Prime Minister? I have no Prime Minister

I woke up this morning feeling kind of rudderless. At first I thought it was just the usual Monday blahs and then it suddenly hit me. I have no Prime Minister. I have no federal leader. Now, I didn't vote for Stephen Harper, but I do respect the democratic process, and was therefore willing to give him a chance. I figured if he happened to be in line behind me at an Ottawa Tim Hortons, I'd cheerfully say "Good morning Mr. Prime Minister -- please go ahead of me." After all, there are plenty of problems in this country. Maybe if the PM gets a nice hot double-double and a few extra minutes before the next cabinet meeting, some of those problems will get a little smaller. Unlikely. But it could happen thinks I in the midst of a Monday funk.

But there have been too many signs that this PM is wrong for Canada. I don't even know if this PM drinks coffee. Lately he's been percolating his own blend of partisan venom. He's waving his robotic arms and droning on in that mopey monotone, pretending that he speaks for Canadians. (And someone is really mixing his metaphors tonight) O well. Here's a quick summary of recent reasons why this PM is no PM:

Item: Prime Minister Stephen Harper bans media from covering the repatriation of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Yes, bereaved families should be protected from hounding media, but these arrivals still need to be recorded. The public has a right to know -- and to grieve -- along with the families. Canadians don't "cut and run" if the cause is just, but most Canadians were cut out of the decision to send troops into Afghanistan in the first place.

Item: Harper brings down a mean-spirited, politicized budget that rewards the wealthy (by lowering the GST), penalizes the poor (by raising the base income tax rate) and then sprinkles a few dollars here and there in a cynical bid to encourage stay-at-home parents (in a society that is structured to essentially require two-income families).

Item: Harper snubs Ontario's Premier by a) delaying a meeting with Premier McGuinty; b) refuses to be publicly photographed with McGuinty either before or after their short meeting; c) attends -- and speaks at -- a Conservative fundraising dinner for John Tory immediately afterward and declaring that candidate the "next Premier of Ontario". Real PMs don't do these things.

Item: Harper justifies his meddling in provincial politics by telling the Toronto Star that John Tory is "a very good friend of mine". What does that mean? Are the other provinces supposed to trust him even if he is not 'bestest friends' with their democratically elected premiers?

Item: He tries to further justify his snub of McGuinty by having the PMO produce pages of Liberal quotations denouncing Ontario's premier. Yes Mr. PM, we know. The previous liberal government was arrogant and corrupt and they self-destructed when they realized they were going to lose the election. Dredging that up does not make your actions more palatable. It only makes your high-school approach to government more apparent.

Mr. Harper, you are one low-down, opportunistic, smug, self-righteous, bad-faith, partisan scallywag. You are no longer my Prime Minister. In Colbertian terms "You are dead to me". If Jon Stewart could add anything to this, no doubt he would close with his patented: "Good day sir. I said good day." And I would only add "What he said".

Freedom isn't Free: The PenOpticons go to Washington

I have visited Ottawa many times, toured Parliament, sat in the Governor General's "backyard", been transfixed by the National Gallery of Canada and cycled miles of bike paths, and gardens. It's an amazing place, but compared to Washington, D.C. my capital is little more than a beaver lodge nestled at the edge of the Ottawa River. A very expensive beaver lodge, mind you. But it's all relative. "Your tax dollars at work" has a very different meaning, depending on which side of the border you happen to be from.

We arrived in Washington in the midst of a nasty storm, a torrential rain that was matched by the stormy events of the day: the Duke lacrosse team rape allegations, Moussaoui's trial in Alexandria and sky-rocketing gas prices (which are now *gasp* almost as high as Canadian prices). We were in the U.S. capital when we learned that four Canadians had been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and that the Harper government had decided not to fly the Canadian flag at half-mast to honor the fallen -- or allow media to bear witness to the return of their bodies. All of these things swirled in our road-weary brains while we wandered around the National Mall.

