Nonsense, in some sense.

I'll be making an appearance shortly. Sorry for the absence, there's been goats to shave.

Save us business men, you warriors for freedom

I long for the day when men of business are in control of everything. When that happens we can be sure that only the best goods and services will be available. When business men compete they always have at the forefront of their minds: "How can I do better?" And this competitive spirit, with one business man struggling to better another business man, will undoubtedly result in only the best quality goods and services for us consumers. Be gone vile governments, with your corpulent inefficiencies and bureaucratic waste! Let the humble man of the market in so that he might offer us something better. Thinking about a world run by men in the uniform of the suit brings a tear to my eye and a boner to my pants, so excited do I get by the thought.

You see, business men can only think about one thing: Quality. They wouldn't put to market any old piece of shit just to make money. They are guided by principles, indeed, the highest moral principles one can fathom in these faulty human reasoning devices we call brains. It's the sacred right to buy and sell, because ultimately life consists in just this. When I wake up in the morning I think to myself, "What goods and services will I sample today?" Sometimes I even think, "Perhaps I have a good or service that I might humbly put to market. Perhaps, if the demand for my product is there, I too can contribute to this heaven on earth of buying and selling."

But you know, human society is still far from perfect. Alas, many, many business men have their greatest dreams thwarted by obsolete notions of fairness and justice embodied by the nation state. The nation state checks their freedoms, constrains their ability to offer the best products possible. If only they could better serve the consuming folk, but no, governments will not allow it. Governments say, "The world is not your playground business men, it is not yours to manipulate like play-doh, not everything is about ledgers filled with black and red ink." But it is! That is why governments are on the downward slope to obsolescence. The time will come when they are represented by a skeleton in a museum, a museum that relies not on public endowments, but on the clever outwitting of one business man over another. What wonders will exist when packaged by the competitive market men? The great, unknown future will be one where men of business compete to their little hearts' content, filling, absolutely stuffing the market of society with unimaginable and necessary products to make life worth living.

Done been thinking about beans

It wasn't the first time I've been outwitted by a can of beans and I fear, alas, that it won't be the last. I've had some experience with the little bastards, I've opened my share of cans over the years. There have been failures yes, but also great successes. There were times when the cans opened as if by magic. Like Ali Baba I have learned secret commands. I've crept up to them, "Now I've got you, you beany little bastards!" - and with a murmur the container's feeble lid peels back like foil, exposing the simple legumes to the lights glinting from my greedy eyes. Other times haven't been so easy, such as when opening a can requires the full measure of my strength. At these times sweat pores out of my pores and I have to be careful not to let my body's salty brine from spoiling the beans. Most of the time, whether by good fortune or great effort, I do manage to open the can and then go on to commit all sorts of heinous acts with and to the beans. It's a free world, each man's beans are his own to do with as he pleases. I counter those who would say, "let the beans be!" with "Mind your own beans and keep your pathetic, undernourished opinions about the beans of others to yourself."

So it was that I with no idea of the struggle that was to come, took up a can of chickpeas and set about working its top free. At first everything went along smoothly, as events like this often do. I lept to the cupboard and found my trusty can opener, gave it a quick inspection to ensure this invaluable tool would yet again be capable of meeting the challenge. It's humble mechanisms seemed ready as ever to carry out my will, the small cutting wheel turned without a squeak, its pliers appearing fully able to grip the tin's lip without trouble. The tool glistened in the afternoon sunlight so brightly that tears formed in my eyes, I couldn't handle its gleaming nor its beauty. So without any sense of pending doom, I made for the chickpeas and sunk my tool's cutting wheel deep into its waxy metallic top hat. As usual, so far so good. I began to turn the key and the cutting proceeded along its circumnavigation.

It was then that I realized that I had tried to fly too high, my wings began to melt and soon I was plummeting past the descending rungs of hell into its most vile and painful depths. I was thwarted by logic, I caught a bad case of Zeno's Paradoxitis. With each turn of the opener's key, the cutting wheel ate into the distance between its starting point and its goal. Slightly smaller intervals remained with each twist so that eventually a slight fraction of a hair's breadth was all that was holding fast the tin's stubborn seal. But I was not able to snip the ribbon, because with every turn of the key, the wheel moved halfway towards its object, and though the distance became increasingly minute there was always half the remaining distance to cover first. No matter how small the gap, it had a halfway point, forever. Not even my trusty electron microscope (note accompanying image) could see an end to this interminable turning and cutting. After many days turning and cutting tiny distances, I cried out to the heavens, "Chickpeas be damned!" and in my confused rage squeezed the nasty tin to kill it.

Just then the top popped off! It clanged and clamored as it hit the kitchen floor, and the sound reminded me of the ringing of bells that mark momentous occasions. Streamers and confetti fell from the ceiling, and a parade of well wishers suddenly appeared, they were patting me on the back and congratulating me on my accomplishment. Many noted the supreme skill I had displayed carrying out my task. No matter. I had a chili to prepare and so with little further ceremony I dumped the foul garbanzos into the pot. Such are the wonders of this life.

