What Makes This City Special

I used to think it was the tams, but now I'm less convinced. Wonderful though the tams are, I think it's barely possible that there's somewhere else on this planet where hippies, goths, medieval sword fighters, and trendsters dressed for a night of clubbing can get together in the thousands for the common purpose of enjoying as much sun, drumming, and THC as possible. I think it's in fact quite likely that there is somewhere else where you can lie on a grassy hillside, making the kids on mountain bikes navigate around you, watch a little girl beat her big brother in a tug-of-war over a stick, and get licked on the toe by a passing huskie. I even think there is somewhere else where one can watch a cyclist and a biker hold up traffic to have a shouting match in the middle of one of the hairiest intersections in the city.

These things, though wonderful, are not what make Montreal so special. I'll give you an example of the sort of thing that does:
Nowhere else will you see a man walking down the street in broad daylight, carrying a chinchilla in an upended floral teacozy.

I love this city.

Nothin' to Prove but the Groove

It's true that it's a sport. There's no game more fun than "bug-the-vegetarian". Unless you are one.

I'm sick of being wishy-washy about this.

I'm sick of hiding behind "It's a personal choice."

I'm sick of it all so I'm just going to say it.

Eating meat is wrong. If you live in a first world country and you don't have a medical condition that would prevent you from being vegetarian, you have no excuse. I know that each situation is different, and people need to judge for themselves what is best for their lives, which is why I would never tell people that they should be vegetarian, and I certainly wouldn't support any kind of vegetarianising legislation, but that's beside the point. Not everything that should be legal is right, and the only realistic way to maintain all our civil rights is if we exercise descretion in using them. Eating factory-farmed meat is cruel to the animal and bad for the environment. Eating free-range meat is somewhat less so, but that's not saying much. Now when it comes to people doing things that are wrong, I'm hardly in a position to cast the first stone, but I'm sick of pretending I don't think what I think. Eating meat is wrong and our reliance on it as a society needs to stop.

There's nothing I can do to make people stop eating meat, but I beg every meat eater who reads this post to really think about it. THINK about it. Do you *need* to eat meat? Do you need to eat as much as you do? If not, why do you? Is your pleasure and convenience worth the loss of the rainforests? Is it worth antibiotic-resistent bacteria? Is it worth upset ecosystems and loss of subsistence farmland and starving people who need the calories that our cows and pigs burn off as heat? Is it worth it? Really?

Just think about it. Please.


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title taken from the Ember Swift song Include My Food.

My Anvil

There's an anvil at the top of my brain. And usually it just hangs out up there and that's fine, and I can think and work and get stuff done, but sometimes it falls down, *kurchunk!*. And when that happens there's just no making anything work.

I tried, I really did. I sat in front of my work computer for two hours this morning, and I tried. But my brain was full of anvil and it wasn't working out. I'll try to describe what it's like.

So if you picture your brain as soft and easily penetrable, then your intellectual input (things you read or listen to) can be like arrows or something. And when you read or listen, the arrows go into your brain and you understand them (or maybe you don't understand them, but you recognize that you don't understand them and you can try to work out what they mean by inviting more arrows, if you want).

The anvil is hard and can't be penetrated. So when the anvil that hangs out at the top of my brain falls down and fills my brain the arrows can't penetrate. They just bounce off. It's not that I stop being able to understand things, it's that the things that I'm looking at or hearing don't get read or listened to, because the arrows can't get in. I think that that sort of thing can happen to everyone sometimes. When we're worried or anticipating something, or otherwise preoccupied, then we'll read the same page in a book five times because the words aren't penetrating.

Well my anvil is like that, only without the preoccupation. It just happens.

Sometimes the anvil is situation-specific. So I'll get a work anvil, or a blogging anvil, or a knitting anvil, or a gardening anvil, or whatever, and then I can still think about (and therefore do) things that aren't related to what the anvil is about. But sometimes the anvil is general purpose, and that really sucks, because it means that I can't do anything but lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, or maybe watch TV.

Sometimes if I change activities for a while, when I come back the anvil is gone. But sometimes not.

Sometimes I try to force the arrows through the anvil, shooting them harder and harder. That can work for a little while, but I'm still really slow at whatever I'm doing, because each arrow takes several tries before it penetrates.

There's been some talk that I might have ADD. I wonder if that's the technical term for my anvil.

Stupid anvil.

New Buddy Blog

My pal Lothyn, MamaE to the owner of this sweater
has her own blog, which I will be adding to the blogroll.

She's awesome, so you should check it out.

D'oh update: The link to the blog: Dreamy Prune Whip

I Think I'll Get A Job In A Slaughterhouse

It must be nice to get paid not to do your job.

I'm no legal expert, so I can't say what the laws actually say, but I will say this: If the laws prevent an employer from taking action against a person who refuses to perform perfectly standard and legal aspects of their job, that they knew about when they took the job, then the law needs to be changed.

And if the law doesn't prevent it then serious pressure needs to be brought to bear against these companies. They need to be boycotted, picketed, and denounced until they start making their employees Do Their Jobs.

I mean really. How old are these pharmacists? 10? They're certainly acting it.

It's real simple people: If your job requires you to do something you find morally reprehensible, get a different job.

I'm incessantly amazed at the stupidity of my species.

Go Ahead, I Dare You.

Call this video of two embryos exploding murder.

Do it.

Compare, in all sincerity, this to the killing of two fully developed human beings.

Please, I beg you. It would so make my day.

(hat tip, PZM)