Feltham Rambles

http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060328/NEWS01/60328009/1006

http://www.cbc.ca/nl/story/nf-seafood-boycott-20060327.html

http://tablemountains.blogspot.com/2006/03/just-read-bit-of-info-on-bridget.html

http://tablemountains.blogspot.com/2006/03/warning-to-canadian-sealers-if-sealing.html

Do they have braille based porn magazines for blind people? Hmm... If they do not, I could be on to something.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/23/texas.bars.reut/index.html

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/03/23/seal-060323.html

I stumbled across this today and went into a fit of laughing, this is so true.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=1999

The next person to wish me a happy St Pat’s Day will have their ISP anonymously informed that they download pictures of dogs fucking babies. I’ve slept with Irish girls and gotten drunk in Belfast, which makes me more Irish than 99% of you — and, whoops, here’s the clue train pulling up to the station, and it says I’m not Irish and neither are 99% of you so you can stick St Pat’s Day up your arse.

If you want to celebrate St Pat’s today, eat a raw potato, build a house out of peat and get yourselfshot by an Englishman.

And guess what? If you were born in America, you’re not Irish, you’re fucking American. Deal with it.

(Though I still advise American tourists in Europe to tell people they’re Canadian at all times.)

This was your Daily Truth. Please return to your duties. Thank you.

I come from a family where both my parents worked full-time, my mother would work nights at the hospital a lot and my father worked the usual 8-5 grind. For awhile, my father would drive into the city to go to work and the time would more or less coincide with the time that my mother was getting off from nights.

Since it would less than 20 minutes, a lot of the time, my sister and I would be dropped off at the car in the parking lot of the Hospital and wait for my mother in the morning. Once she came out we would usually stop into Tim Horton’s for a hot chocolate and muffin / donut, before getting brought to school.

For those of you who are not familiar with the franchise, Tim Horton’s has changed a lot over the past twenty years. Tim’s used to a blue collared hangout for men who would wash down a pack of cigarettes with a pot of coffee while sitting on ugly ass red stools around a counter before heading off to an unsatisfying day of work.

The one thing though that has not changed about Tim Horton’s is their ‘Roll up the Rim to Win’ program. For at least twenty years this has been going on and for at least twenty years I have not won shit!

What makes this even worse for me is that every year they run this, I actually get somewhat excited. I drink the coffee more often and I drink it faster in hopes of getting the rim rolled up to win something. I can handle not winning a car, bike, or television, but after twenty years to not even get a free coffee, donut, bagel, sandwich, or even a bran fucking muffin is a little too much to handle.

A young female police officer pulled over a man for DUI, and said: "You are under arrest. Anything you say can and will be held against you."

The drunk replied, "Tits."

The day is nearing its end here on Monday and I getting tired. My body and mind is drained after a great weekend celebrating Patrick the Saint in the heart of Irish America with Leah and her pals. I get a kick out of the accent from the locals there, mostly sounds like a kid that has trouble pronouncing their ‘R’s.

Every time I leave the Detroit metro I come back semi-depressed and depending on the amount of time I spend away and the destination the level of emptiness varies. When visiting a city like Boston I realize how much Detroit truly sucks, some random reasons off the top of the head include:

- You can’t smell or see the ocean
- Public transportation is non-existent
- There are no hills
- The city is built out – not up
- Crime / Poverty
- No city unity / pride (even the locals say, Detroit sucks!)

Any case, I guess the problem is that I need to move to a metro where I can feel like I am in a big city rather than feeling like I live in the middle of a mess. I want to be a part of a city that people are united and are proud of their area. I want to be able to take public transit when I don’t feel like driving and then be able to be a part of a faceless crowd.

For the most part, the Mid West is filled with bombed out cities with little to no life. People work in the city and then jump into their cars and head back out to their safe gated suburbs. For the foreseeable future, it seems as though I will continue to be part of that awful pack. But, in the meantime I will continue to dream about being in a place that you can work, live, socialize and grow with.

Now that Vancouver is host of the 2010 Winter Olympics these are some questions people the world over are asking!!!!

Believe it or not these questions about Canada were posted on an International Tourism Website. (frightening, isn't it!)

Obviously the answers are a joke; but the questions were really asked!!!!!.

Q: Will I be able to see Polar Bears in the street? (USA)
A: Depends on how much you've been drinking.

Q: I want to walk from Vancouver to Toronto-can I follow the Railroad tracks? (Sweden)
A: Sure, it's only Four thousand miles, take lots of water.

Q: Is it safe to run around in the bushes in Canada?(Sweden)
A: So it's true what they say about Swedes.

