I wish for you now to enjoy a short film starring my roommate, who is, by some accounts, one of the top-ranked Diplomacy players in North America. This short film is entitled 'Waffleman'. This is the sum total of all that I wish. I wish for nothing else.

Make my wish come true.

PS Also I just remembered that I wish too in addition moreover and beyond this for a small planetoid please, to call my own.

I think a truly great invention would be the Swedish Filter: a device one straps to one's head that activates automatically whenever one hears something one would rather not, and translates it all into Swedish, so one didn't have to understand it. I have one of these already. It kicks in whenever people talk about probability. Probability speaks to me in Swedish. Like the cafeteria in IKEA. And, just like the cafeteria in IKEA, I can forsee no other outcome to our interaction than my being pelted with meatballs.

I think that FOX News has been deploying Swedish Filters to their pundits for years now. They seem to be catching on.

1. 90% of the Canadian population lives within 320 kilometers of the US border. They are all ninjas.

2. Why do witches ride broomsticks? Medieval witches used hallucinogenic herbs and ointments in their rites; the hallucinogens were absorbed through the skin. They would rub these ointments on a broomstick and straddle it so they could absorb the compounds through their vulvas, which, with their armpits, were the optimal parts of the body for it.

3. Guinness is not a drink; it is a snack.

4. No number larger than 12 ought to exist. If you see one, drop your chalk and back away slowly. Whatever you're trying to do is more trouble than it is worth.

5. At the beginning of the year, the loonie, or 'Canadian dollar', was valued at 63.40 cents US. The US economy, however, is so shitcanned that the loonie was trading at over 74 cents US just a week ago.

6. There is a Finnish band called The Cybermen. Their website includes a small Doctor Who-related graphic of a Servo Robot.

7. I am a huge dork.

8. There was apparently also a punk band of the late 70s called The Cybermen.

9. Dan Savage will name a sex act after Rick Santorum.

10. Numbered lists get dull after a while.

People are frequently surprised to learn that I do not actually like The Matrix all that much. (If you are not frequently surprised to learn this, you are clearly not a person. You are obviously a sweeping generalisation.) Yea, verily, I like it not. Gosh, you say. And golly. And possibly gee whiz. 'Aren't you,' you say, 'a pretentiously-intellectual science fiction fan? Shouldn't you--' meaning I--'eat this up, eat it like so much tortellini stuffed with gorgonzola cheese and walnuts, sprinkled with oregano and a dusting of pure crack, served on a plate of solid LSD?'

Well, no. I shouldn't.

The Matrix is fundamentally a disappointment on just about every level but its special effects, which are insufficiently cool to justify the hours of my life I'd have to spend vegetating upon my ass to view them. You may take that to be my thesis. In defense of this, I intend to adumbrate several instances from separate epistopic interfaces of the spectrum, making frequent references to Doctor Who. Just because I can.

1. The Name

'The Matrix' does indeed sound like a hip and chic name for a virtual reality. It sounds so hip and chic, in fact, that it has been in use in science fiction since at least 1976, when its depths were plumbed by Tom Baker in the Doctor Who serial 'The Deadly Assassin'. While this Matrix featured significantly fewer instances of 'bullet time', it also cost approximately one hojillion dollars less to film, involves greater camp, can be viewed in easy half-hour installments, and has characters who are clever and surreal as opposed to those who fall back immediately on their infinite powers of ass-kicking. No contest, really. Anything that involves something called 'the Matrix' and is not a Doctor Who episode needs to be about representation theory.

This illustrates a general rule of life: 'mainstream' science fiction's ideas look much less cool when they've already appeared, with more character, on Doctor Who decades earlier. This is why the Borg are also not cool. Not at all.

2. Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves just can't act. It's true. He makes wood look subtle and dynamic. He was at his best in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure; since then, it's been all downhill. (Though his limited acting skills are put to excellent use in My Own Private Idaho.) The real Keanu Reeves is not half as entertaining as the Keanu Reeves lookalike James Duval frequently employed by Gregg Araki. He would've cost less, too, and possibly looks better naked.

3. Solipsism

Solipsism has to be the most self-indulgently masturbatory piece of philosophy ever devised. And you know how much philosophers love to masturbate. The idea that we could all be living in a dream-world or computer simulation or in a big glass jar in some buttock-headed alien's laboratory is neither new nor deep. Mentioning this possibility does not make The Matrix remotely deep or philosophical, because, fundamentally, it makes no difference whatsoever. What if, one night, while you were asleep, someone snuck into your home and replaced everything you own with an exact duplicate, only French? Well, nothing, that's what. It wouldn't make the slightest observable change in the world, except that your loins would be sheathed in undergarments of a more socialist bent. It doesn't matter if the world is an illusion or not so long as it's a convincing one, because none of us inside it could ever tell the difference by any means whatsoever. Fundamentally, it just doesn't matter. Which means...

4. The Computers

If you ask me, the computers are the good guys. So they're keeping the human race locked in a virtual reality. So what? No-one can tell the difference. No-one born in the Matrix even has the capacity to conceive of an existence outside of it until they're forcibly removed. Although...

