To both of my regular readers:
There will be an indefinite hiatus in my blog. My sister-in-law is seriously ill and everything else is going on hold while we all try to help as much as we can.
“Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
Right.
Colby weighs in on Canadian Thanksgiving; he notes Damian Penny’s ferreting out of the origins of Canadian Thanksgiving. It was what we’d today call “an exercise in nation-building.” (Even the date is stolen! Columbus Day coincides with Canadian Thanksgiving.)
We’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving with my wife’s family: in particular, her sister’s family, her parents, and some of her dad’s siblings. Sixteen altogether.
Colby also notes that Canadians take their thanksgivings easier than we Americans do; perhaps that because, with the $CAD being where it is, Canadians have less to feel thankful for….
Seriously, though, Thanksgiving is the big family holiday in the States. There’s no hassling about inclusiveness, as the holiday has been scoured free of any religious connection. (Pilgrims? Fleeing persecution? What?!) Everyone celebrates Thanksgiving.
In LA, celebrities working off their community service convictions trundle down to the Hollywood homeless shelter, where there’s a good chance Christian Slater will be serving up turkey and James Brown will be slingin’ hash.
My favorite Thanksgiving in recent years was the one we celebrated in Santa Monica at Al’s. He was my mom’s neighbor in Santa Monica (he died earlier this year at 83), and a hell of a guy. He worked in the building trades in Los Angeles for probably all of his life, except for the time he spent in the Army in World War II. Men like him literally built LA.
That year, Al had a big picture of a nervous-looking turkey up in his living-room window. The turkey was holding a big sign that said “This year, try a ham!” I never figured that one out, as Al was Jewish… maybe his grandkids put him up to it.
Went running this morning. I almost didn’t, because my exercise partner cancelled at the last minute (actually, 7:40 this morning). So I wasted some time and read my blogs until I decided that I really did want to go running today. Especially since I blew off Thursday (being sick) and didn’t catch up on Friday (still being sick).
So I went out on my own. My knee is feeling better these days. I think I have the pain traced to running on the outside of the sidewalk: this means that I spend some time running on the horizontal inclines of driveways. My partner runs on the insides and therefore on the flatter parts of the driveways.
There was snow left over from the last two days, but it’ll probably be gone by this afternoon. It stuck pretty well, especially on north lawns and in the shade of evergreens, but today is bright and clear, and the sun is already warming the roads. There’s a little bit of black ice; that is, very thin but hard patches of ice. Black ice is slippery and very hard to see. I managed to avoid most of it; I didn’t take any spills, anyway.
I had a chance to time myself today. I would characterize my running pace as ‘a slow jog’, and that is in fact what it is. I am making 7′ 20″ to the kilometer. That’s not suitable for a marathon; to complete a marathon in under five hours, you need to maintain an average pace of 7′ 8″ per kilometer or faster. I didn’t expect to be very fast this early in the training, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. I once ran a mile in the time it now takes me to run a kilometer.
More later, I hope. I’ve taken the last two days off for my cold, but I hope to catch up on everything (house cleaning, work, blogging — maybe even brewing?) this holiday weekend. (It’s Canadian Thanksgiving.)
Medicinal pot growers are suing a newspaper for disclosing too much about their location.
Apparently, violence is involved in the illegal drug trade. This according to the allegedly injured grower, one Michael Maniotis:
“What happens to locations in Vancouver that are known to be cultivating cannabis, legal or otherwise? The doors get kicked down, people come inside, there’s home invasions, people sometimes get killed.”
Gee, then, why don’t you not invite the media to your grow-op? Especially after already getting into trouble with the cops:
Maniotis has been charged with trafficking in marijuana at the Merlin Project’s Marijuana Tea House, which was shut down by police in January after only a few weeks in operation. Police said people without Health Canada licences were smoking pot and that equipment was being set up to grow plants.
Medical officers of health are free to speak on Kyoto, confirms Ralph Klein, premier of Alberta. The Palliser Health Authority plans to meet today to reconsider the firing of David Swann.
But perhaps David Swann wasn’t fired for his unpopular views on Kyoto? Was he perhaps fired for inappropriately using his public position to air his political views? After all, when he gave a speech titled “Genocide In Iraq”, he was identified only by his University of Calgary affiliation.
(The Iraq genocide Swann is concerned about is caused by UN sanctions, not Saddam. And according to this Globe and Mail reporter, the 1.5 million body count Swann attributes to sanctions is made up.)
Coffee demand is down. So are world coffee prices. For some farmers, the price that buyers are willing to pay for their product does not cover the cost of producing the crop.
This is not surprising: coffee demand varies rapidly, and coffee production varies slowly. Land needs to be cleared to be put into cultivation and maintained once cleared. Farmers who grow cash crops are in business, and sometimes a business has a bad year. Or two. Or four in a row.
(But I don’t see restaurant owners crying out for price subsidies and handouts. I don’t see benefit concerts organized for local hardware store owners.)
Oxfam’s proposed solution is to destroy some 5 million bags of coffee, thus raising the market price. They’re asking the major retailers (Kraft, Nestle, Sara Lee etc.) to do this. The major retailers, sensibly enough, claim that this will only address this year’s surplus and will actually encourage more overproduction.
Doesn’t anyone else find it strange that the Ayn Rand Institute is a non-profit organization?
Copyright
So I was going to watch my favorite unemployed New Yorker just now; but I’ve been asked to ‘keep it down’. So I’ll rant instead.
Hewers of wood and drawers of water are rare in our hydrocarbon-based economy; rare enough that we can forget the origins of the term. But they’re not rare in the world.
Last December my wife and I had the privilege of visiting Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world. Mali is where you can find Timbuktu, or if you prefer the colonial misspelling, Tombouctou. It’s also where you can find my mother, working as a Peace Corps volunteer, which is why we were out there almost a year ago.
My mom is stationed in a village with no electricity or running water. If you want water, you have to draw it yourself from the water table — at least 5 m below the surface, sometimes more. If you want heat for comfort or cooking, you have to gather wood from en brousse to burn in your fireplace. Drawing water and gathering wood are necessary life-sustaining activities that must be attended to each day.
Think about what it means for us, here in the West, to have solved the heat and water problems. None of us spends time worrying about personally obtaining fuel or water. It’s delegated and forgotten. Pay some money at the end of the month for hot and cold running water.
The original meaning of “draw” (akin to drag) has even atrophied out of our language. Not so in Bore, the language of the region where my mother lives. The words for “draw water” are le nyu, and the words and concept are very much alive.
We have eliminated whole categories of mentally unrewarding physical work from our world. Isn’t that inspiring?
More tomorrow about hewers and drawers (you’ll see the point I originally wanted to make.) No Colby diplomacy update — bummer!
I spent the morning in bed with a cold. We spent the afternoon reorganizing the office at the organization where we volunteer. Moving furniture and toys &c. Very worthwhile if not “productive” in the classic sense.
Excellent entry from Nukevet, whom I’ve never heard of before. He makes my blogroll, not that it’s much of an honor. Link via Misha, whose new site rocks.
Seems like everybody is switching to Movable Type now, except for the unreconstructed individualists.
Should a betting pool be started on when Colby goes to MT? (Real permalinks… can you hear them calling you?)