Blog This

My friends have a fear of what they call “being blogged.”

I heard it again the other night, and not for the first time. We were sitting around having a couple of drinks and one of them said, “I want to say something, but I’m not going to because I don’t want to get blogged.”

By me, that is. And I understand their fear. They’ll be talking to me one minute, chatting away about this that and the other, and the next day they see it in quotation marks.

I need to put their minds at ease. There’s certain rules in regards to writing, whether in blog form or the old fashioned way. The first rule is: don’t lie. Don’t make something up out of whole cloth and pretend that somebody said it. You can paraphrase all you want, but never lie.

Second, don’t bother with their names. Even if the thing gets into print, a name isn’t usually necessary.

So my friends can rest easy. I won’t lie about what you say. And if I happen to mention the time you got drunk and slept with five Thai hookers while on a weekend bender, I won’t mention your name, either.

I notice Al Gore managed to make the news this week. He went before Congress and talked about global warming and made himself look like a condescending know-it-all. Again.

Al Gore: “The Earth has a fever.”

Really, Al? A fever you say? Well kindly hand me that super sized bottle of aspirin so we can help bring its temperature down. Have mom make a cold compress to put on its forehead, and fire up the stove so we can make some hearty chicken noodle soup. While you’re at it, would you mind running the kettle so the Earth can dip its feet in warm water? Oh, and put a towel over its head, lest it catches chill. It’s awfully drafty in outer space. Tuck it in before bedtime, wipe its nose, read Where the Wild Things Are, and ask if Al can kiss it all better. Then call it “Earthy,” pinch its cheek, and shut out the light, making sure to tell Neptune and Venus to keep it down, because Earth is trying to sleep.

“The Earth has a fever.” What kind of an arrogant ass goes before Congress (and the TV cameras; let’s not forget why he was there in the first place) and talks to senators as if they are three years old? This man is quoted as saying that global warming is going to be the end of civilization as we know it, and he uses “The Earth has a fever,” to describe this scientific catastrophe.

I would love to hear Al Gore describe other problems using his condescending, talk-down-to-children-tone.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa: “The marble feels dizzy.”

9/11: “The birdies hit your Leggo set.”

Oil spill: “Exxon made a boo-boo.”

Hurricane Katrina: “Someone pulled the Caribbean’s finger.”

Apartment suicide: “Little man fall down, go boom.”

Assault and battery: “The bullies played a mean game of tag.”

Nothing will make this man keep his trap shut, especially after having his butt kissed at the Oscars.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Al Gore. Okay, yes I do. But what bothers me about him is that I have to look out the window at snow and ice, listen to him say that the Earth is getting too hot to bear and that I shouldn’t drive an SUV, then watch him hop a gas guzzling jet plane back to his estate.

Civilization as we know it, Al? What’s this we crap?

It Takes a Blizzard

This piece caught my eye, about the people who braved a blizzard in order to march against global warming. What can you possibly say about that and make them sound remotely intelligent?

Photo by AP

Sean in the Sun

Here's a look at a piece that went into the Toronto Sun.

Places Past

I just got home from five months out in the world. I rolled in at around midnight on a cold Toronto night and I stood at the same back door that I stood at five months earlier, and the old, profound thought went through my head: “Well, that was a long trip.”

I always liked Jimmy Buffett’s deal: “I took off for a weekend last month just to try and recall the whole year.”

I can relate. When you’re on road and sea every day for months at a time it is easy to fall into Jimmy’s next line: “All of the places, all of the faces, wondering where they all disappeared.”

Yes, I have a thing for the song Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes. There’s another line in that song that goes, “Reading departure signs in some big airport reminds me of the places I’ve been. Visions of good times that brought so much pleasure makes me want to go back again.”

Maybe. If you’ve had a really good time you shouldn’t want to go back because it means the police have a warrant out for your arrest. But I get Jimmy’s drift, and every time I’m at an airport, I look at the departures sign and count the places I’ve been to. By now, though, it has gotten easier to count the places I haven’t. There aren’t a lot left. That isn’t to say that I’ve been everywhere, it just means I’ve been everywhere that has an airport.

It’s easy to get blasé about it. Have you heard that Johnny Cash song, I’ve Been Everywhere? It made a comeback on some commercial or other. It’s a foot-tapping tune, and Johnny goes on an on in machinegun style, reeling off all the places he’s been. It sounds like a lot, and it sounds pretty cool, but me and my friends laugh ourselves silly listening to that song.

You’ve been everywhere, have you, Johnny? Oooo! Texas and California. Calgary. Washington? Wow!

Gimme a break. The Man in Black may have been everywhere, but only everywhere that a tour bus can go. After that, nada. And that’s not everywhere.

The sea has always had the mystique of travel about it, and it still does to some degree. Business travellers might think they’ve been everywhere, but catching the redeye to London so you can have a 9AM meeting and be back on the plane after lunch doesn’t mean jack. Me and a girlfriend once took an 11 tour into the Andes. It was a long ass trip to the top of a mountain and the bus was crammed with tourists. At the top of the mountain, we had lunch and the tourists took a few pictures. After an hour of that, we drove 5 hours back down that damn mountain. So basically it was an 11 hour lunch break. I wouldn’t call that an “Andes Adventure” anymore than I would call the redeye flight to London an “English Excursion.”

In the spirit of Johnny Cash, I will now go machinegun-style through the places that I’ve been to in the past five months. I probably should have blogged about them ad nauseum, but the truth is this: I forgot, or I was hungover, or I was working, or I forgot. See, if you’re having a good time someplace, you don’t think about blogging, you think about having the next good time. People that write too much about what they’re doing every day worry me as much as the people in a group picture that say cheese, then ask to look at the LCD screen. It just happened. Move on. The point of photographs is not, “So that’s what I look like at this very moment.” Their point is, “So that’s how bad my hair was five years ago.” With writing, same thing. You need to digest an experience before blathering on about it.

Anyway, an homage to Johnny:

I’ve been to Tokyo, Hiroshima, Dalian, Tianjin, Great Wall, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hanoi (Hong Gai for the Commies), Hue (same), Saigon (Ho Chi Minh is a sonofabitch), Laem Chabang, Singapore, Bali, Komoldo Island, Darwin, Cairns, Hamilton (Australia; not steeltown Canada), Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania (no devils, they killed them all a long time ago), Dunedin, Christchurch, Picton, Wellington, Napier, Tauranga, Auckland, Bay of Islands, Rarotonga, Bora Bora, Moorea, Papeete, Rangiroa, Nuku Hiva, Los Angeles, San Diego, Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, Ft. Lauderdale, Princess Cays, San Juan, Dominica, Barbados, Devil’s Island, Alter do Chao, Parintins, Manaus, Boca de Valeria, Santarem, Fortaleza, Salvador de Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Punta del Este, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Cape Horn, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, Valparaiso, Fuerte Amador, Lima, Panama Canal, Key West.

And back to Canada. Right about now someone is calling me an asshole, which is why I don’t talk about vacations with people. When I go to a party, I have to be extremely careful not to yawn when some couple tells me that they’re taking a honeymoon to Hawaii or Tahiti. To me and my friends, that is no different than saying, “I’m stepping out for some milk.”

I often have to remind myself that I am lucky. Most men will never see the Great Wall of China, and not many women will take photographs of where the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy. Before I started travelling, Australia seemed like the moon. Now it doesn’t. The more you travel, the smaller the world gets.

That isn’t to say that I really know all of the places I’ve been to. I mean know them in my bones. You need to live in a place for a while to truly know it. I’ve done that in several places, but most of the others have been a sampling, a taste. But it was a damn good lick, I can tell you that.

Besides, it isn’t really about the places. Let’s say some guy comes up with a project for me that involves the geography of Alaska. Now let’s say that all of my Alaska footage has gone down the toilet or been lost by the idiots at Air France. No problem. I’ll pull out my stock footage from Chile, or Norway, or New Zealand, cut it together with some dumb classical music, and give it to you as an Alaskan souvenir. And you’d never know the difference.

Need a picture of northern Ontario? I’m here to help. I’ll give you some shots of the Canadian wilderness, beaver dams and all. You’ll show your friends, you’ll be happy, and you’ll have not the slightest idea that all of those pictures were taken at a national park in Argentina.

Do you want to go to New Zealand? It’s easy. Take a half hour drive up the coast from Vancouver. Pitch a tent. Stay there for a week and take a bunch of pictures. When you get home, enlarge the prints, put them on your wall, and label them ‘New Zealand.’ Anyone from Auckland that sees the photos will say, “Isn’t my home the most beautiful place?”

The world is funny that way. I mean the way it mirrors itself, not the way everyone thinks their home is the most beautiful place (that’s another thing about travelling; you get pretty tired of hearing ‘this is the most beautiful country in the world.’)

For the Earth, north is south and south is north. The geography is a mirror image, like when you were a kid and stood to the side of mirror. Lift your left leg and ta-da, the right leg goes up too, making it appear as if you’re floating.

Tahiti is Hawaii, Southern Chile is Canada, Norway is New Zealand, the Andes are the Rockies….oops.

No they’re not. Say whatever you want about the Andes, they don’t hold a candle to the Rocky Mountains. On that I can assure you. The Alps might. I’ve never seen them, so I can’t say. However, the Alps are crawling with Germans, Italians, and Swiss, so who the hell would want to find out?

See, it’s about the people. People are what make travelling interesting. A photo of Hawaii might look like a photo of Tahiti, and you’d get away with that charade for a while. But then I’d ask you about the transvestites, and your eyes would go blank. Because in Tahiti, being a transvestite is no big deal. There’s tons of them there. I once asked a Papeete local how to tell which women were actually men. He said, “The good looking ones.”

He was right. Tahiti has a load of good looking women. All of them are the height of runway models. They have amazing cheekbones, great tits, and legs to die for. Problem is, the lazy ones also have a patch of dark hair on the small of their back.

