Shopping Carts in Ravines

Here is a list of weather that occurred during this past year that I do not recall ever having occurred in my lifetime.

• Smog days ran from February to October around Toronto (so yes, that now counts as a type of weather)
• The unprecedented hurricane season counts too, simply due to scale. Toronto flooding counts as well.

But the real freakshow is this winter…

• Temperatures of 10 degrees Celsius in the period of time officially considered to be “the dead of winter”…
• Warm days with strong wind chills…
• Icy cold air that you don’t feel because there’s no wind at all, even in the windiest parts of the city…
• Icy cold air combined with overwhelmingly bright sunshine, to the point that the sun being in your field of vision at all blinds you and starts to give you a headache right away…
• Icy cold days where the sunshine is so warm that it’s intolerable to be outside unless in direct sunlight, in which case it feels warm enough that your skin feels as though it’s tanning/burning…
• Winter thunder/lightning storms…
• Flash (instantly heavy) snowstorms…
• And, outside of my realm of personal experience, are the cold waves hitting the former Soviet states this winter. The gas just got cut off in Georgia, a trend following in the footsteps of our local 2003 mid-summer blackout, and a trend I expect to see continue and accelerate in the future.

“Canada leans right,” “Canada veers right,” every idiot journalist on the planet is calling the ousting of the corrupt Liberal party a shift to the right in Canadian politics.

We have four major political parties.
Three are left-wing.
One is not, and it only got 36% of the 60% voter turnout.
We are very clearly a left-wing country, and the fact that those numbers equate to a right-wing “victory” says nothing about us as a people.
It speaks volumes, however, about how little representative democracy does anything except legitimize a minority oppressing the rest of the country.

The only reason Stephen Harper’s Reform Party, sorry, Canadian Alliance, oh wait, Conservative Party (these hate-based radical religious neoconservative Republican wackos should not be confused with the now-defunct, actually conservative Progressive Conservative Party) was elected was because he hid his right-wing politics, hid his right-wing party members, and because every real (read: non-Sun) newspaper who supported him constantly tried to promote the idea that he was now a moderate - something that fell apart once the television debates were all over and he felt free to drop his PR campaign smile and spew his usual biggotry.

As usual, mainstream media is trying to make it look like what happens amongst the ruling class of a country is in any way connected to what it means to be a normal person in that country. The only connection is that a bunch of average people are routinely fooled into thinking that either of the major parties ever thinks about their constituents’ interests.

Canadians are left-wing, “Canada” - meaning the government - is right-wing. That will always be true, it’s a fundamental element of our society’s class structure.

And I just found a good article relating to this at the Asian Tribune.

My friend just reminded me of something we did in middle school. I think it would be generally healthy for people to do:

Whenever anyone says anything that you recognize as being lifted from or a reference to The Simpsons, punch their arm and say “SIMPSONS!”

Odds are about 50/50 they won’t even realize they were regurgitating TV.

“Possi-blye” may be the most common one, and the one people associate the least with the show. “Boo-urns” is big too.

Apparently, this past week was Slow Down Week.
You might not have known about this… I didn’t until it was mostly over.
I did eliminate the biggest source of demand and stress in my life - my shitty job - that was not only taking up all my free time itself but encroaching on the things I really need to be putting effort into.

The official “week” of this is drawing to a close, but like all Adbusters events, the point isn’t the event, it’s the idea. Keep this in mind year-round, and if you want a specific take-it-easy week, you’ve got 52 to choose from.

(more…)