5. Bad Science

Either Morpheus is a bald-faced liar, or much of the backstory is just stupid. Humans make terrible batteries. We are very inefficient ways of converting sunlight into chemical energy. Why not cut out the middle man, and use plants? Speaking of which, where do the nutrients to keep all those humans fed come from, anyhow? Given that the sun is shrouded, and so plants cannot be cultivated without some external energy source; and what's going to power that? (If you say 'That's what they use the heat from the humans for!' I will hit you with a salmon.) Compare this to an actually interesting and creepy use AIs might have for humans, used by Dan Simmons in his novels Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. I won't tell you what this use is, because I don't want to spoil it. But it involves some very rude suggestions about Catholicism.

6. Hugo Weaving

Come on. He could kick Keanu Reeves's ass in like five seconds flat. You know it. I know it. We all know it. He is roughly eighteen million times cooler than Keanu. Agent Smith is the real hero of the film.

7. The Dialogue

How can Lawrence Fishburn stop himself laughing?

8. The Philosophising

If you want to experience genuinely philosophical science fiction, read Solaris, or White Light, or Daemonomania, or, for that matter, most anything of John Crowley's. He writes stories about characters who find they are part of Stories, and what is that if not the crux of this Matrix idea, only with much better writing?

9. Comic Book Logic

The Matrix is basically a comic book which tries to make itself seem dark and pretentious and philosophical. I prefer my comic bookery to be open and honest about itself. If you want to watch a movie about people with powers beyond those of mortal men, individuals with the power to change the world in ways ordinary little folk like us cannot, why not watch X-Men or Spider-Man? They are campier, more fun, and sexier, and involve a lot more of Michael Chabon. Fundamentally, what The Matrix lacks is a sense of fun; and without that, its conceits weigh it down and render it drab and unstimulating.

And that's my two sense.

Normal service will resume Tuesday. In the mean time, here is a picture of the Tower of Art. Look at it until I get back.

The elusive chanting sample I had stuck in my head for ages was from Thrill Kill Kult's 'Starmartyr'...

'More life, more love, more freedom, more choice!'

My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: excellent glam-trash-metal-techno-dance-sleaze-goth band. Heavy on the sleaze. Sex, drugs and Satan. A good term for them is 'decadent'...Self-consciously, self-indulgently so. Inspect them at once. They do very fun things with sampling; 'Mystery Babylon' is a great example. The albums 'Hit&Run Holiday,' 'Sexplosion!,' and '13 Above the Night' are essential listening. Essential, that is, unless you don't feel like it, in which case they are not. Not that I advocate such things, of course, but I am told that there is a profusion of Thrill Kill Kult tunes available via most file-sharing systems. Or you could just buy the albums, I suppose...If you want to be all capitalist about it.

Information longs to be free!

Someone arrived on my website recently after doing a search on the string 'matthew waterhouse gay'.

Hurrah for randomness!

Commutative rings are evil. 'Commutative', after all, sounds like 'Communist'. What more proof do you need?

Some of you may recall that, not too long ago, I mentioned the novelist John Crowley, and said that you should buy his novels, and then read them several times.

[Y]ou should buy his novels...and then read them several times

See? I did say that.

It is quite likely, however, that there are those among you who still have not bought one John Crowley novel, nor read it several times. To say nothing of them all. This displeases me greatly. Go out and read them, or you will face my terrible wrath.

Perhaps my terrible wrath is not motivation enough. Why, you ask, should I read the works of this man called Crowley? Why, you ask? Why should you continue to process fluids through your liver? It is an integral part of life. It is nature's way.

Perhaps you are not the sort of person who accepts overheated rhetoric blindly and unquestioningly. Perhaps you are the sort of person who requires elaboration. I know your type. Your elaborative type. Very well, then. I shall elaborate.

...

Though he has worked in other forms and media as well, it is primarily as a novelist that John Crowley is of interest. He has been publishing novels at increasingly lengthy intervals since 1975¹. His most characteristic features as a novelist, apart from being extremely good indeed, are his abiding interest in history, and his indifference to genre constraints. He's marketed as a science fiction author, and though some of his works are unquestionably science fiction--Beasts, Engine Summer, and 'Great Work of Time,' for example--his last five novels are equally unquestionably not. Nor, though said novels--Little, Big, AEgypt, Love & Sleep, Daemonomania, and The Translator--contain elements of the fantastical, is it entirely accurate to describe them as fantasy. Perhaps he could be called a magical realist...Or some kind of postmodernist, given that his stories are often about stories themselves, and the story oftentimes is that the characters must learn that they are in a Story...Perhaps that is more characteristic of his work. Or perhaps I should say it's characteristic of Crowley that his works are symbols more than they are symbolic, densely-woven constructs whose unravelling brings a hint of the gnosis about which he writes. Or perhaps...Well. He is difficult to characterise; let us leave it at that. He is obscure, unfortunately, and very often out of print. He is also a truly great novelist; Little, Big is perhaps my favourite book. His prose is beautiful, not overwrought, extraordinarily vivid and full of life. He can use it sweetly, enchantingly, almost, but not quite, verging on the twee. Or he can depict sadomasochistic bondage, uncomfortable eroticism, power, powerlessness, despair, error, failure, Christianity...He has range. And scope. He writes about history, and stories, and why these two things are the same. He writes about gnosis, an awakening into enlightenment. And this is not separate from history; he draws on the Gnostic heresy of the early centuries CE, and the Hermetic tradition it spawned in the Renaissance, and the Art of Memory practiced by the Hermetic heretic Giordano Bruno, and Somehow makes these curiosities from the dusty corners of history not only relevant but positively essential to unwinding the lives and loves of real (or as real as fictional characters can be) people.

