fiona was here
wishing she had a clever tagline

Apparently, France agrees with me, sort of.

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.

The avacodo is a fruit high in caloric value which is unbelievably disgusting when eaten under-ripe. They ripen best, allegedly, in a paper bag (like bananas, which taste unbelievably disgusting in a similar way when under-ripe) but I am reserving judgment about this method until all my avocadoes have ripened.

A baby cantaloupe looks like a little watermelon to the untrained eye (although when she developed her weirdly scaly exterior I should have known she was not an ugly duckling, just a cantaloupe). Wendy was eaten for breakfast and enjoyed thoroughly despite her smallness and unexpected orange interior.

Technorati Tags: produce, avocadoes, cantaloupe, watermelon

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

The cholorphyll in the watermelon's leaves has suffered that tragic fate that begins to befall all plant greenery this time of year. Despite the yellowed foliage, Wendy continues to hang tenaciously to her vine, suspended from her pantyhose hammock. She is still only 24 cm but I remain hopeful that she will grow a little more before she finally succumbs to Ottawa's cold fall nights.
Technorati Tags: wendy, watermelon

Wendy now measures 24 centimetres around and her skin has become weirdly scaly. I think perhaps its too wet for the poor dear. And probably too cold as well. She measured 23 cms last Thursday night so clearly her growth has slowed considerably.

Soon we will hack her open in sacrifice to our pagan god!

There is currently a watermelon plant growing in the garden and it makes me wish I owned a digital camera so bad. The plant grew out of some compost in a rather random way and had originally been judged a cucumber vine. There is only one watermelon on it so far and I doubt that there will be more, this being September in Ottawa and watermelons being best suited for life in South Central Africa where it is considerably hotter.

The one fruit I suspect the plant will ever bear, is currently about 20cm in circumference and furry like a tennis ball. I am tempted to name it Wendy in an attempt to encourage to grow to its full potential so her flesh may be enjoyed by one and all but am trying to hold myself in check.

Technorati Tags: wendy, watermelon

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

The latest news about Karla is her continued inability to discern the nice folks from those about to stab her in the back on her own. Part of me, frankly, is starting to feel a tiny bit sorry for her. I mean, it must be really awful to be that stupid. She seems to try so hard and still be completely insufficient somehow. Like with her French: she's clearly studied very hard to improve on the spotty education such matters warrant in Southern Ontario, but she sounds so like a Yankee the way she chews through her vowels that it's unbearable to listen to all her new found vocabulary anyway.
Tagnorati: homolka, karlahomolka, stupidity

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?