Q: It is imperative that I find the names and addresses of places to contact for a stuffed Beaver. (Italy)
A: Let's not touch this one.

Q: Can you give me some information about hippo racing in Canada? (USA )
A: A-fri-ca is the big triangle shaped continent south of Europe. Ca-na-da is that big country to your North...oh forget it. Sure, the hippo racing is every Tuesday night in Calgary. Come naked.

Q: Which direction is North in Canada? (USA)
A: Face south and then turn 180 degrees. Contact us when you get here and we'll send the rest of the directions.

Q: Can I bring cutlery into Canada? (UK)
A: Why? Just use your fingers like we do.

Q: Can you send me the Vienna Boys' Choir schedule? (USA)
A: Aus-tri-a is that quaint little country bordering Ger-man-y, which is...oh forget it. Sure, the Vienna Boys Choir plays every Tuesday night in Calgary, right after the hippo races. Come naked.

Q: Do you have perfume in Canada? (Germany)
A: No, WE don't stink.

Q: Can you tell me the regions in British Columbia where the female population is smaller than the male population? (Italy)
A: Yes, gay nightclubs.

Q: Are there supermarkets in Toronto and is milk available all year round?(Germany)
A: No, we are a peaceful civilization of Vegan hunter/gathers. Milk is illegal.

Q: I have a question about a famous animal in Canada, but I forget its name. It's a kind of big horse with horns. (USA)
A: It's called a Moose. They can be found hanging out with the hippos in Calgary on Tuesday nights.

Q: Will I be able to speak the English most places I go? (USA)
A: Yes, but learn you must first.

"Newfoundland is remote, isolated, backward, cursed with the most desperate, heartbreaking climate on the globe. It has no soil, its trees are dwarfs, we have fog for ozone. Our politics is incompetent mischief punctuated by outright corruption. It is bare and stark and bleak, yet affection for Newfoundland is stronger than a chemical dependency." Rex Murphy - 1994

"I said to myself then I said to him, 'you may be the leader of the world's most powerful nation, but I'm the leader of the land of tomorrow'."

-Paul Martin to George W. Bush

Nothing out of Nothing - Great Big Sea (Sean McCann)

I left my home, my family by the ocean
Out on my own, to seek my fortune,
There's no work to occupy these young hands
So look out boy! Your heading for the mainland!

And what do you do? Can't make nothing out of nothing
Everybody needs a start
And what do you do? Can't make nothing out of nothing
Give my country back its heart

Now I was born on a St. John's street
Where all my hopes could meet with defeat
I hired my days to higher education
No I'm so smart I could rule this god damn nation!

And what do you do? Can't make nothing out of nothing
Everybody needs a start
And what do you do? Can't make nothing out of nothing
Give my country back its heart

No I'm alone but I'm working everyday
I'm getting stoned and blowing all my pay
Just to survive I'll do whatever I can
No I'm alive, but I cannot be a real man

And what do you do? Can't make nothing out of nothing
Everybody needs a start
And what do you do? Can't make nothing out of nothing
Give my country back its heart

http://danwho.net/mp/index.php?id=snl_natalieportman

Dear Sirs and Lady McCartney;

While CNN and you, Larry, tried to display a balanced perspective on the Newfoundland Seal Hunt, there were significant elements of "not letting the truth get in the way of a good story". It is obvious that even the website mentioned by the McCartney's www.protectseals.org is a false revenue generation front for the US Humane Society automatically forwarding to the URL http://www.hsus.org/

This latest onslaught against the seal hunt is little more than a socio-economic terrorism campaign against the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. Who are the Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans you may ask? We are the Inuit and Innu who migrated east out of Africa eventually setting on the northeast extremities of North America; with the final leg of the journey avoiding the warring of the central pre Columbian tribes to a place where they could be free. We are the Scots, Irish, Welsh, French, Basque, English, etc... Migrating west out of Africa were; the highland Scots escaping the great clearances. The Irish escaping poverty, rebellion, the English crown and famine. The French and Basque escaping wars and rebellions, and Acadians hiding from the English clearances of Acadia. The West Country fisher folk who were left behind on our rock shores to fend for ourselves through cruel winters after the fishing admirals' holds were too full of fish to ship those poor people back whence they came. Much of the inhumanity foisted on Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans was either directly or indirectly at the hands of pompous English Lords.

