Fragile Bird

Wasn’t the weather largely to blame for the low turnout? The daytime temperatures started around -15 which is -26C, rising to maybe -8, or -22C, but with the windchill the temperatures were as low as -30, -34C. Who the hell wants to go out and vote in those temperatures?

I see the other current thread is gone, I thought the two threads would be combined. A couple of days ago the top ten coldest places in the world were all in Canada. Yesterday’s list says the coldest place on earth was a town in Siberia, but 18 of the 20 coldest places on earth were here in Canada. Number 18 was another town in Russia. These cold temperatures are ones that will kill you very quickly if you aren’t properly dressed, and will burn any part of your body not protected within a minute or two. Frostbite is seriously dangerous.

Lol, I asked a few days ago.

Parts of the North West Territories are seeing -49 today, which is -56.2 F, and with the wind chill it’s -57, or -70 F. Edmonton, Alberta saw -43 at the airport, -45 F (-50 is the crossing point for C and F), -53 with the wind chill (-63 F). A lot of flights got cancelled, the equipment was too cold to run.

Friends of mine told me that snowstorms in Wisconsin have created snow drifts as high as the street light poles. Anyone from Wisconsin here? Years ago other friends showed me pictures of the father and his son standing beside a street light, shining at their feet. New Brunswick can get a lot of snow in winter….

@Starkess I don’t think I’ll bother with trying to pick up where I left off, then. When I was listening to the book great mention was made of a certain character being missing and understood to be killed in battle, or maybe not missing just killed. The first thing that crossed my mind was, well, I guess we’ll meet them before the end of the book. And reading the first four pages of the next book I saw I was right. While it might be painful for us to read because of cliches, perhaps it will open the readers to trying other fantasy books, so some good may come out of it.

We got about 5 c of snow last night, finally the predicted storm, but damned if the temperature didn’t rise and it turned into rain. I went out at 10:00 pm and shoveled the slush so it wouldn’t turn into an uglier mess when the temperatures drop today. You could feel the cold moving in, we had nasty winds that started in the afternoon and were a sad reminder that we’re about to have a sharp drop this week. The weather changes the further north you go and the weather service has been giving snow and wind warnings for the higher ground that starts just above Toronto. Better them than us.

Lol, yes!

Er, what about the other thread I started? Combine the two?

See, you guys are saying things about Britain and slavery that I don’t think are right. I double-checked the Wikipedia article on slavery and Britain never passed any laws on slavery and courts repeatedly said slaves that landed in Britain became free. Of course Brits who returned from foreign lands with slaves tried to hold on them, but slaves that ran were usually deemed to be free. I see that for a period of time the law was “unsettled” but the courts didn’t seem to think so. What was going on in the colonies was a whole different matter. I can’t find anything that says Britain had laws about the slave trade in the colonies, but I don’t know enough about how the British ran their centuries of slave trade. They just bought slaves in Africa and took them across the ocean to the Americas? When abolition was passed in 1807 they just declared no British person could engage in the slave trade? I see the 1833 act applied to all British colonies. I don’t see any British laws of partus sequitur ventrem, just laws in colonies, particularly the US colonies. And as for fathers or mothers, I see the British common law was that if you were born in Britain you were British, no matter who your parents were. If you were born outside of Britain, both parents had to be British, until the British Nationality Act 1772, made the provision about children being British if their fathers alone were British, so it wasn’t “always” through the father.

“Oh look, what a fabulous new software system we’ve installed! Worth every penny! Turns out the Post Office is losing so much money because there are so many crooks running post offices! Hand out those bonuses, guys!”

Yes yes, US history, but Haley isn’t the child of a slave and she was born after 1868. And your Wikipedia article points to the Romans being the originators of the law, not the British. And goes on to explain the law was passed because a mixed race woman with a British father was recognized by the Virginia courts as a British citizen because her father was British. The decision was overturned on appeal, but a further appeal to the general assembly restored the original decision. That’s when partus sequitur ventrem was passed, because so many children were fathered by Europeans and Brits, problematic for the slave owners. And of course, it was the slave states that passed the law, not all US states. As for the importance of the mother, as I mentioned, that of course changed once the child was born. They then became the property of their fathers, just like their mothers. The struggle for women’s rights was the next big fight.

I wouldn‘t dwell on that British ruling as the precedent. I think that countries around the world have looked to the mother for hundreds of years, centuries probably. The baby comes out of the mother, that can’t be faked. Who the father is can be faked. After I re-read Josephine Tey’s “A Daughter of Time” for the first time since I was a teen (a wonderful book, named by the British mystery writers association as the best mystery of the century in 1999) I read a great deal about Richard III and the search for genetic confirmation of the bones, found in a Canadian, btw. They looked at a number of noble families in the UK and discovered in a couple of them “a genetic anomaly” ie the wife had an affair and that line carried on, not the expected line inherited from the Lancasters. Btw, whoever keeps calling Trump Richard III, you’re wrong. The murder of the princes has a firm grip in British lore, but lots of people realized pretty quickly it was Tudor bullshit, the likely murderer having been Henry VII, who didn’t need any rivals around to contest his throne.

