivers a solid bodycheck that sends her rival, Miss Sassy Craft, tumbling. The felled player rolls forward with bowling-ball intensity, tripping up her fellow competitors as they advance behind her.

The audience roars as, one by one, the skaters lose their balance, crashing into a massive pileup of bodies.

Campy and irreverent, the inaugural season of the all-female Montreal Roller Derby was the summer's cult sporting sensation.

It's part of a resurgence that has crept across North America, with leagues springing up in Canadian cities such as Vancouver, Toronto and Hamilton.

Founded by Concordia University student Alyssa Kwasny (a.k.a. Georgia W. Tush), the MTLRD featured more than 40 women and three teams: La Racaille (Dirt), Les Contrabanditas (Pirates) and Les Filles du Roi, (The King's Prostitutes). With homemade uniforms and old-school roller skates, the players ham it up for the crowd with trash talk and threats of violence.

Add a plethora of spectacular falls and masked wrestlers duking it out between periods, and it's no wonder why Montreal audiences, fuelled on Pabst Blue Ribbon, whooped it up at the derby.

The sport has come a long way since the first event took place in Chicago in August, 1935. The brainchild of movie-theatre mogul Leo Seltzer, the 3,000-mile Transcontinental Roller Derby featured multiple two-person teams racing around a track 11 hours a day for an entire month. When Mr. Seltzer noticed how much spectators enjoyed the collisions and spills, he retooled the derby into the event it resembles today.

Although the roller derby's profile had been in steady decline since the 1970s, the sport has been boosted by Rollergirls, a reality TV show about the Texas Roller Derby League's Lonestar Rollergirls.

As practised in the MTLRD, it's a two-team contest that takes place over three 20-minute periods. Matches feature four "blockers" and one "jammer" per side. Jammers begin the race at the back of the pack and gain points by fighting their way past the opposing team's blockers, whose sole purpose is to push, shove and bodycheck the competition's jammer to the floor.

Zoe Brown, (a.k.a Di Nasty) - a filmmaker and community worker by day and roller derby vixen by night - could barely skate when she first joined Les Filles du Roi. "I was falling around like a helpless four-year-old."

But Ms. Brown now says that she loves competing in front of an arena full of rowdy spectators - despite the risk that she might get hurt.

"I love the speed and adrenaline and look forward to all the hitting and checking," she says. "Competing in the derby is a wonderful way to channel your aggression."

Awesome pictures of the 2007 ToRD Championship game

2007-11-21T10:31:00.000-05:00

Here is another link to derby pics.

Carnivorous plant has a secret deep inside

2007-11-21T10:30:00.001-05:00

BEN HIRSCHLER

Reuters

November 20, 2007 at 8:10 PM EST

LONDON — The carnivorous pitcher plants that feed on insects in the Asian tropics may not snap shut like Venus flytraps, but they are smarter than they look.

Rather than being passive pitfall traps, the tube-like pitchers of Nepenthes plants actually contain a clever slimy fluid -- similar to mucus -- that produces powerful filaments to snare prey, French researchers said on Wednesday.

The unusual qualities of the fluid could one day be used to develop new, less environmentally harmful pesticides, the experts believe.

Just how pitcher plants catch their prey has intrigued biologists since Charles Darwin's time. Until now, it was thought that gravity and the slippery tube surface were the key, with the fluid in the pitcher simply helping digestion.

But Laurence Gaume at the University of Montpellier and Yoel Forterre from the University of Marseille have discovered that the fluid actually has the perfect viscoelastic properties to snare flies and ants.

"The elastic nature of the fluid is responsible for the huge spring-back forces that act on moving insects," Dr. Forterre said.

"The only chance for insects to escape the fluid would be to move slowly. But once they've fallen in the pitchers, insects most often panic and exhibit quick movements. It is like swimming in jelly."

The effect is seen even when the fluid is diluted more than 90 per cent with water, as can happen during heavy rainfall in the jungles of Borneo, where many of the plants grow.

The researchers have yet to identify the molecules responsible for the elastic properties of the fluid, which appears to be unique in the plant kingdom. But they believe the ingredient could help produce better pesticides in future.

Viscoelastic fluids or polymers are often added to pesticides and herbicides to prevent sprayed droplets from bouncing off plants, so limiting soil pollution.

The fluid from Nepenthes could provide new polymers that are both highly effective and environmentally friendly.

Dear Japan, I hate you, signed Jennifer

2007-11-19T15:52:00.000-05:00

Japanese Whale Hunt: A Japanese fleet left for the Antarctic Ocean yesterday with the intention of killing more than 1,000 whales, including 50 of the endangered humpback whales protected by an international moratorium since 1963. Japan argues that whaling provides value material for research into whale stocks, and that whale populations are at sustainable levels. Hideki Moronuki, whaling chief at the Japan Fisheries Agency, said humpback whales in our research are rapidly recovering Junichi Sato, spokesman for Greenpeace Japan, said "this is not about research," and charged that most of the whale meat will end up in Japanese pubs and supermarkets

Championship coverage

2007-11-18T19:57:00.000-05:00

Here is a link to an article on the championship bout. (I'd like to request that my friends remember that I'm camera shy, and would prefer if you don't comment on the pictures in such a way as to point out which person I am.)

We won!

2007-11-18T01:20:00.001-05:00

I'm in pain, and I'm tired, but we won and I am so happy. I don't have any video from the game yet, but I'll post it if I get any.

A Private Hatred

2007-11-07T15:52:00.000-05:00

I'm furious with someone. I really want to vent about it. But the problem is that it's not very mature to bitch about someone publicly when it will most likely get back to them.
This kind of brings me to wonder about blogging ethics, what to write, or avoid writing. Is a blog more like gossip on the bathroom wall, or writing an article for a newspaper or keeping a diary? Each kind of writing has different rules.
If the blog is my diary and I slam someone in it, and that person is mad, then is that their problem for reading my inner thoughts? Do you open my blog at your own peril? It can't be like the bathroom wall, because even if I don't have my name attached to this blog really, most of the people who read this know who I am. If it was a diary, then you wouldn't be reading this at all because it would be on a piece of paper in a book under my mattress, with one of those funny little locks on it.
I always admire the way that Linny can talk about her feelings and issues she's having with other people without revealing too much, it's deliciously cryptic. But when I do anything like that it doesn't seem nearly so interesting, perhaps it's just not possible to find oneself interesting?
Anyway, if you're reading this, and you're wondering if it's you that I'm mad at, it's probably not and I wouldn't really worry about it, I'm not planning on sending ninjas to any one's house or anything. I just kind of wish that I believed in an afterlife so that I could believe that the person I'm pissed at would get some kind of punishment for what they've done.

First night out after surgery

2007-11-04T11:25:00.000-05:00

As I've already mentioned, I've been staying with my mother since she had surgery 7 weeks ago. My mother's an early to bed early to rise type of person these days. And, that's altered my social life significantly. Saturday was my good friend Neil's birthday. Neil's birthday is always a pretty big event, not something that you could flake out on if you could avoid it. So, I arranged for my mom's friend to come by and serve breakfast and made plans with my lady posse, Miss A and Big D
and the lovely Claire who
was in town for a vacation.
It seemed like a lifetime since I'd been out past 9 pm, and resultantly I had some cash in my pocket, perhaps those two factors led to a certain amount of overindulgence...
We met the party at the Embassy and then headed over to Neutral.
So, I drank too much, I got in a humourous (I thought) arguement with our cab driver on the way down. We got to Neutral and suddenly I felt like I'd walked onto the set of one of my 5 least favourite films of all times, Slacker by Richard Linklater. It was totally excruciating to watch. The sensation kept coming back to me all night. While I was with my friends I was having fun, but as soon as I walked away from them to got to the bathroom or the bar, and had to interact with other people there, the sensation came back. I suppose I was too drunk, and had too big a crowd with me to figure out a plausible exit strategy. It was quite odd, because I normally enjoy myself at Neutral.
The most hilarious part was when a woman came up and struck up a conversation with me. I had no idea why she wanted to talk to me, I'm not even sure what her opening was. If it had been a guy, I would have had my armour on and said something witty and smooth and slightly cutting so he'd get the picture and leave me alone, but, when a woman approaches you, you don't immediately know what she's after. She might be planning to tell you that you have toilet paper on the sole of your shoe or that you've lost an earring. Anyway, this woman started talking to me, and I went along, thinking that I would just find out what she was after. Then, she asked me for my email address. So I gave her my junkmail address, of course, I've never been so drunk that I've given my actual email address to a stranger at a bar.
All week, I kept discovering new reasons not to drink so much. On Sunday, I woke up to find a huge ketchup stain on the front of my new white shirt. Later, I realized that I never said goodbye to Claire at the end of the evening. I told her how to get home and then went back to chatting with my other friends, never acknowledging that I'd enjoyed her company and that I'd probably not see her again.
On Monday, I realized that I'd broken the top button of my favourite jacket in half, not sure how or when or where.
On Tuesday, Ash emailed me pictures of parts of the evening I didn't even remember.
On Wednesday, I suddenly realized that the woman who had struck up the conversation with me at the bar was likely a lesbian and that she'd been hitting on me. Then, I had to admit to my bf that I'd unwittingly given my email address to a lesbian who was hitting on me. Also, with relief, tinged with dismay, I had to acknowledge the fact that the lesbian hadn't emailed me (perhaps I don't still have 'it'?).
Today, I realized that the random friend request that I'd gotten on facebook on Tuesday, and not thought too much about, was from the lesbian, and that I'd made a huge tactical error by giving out my junk email address because it's also the one that's linked to my Facebook account. Fuuuuuck!

OK, so now I need some advice. I'm not really interested in being friends with this woman. She seemed nice enough, but not my kind of person. Also, she's clearly interested in doing stuff that I'm not interested in doing at this hetero/monogamous period of my life. But I don't bear this woman any ill will. Do I ignore the friend request? Do I refuse it? What if I run into this woman again. Do I send her a message and tell her that I'm in an LTR with a dude? I suppose that's the grown-up thing to do? I dunno. Maybe I don't owe this woman anything.
It was pretty embarrassing/dubious telling my bf that I'd given my email address to a lesbian.... If I start an email convo with this woman, I'll have to admit that too.
Jesus Christ!
I'm not vowing to quit drinking... obviously it was going to be a crazy night, Neil's b-day always is.... but next time I'm not going to drink so much that I don't gracefully exit immediately I sense the presence of Richard Linklater.

What Was Behind the Honey Bee Wipeout?

2007-10-23T14:07:00.000-04:00

My friend M sent me this article from alternet.org

Everyone has a theory why the honeybees started dying off. Try malnutrition.

On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row of glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down Ninth Street. Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler amber, depending on the particular mix of flower species the bees foraged. All of it was produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a third of what he had last fall, before the infamous bee die-off that afflicted growers around the world. "I'd better get the honey while I can," one customer remarks.

The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now labeled "colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal truth of today's corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring cross-pollination.

Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they make from collected nectar -- sipped from the throats of flowers into the bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide stretch of the year.

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse disorder.

It's a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling honey. The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost Chinese honey for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for beekeepers, that hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff regulations). The only income remaining has been in pollination services. Alan Wilson's bees are rented out for almond pollination starting in February. After that they go south to the orange groves, then all the way to North Dakota where they make clover honey. Wilson's Central Valley location near Merced has little to offer bees over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the brief flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest. Just the drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson's hives. Still, this year he plans to keep his bees closer to home where he can manage them more intensively and try to increase their numbers.

Every commercial beekeeper has different arrange-ments, but each involves long-distance trucking and the California almond crop. Almonds are entirely dependent on the seasonal importation of honeybees. Growers can't get crop insurance coverage unless they have at least two bee colonies per acre at almond blossom time; some growers use up to five colonies per acre for heavier yields. Over 800,000 Central Valley acres are planted in almond trees. As beekeeper Randy Oliver says, it is "monoculture at its absolute worst -- they don't allow one species of weed to grow": mile after mile of bare soil and almond trees. No native pollinators can survive on this wasted landscape to ease the honeybees' burden, and nothing lives to sustain bees before or after the almond bloom.

Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over the nation -- it takes virtually all of this country's commercially operated pollination colonies to cover California's almonds. While the bees roll down the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait in Central Valley bee yards for the trees to bloom, they're fed a mixture of high fructose corn syrup meant to replace nectar, along with soy protein meant to replace pollen. (Some beekeepers, Wilson among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer though more expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity: "When bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to pollinate an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it's a pretty whacked-out agricultural system."

Oliver's 500 bee colonies -- he was lucky, with losses under ten percent -- follow a relatively short migratory truck route that takes them from Central Valley almonds to Sierra foothill wildflowers to Nevada alfalfa. He attributes his success to fewer and shorter moves, reliance on pasture forage for much of the year, and avoidance of artificial feeding. "Some of these guys move their bees a dozen times a year," he says. Popular pollination routes include apples and blueberries, which rely on honeybees for 90 percent of their pollination, peaches (50 percent), and oranges (30 percent). Farmers won't bother planting squash or melons if they can't get beehives in place by bloom time. One-third of all US crops depend on honeybee pollination.

It hasn't been this way for long. Even 30 years ago growers could rely on a combination of native pollinating insects and local honeybees for most crops. In 1970, there were 35 beekeepers in Alan Wilson's area; now there are two. As farms grew more and more of fewer and fewer crops, using petrochemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, vast tracts of land have gradually approached the reductionist goal of supporting no life at all except the target crop. It's not just the almonds -- every crop is grown this way. That's why it's called industrial agriculture, or factory farming.

Bee researchers have been calling bees "the canary in this coal mine," a different version of the birds and the bees. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein has been popping up all over the Internet: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Einstein never said it, but the instant ubiquity of the sentiment says everything.

Though the media only picked it up this year, bees have actually been in trouble for the past couple of decades. Mites -- parasitic insects small enough to use bees as their hosts -- jumped from other species to honeybees, another example of collateral damage from global transportation. First tracheal mites in the '80s, then varroa mites in the '90s -- even before last winter, the world's honeybee population had declined by half in 30 years.

UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen points out that before the mites arrived, winter losses of five to ten percent of a beekeeper's colonies were the norm. The mites increased yearly losses to 25 percent by the late '80s, and now we're at 40 percent or higher, with some years better than average and others catastrophic. Randy Oliver says, "If we made a list of collapses of the last 20 years, this winter's would not make the top five." Last year's losses were bad for Alan Wilson, but the last four years together have decimated his colonies by over 90 percent. The only beekeepers doing substantially better are the very small percentage practicing non-chemical mite control coupled with little or no trucking or artificial feeding -- in other words, labor-intensive vigilance combined with lower pollination income. It's not a financially viable option for many fulltime beekeepers.

The difference with this winter's losses is not having an identified cause, and therefore no quick (even if temporary) fix. For tracheal mites, beekeepers developed nontoxic preventive treatments -- Alan Wilson successfully doses his bees on a mixture of Crisco, sugar, and peppermint extract. Varroa mites proved trickier, and beekeepers started down the slippery slope of synthetic insecticide use. "Until the mid-'90s nobody dreamed of using chemicals in beehives," Oliver says. Once they did, the race was on, with insecticide-resistant varroa mites evolving neck-in-neck with the newest chemical treatment. European beekeepers, who have had the varroa mite longer, have pretty much given up on chemicals and use an Integrated Pest Management approach. US beekeepers who go this route find it labor- and attention-intensive, and effective within its parameters (not eradication but healthy bees living with a smaller number of mites). According to Oliver, "We're just prolonging our agony as long as we continue to use chemical treatments."

Everyone agrees the honeybee buzzed into the 21st century carrying a heavy load of stress. Colonies were weakened by mites, perhaps by chemicals used to kill the mites, and probably by at least some of the 25 different viruses carried by varroa mites. Add in a fungus, nosema, that's tolerated by healthy bees but a problem for already weakened hives. Then there's the stress of long-distance truck travel, longer distances for more bees every year. The small hive beetle, an African native recently found in Florida hives, posed another challenge; aggressive African honeybees attack the beetle, but European bees, bred to be docile, let it overrun the hive.

Cell phone interference has been proposed as a threat to bees, based on reports of a German study showing bees unable to find their way home in the presence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. This particular theory must be called inconclusive at best, since the study was not designed with enough apicultural knowledge to produce reliable results.

