If you're a hater, and you're in that land
of drifting sagebrush and empty sand,
go ahead and get your hate on.
But not up here; not in this nation,
where the Mounties always get their man.
"Bring it, hate-boys," these toqued folks say.
"Talk your hate talk, and let come what may.
Good old Trudeau--he has made it
so that Mom's soap can stay where she laid it:
the CHRC will make you rue the day."
Oh, indeed, that fine Commission!
Parsing hate speech and omissions!
Didn't mean it? Still a hater!
Spoke the truth? Talk to us later.
Guess why we've got 100% convictions!
This Northern justice, it requires
only that you spoke; nothing higher.
If someone else might take offense,you are stripped of every defense,
even when the plaintiff is a liar.
I'd say some more of this except
that this is published on the Internet.
You know, of course, what this would mean:
it comes within Section 13!
So I'll stop. But I'm not finished yet.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Friday, December 19, 2008
Feeding Time
Ooh! He is chomping
It's like a dinosaur stomping
upon some smaller lizards--
because, until the great blizzards
that ended the tyrannosaur
and made way for more
temperate beings, they seemed
the greatest things ever weaned.
So now as he empties the syringe
that feeds him in his milky binge
he's working within peerless esteem
His parents, blind to fault, just gleam
when he performs the simple task
of swallowing. Because at last,
though often it goes so slow,
they get to sit and watch the future grow.
It's like a dinosaur stomping
upon some smaller lizards--
because, until the great blizzards
that ended the tyrannosaur
and made way for more
temperate beings, they seemed
the greatest things ever weaned.
So now as he empties the syringe
that feeds him in his milky binge
he's working within peerless esteem
His parents, blind to fault, just gleam
when he performs the simple task
of swallowing. Because at last,
though often it goes so slow,
they get to sit and watch the future grow.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Crash-Tanked, Burning
Like the Exxon Valdez, the soil spreads--
over the roiling waters, it spreads!
Blackening bystanders and nature itself
with the ill-gotten ruins of mis-gotten wealth.
Ah, mortality! Meet thou American International Group!
(What an oxymoronic name, anyway).
over the roiling waters, it spreads!
Blackening bystanders and nature itself
with the ill-gotten ruins of mis-gotten wealth.
Ah, mortality! Meet thou American International Group!
(What an oxymoronic name, anyway).
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
First Forever
If A swings an iron bar at B, who is asleep, but misses and hits a negligently-manufactured table leg instead, knocking the leg and table asunder and flinging the pieces across the room and out of the window where they bounce off a passing car and graze C's fingernail, is A liable to C for C's unforeseen allergic reaction to the anaesthetic used by the doctor to repair his fingernail?
All this, and more, can be solved in a mere single semester at a Law School of your choice! It's tedious; it's odd; it's expensive; it's slightly macabre! But it's not conducive to blog writing.
All this, and more, can be solved in a mere single semester at a Law School of your choice! It's tedious; it's odd; it's expensive; it's slightly macabre! But it's not conducive to blog writing.
Monday, August 6, 2007
They look like flying lobsters
There's nothing wrong with cockroaches, except their existence. When they first came crawling down our ceilings with their antennae waving like outer-spacemen with laser guns, it seemed that the only feasible way of retaining the physical integrity of our bodies was to simply show them the quickest way to the sugary treasures of our pantry.
They've been around for a few days now, usually demanding access to the booty at about 10 pm. We typically acquiesce.
But just last night I decided to watch "Where Eagles Dare," in which a young and distressingly Keanu Reeves-ish Clint Eastwood single-handedly slays half of the Nazi SS corps with only a jackknife and a portable stereo. So when the roaches came back for another onslaught in the evening, my wife made several diversionary maneuvers involving a Tupperware container and the Saran wrap, and I headed for my Estwing.
Never before in my life had I seen a Saran-wrapped cockroach lying in a Tupperware after being repeatedly assaulted with all 18 ounces of a construction-grade hammer. Take that, weird antenna flailers! Don't make me bring out the portable radio!
They've been around for a few days now, usually demanding access to the booty at about 10 pm. We typically acquiesce.
But just last night I decided to watch "Where Eagles Dare," in which a young and distressingly Keanu Reeves-ish Clint Eastwood single-handedly slays half of the Nazi SS corps with only a jackknife and a portable stereo. So when the roaches came back for another onslaught in the evening, my wife made several diversionary maneuvers involving a Tupperware container and the Saran wrap, and I headed for my Estwing.
Never before in my life had I seen a Saran-wrapped cockroach lying in a Tupperware after being repeatedly assaulted with all 18 ounces of a construction-grade hammer. Take that, weird antenna flailers! Don't make me bring out the portable radio!