It says that Haley is not eligible to run for president even though she was born in the USA, because her parents weren’t US citizens at the time of her birth. The US Constitution says the person has to be a “natural born citizen”. I looked it up to see what that means, and it means someone who didn’t have to go through a process to become a citizen ie naturalized. I have never heard that people born in the US to non-American parents have to be naturalized to be considered Americans. The site quotes somebody’s alternate interpretation as the correct one.

I had to look up the name to understand the comment. What a disgusting cover-up by the government. One of the BBC stories sets out the compensation schemes offered by the government, and some look reasonable, but I think 600,000 pounds for getting jailed, and possibly divorced and losing your family, just isn’t enough. And I’m surprised that the media in the UK haven’t focused their attention on Fujitsu, who developed the software used by the Post Office. Hopefully the inquiry that’s started will get some answers.

Just like all evil women down the centuries, she practices witchcraft! Ooooooh ooooooh scary!

You realize what this is? Avoidance of scandal after scandal being made public, endless stories in the media. Just sign here. Most people will be glad it’s over and done and won’t want to relive their pain in a newspaper story.

United has also found loose parts on the 737 MAX planes.

Take a look at the weather report, I see we get winter next week so you must too, -8 in the day (about 17 F) and down to -15 at night, 5 F.

The genesis of Murderbot!

Those low bollards are a real hazard, the damn things should be tall enough for you to see them!

A couple of books I’ve just finished. First off, Trust, Pulitzer Prize winner in 2023 by Hernan Diaz, (along with Barbara Kingsolver, first time there were two winners I think) which I put a hold on after Zabz mentioned it last year. A “skip the line” copy popped up, which the reader can borrow for 7 days, so I dropped my other books to read it rather than waiting still another 10 weeks for the 21 day copy. I didn’t realize the unusual construction of the book, basically four books, the first a work of fiction about a famous financier’s wife and the financier himself, which the real-life financier is very angry about, the second a response autobiography by the financier in rebuttal, third a section written by his ghost writer, and finally some diary entries from the wife at the end of her life. The main time period is the 20s, particularly the crash of 29 when the financier made a staggering amount of money shorting the market. Trust is an important element to all the characters and the theme of trust and earning it or losing it is a key element. That may not sound exciting but I found it very engrossing. Especially once you realize how untrustworthy some of the narrative is. Then I glanced at the topic listings at the library and one of their lists was about under the radar books the librarians recommended. Near the top of the list was a short (7 hours) murder mystery that I glanced at and found intriguing. The book Is A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilma Rao, born in Fiji from Indian immigrants (Indian ancestry people make up a third of Fiji’s population) and who is also Australian, her family having moved there when the author was three. The main character is a Sikh police sergeant who was recruited at age 18 to join the Hong Kong constabulary and who flourishes under his Inspector General, being a rising star in the force by the age of 25. Then our honorable and somewhat naive young man gets badly conned and makes a serious error in judgement, resulting in his IG telling him he has two choices, be dishonorably discharged or go to Fiji where the police force needs help, and try to recover his ruined reputation. The year is 1914. The author came across a story about 10 Indian police officers in Hong Kong being sent to Fiji to help the police force there, Fiji being a British colony like Hong Kong. As I started reading the book the facts being presented were so surprising to me I had to read the Wikipedia article about Fiji to get a better understanding about the country, as I knew very little beyond the fact it’s an exotic group of islands people dream of going on vacation to. I never knew that when the US civil war started and blockades prevented shipments of cotton and sugar from leaving the US (I knew about that) places around the world started sugar cane and cotton plantations to pick up the trade. And even though the British had banned slavery half a century before, there was a brisk trade in workers that either was out and out slavery or damn near to it. In later years the Indian government set up a system of indentured labor where Indian workers, basically the lower castes, were sent to places around the world, both in the Pacific and the Caribbean, 60,000 going to Fiji over a 40 or 50 year period. A worker at one of the plantations disappears and the press pick up the story, forcing the police to look into the matter. The workers are all Indian, as the British did not want to use indigenous Fijians because such work was not culturally the work they did. In fact, they wouldn’t create a Fijian branch of the military to fight in WW 1 either, though they did for WW 2. Our sergeant gets sent to investigate the disappearance since he’s the leading Indian on the police force. The IG in Fiji loathes him because he knows his back story. Akal Singh develops a relationship with a Fijian officer, mainly because they both speak English, and then in the course of the investigation also joins forces with a British doctor who goes out to the plantations to provide medical treatment. This book is the debut novel by the author and looks like it’s the start of an ongoing series, Singh, the Fijian officer and the doctor obviously being the central core of future books. Singh has to deal with a great deal of prejudice, since the Indians on the islands are all lower caste workers referred to as “coolies” by the Europeans and Australians who control everything. I’m sure in reality the “n” word was also commonly used. It’s a well written mystery in a very different setting and I hope the author goes on to write more of them.

If he’s like everybody else in the world, he’ll love the book and thank you profusely for the gift.

Oh for crying out loud, just read the Wikipedia article about her.

I don’t have Netflix. Maybe the CBC will get it, or PBS.