I have often said that it is not where you are, it is who you are with. I stand by that. If I am with my buddies Dave and Pete in some craphole, I will have a great time. If I am at the best nightclub in Berlin with some loser who complains all the time, I will hate life. This is why I despise going out with a group of people that cannot make up their minds on where they want to go. You’d figure they’d have learned it by now: if you’re truly friends, then it truly doesn’t matter. If the location matters so much, I have bad news for you: you aren’t friends.

This ties in with another Coyote Law. If someone tells me, “Ah, that town sucks. Nothing to do,” then I know I am in for the night of my life. This happens at least 9 times out of 10. No different than the people that say, “It’s a Tuesday [or Wednedsay, or Monday, or Sunday] and there’s nothing going on.”

Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated bullshit. The words, “This place sucks,” or “There’s nothing going on,” are reserved for the losers of society. These statements are tailor-made for the guys that think backyards and BBQs are the meaning of life, or for the broads that don’t want their boyfriends to drink too much at a wedding reception.

If travelling is about people, then travelling has taught me that people are the same the world over. There’s a segment of every society that wants to have fun, and there’s a segment of every society that doesn’t know how.

Case in point: Lima, Peru last month. Sunday night. I was working, so I couldn’t hit the city until close to midnight. Before heading out, all of the people I knew told me, “Nothing’s going on, this place sucks.” I’m instantly looking forward to a blow out. One of the locals told me, “It’s a Sunday, so nothing’s happening.” Now I’m licking my chops with delight. And guess what? It was a blast.

In life, in the world, there is always something going on. In every city with a population over a few thousand, there’s always a few dozen people that want to do something. It is up to you to go out and find them.

It’s nice to be back in Canada. This is the time where I hang up my shoes and barely see the light of day. Doing nothing for a couple of weeks is a great form of therapy. Call it decompression, like coming up from a dive before you get the bends.

Problem is, I can’t get it out of my head: all of the faces, all of the places, wondering when they’ll all appear. Not the old faces, but the new ones. The old ones I miss, and I pine for, but that is my private affair. But the new ones belong to all of us. The ones I haven’t met yet. The people that make my life (and yours, should you bump into them) more interesting.

What's In My Name?

I've heard that to rouse a slumbering person from across a room, you simply have to whisper their name a few times. I tried it on a sleeping girlfriend, she woke up, and I told her that I was conducting an experiment. She was pissed, but she proved the point.

The point of that article, and another one I read about names, is that our name is the most beautiful sound we will ever hear. Apparently all of us are narcissists.

I was leafing through one of those 'How to Win Friends'-type books, and it told me to say a person's name as often as I could when talking to them. As in, "That's a great idea, Bob." Or, "I'll tell you something, Sid..." Or, "You have fantastic breasts, Janet."

I don't know how scientific all this is, but it would seem to make sense. Hearing our name means someone is listening to us and might even be paying attention to what we're saying. As long as the person saying your name isn't your wife banging on the motel room door, it's probably a good thing.

If you have a good name.

My name is not good. Not because I don't like the name 'Sean,' which is said to be an Irish version of John, but because no two people seem to say it the same way. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but after three decades on the planet, it gets a bit old.

When I was a kid, I had no problem with the idea that S-E-A-N was pronounced 'Sh-awn.' The kindergarten teacher didn't tell me that I was spelling it wrong when I signed my fingerpaintings, so it never entered my head that there was anything wrong with my name.

It was in third grade that funny things started happening. My mom or my dad bought me one of those iron-on shirts, the ones where people would put their names on the back in case they forgot who the shirt belonged to when they pulled it out of the drawer. On the back of that shirt was written SEAN. So it was my shirt with my name. I can't remember what was on the front, but it was probably an iron-on Twisted Sister logo or something.

Anyway, I put on that shirt and went to school. All day long people called me 'Seen,' as in, "I have seen the light." I had no idea why they were calling me this, until I realized that they were ripping on my name. Since that day, I have probably been called 'Seen' about 5, 342 times.

It isn't always the smart-asses that call me Seen. People from east of the Rhine and into Asia also call me Seen, because they think that's how it's pronounced. Filipinos especially have a tough time with it. They see my name on a Hello My Name Is tag or on a piece of paper, and they say, "Hello, Seen." They're just trying to be friendly, and I smile and nod all the same, but in reality I want to punch them in the face.

Non-English speaking people always screw up my name. To the Chinese, I am "See-Awn" or "See-Ann." To the Japanese, I am "Sen." The Greeks and Indians make me feel like I'm back in third grade, because they call me "Seen." To some some idiot from the Czech Republic, I was "Soon." How the hell he got Soon out of S-E-A-N, I have no idea.

It isn't just the foreigners, either. My name is extremely vulnerable to accents, unlike say, Ken. Pretty hard to screw up Ken. A Ken by any accent is still a Ken. But not Sean.

To the English and South Africans, I am 'Shown.' To someone from the deep South, I am still Sh-awn, but with a bizarre twist on the last syllable. The fact that my name doesn't have more than one syllable doesn't matter. They put one in anyway.

Sean is a bummer name on two counts: people can't say it, and people constantly need to be told how to spell it.

Here's a typical phone call when I'm calling an airline or a hotel desk (granted, these are not Mensa candidates).

"Yes, I have a few questions."
"What's your name?"
"Sean."
"John?"
"Sean, S-E-A-N."
"S...Sean?"
"Yes, Sean. Like 'Sean Connery.'"
"Oh, Sean Connery! Right!"
"Yeah. I just wish I had his money."
"Ha-ha-ha."

Mine is one of those names that you say and spell in the same breath. I learned long ago not to wait for someone to ask how it's spelled, because they always ask how it's spelled. So if I am talking to someone for the first time, my name is always, "Sean-S-E-A-N." I knew a girl whose last name was Grey. She told me that she had the same problem, and that her name was always "Grey-with-an-E."

I only use the same-breath-spelling-routine when I know I will have to see the person again in the future. If not, I use "Steve." This is very useful at a fast food restaurant, or a Starbucks, where they have taken to asking your name and writing it on your cup. Rather than go through the "Sean...Not John, Sean...Like 'Sean Connery'..." stuff, I just say Steve and save myself thirty seconds.

Poor Sean Connery. I have had to use his handle so many times, I should be paying him residuals. His name comes in especially handy when dealing with foreigners. They struggle over my name, trying to pronounce it five ways from Sunday, until I say, "Sean Connery."

Their faces immediately light up with recognition. They say "Sean Connery! James Bond!" And we have a great big laugh as I dream about them drowning in the Danube. I wonder what Sean Connery does when he calls a hotel to make a reservation. "Sean. As in Sean Connery. As in me, you damn fool."

"Sean" causes trouble around St. Patrick's Day, too. Suddenly everyone thinks I know the history of St. Patrick's Day, and they take for granted that I'll wear an Ireland soccer shirt and drink green beer until I turn green and puke same.

Not true. I have been to Ireland once. I played golf, and I liked it. But I do not know any Irish folk songs, nor do I enjoy drinking green beer. Unlike the Irish, I enjoy Budweiser as much as I enjoy Guinness. Makes no difference to me, either what beer I drink, or what color it comes back up in.

My family came to Canada sometime in the 1700's, and as far as I'm concerned, that makes me Canadian. If a person's grandparents were born in Canada or the States, then that grandchild has no right to call themselves Italian, or Irish, or German, or whatever. Done deal. The so-called "Irish" people in Boston are full of crap, likewise the "Italians" in New York City. You're American. If you can't give me directions from Genoa to Rome without consulting a map, then you aren't Italian. Get over it.

So this is me, Sean the Canadian. A Sean by any other name is still a Sean. Unless he's a Soon. Or a See-Awn. Or a whatever the hell.

Pleased to meet you.

Getting On

"Seventeen months after Katrina, nearly 200 people uprooted by a hurricane still live in Mt. Olive Gardens, whole families packed into 200 square-foot FEMA trailers they now call home....There were 5,596 words in the President’s speech last night, and reaction to the fact that not a single one was either Katrina or Louisiana was felt not only here in tiny Mt. Olive Gardens, but all across the Gulf.... Words like ‘relief’ and ‘recovery’ now seem as empty to them as last night’s presidential address."

— CBS’s investigative reporter Armen Keteyian, January 24 newscast.

I was taking a turn around the internet horn this morning when I found this quotation on Brent Bozell's site. I guess Keteyian wanted to tug at the heartstrings with this piece, and it could have worked, had he not mentioned that it's been 17 months since Katrina.

17 months?

I may be a hardhearted SOB when it comes to some things, but I am not hardhearted at all when it comes to people that have lost everything. I feel for people like that, and I want them to do well. I don't like hearing about people that lose their house to a fire, or their lifesavings to some corrupt Wall Street scumbag.

But 17 months? That is a hell of a long time. I can't remember where I was 17 months ago (eighteen, now; that news report was filed in January), but I know that I worked for a different company. Last year -- for a couple of different reasons -- I decided to move on and get another job. So I quit the one company, looked around for a couple of weeks, and latched on to something else.

I am not trying to compare my professional life with a family that has lost everything. However, the line that struck me most in the piece above was this one (emphasis mine):

"Nearly 200 people uprooted by a hurricane still live in Mt. Olive Gardens, whole families packed into 200 square-foot FEMA trailers they now call home..."

I hope that is just the reporter laying it on a bit thick. If the heads of these families are seriously calling a FEMA trailer home, then these families are in serious trouble.

The idea of the hardworking family man is not what it used to be. Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath had images of men hunkered down in the dust, worrying about their families ('figuring,' Steinbeck called it), and struggling to find a way to put food on the table. They'd pick oranges for next to nothing, and they'd drive thousands of miles in old jalopies to find work.

Work is all they wanted, however they could get it. They weren't too proud to do anything that would help their children, and they didn't apply to anybody for an assistance program. Assistance programs didn't exist anyway, so they had to roll up their sleeves and get things done themselves, as best they could.

That doesn't seem to be the case today. I didn't see the CBS broadcast, but I will bet millions that Keteyian didn't ask any of these family's adults, "Have you thought of just striking out on you own and not asking for another year's worth of 'relief?'"