In case you Americans don't know it yet, your president now has a "Mini Me" in the form of Canada's Prime Minister: a smug, self-righteous, introverted, media-shy conservative. Harper is doing everything he can to follow in W's footsteps. His newly announced budget will build more jails (in a country with falling crime rates), while granting regressive tax relief to the wealthiest Canadians and businesses. He has manipulated Parliament to avoid contact with media. And, as already mentioned, has forbidden media coverage of the repatriation of soldiers lost in battle (sound familiar?). Our Prime Minister does not look much like W, but he sure sounds like him. Given that Bush's popularity is plummeting, it will be interesting so see if Harper's mimicry results in a similar fate. We can hope.

But back in Washington... we are just two more foreign visitors walking around the White House, striding to the Washington Monument and then proceeding alongside the Reflecting Pool toward the Lincoln Memorial. It's all beautiful and huge and well... monumental. And when the rain finally ends, it's a gorgeous day -- there are white-throated sparrows and warblers singing in the trees around the White House. We are foreigners and yet it is all so familiar -- images embedded and deep memories inserted in the mind by a lifetime of TV and film. And books -- like Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain. Familiar but still strange. The small anti-nuclear protest, the Scientology tent and the lone individual screaming incoherently at the White House (until he was quietly cornered by security personnel) felt like business as usual. When Denise looked through her binoculars back at the White House, she said the rooftop security sniper seemed to be looking right back at her.

And that's the point, I suppose. Supposedly we are foreigners, and yet when you consider the "fundamentals", we're not so different. Consider these two great souls that we lost last week:

John Kenneth Galbraith: A Canadian-born economist who lived and worked most of his life in the U.S. had considerable influence in shaping the discourse of American liberal politics after World War II. Even if you don't like his politics, ya gotta like his wit: The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Jane Jacobs: An American-born urban thinker and activist who lived and worked much of her life in Canada. Jacob's book The Death and Life of Great American Cities got people thinking about sprawl, urban renewal and the disastrous effects of slicing up cities with expressways. She is credited with stopping both New York's Lower Manhattan Expressway and helping to prevent Toronto's Spadina Expressway from being built. Her dream of a creative, organic city was a powerful vision, though sadly, one that has seldom been realized. She tells us: There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. Unfortunately, we are surrounded by "pretended order" -- we are corralled and controlled by 6-lane arterial roads, big box stores and factory outlets.

But there it is. Two great minds lost. Jacobs, an American who lived and loved in Canada and Galbraith, a Canadian who loved and lived in America, both dreaming of a different kind of justice and an order that flowed upward from individual choice and responsibility -- not downward from greed and intangible "market forces". Eyes can meet unexpectedly in binoculars, traversing hundreds of yards at the speed of light and ideas can travel almost as fast between our countries.

But we were not thinking of any of this in Washington when we were still climbing the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and meditating on that President's words. We spent another hour or so wandering around the Korean and Vietnam memorials. These are truly moving places, where families still quietly scan for the names of lost loved ones. A few veterans stand by and politely help out when asked. It's a place of wistful smiles and quiet tears, and for outsiders like us, who never had to come to terms with any of it, the raw emotion of the place still echoes over the names engraved on the Wall.

These are places of healing for bereaved families and surviving veterans and care has been taken to build them well. But it took a long time for them to be built -- a long time to jog the official public memory. The Vietnam memorial opened in Washington in 1982, a mere 7 years after that war ended in 1975. It took considerably longer for Washington to memorialize World War II in 2004 -- almost 60 years after D-Day. Perhaps nothing can or should be made of these facts. Or perhaps the need to honor the dead of a war clouded by political spin and national guilt is greater than the need to honor the fallen of a "just" war. If that is the case, then let us hope they have already mapped out a place for the Iraq War Memorial. It needs to be built now.