He writes about love. Perhaps that is the simplest way to put it. Romantic love. Innocent love. Worldly love. Tragic love. Sexual love. Illegal love.

He tells a Story. And the Story revolves around realising that there is a Story to be told.

And he's a bit good².

1: Sleight, Graham. "The Fiction of John Crowley: A Bibliography." In Snake's-Hands, ed. Alice K. Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi. Wildside Press, 2003.

2: Now read him at once, or face my aforementioned terrible wrath: I shall destroy the Sun.

Are you feeling a vast yet surreal sort of existential confusion?

Would you like all the fun of illicit narcotics use without the lengthy prison sentences? It is like falling into a black hole, only kind.

Or would you just like to play some old-school Oregon Trail until you spray a fountain of vomit across your own face?

I am the Cat of the Futiture.

Someone, somewhere, out there in this big, crazy world has gone and done it. They've invented the Inflatable Church.

Yes, it is real.

The blow-up church, which is 47 feet (14.3 metres) high from ground to steeple, 47 feet long and 25 feet (7.6 metres) wide, includes a blow-up organ, altar, pulpit, pews, candles and "stained glass" windows.

This is a dream come true.

No, literally. I was haunted by dreams of an Inflatable Church almost three years ago to the day. I can only surmise that, like one of H.P. Lovecraft's poor, sensitive artist characters, I am channelling the telepathic transmissions of some dark squamous elder god stirring in its millennial slumber, and that this Inflatable Church is part of its design to clear off the Earth. Perhaps it is a very gassy elder god.

It's the only logical conclusion.

Do you like frivolous lawsuits? Do you wish to marvel at the excesses of the legal profession? Did you sue McDonald's because their fatty food gave you an ass the size of a Buick? Would you sue to be named high school valedictorian? Do you wish other people to compensate you for your own ineptitude? Or would you like to mock those who do? Then you, my friend, need Overlawyered.com:

"A Norlane man is suing Geelong Football Club for allowing him to get too drunk at a president's lunch. ...In Supreme Court documents seen by the Geelong Advertiser, Gregory Allan Clifford claims he consumed 'excessive quantities of liquor' supplied by the club at a president's lunch about two years ago. Mr Clifford claims he fell down a set of stairs at the club function and severely injured himself. In the civil lawsuit against the club he claims the club should have exercised reasonable care to conduct the function in a way where people drinking were reasonably safe."

You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll drink diesel fuel to get high.

I have developed a sudden and overpowering obsession with Finland. A reader informed me, you see, that the Finnish word for 'hedgehog' is 'siili', which is just about the cutest thing I've ever heard in my entire natural life. I wish to learn Finnish. Right now. The words just look so gosh-darned cool. All those beautiful, beautiful vowels...

Michael Palin once sang a song about Finland.

Perhaps you have heard of Apocalyptica? A band composed entirely of Finnish cellists, who made a name for themselves originally by doing covers of Metallica? Good covers, at that? I quite like 'Wherever I May Roam'. Possibly more than I do Metallica's original. They're playing Friday in St Petersburg, if you're in the area...

One of the members of Apocalyptica lists as a musical influence Sibelius, a Finnish composer, one of whose works I'm sure I've heard performed...I am very fond of the name 'Sibelius' because it looks almost but not quite like Latin.

Completely unrelated to Sibelius is the Nuntii Latini, a weekly summary of world news broadcast from Finland, which can apparently be heard on shortwave, and also is streamed online. It is done, as the name suggests, entirely in Latin. I only catch isolated words, listening to it. But it's worth catching for, if nothing else, the chance to hear Classical Latin pronunciation. None of this Ecclesiastical 'pa-che' for 'pace' crap.

A Finnish scholar, one Dr Jukka Ammondt, has recorded an album of Elvis Presley tunes, all sung in Latin. This album features the immortal line "Ne calces mi glaucos calceos". Or, if you must, 'Don't step on my blue suede shoes.' I think Martial would have approved. I cannot find this album, try as I might, on eBay.

Apparently gay partnerships, similar, though not entirely equivalent, in legal status to marriage, have been officially recognised in Finland since 2002.

Tom of Finland, or Touko Laaksonen, for many decades drew quite detailed and famous pictures of very butch men with immense wangs getting it on.

The Finnish Constitution specifically forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

And now it is late and I shall go to bed.

A newslet has landed on my plate this afternoon from my native country, Iowa City...

Lizard head found in Applebee’s salad

Presence of animal parts appears to be accidental

...Which I think speaks for itself. Less apolitical perhaps was the following quotation from today's Globe and Mail, on the changing American stereotype of Canadians, given Canada's failure to support the US in Iraq, and its impending approval of gay marriage and marijuana decriminalisation, amongst other things...The image of 'bland niceness' may be on the way out:

Imagine a story in the [Wall Street] Journal that reports: “A Canadian landed immigrant from Libya was late for his lesbian sister's wedding to a black activist, who runs Vancouver's public heroin-injection site, because he became confused about the location of the church while smoking pot on the rapid transit train from New Westminster on Saturday. The betrothed couple are planning their honeymoon in San Francisco.”