No bee taken from the hive for the first time, as was done in the study, would be able to find its way back, since bees navigate primarily by landmarks, not electromagnetic homing sensors. Their first few excursions are short orientation flights, not blind trips in a box to a release point.

Of all these factors, many beekeepers judge varroa mites the most consistently debilitating. But there's another weakening influence more obvious and more integral to the larger agricultural dilemma. It's the stressor Mussen calls the most important of all -- bee malnutrition. High-fructose corn syrup and soy protein are not any more nutritious for bees than they are for humans (see Spring 2007), and bees in transit and between pollination jobs often must subsist on nothing but these non-foods. Compounding the problem, we're talking genetically modified corn and soy, every cell of which contains a bacterial insecticide. Are bees not insects? US studies have indicated that Bt corn pollen does not kill healthy bees or brood reared on it, but a German study showed that Bt pollen led to "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" in hives already weakened by varroa mites.

We do know that corn pollen in general is poor bee food, high in fiber and low in protein. The Midwest, up until now the country's best bee forage habitat, this year is being planted much more aggressively to GM corn as a source for ethanol -- aggressive meaning planting marginal areas and edges usually left to the asters and goldenrods that are high-quality pollen sources in late summer when bees need to raise the generation that will overwinter. Even when bees are out foraging for real nectar and non-GMO pollen, for much of the year they are likely to be ingesting a monocultured diet due to their use as pollinators for industrial-scale agriculture -- nothing but almond, then nothing but apple, then only watermelon. They're exposed to pesticides used on their forage crops as well. Oh -- and one more influence to factor into the equation -- very hot weather can damage the protein content of pollen, decreasing its food value for bees. Global warming is kicking our butts from more directions than we can comprehend.

Given these conditions, last winter's losses can hardly be considered a surprise. Neither can the failure of bee researchers to come up with one specific cause, much less a magic bullet cure. Still, the kind of thinking that got us this far continues. According to Mussen, "the only hope is the USDA Tucson lab" which is working on a liquid feed that bees can eat all year. Randy Oliver calls this the "holy grail" of bee research. The USDA's proprietary formula, if they come up with one that works, will be patented and licensed to a commercial producer, and the whole agricultural system may manage to lurch along for a few more years, complete with pollinators hauled from Florida to California in time for the almond bloom.

How did all those almonds get pollinated this year, on the heels of beekeepers' discoveries that half (in some cases up to 90 percent) of their colonies had suddenly gone missing? It wouldn't have happened without a change in regulations that allowed bees to be imported from Australia. Bee businesses Down Under went into boom mode, sending 100,000 packages of bees to the States. A package is a starter kit of about 10,000 worker bees and a queen, enclosed in a small screened box with a sugar water feeder. The receiving beekeeper shakes the package into a waiting hive, and given proper nectar and pollen resources, within a month a new generation of bees will be expanding the colony.

The Australian influx may be short-lived, as a colony of Indian bees (Apis cerana) was recently discovered living aboard a yacht off Australia. The Indian bee is host to yet another mite that could wreak havoc if it spreads to the European honeybee. Another factor in almond pollination this year was the rental price for a bee colony, which averaged $150, nearly twice what it was last year. This was the first year in which the income beekeepers realized from almond pollination surpassed the income received for the entire US honey crop. There's talk of opening the Canadian border for next year's almond season.

To paraphrase Randy Oliver, we're prolonging our agony by continuing with this profoundly unworkable agricultural system. Suddenly terms like "organic" and "biodiversity" shift from boutique buzzwords to elements of survival. This country has 4,500 species of native insects that are potential pollinators. On the East Coast, where farms are much smaller, more diverse, and broken up by uncultivated land, native insects account for up to 90 percent of crop pollination. Studies done on Costa Rican coffee crops have shown that yields are 20 percent greater within one kilometer of forest remnants. Canadian canola farmers show increased yields by leaving 30 percent of their cropland wild. It's all about pollination.

Fortunately for us, insects are quick to recolonize formerly dead areas. Hedgerows, windbreaks, wetlands, woodlots -- the particulars of restoration agriculture are easy and already known. It's the big picture that's harder to shift, from the extractive industrial petrochemical model to the biodiverse ecosystem model. Honeybees have upped the ante, giving us all the motivation we need to change -- do we want to continue to eat?

The material appearing here is copyright Terrain magazine, which is published by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California. (510-548-2235). The material is to be circulated for educational purposes only, and is not to be reprinted in any publication, or distributed for commercial purposes, including copying for sale, without the permission of the editor of Terrain.

If you don't want your dogs shot keep them on a leash

2007-10-23T13:50:00.000-04:00

I'm getting tired of people blaming others for their own mistakes. This family has been all over the news crying their eyes out because their loose dogs got shot while they were on a farmer's property. If you want your dogs to be safe, keep them on a leash or in an enclosure. The farmer is legally entitled to protect his livelihood from people's marauding dogs. I see this BS all the time in my neighbourhood with people out with their dogs talking on the phone with their backs turned while the dog shits all over and gets hit by a car. I know that sooner or later this family will probably google blog posts on the subject and come on here with some emotional rant about how Labs are gentle dogs, and their little angels weren't doing anything. But the fact of the matter is that if a dog chases, even playfully, a pregnant cow, then the cow could suffer a miscarriage. Also in the article they mentioned the possibility that their children might also be in the farmer's field with their loose dogs while the farmer was shooting, and what then? Well, the farmer would probably not be criminally liable then too, since the was unlikely any intent to kill humans and no expectation that humans would be trespassing on their property. Farmer's fields are private property not parkland, if you have 5 hectares of your own, why don't you use that instead of going on other people's land?

Family awaiting answers in dogs' shooting deaths

Oct 23, 2007 04:30 AM
Carola Vyhnak
Staff reporter

Devastated by the shooting deaths of their two golden retrievers, an Uxbridge family is still waiting for answers four days after the tragedy.

"The frustrating part is we've been given no information," Helen Jenkins said yesterday. "I just don't believe our dogs were attacking anyone's livestock. I can't understand someone pulling the trigger."

The family pets got away from 13-year-old twins John and Allison while they were visiting neighbours across the road from their country home last Thursday. Fruitless searches and inquiries ensued.

Uxbridge-Scugog Animal Control called Saturday morning to say a farmer had shot the dogs in his field Friday afternoon and the family could pick up their bodies at the Reach St. shelter the next day. They were promised an incident report but were later given the runaround by animal control and the municipal clerk's office, Jenkins said.

According to her, a law dating back to the 1920s gives farmers the right to protect their livestock. In many GTA communities the rural and urban boundaries are blurring as growth pushes out. But Jenkins said that if Sonny, 1 1/2, and Casey, 4, were attacking anyone's animals, "that would set a precedent for golden retrievers."

"We're concerned about the violence of it. He or she has taken that law right to the letter. What if one of my kids popped out of a ditch somewhere? Would they get shot?"

Both dogs were wearing collars with names and phone numbers and could easily have been traced to the family, Jenkins said. The family buried their pets' "shot-up" bodies on their 5-hectare property near Claremont, north of Pickering.

Jenkins's husband, John Sr., received no satisfaction when he sought out Uxbridge Mayor Bob Shepherd for answers yesterday, she said.

While there is a report "somewhere," Shepherd told the Star, he hasn't seen it and he can't say much until he knows the facts of the case.

"I sympathize with the owners. I'm a dog owner myself. I find it difficult to believe golden retrievers could have been that threatening but maybe there's a history there that I know nothing about."

Unless there's some legal reason to withhold the report, he'll try to get it for them, he said.

Update

2007-10-16T13:13:00.000-04:00

I've been very absent from my blog lately. It's been a couple of months. My mother fell off a ladder and broke her leg in 5 places and had to get a plate put in surgically. She's not very mobile and her house is the opposite of wheel-chair accessible. So my lovely aunt and I have shacked up with her and are tag-teaming the cooking and cleaning.
It's pretty sucky for my mom to be stuck at home all day. You'd think it's fun to get to lie around and stay home from work and watch TV and read books. But my mother is in pain, she's tired of being at home and she can't do a whole lot.
Thankfully, I have the world's best job and my boss has been really understanding about everything.

Pandas

2007-10-04T14:12:00.000-04:00

My friend sent me this today, it's pretty cute.

Don Cherry's Tailor has died

2007-09-10T13:51:00.000-04:00

Say what you will about Don Cherry's suits, I've always had a soft spot for the extremely flamboyant.

29 is divine! 29 is divine!

2007-09-06T16:45:00.000-04:00

Since my last post I've turned 29, become a quiz master, and resumed my weightloss competition with my fat friend Ashley.

Turning 29
On CBC radio 1, there's a First Nations advice columnist, she answers letters people write in and her advice is unfailingly sage. Years ago she said that Native people believe that the stages or cycles of life are 7 years long. So every 7 years you enter a new phase. Around my birthday, I started thinking about where I am in life, where I'm going, what's different in my life now... I'm coming up on 30, I've been out of highschool for 10 years (no I don't think I'll be attending my reunion - I didn't like most of those people while I was there, and I don't keep up with more than 3 or 4 of them, and I really don't want to have to explain to the rest of them why I blocked them on Facebook). Anyway, I realized in looking back at things, that I really did enter a new phase of my life last year. I started playing rollerderby, running, started working in a job that I could see myself staying in for a long long time.... it just really seems like a lot has changed for me and for the better too.

Becoming a quizmaster
TT has held a quiz night once a month, for the last year. It's sooo much fun, you end up getting all hot around the collar about the most obscure stuff. I love to let my inner nerd out. Anyway, I had the most points in last year's competition and part of my 'prize' was that since TT is leaving us, I had to become the quizmaster. Last night was my first foray, and while, it wasn't an all around success, it was definitely a good start. Some of the categories were too hard, some too easy. When it was just right I could tell by the excited chatter, the debating. The perfect trivia question is one whose answer you have to deduce or you think you know but you're just not sure that it's right, it really gets you thinking.
Anyway, I already have ideas for questions for the next one, and plans for improving my technique. I'm going to start growing my mustache and then... Alex Trebeck.... watch out... I'm coming for your job!

My fat competition with my fat friend Ashley
Ashley's expanding by the second, it turns out that her failed attempts at losing weight during the last incarnation of the competition were actually successful attempts at maintaining her weight and once the competition ended, she ate her way to gargantuan proportions.
I'm actually not sure whether I gained or lost since we put our competition on hiatus. I have been skating twice a week and running twice a week all summer. So, while, I haven't been weighing myself or watching what I eat (well actually, I have been watching myself eat cake and cookies and fast food by the truckload), my clothes still fit well and I can fit through doorways (which is more than I can say for poor, fat Ashley).
I have to say, and maybe this is going to seem kind of Oprah-ish, but playing derby has altered my body image. I used to exercise and diet for vanity and health. Lately I've started to see my body as a vehicle, a means to an end, I just want to win, and I have to work my body really freakin' hard to make that happen. It's way more motivating. I don't know if my run club realizes this, but I work them waaaay harder when I have a game coming up.

It's very hard to raise a .... Camel

2007-08-20T11:05:00.001-04:00

But in this case it wasn't hard for the camel to get it up....

Aroused pet camel smothers woman, 60
Aug 19, 2007 08:55 AM

BRISBANE, Australia (AP) – An Australian woman was killed by a pet camel given to her as a 60th birthday present after the animal apparently tried to have sex, police said today.

The woman, whose name was not released, was killed Saturday at her family's sheep and cattle ranch near Mitchell, 600 kilometres west of the Queensland state capital Brisbane, state police Detective Senior Constable Craig Gregory said.

The 10-month-old male camel – weighing about 150 kilograms – knocked the woman to the ground, lay on top of her, then exhibited what police suspect was mating behaviour, Gregory said.

"I'd say it's probably been playing, or it may be even a sexual sort of thing," Gregory said, adding the camel almost suffocated the family's pet goat by straddling it on several occasions.

Camel expert Chris Hill said he had no doubt the camel's behaviour was sexual.

Hill, who has offered camel rides to tourists for 20 years, said young camels are not aggressive, but can be dangerous if treated as pets without discipline.

The fate of the camel was not known.

The woman was given the camel in March as a birthday present from her husband and daughter. "She had a love of exotic pets," Gregory said.

RIP

2007-08-16T16:48:00.000-04:00

Gore Gore Rollergirls

2007-08-15T16:58:00.000-04:00

Here's an awesome video that our manager put together. Friends, please be discrete with your comments, don't reveal my identity, I'm shy!

I don't want to say I told you so, but the fact is that if we've ever had a conversation about tattooing, I've probably mentioned this possibility....

2007-08-10T07:17:00.000-04:00

My favourite part of this article is where it says, "Tattooing and body piercing shops are not regulated or licensed." I'm sure if it turns out that people did get HIV, then the shop will try to claim that there's no way of proving the person didn't get it somewhere else.

Oshawa tattoo shop used dirty tools
Oshawa body art studio reopens after owners fix problems with possibly unsterilized equipment
Aug 10, 2007 04:30 AM
Carola Vyhnak
Staff Reporter

Durham Region health authorities are urging as many as 2,000 people to get a blood test for HIV and hepatitis B and C over concerns they may have been exposed to unsterile equipment at an Oshawa body art studio.

The health department said yesterday that possible use of non-sterile equipment at Longhorn Custom Bodyart Studio could lead to transmission of infectious diseases. Anyone who received a tattoo or body piercing between Nov. 17, 2006, and Aug. 1 should see a doctor and be tested, said Ross MacEachern, manager of environmental health.

However, the risk of infection was "relatively low" and there was no evidence that anyone had been infected, he said.

Health inspectors closed the shop Aug. 1 after a routine visit led to "a more detailed investigation of the sterilization procedures," MacEachern said. Lab tests showed the machine used to sterilize multi-use instruments was malfunctioning on and off since November.

The store re-opened around 6 p.m. yesterday after a public health inspector gave the go-ahead, said Kim Towie, wife of owner Hugh Towie. She said five tests they were required to do last Friday all passed.

Towie said they were only aware of the machine malfunctioning early last month and a technician came out to fix it. "It was just a screw that needed adjustment. The temperature was supposed to reach 132 but it only got to 128."

She said the studio has never had a problem during 16 years in business. "We are a very clean shop. We scrub our tools thoroughly and sterilize everything. Our customers are number one."

It was the first time Durham authorities had closed a tattoo shop, MacEachern said, adding that such establishments are inspected at least once a year and usually more often. "Anything we deem to be an immediate risk to the public ... we close the place."

The owner is responsible for testing sterilizers monthly and keeping records to show health inspectors, according to MacEachern.

Tattooing and body piercing shops are not regulated or licensed.

The health department is working with the studio's owner to contact an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 clients, who will be urged to see a doctor "even if you are well."

MacEachern said anyone who received services from the Centre St. N. studio should call the health department "so we can provide information on the recommended follow-up tests required to help rule out any blood-borne diseases."

The Durham Region health department can be reached at 905-666-6241 or 1-800-841-2729.

101 things in 1001 days

2007-08-09T10:02:00.000-04:00

I saw an example of this blogging exercise on Jessica's blog a few weeks ago and decided to do it myself. The idea is that you pick 101 goals to complete in 1001 days, which is a little under 3 years. At the end of this time, you donate 10$ to charity for every task that remains undone. I haven't settled on a single charity, but have a couple in mind as beneficiaries for my laziness. I've also added a couple of asterisks for ones that I'm going to consider more of a lifetime goal, no penalty for not completing them in 1001 days, but bonus if I do. Actually, this list kind of reminds me of that show My Name is Earl.