Doesn't seem a proper question, nowadays. But honestly, 17 months of sitting in a FEMA trailer is not exactly a portrait by Norman Rockwell. Besides, what is more relief going to bring? It is not going to rewind the clock and make Katrina die in the Gulf without ever reaching the shore. The very definition of relief is that it is temporary. Immediate pain is done away with, so that you can get on with your life. So relief for the victims of Katrina is not the problem. It's the 'getting on' that's in short supply.

I have no right to tell these people what to do, and they would be completely within theirs if they told me where to go. But people must learn to carry on with their lives if they expect to have a life worth living. Starting over is tough, and leaving behind fond memories can be a killer. One shouldn't compound it by reliving the worst memories over and over again every time they fill out another piece of government paper (in triplicate, no doubt).

The one thing that will make bad times disappear is to get your ass in gear. Keeping busy and looking for something new will cure almost every ill that can affect the soul. Sitting and waiting is not the answer to any problem. The longer you wait, the closer it is to the time you are forgotten.

Once you're forgotten, you've only got yourself. Oddly enough, this is what you had in the first place. So you might as well get on with getting on. The sooner the better.

Courtesy Flush, Please

Oops. My mistake. I didn't do enough research into the whole 'in case you need to pray while taking a dump' thing.

Check out the link above (click the title) and you'll see that the Brits are also worried about their number 1's and 2's. Apparently you have to face Mecca while sitting on the john. Makes sense. To steal from Britain's own Monty Python, I suppose you would have to face Mecca while on the can, lest you fart in its general direction.

If one sentence can sum up how ludicrous this stuff is getting, it must be the following one from Fox News, talking about Ibrahim Ramey, director of human and civil rights work from the Muslim America Society:

"Ramey said he was unaware of any specific complaints regarding the direction of toilets in U.S. prisons."

Roses All the Way

I went out for a night on the town in Buenos Aires and got a look at what the city has to offer these days. I haven't tooled around in Buenos Aires in a couple of years and it's good to see that things haven't changed much.

The booze is still relatively cheap, the ladies look fine, and the locals are as gregarious as ever. As one buddy of mine said, "People here just seem to age well." He's right. There aren't that many old-looking people in Buenos Aires. I'm not sure if that's because the plastic surgeons are working overtime, or if people just die a hell of lot earlier around here, but my friend has a point. People dress well, eat well, and look well in these parts, and the obesity rate is to be envied because you can't find any fat people.

I did, however, run into a couple of little girls at 3AM. One of them was trying to sell a crummy looking rose, and the other was trying to sell a crummy looking arts and crafts project. I don't know what the thing was, but the kid seemed to think that I would want it if she said "Por favor," fifteen times in twenty seconds.

Those two kids got me thinking about where their parents might be. It's not often that you find two eight-year-olds hawking stuff at three in the morning. I took it for granted that these children are probably on that same street corner every night, because they knew the nightclub bouncer's name, and he didn't try to shoo them away unless they were being a pain in the ass to the customers trying to get in the club.

After asking me a hundred times if I wanted to buy their stuff, they sat down on a bench in front of the bar. It was mildly depressing to see that they were actually about fifty years old. Ten seconds before, they'd been plying me with the cute faces and the sing-song voices. As soon as they sat on the bench to take a load off, they looked like any construction workers during a lunch break: tired, bitching about a long night, shaking their heads and muttering to each other. Through their body language, I could almost translate the conversation:

"Cheap gringo won't buy a damn rose," says one.
"Roses don't sell anymore," says the other.
"Better than that cardboard crap you've got."
"Cut me some slack, it's all I could find."
"You think that lady's got money?"
"With those shoes? No way. Let's keep working the drunks that come out of the club. They always have spare change."
"All right, but gimme a minute, my feet are killing me."

They didn't look poor. They had well-combed hair and they looked as if they'd had three squares that day. Yet here they were, life's little lost ones. Their eyes darted from tourist to tourist and drunk to drunk, looking for a sucker or someone that wasn't paying enough attention to their wallet. They knew more about the street than I ever would, and they weren't old enough to enter high school.

And that's the way it's going to go for them. Roses, to heroin, to jail, to infection, to death in no time at all, and we'll still be going to the clubs and telling the next generation that we don't want their crummy flowers.

Headlines

From Breitbart.com:

Muslim chief slams 'police state' Britain, like Nazi Germany

Speaking outside the mosque shortly before the prayer session began, [Mohammad Naseem, chairman of Birmingham's Central Mosque] compared the current situation, and anti-terrorism legislation introduced in Britain in recent years, to Nazi Germany.

"The German people were told the Jews were a threat. The same thing is happening here. The Muslims are now the bogey people," he said. "It's a small community. It's easy to pick on them. That's what's being done."

A chairman of a mosque hiding behind the Jews. Interesting. I'll bet he doesn't have much to say when Ahmandinejad says Israel should be wiped off the map and all Jews should be exported to Europe.

As for what Naseem says about Muslims now being Jews in a Nazified Great Britain. Um, no.

I read a very good book last week by Richard J. Evans called The Third Reich in Power. It's the second in Evans' trilogy about the Reich, and it's the best book written about the Nazis since Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's chock full of info that nobody mentions anymore, and it shows just how evil the Nazis were, should we care to remember it.

Great Britain's anti-terror laws are not comparable to Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews. Nobody's laws are, except Sharia Law itself, and the call to jihad for global domination and the destruction of the infidel.

Here's a small sample from Evans regarding Nazi Germany's laws vis a vis their own perceived infidels:

- people with two Jewish grandparents had to get permission from the Committee for the Protection of the German Blood if they wanted to marry a non-Jew.

- Jews were not citizens, but rather subjects of the state. They had no rights, including the right to free speech.

- the Law of 7 April 1933 banned Jews from the civil service, universities, teaching professions, and the judiciary.

- in 1935, a law was passed that declared Jewish and non-Aryan foreigners could not receive German citizenship.

- Jewish businesses were not allowed to advertise in the press from 1933 onwards.

- by the end of 1936, laws were passed that banned overseas transfers of Jewish-owned funds.

- Jews were banned from sports fields, public baths, and outdoor swimming pools.

- municipalities were authorized to ban Jews from streets and districts.

- Jews were banned from carrying firearms and offensive weapons.

- The Reich Chamber of Culture banned all Jews from cinemas, theaters, concerts, and exhibitions.

- Jews were stripped of their rights as tenants. They could now be evicted at any time.

- Municipalities could order Jews to sublet parts of their houses to other Jews.

- by 1939, all tax concessions were removed from Jews, including child benefits. Jews were now taxed at a single rate, the highest one in the Reich.

- all insurance payments owed to Jews after the 1938 pogrom were confiscated by the government; Jews had to pay for and clean up the mess left by the rioting.

- on February 21, 1939, all Jewish cash, securities and valuables (except wedding rings) were ordered to be put in blocked accounts; the Reich eventually seized these accounts.

And then, once the war started, the Nazis murdered millions of them. Great Britain like Nazi Germany? I think not.

From the Daily Mail (UK):

Global Warming Sees Polar Bears Stranded On Melting Ice

They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.

Captured on film by Canadian environmentalists, the pair of polar bears look stranded on chunks of broken ice.

Although the magnificent creatures are well adapted to the water, and can swim scores of miles to solid land, the distance is getting ever greater as the Arctic ice diminishes.

"Swimming 100 miles is not a big deal for a polar bear, especially a fat one," said Dr Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service.

"They just kind of float along and kick. But as the ice gets farther out from shore because of warming, it’s a longer swim that costs more energy and makes them more vulnerable."

Bummer.

I don't know what to say about this global warming thing anymore. In the 70's it was global cooling. In the 80's it was warming. Then in the 90's it became 'climate change,' which was a great turn of phrase for the enviro-boobs and unemployed people that wanted to yell at lumberjacks. With the words 'climate change,' bitching about mankind's sins became an all-season sport, snow or shine, blizzard or heatwave.

I studied anthropology in school. That's what the degree says on my wall, anyway (both the degree and the wall are made from tree products. Apologies all around). During those classes we had to look back at history and count the number of ice ages and such. The theory then was that there were three big ones and a bunch of smaller ones.

Not so long ago, Toronto was under a mile of ice and the Great Lakes didn't exist. The ice had to recede in order to leave those puddles behind. So I guess one would have to say that global warming is a damn good thing. Without it, there would be no shopping on Yonge Street, and there would be no forests for the enviro-weenies to run around in.

The conceit of human beings is astounding. The idea that we parasites could affect this planet in any major way is a laugh. It's also a great chuckle watching the National Geographic specials and hearing the narrator give the Obligatory Guilt Trip. At the end of every episode, they always manage to say that such-and-such a thing will cease to exist if Man doesn't change his evil ways. Why? Because the ecosystem is fragile.

Fragile?

Tell that to the people in central Florida. A fragile tornado dropped out of the sky the other day and obliterated a town, killing 20 people in the time it takes to make toast.

Katrina, she didn't look too fragile, did she? We stewards of the Earth gaped in slack-jawed wonder at her power, cowered beneath concrete, and watched as she kicked over levees as if they were anthills.

Or the tsunami (Random Aside: can someone tell me where tidal wave went?) That surfer's wetdream wiped out thousands of people and destroyed entire villages and towns in less than ten minutes.

We're supposed to protect the environment from us? Please. More like the other way around. We're nothing on this spinning globe. Anytime it feels like it, it can give one big belch and we're history.

The Earth is not fragile, and to refute the article above, neither is a bear's grip. Timothy Treadwell could tell us that, were he still around. He's the guy who took his girlfriend up north to live with his furry friends. Treadwell's method of approaching bears was to slowly slink up to them while singing "I love you" in a high-pitched voice. He and his girlfriend are now bear shit.

Our conceit is limitless. The Earth has been through ice ages, massive earthquakes, hurricanes, innumerable volcanoes spitting sulphur into the sky, catastrophic meteorite impacts, so forth. But hairspray and unleaded gas will be the planet's demise?

Ours, maybe. But the Earth doesn't give a damn about us. Ask the next skydiver whose chute doesn't open how fragile the Earth is, and how much it cares. You'll get two four letter words in response. The first is shit!, the other is thud.