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Meditation in one-dimension
Archimedes' latest devil sits torqued into my wall, its one-dimensioned brilliance clutching the plaster with all the friction necessary to grant my copy of Claude Monet the appearance of levitation. A brilliant Greek! that man, who, with force and turn and tourniquet wrenched a solid blade of steel into a single-sided screw.
They say he saved a sieged city, back then, by festering his brain until it created (ex nihilo, perhaps) some megolithic mechanism that (who knows?) blew oily flames all over Spartan invaders or catapulted dogs with ringworm into the enemy's tents until they had to go back home to resupply their stock of Preparation H.
Like Archimedes, Ben Folds has a fascination with Preparation H, which can only mean that he, too, is beginning to experience the toils of middle age, where the insides and outsides want to exchange relative positions. That sort of evisceration (people tell me that this isn't the real cause of the typical haemorrhoid, but what does WebMD know, anyway?) is unnatural, but is also to be expected, leaving us in the pickly spot of a "natural unnaturality."
This is an observation which will probably give us some "cognitive dissonance" at first (a term that teachers use when they want to justify the explosion of their students' worldviews), but, unfortunately, this is pretty much the condition of reality. After all, all of us expect to be surprised at some point in our lives, and even though this mindset is paradoxical at root, not too many people are altogether flummoxed by the logic-garbling fact that they're expecting the unexpected.
Chesterton (the real one, not that quibbling politician in the 1830s) has said something somewhere (Orthodoxy, to be precise) to the effect that people should really be utterly pessimistic and wildly optimistic simultaneously. For him, it's a functional paradox that we should do our utmost in the belief that Right will prevail, even while recognizing that everything we humans do will fall short, in the final analysis. The "natural unnaturality" here is that badness is not only unnatural, but entirely a matter of course.
Archimedes again to the rescue (we, too, are Greeks in a battered polis). Though wrapped round a hollow steel barrel, the screw itself has only one side. With each turn of the socket wrench or Phillips-head, the single-side cuts a single groove and slides itself inside it, slashing to support instead of cutting to destroy, and eventually ends ensconced and useful by virtue of the very thing that resisted its forward movement.
Moreover, this gnarl of steel driven into toughness belies my sense that a diasporic adventure-life brings color and vivacity. The logic of one-dimension means not that the screw remains flat and motionless, but instead that it progresses deeper and deeper without ending, its head forced ever closer and closer to its final home.
The only worry is that it finds a stud, so that sudden weight won't rip it from the plaster.
They say he saved a sieged city, back then, by festering his brain until it created (ex nihilo, perhaps) some megolithic mechanism that (who knows?) blew oily flames all over Spartan invaders or catapulted dogs with ringworm into the enemy's tents until they had to go back home to resupply their stock of Preparation H.
Like Archimedes, Ben Folds has a fascination with Preparation H, which can only mean that he, too, is beginning to experience the toils of middle age, where the insides and outsides want to exchange relative positions. That sort of evisceration (people tell me that this isn't the real cause of the typical haemorrhoid, but what does WebMD know, anyway?) is unnatural, but is also to be expected, leaving us in the pickly spot of a "natural unnaturality."
This is an observation which will probably give us some "cognitive dissonance" at first (a term that teachers use when they want to justify the explosion of their students' worldviews), but, unfortunately, this is pretty much the condition of reality. After all, all of us expect to be surprised at some point in our lives, and even though this mindset is paradoxical at root, not too many people are altogether flummoxed by the logic-garbling fact that they're expecting the unexpected.
Chesterton (the real one, not that quibbling politician in the 1830s) has said something somewhere (Orthodoxy, to be precise) to the effect that people should really be utterly pessimistic and wildly optimistic simultaneously. For him, it's a functional paradox that we should do our utmost in the belief that Right will prevail, even while recognizing that everything we humans do will fall short, in the final analysis. The "natural unnaturality" here is that badness is not only unnatural, but entirely a matter of course.
Archimedes again to the rescue (we, too, are Greeks in a battered polis). Though wrapped round a hollow steel barrel, the screw itself has only one side. With each turn of the socket wrench or Phillips-head, the single-side cuts a single groove and slides itself inside it, slashing to support instead of cutting to destroy, and eventually ends ensconced and useful by virtue of the very thing that resisted its forward movement.
Moreover, this gnarl of steel driven into toughness belies my sense that a diasporic adventure-life brings color and vivacity. The logic of one-dimension means not that the screw remains flat and motionless, but instead that it progresses deeper and deeper without ending, its head forced ever closer and closer to its final home.
The only worry is that it finds a stud, so that sudden weight won't rip it from the plaster.
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