All filler, precious little killer

Something hilarious is happening to the British art scene. As it turns out, Damien Hirst, arguably the richest and by that standard most "successful" artist who ever lived, cannot paint. Many, many people cannot paint, I happen to be one of them, but then all of us non-painters have not managed to hypnotize the world's high-art culture with our every move. Even if you think you've never heard of Hirst, you have. He's famous for taking the classic "ready-made" or "found object" concept to its extreme. How about his diamond-encrusted human skull? Or his pharmacy in the Tate Gallery, calling it - wait for it - "Pharmacy." I suppose spectators were expected to like consider the fact that like pharmaceuticals were like super prominent in our lives and stuff. By no means a lazy man, Hirst has produced innumerable similar installations, entire series of preserved animals, including his famous tiger shark which he blithely called "The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living." If he had asked for my help in naming the work I would have offered, "What's it called at the museum?" or "Preliminary remarks toward obtaining a refund."

One of Hirst's most celebrated approaches to art is his tongue-in-cheek take on the whole concept of artist's apprentice. Skinny dipping in the contemporary shallows, he literally phoned in his instructions to a team of fledgling artists who then painted according to his specifications. How these conversations went I can only imagine: "Well just splatter some color in the middle, yeah, then add the butterflies. There's got to be so many butterflies. It's a fucking butterfly party, yeah." Now, in his early 40s, the mighty artist has decided to crank it up a notch by actually painting something himself. And what this man has painted is crap. It would seem that the emperor of contemporary art is not only without his silken, one-of-a-kind embroidered robes, but is in fact wearing little more than natty, poop-streaked nut huggers.

True, so true. But what of more ordinary expressions of vacuous self-promotion? Recently, I found myself surrounded by a great herd of folk notable for their evident relative financial prosperity. Expensive clothes and lifestyles abounded, were on display and though no particular runway commanded attention, it was indeed a fashion show. Nothing wrong with that necessarily. It's nice to look nice. But as I floated among the currents at their impressively shoe-ed feet, it seemed obvious to me that very fine rules and regulations were being followed. It was not so much expressing wealth to standout, but expressing wealth to fit it. I thought that having money enabled more and better opportunities to locate and express one's individuality. Not so, like columns of soldiers the well-dressed wealthy displayed their matching uniforms. "Do these people collect Damien Hirst?" I didn't ask but now insinuate that I had.

To the dictionary: Pretension - 'Act of claiming or alleging.' Though by different means, both Hirst and these expensively dressed folk achieve a high level of pretension. They claim and allege that what they do and what they have stands as extremely significant, one for the ages, a monument to their ascendancy to the top of pile. When Hirst says, "Look at my fucking butterflies," I hear him alleging, "Everything's crap, but have you seen these choice turds I'm selling?" And when people with large quantities of expendable income (or savings) strut around in expensive clothing, exuding an attitude of "How does the world turn without knowledge of my wardrobe?" I think to my self, "How does the world turn so heavily laden with such idiotic twittishness?" To some it might make sense to value a person based on the clothes he happened to have noticed and purchased, but brand-name labels should not be given the same cultural value as literary works. As the blooming revelation of Hirst's mediocrity teaches us, you can fake it until you make it, but when you make it don't forget that you're also faking it.

Dismantling Democracy

It's time to dismantle democracy because obviously no one knows what it is. For some reason we (that's the Western "we") revere this political concept as the equivalent to freedom. Whenever freedom is in question, it is a challenge to democracy, and the word "Nazis" inevitably gets pulled into the equation regardless of the of the situation.


On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the Soviet regime, the question of what democracy is becomes increasingly valid. The material shared by Batty and Erasmus during September discussing the protests in Washington against health care pose as the poster-child of western political and historical ignorance. And now that the American president Obama hasokayed the health care process, will these Americans now find themselves in an undemocratic situation? Has freedom been unfairly yanked from their grasp? Are they now slaves to their country?


The nearly forgotten Canadian Coalition discussion [link to follow] of this past winter was an event which challenged the taken-for-granted political and historical intelligence ofCanadians . As Canadians we revere ourselves as vastly more intelligent and politically aware than our southern neighbours, which doesn't say a whole lot. It also gives a country, where the majority of the population cannot name the first Prime Minister, more credit than it deserves (hint: he's on the ten-dollar bill, yes, that's the purple one).


The arguments you'd hear in the halls of one of Canada's top universities following this political debate were astounding. The disgust openly voiced by those supporting the Conservative government, identifying the dissatisfied Canadians who were questioning Prime Minister Harper's adequacy as nothing more than leftist pot-smoking hippies who simply couldn't deal with the fact that Harper was voted in and that's simply how democracy works, was excruciatingly ignorant. Yes. That is how democracy works. But not how a Constitutional Monarchy works. Guess which one Canada is.