From the Herald Sun (Australia):

Row Over Washrooms

A ROW has erupted over Muslim-only washrooms at La Trobe University that can be accessed only with a secret push-button code.

Muslim students have exclusive access to male and female washrooms on campus, sparking claims of bias and discrimination. The university and Islamic leaders have defended the washrooms as vital to Muslim students' prayer rituals.

Yes, if you like to pray while taking a dump, I suppose.

There is no doubt in my mind these days that Islamic fascists were wildly successful on 9/11. Lenin once said that the purpose of terrorism is terror. That's true, but it runs deeper than that. There was a Palestinian terrorist who said that before terrorism and plane hijackings became the norm, the Palestinian cause got nowhere. Once they started shooting people and blowing things up, the UN listened and they got their concessions.

The above example adds weight to the insipid idea that terrorism works. It puts a people's cause on the front page, and we weaklings bend before it.

Think back to before 9/11. You didn't see Islam in the news every day. I bet you didn't once think about 'people of cover.' You wouldn't have known about Ramadan as a religious holiday, and there's no chance you contemplated giving Muslims separate bathrooms at universities.

Then 9/11 happened. For the first few months, the story was about us, and the pain we suffered. But slowly and surely, the headlines changed. Now the story is about what we can do for them, and how we are a discriminatory people that must make allowances for people that want nothing to do with our culture and our way of life.

And with each concession, the divide deepens. When strung together in the past, separate washroom were two vile words. Now they are 'vital.'

Welcome to the new world order.

Walk Like A Man

I bought a new pair of shoes yesterday.

That shouldn't be news, but it is for me. I've always had a problem getting over to the shoe store and making a purchase. Like most real men, I only own a few pairs of shoes. A black pair for the suit, a running pair for the street, and a pair of sandals for everything else. I have never owned a brown pair of shoes in my life, not because I don't like the color brown, but because I don't have a brown belt to go with them. As for Oxblood, the name alone turns me off, and besides, red shoes are for Judy Garland.

My shoe-buying process goes something like this:

1) a girl tells me that women will only go out with men that have good shoes. This is their friendly way of saying that my shoes are either out of style, or look ragged enough to have participated in the Bataan Death March.

2) A few weeks go by, and I don't go to the shoe store. Eventually, one of the soles comes apart. (This happened with my most recent pair. I sat down on my haunches to pick something up, and SNAP, one of the soles broke in half).

3) I flop around on the broken sole for a couple of days, always meaning to go to the shoe store, but never getting around to it.

4) I go to the mall to pick something up. I walk by a couple of shoe stores, and the thought crosses my mind to go in. Then I don't.

5) I go to the mall again, and really want to buy a pair, but can't because I'm wearing sandals and, of course, I have no socks.

6) Finally, on a whim while picking up the new issue of Maxim, I stroll into the shoe store and buy one of the first pairs I see.

But not this time.

After the sole snapped, a lot of my friends complained that I needed a new pair of wheels. Let it be said here that I have big feet. Size twelve or thirteen, depending on the brand. Most of the people I know call my feet 'boats,' and whenever I retort with "You know what they say about a guy with big feet?", I usually get a response of, "Big mouth."

Anyway, I was at the mall in Rio and I thought, "Hell with it, I am going to buy a new pair of shoes." I had just come from the beach and I was wearing sandals, but I didn't care. I was going to walk in there and buy the best damn shoes they had. My last pair were Hush Puppies, and all the chicks said they made me look like a clown (because my feet are big, not because the Puppies were red). So I was going to wow them with my sense of style.

I don't speak Portuguese, but it didn't matter. I walked into the shoe store and sure enough, there was a guy there who understood what I meant when I pointed at a pair of shoes, then held up twelve fingers. He looked at my bathing suit, then my bare feet, and shrugged, motioning me to sit down.

Ten minutes later, he came out with four boxes. A real salesman. I guess he thought he was going to take the dumb Yankee for a ride. He handed me a pair of socks and told me to try the shoes on (this sock thing is pretty cool; I mentioned it to a friend later and asked her how long they had been lending people socks in case you wanted to try on shoes while wearing a bathing suit; she looked at me like I was a complete idiot).

I tried the shoes out. Pointy ones, square-toes ones, slip-on ones, and tie-up ones. It didn't matter much, because they were all too big. The guy had screwed up the conversion. He muttered that I was a size 43. (This was a tremendous ego boost. "You know what they say about a guy with REALLY big feet?") Then he disappeared and came back with four more boxes.

I tried them all on. They looked pretty good to me. I have absolutely no idea what good shoes are supposed to look like, so as long as they are black and don't seem too 'clownish,' they're all right with me. I stood in front of the mirror and checked them out, then glanced through the window and into the mall hallway. Every hot Brazilian chick that walked by was looking at me as if I were indeed a clown. It wasn't the shoes that made them smirk. It was me examining myself in a mirror in a pair of beige socks, black shoes, white hairy legs, and a bathing suit. No one can commit social suicide quite as well as I can.

I liked one pair. They weren't as pointy as the Italian elf shoes that are ready-made for nose picking, but neither were they bulbous enough to get me a job with the Ringling Brothers.

I bought them. They weren't too pricey, but they were pricey enough. I even bought a new belt to go with them. Don Juan on the way.

Later that night I went to a party and listened to Samba music and danced like a fool. I got a lot of good comments about my shoes. One girlfriend said she was 'proud of me.' Man, those Hush Puppies really must have been crap.

It was a great night. My shoes were a hit and made me feel ten feet tall. They fit perfectly and felt as if I wasn't even wearing them. They made me feel so good that when a friend and I left the bar and walked down to Copacabana Beach, I hardly noticed when the Atlantic Ocean gave them a free bath.

Shit.

Work

All right, so it's been a while since the Coyote sat his ass down and howled for a while. Usually I have a lot to say, as any of my friends (and various enemies) can attest. So why has it taken so long to write another blog and hopefully entertain people with rants on any subject under the sun?

Work.

I love my job. The only reason I don't talk about it much is because I don't want strangers reading about what I do for a living. Don't get excited. I'm not a pimp or a gunrunner, nor am I a spy for the CIA. Fact is, you've got to be very careful with blogs. Telling the world all about your family and your workplace might seem like a good idea at the time, until some idiot decides to screw you over for whatever it is you've said. Bitching about your boss or calling your mom a nag is not a good idea on the biggest party line in the universe.

Anyway, work's been taking up a lot of my time. I don't really look at it as work, because I like what I do and I get a lot perks out of it. For example, today I met a pretty cool guy who sings Latin love songs to make ends meet. After that, I went and chilled out with two young ladies who were soaking up the Brazilian sun with as much gusto as their oiled bodies could muster. Which is to say, not much.

I've never been a big fan of tanning. I find it a bore. Women covet it, but I can't understand why they use the word 'tanning' as a verb. "We're going tanning." That implies that they are going to do something. They aren't. They are going to lie down as if they've been shot by a Colt .45, and they are going to do it to the sweet sounds of Shakira coming out of their iPods.

Today's tanning episode got me thinking about work. You see, these two chicks are showgirls. That's their job. They're great friends and I love them to death. So as they were lying there, they asked me if I'd mind moving their chairs (whilst they were still lying on them) so that they could get a better angle from the sun. As women do, they had unstrapped their bikini tops and were lying on their stomachs. It was much easier for them to ask me to move the chairs, rather than tie the tops, get up, move the chairs, lie back down, and untie the tops again. So the thought crossed my mind to do it.

Then I saw something. Over their oiled, tanned, gorgeous kick-line butts, I saw a man painting a light fixture. He was sweating his balls off in the afternoon sun, paint chips all around him, the stink of varsol and epoxy in his nostrils.

I told the girls to stick it.

Point is, work is a pain in the ass for most people. I'm not one of them, and I'm lucky. The two showgirls, same thing. But most people don't enjoy what they do. I listen to people bitch about work all the time. If they aren't bitching about what goes on at work, then they bitch about the drive to work, the weather on the drive to work, the damn kids who need to be picked up after work, the good-for-nothing coffee machine that is broken in the break room, so forth. I know waiters that put in 12 hours a day for lousy tips, and I know financial advisors that want to murder the chairman of the Fed. In fact, now that I think of it, I hear a lot more bad things about work than I do good things. I bet you do, too.

It's hard to nail down what jobs are good and what jobs are bad. I hate bugs, but I once met a guy who was absolutely ecstatic about being a public health inspector. I mean, he loved it. He told me all kinds of things about cockroaches. He admired them. He told me that they are very smart and quite crafty. "Take the soda gun," he said. "People always forget to check there. I can go into a restaurant and not find one thing to gripe about. Then I take the top off the soda gun and look down the hose. Bingo. Eggs galore. Yeah, they like their sugar."

He smiled when he said that. I wanted to barf. He told me I wouldn't get hurt by roach eggs, but if it really bothered me I could just order soda in a can. Thanks.

Travelling through South America has given me a ton of choice Coyote Law #1 examples. Watching these guys build houses is as frightening as any horror movie. Nails and glass everywhere, lumber falling from the heavens, and these guys are all in bare feet. For head gear, they wear a sweat-soaked bandana or a dirty Yankees cap. (Random aside: the marketing guy for the Yankees is doing a hell of a good job; Yankees caps have dominated the entire planet, take it from me). Yet the builders look happy. Hot and tired and moving at an incredibly slow pace, but happy. And why not? In poor places, what are you going to bitch about? When you don't have something, it's hard to complain about it when it's broken.

That's the paradox of our culture. There was a dumb bumper sticker making the rounds a few years back that said, "He who dies with the most toys wins." Okay, but you have to work to get those toys. You've got to drink lousy coffee during meetings, and you have to take static from a fat blowhard that stinks of onion every time he passes by your desk. When you open up the box on the new DVD player, washer/dryer, microwave, or high-def television, you might feel like a kingpin, but you're merely forgetting the fact that you had to scrape ice off your windshield 72 times in order to buy the thing.