Nine Days in America

Denise and I just returned from a nine day work/vacation road trip through the north eastern states -- mostly D.C., Virginia and North Carolina. Apart from doing our part to help deplete the world's supply of oil (we burned up 3,000 KM worth), our plan was to make a kind of pilgrimage to Washington, explore the Great Dismal Swamp and visit some of the wildlife refuge areas in the N.C. Outer Banks.

Despite its name, the Great Dismal Swamp is a spectacular place to visit, both for its strange and sad history and its rebirth as a "managed" natural habitat. The Swamp's place in American capital-H-History was cemented in 1763 when George Washington formed a company to purchase the area for logging. The founding father surveyed the Dismal Swamp and employed his own slaves to dig a series of 4 1/2-mile ditches. These waterways were used to drain the wetland and provide canal transport for the logging operation. Washington evenutally sold his share, but logging continued into the 1970's until the Union Camp Company donated the land to the Nature Conservancy.

The old-growth forest is long gone, but there is still a lot of life in the old Swamp. During our two days in the area we tallied over 50 bird species, including numerous Prothonotary and Hooded warblers. We came across several deer and a large bobcat that was slouching across the trail a few hundred yards in front of us. Even in the afternoon heat, the air was ringing with the birdsong of spring migrants and nesting species.

While walking along the Washington Ditch, I kept thinking about our time in D.C. from the previous day. We spent hours trapsing around the National Mall, gawking at monuments and statues. Take the 555-foot Washington Monument, for instance. For a man who started out chopping down cherry trees, and who then moved on to begin the wholesale deforestation of a thriving wetland, it seems entirely fitting that his monument rises like an upraised middle finger from a treeless field of well-worn sod. Does that sound a little bitter? I shouldn't be too hard on that George. After all, for him the American Dream was a vivid waking dream. He couldn't turn away from his destiny and any of us might have done exactly the same thing. I'm sure George wasn't flipping the bird, but I think someone was. Or perhaps Robert Mills, the Monument's designer, has unwittingly built the world's tallest Viagra ad. A terrible way to end this, but there it is. I have more respectful things to say about Washington and the National Mall in the days to come.

Coopers Hawk at York U

I took a walk around a woodlot at York U today and tried out a borrowed Minolta Dimage camera. I was hoping for a good shot of a Cardinal since they have been singing up a storm around the university. Instead I stumbled upon a Coopers Hawk that was glaring at me with a big red eye from a tree branch. We stared at each other for a few minutes until he hopped down onto a log and did a little line dance.

We see plenty of Turkey Vultures arcing above the Ross Building. Hadn't seen a Coopers at York before, though. Beautiful plummage!

Opticons and HOV dummies

Tired of stop and go traffic and all those red lights? You could do what Jason Niccum did. The Longmont, Colorado resident purchased an "Opticon*" from eBay for $100 (US) in order speed up his commute. The device emits the same kind of infra-red pulses that fire trucks and rescue vehicles use to make stop lights change during emergencies. Niccum was busted recently for interfering with traffic lights, but, after using the Opticon for 2 years, he may have gotten his money out of it -- even with the $50 fine. His excuse, as reported by the police: "I'm always running late". Aren't we all, Jason?

If you are still in a hurry, you could try propping up a HOV dummy in the front seat, although that approach didn't work out well for Susan Aeschliman-Hill last month on Interstate 405 in Seattle. When she and her mannequin friend barged into the HOV lane by swerving in front of a school bus, they caused a multi-vehicle accident that injured 12 people. Yikes.

Perhaps Jason and Susan should think about car-pooling. Who knows? It could be a match made in heaven. And if it doesn't work out, they can always opt for 'his and hers' flying scooters. Even that sounds safer than driving with a dummy in the front seat. Me? I'm still getting around on my trusty VIVA bus (my million dollar limo) and bicycles (when the legs feel up to it).

The PenOpticon Limo!

* N.B. This PenOpticon has nothing to do with the "Opticon" that Jason Niccum was using.

