Some misguided people are finding bizarre messages from God in the Aceh earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunamis. Their perspective is offensive, morally and religiously.
Category: Zombies
Behzti and Mr. Bean
The Behzti story has been in the news from England for the last few weeks. It evokes one of the themes of the movie Bend it Like Beckham, as second generation Sikhs come into conflict with their families as they make their own way in British society, but there are no happy endings here. Behzti is a play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, a younger Sikh woman, which was being staged at the Birmingham Repertory Theater. The play is set in a gurdwara (temple) and has a scene of sexual abuse by a Sikh priest – a rape scene. Conservative religious Sikhs protested. At first the protests were small but they escalated to protests by hundreds, with protesters storming the theater on December 18. By December 21, the play had closed and the playwright had gone into hiding after receiving death threats. Some Sikh leaders condemned the death threats.
Flow
Basically this is a book review published at Blogcritics which I have modified a little since publishing it there.
Metal Damage
On December 8, 2004 a young man named Nathan Gale, armed with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, walked on to the stage at a club in Columbus, Ohio during a performance by the heavy metal band Damageplan. He shot and killed the lead guitarist, Dimebag Darrell Abbott, and then began shooting into the audience, killing three more people before he was shot dead by an armed policeman. While the news was sketchy at first, it now appears that Gale was a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions. His illness was diagnosed after he had joined the Marines. He had been discharged in November 2003 on medical grounds.
Ukranian Orange
With orange having been his campaign colour in the Ukranian presidential election, and the emblem of resistance to the fraudulent election results, creative voices in the world media have tried to find an ironic symmetry in the news that medical tests confirm that Victor Yushchensko ingested dioxin. The Daily Express claimed that he had been poisoned with Agent Orange. The news that high levels of dioxin were found in tissue samples tends to cut through some of the confusion and speculation in the media and the scientific community.
Epiphany
Several years ago Phillie Marcowicz, one of the hosts of one of CBC Radio’s folk, roots and world programs was on the Main Stage at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. She asked the audience if anyone had experienced a musical epiphany that weekend.
Pluralism and Orthodoxy
This is a book review that I wrote for the Blogcritics site. The book is the 2003 revised edition of The Dignity of Difference by Jonathan Sacks. The Blogcritics version of the review is nearly identical to this. The ISBN for this book is 0826468500. There is a copy of the 2002 first edition in the Winnipeg Public Library system.
Novelist Seeking Enlightenment
This is a book review that I wrote for the Blogcritics site. The book is “Seeking Enlightenment, Hat by Hat, A Skeptic’s Path to Religion” by Nevada Barr. The Blogcritics version of the review is nearly identical to this. The ISBN for this book is 0425196038.
Irony Week in Ottawa
Rick Mercer is a supercilious prick, but he can be very funny. (Or should I say he is funny and can be a prick?) I wonder if he writes his own lines.
Tonight in the opening segment of his self-named CBC show he commented on George W. Bush’s visit to Ottawa, which includes a visit to the Canadian Museum of Civilization, “it must be irony week in Ottawa.”
Indeed, with the looting of the museums of the cradle of civilization during the American invasion of Iraq … Perhaps not the point Mercer was making but heh…
Greatest Canadian
It’s Sunday night, November 28. The CBC is playing the last episode of its Greatest Canadian series. There are 10 candidates, all in the process by popular nomination and previous rounds of voting. The concept was taken from a BBC series, and like the BBC series, it is an entertainment with a populist subtext.
My sentiments – I don’t think this program pretends to have any clear criteria for judging greatness – are with Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, Lester Pearson.