1. Buy property *
2. Get an RRSP
3. Do 50 situps and 50 pushups every day for 50 days (0/50)
4. Start using my bike
5. Bring lunch to work every day for a week
6. Get permanent job
7. Acheive BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 (0/50)
8. Pay off credit card debt (0/9)
9. Secret task *
10. Save 3 months rent/mortgage (0/3)
11. Run a 5K
12. Run a 10 K
13. Run a half marathon
14. Run a whole marathon
15. Get a really awesome pair of jeans
16. Get a comfortable reading chair
17. Floss every day for 90 days (0/90)
18. Find/buy a bathing suit I feel comfortable wearing in public
19. Visit Dan-boy in Paris and Sly in London
20. Visit the Maldives *
21. Go on a safari in Africa *
22. Get a new computer, possibly a laptop
23. Get a new palm pilot
24. Organize my digital photos
25. Get a fireproof box for pictures and documents
26. Try snowboarding
27. Learn to download music
28. Download and complete language tapes for 5 languages (0/5)
29. Learn how to use photoshop and make a photoshopped image worthy of hanging on my wall/using in a card
30. Frame and hang at least 15 photos in my apartment (0/15)
31. See the northern lights
32. Graduate
33. Get a facial
34. Take an art class, photography or pottery
35. Reorganize/purge closet
36. Develop old film rolls that are lying around
37. Get a Tetley tea pot with my saved UPCs
38. Donate blood
39. Have a set of indoor wheels and bearings and a set of outdoor wheels and bearings
40. Get a proper skate tool and a toe guard for skates and new elbow pads (0/3)
41. Get a crown on my right lower molar
42. Put together a cookbook with my favourite recipes
43. Change banks
44. Make/print photo albums for all major trips in the last 5 years
45. Visit remaining 2 continents (0/2) *
78. Get a Glamour Shots portrait done - can you still do that? (with Jessica)

Awesome!

2007-07-31T13:34:00.000-04:00

Now that is rehab! Why don't we have amazing dance programs for prisonners here? They've got nothing but time on their hands! Dude this is the second best thing I've ever seen on YouTube, after this. Funny how they are both Thriller related.

Finally!

2007-07-30T00:12:00.000-04:00

I finally got some frickin' air time, to bad it was just a passing shot of me sitting in the stands. I am dying to get on the news with one good clear shot of me in uniform, on the track, taking someone down, or being taken down, spectacularly.
In the mean time, check out this Canadian Press piece on Toronto Roller Derby.
Oh well, there's always next game, which if you're interested is this weekend. Let me know if you want tickets.

Safest community in Canada... even with me in it

2007-07-18T20:42:00.000-04:00

Toronto crime rate among lowest in country: StatsCan
Last Updated: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 | 3:55 PM ET
CBC News

The Toronto area has the second-lowest crime rate of all large urban regions in Canada, behind Quebec City, according to figures released Wednesday by Statistics Canada.

Greater Toronto had 5,020 criminal code offences in 2006 for every 100,000 people. Winnipeg, Vancouver and Edmonton recorded more than twice as many.

For violent crime, there were 738 offences, with only Ottawa and Quebec registering lower rates for their populations.

A large city or area, according to the study, was defined as having a population of 500,000 and over.

"Toronto is actually one of the safest communities in Canada," University of Ottawa criminologist Ron Melchers told CBC News.

Contrary to popular belief, smaller cities in Western Canada have more crimes per capita, with Regina claiming the dubious distinction as Canada's crime capital.

The capital of Saskatchewan had 12,415 criminal code offences per 100,000 of population, and 1,546 of those were considered violent.

City life can be a kooky experience....

2007-07-18T11:23:00.000-04:00

On my way home last night, I noticed a police cruiser on my street, a few buildings away from my own. I didn't wonder too much about what was going on (since this is a common occurance) until I got closer and saw a whole bunch of police tape and the super of the building hosing blood off the sidewalk. I have a friend/acquaintance who lives in this building, so I emailed him to see if he'd heard what was going on, and his response was so hilarious that I just had to post it here word for word.

I wrote:
"What the heck happened outside your place last night? There was police tape all over and someone was out front washing away blood when I was on my way home!"

He wrote:
"It's a pleasure living there, obviously. Thing is, I'm not sure what happened last night.
On the way in last night I saw the police cruisers, the cops, the blood stains, the blown-out panels of glass from one of the front doors, a bun (?), and what I think was a bottle of piss, but, you know, nothing that clued me in to what had gone on.
And that's a bummer since I'm sure the story's pretty wild.
I'll let you know more when I know more."

I'm still giggling. Wacky wackiness.

National Attention!

2007-07-16T10:50:00.000-04:00

Roller derby taking off in Canada
By CHRISTOPHER MAUGHAN
TORONTO (CP) - They go by names like Killah Cupcake, Knina Knuckles, or Danger Mouse, and in their ripped fishnets and short miniskirts, they look a bit like burlesque dancers gone goth.

But these women aren't putting on some suggestive dance number - they're getting ready to race around a rink on rollerskates and knock one other down to the cold, unforgiving concrete of Toronto's George Bell Arena.

The women of the Toronto Roller Derby league are enjoying wild success in their first full season of play. In 2006, they started working to bring the retro 60s-era sport back. Today there are fledgling roller derby leagues in at least nine Canadian cities, from Vancouver to Montreal.

"The growth has been huge," says Danger Mouse, who's known as Jennie Boone to her non-derby friends. She plays in a new league in Hamilton that has only two teams so far. But she says she expects the league will double in size by next year.

And the six-team Toronto league, according to one of its co-founders, has become the biggest in North America, if not the world.

"There's a whole network of derby girls and we've checked every website out there. Most leagues have two to four teams and there are very few that have grown to five. And we're the only league that has six," says Monica Mitchell, a photographer by day who goes by Monochrome on derby nights.

Just like it was in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, the sport is a brutal mix of bodychecks and trip-ups as players race around a track at breakneck speed, scoring points when a designated player, called a jammer, laps a pack of blockers.

Emily Simmons, who plays a Kiss-inspired character called Gene Scrimmage, says the sport is as rough as it sounds. She has seen her fair share of injuries.

"One girl from our team broke her ankle," she says. "One girl from the Death Track Dolls tore all her leg tendons... There's an old saying in roller derby: It's not if you get injured, it's when."

Simmons herself has a nasty scar on her knee, a souvenir from a practice when she fell to the ground and one of her pads got caught, causing her kneecap to scrape across a cement floor.

There's even the odd fight, according to Boone. She says one of the Hamilton teams, the Steeltown Tank Girls, was in Buffalo last week, where an opposing player made a habit of bodychecking from behind.

"She pushed one of our players into the boards head first... so there were words back and forth and eventually the ice broke," she says, adding that players even came off the benches to participate in the brawl.

"It's on YouTube," she says with a wry smile.

"There's definitely an element of spectacle (to the sport)," says Simmons, alluding not only to the violence but also to the dyed hair, spooky makeup and skimpy outfits typical of roller derby."We do play that up."

Each team operates under a chosen theme that governs how players are named. Saturday night in Toronto, the Bay Street Bruisers, a group of skaters in tight black t-shirts with paited-on ties, were taking on Chicks Ahoy, a group in mock green-and-black sailor suits.

Natasha Jesenak, a.k.a. Nasher the Smasher, is one of the Chicks. They're getting ready for their first public bout. She has a simple answer for anyone who asks about her style of play.

"Nasher's big and she hits people. I'm going to plow through everything and nothing's going to get by me... I'll just smash the shit out of them. That's my main move."

As much as roller derby is spectacular to watch, those closest to the game emphasize that it's a sport first, and a spectacle second.

Toronto League President Jennifer Capes, an elementary school teacher by day, says there are a lot of technical elements to roller derby that have to be learned, such as legal blocking and strategic skating.

She says the recent growth of the sport is a testament to how dedicated its players are. Unlike the roller derby leagues of old, which had TV contracts and big-time promoters, today's leagues are run by the skaters themselves.

"We don't have any big sponsors or promoters with billons of dollars," says Capes.

Like many modern derby girls, she says she remembers watching the sport as a kid, and was inspired to get into it through a 2006 A&E documentary series on a league in Austin, Tex.

She says a few women who knew each other through common friends got together at a bar and formed a team. After a year's hard work, they had a league up and running.

Capes says there's a lot of work ahead for women in other cities trying to get the sport to catch on. "They're learning and growing (as players) and you have to do a lot of that before you're ready to host an event."

Ottawa's Kelly McAlear says she's up to the challenge. She started a team a few months ago and is drafting players to form a team that would play against derby squads from Montreal.

She says she'd eventually like to get the sport going at the youth level, too.

"They have that in Vancouver where (they) teach the game to 12-year-olds and actually some of the daughters of the women on my team have expressed an interest."

Saturday night in Toronto, there was plenty of interest, with about 500 people showing up. Ron Wencer, who remembers going to bouts in New York in the 1960s, says he sees the spirit of roller derby living on.

"Just looking at the girls skating, and my fellow attendees here," he says, "I can tell there's the same gum-chewing attitude that there was back then."

Best fight so far...

2007-07-16T10:39:00.000-04:00

I missed a game in Hamilton last weekend, and I am so bummed about it. The worst part is that I missed the best fight that Ontario derby has seen yet.
The Steeltown Tank Girls (Hamilton) were playing the all-star team from the Queen City Rollergirls (Buffalo). One of the Queen City girls came up behind one of the Hamilton girls and launched off her toe-stops and pushed her from behind, the Hamilton girl went head first into the boards, and got up and took the Queen City girl on.

Another perspective on Jenni

2007-07-13T11:45:00.000-04:00

Apparently, this is how the people I work with see me.

TB-infected man sued by plane passengers

2007-07-13T11:18:00.000-04:00

Seriously! This is unbelievable. His father-in-law is a TB expert, so you'd think he'd know better than to go flying all over with his medical condition. AND he's a personal injuries lawyer, from one of the most litigious societies in the world, so you'd think he'd realize that he'd get sued if people found out that he put them at risk of catching his extremely drug resistant TB. I hope this serves as an example for other selfish contagious people to stay home and keep their cooties to themselves.

8 Canadians who took same flight claim distress, financial losses

Jul 13, 2007 04:30 AM
Megan Ogilvie
Health Reporter

Eight Canadians who took the same flight as a TB-infected American lawyer launched lawsuits yesterday against the man, claiming financial losses and emotional and psychological distress.

One passenger, a 72-year-old Montreal man, has tested positive for tuberculosis, said the plaintiffs' lawyer An-Lac Nguyen. He cautioned that the diagnosis is not definitive and said it is not clear if the man got the infection on the plane.

The other passengers are being monitored by local public health authorities and are still waiting to hear whether they contracted TB.

Andrew Speaker ignited an international health scare in May when he flew from Prague to Montreal, despite warnings from health officials that he had a deadly form of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

"All of the plaintiffs feel their lives have been gravely affected by this event," said Nguyen, who filed nine civil suits in Quebec Superior Court on behalf of the eight passengers and one family member who lives with a plaintiff but was not on the flight. The two Ottawa residents, two Czech citizens and five Montrealers are seeking a total of $1.38 million in damages. Nguyen, a partner at the Montreal firm Nachar Nguyen, said he expects more plaintiffs to come forward.

The elderly passenger who tested positive for tuberculosis has had to isolate himself from his family and friends while he waits for further tests at the end of the month, said Nguyen. Even though the TB skin test is not 100 per cent reliable and the result may be a false positive, Nguyen said the man has not been allowed to see his children or grandchildren in two months.

Nissam Tabri, 26, was seated one row in front of Speaker on the May 24 flight. The Montreal graduate student said he has spent the past two months in a state of anxiety.

"I believe that Andrew Speaker's negligent, reckless and selfish behaviour cannot go unpunished," he told the Star. "It was extremely dangerous what he did. He knew that he was on the no-fly list," and he flew despite that, Tabri said. Doctors have told Tabri, who is to have a final TB test at the end of the month, that he has one chance in 1,000 of getting tuberculosis. Tabri is seeking $142,000 in damages and his twin brother, who he lives with, has also filed a suit against Speaker.

After getting married in Greece and honeymooning in Rome, Speaker, a personal injuries lawyer, was told not to fly back to his hometown of Atlanta because he could infect fellow passengers. But he decided to dodge health officials by flying into Canada.

Last week, officials said Speaker, who is being treated at a Denver facility, has a less deadly strain of TB than previously thought. While saying it's too early for final conclusions, Public Health Agency of Canada officials say no active TB cases have been seen in the 29 passengers who sat within two rows of Speaker.

The Troll returns

2007-07-09T17:06:00.000-04:00

Imagine you have two jobs, each with some upsides and some downsides and one day you go to work and all the downsides of the one job have transplanted themselves to the other workplace and added themselves to the downsides of the other job. That's what happened today and I thought my head was going to explode.

The Troll went to the museum this weekend. The same musuem I volunteer at. I thank Jesus I wasn't there that day. But, I'm not thanking Jesus that I had to listen to her whining about her experience there all day at work today.

Here's the thing, the museum has a new addition. This addition sucks (but maybe not as much as I thought it was going to). The museum is overpriced, I'll be the first one to tell you that the addition sucks and the admission is too much. Usually, when visitors come up to me and tell me this, I let them know diplomatically that I'm not shocked that they said this and that I sypmathize with their situation. Then I tell them who to complain to, where they actually might get some action, rather than just torturing the staff with their complaints. If these visitors are nice people, they'll get my drift and complain to the right person, or let it go. Sometimes someone comes up and complains about these things and you try to sympathize and agree but they just won't let it go - that's where the Troll was today, and I couldn't get away from it.

First she stood by my desk talking to my co-workers about it for at least 45 minutes. I missed about ten of it, because I went to the kitchen to get some tea, actually, just to get away from the conversation, but I got some tea while I was there. Then later, I went to get my lunch in the kitchen and she was in there bitching and moaning about it. Everywhere I went today, she was there. I wanted to give her her 30something dollars back just to get some silence, but I doubt that it would have worked and she probably would have gotten bent out of shape if I'd talked to her at all, so I just tried to go to a happy place.
I bet she made the museum staff miserable, I bet the all talked about her when they were discussing all the especially bitchy people they had to deal with that day when they were locking up.
In the past, when I've had to deal with people like that at the museum, people who were totally unreasonable and intensely snotty, I often wondered if they had family who loved them, co-workers who respected them.... if they were just having a bad day or if they were assholes 24/7.... now I understand.

The disco bush looks better and better after reading this chilling article

2007-07-05T11:31:00.000-04:00

Extreme bikini wax prompts cautionary tale
Warning: This story contains graphic medical details
Last Updated: Thursday, July 5, 2007 | 8:32 AM ET
The Canadian Press

It's the story of a Brazilian wax that went south, a drive to get rid of the hair down under that nearly cost a young Australian woman her life.

Her doctors say it's also a cautionary tale for other aficionados of the minimalist look — a warning that maximum depilation can potentially lead to debilitation, especially when it's being performed on someone with a weakened immune system.

"I think the message … of this case is just to say: 'Hey guys, you know, we need a bit of a reality check here,' " says Dr. Lindsay Grayson, an infectious diseases specialist with Austin Health and the University of Melbourne.

"This might be fine and mostly pretty innocuous and fun, but for some people it's not that. It can be quite serious."

The "some people" Grayson refers to are people whose immune systems are weakened — or compromised, in the language of the medical community.

That typically encompasses people with HIV/AIDS, those on immune-suppressing drugs because they've undergone an organ transplant or people receiving cancer therapy. And in this case, it also refers to someone with poorly controlled diabetes.

The person in question is an unidentified 20-year-old Australian woman with Type 1 diabetes — the kind that requires regular insulin shots — who underwent a disastrous Brazilian bikini wax. Her physicians report on her startling case in an upcoming issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

During the waxing procedure, which was performed by a trainee, the woman experienced some vulval bleeding, suggesting tearing of the skin. And in the two weeks after, she developed symptoms of a worsening infection — pain, swelling, redness and discharge.

By the time she sought medical help, she was reporting excruciating pain, fever, a rash that extended up to the chest and neck and severe difficulty urinating. Examination showed her external genitalia were "grossly swollen." Doctors couldn't do an internal examination because the woman was in too much pain; one was eventually performed after she'd been put under general anesthesia.

Her condition was so severe treating doctors thought she had necrotizing fasciitis — flesh-eating disease — and they urgently put her on a regime of heavy-duty antibiotics.

The woman didn't have that rapidly progressing infection, caused by some strains of Streptococcus bacteria. But she did have a life-threatening Streptococcus pyogenes infection with what looked like a flare-up of a pre-existing herpes infection.

"If she had not received appropriate therapy, she would have died," Grayson said in an interview from Melbourne.

Second bout
The antibiotics did the trick, though, and the woman recovered. She was released from hospital after 10 days and was able to return to work after 21.

But this tale of hair scares doesn't end there.

