Spirits

My nephew, a fan of London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, tells me that Boris did something good. Not only was he cycling, but he also saw off some scum buckets who were attacking a woman.
Well done Boris, on both counts.
However, one swallow does not a summer make.
I suppose he could be given some kind of international award though, and that might encourage him to become a good person.

Sleepy sent me a link from Auntie's website, about Spirit Bears and how they have survived by being less visible to salmon, and thus more successful at catching them. There is an absolutely brilliant video attached to this article.

I really don't understand. The RCMP have arrested and charged an immigrant in Ontario, with war crimes related to the Rwandan genocide. This is an outrage, it means he must have lied on his immigration form. I specifically had to sign to say I had never been involved in a genocide. OR...maybe he didn't lie but they don't look at the forms properly until later.

Sky

Hands up anyone who's currently having to work in similar temperatures to those endured by Satan's little helpers. And that's just my office. I'm lucky enough to be able to open a window. Grieves me to have to do so, rather than turn the thermostat down, but that's all the control I have. But for most of the day I am either outside or can find some reason to be so.

Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall are here in BC now. Victoria today, Vancouver tomorrow.
I wonder if they might pop into Ikea tomorrow for a plate of meatballs, or just to look at the cushion covers. OR....get a few tasteful Chrimbo decs for their little pile in Gloucestershire. If so, this could be my chance to persuade them to buy a nice condo here from which they can trainee rule the Dominion.

Good Job

Most times, I find the French on products, more accurate a description than the English, but some biscuits caught my eye in Save-On today. The English name - 'Ginger Kids' huh, the French, 'les petits gingembres' huh, huh.

Today the Calgary Flames hockey team have been heavily criticised for having the Swine Flu vaccine ahead of other people. And yet just over a week ago, the government were fretting over how to persuade everyone to get the jab. Indeed, I overheard Bozo arguing with another friend who thought the government should just have the right to force people to get the injection. So, it seems to me that one good way of persuading people, especially a hockey obsessed people, is to get your hockey players to be vaccinated.
Sometimes we behave like the townsfolk of Springfield.

On the radio, the manager, coach, whatever, of the German winter Olympics team was saying there was no need, it - H1N1 - would all blow over long before the competitions. What I couldn't quite catch was his name, it sounded like 'Wolfuck' or 'Wolfart'.

Luckily, we have the tour of Canada by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall to distract us from H1N1. Oh no, wait. Every time we see them, a comment is always made about how they are shaking hands without gloves, a high risk activity. Prince Charles also stalwartly doesn't wear an overcoat. This impresses people. Yesterday, some little man in a small town in Newfoundland, after Charles had given a short speech, said,
'Good job'.
My toes curled.

Why do we always start eating our dinner when 'Bones' is on? They are always cutting up the MOST disgusting cadavres whilst I'm cutting up my food.

Across the road from our house, there is a house which has had red and green Christmas fairy lights up since Thanksgiving. Red and green. They are the old-fashioned energy vampire type. But then this man is barking. I mean he is literally barking. When I took Whisky for his walk the other day, the man was winding two other dogs up by standing on his lawn and barking at them, they were seriously wound up, and their owner was trying to drag them away.

This evening I went for my squishogram. Very efficient, friendly and professional service. Having been through it once now, the whole boob squishing starts much earlier here, so Canadian friends the same age as me have been being squished since they were 40 - I was far more relaxed about it. It really isn't too awful, and I had forgotten that your mind is taken off the discomfort because the technician suddenly says,
'Stop breathing now.'
'Wha'?'
By the time you've worried about it, the thing's over.

All Souls

All Souls. This reminds me of a name on those standard lists of pretend names that boys give you when you go to a new school and get to cover someone else's class. Wayne King, Mike Hunt and R. Soles.
That's about it actually, they're rarely very inspired.

Tonight we had a candlelit walk of the Labyrinth in remembrance of our dead. I love the labyrinth, of being entirely in your own space but passing people all the time who are in their own space, the same and yet utterly different.
The part of your life after your parents have passed is another phase, a discovery of them, of their experience of life, that you can only explore once they have stopped interacting with you.
It's a bizarre time of growing up, after your parents' death.