Which sounds like my kind of nation.

Also, my Latin dictionary describes the word 'prox' as a 'comic representation of a fart'.

This is all.

I can't stop buying books, goddammit. Amazon.com is really amazingly convenient for those of us in the Pacific Northwest. They ship like a proverbial mofo, even. And they're doing free shipping on orders of over $25. These are such hella crazy dealz, they lose money on every book you buy.

('But don't worry,' the executives assure you. 'We'll make up for it in bulk.')

This new batch: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, by Ioan Culianu, one of many sources employed by John Crowley; Eros, Magic, and the Death of Professor Culianu by Ted Anton; Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.

These come hot on the heels of the critical collection Snake's-Hands; and Appleseed by John Clute, which just recently arrived. It is to Snake's-Hands that I would particularly direct your attention now. I'm working my way through the sections on AEgypt right now. Lots of very interesting commentary on John Crowley, quite a bit on his old notes and typescripts for Engine Summer, and also an exceedingly good essay by Graham Sleight on misunderstandings in the AEgypt sequence. I command you to purchase and read it at once.

Oh...It's entirely likely that some of you may not actually be familiar with John Crowley. In which case you should buy his novels first, and then read them several times, and then buy Snake's-Hands. But do get to it eventually.

Dammit. I must do some complex analysis. Hold that thought.

Much has been said in days and years past to the detriment of boredom. Some scandalous wags (not wangs) seem to find in its antithesis, 'excitement' or 'excrement' if you will, something devoutly to be desired. (HogBlog is thinking now of a Shakespeare line HogBlog cannot quite recall at the moment, to speak in the third person without use of pronouns.) Boredom is something to be fought to these poor, sick bastards, a disease to be cured, a pox, if you will. To such people as these, This Modern World must seem heaven-sent, for truly we live in Interesting Times. If you will.

Why does boredom have such a bad reputation?

Given that Interesting Times typically involve political turmoil, crusades to fight, dragons to slay, calls to arms, heroic rescues, divers alarums, war, chaos, destruction, death, burnt toast, left luggage, blood, sweat, tears, urine, semen...What's the attraction? Really?

Who wants to live in a time of upheaval and turmoil?

The proper state for any society really worth living in, if you ask HogBlog--and HogBlog knows that you didn't--is a sort of muddling, good-intentioned stability in which uninspiring and possibly unimaginative yet competent political figures with no definite agenda guide the nation through a long, dull national nightmare of peace and prosperity, while the great masses of the populace go about their diurnal lives in a deeply noncombative yet quietly progressive tide of advancing liberal sentiment, paying heed to politics only when it suits them, secure in the knowledge that their elected representatives, without their own personal constant supervision, will get things, if not quite right, then not wholly wrong; or sufficiently right for most tastes, will stumble perhaps but at least when they fall they will fall forward, gaining inch by awkward inch.

In short, in times of boredom We The People can exercise our fundamental God-given right to political apathy, which, really, is what makes life worth living.

Politics should not be a major concern to anyone not directly involved in governance, most of the time. And sometimes not even to them. The State, after all, is nothing but a convenient fiction. There is no entity out there called America, a living thinking creature with passions, desires, goals, fears, hobbies, parent-teacher meetings. (Unless you're living in a John Crowley novel.) This fiction exists solely for the comfort and convenience of We The People. In Interesting Times such as these, less boring and less benevolent regimes often gloss over this fact, bludgeoning an unprepared populace over their collective head into obedience with the Idea of the State, when the reason the State exists at all is to serve Us. Remember? To handle things like the post, sanitation, roadways, schools, law enforcement, environmental preservation, public libraries, Fermilab, the National Endowment for the Arts? Not in fact to shit the Patriot Act into our mouths?

Why should the concerns of this fictitious State trump those of actual, breathing people, We The People who exist, breathe, love, excrete, consume, read, build, who watch hockey, who pay outrageous box office prices to see X2, who make the society the State claims to represent? We who do the things that make history happen? Who live the lives that will become the future's stories, and make stories out of the lives of the past? History is not a triumphal parade of generals, battles, dates, and revolutions; history is the story told by women and men, written by women and men, for women and men. We are not its slaves, but its parents.

The important things are the details of small, ordinary human lives.

A boring State is a safe State. Look to the north. Look to Canada. What do you see? You see what America could have been under President Gore: with a federal leadership that might be a bit of a joke, but a harmless one, quiet and prosperous, its currency at unprecendented highs, with a firm international standing, and liberal ideals slowly seeping over the land despite everyone's best efforts.

Compare that to what the US currently has. The shouting, the rhetoric, the Republican Attack Machine, the paranoia, the patriotism, the propaganda...

One wants to grab America by the shoulder and say 'Dude, just chill out already. Dude.'