Six months later, the woman again tried to denude her nether regions, this time eschewing wax and turning to the razor. Razors often make small tears in the skin and a few days later, she was back in hospital with a second infection and herpes recurrence.

The second bout was less severe than the first, possibly because she sought care more quickly, Grayson says. "She was scared stiff."

While Grayson and his colleagues acknowledge that this case is probably at the severe end of the spectrum of hair-removal complications, they nonetheless think it sounds a crucial cautionary note.

"The importance of it is that it highlights a potential new phenomenon and that is the impact of the beauty industry on patients such as this," Grayson says.

Common infections
Dr. Michael Libman, director of infectious diseases for Montreal's McGill University Health Centre, admits he's never seen a case as bad as the one this woman had.

But Libman says skin infections are common among people who remove hair — whether it's men shaving too close to a herpes cold sore and spreading it about their face or infected lesions that develop on legs nicked in shaving.

And the risk, of course, is greater in the groin.

"One of the problems with shaving pubic hair, as opposed to shaving your face or shaving your legs, is that it's an area that just has more bacteria in the neighbourhood," Libman says, adding that waxing also causes microscopic tears in the skin that can allow bacteria that normally sit harmlessly on the surface of the skin to slip into tiny cuts and cause infections.

While he says many doctors will have seen infections resulting from hair removal efforts, he doesn't anticipate anyone would issue general guidance against it.

"I think the rate of complications is too low that people are going to say 'This is too dangerous,' '' Libman says. "But the recommendation would be to be careful."

Pigeons = Death

2007-07-04T23:32:00.001-04:00

Look at all the horrible diseases you can get from pigeons!
Bob Dylan even got histoplasmosis.

One of those days

2007-07-04T23:08:00.000-04:00

-two buses closed their doors and drove away from me this morning as I
was running towards them trying to get on on my way to work
-mid-morning I decided to go to the coffee shop across
the street for a muffin and a tea. I went to the bank machine to get
some cash, as I had nothing in my wallet, only to discover that no
money at all was available in my account
-I abandoned the muffin-run
to go back and find out where all my money had gone only to find that
my landlord took more than twice the amount of my rent out of my
account and overdrew it by 500 dollars
-I called the landlord to say WTF
and they were completely indifferent and told me to write a letter and
drop it off to them so they could decide what to do about it and the
soonest I could get my money back was in two weeks (what do I do for
cash between now and then? *have you ever been shrugged at over the
phone before? now I have)
-I called my bank, they were much more
sympathetic, but I'm still looking at some pretty hefty bank fees that
I'll have to try to reclaim from the landlord after this whole thing
gets resolved
-I went to the walk-in clinic after work to try to get
someone to get to the bottom of why I have an itchy rash all over my
poor little body, waited for hours, finally got a prescription for a
medication that I could have bought over the counter
-went late to practice, pulled my groin
-couldn't
get my skates off after practice, because of the knot I tied in the
laces and because I couldn't lift my leg with the pain in my groin,
decided to cut the laces, only to find that the scissors I thought were
in my bag got taken out over the weekend
-went to the pharmacy to
pick up my prescription only to find that I might be allergic to the
medication and that the pharmacy didn't have it anyway
-I am now going to try to go to sleep and hopefully tomorrow won't suck so much

Turns out, I'm "That Guy"

2007-07-03T14:01:00.000-04:00

Instead of going camping this weekend, I decided to stay home and relax and watch movies. It's been pretty busy lately and I thought I'd be able to get some rest. But the the boyf who normally doesn't want to do anything decided that this weekend was the weekend that we should deal once and for all with the pigeon infestation that we have on our balcony. These pigeons are disgusting, every inch of our balcony is encrusted in their shit, including the intake for our heating and air conditioning - which means that whatever diseases they may have are most surely circulating around our apartment, killing us with every breath we take. So we buy some netting and wood, and spend the entire day putting the stuff up. It's tough work drilling into poured concrete, we took turns and recharged the drill every 15 minutes. Late that night we finally had the whole thing done, when suddenly I saw a streak of light whizzing past our balcony railing. It had to be about midnight at this point, I figured it must just be a one-off, some drunk lighting their last fireworks on the way home. But then there was another one, and another one metres from our nylon, very melt-able, netting. Turns out that some idiots decided it was a good idea to have a midnight to 2 AM fireworks display dangerously close to my building. Finally, at a quarter to two in the morning, I called the super and asked her to go down there and tell them to can it. Her response, "They're following the safety guidelines that were posted in the building."
What? It's 2 in the freakin' morning!
(Out of curiosity, the next morning, I went out to where these guidelines were posted and I checked, sure enough, it didn't say to stay away from structures while setting off your fireworks, and it also didn't say to follow noise bylaws and stop your display before 11 PM. But, it did say make sure someone responsible was in charge of your display, and, seriously, as if any sober, responsible person ever thought it was a good idea to set of fireworks at 1 am... assholes.)
So, I told the super that if she wasn't going to stop it, my next call would be to the police.
So, now, I'm 'that guy'. I didn't want to be 'that guy' but they made me. It was mostly because I was afraid they'd melt my precious pigeon netting, but also, a little bit because I didn't want to be woken by the ambulance sirens when one of them blew their hand off.
I'm starting to think that selling fireworks to just anyone is a mistake, you should have your own barge and a licence, and a million dollars of insurance, before you can do a fireworks display. There are very few people out there who are responsible enough to be able to put on a home fireworks display, and if you were really that responsible, wouldn't you just go down to the lake shore and watch the professional display anyway?

The stuff you can do with Lego!

2007-06-30T13:08:00.000-04:00

Yes kids, some cool cat made a rollerderby themed diorama out of lego.
Look at the little mohawks!

The jam is about to begin...

The jammers are poised, waiting for the whistle.

Loves it!

T.O. 's water 3rd best in taste test

2007-06-26T13:43:00.000-04:00

Now I want to go to Oklahoma City and some place in Kansas and find out what's so excellent about their water, I've always quite liked Toronto's tap water.

City judged against 10 U.S. entrants

Jun 26, 2007 04:30 AM
Jennifer Bain
Food Editor

Toronto tap water has won third place in a blind North American taste test.

Sure, we lost to Oklahoma City and a county in Kansas, but these aren't bad bragging rights considering it was the first time we'd entered the Best of the Best Water Taste Test.

"That's excellent – I feel great," Patrick Newland, director of water treatment and supply for the city of Toronto, said yesterday. "This gives us an opportunity to compete at a different level at other shows."

But he had an important caveat: "Our water is second to none. We're very lucky here in Toronto."

So what does a winning water taste like? In a word, nothing.

Great tap water should be "clear, crystal and have a nice taste without having any flavours associated with it," judge and emcee Prof. Mel Suffet of the UCLA's School of Public Health said yesterday.

The liquid contestants were couriered or hand-delivered to Toronto for the American Water Works Association annual conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Ten waters had already won U.S. regional competitions. As host city, Toronto got the 11th spot.

Five judges (including me) privately tasted the "blind" samples – knowing them only as numbers 1 through 11 – and at room temperature. It was a cinch to eliminate six for smelling like chlorine or tasting salty, earthy or musty.

Five waters (the more neutral of the lot) moved on to the finals, where they were relabelled A through E. We tasted and scored these live in front of a crowd of curious conference-goers.

Like a wine tasting, we sniffed and swirled before sipping and swirling some more. Unlike a wine tasting, we didn't get to spit anything out.

"I'm drowning," confided judge Djanette Khiari, project manager with the American Water Works Association Research Foundation. (She chairs the taste and odour committee.)

"Good" water got marks of one to four. "Better" water got five to eight. The "best" water got nine or 10. Our quest was to pinpoint the most tasteless and odourless water, but we were encouraged to let personal preference drive our rankings since this was a fun (and not deadly serious) competition.

Suffet and Khiari, along with California environmental consultant Michael McGuire, were considered properly trained technical judges. They have even co-created a "Drinking Water Taste and Odour Wheel." Mill St. Brewery brewmaster Joel Manning and I – both with jobs that demand plenty of tasting – stepped in as local judges.

Pros or not, we had virtually no problem agreeing on who the finalists should be.

"Beer's mostly water," Manning said.

"We take Toronto municipal water, filter it, treat it and make beer out of it." He wasn't sure that he could pick out Toronto's water from the group of 11, but described it as "fairly chlorinated."

It turns out that I put a star beside water number seven and gave it a perfect score during the first round. Taste test organizer Kylah Hedding later revealed that #7 was Toronto's finest. For round two, however, Toronto's water was relabelled "water B" and I thought I detected chlorine so gave it a lower score.

Organizers had only planned to release the first-place winner, as in the contest's previous two years. But in the frenzy of the moment they named second and third place winners after tallying the scores.

So what makes Oklahoma City's water better than ours?

McGuire described it to the audience as "really refreshing" and "terrific." I had to admit to the emcee that I couldn't come up with anything to say to capture the water's screaming neutrality.

"That's good," Suffet replied. "When you have nothing to say about a water, that's good."

MTV Canada did a spot on rollerderby yesterday

2007-06-13T16:47:00.000-04:00

There's a quick flash of me in there, click here to watch it.

Some Video from Kruger National Park in South Africa

2007-06-13T16:41:00.000-04:00

This video is crazy, but really worth watching to the end.

Anthropologists eat this shit up

2007-06-11T23:05:00.000-04:00

Thanks to my brother for sending me this article.
Is Prince Philip an island god?

By Nick Squires
BBC News, Vanuatu

Britain's Duke of Edinburgh may be planning a quiet birthday celebration at home this weekend, but there will be feasting and flag-waving in an isolated jungle village in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where he is worshipped as a god.

The islanders associate Prince Philip with a mountain spirit

The Land Cruiser ground up the rough dirt track, pitching and rolling like a boat. The trail was so severely eroded that it was more like a river bed, with miniature canyons gouged out by the monsoon rains.

I had been drawn to this poor excuse for a road by a story so unlikely that it sounded barely credible.

It was one I had wanted to investigate for years.

Legend had it that there was a clutch of villages on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu which - as bizarre as it may seem - worshipped Prince Philip as a god.

How and why they had chosen the Duke of Edinburgh, I had no idea. I fully expected the story to be either false, or wildly exaggerated.

Distant adoration

After an hour's drive we pulled into a jungle clearing shaded by giant banyan trees.

A short walk led to the village of Yaohnanen, a collection of sagging thatched huts, banana trees and snotty-nosed little kids.

With the help of my driver-cum-interpreter, Lui, I was introduced to the chief of the village. Jack Naiva was a bright-eyed old man of about 80, with grey hair and a faded sarong wrapped around his wiry body.

I felt deeply foolish telling him I had come to his village to ask if he worshipped the Queen's husband.

I wondered if it was all some sort of elaborate joke.

Jack Naiva, chief of the village, has an official portrait of the Prince

But the look on Chief Jack's face told me it was not. He dispatched one of the villagers and a few minutes later the man returned from a hut with three framed pictures.

They were all official portraits of the Prince.

The first, in black and white, looked like it was taken in the early 1960s.

The second was dated 1980 and showed the Prince holding a traditional pig-killing club - a present from the islanders.

The most recent was from seven years ago.

They had all been sent from London with the discreet permission of Prince Philip, who is apparently well aware that he is the subject of such distant adoration.

Ancient legend

Chief Jack squatted on the ground as he told me how the Prince Philip cult had come about.

It seems that it emerged some time in the 1960s, when Vanuatu was an Anglo-French colony known as the New Hebrides.

For centuries, perhaps millennia, villagers had believed in an ancient story about the son of a mountain spirit venturing across the seas to look for a powerful woman to marry.

They believed that unlike them, this spirit had pale skin.

Somehow the legend gradually became associated with Prince Philip, who had indeed married a rich and powerful lady.

Villagers would have seen his portrait - and that of the Queen - in government outposts and police stations run by British colonial officials.

Their beliefs were bolstered in 1974, when the Queen and Prince Philip made an official visit to the New Hebrides. Here was their ancestral spirit, resplendent in a white naval officer's uniform, come back to show off his bride.

"He's a god, not a man," the chief told me emphatically, pointing at the portraits.

Response to colonialism

None of the cult followers can read or write.

Prince Philip gave permission for portraits to be sent from London

They told me - somewhat amazingly - that it was only this year that they learnt the date of the Prince's birthday - 10 June.

As Philip turns 86 and they are planning to mark the occasion with a feast and ceremonial drinking of kava, an intoxicating brew made from the roots of a pepper tree which makes your mouth go numb.

They have even acquired a large Union flag which they are going to run up a bamboo flag pole.

It is easy to see all this as so much South Seas mumbo jumbo.

But that would be a grave mistake, anthropologists told me.

Millennial movements like this were a highly sophisticated response by islanders in the South Pacific to the arrival of colonialism and Christianity.

By combining the fundamentals of their ancient beliefs with new elements gleaned from their contact with the West, they were able to preserve their culture.

There is, of course, a delicious irony in all this.

Prince Philip, after all, is a man who has a reputation for making politically incorrect gaffes, often about foreigners.

He once advised British students not to stay too long in China for fear of becoming "slitty-eyed".

And he asked a group of stunned aborigines if they still threw spears at each other.

The villagers of Tanna may live a life far removed from the splendour of Buckingham Palace and Balmoral in far away Britain. But they are as firm in their beliefs as Prince Philip is in his.

I suspect that if they were ever to meet, they would get along rather well.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 9 June 2007 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Swiss and Italian scientists conclude arrow killed frozen mummy

2007-06-07T08:55:00.000-04:00

Published: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 | 2:19 PM ET
Canadian Press

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) - Swiss and Italian scientists say they have solved the mystery surrounding the death of the prehistoric hunter frozen in a glacier for more than 5,000 years.

They say the man known as Oetzi bled to death after being struck in the back by an arrow.

According to the researchers, the arrow tore a hole in an artery beneath his left collarbone, leading to massive loss of blood and shock and causing Oetzi to suffer a heart attack.

Their findings were published online in the Journal of Archeological Science.

Oetzi became a celebrity after his well-preserved body was accidentally discovered by hikers in 1991 on a glacier more than 3,000 metres above sea level on the border between Austria and Italy.

Archeologists believe Oetzi may have been killed in a skirmish with a rival tribe.

The researchers used newly developed medical scanners to examine the frozen corpse.

Even today, the chances of surviving such an injury long enough to receive hospital treatment are only 40 per cent, according to the article.

The fact that the arrow's shaft was pulled out before his death may have worsened the injury, said Frank Ruehli of the University of Zurich, who carried out the research with scientists from Bolzano, Italy, where the iceman's body is preserved.

The use of high-resolution computer tomography - normally used to diagnose living patients - allowed the researchers to create three-dimensional images of Oetzi without having to use surgical procedures that would have damaged the body.

"Five years ago this would definitely have been more difficult," Ruehli told The Associated Press.

Famous all the way to Seattle!

2007-06-06T16:06:00.001-04:00

Check out this little blurb in the Seattle Times on Toronto Rollerderby.

We're huge in Seattle

2007-06-06T16:06:00.000-04:00

Check out this little blurb in the Seattle Times on Toronto Rollerderby.

Last minute of Saturday's Bout

2007-06-05T11:33:00.000-04:00

Click here to see a video that Ash took of the last minute of my bout on Saturday.