Across Canada, the H1N1 experiment is going awry. Having announced it had two doses of vaccine for every resident, they then started the three phase programme of vaccination. Low risk people like myself would be last, and would get their injection from clinics that have been set up, the third week in November.
Then they polled the people and it was found that only half of the nation would be taking up the offer thank-ye very much.
Phase one started. This didn't go very well. People from all risk groups have been lining up for up to five hours and the vaccine is running out.
Shambolic it is.
Oh well, I blame the government, me. Oh, and the twonks who don't do as they were told.

Samhain

Stir the pot and look within,
A time to bring the last crops in,
Play the shadows as they grow,
From dark of Samhain to still of snow,
And deep inside each woman's soul,
The mysteries of the cauldron roll,
And warmed by blood of sacred earth,
Sleep and silence bring rebirth.

Cerydwyn

But the picture's Witch Hazel.

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

This is my friend Bozo5. In my opinion, this is the BEST Hallowe'en costume EVER!!!! I love it. And yes, I got Bozo's permission before posting - which he gave, but I have to share any revenue generated :)

Today is, it seems, at least in the UK, Equal Pay Day. What this means is that, since the average hourly rate of women's pay compared to men's is 17.1% less, 30th October is the day after which, women work for free.

At work, children came in costume for Hallowe'en Howl today, as did the adults. Mostly the girls were going to be witches or dead cheerleaders. (sic) One girl with a long, blonde wig was going to be Hannah Montana, this, I told her, was truly scary. The programmes all overran, since the children and adults were all hyper.

Taking Whisky for his teatime walk, exactly as Sleepy had pointed out, I could hear another dog owner calling, 'Whisky, Whisky, Whisky,' as I walked towards him. His dog, Toby, a beautiful Scottie, seemed to be wearing a raincoat, except, not as one might expect, a tartan, but rather, Burberry.
I will say no more.

Anubis

Scary quote from six-year old girl at one of today's Halloween Howls - 'Children are baby ghosts!'
Rrrrrrriiiiight.

Dog walking is a sort of encoded socialising. You see certain dogs and their humans. I think it may be different for me than for others, OR...it could be the same. Some dog owners allow their poochies to sort of air kiss with Whisky. They remember Whisky because he looks like an ewok. We talk about dog stuff, stuff that doesn't even remotely interest me. What interests me is people, the people behind the dog. And yet, I don't really want to talk to them in any depth. The dog air-kiss is an encoding because it allows you to swap a few sentences on the level of cocktail party banter and then move off before it gets awkward.

And so to the opposite of dog. God. Yes, even though it's mid-week, I have been thinking about God.
Coincidentally, Raymond touched on something I had been thinking about in a recent post.

Why, I was wondering, do we need religion? Marx said that it is the opium of the people and I think he didn't just mean that the establishment uses it to dope us into submission and non-thinking, but that we also develop an addiction for it.
What do people get from it?
Some people need to feel that there is a supreme being watching over us, others, that there is substantiation for their ethical system. I think some people like the outward pouring of religious feelings, I personally like the inward, the spiritual, the centring it gives me.

Why do we need to believe in God?
Like Raymond, I have studied Philosophy, it was my subsidiary subject for my first degree. And I taught it to A-Level for twelve years. One of the papers on the A-Level syllabus was 'Arguments for the Existence of God', which led us to question why this was important.
I felt it was important because the idea of God underpinned several ethical systems, some of the arguments about the nature of our own existence and some accounts of how we gain knowledge - Epistemology. We also looked at Freedom, Law and Authority - another paper on the syllabus, and many political ideas cannot be considered without considering notions of God and whether God has actual existence.

I do think that we create God in our own image. That doesn't mean I don't think that God has existence, but that our perception is altered according to our needs and experiences. But then it is in the nature of that which contains all perfections, to become all things to all beings.

And if you like dogs, you might consider Anubis, although not a god for the faint-hearted. Anubis protected the dead, brought them to the afterlife and weighed their hearts. A soul with a light heart would be allowed to proceed, a heavy one would be destroyed. Hopefully recycled. And indeed, Anubis' head is black like the colour of rotting flesh and the fertile and thus life-giving river Nile.
Through death we come to new rebirth.