America would be a much happier and less hostile place if our elected leadership and unelected presidential frauds were required by law to smoke pot on a weekly basis. Say, on Friday nights. They were tailor-made for pot-smoking, as Dan Savage describes it in his book Skipping Towards Gomorrah, in which Mr Savage theorises that marijuana acts like a vacation compressed into the space of a single weekend for vast legions of overworked, under-relaxed American toilers and wayfarers. They'd be so much mellower, and less likely to oppress us ruthlessly beneath the iron heels in their velvet jackboots.

In conclusion, then, three cheers for boredom, a sure sign of a well-managed state!

Possibly several thousand hedgehogs live in the parks of downtown Helsinki.

Both Eurasian and Eastern European hedgehogs live on the south short of the Gulf of Finland.

There is also a travel guide to Finland called The Hedgehog. But it does not eat insects, or roll itself up into a spiky ball for protection.

Visit the Finnish Hedgehog Society! But be prepared not to understand it. Because it's in Finnish. But you can enjoy the long and pretty words nonetheless. Words like 'lemmikkisiilit'.

I think the Finnish word for 'hedgehog', in some case at least, is 'Siiliyhdistys'.

Do not say 'vittujen kevŠt ja kyrpien takatalvi' in Finnish...I think it might be obscene. Although, to the best of my knowledge, this does not involve hedgehogs.

Until 1981, the Manitoba Legislative Assembly would end its sessions in a massive paper fight, when MLAs and reporters in the press gallery would pelt each other with wads of paper, transcripts, and, eventually, rolled-up magazines. Nine microphones were broken in this manner in 1980.

Click here to watch elected officials pelt one another like a bunch of kids after the first big snowfall of the year.

I like this.

If the US Senate tried it, the Senators would hurl anthrax and dirty radioactive material removed from Iraq's nuclear depository while it was left completely unguarded and unsecured by the invading US forces.

Those lovable little scamps.

So I was walking back to my office after lunch at the Ugly Mug today, passing through the Quad, when a tall, lanky, and cute smiling young man approached me, in a very laid-back sort of a way, and asked me if I'd 'seen one of these before'. I bit back the obvious quip when I noticed he was handing me a small pamphlet or thingy or whatsit, and not in fact his genitals. This whatsit or thingy or pamphlet is entitled 'The Mystery of Human Life', which Tall Lanky Cute Smiling Young Man then explained to me. It was about God, of course, but he was sufficiently attractive that I listened quite politely and didn't attack him viciously at all. As it happens, I soon realised that what he was saying was, in fact, actually rather interesting, for he described his faith in a heresy I'd never encountered before in workaday life. America is a wonderful place for heresies.

Firstly, he put it to me that God put Adam and Eve before the Tree of Knowledge fully intending that they should eat the fruit and thereby become more like God, for God wishes to express himself through humankind. In fact, the Christian goal, he affirmed, was not to worship God but to be filled up with God and become one with God. And was it my imagination, or did a certain hedonistic light gleam from his face when he spoke of the need to appreciate life and the material world as aspects of God's self-expression?

Secondly, I noticed some entertaining diagrams on his thingy or whatsit of pamphlet, affirming the threefold nature of the human entity: body, the material form; and spirit, the divine portion; and then soul as an intermediary between the two, allowing spirit and body to communicate; which I seem to recall reading in Dame Frances Yates' accounts of Marsilio Ficino in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, an absolutely lovely study of certain branches of Renaissance occult thought. I think it was a more generally Neoplatonic doctrine, but don't quote me on that. I'm not sure what its status is in modern mainstream theology, but it is nice to know you can't keep a good doctrine down.

Thirdly, said thingy or pamphlet or whatsit contains the suggestive invocation:

To be regenerated, simply come to the Lord with an open and honest heart and say to Him:

Lord Jesus, I am a sinner.
I need You.
...
Come into me! Fill me with Your life!
Lord Jesus, I give myself to You for Your purpose.

...Which I think speaks for itself to anyone with even the slightest of slightly dirty minds.

In conclusion, then, I suspect this Christian Students Association is actually a coven of gay Hermetic astral-magician Time Lord nymphomaniacs.

Which I can respect.

PS...He also said that a sincere and heartfelt declaration that one does not believe in God is also as pleasing to God as proclamations of faith, so long as one is open to the world of experiences, which I thought was remarkably nice of him. Much nicer than than Pascal's trite old Wager.

Politics can be boring. Even to politicians. Despite his rumoured grudge against Paul Martin, or possibly his rumoured grudge against John Manley (no-one's quite sure), Prime Minister Jean Chretien preferred to watch an NHL hockey game to the first Liberal debate.

Chretien jokingly weighed in on a controversy around the Saturday debate between Paul Martin, Finance Minister John Manley and Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, saying he frequently switched to an NHL playoff game between the Ottawa Senators and the Philadelphia Flyers. "I watched TV, sometimes I switched to hockey, I came back, I'm like any other citizen," Chretien said following his weekly cabinet meeting.

When asked whether he found the viewing boring, Chretien responded, "the hockey, no."

Which is entirely reasonable. And displays exactly what I like about Canadian politics right now. It's safe. Even if Paul Martin has himself crowned Emperor of all the Canadas, the absolute worst-case scenario is still, well, not bad. Whoever becomes the next Prime Minister, they won't try to block gay marriage, or crack down on recreational drug use--which, in Thomas Pynchon's Mason&Dixon, is endorsed by no less a personage than George Washington himself--or privatise everything, or introduce a Total Information Awareness programme headed by a convicted Iran-Contra conspirator, or fight a series of unjust and cynical wars for political gain, or prostitute the nation to mega-corporations...