Mistresses of mayhem

2007-06-04T10:33:00.000-04:00

Roller derby rocking T.O. again with plenty of action and bad attitude By BILL LANKHOF
Bones Brigade wipes out on top of Death Track Dolls teammate Jubilee as Lock 'n' Roll (left) and Alicia Arsenic (right) of the Gore-Gore Rollergirls skate by during Saturday's Toronto Roller Derby League bout at George Bell Arena. The six-team league is just one of several springing up around southern Ontario. (Mark O'NEILL/Sun Media)

Gonna tell you a story that you won't believe ...
The night that I fell in love with a roller derby queen
Round and round, oh round and round
The meanest hunk o' woman
That anybody ever seen

-- Jim Croce's lyrics from Roller Derby Queen
And, the lady -- I think it was the one dressing in the black widow-maker outfit, yells over the babble and dressing room laughter: "Hey, you don't mind if I take my top off to change, do you?"
Welcome to women's roller derby. Sure beats watching Darcy Tucker turn into a puddle of sweat. Already, I'm beginning to understand the, uh, appeal of this sport.
You thought roller derby went out with the hoola-hoop? Well, hold on to your poodle-skirt, Becky Sue. The game that takes sexual innuendo and trash talking and blends it with women who make hair-pulling an art form is making a comeback.
It's loud. It's profane. It's dangerous. It's fast -- the sport, not the women. I think. And, they're proud of it.
TATTOOED LADIES
It is a weekday evening at George Bell Arena and, in a dressing room, somebody's mother, your little sister and the girl next door are mingling with tattooed ladies and girls with metal rings hanging from their lips -- all of them morphing into the Death Track Dolls, one of six teams in the Toronto Roller Derby League, which opened its season last Saturday night.
Sandra Gilraine, a lovely lass of golden hair by day and captain of the Dolls says: "We have women from all walks of life. When we did auditions, we were looking for girls who weren't afraid of being in the spotlight, who weren't afraid of breaking a nail. We didn't necessarily take the girls who could skate the best.
"Roller derby is a lot about attitude. We can teach anyone how to skate. You can't teach personality."
It is also a lot about innuendo. Opening Night's motto? Cherry Poppin' Bout. You figure it out. We're not going there ... but, a lot of ordinary women are: The teams, with names such as the Hamilton Harlots and Gore-Gore Girls, consist of moms and managers, a bookkeeper, a realtor, waitresses, a musician. There is an astro-physicist by day. By night, they are mistresses of mayhem.
None of the skaters get paid. Money from ticket sales goes back to the league.
"We're a pro league but any money we make goes back to make the sport grow," Gilraine says, irked with any suggestion that getting knocked on to a concrete floor a dozen times a night is a funny thing to do for fun with not even enough of a payback to buy a tube of liniment.
The sport involves women skating on an oblong track. Each team has a skater in the rear who must try to push, swerve, duck flying elbows and hip checks and reach the front of the pack without getting so much as a rip in her fish-net stockings.
Meantime, skaters fall, get run over, curse, grin, high-five and frolic in the alter-egos of the pseudonyms they all adopt. It's a little like pro wrestling -- without the script.
Popular in the 1950s, the sport is enjoying a revival with more than 100 leagues in U.S. cities. Now teams are springing up in places such as Barrie, Hamilton, Windsor, Ottawa and Sudbury. The Toronto league has 80 skaters. The costumes and names are half the fun. At a Toronto league exhibition last week that attracted 500 fans, backers of the Chicks Ahoy team showed up in pirate costumes.
- - -
She was 5-foot-6 and 215
A bleached-blonde mama
With a streak of mean...
You know that I fell in love with a roller derby queen
Round and round, oh, round and round
"You've got to have one (a pseudonym). I mean how scary is (Tracy Ryan). It just doesn't do it in roller derby," Black and Blue Barbie says of her real name.
So, what are perfectly normal moms doing in a place like this?
"To be honest," says Barbie, "just skating isn't much fun unless you get to knock other people over."
Or, if you insist on a more cerebral explanation for risking limb, if not life, Gilraine explains: "For many of us it's about being a woman and being empowered; that we can succeed and excel at a sport."
As for the sexual undertones, no apologies. It's part of the program, Gilraine says. "I'm a woman and we show off a bit of leg. It's really not much different than the things the Raptors do during breaks. It's entertainment meets sports."
ANGER MANAGEMENT
Which explains Kinky K. She is the team's bad girl, her helmet emblazoned with "I'm A Bitch" just in case anyone forgets.
"The day I tried out, I had a bad breakup with my boyfriend," Kinky says. "I didn't even want to go, but (friend and teammate) Miss Tress Nightmare told me if I didn't get out of bed she'd drag me out and all the way over here with my mascara all over my face. I went. Now it's my anger management program."
Not to mention she gets to wear fishnet stockings and knock the crap out of anyone messing with Bonky Kong.
Bonky Kong is really Bianca Rooney and in real life she's the one with the pleasant smile who works for Dominion groceries as a bookkeeper and supervisor.
"I used to watch roller derby on TV when I was a kid and remember thinking it would be really cool to get flipped over the rail. My great aunt thinks what I'm doing is the coolest thing ever," she says.
"This is really me. I've got a job where I can't be telling people off even if I'm thinking: 'I can't believe you're bringing that back for 10 cents.' I never get mad at people. I'm the type to hold it all in. This is a great emotional release ... I can just let everything out."
- - -
Things looked kind of bad
Until the day she skated into my life
... She's my big blond bomber
My heavy handed hackensack mama
Round and round, oh round and round
There is animosity, even in the practice between the Dolls and another club called the D-VAS.
"We equate what we do with hockey. Fights aren't allowed but it is beneficial to your team if you can knock the other guy down." says Gilraine. "It's not like pro wrestling in that everything is choreographed. We don't plan who wins. It's like hockey in its intensity, speed and violence. That's the appeal ... and, oh yeah, the short skirts."
There are rules. No grabbing or tripping is allowed. Clothes-lining draws a penalty. So does elbowing. No fighting. Still, stuff happens. Girls will be naughty and the guys dressed up as referees have about as much chance of winning this debate as that time at home when they ended up sleeping on the couch.
Last week, says Amanda Caskie, they lost two players to a broken wrist and a torn ligament. She is a member of a three-piece, all-girl metal band called Cougar Party and looks like the girl next door. Then she saw a show called Roller Girls on A&E and heard about the Toronto league and figured a sport in which the worst penalty -- unofficially -- is for not looking good, can't be all bad.
"Mostly," she says, "its just such fun. It's hot chicks on skates kicking each other's butts."
---
SHOP TALK
(Derby jargon)
- Flat Track - A track outlined on a flat surface in an oblong oval shape. This is what the Toronto Roller Derby League plays on.
- Jammer - The girl from each team weaving her way through the pack, this is the only person who can score points for her team
- Blocker - a skater who tries to block the opposing jammer from coming through, while assisting her own jammer to get through.
- Jam - The rounds played during a period.
- Lead Jammer - The first jammer to legally make her way through the pack.
- Pack - The two groups of blockers and pivots skating in a pack and blocking the jammers
- Pivot - The skater who sets the pace for the rest of the pack. This role is crucial in formation of the pack.
---
NEED-TO-KNOW BASIS
Website: torontorollerderby.com
Tickets: $10 at Soundscapes, 572 College St.; Rotate This, 620 Queen St. West, or the website. At the door, $15.
Teams: Bay St. Bruisers, Chicks Ahoy!, Death Track Dolls, Deady Viper Assassin Squad (D-VAS), Gore-Gore Girls, Smoke City Betties.
Bouts: George Bell Arena, 215 Ryder Ave. at 7 pm.
On the schedule: June 16, Smoke City Betties vs. D-VAS; June 30, All-Star Game; July 14, Chicks Ahoy! vs. Bay Street Bruisers; July 28, Death Track Dolls vs. Smoke City Betties; Aug. 4, Bay Street Bruisers vs. Gore-Gore Rollergirls; Aug. 18, Chicks Ahoy! vs. D-VAS

Cherry Poppin'

2007-06-03T13:29:00.001-04:00

This was in the Toronto Sun yesterday:
The women of the Toronto Roller Derby League begin play tonight at George Bell Arena at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 at the door. It's kind of like hockey except that nobody has to pretend they are chasing a puck before thumping each other ...

Salt stains on my sweat pants

2007-06-02T12:09:00.000-04:00

Yes kids, I practiced so hard on Wednesday for my game today that I ended up with salt stains on my sweat pants in the shape of the outline of my knee pads. Bleh. I hope all the work pays off.

Skating gets rough in roller derby revival

2007-06-02T12:07:00.000-04:00

02/06/2007 10:49:29 AM

Leading her opponent on a lap of the oval track, a nimble skater decked out in a short skirt and blood-stained apron approaches a pack of skaters trying to impede her from passing through the group.

Saira Peesker

Smoke City Betties skater Demolition Dawn surveys the track in advance of Toronto Roller Derby's May 26 event. (Jessie Adams)

After struggling to get around a girl with an uncanny ability to put herself in the way, the skater's lead is terminated when she's knocked to ground with a hip check from her blind side.

Members of the 500-strong crowd leap to their feet, yelling encouragement to the fallen skater or congratulations to her aggressor.

This is roller derby -- the high impact and unabashedly bizarre sport experiencing a revival among athletes who feel more comfortable in fishnets than track pants; who'd rather put on a show than play to a set of empty bleachers.

The game places two teams of five girls on a flat oval track. One skater from each team -- the "jammer" -- has the mandate of passing as many of the opposing team's players as many times as possible.

The jammer fights her way through a gang of blockers ready to stop her or knock her down, then skates around the track as fast as she can to do it again.

She earns one point for each opposing skater she passes on each lap. Each round, or "jam," lasts two minutes or until the first jammer to break through the pack decides to call it quits. A full game ("bout") runs for three 20-minute periods.

Despite the obvious risk of injury and physical endurance required to play, derby is quickly becoming a subculture phenomenon in cities across Canada.

Following the success of Austin, Texas' Lonestar Rollergirls -- and "Rollergirls," the reality TV show that followed their exploits -- leagues or teams have popped up in cities including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Hamilton, London, Halifax, Edmonton and Calgary.

"It's such a refresher from conventional sports," said Gordie Wornoff, 26, who attended Toronto Roller Derby's inaugural event dressed head-to-toe in a rat costume on May 26.

"I find most sports so typical, with sort of a tough-guy energy... There, I felt at home in my freakiness."

Costumes and pageantry: part of the game

Wornoff was part of a large group of friends who showed up at the event dressed in costumes. He defined his outfit as "bilge rat," saying he came from the depths of a sailing ship to cheer on his team.

While there were few other costumed fans among the crowd of about 500 assembled at the west-end arena, pageantry does hold a prominent spot in the game.

Competitors wear elaborate costumes and create "derby names" and personas to match.

It's a sport that boasts a punk-rock aesthetic -- players choose pseudonyms like Chili Con Carnage, Splat Benatar, Tara Part and Chastity Pelt. They're not exactly the type of gals one takes home to mom.

The Toronto league, the largest in Canada, is made up of six teams: The Death Track Dolls (who wear aprons splattered with blood), The Gore-Gore Rollergirls (wearing various shades of leopard-print); The Smoke City Betties (vigilante super-girls); The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (also known as the D-Vas); The Bay Street Bruisers (white-collar gals letting loose); and Chicks Ahoy (sailors gone wild).

While some leagues emphasize wrestling-like entertainment over athleticism, Chicks Ahoy captain Lindsay "Cookie Toss" Casey says she likes that the Toronto league has its priorities straight, focusing on the game.

"I like showboating as much as everybody else, but I don't want to see the actual sport get completely removed," said Casey, a public relations student. "I don't want it to all be about fishnets and what colour underwear everyone is wearing. I think there's a line, and I don't think our league is crossing that line."

League president Jennifer "Killah Cupcake" Capes, a member of the Bay Street Bruisers, sees the ideal balance as enough flashiness to bring in the crowds, but enough quality skating to keep them coming back.

"Certainly with six teams in our league there is more than enough room to develop rivalries and personalities for teams that we will want the public to get involved in," said Capes, a Grade 6 teacher.

"Financial success is really secondary to having a league that produces the kind of events that people are really excited to see."

Not so 'down and dirty'

It's the physical contact that not only thrills fans but also plays a main role in defensive strategy. While shoulder and hip checks are allowed and minor injuries are common; however, it's a far cry from the all-out roller battles that took place in the days of Skinny Minnie Miller, prominent derby queen of the 1970s and 1980s.

"I probably expected it to have more physical contact and was anticipating at least several injuries," noted Barry Leigh, a 57-year-old aerospace engineer who attended the Toronto event with his son. "Clearly, this version is a lot less violent."

Kathy Last, 48, can certainly vouch for that. The Guelph-based administrative assistant was a player in the sport's 1970s heyday. When she wasn't playing, she was following the Montreal-based Canadian All-Stars to their games, trying to learn whatever she could from the women she considered her "idols."

"You might have been prim and proper off the track, but there was a lot more physicality back then," she told CTV.ca. "We used to go behind (the opposing players) and knock them down. We'd do full-leg blocks across their midsections. It was down and dirty."

In fact, some of the most famous pictures of San Diego's darling Miller show her punching other skaters in the face as she passed them on the track.

That said, there was certainly enough aggression to keep many fans cheering at Toronto's Friends and Family Day on May 26, particularly those who were new to the game.

"I'd only seen it on TV and it was way more exciting than I expected," said Andrew McCracken, 24. "To see a bunch of sexy females pumped and pushing each other around... it was worth the trip."

Saira Peesker has covered news and Canadian Idol for CTV.ca and is a member of Toronto's "Chicks Ahoy" roller derby team.

Rick the Mailman

2007-06-01T14:55:00.000-04:00

I was just reminded of the nicest story....
When I was a kid, we had a mailman named Rick. He probably had the same mail route for 20 years. He was the nicest guy. When we were kids and we were out watering the garden on hot summer days, Rick would come up and drink out of our hose to cool down. He knew all our names. If he knew when your birthday was, he'd drop off a birthday card for you with the mail. My mom always gave him a bottle of booze at Christmas every year, in case she missed him when he was delivering, she'd leave it in a gift bag in the mailbox for him to find when he made his delivery.
When I was 11 or 12, Rick and his wife won the lottery and he retired. But every so often he would come back and walk his route just to say hi to whoever happened to be out when he was around. I miss that.

2007-05-27T12:41:00.001-04:00

Dinosaurs on ark, Ky. museum claims

2007-05-27T00:30:00.000-04:00

May 26, 2007 11:39 AM

Reuters

PETERSBURG, Ky – Like many modern museums, the newest U.S. tourist attraction includes some awesome exhibits – roaring dinosaurs and a life-sized ship.

But only at the Creation Museum in Kentucky do the dinosaurs sail on the ship – Noah's Ark, to be precise.

The Christian creators of the sprawling museum, unveiled Saturday, hope to draw as many as half a million people each year to their state-of-the-art project, which depicts the Bible's first book, Genesis, as literal truth.

While the $27 million museum near Cincinnati has drawn snickers from media and condemnation from U.S. scientists, those who believe God created the heavens and the Earth in six days about 6,000 years ago say their views are finally being represented.

"What we've done here is to give people an opportunity to hear information that is not readily available ... to challenge them that really you can believe the Bible's history," said Ken Ham, president of the group Answers in Genesis that founded the museum.

Here exhibits show the Grand Canyon took just days to form during Noah's flood, dinosaurs coexisted with humans and had a place on Noah's Ark, and Cain married his sister to people the earth, among other Biblical wonders.

Scientists, secularists and moderate Christians have pledged to protest the museum's public opening Monday. An airplane trailing a "Thou Shalt Not Lie" banner buzzed overhead during the museum's opening news conference.

Opponents argue that children who see the exhibits will be confused when they learn in school that the universe is 14 billion years old rather than 6,000.

"Teachers don't deserve a student coming into class saying 'Gee Mrs. Brown, I went to this fancy museum and it said you're teaching me a lie,"' Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, told reporters before the museum opened.

A Gallup poll last year showed almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Three of 10 Republican presidential candidates said in a recent debate that they did not believe in evolution.

Snakes on a plane

2007-05-24T14:34:00.000-04:00

Air traveller grounded with 700 snakes

May 24, 2007 11:24 AM
Associated Press

CAIRO, Egypt – Customs officers at Cairo's airport on Thursday detained a man bound for Saudi Arabia who was trying to smuggle 700 live snakes on a plane, airport authorities said.

The officers were stunned when a passenger, identified as Yahia Rahim Tulba, told them his carryon bag contained live snakes after he was asked to open it.

Tulba opened his bag to show the snakes to the police and asked the officers, who held a safe distance, not to come close. Among the various snakes, hidden in small cloth sacks, were two poisonous cobras, authorities said.

The Egyptian said he had hoped to sell the snakes in Saudi Arabia. Police confiscated the snakes and turned Tulba over to the prosecutor's office, accusing him of violating export laws and endangering the lives of other passengers.

According to the customs officials, Tulba claimed the snakes are wanted by Saudis who display them in glass jars in shops, keep them as pets or sell them to research centers.

The value of the snakes was not immediately known.