Organized Crime and the Midnight Tow Truck

This week's Toronto-area crime news has been dominated by front page pictures of eight murdered Bandidos motorcycle gang members and related stories of gang activities within the GTA. It turns out that the Bandidos and other gangs have been using tow trucks to haul drugs around the city. In fact, the Toronto Star reported that on the night of the Shedden massacre, police tailed a tow truck along highway 401, but were unaware that the car in tow was weighed down with 200 KG of cocaine. The three men in the truck were gunned down after entering a farmhouse owned by Bandido member, Wayne Kellestine.

The tow-truck connection made me re-think an old children's story called Matthew and the Midnight Tow Truck. After losing a favourite toy car, young Matthew goes to bed and dreams he sees the flashing lights of a tow truck outside his bedroom window. When the Midnight Tow Truck Driver calls up for help, Matthew sneaks out of the house and the two of them cruise through the night, hauling vehicles to a special car wash facility that shrinks them down to pocket size. The drivers seem to eat nothing but "red licorice" and they even give some to Matthew for helping out. When he wakes up, he finds his favorite toy truck in his shirt pocket and insists that his mother buy lots of red licorice. He tells here to leave some on the windshield of her car so that it will never be towed away. It was a fun story and both of our kids enjoyed it 14+ years ago, but shrinking cars and red licorice pay offs? Were the Bandidos already involved in the murky underworld of children's literature? Such meta-narratives! It's all too much for my small brain!

Time to legalize red licorice?
Now I personally am not big on the stuff, but I do believe it may be time to legalize "red licorice" so that society is no longer held hostage by these midnight tow trucks. Imagine if you could walk into any LCBO -- Licorice Control Board of Ontario -- outlet to purchase enough for your own use? It just might take a little business away from the Bandidos and tow truck drivers of the world. Perhaps this was the unspoken message that Michel Auger, a Montreal crime reporter, had for CBC's The Current last Wednesday. Auger, who took six bullets in the back from a Quebec-based motorcycle gang in 2000, spoke of the futility of expensive police stings and undercover operations. He told The Current's Gary Simmons:

"It's too easy for the criminals to profit from the millions they are making with drug trafficking and if there is trafficking it's because there are customers. So it's the citizens who are complaining about the violence and activities of organized crime, but they are buying the cocaine and hashish and marijuana... so there is no way to succeed against organized crime because society is the customer. They are supplying what society needs."

Hmm. What society needs? It's hard to say. In developed societies, where the basic needs of most are easily met, many people struggle with individual wants and desires. But perhaps collectively, we really can't function unless a certain percentage of the population has regular access to psychoactive drugs. Maybe those who sing the Ramones signature song: "I Wanna Be Sedated" really need to be sedated. If that is the case, better they should buy their stuff from a surly civil servant than a burly guy on a Harley. If nothing else, at least recreational drug tax revenues could be used to fund drug rehab programs -- just as a percentage of state gambling revenues are funneled into gambling addiction programs.

Guitar Gods

A friend sent this and I had to blog it because I love this piece of music and this kid is an awsome player. And to think I had the nerve to post a few of my own MP3s (though I posted them on April Fools!) Click and enjoy:

And still the birds fly...

In spite of global warming, the war in Iraq, multiple murders and assorted mayhem, da boids are doing that crazy migration thing that they do. The Redwing black birds have been back for a while. We've seen a few Great Blue Herons and some have seen Egrets. Today we took a walk at Thickson Woods in Whitby, and found returning Phoebes, Golden Crown Kinglets and Winter Wrens. The woods were waking up with Northern Flickers, Sapsuckers and Downy woodpeckers hammering away. A Great Horned Owl -- a regular at Thickson's -- dosed high up in the canopy (I included a pic of two babies from a few years ago). It was a pretty good show, a warm up act for the return of the warblers in May.