In short, Canadians have nothing to be afraid of. While, down south, George Bush is one of the worst things ever to happen to America, and there's unfortunately a very real chance we'll have four more years of him. And then quite possibly four years of his chosen successor, Jeb. And then plagues of locusts, and waters turning to blood, and the star Wormwood plunging from the heavens, and dead Reagan-era conservatives rising from the grave to take up important Cabinet posts...Living under the Bush regime is somewhat worse than having a cactus forcibly inserted up one's rectum. A cactus covered in poison. One is just waiting to see which of one's moral and intellectual orifices they'll violate next. It is very much like Kafka, I think. In Kafka--one sees it even in the comparatively lighthearted Amerika, which I've been reading--authority figures are all arbitrary, cruel, vengeful, petty, and out to get you. You. Especially you. Even if you're just the tiniest cog in their vast bureaucratic machine--it's hilarious what a baroque Hapsburg monstrosity Kafka conjures up for a simple hotel--and you're hardly worth the notice of your superiors, they will still take time out of their busy schedules to crush you personally and absolutely. Kafka populates Amerika with capricious wrestling rich girls, grotesquely fat businessmen, Head Porters with imagined grievances, policemen who ask for papers like something from the Soviet Union, manipulative Frenchmen forcing one into servitude...All sorts of authority figures for his poor hero Karl to run up against and be tormented by. He is at the mercy of anyone with money, or power, or strength. Even his uncle, Senator Jacob, is cold and distant and controlling, and casts him out in the end.

Kafka would've found the Bush regime very familiar, I think.

Politics ought to be boring. Politics ought not to inspire massive protests, or fear. Politics is not supposed to be about passions. It's supposed to be about muddling through and keeping people more or less not entirely displeased. Quietly and efficiently. Without interfering overmuch in people's lives.

Good politics are boring politics.

Okay...There'll be none of that, mister. Damn that Somethingawful. This was meant to be something pure and innocent; instead, they turned it into, well, I'd rather not say. I will be traumatised for life now. I'm going to go into the corner and cry.

As I was standing at a bus stop today, I noticed this story on the front page of the Seattle Times:

Majority of antiquities feared lost found at Iraq museum

By Christine Spolar
Chicago Tribune

BAGHDAD — The vast majority of the Iraqi trove of antiquities feared stolen or broken has been found inside the National Museum in Baghdad, according to American investigators who compiled an inventory of the ransacked galleries over the weekend.

I was thrilled. The looting of the National Museum and burning of the National Library were senselessly obscene acts, and while one can hardly compare a loss of things to a loss of lives, or an Iraqi boy's loss of limbs graphically and horrifically described, it is still not insignificant. The cultural destruction wasn't even a malicious act; it wasn't collateral damage, or a regrettable necessity, or in any way remotely justified by any larger military necessity. It was a display of supreme indifference. If one US tank had agreed to move about 60 meters, or a few American soldiers had been stationed to prevent looting, it would never have happened. The US forces just didn't care enough to make the effort.

Imagine, then, my delight! Having forgotten to synchronise my Palm Pilot this morning, I couldn't search for more information until returning here to the Halls of HogBlog, where I pulled up the story. And then I noticed something very, very unsettling:

Thirty-eight significant pieces, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing. Among them is a single display of Babylonian cuneiform tablets that accounts for nine missing items.

The single most valuable missing piece is the Vase of Warka, a white limestone bowl dating from 3000 B.C.

...

Investigators broke through hastily constructed cinder-block barricades Saturday to search five large storage rooms in the museum's basement. Only one of the rooms had been broken into, and even there hundreds of cardboard storage boxes were intact. About 90 plastic boxes, containing perhaps 5,000 less-valuable items, were missing.

...

Investigators are concluding that little damage occurred to antiquities at the museum. They have counted 22 damaged items, including 11 clay pots on display in corridors. Most of those damaged artifacts are restored pieces and can be restored again, museum officials told investigators.

...After reading which, I came to a much less heartening conclusion: it's propaganda. Which is not to say it isn't true, insofar as its figures are concerned. Googling, I find the story popping up in quite a few papers around the US. All quoting the same figures, with are much better than I'd feared at first. All, however, with headlines and spins on the story that are patently false. In the sense of not being true. From the headline and the tone of the article, one would conclude that the Museum came through the war largely intact, yes? Very few items stolen or destroyed? Not, perhaps, such a big deal as all that, hmm?

Which is completely false. The article, first of all, seems to think the only important artifacts are the monetarily valuable artifacts. That's irrelevant here. These items aren't important because they're worth money. They're important because of their historical significance. Note how offhandedly the article mentions that, by the way, about 5,000 items were definitely taken from one storeroom, but it's okay because they weren't that expensive anyhow? Bunk. Shash, even. We can't exactly walk out to the shops and buy another one, can we? 5,000 artifacts is a not inconsiderable figure, and all of them are important. This figure of 5,000 is also by no means established, given that the Museum's catalogues and documents were all destroyed, and the surviving copies abroad may be out of date, and the Museum staff, who are in a much better position to make judgements than American teams, have yet to inspect the vaults thoroughly. And the damage to the Museum is soft-pedalled to a shocking degree. While it is true that the Museum's collection is in much better shape than was feared (keen use of the passive voice, eh?), the damage was significant and still cannot be fully judged. What's more, since the Museum's files and records have all been destroyed, it'll be extremely difficult to reconstruct what, exactly, the Museum had in its collection before the war, and what has gone missing.

