Random

• Year Zero is fantastic. Go buy it, make sure to note the change in CD colour after playing it. Be sure to check out: http://www.freerebelart.net and scare your friends too.
• Less than two weeks until I go back to the Okanagan. I can't wait. The weather here has been hideous lately, the job market has little for me, drivers are terrible (yet another close call in an intersection on Monday night), apples are obscenely expensive, and people frequently smoke in non-smoking areas.
• I'm reading a fictional book for the first time--anything Star Wars notwithstanding--since I can't remember. It's Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, on the recommendation of one Banana Doodle. Very chilling book about a dystopian future (what is up with all the dystopian future tales these days?) in which women have no rights at all. Best line: "Maybe boredom is erotic, when it is women doing it, for men." Wait, that's the current environment!
• Is bringing up the "global conscience" conference the best way to demonstrate Stephane Dion's leadership credentials? Not really. President by default of a talking head meet-n-schmooze isn't going to inspire Canadians when the overwhelming number of Canadians don't actually pay close attention to these types of conferences. What he needs is a nickname. It worked well for Chretien.
• I read the entire 70+ page US Supreme Court decision yesterday pertaining to the ruling in the so-called "partial birth abortion" legislation that Congress passed in 2003. Very informative reading, yet I am surprised and disappointed at the conclusion that the majority reached based on the information provided by the doctors who had the most experience and knowledge in performing abortions. Justice Ginsberg's dissent was impassioned and powerful, and I tend to agree with her: removing one of the safest methods of performing a second trimester abortion as an option seems to be an interference on the part of the state with a woman's sovereignty over her own body. Not surprisingly, Americans are largely divided along partisan lines, and the reaction is very strong from both camps.
• The playoffs just haven't been as fun to watch this year without Montreal in them.
• I managed to catch a show on PBS' America at the Crossroads series that was hosted and narrated by Richard Perle. Whatever mistakes have been made, America's course is still the right one, and I'm happy to see proponents of America's current grand strategy--the Bush Doctrine--still being given airtime.
• As feared, the murderer at Virginia Tech is increasingly appearing to be, at least partially, motivated by a hatred of women. A loner, a stalker, first victim was a woman, another woman reportedly shot in the eye. This wasn't the sole motivation--though apparently some rag in Britain posted a picture of Emily Hilscher with the headline "Was it an obsession with Emily that drove gunman to kill?" and a first sentence of "This is the face of the teenage student who may have sparked the biggest gun massacre in US history." It turns out that they never were an item, but for whatever reason, this paper was compelled to lay the blame on her as the cause of Cho's madness and violent rampage. Despicable. We obviously know that he was twisted and warped by a number of factors, but the all-too-common theme of misogyny is yet again a player in a man's determination to go on a path of slaughter.