Last weekend, we headed out to Grimsby for a taste of the spring Hawk Watch and watched waves of TurkeyVultures and sporadic flights of Coopers, Rough-legged, Sharp shin and Red shoulder hawks rise up over the Niagara Escarpment. I have neither the time, the eyesight or the skill to do a full-day observing and counting the return of these creatures, but those who do are a rare breed and are to be respected. I should have taken a picture of the large crowd of people out for a day of hawk watching, but all I got was this pic of the town of Grimsby and Lake Ontario.

NB. If Grimsby does not have a sports team called the "Reapers", they really ought to.

Midnight justice, or whatever you want to call it.

"Midnight justice, or whatever you want to call it" is how one resident described today's discovery of eight bodies in a farm field near Shedden, a tiny community in south-western Ontario. Was it a psychopathic mass murder or just another example of what sometimes passes for justice under a dark rural sky? Either way, this tragedy will provide further ammunition to Canadian and American politicians who want to tighten borders, build more jails, and generally spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among the citizenry.

But what if crime rates are actually falling? What if there is a disconnect between what is really happening in our neighbourhoods and what is reported? Such a disconnect was evident in the Toronto Star's reportage of this event. The Star included background on several other "grisly" Canadian mass murders and duly noted that "the scale of the [the Shedden murders] is unprecedented in modern Ontario history." No doubt the "if it bleeds, it leads" approach to journalism sold a few papers today.

But, what the Star failed to note as part of this story is the fact that crime rates in Canada have been falling steadily since 1991. And, despite a growing population, Ontario, Canada's largest province, still has the lowest crime rate in the entire country.

I don't know why those eight people in Shedden died, but the circumstances in which they were found sound like the drug-deal-gone-bad scene in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. It's a depressing episode that may have more to do with our Draconian drugs laws -- laws which have served to foster a thriving underworld economy -- than a societal meltdown.

After all, when you look at crime rates in America, you see a similar trend. All forms of crime have been falling for several decades -- all except drug-related crime. The U.S. answer to the drug problem -- the infamous War on Drugs -- has resulted in a record number of black and Hispanic men being thrown in jail.

The ugly, dirty little secret (which is really not a secret at all) is that all crime committed for the purpose of turning a profit requires both producers and consumers. The Christian right, and various conservative movements prefer to target the producers of crime while ignoring the fact that it is primarily mainstream (dare I say white?) Americans and Canadians who consume it. We see evidence of this consumption every time a celebrity is "busted" for drug use or a politician is ousted for corruption or a TV evangelist is revealed to have a predilection for young prostitutes. When things go wrong for "mainstream" consumers of drugs, illegal gambling and prostitution, they are often embarrassed (while the rest of us are sometimes entertained). When things go wrong for the marginal, unacknowledged producers of illegal goods and services, it can often lead to something more tragic -- like eight dead bodies slumped in a farm field.

* Graphs from Statistics Canada 2004 Crime Statistics Bulletin

Help make a difference and Save the SUVs

We had a lively conversation at work today about cars and SUVs. Several of my co-workers have bought gas-guzzling cars and SUVs in recent years and now they gripe about the high cost of driving, parking and repairs. Let's not even talk about the post-petroleum stone age. It made me think of one of those Save the Children ads -- but for SUV owners. So, here's the PenOpticon Save the SUV Public Service Announcement.

Focus (Folk Us) on April Fools

In the few weeks that I have been blogging, I've been happy and bitter, optimistic and critical -- and often a bit of a pompous ass! And, as I expected, I have not been able to focus on any one subject. I wanted to play a good April Fools trick on you -- my non-existent readers -- but as my satirical muse, Jon Stewart would say: I got nuthin! So instead, I'll leave you with a few home-made MP3s and two pictures of Midnight (who went to the big pond / cheese factory / squirrel-chasing country in the sky last year).

Here's old man Midnight looking at you kid!

Midnight could always make us laugh, no matter how surreal things got. He put up with us for 15 years and we walked hundreds of miles together all over southern Ontario. This was taken years earlier at the southern edge of the Oak Ridges Moraine near Richmond Hill, Ontario. Sadly, this valley has now been cut in half by a 4 lane bridge, the paths have been eroded by ATVs and thousands of new houses are crowding in where the trees used to be.