Work is a bitch because it's supposed to be a bitch. I complain as much as the next guy and immediately forget my own platitudes when someone pisses me off about some project or other. But then the check comes, and suddenly the angels sing from the heavens. I buy a round of drinks for the ladies, and I purchase a brand new something-or-other. Then it's back to work.

When I was a kid, I remember hearing all about how we wouldn't have to work when I was older. We'd have a ton of free time, because robots would be doing things for us, and we'd be able to fly our helicopters to the Hamptons whenever we wanted.

They lied to me, the bastards. Technology hasn't set us free from anything, because new laptops and kick-ass TVs cost money, and in order to get money, you have to do something for somebody. That's what work is, in case you've forgotten: doing something for somebody else. Unfortunately, people work harder when you pay them for it, which is why a deck built by a pro is level, and the one built by your cousin Todd is a piece of crap. I wish my job came with a billion dollar paycheck like the movie stars get, but it just ain't gonna happen. What most people do for a living doesn't have as big a price tag as what the movie star does. For some reason, millions of people want to watch Julia Roberts cry, but they don't want to see a guy shovel dirt. Strange.

So yes, work has taken up a lot of my time lately. But as said, I can't bitch. At least, not right now. But give me five minutes, and I'm sure I can think of something...

Heat

Sitting around in Costa Rica gives you a chance to unwind, relax, and sip Pina Coladas while watching the world go by. It also gives you a chance to sweat.

Heat is a funny thing. Like water, human beings love it. We flock to it when winter comes, can't wait to strip down and bathe in it over Christmas break, long to lie in it until we are crispy brown or lobster pink. Sun and surf are all that comes to mind when daydreaming behind the snow shovel.

It's a relatively new phenomenon, this love of heat. For one thing, vacations are a fairly recent concept. Nobody got a vacation until the last century, and even if they did, there was no way to get to St. Bart's and back within a week. Ships helped, but still took too long. Then airplanes arrived, but they were too expensive.

Nowadays, it's amazing how blase we are about the ability to leave a cold February in Toronto on a Thursday night, hit the beach in Barbados on Friday morning, then be back in the office by Monday at nine. Sixty years ago, that would have been an HG Wells fairy tale. Thanks to expedia.com and their ilk, you now hear it all the time from the dude in the next cubicle.

I have spent years in the world's hot spots and amongst the tourists they attract. Tourists are a funny bunch. Anyone that tells you they travel in order to learn about 'culture' are full of baloney. After sailing, flying, and hitchhiking around various parts of the earth, I have come to the firm conclusion that nobody wants to learn anything about anybody. At least, not anybody that is alive. People might fly to Italy, but they don't do it so they can rent an apartment in some Palermo craphole and learn the culture of getting mugged. No, they fly to Italy to check into a hotel, look at David's genitals, take a stroll around the Colosseum, then have a pizza at an 'authentic' restaurant.

Let's dissect that for a moment. First, David's privates aren't as big as they look on the postcards, though he's doing all right. But that's isn't the point. The point is, his balls are old. There may be a few dames out there that fly to Italy to look at real Italian balls, but for the most part, tourists want to look at things that were built by dead people. Living people don't interest them in the least.

Take the Colosseum. There's all kinds of modern buildings standing around in Italy, but everyone wants to go to some old joint where people were butchered by the thousands. Invariably the tourists can be heard to say something like, "It's smaller than it was in Gladiator." I shudder at the thought that one day, Auschwitz might attract people with cameras dangling from their necks and zinc oxide plastered to their noses. When you get down to it, what is the difference between the two, besides the fact that one's in Poland and the other's in Rome?

As for the pizza, don't believe the hype. I have eaten about 20 pizzas in Italy. They all sucked. I'm sorry, but it's true. Every single travelling friend of mine tells me that they love 'real Italian pizza.' I was on a two month tour there once, and if I heard the words, 'real Italian pizza' one more time, I was going to butcher someone in the Colosseum.

Italian pizza is flatter than a pancake, has maybe three pieces of pepperoni on it, and cheese that makes you wonder what cheese is made out of. Italian pizza blows. But no matter: if you're in Italy, the pizza must be great, just as when you are in China, the Peking Duck must be good (even though it's always served lukewarm and tastes like a Goodyear tire). The bottom line is, I have yet to find a pizza anywhere in the world that is as good as the Pizza Hut two blocks from where I grew up.

No, culture is not that big a deal to a tourist, though they think it is. Recently graduated college chicks are always carrying on about how they love to hike around mountains and cities and immerse themselves in culture (ever notice they're always 'taking a year off'; how can you be taking a year off when you haven't started anything yet? Who, exactly, is missing you in the workforce? Certainly they're not taking a year off from their dad's wallet). Anyway, their love of culture is cute. I'd even believe it, were it not for them bitching that their hair dryer doesn't work in the 220 outlet when they get back to the hotel.

I've seen a lot of culture. My first experience with culture was when I was 5, and my mom took me to kindergarten. I learned how to say the ABC's while sitting in a formation called circle. Another experience was going to Star Wars with my dad and eating popcorn. Everyone was facing a large, bright rectangle, and we giggled at moving pictures. Another time, my dad took me to a funny game called baseball, and we sat and made loud noises when men hit round objects with a stick....

Oh, wait. You mean culture-culture? Oops. I forgot that culture only counts if it has a different language, or if it's found in a faraway place. My mistake.

And, of course, that's where the culture thing breaks down completely. I don't have much time for the backpacking crowd. I did it myself for a while, but it was too depressing listening to pot smoking losers talk about culture when they didn't even know what the word meant.

Culture, in a word, is anything. It doesn't matter if it's downtown Toronto, East LA, or Mozambique. If you're sitting in a room right now and are completely alone, look around you. There's your evidence of culture (if it makes you feel better, the stereo may have been made in Taiwan). If you're on your laptop at Starbucks, check out the people in line. There's culture.

Culture is not about differences. Culture is about being. That simple. You do not need to go to Tibet to find culture, nor Paris. Go downtown, get on a bus, and take a half-hour ride. Do it for two weeks. Take notes. Congratulations. You've done an in-depth study and are now ready to begin your thesis. If you fill it with enough mumbo-jumbo and make it long enough (over 3000 words should cut it), then you can call what you've written an ethnography. Anthropologists do it all the time. Hurray.

So culture is not what people are after. What they're after is something cool. They're also after it in a hot place. No lover of culture seems to study it when it's cold outside. I hear all kinds of people tell me they love England, and it's history and culture, but they follow that up with, "Don't go in January, it's too damn miserable."

Yes, the heat is where it's at. And what spoiled brats we are, too, to be able to enjoy these hot places without the minor drawback of dying. The Panama Canal attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year. I'm going to see it for the tenth time next week. It really is a modern wonder of the world. It's also hotter than hell.

I mean hot. A heat that drives you to your knees and makes you sweat endlessly. Then you go inside and have another margarita. Then you go back outside and sweat some more, and curse the heat. So you go back inside and get a blast from the air conditioner, then go back outside and sweat some more.

Sounds miserable, doesn't it? Of course, not. We've all been to hot places, and we bear with them because we have margaritas, and cold beer, and ice, and air conditioning. But it is sobering to think of the guys that built the Panama Canal, and the Pyramids, and other big things in hot places. No ice or AC for them.

The Panama Canal claimed tens of thousands of lives. From the heat, from yellow fever, from malaria. For the French, it was the jaws of death and they gave up building the thing before it wiped out too many more men (over 20, 000 Frenchmen succumbed in the disastrous attempt to build a sea-level canal across Panama between 1881-1889). For the Americans, it was a good dose of hell, but better hygiene, equipment, and the theory that mosquitoes spread disease saved many.

Yes, that pesky mosquito, the bringer of death. Malaria kills scores of people each year, and he keeps right on humming (or rather, she does. It's the female mosquito that causes so much havoc). The numbers are hard to nail down, but it's estimated that 1 to 3 million people buy the farm every year from malaria, with more than three hundred million infections annually. DDT did a good job wiping them out in the more impoverished parts of the world. But hey, DDT might be bad for the environment, so the WHO told everyone to stop using it and the impoverished people could go back to doing what they do best: dying while we don't care.

In any event, while we sip tropical drinks and enjoy the sun, it's well to remember the people that hated the heat and ultimately died from it. A vacation to Panama would have seemed a laugh to any of the 27, 000 that died there building the canal. I'm sure the slaves that built the Pyramids would feel the same. Nobody will ever know how many of them perished in the desert, but the number must be extreme. Think about that the next time you're at the McDonald's gazing out at the Pyramids and eating a McFlurry.

Heat and culture. Two good reasons to take off early on a Friday and enjoy some rays. While you enjoy them, just try to remember who you're standing on. Literally.

Christmas Ramble

This was meant to be an obligatory 'I hate it when people say Happy Holidays' entry, but I'm not quite in the mood. This year, I've discovered that I'm not really one way or the other about the war on Christmas. We've lost that war, and there won't be a rematch, so we might as well move on.

If you don't believe me, let me ask you a couple of questions: do you think about people getting upset when the word 'Christmas' is mentioned on TV? (I'm not asking you if you care that they're upset; I'm asking if you think of it). Are you somewhat surprised when you hear Christmas music being played in a shopping mall or store, then turn to your friend and say, "Hey, it's nice they're playing Christmas music"? Do you get a momentary sinking feeling in your gut (the kind of gut-speak that hits you when you think you've lost your wallet) when you hear the word 'God'?

Now, answer those same questions, but insert the words "Ramadan," or "Buddha," or "Kwanzaa," or "Allah," or "Chanuka." Case closed. The war's over. Saying those words in place of "God" and "Christmas" is more mainstream than Christmas nowadays. Words don't count without meaning, which is to say emotion. The very fact that you have to say "I'm glad they're playing Christmas music" is a sign that the culture has changed for good.

Another example in that vein come from that buffoon on Fox News, Alan Combs. He was giving an interview and when his guest opened with, "Merry Christmas to you," Combs replied with something like, "Thank you for that. I'm not offended. No war on Christmas here."