California Dreamin'

2007-05-24T10:06:00.000-04:00

The boyfriend's brother got married last weekend in LA. So we flew down there to attend the festivities. That couple really knows how to throw a party.
I left on Friday afternoon and met the boyfriend in LA. We stayed in a nice enough cheap hotel in LA's downtown. We were quite close to the nicer hotels where the other guests were staying, but ours was significantly cheaper, and really what do you do in a hotel room but shower and sleep anyway, and for most of that time the lights are off, so what's the big deal with an expensive hotel room. On the other hand, I actually started to wonder after a few encounters with the staff if there was something wrong with them, perhaps the hotel was a sheltered workplace for the mentally challenged or something (I changed that just for you Ash!). For example, when I went down to ask for more pillows, and told them my room was 1255, instead of calling housekeeping, the woman called our room and told us to bring pillows up to 1255. The BF tried to explain to them that we were 1255 and if we had pillows we wouldn't have asked for them. It was more funny than annoying.
The first morning we were there, we went for the rehersal breakfast dim sum. Some of the bride's family were from less multicultural areas and so dim sum is a new thing for them. Normally, when we go out with TT, we take sort of a sink or swim attitude to introducing people to new Asian food experiences. Many readers of this blog have had heard TT yell, "NO FORKS!" at a waiter who was charitably trying to bring forks to our floundering whities at Asian restaurants. Before meeting them, I was threatening I would do this to the bride's family. But when they got there, they were such good sports about the whole thing, even though some of them were really out of their element, that I really had to admire them.
We dropped in at a grocery store after brunch and I just wandered up and down the aisles looking at how much stuff they have for sale there that we just don't get in Canada, so many different kinds of pop. The BF's dad was waiting in the car and I was just wandering up and down the aisles looking at stuff. After that we headed out to a discount shoe store we'd heard about, it was the size of a football field. I bought 3 pairs of shoes, two more practical and one pair of high-heeled leopard-print Steve Maddens that came in very handy later.
Later, while the BF was 'playing videogames' at the bachelor party, I met up with a friend from high school who lives in LA, it was great to see her. It's so nice to be friends with someone you can not see for years and you just pick up where you left off.
The wedding was held at an old art deco hotel in downtown LA called The Oviatt. The wedding was lovely. I really enjoyed it. The theme was picnic, so there were these amazing grassy flower arrangements on the tables and a burger buffet with all the fixin's you could ever hope for, and the dessert table was all cupcakes and glass jars of licorice and candy bars. It was just lovely. It's the kind of wedding I could picture myself having if I ever got married. Elegant without being fussy, and the focus was on fun. The venue was so beautiful, I think that's what really made the evening. I love Art Deco.
And there was a hallway full of signed pictures of Howard Hughes and Leslie Howard (from Gone With The Wind) and other famous people. The original Lalique decorative glass was still there, and some beautiful Deco art. There was even a secret toilet that looked like a chair and a sink that looked like a side table. I love that stuff.
All the pictures in here are from the Oviatt.

A Sad Day

2007-05-22T23:51:00.000-04:00

I'm back from LA, the trip was fun. But I returned to some horrible news. Someone I'd met through work was killed on Friday. I didn't hear about till I got back from my trip. It's frightening and sad. Being at the office today was like sitting in the middle of a funeral at a desk trying to work. All the media calls brought up memories of when one of my relatives was killed in a workplace accident several years ago. The whole thing is so awful, I don't even know what to say about it.

Goin' to the evil empire

2007-05-18T11:33:00.000-04:00

I'm spending the long weekend in LA y'all. Don't bother trying to break into my place it's being housesat by someone who will probably burn it down or flood it before you even get there with your lock picking tools. I just want to leave you all with a thought:

Given the expected cost of global warming, the Optimum Population Trust in England calculates that the use of a 35-pence condom produces a "9,000,000% potential return on investment.

And that's just the cost of global warming, that's not including the actual cost to the parent. One of my co-workers, who has a child, asked me this morning, how I can possibly afford to take so many vacations. I think she was expecting me to tell her that I sold drugs on the side or something. Instead, I told her about how if you invest in condoms, you get a guaranteed return on investment, ie your paycheque goes directly into your pocket instead of spending it on diapers, and video games and the latest craze in athletic shoes. I don't think she liked my answer.

Vegan parents jailed for baby's death

2007-05-09T15:17:00.000-04:00

Normally I'm the last person you'd find criticising anyone for making the environmental and ethical choice to give up meat. But lately, I've encountered a couple of people who are taking the granola eating, sock and sandal thing too far. I think it's perfectly do-able to have vegan children, but you need to do a little research and perhaps look into breast feeding.

May 09, 2007 10:53 AM
GREG BLUESTEIN
Associated Press

ATLANTA – A vegan couple was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison for the death of their malnourished 6-week-old baby boy, who was fed a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice.

Superior Court Judge L.A. McConnell imposed the sentences on Jade Sanders, 27, and Lamont Thomas, 31. Their son, Crown Shakur, weighed just 3 1/2 pounds when he died of starvation on April 25, 2004.

The couple was found guilty May 2 of malice murder, felony murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children.

A jury deliberated about seven hours before returning the guilty verdicts.

Defense lawyers said the first-time parents did the best they could while adhering to the lifestyle of vegans, who typically use no animal products.

They said Sanders and Thomas did not realize the baby, who was born at home, was in danger until minutes before he died.

4:14

2007-05-08T14:06:00.000-04:00

Last fall I joined a rollerderby team. In the past I've been a bit skeptical about the whole fitness thing. And, getting into it, I don't think I really considered it a fitness commitment so much as an ass-kicking good time. But the fitness part of this thing is punishing. My feet have been like chopped liver all winter from my skates, practicing in a cold arena is not a good thing with leather skates that get stiffer the colder they are. I spent the winter being obsessed with the temperature of my skates on practice days. When the team started doing endurance training the first one was so rough that one of our team captains threw up.
Since I started last fall my fitness has improved immensely. I can see improvements with every practice, but when the skills and safety testing for the season started looming I started to get scared. The skills and safety testing is for our insurance coverage for the season, if you don't pass the test you don't play. Among other things, we have to be able to skate backwards, jump and land on our skates, and the scary part, skate 5 laps of the track in 1 minute and skate 20 laps of the track in 5 minutes. I've been sweating about this for weeks. The last time I did a trial run on the '5 laps in a minute test', I managed 4 laps in a minute. This was pretty far from the goal.
So I started looking for things I could do between practices to get my speed up. I went running by myself for the first time ever. My maximum heart-rate for that first running expedition, according to my exercise heart-monitoring watch gizmo, was 218 beats per minute. After that, I didn't really feel like going out again, but one of the girls I work with is a big fitness person, so I asked her if she wanted to maybe do some running some time. But then after I asked her, I started feeling self-conscious about the running, so I suggested that we should invite some other people at work who might be interested which turned into a real life Running Club.
Anyway, I've been working my tail off because I'm so afraid of the speed and endurance part of this test. And today it all paid off! I did my test and I got my 20 laps in 4:14, a full 46 seconds to spare. I am over the moon with relief. And... now I'm part of a running club and suddenly very fitness minded when all I really wanted was to kick some ass!

There are some crazy bastards out there!

2007-05-01T22:53:00.000-04:00

Sometimes when you live in a city you have encounters that leave you wondering if you've been caught by some kind of hidden camera shows, here's one such tale of something that happened to me earlier this evening....
I have a friend staying with me this week. And tonight I decided to stay home and get to bed early so he went out with some of his other Toronto friends. When he was leaving to meet his crew, I decided to walk him as far as the corner store and get some milk and pop for my evening in.
We had a nice chat as far as the corner, we stopped and hugged, and then I turned to go to the store and he kept going straight. As I was walking away from my friend this older, probably gay, guy in a suit walked out of his way and into my path to lean towards me and said, "No offense, but I don't have any spare change." And walked off. I raised my eyebrows and looked at the only other person within earshot and asked what he thought that was all about. He just looked kind of confused and shrugged.
Did the guy think I was homeless? I wasn't wearing the nicest outfit I've ever left the house in... my gym clothes and a jacket over top. But anyone who has ever read my other blog should know that my gym clothes couldn't be ratty, they don't really get a lot of use. I've been mistaken for a hooker a couple of times, but a panhandler? I usually assume when a john tries to buy my services as I walk over to friends' houses in a bulky winter coat, long pants and flat shoes (or some other similarly unprovocative outfit), that he must assume that any woman walking in a neighbourhood known for the sex trade must be a hooker. I don't know what to think about this guy and his change comment. Even if he did think I was panhandling, as I walked
towards a store not making eye contact with people, have you ever gone out of your way to tell a panhandler that you didn't have any spare change when they didn't ask you for any? I sure haven't.
The only possible reason I can think of for this guy accosting me was that (since I
didn't have any pockets in my exercise clothes) I had my house-keys on one of thosepasscard -holder/necklace-thingies around my neck and they were jingling a bit as I walked. Maybe it sounded like change to him? I dunno. Thoughts? Anyone?

Everybody's workin' for the weekend!

2007-04-28T19:35:00.000-04:00

We had a public event at work this week. I was a little nervous when I found out that I'd have to work side by side with 'The Troll'. It actually worked out fine, no problems. But when our event photographer came over to take a picture of us, she came right over and put her arm around me and gave the camera a big smile as if we were best pals. My skin crawled a little bit.

Al Gore calls Tories' green plan a `fraud'

2007-04-28T19:30:00.000-04:00

Apr 28, 2007 07:02 PM
Canadian Press

The Conservatives' new environmental platform is a ``complete and total fraud" that is "designed to mislead the Canadian people," former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said today.

The noted environmentalist was presenting his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in Toronto at a consumer environmental show, with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and environmentalist David Suzuki in attendance.

Gore praised Suzuki for confronting Environment Minister John Baird on Friday, saying he saw the two exchange words on TV.

When Baird told Suzuki the Conservatives were going further than any other government in Canadian history, Suzuki said it wasn't enough.

The Conservative government strategy focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality. But the plan failed to spell out precisely what many of its regulations will look like.

"In my opinion, it is a complete and total fraud," Gore said. ``It is designed to mislead the Canadian people."

Gore acknowledged he is not a Canadian citizen and said he has ``no right to interfere in your decisions."

However, he said, the rest of the world looks to Canada for moral leadership, and that's why this week's announcement was so "shocking."

Baird released a statement later in the day in which he refuted Gore's criticisms.

"The fact is our plan is vastly tougher than any measures introduced by the administration of which the former vice president was a member," Baird said in the statement.

Baird's statement also offered an invitation for Gore to discuss climate change and the Conservatives' environmental policies with him.

Facebook flashback

2007-04-25T16:51:00.000-04:00

I don't want to start some firestorm of bitching about Facebook here, but I do want to tell a Facebook related story. I've been on Facebook for a while now and I hear a lot of people complaining about being friend requested from people from their past with whom they never wish to associate again. For the most part, I don't have this problem because a lot of the time, people I don't like, also don't like me, so we just avoid eachother and there's no need for pretense.
Today, I had an odd blast from the past with Facebook though not an unpleasant one. I got a friend request from a guy that I hadn't seen in 10 years. I met this guy, one time at an out of town party, he was cute, there was a little bit of making out, but it was all very PG13 and then, being in different cities, I never saw the guy again. I can't flippin' believe that he remembered this 10 years later, saw my picture on my friend's facebook friend list, and friend requested me! I think this proves for all of those folks out there who think that the blast from the past friend request is a bad thing, that sometimes it's a good thing. I had no clue that I was so dang memorable.

Ashley's blog on Vegas

2007-04-20T13:42:00.000-04:00

Click here to read Ashley's account of our trip to Vegas.

City life just gets stranger and stranger

2007-04-19T23:29:00.000-04:00

I found this story in the paper after one of my friends told me that his female co-worker was leaving work the other night and got punched. Totally bizarre.
Stalked by fear of the silent sucker punch
Apr 16, 2007 02:30 AM
Joe Fiorito

There's a guy downtown who sucker-punches women and runs away. No one knows his name or where he lives or what his problem is.

But Jean Rusty is familiar with the guy. She lives near Dundas and Spadina. We were sitting in her apartment the other day.

She was telling me the story. Truth is, I could read it on her face. She still has a shiner, late-stage now, more yellow than blue. There are other effects.

She kept one eye on her TV as we talked. The screen gives her a closed-circuit view of the lobby.

She was watching to see who was coming, who was going, and who was just hanging around. She's nervous about going out. The guy has hit her twice.

"The first time was just before St. Patrick's Day. I was at the doughnut shop, standing outside having a smoke. He came up behind and said something. I turned around to see. He punched me in the nose and took off."

He bloodied her face pretty good. "I went to the walk-in clinic. I called the police. They told me to find his name and tell them. How am I going to do that? He likes hitting and taking off."

What does this guy look like? "He's about 5-4. I think he's Korean. He's got black hair, dirty, shoulder-length." What was he wearing? "To me, he's wearing colours. He's got a red jacket down to here." She made a mid-thigh gesture.

"He was wearing blue sweat pants. His clothes are dirty. I'd say he's between 35 and 42." She remembered something else. "Sometimes he walks normal and sometimes he walks like this."

She got up from the couch and took three little steps forward, did an abrupt about-face, took three little steps back, then stopped and turned and took three steps forward again.

You know that walk; a little duckie in a shooting gallery, an addict on the edge. She said, "If he's doing crack, he doesn't know what he's doing."

The creep hit Jean a second time, this time on St. Patrick's Day; again, outside the doughnut shop. Again, she didn't see it coming.

She had to go to the hospital. The cops took pictures of her face. You don't want to see the pictures. She touched her cheek gingerly. "I found out I have a fractured nose." She pushed her hair aside. "And there's this bump on my head." And she still has headaches.

A couple of days later, while she was on her way home from the drugstore – she'd gone to pick up pain medicine, and some of those depression pills – she spotted the hit-and-runner on the other side of the street. Jean didn't have her phone.

She did the unexpected. She called out to him. "I see you. Do you see what you did to me?"

You or I might have ducked down, turned a corner, kept on walking. Why did she call out? "I wanted to show I'm not afraid. He just looked at me. I kept looking behind to see if he was following."

The guy didn't follow Jean.

Instead, he went over to the doughnut shop, punched a Chinese woman in the face and ran away again. The guys at the doughnut shop called Jean and told her when the guy showed up. They should have called the cops. Jean said she called 911 but by then it was too late.

I said I thought she ought to get a restraining order. She said, "I been beaten up before by a guy. You can't get a peace bond if a guy has no fixed address. I don't know what the law is any more."

Jean hasn't had an easy life, but the hard knocks have made her observant. "I feel like there's something wrong with this guy. He's asking for help."

He's asking for something, I guess. He might not like what he gets when his time comes.

Jean said, "He's asking for help, but I'm the one who's suffering. I don't know if he's living on the street or in a shelter. But if he ends up with the wrong crowd, he'll end up killing someone."

Jean paused. The pause lengthened.

"I'm sorry. I'm reliving the nightmare. That's why I'm on depression pills. I'm trying to be really strong. I'm the victim. Why should I hide? That makes him the winner." And so she takes precautions.

She watches the lobby. She shops during the day. She goes out with a friend and takes no shortcuts. "I stay in the open. I don't want to be found in a laneway."

In the meantime, she said, "You go to sleep at night, it's nightmares over and over. People say forget the past but it sneaks up on you."

Watch your back.

Las Vegas

2007-04-17T11:23:00.000-04:00

Tao

2007-04-17T11:22:00.000-04:00

Red Rock

2007-04-17T11:19:00.000-04:00

Red Rock

2007-04-17T11:08:00.000-04:00

Red Rock

2007-04-17T10:53:00.000-04:00

Red Rock

2007-04-17T10:49:00.000-04:00

Red Rock

2007-04-17T10:31:00.000-04:00

In N Out Burger

2007-04-17T10:26:00.000-04:00

I love In N Out Burger

Leaving Las Vegas

2007-04-17T10:22:00.000-04:00

Britain fights Japan's bid to control whaling commission

2007-04-17T10:09:00.001-04:00

Britain fights Japan's bid to control whaling commission
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 16 April 2007
Britain has led an anti-whaling fightback against Japan's attempts to take control of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and scrap the international ban on commercial hunting of the great whales.