...and a few MP3s

41 Hours in the Gaping Maw of WalMart

Woe is us. A few weeks ago Skyler Bartels had an idea. The Des Moins, Iowa college student decided he would inspire himself as a writer by spending a week in the bowels of a 24x7 Wal-Mart. Fitted out with only with a debit card and a toothbrush, Bartels was consumed by Wal-Mart for a mere 41 hours before he was spit back out for a second chance at life. This story is remarkable precisely because it is not a story at all, though it has been replicated in hundreds of news outlets around the globe. Even Bartels remarked that he thought the exercise was a failure until he spoke to the Des Moines Register. And then the networks began to call. As did National Public Radio. And a book agent. And a film company.

So was the Wal-Mart experiment a success? Can Bartels take his rightful place within the celebrity pantheon because during March Break he spent 41 hours in a store, watched Chicken Run and took a nap in the garden center? Or was it a failure because it was inane, pointless and boring? Or will it be considered a success if it engenders a book or a movie or an interview with Oprah?

If Bartels' stunt can be compared to placing a canary in a coal mine, it appears that he survived this 41-hour ordeal quite nicely. However, the fact that such an an experiment was even attempted is proof that something vital in us has failed and may already be dying. Or dead.

So woe is us. And woe is U.S.

Truthiness and Fairlessness

Since Stephen Colbert inspired us to think about the meaning of "truthiness", I wanted to be the first to introduce the word "fairlessness". You never know when a word like this may come in handy, but what does it mean? In order to be fairless, one must be fearless about being less than fair. In other words, if you would be fairless, you must blatantly call for, or enact, unfair laws, principles and polices in the name of fairness. Fairlessness abounds in our world, and when ever someone begins a sentence with "We all have to make sacifices..." or "In order to create a level playing field...", you know that you will soon be up to your knees in fairlessness. At least now you have a name for it.

Fairless, adj: describing the quality of being fearless about being less than fair.

Is there a little Dowie in W?

President may be related to 19th century Evangelist

Mar 25, 2006, PenOpticon News - The White House refused to confirm or deny rumors that President George W. Bush is descended from John Alexander Dowie, the controversial evangelist who stormed America with Biblical force in the latter years of the 19th century. According to Dr. Russell Newcome, Dowie was the great uncle of George Herbert Walker Bush. "Dowie founded the town of Zion, Illinois in 1901 and employed Biblical principles to perform thousands of miracles in Chicago", Newcome told the PenOpticon. "He set up numerous Healing Homes in that city during the 1893 World's Fair and is said to have even cured Buffalo Bill Cody's niece. By the end of the Fair, there were sightings of Angels flying over Chicago and Dowie began to appear in public as the prophet Elijah." Though Dowie's ideas were radical, they may have paved the way for Bush's faith-based agenda. [Full story at satire.penopticon.com]

Look who's tending bar!

This "vision" came to me in a dream last night, so I decided I just had to oust the night demons by making this montage. You would have to open the full-size version to decode all of the faces, but here is the basic idea: Tony Blair has been mounted on the wall in a permanent grimace and stares at W, wondering what will happen next. My Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) grins sheepishly at his idol. Like a deer caught in the headlights, our big-headed barkeep stares at deadeye Dick. Guess what Dick is thinking about? God I hope I hope I hope I hope none of this is true.

Sunday evening anger

So Tony Blair is trying to convince himself that he did the right thing by toadying up to George Bush and committing British troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. As reported in CNN:

"If we want to secure our way of life, there is no alternative but to fight for it," he told a joint sitting of the Australian parliament in Canberra on Monday.

