Nowt so queer as folk.

Another disjointed blog I'm afraid.

I should have made clear yesterday when talking about corned beef that corned beef here is an edible foodstuff, not like the disgusting thing that comes out of a can and is used only by really desperate boy scouts stuck on Mount Snowden in Britain. Girl guides would have planned better.

This morning I received an e-mail from the Mayor of London thanking me for taking the trouble to write to him. From the e-mail it was clear this wasn't an automated response but an actual reply from Ken Livingstone himself. Should you wish to refresh your memory on why I wrote to him, this is the link. I'm mightily impressed with this. You may also remember that I e-mailed Rob Feenie's restaurant in Vancouver back in December to ask him whether the veal on his menu was ethically reared. Still waiting.

So moving on, going to the Nature Park this week has interfered with my French news watching and thus with my knowledge of what is going on in the world. Until.... I discovered that I could watch the entire newscast online from the TV5 website. Then I discovered that I could also watch the news in German from the 'Der Spiegel' website. And then.... I found that I could watch News at Ten from the BBC website. Such riches.

Now, if Sainsburys would kindly agree to deliver to Richmond BC I'd be like a pig in clover and could get on with my masterplan. One of the things I'd like Sainsburys to deliver would be Crazy Jack's organic apricots. Apricots are one of my favourite fruits, but Crazy Jacks are the sweetest most apricoty tasting apricots on the planet. They are organic and dried without chemicals, so they are a very dark colour, almost black. Compare this with some dried mangos we bought recently. Now a mango is a very sweet fruit to start off with and yet these were preserved with sugar. How can Crazy Jack dry apricots that taste divine with no sugar and no chemicals and yet mangos need both? Who knows, who really cares, just buy Crazy Jack's if you live in the UK because you can.


On TV the other night, we were watching the sitcom, 'Four Kings'. I quite like this show. One of the characters corrected his girlfriend on her use of less and fewer. I couldn't believe it, my own pet grammar peeve. Yesss! Bonded, he'd better not do anything annoying now.

I have seen four films recently on DVD. 'Being Julia' was interesting, it was a Canadian/British film plus Annette Benning. Without the amazing cast it would have been nothing but with.... Miriam Margolyes, Juliet Stevenson, Bruce Greenwood, Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon it was a treat. To just see the craft of acting demonstrated by this cast was like having a table of all your favourite foods set out in front of you.

North Country was a film I had been wanting to see. It was the story of the successful prosecution of a sexual harassment case in the States in 1984. The story was absorbing and needs telling and re-telling. Although those of us in the workforce in the 70s and 80s and of course before that didn't necessarily suffer all the things portrayed here in this film, I would wager that there are few women who have not been subjected to the general discriminations that underlie the story. Charlize Theron and Frances McDormand were as ever indomitable. A story well told by good actors.

The 40-year-old virgin, well I hesitated when renting it, but in fact it was very funny. I loved the three co-workers who become a main part of the story, they were nicely done without the truly awful frat humour you have to suffer in some comedies. Catherine Keener was wonderful as the love interest, but for me it was Jane Lynch who shone. What range she has, amazing comedy acting here, but just as skilled as Tina's pushy lawyer in the L-Word.

Lastly, we finally watched 'Walk the Line' the film about Johnny Cash's rise to fame. It has received a lot of praise and hyperbole. Sadly, as I have often stated, I have a very low boredom threshold, thankfully I wasn't in the cinema because reading your boredom back-up book in the cinema is generally frowned upon. I found it duller than actually watching paint dry.

On Thursday we went from Richmond Nature Park to look at a bog in West Vancouver. I have really felt quite privileged to be freely given the time of people who know so much about the ecology of the area and who are willing to share it. I am finding out so much about how different the flora and fauna are here from Europe. There is just so much to see in a dynamic eco-system like the bogs we have around Vancouver. The birds are different, you just casually see crows and hawks chasing each other around the sky, although to be fair, even Lori and Joanne were pretty excited about that one. The plants are different, all the species of ferns and fungus, the trees, I didn't even know there was a tree called Hemlock.
What isn't different is the ridiculous behaviour of people. In the nature park in Richmond, people aren't allowed to bring their dogs. Here in Camosun, not much can be done to stop them. As at home, people are supposed to scoop their poochie's poop. Some do, some don't. But then we found a bag of dog poo just abandoned. This seems worse somehow than not picking it up in the first place. So presumably, people come along in their SUVs (Satan's Utility Vehicles),walk their dogs, pick up the poo and place it in a plastic bag then just chuck it down next to the trail. Bizarre.

Like the saying goes, 'there's nowt so queer as folk'.