Guys, Canadian television may have just found a way to broker peace in the Middle East and around the world for that matter. Little Mosque on the Prairie is a new show to be premiered on CBC on January 9th, 2006. The website alone made me pee my pants. The writer is a young Muslim Canadian woman with a sense of humour that will slay Rick Mercer. Anyway, check it out. GOD (I mean Allah)! This is the answer we’ve all been looking for!
AFRICAN PATHways January 3, 2007
There is a new African information hub that links news stories, blogs, links and African issues in general. It provides a pan African (and international) forum for discussion on all things African. Many of you often ask me what really goes on in Africa. Which countries are safe to visit? What life is really like in African countries? The other day even my brother, a communications expert, asked me if “that stuff in Sudan was still going on”. So I urge you all to check this site out. It is effortless since it is all right there, easily accessible.
Another interesting site is http://www.ethiomedia.com/ . It may provide some less mainstream insights into why Ethiopia bombed Somalia last week. Hey, it even gives you a link to a place where you can “meet hot singles in Ethiopia”! Note that many pro-democracy websites and blogs are blocked in Ethiopia. This is one of them.
Culture of reversibility December 9, 2006
I just solved my first SUDOKU puzzle ever! I never thought I’d have the patience or the wit to get to the end, but tonight, glory was mine! May I encourage all you sudoku aspirers to give the online version a shot if the hard copies have been your arch nemeses. There is just something so reversible about computer work that it will give you that extra jolt of confidence to try and err and try and succeed. In this era of computer technology, putting anything down on real paper with a real pen is just so damn frightening. Even pencils seem not to erase as they used to.
Peace November 5, 2006
I love the first real snowfall.
You wake up in the morning, not knowing what happened overnight, you look out the winow and are rendered breathless by the pure, unsullied blanket that covers the world. For a few short hours, before the city awakes, the landscape’s diversity, whose usual technicolour reflects all manners of sin, now appears untarnished and limpid, exonerating the summer’s sordid debaucheries and the autumn’s ravaging harvest.
For a few short hours, we are all absolved and equalized by nature’s bountiful frost.
The VBC and other misappropriations October 2, 2006
September 29th in Canada, although it is most likely September 30th in Accra, but I wouldn’t know for sure because I ceased to wear a watch years ago.
Tonight, KLM is my home. Turbulent skies are my cradle. Exotic lands are the backdrops of y dreams. Africa is my destination.
Funny how one only feels the speed of her jetliner chariot when it is being tossed about through unrelenting pockets of air.
Our seatbelts have been fastened again. The feed service has been truncated two rows from where I am sitting. Damn! I’m hungry! And all because of a little turbulence. Pshaw! What are the chances of the plane actually crashing? Ok! Ok! I know. Maybe I just tempted the fates. But really… Those Royal-Blue-Clad girls could have pushed their trolleys 2 extra rows to feed me before stowing the food cars and fastenings their belts.
Aside: Other than sailors and pilots, who actually “stows” anything?
In my carry-on bag I haphazardly threw 2 books from my “still-to-read” shelf. Ironically enough, both books seem to be the natural sequiters to the week of the VBC—Val’s Broadcasting Corporation.
I don’t know why, but this past week, more than ever before, I lived and breathed CBC radio, and oddly apparent only to me, the CBC aired programs that tugged at every emotional string in my being—as though the producers hung hammocks in my spirit, chilled out there for about 12 months, absorbed all my subconscious thoughts, craftily masked them as radio programs and strategically aired them this past week, when I most needed to hear them, but least could handle them.
It is oddly amazing how the CBC can be one’s confidant and one’s tool for introspection on the one hand and one’s only connection to the world on the other hand—and all in the span of a one-hour program.
Last week on Wire Tap, Jonathan Goldstein, in his dry and sarcastically compassionate ways, explored the theme of unrequited love. I had the fortune of hearing the program twice—most likely as a reflection of the exaggerated proportion of misadventures of the heart that mark my life.
And yet, no matter how pathetic the Pos and the Blakes and the Alighieris have made this subject, Goldstein almost makes you feel exalted for being on the unrequited side of love. He has a way of appealing to the romantic, to the love-deprived lunatic and to the desperado in each of us. He profiles people whose desperation puts to shame regular people’s embarrassing attempts at seduction—midnight gay-club scavenger hunts and riding bikes in stilettos and a cocktail dress through downtown desolate streets in the hope of securing love, but instead hobbling home with a broken heal in one hand and a flat-tired bike in the other.
Then there is Stuart MacLean whose Vinyl Café this week was dedicated to reading testimonials on being Canadian—a wonderful response to a US middle school teacher’s request for letters on what living in Canada is like. But he inspires with this understated intellect. He has a way of appealing simultaneously to the child, to the intellectual, to the nationalist and to the elitist in each of us, while making us feel privileged and special and unique within our own individual selfishness.
The CBC unites this country in ways that no other entity does. Not only is it the one apparent common thread that weaves itself throughout, but it also renders apparent those unknown commonalities that escape us when we are overshadowed by our regional hats.
As such, in an ostensible knowledge-sharing activity with our neighbours to the South, Stuart MacLean brought this country together last Sunday through story.