But on our rocky shores they were unfettered and free; the deer in the woods were not the king's deer, the trees not the king's trees, the fish and seals in the ocean not the king's fish. What we had was ours to subsist upon and grow. In the post ice age trans-Siberian migrations, the millennia since Norse settlement and half millennia since English and Portuguese rediscovery we have become a unique society with our own culture, music, customs and folk lore. Two of the most recognized and best loved dog breeds in the world, the Newfoundland Dog and the Labrador retriever hail from our shores. We have thrived here by subsisting off nature's bounty as men and women of steel in frail wooden boats.

Every season had its purpose in our symbiotic relationship with this New Founde Lande. One of those seasonal bounties were the seal herds following the ice flows in the harsh winters when the root cellars were nearly empty of the previous years crop and the fish and caribou were out of reach in the thick sea ice and deep woods snows. Seal meat rich in omega 3 fatty acids sustained families through the lean winters, Seal oil lit lamps against winters darkness, seal skins became parkas and boots against winters cold fingers. It was then and still is subsistence hunting. Seal meat today in addition to being a pure, growth hormone and antibiotic free beneficial food source, is as much a delicacy in Newfoundland and Labrador as Veal and Fois Gras is in Europe. Yet the seals live wild and free and that some of their number fall to the hunter's bullet on a hazardous winter ice floe has none of the inherent inhumanity associated with the production of Foie Gras, veal or any other intensive factory farming technique. By comparison Sealing is a small scale near cottage level enterprise in which the sealers get a significantly larger percentage of the profit and healthy meat from the endeavour than workers with the Agri-food Multinationals responsible for the mass production of hormone and antibiotic laden Chicken, Beef , Pork etc...

Sir Paul tries to differentiate between Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans pursuing their traditional Seal Hunt and aboriginals who do it for subsistence. The Inuit seal hunter who leaves Makkovik or Cartwright in his boat to hunt seals is pursuing the same basic human right as the sealer who leaves Twillingate, Bonavista or St. Anthony; Feeding, housing and clothing ones family. To say there is any difference smacks of racial discrimination and elitism, claiming that one class of human being has different inalienable rights than another. If you were to completely map the genome melting pot of Newfoundland and Labrador society after the past millennia, the boundary between those whose ancestors exclusively migrated from the East out of Africa are as rare as those who exclusively migrated west from Africa.

These are the same small boat, inshore and near shore fish harvesters whose 500 year history of sustainable fish harvesting has been destroyed by the foreign offshore draggers and factory freezer trawlers. Primarily from the European Union, these wealthy and powerful multinational corporations have vacuumed the fish stocks before they came ashore to feed these rural families. Despite decades of outcry by our rural communities, no high profile bleeding hearts like the McCartney's ever lead the banner march to stop the corporate pillage and return that world heritage resource of the Grand Banks to its former abundance.

I am an engineer in the Petrochemical Industry and my westward migrating ancestors have been on Newfoundland's shores since the mid 1500s. Despite my ancestors of the recent two centuries being Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors, Nurses, School teachers, Merchants and Artists, we all farmed, fished, hunted and ate what we hunted and fished. I have had a personal use sealing licence, for mature adult seals only, whenever I lived in Newfoundland and ate what I hunted. I am very conscious of what I eat and stick to organic, naturally raised or sustainable/wild caught animal and fish products.

Likewise I am conscious of the clothing and products I buy, gravitating towards cotton, hemp, silk, flannel, leather, fur, etc. all biodegradable. In fact when my seal skin boots of 18 years service were finally beyond repair, the boots and felt liners were put into my compost heap to eventually be recycled into fresh vegetables. I wonder what could be said of Lady McCartney's much touted synthetic boots, manufactured from non-renewable petrochemical resources in plants that use many carcinogenic compounds and are often cited for fugitive emissions polluting the air, soil and water. Such synthetic clothing items are exceedingly difficult to and rarely recycled usually ending up in the morass of land fills or burned to release their constituent toxins into the air, soil and water.

Rather than focus on the plethora of inaccuracies in most of Sir Paul's and Lady Heather's arguments, I would prefer to direct you to the governmental web site for Fisheries and Oceans responsible for the Seal hunt.

http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/seal-phoque/myth_e.htm

I think Lady Heather and Sir Paul would find it difficult to accuse the same Government of Canada of lying about a small rural cottage industry as the seal hunt, while being such a stalwart supporter of Lady Heather's ban on land mines and its 40 year history of international peace keeping activities.

