Hope

The snow drops fight their way through frozen earth and a mantle of snow to prove that Spring has finally wrested control from Old Man Winter in this little piece of paradise.

The crocuses (crocii?)give us a splash of colour as they too appear from beneath the cast off leaves of the maples and oaks.

The spring garden is truly a wonder. It doesn’t matter who is at 24 Sussex or the White House. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the economy is. It doesn’t matter whether you are dealing with personal success or great tragedy. Year after year the plants sense it’s time, put on their flashiest outfits, stage the grand entrance, and grace us with their presence for oh such a fleeting time.

 

 

Yeah, that would be it….

Every so often I get the desire to read some mind-numbing pulp fiction for a change. This time I picked up Terminal Freeze, by Lincoln Child. I had never read anything of his so I thought it worth a try.

The general premise is that a team of researchers discovers an ancient cat-like animal embedded in the northern ice. The block of ice containing the animal is cut out and stored in a locked wooden vault, to be shipped south. The cat is stolen from the vault by way of a hole cut in the bottom of the container. One of the researchers determines that the hole was cut from the inside and not the outside, leading to this dialogue:

Marshall glanced at Faraday. “You know what this means?”

Faraday nodded. “It means whoever stole the cat knew the combination to the vault.”

Child must be an Unger fan.

Fox News?

With all the brouhaha over the recent Fox News Red Eye segment, this seemed timely.

(Source: Page-A-Day Calendar, March 25, 2009)

No one gets out alive

It’s been a couple of years, so time again for one of my favourite rants.

In today’s Ottawa Citizen  the lead sentence in a story about the health risks associated with eating too much red meat states, “Eating large amounts of red or processed meat increases the risk of dying.” Later on the reporter says that people who “eat about four ounces of red meat per day … had a higher risk for overall death.” Even the study’s author, a scientist who should know better, claimed that “the consumption of red and processed meat was associated with a modest increase in total mortality.”

Since the mortality rate for the human species is, as far as we know, 100%, that would be an increase to … what? 105% of all people will die? 110%?

Now obviously that’s not what the study’s authors intended. Clearly diet can affect longevity, and it can be a determining factor for disease and eventually the cause of death, but diet choices will never change your “risk of dying”.

I just wish that they’d get it right for once. Is that too much to ask?

Conservatives help you pay less tax.

It’s true. And to prove it, I got this handy-dandy 14-page guide to tax savings in the mail today, complements of Cheryl Gallant, one of the more useless Con backbenchers on the Hill.

Basically it’s more Conservative Party propaganda touting their “Tax Cuts for Everyone” and “Tax Cuts for Hard Working People”. Every page assures us that “Families save with Conservatives” and lists as tax cuts such items as: medical expenses, child care expenses, GST tax credit, capital cost allowance for farmers, education tax credit, and other tax policies that were in place years before the Cons took power. Well it’s not the first, and won’t be the last, time they take credit for the work of others.

Calls in to Gallant’s constituency office asking if this was funded by the Party or by the Government have not been returned.

Teasing…

We awaken to clear blue skies. Even at 7 AM the sun warms the room and holds the promise of a beautiful spring day.

But those are simply appearances, wishes. The actual temperature outside is –10, driven to –20 with the chill of a brisk north wind. Snow remains deep on the gardens, and ice on the shaded parts of the driveway. But for the bitterness of the wind, we could still be skating on the lake.

It has been this way for days. Spring continues to tease and tempt, but so far has failed to deliver the goods. Discouraging, to say the least, for those of us suffering the symptoms of spring fever.

We are all connected

In 1990, a young news photographer, Tom Hanson, was covering the Oka Crisis in Quebec when he took this photo. The subject was Richard Nicholas, a Mohawk warrior waving his rifle while standing atop an overturned Sûreté du Québec police van. The two men never met.

On March 10, Tom Hanson, aged 41, collapsed while playing hockey in Ottawa and died shortly after. That very same day, Richard Nicholas, also aged 41, died in a motor vehicle accident in Quebec.

We are all connected in ways impossible to fathom, and last Tuesday one such connection was shattered by tragedy, 19 years after two very different men briefly crossed paths.

Photo: Tom Hanson