And now, on this plane, I read a compilation of old programs aired on Ideas. And once again, the CBC reaches out to me as I move further and further away from my country.
I don’t know if it is ironic or totally predictable that as I head to Africa for the second time this year, I am consumed by thoughts of my country and how my travels always take me away and how little I really know about it. Like, what is the meaning behind the Canadian flag? Someone asked me that in Ethiopia last time I was there, and I didn’t know the answer. Aside from the maple leaf, why red and white? Why the two stripes? I keep forgetting to look it up but will do so as soon as I get myself to a computer with internet access in Ghana.
The turbulence has stopped. My food has arrived. We didn’t crash… See, I told you.
I’m likin’ the Lichen June 29, 2006
I had a rather silly conversation/debate the other day with a friend in regards to symbiosis. He was trying to make the case that the relationship between Homo Sapiens and domesticated cats is a symbiotic one. I, of course, disputed his unsubstantiated blather. Surprisingly enough, this discourse went on for much longer than its apparent worth warranted. In hindsight, however, it all makes much more sense.
You see, we had begun from opposite premises. Neither of us is a biologist (he thinks he is and I used to be a biochemist, but now we’re both social scientists, which means that we know nothing about anything of substance). So I remember something about symbiosis from Voyage of the Mimi, this interactive nautical book we read in grade six. Something about barnacles and whales and how one can’t live without the other. He, on the other hand, bases his argument on some “textbook” example that I’ve never heard of –Lichens, or something of that nature. So, I say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about”, and he then gives me a more mainstream example of the Clown Fish and the Anemone to which I yelp, “Hey, I know that!” (ignominiously revealing my main sources of information). So I feel like we’re on the same page, until of course, it becomes apparent that we are discordant on the very definition of symbiosis.
Voyage of the Mimi forced me into believing that symbiosis was a relationship between two species, whose very existence hinged on its mutual necessity. Lichens and Clown Fish caused my friend to believe that a symbiotic relationship was not, in fact, necessary for the survival of each respective species, but that it was mutually beneficial. It turns out we were both right (I being a little less right) but both very incomplete in our understanding.
According to one of the top Google hits on this subject, there are 5 types of symbiosis: Mutualism, Commensalism, Parasitism, Competition and Neutralism. Without going into detail or graphings, these categories (rather self-explanatory, actually) range from mutually beneficial to mutually unaffected, with Parasitism harming one species and benefiting the other.
The thing about the symbiosis between a human and a cat is that it is ephemeral at best. The cat is such a fickle and capricious being that the human owner may be its salvation one day and its very nemesis the next. But, by the same token, let us not overestimate humanity’s resolve. The human is just as, if not more, mercurial than it’s feline counterpart. The two species do not need one another for survival; however, to categorize their symbiosis within the parametres delineated above is to underplay the complexity of their relationship.
I think that we humans like to keep cats around not because they provide endless fun or are riveting companions, but because they exhibit the unfettered and inherent ability to vacillate between love/hate, affection/disregard, and purrs/scathing clawings without moral consideration.
How often would we like to be able to do the same? How often would you like to dole out your indiscriminate but honest feelings to that co-worker who checks out your cleavage before deciding whether or not to say good morning, or to the new chick you’re dating who makes you wash your feet before getting into bed, or to the fat bitch who pushes the “close door” button on the elevator as you run toward it with a spilling coffee in one hand, or to the vice-dean who rejects your law school application because you can’t write a stupid standardized test. Would it not be so cathartic to scratch the eyes out of any and all of these folks the moment they do you wrong and then go rub up against their legs when you want something from them and have them pet the back of your neck anyway?
We live vicariously through the house cat. We long to be all that she is. Lazy. Capricious. Exceptionally agile. Unbearably cute.
So to my ostensible biologist friend, I commend you on your identification of this symbiosis. May I recommend that you watch more animated films to identify other examples of symbiosis that your plebeian friends may be able to associate with?
9 holes in and you’re going strong! June 15, 2006
Ok. I’m totally obssessed. I can’t concentrate on anything other than your game, BF. You just played the first 9 holes and you are right in the top 15! Brad, do you realize how well you’re doing?! I’m overjoyed. Keep it up! This is what the Top 25 leaderboard looks like right now (nevermind, it wouldn’t paste properly). I know it’s too premature to say anything, so I won’t. Who knew I could be so excited about golf??! Damn TV stations are only showing that evil-looking Mickelson guy. He’s gross and I hate him. What makes him so special? Why don’t they show your cute blonde locks instead? More to come soon…
The first star among us June 15, 2006
Upon graduation from high school, friends inevitably have that Who is gonna become famous first conversation. I know that we had it within our group, but I can’t remember who was at the top of the list. However, I don’t think we thought it would be Brad. Well, now we know how insightful a bunch of 17 year olds is.
Today, my boy, Brad Fritsch, is making his PGA debut in the US Open, of all competitions! His name is all over the Canadian media. His picture is in every newspaper and all over the web. He is, for all intents and purposes, famous in the sports world.
I want to send out a huge GOOD LUCK to him today. He tees off at 2 something, although it appears that as of 10:06 am he’s played two holes already and he’s on PAR!!!
Here he is signing autographs for his fans. Brad, we are all so proud of you. I’m watching and keeping abreast of your progress!
Love you so much!
