Fragile Bird

Has the kind of cancer been leaked yet? All I’ve heard is that it’s not prostate cancer.

That’s the situation here now, the streaming concept we once had was terrible. Teachers knew best, eh. The VP at my grade school told my mother that I could do anything I wanted, my oldest brother would be lucky if he graduated from high school, and my younger brother would be lucky to get to grade 8. My older brother went to university in the US where he graduated Magna Cum Laude in his business degree, and then went to law school. He had to work hard. Everything came easy to me, so once I got to law school I was pretty lazy. My younger brother was dyslexic, which no one fucking recognized, so he got labeled as stupid. My mother saw he had trouble with his letters and attributed his improved abilities as a teen due to his desire to read comic books. Comic books, she always said, taught him to read where schools failed him. Ontario officially recognized that streaming was disadvantageous for students in lower economic classes by 1999, but have they cleared out all forms of streaming yet? Hell no. I think math streaming still goes on, and the provincial government still swears it will end all streaming.

Do no US states still stream students? We had streaming here in Canada when I was a teen. By grade 8 your life was taken over - you went into the university stream if you attended certain schools, or there was the “commerce” stream where you were sent to become a secretary or other office worker, and if you were deemed too stupid to handle the course loads, they sent you to a technical school to learn to be a mechanic or a woodworker or something. Lots of parents put their kids into the Catholic high school system because they were pissed off at what the school boards decided for their kids. Iirc, Germany did that, though I think they also wanted smart kids in the technical schools, and I think a number of Asian countries do it, particularly Japan. Which is why terrified parents push their kids hard to get them in a good school. I think there’s an element of what school district you live in as well, everyone wants to live where the good schools are.

Let’s hope so, but I’m cynical.

I know you want to explain things but I have to say I’m getting annoyed (not with you) because you don’t have to justify your family’s actions. My brother wanted to go to university in the US, not a fancy Ivy league university, but we weren’t rich either and the Canadian dollar was low, so we all made sacrifices for him. I didn’t want to burden my parents with debt so I went to university in the city instead of going out of town and having the away-from-home experience teens want and enjoy. And paid my way with student loans, which my brother was not burdened with. Family.

According to the report I just saw on CNN, the problem is the reservoirs are already full. At least the forecast seems to be for less rain than initially expected, yesterday I saw reports that they’d get a year’s worth of rain in 24 hours, now they are saying 6 months of rain instead. I can’t imagine getting 6 months worth of rain in 24 hours, though we get more rain here than most parts of California. I checked the snowfall in Cape Breton, they got 80 cm, which means snowdrifts are probably 2 to 3 metres deep.

Has it stopped yet?

Not into song lyrics much, are you? Her writing is the reason so many people love her. Try searching “Taylor Swifts’s best lyrics” and lots of praise comes up. Her story telling in some of her songs is amazing. See “All too well”, a really poignant song. Great lines. “You call me up again just to break me like a promise, So casually cruel in the name of being honest, I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here, ‘Cause I remember it all, all, all too well”. She added lyrics to the new long version, about Jake charming her father, drinking coffee in the kitchen like “you’re on a late/night show”, and her father watching her watch the front door all night, and saying “it’s supposed to be fun turning twenty-one”. Trust me, I’m not a 12-year old, and I hear lots of things in her songs. Why are Republicans so frightened of her? She sponsors “register to vote” campaigns and tells her audience that they can change the world, that they have power. Women with power, that scares the bastards. And she does whatever the fuck she wants to do, she has affairs and suffers break-ups and even if her heart gets broken she picks up and moves on. There was a period where people really tried to crush her, destroy her reputation (and she wrote songs about it) (the tramp who can’t keep a man, something’s wrong with her, that kinda shit), and she’s bigger than ever. Gawd, I remember when the video for “Shake it Off” came out, she got attacked for all kinds of reasons including attacks from black commentators who literally said, how dare she try to twerk her ass like a black woman, go home whitey and stop your cultural appropriation. Really. I wish Hilary Clinton had her ability to knock down her critics.

You may not listen to her in the radio or your streaming service, but you still go shopping or eating out or to public venues where music is playing. It’s like getting Whammed at Christmas.