A British diplomatic campaign has led to six nations joining the IWC - countries who in May will vote with the anti-whalers and thus nullify the voting majority which Japan and its pro-whaling allies secured in the organisation for the first time last year, at the IWC meeting in St Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies. The six who will line up against Japan in Anchorage, Alaska, are Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Croatia, Peru and Costa Rica.

Greece and Cyprus have come on board after a British lobbying campaign in which a glossy brochure, setting out the case against whaling and jointly signed by Tony Blair and the doyen of British environmentalists, Sir David Attenborough, was sent to 57 governments, including new European Union members.

Slovenia and Croatia joined up after earlier British encouragement, and the two Latin American countries will be voting because they have paid up the arrears in their IWC subscriptions (which last year prevented them) - Peru at the prompting of the British and Costa Rica after a campaign by US environmentalists.

It is possible that further countries may join the IWC on the anti-whaling side, although not in time for the Anchorage meeting. "We think there may be as many as four more waiting in the wings," said the Environment minister, Ben Bradshaw, the man behind the brochure initiative.

Last year's Japanese majority was secured after a decade-long campaign of persuading small countries to join the IWC and vote with Japan in return for substantial aid packages. So in a sense Britain and the other anti-whaling nations, such as the US and Australia, have been playing the Japanese at their own game.

Senior British sources are confident that the votes of the six new members will be enough to nullify the Japanese majority. In St Kitts it was achieved at only one vote, and as it was a simple 51 per cent majority, it was was short of the 75 per cent needed to overturn the whaling moratorium.

But it did enable the Japanese and their pro-whaling allies, led by Norway and Iceland, to pass the so-called "St Kitts declaration", which said that the 1986 international moratorium was no longer necessary, and that as whales consumed "huge quantities of fish", whale hunting was now necessary for food security for poor nations (strongly disputed by anti-whaling countries). This signalled that the campaign to reopen commercial whaling was in full swing. "It was a considerable propaganda coup," Mr Bradshaw said.

If the Japanese majority can be decisively overturned, a counter-resolution is certain. "It is essential to get the majority back, and push through a new resolution reaffirming support for the moratorium," said Mark Simmonds, international director of science for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

Cell phone link to honey bee die-offs?

2007-04-17T10:07:00.000-04:00

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees
By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross
Published: 15 April 2007
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".

No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.

German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.

Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.

Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."

The case against handsets

Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.

Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.

Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.

Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting.

Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers.

Fire guts Spadina building

2007-04-17T09:50:00.000-04:00

Apr 17, 2007 09:22 AM
Joanna Smith
Staff Reporter

One southbound lane of Spadina Ave. remains closed between Dundas and College Sts. after more than 100 firefighters battled a three-alarm blaze early this morning.

Firefighters rescued two people trapped in apartments above a row of businesses at 368 Spadina Ave. after flames broke out around 3:15 a.m., while another man was rescued from the roof, said Toronto Fire Capt. Adrian Ratushniak.

One person was transported to Toronto Western Hospital with minor smoke inhalation injuries, he said.

The blaze reached three alarms by 3:40 a.m. and a total of 30 trucks were called to the scene before the fire was extinguished.

At one point, fire crews had to pull back as the roof was in danger of collapsing. Another harrowing moment came as bricks loosen from the building and crashed to the street below, Ratushniak said.

The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, he said.

One southbound lane of Spadina Ave. is closed to traffic south of College St., but the Spadina streetcar is running in both directions.

If you couldn't think of another good reason to use condoms...

2007-04-12T13:36:00.000-04:00

Gonorrhea becoming drug-resistant
As STD joins list of 'superbugs,' CDC recommends new drug for treating it

Apr 12, 2007 12:24 PM
Associated Press

ATLANTA – U.S. health officials are recommending wider use of a new drug to treat gonorrhea because the sexually transmitted disease is steadily becoming resistant to the longtime standard antibiotic.

Fluoroquinolones, a class of antibiotics that includes Cipro, have been the most common way to treat the bacterial disease since the early 1990s. Since then, gonorrhea has grown increasingly resistant to those drugs.

On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that a different class of antibiotics, cephalosporins, be used instead.

"Gonorrhea has now joined the list of other superbugs for which treatment options have become dangerously few," said Dr. Henry Masur, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America. "To make a bad problem even worse, we're also seeing a decline in the development of new antibiotics to treat these infections.''

The CDC made the new recommendation after discovering that nearly 7 percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in a survey of 26 U.S. cities last year had drug-resistant strains of the disease. In 2001, only about 0.6 percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men were drug-resistant.

"That leaves us with a single class of highly effective antibiotics," said Dr. John Douglas Jr., director of the CDC's division of STD prevention. Other experts called the situation perilous.

It's the first time cephalosporins have been recommended to treat gonorrhea for the entire U.S. population, although the CDC recommended the antibiotics to treat against drug-resistant gonorrhea in California and Hawaii in 2002. Two years later, the CDC made the same recommendation to treat the bacterial infection among American men who have sex with men.

The newly recommended class of antibiotics includes the generic drug ceftriaxone, also known under the brand name Rocephin, which must be injected and "works very well" although the drug is not commonly stocked in doctor's offices, Douglas said.

In contrast, Cipro and other fluoroquinolones were more commonly available and easy to use because they could be taken orally in a single dose.

Ceftriaxone must be given as a shot and costs about $20, about the same as Cipro, said Ira Katz, pharmacist and owner of Little Five Points Pharmacy in Atlanta.

The CDC estimates that more than 700,000 people in the U.S. acquire gonorrhea each year through sexual contact. It is the second most commonly reported infectious disease in the United States, the infectious disease society says.

The highest rates of infection are among sexually active teens, young adults and African-Americans. Because many people don't have obvious symptoms, they can unknowingly spread it to others.

Though treatable, gonorrhea puts people at greater risk of catching the AIDS virus. In women, gonorrhea can cause pelvic inflammatory disease. In men, it can cause epididymitis, a painful condition of the testicles that can lead to infertility if untreated, the CDC said.

In the survey of 26 cities last year, Philadelphia had the highest percentage of drug-resistant cases with almost 27 percent, followed by areas in California and Hawaii where health officials long have known about gonorrhea drug resistance.

A quarter of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in Honolulu, San Diego and Orange County, Calif. were drug-resistant, followed by 22.5 percent of cases in San Francisco and 22 percent in Long Beach, Calif. More than 15 percent of cases in Miami were drug-resistant to the bacteria, the CDC said.

He's much more reasonable than the Yanks would have you believe....

2007-04-11T21:48:00.000-04:00

Weekend Edition
April 7 / 8, 2007
And Other Reflections on the Internationalization of Genocide
Where Have All the Bees Gone?

By FIDEL CASTRO

The Camp David meeting has just come to an end. All of us followed the press conference offered by the presidents of the United States and Brazil attentively, as we did the news surrounding the meeting and the opinions voiced in this connection.

Faced with demands related to customs duties and subsidies which protect and support US ethanol production, Bush did not make the slightest concession to his Brazilian guest at Camp David.

President Lula attributed to this the rise in corn prices, which, according to his own statements, had gone up more than 85 percent.

Before these statements were made, the Washington Post had published an article by the Brazilian leader which expounded on the idea of transforming food into fuel.

It is not my intention to hurt Brazil or to meddle in the internal affairs of this great country. It was in effect in Rio de Janeiro, host of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, exactly 15 years ago, where I delivered a 7-minute speech vehemently denouncing the environmental dangers that menaced our species' survival. Bush Sr., then President of the United States, was present at that meeting and applauded my words out of courtesy; all other presidents there applauded, too.

No one at Camp David answered the fundamental question. Where are the more than 500 million tons of corn and other cereals which the United States, Europe and wealthy nations require to produce the gallons of ethanol that big companies in the United States and other countries demand in exchange for their voluminous investments going to be produced and who is going to supply them? Where are the soy, sunflower and rape seeds, whose essential oils these same, wealthy nations are to turn into fuel, going to be produced and who will produce them?

Some countries are food producers which export their surpluses. The balance of exporters and consumers had already become precarious before this and food prices had skyrocketed. In the interests of brevity, I shall limit myself to pointing out the following:

According to recent data, the five chief producers of corn, barley, sorghum, rye, millet and oats which Bush wants to transform into the raw material of ethanol production, supply the world market with 679 million tons of these products. Similarly, the five chief consumers, some of which also produce these grains, currently require 604 million annual tons of these products. The available surplus is less than 80 million tons of grain.

This colossal squandering of cereals destined to fuel production -and these estimates do not include data on oily seeds-shall serve to save rich countries less than 15 percent of the total annual consumption of their voracious automobiles.

At Camp David, Bush declared his intention of applying this formula around the world. This spells nothing other than the internationalization of genocide.

In his statements, published by the Washington Post on the eve of the Camp David meeting, the Brazilian president affirmed that less than one percent of Brazil's arable land was used to grow cane destined to ethanol production. This is nearly three times the land surface Cuba used when it produced nearly 10 million tons of sugar a year, before the crisis that befell the Soviet Union and the advent of climate changes.

Our country has been producing and exporting sugar for a longer time. First, on the basis of the work of slaves, whose numbers swelled to over 300 thousand in the first years of the 19th century and who turned the Spanish colony into the world's number one exporter. Nearly one hundred years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Cuba was a pseudo-republic which had been denied full independence by US interventionism, it was immigrants from the West Indies and illiterate Cubans alone who bore the burden of growing and harvesting sugarcane on the island. The scourge of our people was the off-season, inherent to the cyclical nature of the harvest. Sugarcane plantations were the property of US companies or powerful Cuban-born landowners. Cuba, thus, has more experience than anyone as regards the social impact of this crop.

This past Sunday, April 1, CNN televised the opinions of Brazilian experts who affirm that many lands destined to sugarcane have been purchased by wealthy Americans and Europeans.

As part of my reflections on the subject, published on March 29, I expounded on the impact climate change has had on Cuba and on other basic characteristics of our country's climate which contribute to this.

On our poor and anything but consumerist island, one would be unable to find enough workers to endure the rigors of the harvest and to care for the sugarcane plantations in the ever more intense heat, rains or droughts. When hurricanes lash the island, not even the best machines can harvest the bent-over and twisted canes. For centuries, the practice of burning sugarcane was unknown and no soil was compacted under the weight of complex machines and enormous trucks. Nitrogen, potassium and phosphate fertilizers, today extremely expensive, did not yet even exist, and the dry and wet months succeeded each other regularly. In modern agriculture, no high yields are possible without crop rotation methods.

On Sunday, April 1, the French Press Agency (AFP) published disquieting reports on the subject of climate change, which experts gathered by the United Nations already consider an inevitable phenomenon that will spell serious repercussions for the world in the coming decades.

According to a UN report to be approved next week in Brussels, climate change will have a significant impact on the American continent, generating more violent storms and heat waves and causing droughts, the extinction of some species and even hunger in Latin America.

The AFP report indicates that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forewarned that at the end of this century, every hemisphere will endure water-related problems and, if governments take no measures in this connection, rising temperatures could increase the risks of mortality, contamination, natural catastrophes and infectious diseases.

In Latin America, global warming is already melting glaciers in the Andes and threatening the Amazon forest, whose perimeter may slowly be turned into a savannah, the cable goes on to report.

Because a great part of its population lives near the coast, the United States is also vulnerable to extreme natural phenomena, as hurricane Katrina demonstrated in 2005.
According to AFP, this is the second of three IPCC reports which began to be published last February, following an initial scientific forecast which established the certainty of climate change.

This second 1400-page report which analyzes climate change in different sectors and regions, of which AFP has obtained a copy, considers that, even if radical measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that pollute the atmosphere are taken, the rise in temperatures around the planet in the coming decades is already unavoidable, concludes the French Press Agency.

As was to be expected, at the Camp David meeting, Dan Fisk, National Security advisor for the region, declared that "in the discussion on regional issues, [I expect] Cuba to come up () if there's anyone that knows how to create starvation, it's Fidel Castro. He also knows how not to do ethanol".

As I find myself obliged to respond to this gentleman, it is my duty to remind him that Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than the United States'. All citizens -- this is beyond question -- enjoy free medical services. Everyone has access to education and no one is denied employment, in spite of nearly half a century of economic blockade and the attempts of US governments to starve and economically asphyxiate the people of Cuba.

China would never devote a single ton of cereals or leguminous plants to the production of ethanol, and it is an economically prosperous nation which is breaking growth records, where all citizens earn the income they need to purchase essential consumer items, despite the fact that 48 percent of its population, which exceeds 1.3 billion, works in agriculture. On the contrary, it has set out to reduce energy consumption considerably by shutting down thousands of factories which consume unacceptable amounts of electricity and hydrocarbons. It imports many of the food products mentioned above from far-off corners of the world, transporting these over thousands of miles.

Scores of countries do not produce hydrocarbons and are unable to produce corn and other grains or oily seeds, for they do not even have enough water to meet their most basic needs.

At a meeting on ethanol production held in Buenos Aires by the Argentine Oil Industry Chamber and Cereals Exporters Association, Loek Boonekamp, the Dutch head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s commercial and marketing division, told the press that governments are very much enthused about this process but that they should objectively consider whether ethanol ought to be given such resolute support.

According to Boonekamp, the United States is the only country where ethanol can be profitable and, without subsidies, no other country can make it viable.

According to the report, Boonekamp insists that ethanol is not manna from Heaven and that we should not blindly commit to developing this process.

Today, developed countries are pushing to have fossil fuels mixed with biofuels at around five percent and this is already affecting agricultural prices. If this figure went up to 10 percent, 30 percent of the United States' cultivated surface and 50 percent of Europe's would be required. That is the reason Boonekamp asks himself whether the process is sustainable, as an increase in the demand for crops destined to ethanol production would generate higher and less stable prices.

Protectionist measures are today at 54 cents per gallon and real subsidies reach far higher figures.

Applying the simple arithmetic we learned in high school, we could show how, by simply replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, as I explained in my previous reflections, millions and millions of dollars in investment and energy could be saved, without the need to use a single acre of farming land.

In the meantime, we are receiving news from Washington, through the AP, reporting that the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees throughout the United States has edged beekeepers to the brink of a nervous breakdown and is even cause for concern in Congress, which will discuss this Thursday the critical situation facing this insect, essential to the agricultural sector. According to the report, the first disquieting signs of this enigma became evident shortly after Christmas in the state of Florida, when beekeepers discovered that their bees had vanished without a trace. Since then, the syndrome which experts have christened as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has reduced the country's swarms by 25 percent.

Daniel Weaver, president of the US Beekeepers Association, stated that more than half a million colonies, each with a population of nearly 50 thousand bees, had been lost. He added that the syndrome has struck 30 of the country's 50 states. What is curious about the phenomenon is that, in many cases, the mortal remains of the bees are not found.

According to a study conducted by Cornell University, these industrious insects pollinate crops valued at anywhere from 12 to 14 billion dollars.

Scientists are entertaining all kinds of hypotheses, including the theory that a pesticide may have caused the bees' neurological damage and altered their sense of orientation. Others lay the blame on the drought and even mobile phone waves, but, what's certain is that no one knows exactly what has unleashed this syndrome.

The worst may be yet to come: a new war aimed at securing gas and oil supplies that can take humanity to the brink of total annihilation.

Invoking intelligence sources, Russian newspapers have reported that a war on Iran has been in the works for over three years now, since the day the government of the United States resolved to occupy Iraq completely, unleashing a seemingly endless and despicable civil war.

All the while, the government of the United States devotes hundreds of billions to the development of highly sophisticated technologies, as those which employ micro-electronic systems or new nuclear weapons which can strike their targets an hour following the order to attack.

The United States brazenly turns a deaf ear to world public opinion, which is against all kinds of nuclear weapons.

Razing all of Iran's factories to the ground is a relatively easy task, from the technical point of view, for a powerful country like the United States. The difficult task may come later, if a new war were to be unleashed against another Muslim faith which deserves our utmost respect, as do all other religions of the Near, Middle or Far East, predating or postdating Christianity.

The arrest of English soldiers at Iran's territorial waters recalls the nearly identical act of provocation of the so-called "Brothers to the Rescue" who, ignoring President Clinton's orders advanced over our country's territorial waters. Cuba's absolutely legitimate and defensive action gave the United States a pretext to promulgate the well-known Helms-Burton Act, which encroaches upon the sovereignty of other nations besides Cuba. The powerful media have consigned that episode to oblivion. No few people attribute the price of oil, at nearly 70 dollars a gallon as of Monday, to fears of a possible invasion of Iran.