So if anyone tells you that the Museum is just fine, take off your shoe and beat them about the head and shoulders with it until they cry for their Magna Mater. Figuratively speaking.

And complain to the news agencies which are trying to sanitise a fat bloated sickly American blunder, or whitewash that seething pus-filled boil on the anus of the Iraq War. They do a disservice to human civilisation.

PS Andrew Sullivan smells like poop, too.

...Of Parliament, that is. The heat is on. On the street, even. The heat from the coruscating flames of Canada's Liberal Party leadership race! The race that will determine who will be Canada's next Prime Minister. The astute reader will recall that HogBlog recently began a series of blogging bits of bloggish bloggery devoted to the leadership race, to profiling the candidates, and to finding every reference possible to marijuana in Canadian politics. Let us now go one step further. We present to you the Official HogBlog Guarantee^[TM]:

'So that we can bring you total all-consuming coverage of this campaign, we of HogBlog will not eat, sleep, oxygenate our blood, or engage in any bodily functions whatsoever, placing ourselves in complete metabolic stasis, until the race is over.'^*

^*Recall the previous Official HogBlog Guarantee^[TM]: 'All Cretans are liars. HogBlog is a Cretan.'

First, marijuana. Manitoba's provincial elections in 1999 brought the New Democratic Party under Gary Doer to power. In this election, the Communist Party won only 0.09% of the vote. The Marijuana Party, however, rocketed into fourth place, winning more votes than the Greens, Libertarians, and Communists combined, with 0.58%.

And now for something completely different: issues!

III. Canadian Culture

Canada is a nation of some 30 million people, roughly equal in population to the state of California. It occupys the second-greatest land area of any nation on the face of this Earth, and contains world-class cities like Toronto and Vancouver. It should come as no surprise to non-Canadians, therefore, that Canada actually does have a domestic television industry. And I'm not just talking about Red Green. Recently, John Manley stirred a veritable hornet's nest, all of whose occupants then flew up his rectum, when he announced the government was cutting $25 million, a substantial fraction of the total funding, from the Canadian Television Fund, imperilling quite a few popular programmes. Among the shows this threatened with cancellation was This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which is a bit good indeed, clips of which are well worth investigating. This cut was just silly. As Jeffrey Simpson noted in his piece in the Globe and Mail on 25 April,

Not only is $25-million a pittance for Ottawa, but cutting that amount from the last budget ran against that document's grain. Total program spending this year jumps $4-billion from last year.

And yet, it remains a mystery why, amidst the cornucopia of new spending, with money being splashed in all directions, Finance Minister John Manley targeted one program for the axe: the Canadian Television Fund.

The CTF, begun in 1996 to assist the production of Canadian TV programs, had been receiving $100-million a year. At its inception, the government said the CTF would eventually be reduced as production companies found private-sector money to replace the government's.

Former finance minister Paul Martin, a booster of Canadian culture, never acted on the implicit assumption that the CTF would be reduced. But Mr. Manley did act in the weeks before his budget. He sliced $25-million a year from a program his very own budget document described as having "met with considerable success in providing new quality Canadian programming."

In the slash-the-deficit era, programs everywhere got the chop. In today's era of large surpluses, programs everywhere got new money. Thus the CTF cut was not a random decision, or a mistake, or an oversight. It was a deliberate act, for reasons nobody in Ottawa can fathom.

Mr. Manley has said he was merely acting on the old implicit assumption of an eventual reduction in the CTF's budget. But this explanation is awfully lame, given the praise heaped on the program in the budget, the new spending everywhere else and the huge government surplus.

No, it is widely assumed that Mr. Manley has little sympathy for subsidizing Canadian cultural production, unlike Mr. Martin, let alone Heritage Minister Sheila Copps. If Mr. Manley believes that subsidizing Canadian TV is a waste of money, that argument should be made now, as the Canadian Alliance does, because it certainly wasn't put forward in the budget.

Ms. Copps is said by friends to have been blind-sided by the cut. She is, after all, Mr. Manley's leadership rival, and the two have exchanged public barbs in recent weeks that mirror their testy private relationship. Cutting the CTF might have struck Mr. Manley as a clever little dig at the heart of Ms. Copps's political support in the cultural community.

Fortunately, after some days of confusion in which Manley attempted to use the fund as a political weapon against oppenent Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, Copps has emerged triumphant, securing the money to undo Manley's cuts and even boost the Fund's funds. Which means that Canada will continue to enjoy current-events satires such as this 'Apology to America', which is the source of much merriment here in the halls of HogBlog.

'I'm sorry we burnt down your White House during the War of 1812. I see you've rebuilt it. It's very nice.

..

'I sincerely hope that you're not upset over this. Because we've seen what you do to countries you get upset with.'