What a loser. He fell right into the trap the Unserious always do: not being able to see his own pathetic irony even whilst choking on it like last year's turkey dinner. Or in Combs' house, probably tofu with a side order of sanctimony.

The war on Christmas was fought from the inside. It is a self-inflicted injury. Indeed, it is strange that those on the Left despise Christianity and want nothing to do with it. Jesus was all about suffering. Apparently he suffered for everyone's sins, including theirs. It is strange that the Unserious don't dig that. Their idea of a good time is mental self-flagellation on a grand scale.

They beat themselves up for pollution, global warming, AIDS, homelessness, cigarette smoking, Big Macs, oil that powers their SUVs, trees in the forest, owls that live in the trees, trees that fall on trucks and kill a family of four. On and on. Baby seals but not baby humans. Baby ducks but not baby houseflies. Turtles, but not termites. Whales in the ocean, but not poor people in Darfur. I suppose anything is worth saving, as long as you care to look at it as a pet and not a pest.

It makes sense that sooner or later, they would confront the main foundation of Western Culture. No, not football. Christianity. Why bother chipping away at issues like the environment, abortion, and Japanese whaling rights? Going after Christianity is an assault on all Western beliefs at once. Tear it down, and you make every other issue stand naked in the shower.

Ronald Reagan once said that if the US did not stand as one nation under God, it would fall apart. Nobody in the audience booed, and it didn’t make the news as a negative piece about religion in politics. Today, if Harper or Bush did that they’d be villified. Hero of the Left JFK was a warmonger, a womanizer, and loved nukes. If he’d drank more, he would have been my kind of guy. He also said the word ‘God’ a lot, and was the first Catholic president. Today, the Left would cream him for all of the above.

Ben Stein has pointed out that the idea of the United States being an athiest country is relatively recent, but is picking up speed at a frightening pace. That can be applied to all Western countries. England, where they ban their national flag in prisons (it has a cross on it) lest it offend a Muslim inmate. Canada, where Stockwell Day was dragged through the mud as a ‘fundamentalist’ because he liked to take Sundays off and go to church. If that’s the case, then 25 years ago every shopowner in Burlington, Ontario was a fundamentalist. When I was growing up, the only store open on a Sunday was a Becker’s where I could get a freezy.

I was talking to an Australian guy once, and I made mention that Canada was a Christian country. Well, you might as well have clubbed a baby seal right in front of him. But let's face reality: every Western culture has had Christianity as its bedrock faith for the past 1500 years at least. The other religions were more or less around, but they had nothing to do with our ancient regal monarchs, or the founding of any constitution. Islam made a go of it at one point, until they got their asses kicked, and it only became trendy to mention Chanukah in December about 40 years ago.

I remember when I was a kid that the Happy Holidays thing hadn't happened yet. Back then, cards said Merry Christmas, then Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, then Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah. Then the guys at Hallmark probably got tired of surfing the PC tide and said, "Hell with it. Write Happy Holidays on it, print a billion, and sell them into the next century."

I still find it funny that all of these cards are still called Christmas cards. More irony to choke on. We all run around wishing everyone a happy whatever-the-hell, but when it comes to slipping pieces of cardboard into the mail, we still say, "Shit, I forgot to buy Christmas cards." When are we going to start calling them Holiday cards? My guess is 2010. Damn, I forgot. They’re Greeting Cards.

But greeting what?

Christmas Ramble (II)

Life is beautiful because it makes me laugh. You can keep your flowers blooming in the sunshine, and you can throw out the pretty poems. It's laughter that makes the world a damned nice place. Problem is, I have a comedian's bent of only laughing about what makes me angry. It's an old comedy rule: if you want to write a funny routine, don't think about what makes you laugh; think about what makes you angry, and then attack.

I knew a comedian once who made a joke about Poles during his routine. After the show, the hotel management asked him what he was thinking, told him that guests had complained, asked him to explain himself, so forth.

He was a British comedian, and he had a great Limey accent. He looked down at his fingernails for a moment, studied them, and shrugged. Then he looked up at the authoritative figures around him and purred, "Sometimes comedy is...cruel."

When I heard that, I hit the floor.

That comedian wasn't wrong. Comedy is cruel. At it's root, comedy is a mean art. Completely sado-masochistic. Anything in it's path, including the comedian himself, is apt to be spliced down the middle with a blowtorch. I say 'himself,' because women aren't inherently funny. Once in a while a Lucielle Ball or a Phyllis Diller comes along, but most of the time all we get is Ellen DeGeneres. A few yucks and then their shows have to break out the lesbian storyline to try and shock the viewers back into their seats. If the comedian isn't a lesbian, then they try the other route: they get her pregnant. Nine months of semi-giggles later, and the show goes in the can.

The last couple of weeks have had plenty of laughs in. There was Ahmandinejad saying for the 100th time that Israel should be wiped off the map and that the Holocaust never happened. There was Jimmy Carter releasing a book that compared Israel with Apartheid South Africa. There was the usual lame response from the politicians, saying that anti-Semitism is bad. There was Kofi Annan, saying that the US has to get in step with the rest of the world and stop causing so much trouble. And there was me, laughing.

Laughing, because as that English guy might have said, "What proper fools we are." A Holocaust-denying madman in the desert wants to blow Israel sky high, while the Left's idiot of an elder statesman says the Israelis are the problem. Meanwhile, the leader of the UN says not one word about Iran wanting to vaporize the Jewish state. Instead, he takes a potshot at US foreign policy. And when it's time for us to speak up, we say the usual mumbo-jumbo. Come on, you know the mantra by now. Two words. Outrage and condemnation.

Please. Like the Unserious or the bigots care if we're outraged. It makes no difference to them, because they know that talk is cheap. And condemnation? That won't even get you a cup of coffee at Denny's.

I'm getting pretty tired of anti-Semitism. I don't need to go into the history books to look for it (though I have), and I don't need to read the papers to find it (though I do). No, I look back at examples from my own life, and it is shocking how deeply imbedded anti-Semitism still is. In fact, it has been so shocking for so long, that I've come to realize that it will never end. It will always be around, this curious little monster that is so invasive, some people don't even realize they have the disease.

I was brought up in a Catholic school, and my parents are what you would call 'conservative.' But guess what? I didn't hear one anti-Jewish slur in my household or in my school. One of the great lies of our day is that Christians blame Jews because Jews were the Christ killers. I don't know anyone alive who has told me that they dislike Jews for that reason.

In grade 11, we had to study other religions. Our teacher put Catholicism on the back burner, and we went over Buddhism, Judaism, Taoism, and every other 'ism.' I can't remember one slight being levelled at any of those creeds. No one poked fun at the Jews, and our teacher never taught us that they were all that different from us.

When I left that class, I mainly thought Jews were different simply because they didn't read the New Testament and because they didn't believe Jesus was a bigshot. Fine by me. I don't think my friends and I ever discussed it outside of class. We were too busy planning the next party or, this being a Catholic school, watching kilts swish to and fro.

My mom dragged me to Church until I was about fourteen years old. Though my memory of those years is foggy, I'm pretty sure that I would remember a priest railing against another group of people. Not one of them did, ever. I heard a lot of boring sermons in my time, most of them revolving around not doing drugs or committing some sin or other. But fiery rhetoric about Christ-killers didn’t make it to the podium.

My first glimpse of Holocaust-denial came from two people in my high school. I didn’t know they too well. They were friends of a friend and we were killing time, waiting for her. I’m pretty sure they weren’t Christian, but they might have been. Anyway, they were a boy and a girl, and the girl had a German mom. Somehow WWII got brought up, and being young we thought we knew everything about it. I mentioned the Holocaust. The girl looked at me with hooded eyes and said something like, “There’s still an argument about whether that even happened.”

The guy nodded. I was dumbstruck. Not by the guy. It was pretty obvious he wanted to get into her pants, so he would have agreed with her if she’d said the earth was flat. But the girl was a young, vivacious, attractive, smart-sounding chick. I knew she was a grade ahead of me in school, and I therefore knew that she’d already taken Mr. Canham’s class on the war. I knew she’d seen the pictures I’d seen, and read the texts I’d read, and heard Mr. Canham’s lectures on the subject. And learned nothing.

In University, I had a Jewish girlfriend. I was visiting her family and they were all downstairs watching the tube while I took a break and perused the old man’s library. I found a book on Hitler and the Holocaust. I sat down and read it (I already considered myself a WWII history buff and still keep up with it today). And you know, the whole time I’m reading it, I’m thinking about my girlfriend. For the first time, the war became emotional for me. I’m thinking about someone putting a bullet in my girlfriend’s head, or lighting her on fire, or making her eat crap in a ghetto.

While I was leafing through the book, she walked in. She’d told me once that she didn’t like to talk about the Holocaust. Her father had lived through it, and it upset her too much. So I closed the book and looked up at her sheepishly. And then I started to cry. Just like that.

You see, when she walked in the room she was early twenties, pretty as hell, smart as a whip, and had the damnedest smile. It was obvious she had come into the room to see me. Not because she had any big news, not because the TV show they’d been watching was a bore, not because of anything. Just to see me. And I looked up at her face and thought of all those people who died at the hands of those murderous sonsofbitches, and for a moment I saw her there, in a ghetto, persecuted. And I started crying.

She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that if someone laid a hand on her head, I would kill him. Kill him. And you know what she did? She laughed. She put the book away and put her hand to my face, and she told me that no one was going to lay a hand on her head, so relax. She played it so matter-of-factly, and she never brought it up again.

Imagine the dignity in that. The courage, to be the one to say, “There-there, everything’s going to be all right,” when victomhood was hers for the taking. Instead, she comforted me. Incredible.

As time went on, I met a lot of sonsofbitches. I met a Greek man some years ago, and he became a good buddy of mine. And, as anti-Semites do, he waited until we were good friends to open up his thoughts. He told me that Hitler had all the right answers about the Jews. He told me that I didn’t understand it now, but I would when I was older. He wasn’t my friend after that.