For sure you have. Plus the satires of some of them. Look up “Shake it Off”, “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together” (one of my favorites!), “Blank Space”, “Look What You Made me Do”, “All Too Well”, and her biggest hit ever, “AntiHero”. The album Red was a huge best seller, and her crossover from country-ish to pop. And she wrote or co-wrote most of the songs. Max Martin was the producer and really worked well with her. I remember hearing an interview with him where he said they were in the studio when Swift walked in in an absolute fury and rage over a rumor she was going back to her previous boyfriend (Jake Gyllenhaal apparently), yelling “we are never ever getting back together again “. And Max Martin immediately said, that’s a song.

Andy Borowitz had a good comment: “Trump claims Taylor Swift was born in Kenya”.

50 thou a year? Holy crap.

Did anyone see the story that popped up about vanishing Air Pakistan stewardesses? At first I wondered if they were claiming they had been murdered or something, but no, planes come in to Canada from Islamabad, the flight crew gets off and then someone never shows up the next day. Eight in the last year, the most recent this month. Apparently Pakistan is blaming lax Canadian refugee laws. It’s been happening with flights to Paris and into other EU cities as well. The story I saw suggested the lousy pay for crew might have something to do with it.

Lol, that didn’t even cross my mind!

Congrats to your little nephew’s school! “Harrow flew down”? Did you mean Fox flew down?

I suspect a long list of Conservative politicians attended Harrow. You know the saying about the playing fields of England? It seems like none of sex, drugs or cheating are things you get expelled for, if Parliament is any example. Maybe he was blackmailing somebody.

I have no idea what happened, but he was a student at the very upper crust school Harrow, when he was expelled a few weeks before taking his A-levels. He couldn’t get into any university due to a report about him from Harrow. There may be something out there on the internet explaining what he did, but I haven’t bothered looking. Presumably it was about cheating, but maybe it was something more, Sex, drugs and cheating?

Hey, maybe you guys gotta build that wall with Canada! An Iranian and two Canadians, including a Hell’s Angel, have been indicted in a plot to assassinate Iranian dissidents in the US.

I thought I’d look up Fox on Wikipedia just for the heck of it, and holy crap, he was married to Billie Piper? Girl, you gotta make better choices. (Read the Piper page too)

For the last 10 years I’ve bought Olive oil sold by the Peace and Justice committee at my church. They mainly bring speakers in and pass around petitions to be signed, but once a month they sell fair trade stuff to the parishioners, chocolate and coffee, spices from the Middle East, occasionally some crafts, and as I said, bottles of olive oil, produced by farmers from the West Bank. Unfortunately bringing in the olive oil has become too complicated for the importer and it’s no longer available. I’ll have to go to main stream suppliers. The Costco Kirkland brand’s okay, as are some of the grocery store brands. Speaking of pancakes, I came across a stupidly easy recipe that’s quite tasty. Ingredients - two eggs and a banana. I crack open the eggs and beat them well, and then thoroughly smash up the banana and add the eggs. Mix well and make pancakes from the batter. Add cinnamon if you want.

When I saw the post I checked the list of Penric & Desdemona books and nothing new came up, but I just checked again and saw Demon’s Daughter comes up. I assume this is what is being discussed? My library doesn’t have it yet, it will probably be a while longer.

I didn’t know that the Nazis killed millions of Palestinians. In fact, I thought they actually had Arab allies in WW 2, because, you know, the Germans were killing Jews. The insult to Jews seems far more serious in those circumstances.

Such a beautiful place! And the sound of running water…

I don’t know if this is the right place to mention this, but since this war started because of the terrorist attack on Oct. 7, I guess there is no better place. There’s a UN agency called UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Turning on my cell phone tonight a headline story popped up saying 11 workers for the agency participated in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. Canada had already announced it is suspending support payments to the agency, as is the US. I assume other countries will as well. Expect people in a number of countries to use this as yet another reason not to support the UN. Pretty sad situation.

Has a bill been proposed yet regarding the wall to be built at the Canadian border? Or is Canada going to pay for it?