Which segues nicely into the next issue: America.

For those keeping count, with Manley's hostility towards Canada's cultural industries contrasted with Martin's and Copps' staunch support, and Martin's personal qualms about gay marriage--although keep in mind he wouldn't seek to block it, and it seems to have gained wonderful momentum--against his opponents' outspoken support, the score now stands at:

• Manley: 2
• Martin: 2
• Copps: 3

They all love pot.

Achewood today has a very important message for all the young people out there:

"If a number can't come real/ Then I don't need that stumper/ The concept of the variable/ can take it in the dumper."

In November, the Liberal Party's Leadership Convention will choose a successor to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. There are three candidates in the running: former Finance Minister Paul Martin, Deputy Prime Minister John Manley, and Heritage Minister Sheila Copps. If you are an incredible geek, and if you're reading this the odds are good that you are, then the first question to come to your mind is liable to be 'Who has the best website?' Paul Martin sweeps this one, with his very own blog (which he never updates); Sheila Copps gets multimedia kudos for a large animated maple leaf. John Manley redeems an otherwise uninspiring site by looking much like Bill Clinton, and having the almost pornographic name 'John Manley'. Which is not quite as good as 'Lance Manley'. I once lived upstairs from someone whose father was called Lance Longman...But he is not a candidate.

But what of those who are? Whither now for Canada?

I. DRUGS

Prime Minister Chrétien has very civilisedly decided to decriminalise marijuana possession.

"We will soon introduce legislation to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana," he told a Liberal party fundraiser. Amid applause, he quipped, "Don't start to smoke it right away! We're not legalizing it."

His successors all support the smoking of a bowl. Manley comments on marijuana:

"No, never," Manley deadpanned when asked if he'd ever smoked pot. "I regret that, now, because apparently it's 'de rigueur.' "

Sheila Copps tops him boisterously:

The 50-year-old, who attended the University of Western Ontario and university in Rouen, France, freely acknowleged she smoked marijuana in her salad days.

"As a young person? Of course," said Copps, before laughing self consciously.

And Paul Martin, while supporting the measure also, is sadly lacking in amusing quips.

After our first issue, it's a dead heat, one point all, though Manley and Copps win kudos for cool.

II. GAY MARRIAGE

The British Columbia Appeal Court has just ruled that refusing to allow same-sex couples to marry is unconstitutional.

In its decision the court gave the federal government until July 12, 2004 to change the law preventing gays and lesbians from marrying.

Justice Minister Martin Cauchon hasn't decided whether to appeal the B.C. judgment, he said Thursday outside the Commons.

Would the Liberal candidates support or appeal the ruling? Paul Martin wavers.

"It's an issue I'm wrestling with, as I think are a great number of Canadians," he said in an interview yesterday.

He would not appeal any court decision, however, that would require Ottawa to include same-sex relationships under the definition of marriage, he said.

...

Mr. Martin is clearly uncomfortable discussing same-sex marriages and several times over the weekend avoided saying where he stands on the issue.

The article also mentions that Martin is personally opposed to abortion, but supports a woman's right to choose; Martin, in short, seems to be shaping up as a personally somewhat conservative man who would put his convictions aside to groove with the liberal Zeitgeist. His opponents, however, are unashamedly, flamingly pro-gay. His firm Christian beliefs do not impede Mr Manley from making the very civilised proclamation that

"I think the issue here is if people make a life commitment then it is a matter for them to decide and the state should treat that kind of commitment the same regardless of who it is, or whether they are same sex or different sex or whatever. We have moved on to that stage."

And the very inclusive Ms Copps has a page on her site 'For Gays and Lesbians', very boldly labelled too, on which she states:

For many years now, I have called for recognition of gay marriages. To me it is an issue of fundamental human rights. It is also clearly an issue of inclusion and empowerment for young lesbians and gays who are struggling to be accepted and, in many cases, to build their own sense of self-worth.

Which brings the score then to two of two for Copps and Manley, and one for Martin. Though it seems a pity to penalise him for taking a position that would be considered quite liberal in the United States, where nominees to the Federal judiciary compare homosexuality to necrophilia.

On which note, join us next time, as we go deep inside Paul Martin, gently probe at John Manley, and explore every crevice of Sheila Copps. Who will win? Who will lose? And will they ever play the harmonium again?

The German word for 'asshole' is 'Arschloch'. Isn't it wonderfully rectal? Like some kind of gassy discharge?

It's official! May 1 is Loyalty Day!

Because May Day is for dirty Commies.

Our children need to know that our Nation

--'Our Nation'...Sort of like 'Our Father'. As in, 'Our Father which art in heaven'. Only more patriotic--

is a force for good in the world, extending hope and freedom

and cluster bombs

to others.

Especially others who live on top of rich and bountiful oil fields.

By learning about America's history, achievements, ideas, and heroes,

but not the Godless heresy of evolution,

our young citizens will come to understand even more why freedom is worth protecting.

...By shooting crowds of the civilians we've just liberated.

Repeatedly.

We must defend against all heinous unarmed parties our God-given freedom to be monitored by government agencies without regard for privacy or civil liberties. It's freedoms like that which separate the decent, noble United States of America from the filthy and degenerate Canadians.

God bless America.