Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

The Great White North is a not as white as we were thinking.

Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004
8:26 a.m.
It is my best belov�d�s birthday today, a whopping 46 years old. I am so disorganized at this point that I haven�t even purchased a cake or a card. I bought some presents a while back, none wrapped, of course, one of which I hid so well I now have no idea where it is. It�s a wall calendar with beautiful photographs of galactic phenomena, so as long as I find it before Christmas it won�t get stale. But then there�s the story of the chocolate coins that I bought to distribute as Hannukah gelt to my wee ones one year and hid so well that I didn�t find them until two revolutions around the sun later. Dang!

We had a rehearsal last night in the hall with the percussion and guitar. It�s loud. Kevin O, playing timpani directly in front of me blocked my view of the conductor, and I keep elbowing the girl next to me to move over so I could see better. It would be nice to be a little bit taller. Now that the drums and guitars are wailing away, we can�t hear the percussion on the recording at all and are totally dependent on Herr Doktor Professor for visual cues. Well, it should be interesting. In any case, it will be loud, and that�s what our audiences here seem to relish.

There was a telling article in the morning paper (by Paul Willcocks of the Vancouver Sun) which I couldn�t access on line to link, so I will have to recap for you: The Canadian immigration department, since 1997, �has been offering special visas to women from around the world who are willing to promise to spend two years stripping and doing lap dances in sleazy Canadian bars [because Canadian women are refusing to do these jobs since there is so much pressure to perform sex acts]. �Think about this for a minute. Your daughter is not prepared to do lap dances six days a week for drunk men in a dark bar. So the federal government has decided to solve the industry�s problem by letting recruiters visit Costa Rica or Romania or Mexico and find women who will, and offer them special immigration status. Last year, 665 women were allowed to immigrate--as long as they would work in strip clubs. Canada accepted barely 500 computer engineers under the same program.� Suddenly Canada doesn�t seem so lily-white and driven-snow pure anymore. The article ends with this little titbit: �Our government makes much of its opposition to global trafficking in women as part of the sex trade. Except when it�s a participant.�

I�m off to write a Latin test on noun declensions. Wish me fortuna.


from harri3tspy:

In my family, one of the most established of Christmas traditions is the annual losing of a gift. My mother loses something for somebody every single year. We thought it would improve after we moved out of the house and she didn�t have to hide anything anymore, but the tradition remains!

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