I once met a Hungarian girl and I asked her if she was Jewish. She looked utterly revolted. Her face changed into a snarl. She told me no, and then asked, “Do I look Jewish?” And she was worried. Worried that I would say yes. If I had, it might have destroyed her twisted self-image for life. Instead, I told her I didn’t know what Jews looked like, changed the subject, and didn’t talk to her again.

Anti-Semitism runs deep. I don’t know where it grows, but it doesn’t grow in the church. Neither does it grow at the movies. I like Charles Krauthammer a lot, but he was way off when The Passion of the Christ came out. Charles said that it would spread anti-Semitism, and was a massive setback for Jews.

Sorry, Charles, but you were overreacting. I’ve met a lot of Europeans, and therefore a lot of anti-Semites (that isn’t to say that Europeans have cornered the market, though they might; they just expose it much more readily). Two hours of cinema are no going to make someone hate Jews. The Christ-killer theory is a load of bull on both sides of the coin. Anti-Semites are not born of it, which means Jews shouldn’t look to it as a reason for anti-Semitism. I firmly believe that all Jew-haters I have met learned their stuff at a very young age, too young to be let into violent movies made by Mel Gibson.

But what does all this have to do with Christmas?

Good question. I guess I’m just looking back at Christmas past, and bemoaning the fact that Christmas is taking a nose-dive in the popular culture as a spiritual event. Not because I am all that spiritual, but because I liked it when other people were. I liked knowing that people were praying, and giving a little thought to what the spirit of Christmas meant. More than that, I liked knowing that they didn’t have to feel any kind of guilt about it. Christians are not all racist, anti-Semite, whackos. They’re just people.

Christianity is painted as some sort of cult nowadays, which is as sad as it is wrong. Evil things have been done in the name of Christianity before, but it is self-evident that more good has been done than evil. Every Christmas movie, message from the Queen, Christmas story, and Christmas carol sends messages of love, forgiveness, joy, and hope. Can an evil, cynical faith inspire such messages? If so, how? Certainly a Spanish Inquisition from hundreds of years ago doesn’t outweigh Mother Theresa and so many others like her. Does it? Should one feel guilty for praying for someone on December 25th?

I sure know that we don’t need to feel any from the Jews. An email arrived from another old Jewish girlfriend of mine, wishing me a Merry Christmas. If she is supposed to be different because she is a Jew, she doesn’t know that. All she knows is that she is happy for me because I am celebrating something. And she acknowledges that by celebrating me as a person she has known and loved.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas to her. And you.

Thinking Of You

This has been a hell of a long week, with a lot of work, but a lot of fun. Anyway, I just wanted to drop my friends and family a line and tell them that I'm thinking of them, loving them, and wishing them well as Christmas comes up to smack us in the kisser a lot sooner than we thought it would.

And Pete, have a great, big CC and ginger for me, would you?

Later.

A Study in Senility

Well, what did we expect?

At least the Iraq Study Group (ISG) showed some courage. They decided to drop a bomb of surrender on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It takes chutzpah for the Unserious to do something like that, and it helped turn the evening news into the most bizarre show around: a clip of ISG members saying the US should go to thug regimes Iran and Syria with hat in hand, begging for help, followed by a clip of Roosevelt saying he was going to open up a can of whup-ass on the Japanese.

No coalition of the willing for Roosevelt. Back then, there wasn't much talk of making sure Tonga's security council vote would allow Americans to defeat their enemies. Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Midway, Leyte Gulf, Solomon Islands. Not too many Polish and French (they'd already surrendered) running around during those battles. It was all red, white, and blue. A Japanese admiral said the Americans were filled with a 'terrible resolve,' a resolve which took them all the way to final victory.

65 years on, it would seem that many Americans still have a terrible resolve, though not in the way that Yamamoto meant it. When he said those words, he knew a determined enemy was advancing constantly, and wouldn't give up until they'd won the day. He had little doubt that within a couple of years, Roosevelt's boot would be up his ass. He was wrong. It was Truman's.

No, the resolve today is terrible because there isn't any. The 79 articles that these ISG has-beens came up with is a recipe to do nothing on the one hand, and to appease dictators on the other. It is a shameful, embarrassing document (you can find it on Jim Baker's website; I'd give you the address, but I don't want to help his counter go up).

When former Secretary of State and ISG-man Lawrence Eagleburger was asked today what he thought of the New York Post (good for you, Post) calling them a bunch of "Surrender Monkeys," he replied with a stern, "That was probably thought up by some 20-year-old punk."

Maybe. But does that mean the punk's wrong?

You were a 20-year-old punk yourself once, Larry. At least, I hope so. Being a punk means taking a stand and sticking it to the man once in a while. Punkness takes heft and attitude. Punkness requires, oh, not asking the President of your nation to go to an Axis of Evil country four years later and beg them for help when you know damn well that they're the ones behind this insurgency in Iraq. You're not a punk anymore, Larry, you're just a regular, arrogant coward.

Arrogant, because you think you know it all and can toss others off with one-liners involving the word 'punk.' Coward, because the only new issues in the document you signed involve running away as fast as possible, screwing Israel over by making this a Palestine question, and having a meeting of minds with a dictatorship that hangs people for being gay. (And Larry, nobody uses 'punk' anymore. Just how many times beyond 79 do you have to prove that you are out of it?)

His next flippant comment on Fox News proved what an old fool he is. When asked what he would do if the President didn't take action on even one of the ISG's recommendations, Larry said it was the President's decision. For his part, Old Larry would return to his stamp collection and come back to chat with Fox News once in a while if they wanted him to, hardee-har-har.

That's great. Thanks for your service, Larry. You worked nine months on a report to the US President, and you now place it's importance somewhere behind your stamp collection and being a hack for the cable news networks. Please, Larry. Go back to collecting stamps. Mail someone a letter that contains your last original thought, before it dies of loneliness.

I didn't hold out much hope for the ISG. It sounded pathetic to begin with, the way 'study group' sounded lame whenever a university professor made me go over to a homely girl's apartment on a Saturday to compare notes. There we'd be, the such-and-such study group, put together by a prof who went around the room repeating one through five over and over, until all the ones had to meet at John's, all the twos at Jenny's, etc.

I detested study groups. Every time a professor said the magic words, "Let's split up into groups," I wanted to do a header off the fifth floor of the social science building.

Most of my study groups were garden variety. A couple of gay guys, the homely girl who served Doritoes and owned a lot of teddy bears, a token feminist or two, and me. We'd chat for a few hours about our homework, I'd say a couple of things to piss off the feminists, and then I'd try to get to the bar by last call. Point is, every study group I've seen has been a joke. People walk in with their beliefs firmly in place, and they walk out with them a couple of hours later.

Nobody changes their minds during a study group. Certainly no one learns very much. In fact, I only ever agreed to sign any study group's papers because I knew it was a waste of time to argue a point and, as said, I wanted to make last call. Besides, it wasn't like I was concerned with not getting a good grade. If you had a gay guy and a couple of feminists on your team, there wasn't a chance in hell the prof would give you less than a B+.

A couple of hours of study group pretty much ensured that I would sign anything put in front of me. After nine months, I'm not the least bit surprised that these 10 old-timers found a consensus. Nine months? My God, after nine months of study group, I would have signed away my heterosexuality, told you I wore ladies underwear, and sang 'I Feel Pretty' from the top of my university residence. I'm amazed these old buffoons lasted so long. When a stamp collector is one of your heavy hitters on foreign policy, you begin to wonder who gave them the code to get out of the old folks home in the first place.

By now you're thinking that I'm ripping on the elderly too much. You're right. I am. And they deserve it. Look at it this way: all of that old thinking is long gone. It's over. Those rules of foreign policy and diplomacy are out the window. For one, it is pretty hard to practice diplomacy when the groups you are talking to don't have any diplomats. For another, these terrorists and Islamic fascists don't care what Baker and Eagleburger say.

When Baker was talking to the Russians, he knew they were full of crap, but at least they pretended to listen. Today, the Islamic fascists say, "You want peace? To hell with you. Die, infidel scum!" And we go running to the evening news for analysis of what the terrorist meant by that. Well, he means he wants you to die. Olive branches extended in their direction end up buried in your throat.

In Baker and Eagleburger's day, foreign policy meant two things: Communism and the United States. That was it. The rest was merely details. Name me one important conflict that took place post-WWII that didn't involve some influence of the US and USSR. Name one. (Sorry, British guys, the Falklands don't count. Be real).

Don't cheat by handing me Israel and the Arabs. They were both being supplied by the big boys, and the big boys had a vested interest in which side won, lost, or stayed static. Korea and Vietnam? Wrong. Just because the soldiers didn't speak Russian doesn't mean they weren't partnered up with the Russkies behind the bedroom curtain. Do you think those cute AK-47s were grown in the rice paddies?

The members of the ISG are old, and they are out of their league. This game is faster, younger, and far more uncertain. When Eagleburger was making the rounds, the world spun very slowly. If he talked to a Russian ambassador, the Russian ambassador would get back to him in months with nothing new to say. If the talks went badly, well, we'll have more talks next year. And hey, if those talks don't work out, no big deal. The chances of us ever attacking each other face to face are extremely remote. One thing about the Cold War, there weren't too many American or Russian civilians being killed by the other side.

The ISG group proved their irrationality by talking about the conditions in Iraq getting worse and worse, spiraling out of control. Okay, fine. But tell me, lead foot, exactly what is your definition of 'spiral'? Because you didn't seem to be too quick in getting that report onto the President's desk.

The old boys' diplomacy network is over. We don't have time for nine month reports, conferences next summer, Pan-Arab talks. I'm sorry, Larry and Jim, if you miss the good old days of flying around and rubbing elbows with other guys in expensive suits. I apologize if you miss chatting with your foreign policy buddies over caviar and champagne. You can't drag your old methods into this fight. It distracts us, and it weakens us. Like you, the guys we're fighting while you're collecting stamps also wear pricey vests to wedding parties, except theirs explode and wipe out entire families.

Today's enemy doesn't talk. They blow things up. There is no evidence that they want to hear from us unless it is to accept our conversion to Islam and a capitulation to their terms. To treat them as Eagleburger and Baker treated past foreign dignitaries is lunacy.