Sir Paul your desire to completely stop the Seal hunt is not a one issue campaign, but a case of tunnel vision brought on by the propaganda of those who reap enormous financial benefit from using you and Lady Heather as the poster children for their cause alongside a newborn Whitecoat Pup. Speaking of which, I think is it time that Premier Williams launches a lawsuit against using the Whitecoat pup image associated with campaigns to ban the seal hunt as fraudulent misrepresentation, since the federally regulated hunt does not permit hunting and killing of these seals in the Whitecoat stage.

Furthermore, Premier Williams should request Congress and the FBI to do a forensic audit of the Humane Society of the US and any other agency that uses the seal hunt as a revenue generation mechanism to show what proportion of the seal hunt revenues go towards the seal hunt campaign, and what portion are diverted into general revenue, as none of these monies are ever directed towards the rural communities whose fabric has been ripped apart by the fishery collapse. If found guilty of such misappropriation of cause specific funds, then these agencies should be stripped of their taxable donation status.

Sir Paul, if you are looking for a just cause in your golden years, then put your weight and wealth behind stopping the EU based over fishing on the Grand Banks. Help restore a sustainable Cod Fishery of 500 years to its former abundance and the outport Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans reliance on the Seal hunt will taper off accordingly. Plus the seals won't have to scour for food on the Trans Canada Highway far from the sea.

Desmond McGrath
A Newfoundland Patriot
Living in Political and Socio-Economic Exile in the Bayous of Louisiana

Just in case you ever got the two mixed up, This should make things a bit clearer:

IN PRISON… you spend the majority of your time in an 8X10 cell.
AT WORK... you spend the majority of your time in a 6X8 cubicle.
IN PRISON...you get three meals a day.
AT WORK...you only get a break for one meal and you pay for it.
IN PRISON...you get time off for good behavior.
AT WORK...you get more work for good behavior.
IN PRISON...the guard locks and unlocks all the doors for you.
AT WORK...you must carry around a security card and open all the doors for yourself.
IN PRISON...you can watch TV and play games.
AT WORK...you get fired for watching TV and playing games.
IN PRISON...you get your own toilet.
AT WORK...you have to share with some idiot who pees on the seat.
IN PRISON...they allow your family and friends to visit.
AT WORK...you can't even speak to your family.
IN PRISON...the taxpayers pay all expenses with no work required.
AT WORK...you get to pay all the expenses to go to work and then they deduct taxes from your salary to pay for prisoners.
IN PRISON...you spend most of your life inside bars wanting to get out.
AT WORK...you spend most of your time wanting to get out and go inside bars.
IN PRISON...you must deal with sadistic wardens.
AT WORK...they are called managers.

http://newnewfie.blogspot.com/2006/03/i-love-living-in-nifindlind.html

http://tablemountains.blogspot.com/2006/03/contrary-to-popular-beliefs-this-image.html#links

Link to article

By MICHAEL HARRIS

Let me begin by affirming that I am a follower of Marx and Lennon -- Groucho Marx and John Lennon.

Which is to say, I believe that laughter and music are indispensable to survival on this dear, dirty planet. On the music side, I was the first kid in my school to sport Beatle boots, a collarless jacket, and to sing in a really bad band. And hair? Let's not talk about hair.

So it is with a full heart clot of regret that I see one of the golden boys of adolescence, the incomparable Paul McCartney, following in the high-heel prints of Brigitte Bardot to denounce the Canadian seal hunt.

McCartney is arguably the biggest celebrity in the world. In the entertainment business such clout is usually squandered. It is employed to either arrange one's utter dissolution, as in the case of Kurt Cobain, or, like William Shatner, to become a fatted capon of the marketing world when the glory days are over.

But for some stars the cornucopia of their blessings occasionally causes the old guilt complex to kick in. So after ER made George Clooney into blue-chip beefcake, and he got to play poker with Brad Pitt and the boys, he developed a social conscience and produced important movies like Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana. These cautionary tales traded special effects for especially effective social commentary. It was a nice rest from watching baby pterodactyls burst out of Sigourney Weaver's heaving chest.

So what do Sir Paul and Heather Mills McCartney choose to do with the most powerful celebrity-hood of all, the sublime afterglow of being an ex-Beatle? Do they give a free concert to the bedraggled homeless of New Orleans, make a musical stand in Darfur, or battle nuclear proliferation on the Indian sub-continent? No, they choose to torment the poor fishermen of Atlantic Canada in a cause that is unjust, dishonest, and mercenary to the core. Hands across the water stiffing for the U.S. Humane Society.

Paul and his wife plan to take a bunch of helicopters to the ice and play with seal pups in front of the cameras before the guys with less time on their hands begin the real work -- harvesting an ocean resource like any other. The federal government has sanctioned the hunt as a "cultural right" of Atlantic Canadians and set a quota -- about 325,000 animals a year since 2003. The seal hunt is as legal as any other abattoir operation. The difference is that this slaughterhouse is outdoors, where you can see -- and be seen.

