fiona was here
wishing she had a clever tagline

So Kofi Annan says, "Stop reprinting the cartoons." Frankly, I'm of the opinion that everybody should print the ones that make fun of the Jyllands-Posten's desire to undertake the project in the first place accompanied by a series of editorials by anyone and everyone on why this sort of deliberate attempt to antagonize another's personal beliefs is childish and offensive. Interestngly, I felt differently about the matter before I actually saw the cartoons (which are here, if you're curious too.)

The fact that human beings still continue to be so violently rabid about religion makes me think it's time we started treating religion like the addictive drug that it is and start regulating who we allow to dispense it. I mean: any whacko is allowed to trot off to seminary or imam school or an online course and then we're expected to respect thier opinion just because they're a "religious authority". Someone explain to me how that makes any sense.
Technorati Tags: religion, regulation, cartoons

Dear Stephen,

OK, I take it back, maybe you are likeable enough that a sufficient number of people would vote for you. I think I even saw some movement in that frozen helmet of hair you insist on sporting. Perhaps you ran out of product and had to go au naturel; whatever it is, it's working.

Don't do anything crazy now.

Best of luck,
fiona

technorati tags: harper, stephenharper, hair

Dear Stephen,
Here's the thing: you need to resign the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada and you need to do it now. I know you have some great ideas and lovely leadership skills and could do a great job of leading this county to new heights but, while I don't have anything against you personally, you are incapable of ever being likable enough that a sufficient number of people would actually vote for your party when they know it would cause the Prime Minister to be somebody so lacking in fun and charm as yourself.

Please understand that this is nothing personal. I'm sure you're a really fun guy when you've had a couple beers and let down your hair; in fact, the next time you have a free hour, gimme a call and the beers are on me. We can have a stimulating converstion about the differences between what we feel we project and what people percieve.

So, if you really want to save the country, this is what you must do: call Peter and tell him it's his turn to lead the party to victory, then you step down to the position of deputy leader. You have to do it now, though, before any more time passes. We can't have five more years of Paul Fucking Martin, Stephen, we just can't. Please.

Yours,
fiona

p.s. I'm sorry about suggesting that Peter should push you in front of a bus. Please don't hold it against me; we really should go for beers.

Technorati Tags: harper, stephenharper, canada

I seem to be having this problem with chronic depression. I had assumed, for the longest time, that it was simply a situational response to the medical tragedy that calls itself my body. I mean, who wouldn't be depressed if they felt too shitty to live life? But apparently I'm really fighting an uphill battle here because I have recently discovered that the same protein that's making my poor colon and fascia inflamed, also causes depression.

1. The relation of severity of depressive symptoms to monocyte-associated proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines in apparently healthy men
2. Cytokine-Associated Emotional and Cognitive Disturbances in Humans
3. Acute inflammation and negative mood: Mediation by cytokine activation

Fucking ass. No wonder I'm ready to throw myself under a bus. Goddamn body.

When I was in high school I was a fat girl. Not frighteningly large, just too well-padded to warrant male attention. Every day I struggled to eat as little as I could in the assumption that this would help. It never did. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't eat so little that it resulted in actual weight loss. Then at the age of twenty, I developed a painful chronic intestinal disease and puked up nearly half my body weight.

It was sort of nice at first. Suddenly, I was thinner than I'd ever dreamed and I didn't even have to use any kind of will power to maintain this new weight. Any superfluous pounds were quickly burned off by the constant low level fever. When I would tell people about the weight loss they were all pretty much in agreement: at least I didn't have to struggle with my weight anymore. A crappy silver plate lining for my diseased cloud, if you will.

It's not very nice anymore though. I spend all day, every day consuming as much food as I can and, inexplicably, continue to lose weight. I ate so much yesterday that it physically hurt yet my weight has gone down another pound. I worry sometimes that I will weigh less and less until I am so light that someone will blow me away in an exhalation of frustration, inadvertenly sending me floating into the sky. Which is ridiculous of course, because my heart would give out far before then, either from frustration or lack of nutrients.

If there are any anorexics out there who aren't very good at it and would like to trade bodies, feel free to email me.
Technorati Tags: weight loss, inadvertent

Earlier this week (or last week depending on how your mental calendar works) when Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S.'s Gulf Coast, I thought to myself: "What a great opporunity for Dubya to boost his approval rating!" After all, the man's incapable of leading, but he looks really good in a crisis, and surely one of his advisors would have pointed out this chance for him to reinvigorate his floundering approval rating.

Only, I guess his advisors are as stupid and short-sighted as he is, so instead the governmental ineptitude continued and now a bunch of people are dead. Which is bound to make people angry and start looking for reasons and somewhere to lay blame.