The Iraq Study Group was another lesson, and it was a good one. It's time to kiss the old-timers good-bye. They're past their foreign policy prime, seeing a diplomatic world they used to see, living in the dreamland of lost memories. Listening to them is as foolish as it is dangerous.

Say good-night, Larry.

Threesome

Her some,
Me some,
She some,
In sum.

Football (Black &) Blues

Travel makes the days go by faster. I can't decide if that is because I'm busy seeing all kinds of neat, interesting things (statues of famous people, old churches, girls in bikinis, puddles of barf outside a Shanghai nightclub), or if it's just because I miss football.

One thing about football is that it helps you mark the time. From kickoff on Sunday afternoon, to the last whistle on Monday night, all you think about is football. You eat it in the form of chilli and cheese. You drink it in the form of Budweiser beer (unless you had a particularly hard Saturday night, in which case you drink football in the form of orange juice and aspirin). You sleep it in the fitful rest of a man who took a lousy quarterback in the fantasy draft.

The remainder of the week is nothing more than waiting for football to come back around again. You check the injury reports, the stats, the blogs. You watch SportsCenter for the 18th time, never realizing that the highlights won't change: the receiver who dropped the touchdown pass and blew the spread along with your fifty bucks will still drop the damn pass, no matter how many times you watch it.

Football is a love/hate affair. Sometimes it is as boring as a young woman, other times as torturous as a Motley Crue reunion tour. But always it is what we want it to be: a game filled with the expectation of victory, and a chance to watch someone get his clock cleaned.

That is, unless you're traveling.

Travel is a hell of a lot of fun, and you can learn a lot about many people and places. One thing you learn very quickly is that nobody watches football beyond the borders of North America. Not only that, but the sad sacks call a completely different game by the same name.

It would seem to make sense. A bunch of wimps running around on a field kicking a beach ball to each other. They use their feet a lot, so hey, the game is called football. Once in a great while, these masters of the Olympic event 'jogging' will even kick the ball towards a barn-sized net. And, once in an even greater while, the ball will go into said net. After that, the fans sing a song and beat the crap out of each other. Where do I sign up?

When there is more violence in the stands than there is on the field, the activity you are playing is a game, not a sport. And when the game you are playing is 90 minutes long but can still end in a 0-0 tie, you are playing an extremely stupid game at that.

I'm a little bit tired of hearing that sooner or later, soccer is going to be a popular sport in the United States and Canada. It isn't. It never will be. Everytime I sit down to watch a football game in a foreign country (relegated to the back of the bar with the small TV, sans volume) some European loudmouth thinks it's time for a soccer discussion. It goes something like this:

"What are you watching, mate?"

"Football," grumbles the irritable Canadian, as he picks up his tuna sandwich because the place doesn't serve wings.

"That ain't football. That's rugby for women."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Football is what you call soccer."

"Yeah."

"Soccer's big in America now. It's going to be bigger than baseball."

"Why's that?" asks the very irritable Canadian, though he already knows the answer because he's heard it five hundred and sixty-two times before.

"All the kids are playing it. When they grow up, they'll play soccer."

563.

I would wager that right now, some poor Canadian is sitting in a Norwegian bar that has satellite reception, and he is listening to the same garbage.

To the Euro-weenies, let's put something on the record: the kids who play soccer are there because their parents won't let them play a violent sport. Football and hockey are out, and fastballs scare the hell out of mothers, so baseball's out, too. Unless you're over six feet tall by the time you hit grade 11, basketball is also a no-go. That leaves soccer. Your passionate game of kick-the-ball-around is there to raise the self-esteem of children that wouldn't have amounted to a damn on the grid iron, and to keep hockey players in shape during the off-season.

People are not going to watch soccer in North America. It's made up of all the people that got cut from the other sports. Sure, there might be a few kids that played soccer as their first choice, but who the hell wants to watch a guy like that play anything? And just because we did something as kids doesn't mean we're going to keep doing it as adults. Using the old 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' might have worked while hiding in the cushion fort, but it doesn't go over so well on the nightclub circuit.

One thing that does fascinate me about soccer and its fans are the songs they sing. Before the game and after, they trash the USA to no end and make fun of the sports they play. But during the game, virtually all of the songs the Europeans sing (yes, including the O-lay, O-lay, O-lay ditty) were written by American composers. Weird.

Euro-boobs aren't the only ones who don't watch football, yet complain about it constantly. South Africans and Australians are even worse, because they play rugby.

I dig rugby. It's a tough game to play. It was the forerunner of football. Indeed, the Canadian Football League was known as the Canadian Rugby Football Union in 1884, then the Canadian Rugby Union, then the Canadian Football Council, and finally the Canadian Football League in 1958.

The Canadian and American games were both born from rugby, and one of the first recognized football games took place between Harvard and McGill University. There isn't enough time to go into all the ways that the American and Canadian games diverged, but there is enough time to tell the bonehead from Tennessee whom I met that the CFL didn't start in the 1970's, and they didn't change the 4-down rule to 3-downs 'just to be different.' The 4th down appeared in American college ball in 1912. The Canadian game simply kept the 3-down format.

Football came from rugby, but it was a much tougher game than rugby from the start. On-field deaths were not unknown, and a closed fist punch to the face was a legitimate way to bring a man down.

Aussie Rules football might look tough, until you notice that the highlights you see are the only hits that took place in the entire game. Rugby itself is missing two critical elements: the football rule that allows you to hit a man as hard as you can, anywhere on his body, without needing to use your arms, and the ability to blindside the man even if he doesn't have the ball.

Rugby tackles hurt. Football tackles are devastating. But it is the rugby player and rugby fan who freaks out whenever the subject of which sport is 'tougher' comes up. Football fans and players pay this argument no mind for two reasons: we know football is tougher, and we don't watch rugby, anyway.

The pads argument is usually the first to come out. Rugby fans complain that football players wear pads and helmets. This argument stuns me with its idiocy. Do the rugby fans mean to tell me that a game that requires armour in order to avoid serious injury or death is less tough than the one that does not? And do they believe that football started with all of this armour in the first place? Fat chance.

The history of football is actually a history of governing councils trying to keep young men from killing each other. Americans and Canadians took rugby and turned it into the most cruel, barbaric sport imaginable. Since then, it has been a struggle to keep it as sane and safe as possible while still allowing men to beat each other's brains in.

As far as I know, rugby has not changed any of its major rules in decades. The absence of helmets and flak jackets on their players is proof positive that the game is not, on the whole, life threatening (rugby does not allow a tackle above the shoulders, nor does it allow 'hitting,' that is, tackling without using the arms to wrap up).

A quick look at football's history tells you why the game was almost banned on more than one occasion. In 1892, Harvard used a new formation against Yale called the 'flying wedge.' It was developed, oddly enough, by a chess master.

The front line of the offense would interlock their arms and plow forward, the ball carrier behind them. Defenders would have to rip this wall apart to get to the man. It must have been Dislocated Shoulder City. Any defender who fell down was trampled beneath the wedge. Add the face punch into the mix, and these college students would have been a bloody mess.

Which they were. Seven players were carted off the field in what one paper called "a dying condition." There were so many injuries to Yale that they took it personally. The two schools broke off all official contact for the next two years.

The brutality got worse. Wedge formations and the act of dragging your ball carrier forward (in effect standing him up for an especially painful hit) made the game lethal. By 1900, serious injuries and on-field deaths were a regularity.

There's no way that football could be started from scratch today. It's incredible that it lasted at all. Remember that these were college students. Pro football was still small time, and the NFL didn't yet exist. Mothers were shipping their boys off to Yale, Harvard, and Rutgers to get an education, and then watching them come home in a pine box.

1905 was a bad year. 18 college students died playing football, and the game was banned in a number of schools. President Roosevelt finally stepped in and told colleges to clean up the game, or he'd campaign to have football banned outright.

Taking heed, nineteen colleges got together and drummed up some new rules. If you've ever wondered how the NCAA got it's start, now you know (it was originally called the Intercollegiate Athletics Association of the United States; its specific purpose was to find a way to keep football, and its players, alive). The 1906 meeting invented the neutral zone, wrote up some new laws about tackling, and also codified the laws for the forward pass. With the formal entry of the forward pass, football kissed rugby good-bye.

The new rules were a good idea, but they didn't help much. In 1908, 33 more college players would die playing with the pigskin. Someone has pointed out that with a limited number of schools playing ball at the turn of the century, you had close to a 50/50 shot of buying the farm stepping on the football field. Tough odds.

If the internet, television, and SportsCenter had existed back then, football would have been as dead as the players it killed. No one would have stood for endless highlights of college kids being carried off the field, dead and broken. If it happened just once today it would be dreadful, and the second guessing of the game would be extreme. But thirty-three times in one season?

What's incredible is that our forebears stood for it, and that college students still wanted to play the game. Helmets, pads, and various rule changes throughout the years have made the game safer, but only safer in the quotation mark sense. Today, about 8 players a year get killed playing football. That's from all levels combined, making it small potatoes compared to the old days, though a staggering number of injuries flood the locker rooms each weekend.

Concussions, for one. 40 000 of them are reported annually among high school players alone, and those are only the kids that get treated. Concussions are such a certainty that NFL teams have a chart for each player. If a player gets nailed in the head, they know what questions to ask that particular man in order to find out if he's still got all his marbles. And even if he does, that's not to say that he'll have them later on. Former players report nausea and forgetfulness well after they retire, a chronic symptom of having your head kicked in. It will be with them for the rest of their lives.

But, hey, who needs helmets?

It's insane for us to love this game. Absolutely crazy. But love it we do. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that football is by far the sport with the most injuries, and also the sport with the highest television ratings and fan attendance. Perhaps.

Traveling puts me through intense football withdrawal. I love the game, brag about it, want to jam it down a Euro-weenie's throat every time they crack wise. It says something about me and my culture that I long to see a man carry a ball over a white line, even if he has to destroy himself to do it.

But then, what does it say about the player?