Well Tony, "our way of life" seems to be different all over the world. In Afghanistan, mainstream clerics and citizens want to execute a Muslim because he converted to Christianity. George is "troubled" by this. Condi calls President Karzai to explain the unacceptablilty of the situation. In that same country, village elders smiled and chatted with Canadian soldiers and then dispersed instantly (and knowingly?), when a young rebel ran out and slammed an axe into a Canadian soldier's head. And yet:

...in the struggle to defend global values, Blair said there was no prosperity without security, and no security without justice. He said a global alliance should be pushing to defend universal values wherever they were under threat.

Here's the thing. There are no universal values of justice. We can't even enact and apply laws equally and justly within our own countries. Don't pretend that bringing democracy to Iraq or Afghanistan or any other country is an altruistic gift that has no political or economic -- or cultural -- strings attached. Don't pretend that you are not filled with blind arrogance and a firm belief that your values, laws, god and way of life are superior to those of the countries you invade.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that any country that tries to run itself according to the laws of a medieval (or older) religion is a ridiculous enterprise that, when left to itself, will only lead to bloodshed and failure. But such countries should be permited to work out their problems without our "help". Unfortunately, when European and North American interests interfere, the misery of these failing states is usually prolonged. The only way to help is for the keepers of these "universal values" to stop selling arms and chemicals.

George and Tony: if you insist on spreading universal values, call it for what it is: an attempt to forcfully stamp Judeo-Christian-Capitalist values on every other culture on the planet. After all, the New York Times reports that Bush "was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons" according to a confidential memo written by David Manning, Blair's top foreign policy adviser.

Will Iran be the next country to bend over to be freedomized by George and Tony?

A step closer to a cure for T1 Diabetes

Three cheers to Denise Faustman, the innovative Diabetes researcher who has found a way to halt the autoimmune process that destroys pancreatic islet cells in Type I diabetics. So far, her work has focused on diabetic mice, but because her approach involves modulating the immune system, there is good chance it may also work in humans. She has succeeded in reversing diabetes in mice by injecting them with Freund's Complete Adjuvant (FCA), a mixture of water, oil and parts of dead bacteria. Apparently this compound stimulates T cells that attack the pancreas and causes those T cells to self-destruct. Faustman's research also involved transplanting spleen cells into the mice and she found that these cells differentiated into islet cells, allowing the treated mice to produce their own insulin. The big news this week is that three other labratories have now independently validated the first procedure -- the abatement of autoimmune islet destruction. While these labs did not confirm that spleen cells had any effect on producing new islet cells, they did discover that a significant number of tested mice regenerated their own islet cells after the destructive T cells were eliminated. In other words, by teaching the immune system to stop attacking islet cells, these researchers found that many diabetic mice were able to self-repair islet function and produce their own insulin.

This is absolutely fabulous news. A cure for diabetes would make millions of people happy and would free up billions of dollars that could be spent to tackle other diseases and global issues. It just might create an avalanche of good! With significant help from the Iacocca Foundation, Faustman is gearing up for human trials of this treatment. If you would like to help out, please donate a few dollars to help fund Faustman's work at the Massachusetts General Hospital Diabetes Unit.

It's important to realize that despite the promise shown in Faustman's work, her efforts have garnered no interest or money from large pharmaceutical companies or from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Some have accused the JDRF of refusing funding due to a political bias that favours stem cell research. If that is the case, Faustman's work will rely even more on individual donations if it is to continue.

Have you Weboggled?

I’ve never been a big fan of computer games. Perhaps it’s because my brother and I were teenagers when the first TV “Pong” game came on the market. We had one, and for a few months we played against each other and against “the box” for hours every day. The games were limiting, but they did help us channel a bad case of sibbling rivalry into a safe, bruise-free virtual space. In any case, once you've experienced the monochromatic excitement of a 5-hour Pong marathon, modern 3D games with their billions of polygons and complex shaders just don't hold much interest. Or maybe it's just that I truly suck at 'em. In any case, the video game era has left me in the dust.

And then there was Weboggle.

It's a great web adaptation of Boggle. It's simple and elegantly done. It's fun and it's free. But the competition is fierce. You can take everyone on or you can play in teams. If you love words, you should PLAY THIS GAME.