I'm finding it hard to stomach the claims of racism though. It seems to me that any time there is any opportunity for somebody like Al Sharpton to claim racism, he will do so quick and loudly with little real evidence. The lack of help didn't stem from the colour of thier skin but from the thinness of thier pocketbooks. After all, why bother rescuing someone who's never going to donate anything to your political party? Why help the economic group that's least likely to vote for you? Rich black people would have been lifted out in Air Force One for Dubya is blind your ethinicity so long as he can see your money. There isn't that much space inside his shrivelled, alchohol-pickled brain to accomodate complicated biases based on inherited genetic characteristics, hatred of the poor is simple and uncomplicated and doesn't confuse him.

But nobody can say it. Because that sort of hatred is still tacitly okay in America. There's still a notion that poor people have it coming anyway for being lazy. And if they'd just stop wasting thier money on unnecessary things and work hard every single day and go to mass on Sunday and be honest upright cititzens then they, too, can rise through the ranks of society. Like some fucking Horatio Alger story. Only America doesn't work like that anymore.
Tagnorati: aftermath, horatioalger, katrina, racism

I went in to work this week with the full intention of doing what I usually do, namely: the least that is really required of me. I feel perfectly justified in this half-assed attitude because nobody ever takes me or my library seriously. People have come to regard the library, my library, my beloved precious library, as the place where the extra printer toner is kept.

However, today I discovered that not only do they not take me seriously, they actually seem to be mocking me. OK, they're probably not but somebody, or a couple of people, took out subscriptions to journals, terribly expensive scientific journals, to which we are already subscribed and deposited them in my inbox. As though the concept of a library, the notion of having one copy and sharing it like good little researchers, had not even occurred to them. Apparently, my library and I are pointless in this person's (or people's) world.

But no longer. I've decided since it's my own damn fault these people don't take it seriously, because I neglect to make them with my half-assed approach, I'm going to make them. I will seize their superfluous subscriptions and cancel them and set up routing lists and put these offenders at the bottom of the list. How dare they doubt my power?

No, I'm not really. It was so easy a chimp could have done it. I'm still proud of myself for thinking to bother with doing it the way I did though. I'm finally getting the hang of these nested templates.

Edited to say:
If you're frustrated by the lack of Karla Homolka in this post, go here instead.

Karla Homolka's kind of scary and I really wouldn't want her living next door to me but if she's got to be let out (and she has to be because a deal is a deal even when we don't want it to be) I think we should give her her own reality show.

I'm thinking half an hour, once a week, because she's not really all that interesting and we don't want to have to expend too much time on her; but with a webcam so we can get up to the minute breaking news, when necessary. Ideally on the CBC becuase they could make it seem classy but more likely on CTV (or perhaps one of the American networks could run with it. I haven't worked out the details yet). The purpose of this is two-fold:

1. it allows us all to keep a fairly close eye on a nasty nasty woman who's going to do Something Unspeakable to someone as soon as she can find someone to lead her around by the nose
2. the positive reinforcement of constant camera time might reduce her desire to do anything Unspeakable for fear of losing the spotlight. This could be exploited with stipulations that cancellation will follow any trouble with the law

We could have her in the palm of our hands. The tiniest mis-step and we nail her ass to the wall.

Tagnorati: homolka, karlahomolka, realitytelevision, behaviourmodification

I hate my pharmacy. I have for the longest time. The only reason they got my business in the first place was because they had a lesser dispensing fee than anywhere else. But I don't like them for a myriad of reasons.

• The staff keeps changing so anytime they get to know me, new people suddenly appear who have no idea who I am which bothers me because it makes the world a less stressful place when your presence is intrinsically understood and you don't have to explain who you are all the time.
• They never seem willing to go above and beyond the call of duty until I go in person and make them do so; over-achievement is a quality I embrace in my service professionals and none of them have displayed it since Fenton, my favorite pharmacy assistant ever who deserted me years ago.
• And when the price of one of my medications goes up unexpectely, they don't warn me or even mention it until I query thier seemingly random price fluctuations.
• In order to get a refill on a prescription I have to navigate a horrible electronic touch-tone system that sucks up far too much of my time with it's assine requests for more numbers.
• But the clincher is that the pharmacy is part of Loblaws (who, I'm secretly convinced are evil and going to take over the world but make a fine chocolate chip cookie) which makes me feel guilty for supporting an evil empire (although they aren't evil on a Wal-Mart scale).

So today, I had to go and visit them in person and berate them for not making a greater effort to fill my prescription. It is, they keep telling me, "backordered", as though that absolves them of any responsibility to talk about the matter. After making them phone other pharmacies to find another place that could fill the prescription, I left (a line had started to form behind me).

When I got home I called the little pharmacy down the road and talked to the pharmacist there (who actually answered the phone himself. Physically answered the phone. In this day and age, if you can believe it) and asked him about my medication. He too was fresh out but he very pleasantly told me the full story of my desired drug and what the company was saying and how they kept changing the date for more production and when it might come in and what pharmacy was I using now? He caught me off guard and I told him the truth and felt about three inches tall. And then he asked me my name and I know if I go in tomorrow, he'll remember.

Tagnorati:pharmacies, pharmacy, loblaws, guilt,