And finally we have the Iranian protests following the summer election. To think that Westerners, especially Americans, have the audacity to claim that a country with rigged elections is simply not prepared for democracy. Does George Bush ring any bells? George Bush in 2000? Florida recount? Anything?! Yes - the Iranian situation is a fantastic example of inhumane andunhumanitarian behaviour. But can we safely deduce that part of the Western reaction to this has been clearly led by our safe assumption that anything Middle-eastern has been cleverly concocted to deny the rights of individuals while we sit in the Free West?


Now I'm not a political scientist. I hate politics. But I will try to give an accurate definition of democracy. Democracy is built around the freedom to have knowledge of who you are voting for ... but a democracy is also run by a tyrant. It's a "one-man" show and it doesn't mean personal freedom under a regime.


The Cold War is over and yet we continue to divide the world into two parts which contrast one another. But this continuation of duality is a figment of our imaginations. The world can no longer be divided in two - it's like a playground where one bully picks out its foe. It worked during the Cold War because the playground was equally divided out of fear - the smaller countries where threatened into giving their lunch money and cookies to the two superpowers. But once one of the bullies fell to the other, the playground has become a colossal mess. Some of the countries still hand over the lunch money, but they can't really figure out who to give it to. There are no longer two superpowers - there is a contest as to who will reach this status among the previously minor countries, while other countries have become bored with the whole game and are playing four-square and fooling around with the tether ball.


The west still insists on dividing the world according to democratic and undemocratic nations. But how long will it take for us to understand that perhaps what the west is advocating isn't exactly democracy, and that this definition of democracy is actually applying to other political concepts. The point is that we need to properly define what we are and what we want, and to cease concocting definitions when we find it suitable.

I thought it was a wink

So I was at "work" the other day, "working" among other things, when all of a sudden an aged, derelict man approached me. At first I didn't notice him. He shuffled up so quietly, like a stalking animal, and being that I was fully engrossed in my considerable labors, I remained focused on polishing the floor's square tiles with a soap-drenched mop. It wasn't until I heard his unique mixture of mumbles, grunts and words when I realized I was sharing a moment with a famous local crazy person. He is a very tall, very old man with a striking beard, which were it not atop the chin of 'ole Wacky McWackerton, would no doubt be cared for with fragrant oils in preparation for his duties as Santa in shopping malls and other shopping malls. But no, his beard does not smell of fragrant oils and because I do not have the nerves, guts or courage to lean up and with my nostrils drink in his earthy, rustic odor, I cannot with a clean conscience speculate as to what his gnarled, ragged beard stinks of. Suffice to say that it stinks, probably.

When I finally did gaze into his warm, blue eyes, which as always were flitting unpredictably as a hummingbird gathering nectar, I also noticed that a stream of coffee was working its way down the fine textures of his beard, collecting into plump droplets, losing their grip and falling away, way down to the floor. As fortune would have it, the mop in my hands was designed expressly for the purpose of cleaning such unwanted droplets, and so with each splatter of milky coffee, I was there to mop it up. For sometime we stood like this, a drop of his beard river falling like a shooting star to our feet, and there like a steward to the gods was I with my mop, doggedly wiping it away. All the while McWackerton was counseling me with his usual mixture of mumbles and words. It would go like this, "You know if Gretta would ghms, sdsdi sfdf.... (?)" with each sentence, though begun in good order, would trickle its way into oblivion, much like the lonely droplets of coffee which fell from his bobbing chin.

I thought that this interaction was leading nowhere, I thought, "Man he's crazy," and I had made up my mind to step around him and continue my mopping duties. Just as I made to leave I felt his surprisingly soft touch against my right hand, at first two fingers which soon scissored as though to grip me more firmly. The thing was, his grip was as gentle as a newborn's, in fact I've held the hands of a few infants whose tiny fingers appeared to reflect a desire to crush bones, so violently and aggressively did their miniature knuckles contract. His touch was of an earthbound angel, indescribably gentle, and were it not out of a fear (irrational as per usual) of contracting herpes or AIDS, I might have stood there with him for eternity, as his bony, chalk white fingers lightly played a tune against my hand. But then, as thoughts of vagrancy and disease began to throb in my mind and I made to pull my hand away, he held out to me a gift, a coffee mug. Behind him I could see where a similar mug was missing and realized that the 'ole madman had, probably with a similar delicate gentleness, picked it up and brought it to me.

Now I understood why he was speaking in tongues at me, why he was softly touching my hand, it was because he wanted to give me a present. Actually, it turned out that he wanted to give me the mug only for safe-keeping, it was actually meant for someone else. Try as I might I could not make clear who it was for, the beginning of each of his sentences starting off promisingly would invariably lead into an opaque mystery towards the middle, and in the end he emitted only the sound of winds through empty forests and worms burrowing beneath our feet. So he left me with the mug, a gentle and sincere smile, and what I think was a wink, as though to seal our secret. He shuffled out, his pants low around his buttocks, just like the young men who ape the culture of poor-urban America circa 1993. Bon voyage McWackerton, till we touch again.