For All My American Friends

And to your new President:

AUGURI!

And to celebrate I'm going over to a favorite site and set off some fireworks!

20 gennaio - San Sebastiano

Focus on the Family????

An apology to anyone who looked at this entry earlier today - I forgot to change the url on the cartoon I was enthusing about. The link has now been corrected - just in case anyone has come back for a second look.

Every morning I go for my daily dose of Doonesbury at Slate. As well as the current week's features there are flashbacks to events that have shaped many of our lives in the past 35 years - sure mostly in the U.S. but let's admit it what happens in the U.S. doesn't stay in the U.S.

It's also fascinating to see how Garry Trudeau's style has evolved: those sketchy characters from 1972 have now become fully developed - artistically and as "people."

In Sunday's feature Trudeau hits his target dead centre with a question that the good folk at Focus on the Family have yet to answer.

Stop and Smell the Flowers!!!!!

My colleague Shirly thought she would buy some but then a few questions arose (as it were):

I wonder what kind of a vase you would use to display them?

I wonder if they come in different colors?

I wonder about the fragrance?

I wonder if it would help to put those preservative packets in the water?

I wonder whether they would look better on the kitchen table or in the entry?

I wonder if they are cheaper by the dozen?

I wonder if they come in long-stemmed?

Captured at 115th and Allisonville Road in Fishers, Indianapolis. The sign is real and was up for about two hours before someone stopped and told them how to spell peonies.

You Can Say That There ..... Now!

As a follow up to last week - the vagina thing:

The School Board in Cross River N.Y. has had second thoughts about suspending the three girls who used the dreaded V word in a presentation of The Vagina Monologues. As with most bureaucratic changes of heart/mind only after parents, students, author Eve Ensler, the news media and the Civil Liberties Union raised a fuss did Superintendent Bob Lichtenfeld see it for the foolishness it was.

And I may be reading this wrong – after several Venetian murder mysteries I become cynical about officialdom – but is Superintendent Bob hanging the principal out of dry? Or just his principles??

You Can't Say/Do That Here/There

I’m not into U.S. bashing – that holier than thou attitude we tend to take here in Canada does have a tendency to backfire. You know the one: We don't have racial discrimination here in Canada – hmm just ask the people of Africville. However a few things I’ve read today make me fear for the Land of the Free.

In Cross River, N. Y. Three high school girls are being suspended for using the word “Vagina” during a public reading from Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. It would appear that using the proper anatomical term was going to damage the psyche of children in the audience. Somehow – though maybe I’m being unfair here – I can’t believe that many parents in Cross River would take their children to see something called The Vagina Monologues.

And this week poor Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter to most of us) has been the subject of outraged comments from American parents on several blogs – including one celebrity gossip site that I will not admit to visiting from time to time. So what has poor Harry… sorry Dan done? Well he is currently appearing in a revival of Peter Shaffers’s Equus in London’s West End. And for 5 minutes of this 180 minute play Dan is nude - with his “weewee” – I don’t want to use the word “penis” in case there are children from Cross River reading this – exposed. Now during the play he also rides on the back of men dressed up as horses and drives spikes into said horses’ eyes. But apparently that isn’t important – it’s that exposed weewee that is going to scar America’s children for life. They will never be able to look at a Wizard’s wee… damn it penis again!

The odd thing is that it isn’t happening in the mass media in the U.S. – the great exposure is happening in a theatre an ocean away. The likelihood of any of these people’s children making the trans-Atlantic hop to witness this dreadful unveiling are extremely slim –actually I can’t imagine its all that dreadful, Dan looks pretty damned buffed in the publicity photos. One upset mother referred to him appearing in a pornographic play. Any bets that Mom hasn’t read, if she reads anything at all, the play or perhaps seen a play for that matter.

Most of the indignation and outrage – indignation at the use of the perfectly valid word Vagina and outrage at a naked man 3000 kilometers away – seems to be the indignation and outrage of the ignorant. And that's what is frightening me.