Those who oppose the seal hunt insist that it is a heartbreaking slaughter. What slaughterhouse operation isn't? For cattle it's either captive bolt stunning, where a metal rod is blasted into the animal's brain; an electrically induced grand mal seizure; or plain old throat cutting. Do they suffer? It's hard for the hired help to know, given that they often work on assembly lines where 309 animals per hour are "processed" on the way to the grocery store. The "T" in T-bone is for terror.

And don't tell me that large numbers of animals in a conventional slaughterhouse don't experience dread through those acute eyes, ears and noses of theirs. If you've ever seen a tractor-trailer load of hogs parked and shuffling at the gas station while the driver grabs a burger, you know that they know they're not on their way to Green Acres.

The point is this: As spectator sport, mass killing of anything -- fish, fowl, or four footed -- is never an agreeable sight. But if the seal hunt ought to be stopped, so too should the operations that supply our barbecues and ovens, that send animals to scalding tanks, and killing floors and dangle them by one leg from chains on their wide-eyed way to the knife. So too should farm operations that force-feed geese to bloat their livers for foie gras. And let's not forget all those defenseless calves that die in the name of our right to veal cutlets.

Paul McCartney has spent his influence in a cause where hypocrisy is in a foot race with meddlesome ignorance.

If he had bothered to ask, Canadian fishermen could have told him that nature was thrown out of balance when international protests first closed the seal hunt in 1983. They could have told him that you can't protect one species in the ocean while mercilessly fishing all others without dire consequences to the environment.

We got them in 1992 when gross over-fishing exacerbated by the explosion of the protected seal herds contributed to the collapse and closure of the great northern cod fishery off Newfoundland. A seal consumes 6% of its body weight in fish every day. There are now 5 million of them but Sir Paul didn't stop on the long and winding road to do the math or the thinking. They're starving in Africa, dying in Iraq, and McCartney makes his stand on Iles de la Madeleine doing photo ops with seals.

On the other side of Strawberry Fields, Lennon must be cringing

I hate a lot of things, but I guess if you know me you already knew that.

For the most part, it’s not that I dislike everything, but I feel I take things as they are, complain about it and try to make the situation somewhat humorous. But, then there are things that I truly hate and static is near the top of that list.

For the past several months I have been freaked out each any every day. It seems like every article of clothing I put on sticks to me from the static electricity. Any piece of metal I touch I get a shock, and all the hair on my body just feels fucked.

I have had enough.

If static was a person, I would beat it to within an inch of its life, and leave it to die in a ditch. I would come back a few minutes later with a costume on, bring static into my home, nurse it back to life, and gain its trust. Then I would remove the costume to reveal it was me all along (insert dramatic evil laugh here). I would then proceed to burn static alive, piss on its ashes, and mail the remains to static’s grandmother.

I don't understand.

After the last child was born, she told me we had to cut back on expenses, I had to give up drinking beer. I was not a big drinker maybe a 12 pack on weekends. Anyway, I gave it up but I
noticed the other day she came home from grocery shopping and when I looked at the receipt and saw $45 in makeup. I said, "Wait a minute I've given up beer and you haven't given up anything!" She said, "I buy that makeup for you, so I can look pretty for you." I told her, "Hell, that's what the beer was for!"

It’s bad enough that I ran out of good Coffee this week and have been forced to drink the brown coloured water that they pawn off as Coffee at the office. But, to be somewhat late for a meeting and to find that the percolator is being used by some jerk off making decaf at 8:55am is too much for me to swallow.

Who drinks decaf, let alone first thing in the morning? Is it a sad attempt to fit in with the rest of the ‘real’ Coffee drinkers? Drinking decaf makes about as much sense as drinking non-alcoholic beer, why even bother, you know you will be disappointed. They made it right the first time; the beans have caffeine in them for a reason. If you don’t like the caffeine than try drinking something different, like water, or who knows, maybe poison.

We are always in need of having new Holidays and I think I have a great one; “Fuck with decaf drinker’s day”

It would be glorious!

Then again like most things, it would probably get out of hand, the jokes would escalate. People would first start with switching the decaf to regular strong ass Coffee. Then I would come home one day, turn on the CBC and hear about some sadistic guy putting LSD into the decaf pot. I can see the images now of all the decaf drinkers running through the streets naked, shooting pink elephants and doing nose dives off bridges.