Where shall poor Third World countries find the basic resources needed to survive?

I am not exaggerating or using overblown language. I am confining myself to the facts.

As can be seen, the polyhedron has many dark faces.

If you're going to celebrate religious holidays, at least do it right!

2007-04-02T16:33:00.000-04:00

Yes, I know, celebration of religious holidays like Easter and Christmas has been under fire for a while now. And, to that, I say, bullshit! We should just celebrate every group's holidays. More celebrating is what we need, not less. I'll celebrate the Jewish holidays, the Hindu holidays, made-up holidays... why not? It's fun, you learn about other people's cultures, there's generally food involved... what's not to like about this?
Anyway, here's the thing, I'm not religious, but I think if you're going to celebrate a religious holiday, you should do it properly.
That's why I was kind of put out when I walked into work this morning, to find the whole joint covered with baskets of chocolate, it's still Lent people! You can't crack out the chocolate until after Good Friday (remember Good Friday? It's only the holiest day of the whole Christian calendar). I know I'm hair splitting, and I suspect that a lot of the people who are getting all into this office Easter celebrating aren't Christians, so you can't really get on their case about not getting it quite right - also, complaining about it makes you seem like a religious cook - which I vehemently am not, I just like things to be done right.
The worst ever was the time we went out to the bar on Holy Thursday night (the day before Good Friday) and the bar was holding a Mardi Gras Party - I can't explain why it bothered me so much. Obviously, I wasn't really observing Lent (since I was at a bar), but it still ticked me off. If you're going to reference a religious holiday then you should do it properly. Mardi Gras is the last day before the beginning of Lent, Lent is a period of fasting and praying, so you party like crazy until midnight of Mardi Gras because it's your last chance before Lent. Good Friday is the last day of Lent and the day you kick the fasting and praying into overdrive. Easter Sunday is the day you celebrate and eat the chocolate and all that fun stuff. So throwing a Mardi Gras party (or cracking out the Easter chocolate) during Lent is just gauche.
In my defence, I'd just like to say that, it bothers me that this bothers me.

Apiarists buzzing about soaring rate of honeybee deaths

2007-04-02T14:00:00.000-04:00

Die-offs raise chance devastating disease has migrated north from United States
JOHN PARTRIDGE

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Honeybees in southwestern Ontario have been dropping like flies this winter -- potentially threatening honey production and some of the estimated $5-billion in fruit and other crops across Canada that depend on the insects for pollination.

There also is talk in beekeeping circles of suspiciously high honeybee losses in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.

However, commercial beekeepers and government officials in Ontario are not yet ready to concede that the unusually high winter mortality rate -- nearly three times the average -- may stem from the same mysterious syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) that is devastating honeybee populations in 24 U.S. states, with some losses running as high as 90 per cent.

"We don't think it has anything to do with colony collapse disorder," said Brent Halsall, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association and proprietor of Halsall's Honey in Greeley, near Ottawa.

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"I don't know of anyone yet reporting [CCD] from Canada, but we are certainly watching it with concern," Heather Clay, the Calgary-based national co-ordinator of the Canadian Honey Council, said.

In the United States, honeybee pollination activities are estimated to add about $15-billion (U.S.) a year in value to crops, especially almonds, berries and other fruits and vegetables, and expert witnesses at a congressional committee hearing in Washington last Thursday warned that lower crop yields and higher prices could result if a way to combat CCD is not found.

"It's an absolute catastrophe in the U.S.," said Peter Kevan, a professor who specializes in bees in the department of environmental biology at Ontario's Guelph University.

Among the most northerly affected states are Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has estimated that the value of honeybee pollination in this country is more than $1-billion a year and represents 21 per cent of the value of about 26 selected crops.

Winter losses of honeybees in Ontario have averaged about 18 per cent a year over the past 10 to 15 years, according to provincial apiarist Douglas McRory of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

However, as they start preparing their colonies for the 2007 honey and pollination season, commercial beekeepers in an area of southwestern Ontario have been reporting "exceptional" mortality levels.

"Most of them are about 50 per cent, but there's one person at about 90 per cent," Mr. McRory said when reached at his office in Guelph, west of Toronto.

"I personally don't think that we have what they're seeing in the States," Mr. McRory said. "There, they think it's the result of several things that aren't happening here."

He cited U.S. findings of the buildup of residues in honeycombs of certain chemicals used by U.S. beekeepers that have not been used as long or as widely in Canada, along with predations by so-called small hive beetles, which are not yet found in this country.

As well, U.S. beekeepers truck hundreds of thousands of colonies from state to state as particular crops require pollination. This makes for a much more intense and stressful life than most Ontario honeybees endure. "We move ours maybe once [a season], out east to pollinate blueberries, and then we bring them back," Mr. McRory said.

Instead, he and other experts are pointing to unusual weather patterns that led to reduced production of late-season honey on which the bees and their offspring live during the winter, and to the fact that frigid winter temperatures did not arrive until mid-January, the start of a critical period for bee reproduction.

The bees form clusters inside the hives to maintain the temperature at 21 degrees during most of the winter, but the lengthening of the days after Jan. 15 is a signal for them to raise this to the 35 degrees their nascent offspring or "brood" require. "Once they do that, they won't leave [the cluster] and they can literally starve to death even with honey on the sides of the hive," Mr. McRory said.

Meanwhile, Tim Wendell, president of the Saskatchewan Beekeepers Association, figures several unusually high losses that he has heard about in the province this year -- 60 per cent in one case, 80 per cent in another --may have more to do with poor management than anything else.

Still, Mr. Wendell also said he has not yet heard from a lot of other beekeepers in the province, and nobody appears willing to rule out the possibility that CCD may, in fact, have spread to Canada.

"I think it is certainly safe to say that we have suspicious losses across Canada, but at the moment, nobody is actually attributing them officially to colony collapse disorder," Prof. Kevan said yesterday. "The jury is still out."

Honeybee blight

Beekeepers in Ontario are reporting about three times the average mortality rate for honeybees. Such high winter death rates raise the possibility that a syndrome devastating bee populations in the United States and Europe, called colony collapse disorder, has moved into Canada. Canadian officials are unwilling to say the death rate is a result of CCD. They are pointing to the unusual winter weather instead. The cause of CCD, which can affect an entire beehive or colony, remains unknown.

Western honeybee

There are only seven species of honeybee, all of which produce and store liquefied sugar in the form of honey and construct colonial nests out of wax secreted by the workers in the colony. The Western honeybee is the subspecies that has been domesticated for commercial production in North America.

What's causing colony collapse?

The cause of the syndrome is not yet well understood and its existence remains disputed. Theories include environmental

change-related stresses, malnutrition, unknown pathogens, mites, pesticides, disease, or genetically modified crops.

PATHOGENS

Varroa mites prey on developing bees by infecting the chambers where larvae are developing and feeding on their blood. However, Canadian authorities do not believe they are the cause of the recent die-offs.

PESTICIDES

A number of destroyed colonies in the U.S. have been found to have build-ups of certain nicotine-based insecticides. However, these chemicals are not in wide use in Canada and are not thought to be the cause of Canadian deaths.

WEATHER

The relatively warm temperatures in January may have wreaked havoc with the bees' finely tuned breeding cycle, causing them to accelerate the development of larvae just before dangerously cold temperatures struck.

TRANSPORTATION

U.S. commercial beekeepers truck colonies between states as seasonal crops require pollination and this is known to cause considerable stress to the bees. In Canada, this practice is limited by the shorter growing season.

Four Canadian provinces have reported sudden, massive and unexplained die-offs of commercial honeybee colonies. Spokespeople for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs say they are not convinced the die-offs in Canada are happening for the same reasons they are happening in the United States and are reluctant to apply the term colony collapse disorder to the Canadian cases.

A person just can't be held accountable for the content of their dreams, right?

2007-03-29T14:02:00.000-04:00

I've been having some wacked out dreams lately, here are two of the more amusing examples:
1) The night before last I dreamed that there was a huge punch bowl of water in the room with me and it was full of huge hairy tarantulas. This isn't so weird, I'm studying arachnids in my zoology class right now. I'm not sure if it really bothered me or not that there was a bowl of acquatic spiders, or that they were all trying to climb up the sides to get out. But the wierd part was when I looked at the side of the bowl up close and realized that all the spiders had monkey faces.
2) I don't remember a single other part of this dream other than the part where David Miller arrives. Now, as I'm sure you all know, I've been crushing on our mayor for years now. But, as far as I can recall this is the first time I've actually dreamed about him. Anyway, David Miller comes running up the beach wearing all white, you know like you'd wear in an ad for Nautica or something. Everyone kept their clothes on, it wasn't even remotely dirty, just kind of weird to wake up after having the mayor do a cameo in your dream.
So my little amateur psychoanalysts and dream analysts, what does it all mean?

Rheostatic retirement

2007-03-29T14:00:00.000-04:00

Without these eclectic rockers - about to play their final Toronto shows - it's safe to say Canada's indie music boom would never have happened

Mar 29, 2007 04:30 AM
Ben Rayner

If there's a positive spin to put on the Rheostatics' looming retirement, it's that one of Canada's most beloved cult bands will shortly be in a position to be rediscovered.

Not that the Rheos' good name isn't well travelled in Can-rock circles. After more than 20 years on the periphery – and occasionally just inside the periphery – of the nation's cultural consciousness, Etobicoke's favourite sons are a familiar, if somewhat obscure, entity to most folks who have a passing acquaintance with Canadian rock `n' roll.

Even if you can't name a single song in the Rheostatics' catalogue, chances are you've heard the Tragically Hip pumping the band at one time or another over the years. You probably read about them in 1995, too, when the national media were briefly abuzz with news that a little-known art-rock outfit from Toronto had been commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada to compose a transporting soundtrack to its Group of Seven retrospective.

And although you probably won't realize it until someone pulls the tune out of the stacks in the days ahead to honour the Rheostatics' final two Toronto shows – one at the Horseshoe Tavern tonight, another tomorrow at Massey Hall – you've likely tapped a toe to the band's one proper radio hit, 1994's lovely "Claire," maybe while thinking to yourself: "Who does this song again?"

So maybe the Rheostatics aren't exactly undiscovered. Like many defiantly iconoclastic musicians before them, though, they're definitely under-discovered.

This is largely their own doing, of course. What the Rheos' discography lacks in stylistic consistency, it makes up for in its ability to consistently challenge, if not baffle. Short of techno and thrash metal, they've tried pretty much everything over the course of their 10 studio albums, as befits a band that would seem to venerate Rush, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot in equal measure.

The rustic folk-rock yelping of 1987's indie classic Greatest Hits and 1991's Melville would give way to the luminous pop of 1992's Whale Music and the eclectic, prog-influenced expanses of 1995's Introducing Happiness, an underappreciated tumult of big-budget studio weirdness that would end the band's brief relationship with confused American major label Sire Records.

Music Inspired by the Group of Seven was followed by the relatively straightforward, Crazy Horse-ian scrape of 1996's Mike Harris-bashing The Blue Hysteria, but whatever mainstream attention might have been regained with sporadic airplay for "Bad Time to be Poor" was deliciously squandered on a children's album titled The Story of Harmelodia three years later. The last Rheostatics album, 2004's 2067, was a concept record envisioning Canada 200 years after Confederation. A tough sell, even in Canada.

"I think maybe they're a little too good for their own good," the Tragically Hip's Robbie Baker remarked to me in 1997.

He's bang-on, really. I've had some near-religious experiences at Rheostatics live shows, cherish a number of their songs ("Aliens (Christmas 1998)" is a fave) and have always found the lads – Dave Bidini, Martin Tielli, Tim Vesely and Michael Phillip Wojewoda, as well as past drummers Dave Clark and Don Kerr – a tremendous bunch of guys, but I'm by no means an aficionado because, to be honest, sometimes I find their more freewheeling antics quite impenetrable.

This is a compliment. Bands shouldn't make it easy for their fans, and I admire the Rheostatics for parlaying their penchant for Canadiana into not just goofy ditties about Wendel Clark and Saskatchewan, but into rustic/cosmic whale music for Group of Seven paintings and cerebral song cycles mulling the future of Canadian nationhood.

The Rheostatics have been pillars of an independent scene and a model of sustainable, self-sufficient artistry untainted by commercial considerations for more than two decades. If they and their contemporaries had not nurtured our rock `n' roll underground, Canada's recent indie boom would, it's safe to say, never have happened. And if they hadn't encouraged a 13-year-old kid to start mail-ordering indie records and looking beyond Good Rockin' Tonite for cool music, I probably wouldn't be writing this today.

So, thank you, Rheostatics. We couldn't have done it without you.

Hundreds of pigeons make for foul tenants

2007-03-26T13:08:00.000-04:00

I am so disgusted with the 2 pigeons nesting on my balconey, I can't even imagine how gross it would be to have hundreds in my apartment. I felt like a bad tennant for overflowing the tub yesterday, but this makes me realize that any landlord would be lucky to have me.

Cooped up birds, mice found in tiny apartment after stench alerts neighbours

Mar 26, 2007 04:30 AM
Tamara Cherry
Staff Reporter

Residents of a Bleecker St. apartment building were stunned yesterday when their complaints about a foul odour seeping from a 15th-floor apartment led to the discovery of hundreds of pigeons and cannibal mice being raised by a man later detained under the province's mental health act.

The free-flying birds and caged rodents were found crammed inside the small apartment, which was fouled with animal droppings and littered with valuable books and an extensive collection of pornography.

The books and porn were protected with plastic wrappings, a human society inspector said, suggesting the occupant knew his wildlife collection was creating a mess.

Officers responding to residents' complaints of animal noises and noxious odours arrived at the Bleecker St. apartment north of Wellesley St. and west of Parliament St. around 2:15 p.m.

"We found literally hundreds of pigeons flying loose, rats, mice, excrement from animals throughout," Toronto police Staff Sgt. Stan Belza said.

Following the repelling discovery, police called in the Toronto Humane Society, which found between 300 and 400 pigeons and 250 mice, spokesperson Lee Oliver said.

"The pigeons were actually being bred," Oliver said. "There were eggs and that sort of thing and they built nests inside the apartment."

Many were found inside rows of open cages stacked to the ceiling of the 800-square-foot apartment. Scores of others flapped up against each other and the cages, leaving layers upon layers of excrement smothering the floor and furniture.

A man in his mid-60s was arrested under the the Ontario Mental Health Act after he was "deemed to be suffering from a mental illness," Belza said, adding he was the only human occupant of the apartment.

"There were 250 mice in an aquarium without food and water and apparently, they were actually eating each other because this guy wasn't feeding them at all," said Oliver, who discounted reports of rats in the apartment.

"The biggest number were the pigeons," he said. The mice, Oliver added, "were just extraneous to the mess."

While the birds and mice lived and died in their filth, selected items were wrapped in plastic to protect them from the gruesome conditions.

"Apparently he had some really expensive book collections, like a biography of Beethoven and that sort of thing, wrapped in plastic so the pigeons wouldn't destroy them," Oliver said. "And, apparently, a lot of pornography."

"He would have to know the damage (caused by the birds)," Oliver said of the arrested tenant. "If he can identify something as valuable and cover them up, then yes, he had an idea of the damage he was doing."

Four Humane Society officials in masks and white biohazard outfits worked into the evening to capture the free-flying birds, which were boxed and removed. The animals were taken to the society's downtown office's wildlife centre, with pens and coops usually reserved for injured birds brought in from the street.

"Most of these pigeons will be transferred to those pens and we'll also try to find some other shelters," Oliver said.

The apartment's doors have been sealed to protect other tenants in the building, none of whom were evacuated, Belza said.

"Until the rest of the cleanup is done tomorrow, they were advised to put towels under their doors and those will suffice," he said.

Over the next couple days, the birds and mice will be tested for the presence of diseases before being freed in a location predetermined by the Ministry of Natural Resources, Oliver said.

Oliver and Belza said they've never heard of a situation like this before.

"They were surprised, shocked," Belza said of the attending officers. "They had never in their lives, in their professional careers, cumulatively anticipated anything like this."