In the News...

-It has been one week since hurricane Katrina struck, and, though we have sent rescue crews down, and two warships loaded with aid and supplies are on the way, Canadians have so far donated less than $2 million to the New Orleans cause. This is in sharp contrast to the $37 million we donated within one week of the tsunami this past winter. Speculation is that, pity for the largely poor and helpless hurricane victims aside, we Canadians may be just a little miffed about the United States' holding back the $5 billion they have taken from us in recent years in illegal softwood lumber tariffs.* Pay up, neighbours. And yes, that is how you spell neighbour up here.
See these links for more information:
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/eicb/softwood/what-en.asp
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/softwood_lumber/
http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/HET/Softwood/
*Bitterness over the outright theft of this $5 billion does not, however, keep us all from feeling tremendous pity for the dead, the sick, and the homeless; it only adds to the anger over American money-handling. Why, oh, why did they not get water and doctors out to these people earlier? Tonight, on the news, I saw a father holding up his severely dehydrated infant. He had no formula or water to give his child. Tell me, if the government is, as they say, spending $500 million per day on the recovery effort, why is that baby without food and water?

-In the most baffling agricultural mystery since crop circles, what is being called The Great Mutton Caper has farmers and police across Canada scratching their heads. Farmer NOrman Goulet in Manitoba awoke this morning to a pasture almost entirely cleared of the 1,700 sheep it should have been holding. They did not cross the border, they did not show up at the area livestock auction, and the only witnesses of the event are - sheep. The most likely scenario has skilled farmer-types showing up in the dead of night, hustling the approximately 1,200 hundred wool-producing beasts into at least 2 multi-level sheep trucks, moving them out to a different farm, changing the ID tags, and slowly assimilating them into the local freezers via small-scale slaughterhouses. To which I say, Baa Humbug. (Sorry, I had to put that in there.) What do you call this sort of thing anyway? Sheep-laundering?

-Is anybody else out there just a little bit bothered by the number of plane crashes in recent weeks? First there was the jumbo jet from France crashing at Toronto's Pearson Airport (miraculously, not a single person died); then there was the horrific Cypric crash, the one where the cabin pressure dropped and all the passengers were almost certainly dead before the plane hit the ground; then there was one in South America, wasn't there? Plus one in Asia? And wasn't there another in the news yesterday? What is that, five in a little over a month? Maybe it's just because I grew up in a Big-Brother-paranoid household, and because I spent a large part of my childhood stuffing people's mailboxes with conspiracy-theorist and extreme right-wing literature, but this crash rash has me worried. Not that I can think of any linking element between all these downed planes. Honestly, I don't think Bush or any other Power-That-Be is tossing planes to the earth, but why are they all going down? Whatever. I like my car. Oh, wait. That would be my parents' car, seeing as I'm unemployed and broke at the moment...

This news flash brought to you by boredom, repressed ranting, and Okanagan Springs' Medium Dark with dinner.