Every so often I begin muttering pirate noises. "Aaarrrgghhh!" I moan, wrenching out hair by roots, throwing periodicals at the TV set. This behaviour signals the need for another time-out, another hiatus from CNN, CBC, BBC, Fox, international "news".

I return to local news only.

Seems the local Downtown Redevelopment Plan is not going well. The new Convention Centre is built but the new hotel needed to house all those expected conventioneers is busted in the credit-crunch, and all those millions already spent by ambitious, pro-development City Councillors and Mayor more or less flushed down the drain. I could have told them that would happen, just like the other half-dozen times their ambitious, self-enriching plans ended up in the sewer. Hell, thousands did tell them that, turfed Mayor and self-aggrandizing Councillors out on their arses, but the new bunch seem no less egregious.

The RCMP are being sued by a mother whose four-year-old child was killed in a police car-chase. Para-Olympians light the torch for the 2010 Vancouver games. The SPCA has cute cats which need homes. An expensive house in a Ritzy part of town burns to the ground as result of faulty grow-op wiring.

And there's this: Local hunters short of Ammo!

Seems the Exited States of America consume, on average, some seven billion rounds of ammunition yearly, but in the last few months alone has consumed nine billion rounds. Worse, those who reload their own ammo are out of luck. There is a black-powder famine of Biblical proportions.

Seems all the crazy gun-people, spurred by the even crazier Becks and Limbaughs and O'Reillys, have been hoarding in fear of an Obama crackdown on guns 'n ammo, creating themselves what they feared Obama would do.

Back to bows 'n arrows, I guess.

it starts when you're always afraid...

Telling me I got to beware...

Wasn't that lyric written by Torontonian sportswriter Jim Young's son Neil?

Just askin'.

Neil's my man, though.

The guns n ammo one is my favorite.

As far as I can recollect, neither Obama nor the Dems in Congress have uttered the words once, let alone try and stick them into a law. And yet, the right feeds itself with daily second amendment freakouts as if the black helicopters were already on their way to swoop into the trailer court and round up all the ARs stached under their futons.

The latests dorks on Parade - Oath Keepers: <link>

Seems all the crazy gun-people, spurred by the even crazier Becks and Limbaughs and O'Reillys, have been hoarding in fear of an Obama crackdown on guns 'n ammo, creating themselves what they feared Obama would do.

I read an article about this in the Wash Post. According to the reporter, the ammo hoarding could be because of fear about the Second Amendment, OR it just be your basic end-of-the-world survivalists, who think a coming economic or environmental or terrorist crisis could result in an every-man-for-himself lifestyle for the foreseeable future.

Me, I'll just keep reading poetry.

Knowing your stated history, I think you may be interested in this.

Most crossed the border and enlisted in little border towns. Bellingham, Washington for many from my area.

Of the 40,000 enlistees, I don't know how many went overseas, in country, but far too many, and because they enlisted in American recruitment centres they are listed as American casualties on the Vietnam War Memorial, even though they be from the sawmill flats of Oliver, B.C. or the wharves of Port Coquitlam.

It's a bit of history lost. Eager recruiters never listed point of origin, just point of enrollment.

the Marine Corps. I asked the Brit where he was from and he said England and there was a pregnant pause while that sunk in, then I said, 'what the fuck are you doing here?' he couldn't really explain it.

the less they have to give to right-wing candidates.

everyone wins

"I'll just keep reading poetry."

More, please, appropriate, transcending iffy topic, as usual.

A MAN DOESN’T HAVE TIME IN HIS LIFE by Yehuda Amichai A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

"Only his body remains forever"

Reminds me of my father's admomition, pointing at the bare bulb in the unfinished kitchen ceiling of the always-under-construction log house of my youth: "See that bulb? It's but a husk. When the filament burns out, only the husk remains. Such is life; so are we."

My father entered University at age 15, graduated at 18. We kids were less in awe of his brilliance than properly derisive, but I've come to appreciate some of his almost folksy utterances as I age into his precise, if not kid-friendly wisdom.

"...the right feeds itself with daily second amendment freakouts as if the black helicopters were already on their way to swoop into the trailer court and round up all the ARs stached under their futons."

They have futons? I'd have thought them more predisposed to stone thrones and iron bulwarks and hidey-holes under the moats threatened by Hordes.