To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
18
Oct
2022
Thursday September 28, 2022
I took my kitten out for a walk, for him to discover the world outdoors. Something launched a filibuster at us out of the catalpa tree.
It took me a while to discern the source. A squirrel. It leaped effortlessly from branch to branch, uttering a stream of profanities that would make a teenager blush.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Squirrels, invasive species, cute, profanity
Sunday September 18, 2022
Municipal elections are held every four years in B.C. The next election is coming up fast – October 15.
On the political spectrum, municipal elections are the poor cousins, the runt of electoral litters. You don’t think so? Consider at the emotions they arouse. Federal politicians get hated. Provincial politicians, ridiculed. Municipal politicians? Mostly a shrug.
Especially, in a rural municipality sandwiched halfway between two much larger cities.
I attended an all-candidates’ meeting for the District of Lake Country. Out of curiosity, mainly.
To their credit, no one attacked any other candidate.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Elections, candidates, municipal
Thursday September 21, 2022
Municipal elections are coming up. “Why don’t put your name in?” a friend asked the other day. “You’ve always got a lot to say.”
I hope he was kidding. Because politics already has too many people in love with the sound of their own voice.
Besides, if I got elected, I would have to attend meetings. I’ve missed four meetings in the last two weeks, unfortunately. I suspect that my forgetter is telling me that I don’t like meetings.
Perhaps I never did like them.
In the past, I tended to resent meetings. They took a block of time when I could have been doing something productive. I felt obligated to attend because feared the organization might do something catastrophic without me.
Tags: meetings
28
Sep
I attended an all-candidates’ meeting for the District of Lake Country. Out of curiosity, mainly. I already know who I’ll vote for.
I didn’t go as a journalist. I went to see how the candidates treated each other.
Tags: Elections, promises
Tags: tradition, Meettings, agendas
Professionalism, generally, means that you do your job without letting your personal preferences interfere.
So a lawyer sets aside her personal loathing of a long-term criminal to defend him, to the best of her ability.
An NHL hockey player plays his best, regardless of what city he’s traded to.
And a doctor treats a gang member or a sex worker without letting her own distaste for their lifestyles affect her diagnosis and treatment.
In the same way, I have always assumed, professional journalists should deliver the facts impartially, without letting their own political biases colour their reporting.
Tags: truth, Professional, journalist
Thursday September 15, 2022
I’m looking at a relic. No, not the bones of some ancient saint. Or a corpse, mummified in a peat bog or frozen in a glacier.
This relic is a blue-and-white porcelain teapot.
We gave it to my father’s second wife, Christina Fraser, for Christmas one year. Blue and white were Chris’s favourite colours. We found this teapot in Eaton’s, when Eaton’s still existed. She loved it.
Then she wanted to ship it home safely from Toronto to Vancouver. She didn’t trust her suitcase to protect it from Air Canada’s baggage handlers. So she took it back to Eaton’s, figuring they had the expertise.
“Sorry, we can’t do that,” she was told.
Tags: Teapot, Eatons, Baal Shem Tov
Sunday September 4, 2022
Grief. I thought I knew all about it. I even wrote a book about it., many years ago. A professional family counsellor praised it as, “the only book on grief written from a father’s point of view. All the rest have been written by mothers.”
But the events of the last week in Saskatchewan and in Balmoral have made me realize I was writing about MY private grief. Not about the kind of collective grief that people around the world, and in James Smith Cree Nation and the village of Weldon particularly, are currently living through.
I made the mistake of treating grief as an individual experience. Indeed, in many ways, it is. You feel alone. Indeed, it seems to force you in on yourself.
Tags: James Smith Cree Nation, stabbings, Sandersons
4
By now, everyone must have seen the video of Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland being accosted in the lobby of a hotel in Grand Prairie, Alberta, on a visit to her home province; she was born in Peace River, north of Grand Prairie.
Freeland is quite short, even in high heels. One of her own Tweets gives her height as “5 feet 2 inches, on a good day.”
The man – identified by his own Internet postings as Elliott McDavid – towers over her. He’s almost a stereotype of an Alberta redneck -- burly, heavily bearded, dressed in a tattered undershirt.
Media coverage described him as a "right-wing extremist" and an "active organizer of convoy protests.”
Tags: harassment, Chrystia Freeland, Grand Prairie, redneck
Thursday August 25, 2022
Something got me thinking about the pop songs I listened to in my youth. Here’s one of them: “Sh-boom sh-boom… yallalala lallalalala, Hey nonny ding dong, a-lang a--lang a-lang, Boom ba-doh, ba-doo ba-doodle-ay…”
The quartet went on to include some real words, but they’ve faded from memory. Only the nonsense syllables remain.
Or Sammy Kaye and his orchestra, otherwise a fairly conservative group: “Chickery chick, cha-la, cha-la, Check-a-la romey in a bananika, Bollika, wollika, can't you see, Chickery chick is me?”
Tags: Silly songs, innocence