Pick a handle and attach it to a sharp pointy idea

There is nothing deep about playing Weboggle, but a while back I was musing over the game handles players were choosing. The freedom to adopt any handle allows WebBoggle users to assert a kind of agency, to link themselves with a political movement, a trend, an emotion or just about anything. The screen on the left is fairly typical: players include “Bush War Devil”, “Kerry is Satan”, “AWOL Bush”, “Go SOX Go Kerry”, etc. Some players log in with web site addresses (hoping other users will visit their URLs). Others use self-disparaging (or aggrandizing) names. Nothing new here -- the web has always been about alter egos and virtual (risk free) grandstanding. For me the interesting aspect of using these handles is in linking the player’s message with their skill level. A pro-Bush player who wins consistently seems to mean more than a similar name that languishes in the bottom half of the score box. I don’t really believe this, but it “feels” like it is true. In Colbertian terms, there seems to be a quality of truthiness in Weboggle handles. I could add that it seems as if anti-Bush players seem land in the top five positions more frequently. But this could be my own subjective bias -- I am blinded by the truthiness. Perhaps all of this says something about the culture of winning that permeates our world and what it does done to our language. We compress complex sets of ideas into “platforms”, talking points, sound bites, slogans and even single words: flip-flop, AWOL, global test, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a single word can be worth a million votes. Or so it would seem. On the other hand, looking for meaning in Weboggle scores is probably at least as silly the thought that exercising one’s “agency” by playing Weboggle could ever be a meaningful political act.

I needed a small (Canadian) chuckle so...

Ok, it's a very small chuckle. Rick Mercer of The Mercer Report fame recently challenged anyone with too much time on their hands to create an image that takes Canada's Prime Minister out of one strange context and insert him in another.

On the left we have the original: Prime Minister Harper poses in Zombie-like fashion with what appears to be either a tin of Plutonium or a lovely cheesecake. It wanted a bit of symbolism, so I placed Harper, a staunch westerner, on a rusty tractor so he could take David Emmerson's head to market. Not to be confused with Ralph Waldo, this Emmerson is a former Liberal M.P. who crossed the floor to join Harper's cabinet about 25 seconds after being re-elected. In Canada, some politicians are bought and sold like bushels of wheat. U.S. congress members are a little more expensive, I'm told. This is old news, of course, but it can be legitimately be repeated over and over out of respect for Emerson's constuents who were kicked in their political pearly whites by his defection.

If I was really trying to be fair (ha!), I would have completed the picture by placing Belinda Stronach in front of the tractor. Harper would be unlikely to brake for a Convervative member who defected to the Liberals and quite a few boomer Tories living in Newmarket, Ontario would be cheering him on.

On the otherhand, at least Belinda had the grace to defect before any votes were actually cast -- and she was still elected.

Spring! Sproing! Sprung!

Another gawdawful February has finally run its course -- though this Feb was more like a typical southern Ontario Jan and Jan was more like a Mar or an Apr. Clearly someone is mixing up the months. Could it be us? In any case, if you live in a northern climate then I hope this Chestnut-sided warbler gives you some hope for the coming spring. Two years ago I was lucky enough to spend some time around Pt Pelee, Ontario during spring migration. On the day this was taken, two large groups of birders were standing on either side of me, straining to see a fairly rare Golden Wing warbler. They couldn't understand what I was looking at because I was very close to the Golden Wing and not looking at it. My view of that bird was blocked, but this little guy decided to pose on a branch just a few feet from from me. Bayootifool plumage, wot? Just goes to prove again that the most beautiful things imaginable are often closer to us than we think and that learning how to see is as difficult as it is important. I keep relearning this lesson every time we tramp around the edges of forests, wetlands and lakes looking for birds. Annie Dillard points out in her essay, Seeing: "My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head; I'm bony and dense; I see what I expect". Bony and dense. She can say that again.